Help Us Help You – The Value of Client Involvement in Achieving SEO Success
As a business owner when was the last time your SEO Company asked you for your help and insight?
As a search engine optimizer, I like to focus on doing what I do best – optimizing websites. However, this is often near impossible without the help of the marketing manager or, in the case of a lot of small businesses, the owner.
Take for example one of our clients – an aerospace contract manufacturer. Apart from the company I have no connections or experience in the aerospace industry. Before starting on the project, I knew little about shot peening, sourcing or quality inspections. I also knew little about their target market and the main competitors in the industry.
This is why I rely on the help of the client. Believe me when I say that it is to your advantage to offer direction and assistance in helping your search engine optimizer understand your business. Throughout the SEO Process, I ask for customer involvement.
Website and Server Analysis Assistance
After analyzing the website design and the server configuration there is often a list of recommended changes to help make the site more ‘search engine friendly’. The majority of the time these changes are out of my own control. During this stage I ask the customer to make the recommended changes. This often involves going back to their webmaster or web host.
In my experience, customers that follow through and implement the recommendations are able to earn much higher visibility in the search engines and increase their traffic and conversion rates.
Keyword Research Assistance
For customers with a broad range of products or services it is often difficult to know where to even start when choosing keyword phrases or themes to optimize for.
During this stage I like to analyze what the competition has optimized their websites for – this often provides hints as to what the client should also do. Rather than estimating who the main competition is it is better for the client to provide a list of three to six competitors and their websites for us to look at.
Often my clients will have a set of products or services they want to focus on. For example, I recently optimized a medical clinic’s website. While they offer a wide range of medical services such as urgent care, podiatry, cardiology, family practice and nutrition services, their main focus was on expanding their urgent care services. As a result, the majority of optimization efforts were spent on urgent care and pushing this division of their business.
Receiving this type of direction from the client helps to achieve their overall business goals. As an optimizer, I wouldn’t know that they wanted to increase their urgent care services and open three new clinics in the next year without their insight.
Finally, the client has the final approval for all the recommended keyword phrases and the optimization performed to support those keywords. This checkpoint ensures that we are both on the same page moving forward in the optimization process.
Content Optimization Assistance
As I mentioned before, I often work on websites for businesses operating in industries I am unfamiliar with at first. I overcome this by researching the industry and visiting competitors’ websites. But I also need the help of the client to become more familiar with their core services and major competitive advantage.
I request relevant text content from the client before beginning optimizing and writing new Titles, Descriptions and Page Content. Any relevant brochures, press releases, FAQ pages, white papers or other promotional material is of great value during the writing and optimization process.
Before any content pages are published on the company’s website or any press releases are sent out I ask the client for final approval. This ensures that all of the information is accurate and truly reflects the company’s brand and message.
Progressive Optimization Assistance
As an optimizer I can analyze traffic, keywords and landing pages as much as I want. But unless the client has sophisticated analytics installed in their website and has given me access to these, I am unable to track the number of new customers, number of repeat customers and so on.
It is vital to receive client feedback about how their sales are faring. I love to hear from clients that their phone rings much more frequently or that they have customers making purchases.
By sharing these results I can make further improvements or changes to the SEO Campaign in order to keep getting great results.
After reading this article I hope that the benefits of being actively involved in your SEO work is more evident. For a free initial search engine optimization consultation please:
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