How can you ensure your SEO work is valuable to clients?

Know what your clients want. Align your SEO plan with their business goals, whether it's boosting their brand, driving sales, or expanding their market share. This way, your efforts directly contribute to their success. Regularly share key numbers and insights with your clients. Prove how your SEO work is improving things like website traffic, conversion rates, and revenue. Keep your clients in the loop about what you're doing Establish transparent and open lines of communication. Regularly update clients on the progress of SEO initiatives, discuss challenges, and provide solutions SEO doesn't operate in isolation. Collaborate with other digital marketing channels to create a holistic strategy.

Ensure the value of your SEO work for clients by aligning strategies with business goals, providing transparent communication, tracking measurable KPIs, and offering regular, insightful reporting. Stay adaptable, educate clients, prioritize user experience, and focus on mobile optimization. Implement ethical practices, emphasize local SEO for relevant businesses, and actively seek client feedback for continual improvement and collaboration.

10 very popular sites where search is a major functionality of the site, but we refuse to acknowledge them as search engines: 10) Reddit 9) Pinterest 8) LinkedIn 7) Quora 6) Twitter 5) Google Play 4) Amazon 3) Instagram 2) Facebook 1) YouTube Next time you are on these sites, try search for a generic keyword relevant to your brand. Observe who is ranking. And try extend your SEO strategy to get to #1 on the platform. Stop SEOing only for Search Engines. Also include sites with Search Boxes in the scope. It will improve the overall organic health of your brand.

Set Clear Goals: Clearly define goals with your clients. Understand their business objectives, target audience, and key performance indicators (KPIs). Align your SEO efforts with these goals.

Scope MUST show what can be achieved or what's the purpose of even doing SEO for that particular client. Like for some clients it can be getting more visibilty in Google News while for some others it can be just imrpoving ranking of their Google Business Profile in order to get more local leads.

Go beyond ranks and traffic and focus on the clients business goals. E.g revenue , sign ups , subscriptions, returning users etc

Tie all KPIs back to revenue, even if the connection is indirect. For example, if the goal is to improve rankings on your top 10 pages, using your current conversion rate and keyword data, what revenue do you expect to see if you're p3? What about p1? Is the amount you're spending on labor less than what you could make? If the goal is to increase domain authority, what average ranking increase would you expect to see with that? How will that create revenue?

What I do with all potential clients is make sure we're tracking the right KPIs. Some clients care about organic traffic. Other clients care about organic sales. My process looks like this: 1. Talk to the client about KPIs 2. Measure a baseline KPI 3. Calculate a realistic KPI goal 4. Make sure it's valuable for both sides If you're not sure that your work will be of value to your client, don't sign the client.

Your KPI's are not your clients. Theirs are sales/leads/revenue etc. These are all lagging measures that are too late, once reported, to be useful for you. Your KPI's should be the leading measures that generate the lagging ones. Capacity > Deliverables > Soft KPI's > Hard KPI's

It's essential to set realistic expectations for SEO. The only goal of SEO is to get a website showing up on search engines for strategic keywords. Once someone lands on the page, it must have a compelling message, load fast, and be free of errors (which is beyond the scope of SEO). If a lead is captured on the page, it's then on the client's internal sales team to close the sale (again, beyond the scope of SEO). For this reason, we (directly) measure SEO success by keyword ranking and only keyword ranking. Other metrics, such as organic traffic, conversions from organic traffic sources, and sales numbers are excellent indirect measurements. Especially if/when they increase as a result of SEO, but ultimately beyond the scope of SEO.

Communication can break or make the SEO campaign, I would recommend to communicate with client about specific things like performance or clients and talk with them about how this increasing ranking or clients is ACTUALLY driving up their sales or helping to get more foot traffic into their physical location. Make sure to talk less about hifi SEO metrics HAHA and rather just discuss more how those metrics increasing or change is helping business to grow. Clients only want to hear about business growth and not oh number of page views went up last month by 35%

Clear, consistent and concise communication wins the day. You need to make sure that all your communication speaks their language. Remember that they may want/need to report internally to their teams. They need to fully understand what you've done or are doing, and you need to fully comprehend their needs. Ask lots of questions, get more depth, and augment your articulation to suit their needs.

Communication is a vital and sometimes underestimated part of SEO. Setting a regular communication schedule can be a great way to ensure you keep them updated. If a client is asking you for an update, it’s a sign your communication needs improving. In addition, speak their language and understand what’s important to them. It can be too easy to get caught up in the specific, technical targets we set ourselves as SEOs (links, keywords, tags etc) and forget the ‘real life’ targets that make a difference to the client. Whether that’s increased leads, sales or revenue, always refer back to project brief and ensure these are the goals you communicate back to the client.

Match their business goals with SEO strategy. Clients usually don't know, understand or care what the specifics of SEO are, (i.e we fixed X meta titles) no matter how much you educate them, in these times it's about impact, and why you're doing what you're doing. You're doing it so they achieve their goals through SEO and build the site as a larger channel of leads or revenue.

If you understand the goals the client aims to achieve with website, it is necessary to establish a results measurement system that will essentially serve as a reporting system. SEO is a complex field, so tailor your communication to present the SEO implementation in alignment with the client's objectives.

For the most part, what you're selling is often "invisible" and "pay me now, for results you want in the future". This means that you need to properly articulate the WHAT you are going to do and the results it should have, in the client's language. They don't care about CTR or Rankings, those are leading measures that show things are progressing (keep recording and reporting them). They care about the result of what you do, this is the key thing. Speak their language when reporting the results. Make it easy for them to report internally by asking them to tell you what they want in the main report/summaries so that it is easy. "A confused mind doesn't buy." - Just because they are a client, doesn't mean they will remain one.

SEO Education is always good, it's good to be transparent and provide extra value to people so they understand what you're trying to do. Sometimes you'll get someone who cares, but a lot of the time the owner or MM just cares about the results and the impact of the efforts.

Educating clients on SEO process or practices is a good step to build that long term relationship but always keep in mind that some clients may feel like they're paying you as a SEO Specialist to be their teacher for SEO rather than a specialist who is contracted to grow their online presence. Always keep in this mind and have a boundry about how much to educate clients because some may feel weird actually.

ALWAYS send an NPS survey to clients periodically. Ask for candid feedback. If you don't you'll never really be able to reliably improve your services. Testimonials are 'alright' I guess. They help add some credibility to your work and add a little trust, but nothing says "THIS IS A MASSIVE VOTE OF CONFIDENCE" than every client wanting a Case Study done out of the work, and its results, that you delivered.

I work in B2B marketing and I find that customers do not understand most reports. They want leads not ranking so they will measure performance based on the number of inquiries they receive, no matter how good your ranking is.