Editors Note:Once again, I found a really nifty guest post for Sitegeist, which is likely to make you either laugh or frown (depending, I suspect on whether you’re a vendor or a client..) Today’s post is from Chris Walker, a local SEO specialist from St. Louis. Chris has some straightforward advice regarding what every SEO client should know…
Here’s Chris’s post…
This letter goes out to all the clients out there, current and potential. Just to let you know, we sometimes have a love/hate relationship with you.
Please Don’t Expect Results Overnight
Or in 2 weeks after you last spoke with us. Please don’t send me an email asking for a ranking report and then ask me 2 weeks later how we can speed this thing up. The answer you will get is; increase your budget or just wait for the SERPS to change. You were given a conservative timeline for a reason. Good SEO is a building process and your business may not be the most exciting thing on the planet to write about. If you want overnight results then we will start a PPC campaign for you. But that’s going to cost you too. You’re going to need someone to manage that. So please…
If You Don’t Have the Budget Don’t Come Calling
Not to sound rude, but good SEO costs and so does the time it takes to manage a SEO campaign or a PPC campaign (if you still want those overnight results). SEO consists mostly of content generation and relationship building and thus, time. We know you value yours and we would like you to value ours for the same reason. For example it will probably take you a good 2-3 hours to put together a decent piece of content, and this is if you’re a writer by trade. It will probably take the layperson about 5-6 hours total to get something polished enough to get published without previous webmaster relationships in place. Not to mention, another 2 hours of follow up to get the thing placed. And this is just to get one simple piece of content published. All the while we’re using our trade skills to make sure we’re getting you the best value for your dollar.
Please Don’t Make Changes to the Website without Our Knowledge
No matter how many times I tell the story of that large HVAC company that nearly lost everything because they switched SEO companies (because they thought they were overpaying), to one with a high level of incompetence and a smaller monthly fee. Or how many times I put it in your paperwork about how you shouldn’t make changes to the site without consulting us first; I still get clients that screw up their own SERPS by making changes to their site. It’s frustrating beyond belief… And then I’m left telling them how they lost all their static page content and their rankings because they switched their site to PHP from ASP or HTML or whatever the change was. We agreed that I wouldn’t touch the pages you already had in place as they were already everything you had dreamed they would be, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t tell me that you hired a programmer to make some serious changes.
Take Our Advice about Website Related Issues
When we tell you that you should switch hosting providers, it’s not because we have a good friend over at so and so. Honestly, I don’t recommend anything I wouldn’t use myself. If your host is always down or if they are going to cause us issues moving over to the new version of your site, we will let you know. Please, please listen when we give out advice. It’s not because we like hearing ourselves speak, it’s because we want the best for our clients and we want them to be able to reap benefits quicker from our work. SEO takes plenty of time as it is, we don’t need anything else in our way, especially a crummy service provider. We need your website to perform optimally in order for you to reap the rewards of our labor. We will only make requests that we feel are necessary, believe me, we hate change as much as you do.
Bottom line is, please take our advice, especially if you ask our opinion. Write it down if you have to. Call us if you think it’s something that could impact our work. Remember when your teacher told you that no question is a stupid question? That actually applies here.
Chris specializes in local search engine optimization (SEO) at RankLocal. There they offer local search marketing services which focus on the promotion of small businesses in local markets throughout the country. These services provide SMBs exposure in their local community by putting their websites at the top of the search results in highly used search engines for niche related and geo-related search queries.
This straightforward advice to both the SEO vendors and clients are nothing but true. It is very common to see the clients expecting fast results from the vendors but they do forget that it is only a process which is bound to take some time. Also the clients think themselves to be seemingly all knowing and make changes to their website without telling the vendors or do not take their advice in any issue related to their site. But they should understand that the SEO vendors are there to solve your problems, so first you need to tell them.
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Love the straightforward advice. I think this kind of thing happens in most trades. A client (however well-meaning) may impede your efforts to help them by trying to take matters into their own hands. It sounds like you take your commitment to your own clients seriously and that is great to see!
Thanks, Elena, for the comment. I think the toughest thing for clients to realize is that SEO is really a longer term investment requiring more patience than the instant gratification offered by PPC or other options. Helping the client to continue to be patient until tangible results can be seen requires some diplomacy.
David Hitt recently posted..WordPress SEO Tips for Bloggers: Advice on Using Yoast’s ‘WordPress SEO’ Plugin
Sometimes these clients become a pain in ass when they start expecting results in just a week. A client of mine had a nice blog but he was not getting any traffic from there. He came to me asking for 1000 subscriptions in a week and rise in natural traffic by 200%. How to handle these type of conditions?
I believe that such clients need education before you start working for them. So that they are aware about the things.
Clients can be a pain in most businesses, and when they want fast, good and cheap then we have a problem. They always have to drop one of those if they wanna be real…
Really Shareable information by the all vendors on their clients profile. But i can’t understands why you hate changes as they do, this advice create ambiguity in my mind..
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Very good point of view, I also have been working with SEO optimization and fully agree with your views. Each would like to have their site recognized overnight, without cash contribution.
I love your assertiveness. Most of the time , a lot of people expect results with out having the patience. Sometimes we just have to buckle down and do all we can do on our end, an let our paid services do the work and just be a little more patience even with paid seo.
Usually, a brand new website takes about six months to one
year to appear in the SERPs of Google, assuming the service provider is worth their salt.
B) SEO basics – Image 2: Select-’English’ and ‘All Countries and Territories’.
You can then take a hard look at the companies that come
up for that particular keyword. While you’re at
it, remove all or fix 404 errors. A client can also seek
troubleshooting services from SEO experts if their site is
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Meta Name and Meta Description Tags are two of the important
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such a way that the algorithms find them easily. Online research is required to determine the packages and SEO Company.
Be sure that the SEO outsourcing company you hire is capable of communicating properly.
Search engine optimization is necessary for online businesses because it lets your website
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Basically, if you create links to your website with “ink cartridges” or “printer cartridges”
in the anchor text, it will help move your website up on the search
results for those key words. Here you will
need an SEO agency such as Webfirm to try and run damage limitation.
In this article, I will show you the best Word – Press SEO plugins you need
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SEO defined. Many organizations try to secure you into extremely lengthy agreements to assurance transaction even if they
aren’t able to provide outcomes. When a person enters a keyword into the search box of a particular search engine such as Google, there will be scores of results showing out which are a result of a search engine algorithm devised by that particular search engine. The website serves as a way for customers to find the business and be able to see what services are offered. Yahoo style guide.
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This uncomplicated guidance to both the SEO providers and customers are nothing but real. It is very typical to see the customers anticipating quick outcomes from the providers but they do ignore that it is only a procedure which is limited to take a while.for more details just click here
Afligido siento siempre que esto hiere a alguien pero la verdad no es siempre un mar respecto de nubes de caramelo rosa, placentero por otra parte blandita en el cual