When faced with questions from clients who just want the best return on their investment, it’s sometimes difficult to give the reassurance they desire. This is probably more glaringly prominent in the SEO industry than most because, put bluntly there are no guarantees as far as search rankings are concerned. You simply cannot guarantee top rankings and any company that does should be scrutinised very closely.

However, there are  practices you can put into place to assure your client of your capabilities and put their minds at ease.

Educate them

SEO can be difficult to explain and subsequently understand; the game is always changing but the general rule of thumb remains “the more incoming links your website has under a particular keyword, the better it ranks for that keyword”. To explain this in real world terms - utilise the voting metaphor that is “each link is like a vote for your website and Google gives preference to the highest number of quality links”; this is the premise of link building.

Plan it

Once the client begins to understand the concept of link building you will need to package together a method, by which you are going to achieve your claims. Taking into account your keyword research, any on-site factors you will need to address and the overall cost to yourself in time and money, propose a plan that you can discuss with the client.

Select 6-8 keywords over a 3 month period. Choose relatively easy keywords for the first month and work towards more competitive ones over time. Once you have reached the end of that quarter you can address the campaign and decide what to do next.

Make it measurable

Don’t just tell your client you’ll build some links for them and do a spot of on-site clean up. Businesses are only concerned about improving their bottom line and they want to see firm targets that are going to achieve this.

Which of the following methods do you think is the best way to measure an SEO campaign?

• Backlinks
• Ranking
• Traffic
• Conversions
• Time
• Cost

Let’s break each one down...

Backlinks

This is an internal way of measuring the number of links that you have gained. You can store details about each link including page address, keyword, PageRank, date and cost. Most clients will not be interested in this information, but bear in mind some may ask for proof of links gained and ideally, you should be offering this report on a monthly basis.

Ranking

This is pretty simple to measure – if the client website ranks at 52 at the beginning of the campaign simply make a note of where it lands at the end of each month. Make sure you’re not logged into Google otherwise you’ll be viewing personal results.

Traffic

Here’s the biggie. Clients want to see an increase in their traffic through their improved rankings. Use Google Analytics or a similar package to measure this – you may need to ask the client for access to these stats at the beginning of the campaign.

Conversions

Do you think conversion rates have anything to do with SEO? This is actually a side-issue and should be addressed as such. Conversion optimisation is getting people to buy where search engine optimisation is getting them on the site. They are two different things entirely and while this obviously matters to your client, in respect to you as a search engine optimiser this is not your concern. You may need to explain this to your client, as many still act under the premise that traffic = sales, when in reality it just isn’t as cut and dry.

Time

Another internal measure – once your client knows their campaign is running monthly, it is down to you to manage the campaign.

Cost

This matters to both you and the client because as any good SEO will tell you, you need to invest money from the word go in order to purchase links. It’s a good idea to ask for 50% up front in order to do this logistically, and the x% you put on top will account for your time investment.

To Summarise

Hopefully this has given you an insight into planning and executing a strong SEO campaign. By understanding your industry perfectly you will be able to deliver a strong proposition to your prospective clients that will help them find confidence in your abilities.