Last week, Tarla wrote an excellent post on how to report your SEO success. Definitely give it a once-over if you haven’t already! For this weeks tip, I wanted to take those tips and push them one step further.
One comment (or question rather) I often hear is “Why?” As Tarla mentioned, clients have every right to fully understand the campaign they are paying for and it is our job as the experts to make sure they are not left with unanswered questions.
After you have gathered the heaps and heaps of data and placed everything into nice charts and graphs, do your clients a favor and explain what that data dump actually means. Great! You ranked in position one in Google…so what? If you can begin to accurately answer all of those “so what” and “why” questions, then not only will you be providing much needed campaign insight to your client, but you will be proving the true value of your SEO campaign. By forcing yourself to answer these questions, you too will gain insight into your campaign that will help with optimization.
From the start of the campaign explain why certain keywords were chosen instead of others. How will these keywords impact traffic volume? What kind of search trends do you see with these keywords? Why do some keywords work and others do not? Of course, some of this might be subjective but, by using your handy dandy toolkit you should be able to give some kind of working estimate.
Instead of only showing one month’s position report, consider showing trends – or at the very least several months at a time. Is there a certain grouping of keywords that are trending better? Why would one downward trend of keywords not matter as much as a downward trend of another keyword? What does the overall performance look like over 3 months time, 6 months, or a year? Using these trends, your client can compare quarter-over-quarter or year-over-year and see the benefits in black and white (or color, depending on your print properties).
We know our industry. We’re the experts. If we can’t answer all of our clients questions then we are not providing high-quality service. In the perfect world, however, we will be able to answer all of those questions before our clients even ask.