Good SEO specialists understand that quality results can take time, but convincing customers that they’ll need to wait it out can be difficult – especially when clients have little to no experience with back-end SEO practices. Taking some time to clue in your customer base about SEO basics can go a long way in helping to develop a healthy working relationship and will give them some resources to map out their expectations for the timeline of your work.
Clients often expect keyword lists to take hours or even minutes to compile – but the best SEO experts know that keyword analysis is an ongoing process and that a basic list can take days or even weeks to perfect. High-ranking websites use a combination of long-tail and short-tail keywords that are found from a variety of sources and that have statistical data which demonstrates success. Even after keywords are implemented, tools like Google Analytics should be used to monitor click-through-rates and general traffic statistics, and low-performing keywords should be swapped out.
Once upon a time a webmaster could buy hundreds of links at once and see their Google rankings rise instantly overnight. This is no longer the case and Google now looks for content-related links from reputable sources, which can be difficult to obtain. In the same way that it would take a professional a long time to “network” at a dinner party, it will take time for a website to “network” with related sites and to gain a variety of inbound links.
Taking a few minutes out of your day to explain these time related issues to clients could make a huge difference in their understanding of the important work you do each day.
By Michelle Robertson