In the Digital Marketing Services Sector
Everyone is Keen To Tell You What Doesn't Work
I’ve been guilty of it myself in the past. Going on about the promises that web marketers should not make to potential or existing clients in digital marketing services. I hope though that I’ve always offered something positive.
A recent article on SearchEngineLand has proved pretty popular over the 18 months, and while I agree with the main thrust of it, which boils down to;
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep”.
It does beg the question from a client.
“So what am I actually paying for then?”
The Need For Honest Discussion In Client Based SEO
Updated from a post on my old blog demondemon dot com by Paul Rone-Clarke
So what can I promise?
Good question.
If offsite SEO is what you are doing then link building will always be involved (Offsite SEO – even pure “social marketing” always requires a link somewhere… or did you expect the visitor to type your URL into their browser? Really? )
I’m going to go through the ten points of the article linked above and give you solutions to what you should do – rather than just what you shouldn’t. Business is, after all, about taking action, not inaction and being overwhelmed by fear of action.
Links As A Conduit For Establishing Brand, Trust Or Authority
Sorry, I’m guessing there’s tea or coffee all over your keyboard now. What the flying (insert expletive here) am I going on about? Links establishing trust? Where does an idea like that come from?
Let me explain. You know the answer already, but it may have been forgotten in the “links are bad” and “Google ban sites with inbound links” paranoia which is destroying the fabric of the web.
Here’s an example. A major brand or niche player writes an article which gets a lot of attention. Something new, something controversial – maybe just something really well written and enjoyable to read
Wow, imagine that – an article written to be actually read and enjoyed, not just to provoke a Pavlovian buying, liking or sharing response.
Oops, rant off. Ok, so there’s this great piece of content out there. Something you enjoy, something that piques your interest, something you can add to or critique on behalf of your client. So why don’t you? That should be a part of your digital marketing services package no matter what colour or tint of hat you are wearing.
This may have the opportunity to drop a link, it may not. But if building your clients brand is your aim and you have gone to the trouble to set their social media profiles up properly. Ensured they have a business Facebook profile for sites that allow Facebook comments, or the same for Disqus, Twitter.. whatever. Then just getting the brand or name associated with the content is good. The logo, the company name. Getting involved in discussions, building relationships
Isn’t This White Hat Sophism?
Well, there is that. Currently there is very little that automates this process, although tools like Buzzbundle do help in finding these conversations for you. I’ve also been speaking to several others in the SEO application world, some of the biggest names – and suggesting that making tools that find these conversations, log into them, select the right profile, maybe even do some topic research (scraping RSS feeds, Google news) to allow your replies to have so good content and citation might be a really good addition to their standard SEO tools. Sort of like this.
This is in line with my idea that link building should now be secondary (but always present) behind content management and profile management when developing updates for the existing AAA SEO tools out there.
So yes, it is a little time intensive, and there are not many options out there to speed the process up. But this is just the tip of the work pyramid and really shouldn’t be more than a couple of hours per month per client. Very valuable though.
Rank And Bank On Trojan Horse Sites
The article I linked to from SearchEngineLand gets it all wrong. If you are going to do a “hit and run” in terms of your digital marketing services in a niche, or considering taking some SEO action you consider risky but worth it, then you…
DON’T DO IT WITH YOUR MAIN BRAND SITE
Trojan Horse SiteHere’s the thing. Setting up a website is cheap, quick and stupid easy for anyone who has been in the business for a couple of years or more.
A really good looking but small site can be built inside half a day One that is branded, uses multimedia etc. The compromise is, that the site will be small. A couple of pages of content and the headline products.
Don’t forget though: Google rank URL’s not sites.
You don’t look to rank a site for a keyword or niche, but just a single URL, and it’s this that makes the idea of creating Trojan Horse sites to get into a market for your brand so quick and simple.
Clever re-use of the art assets from the main site seems to work just fine as well. Rescale here, resize there, rename, add new Alt tags etc. This can be done so quickly and simply with free tools. Job done.
It’s your clients site, your clients own assets after all, they can do whatever you want with them.
I’m not saying this is the ideal solution to every problem, but it covers point 4 in the SearchEngineLand article for me.
So Long And Thanks For All The Fish
Yes, many clients will want to pull the plug at some point. They’ve had steady results, ranking has been decent and they aren’t seeing a great deal of upward movement in terms of traffic or income.
The first thing here is the meeting. Get together with the client and chat about re-focussing. How could you alter the way the existing budget is used to perhaps bring in more visitors even without increasing positions in SERPS?
Have you managed your clients well and provided good digital marketing services?
Are there other long tail keywords you could grab easily for small improvements? Could their site be added to or adapted to make the onsite site of getting these keywords dove-tail in with the offsite SEO you are planning?
Would PPC work? What would the ROI be? Are they willing to set aside a small budget to test?
Try all these things and more, but at some point a client will more than likely say “Thanks very much, I think we can manage without you then” What do you do here?
You Let Them!
No whinging explanation of why you think it’s a bad idea. Just a straight forward. business approach. Something along the lines of;
I completely understand. What I will do is prepare a final report for you. Visitor levels, positions for agreed key phrases a the time I hand back to you and for my part I’ll keep everything on file. So should you ever need to re-employ me to work again we can start back up with the minimum of lost time and effort. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to work for you. Regards …
Then do exactly that. However, in the background you are going to monitor their site for at least 6 months, and check against those final reports you made. Should the rankings slip significantly, then a quick note offering to get back on board again to recover for them is perfectly fine.
Don’t hassle them though – and don’t go back too quickly. 3-6 months down the line is about the sweet spot here. On a personal note I get back maybe 40% of my clients doing this. It’s an easy win.
The Client Who Messes With Their Own Site Too Much
SME clients in particular love to fiddle about with their sites and on the internet on behalf of their business. In other words, everything that happens in SEO terms is not necessarily caused by the SEO professional hired to do it.
Dealing With Clients Who Mess Up Their Own Online Business
It’s human nature, people love to fiddle and business owners like to feel personally invested in all aspects of their enterprise, and that might well involve doing stuff behind your back (leaving the potential for blaming you should something go wrong) It happens.. quite a lot.
Here’s where tools are your friend. If you create links you record them right? No? Well you should. Every one. The URL, the anchor text and the target – every link.
Then you get a subscription to a service like Majestic SEO and monthly run a report which shows most (not all – nothing is perfect) of the link building.
See some links you didn’t make on there? Well two possibilities.
The web is working as it should. People are suppose to make links and share. That’s what the whole WEB2 and social media is about. Someone came to your clients site, saw something valuable and shared it SHOCK HORROR – a natural link.
Your client is creating links. Either just to share, or dabbling in SEO
Either way you react exactly the same.
Meet, Discuss, Report. (a bit of a rant)
At your monthly or quarterly meeting you bring up link build. Numbers, location, effect. You point out the quantities you made, and also the “others” you’ve found.
You are careful to point out any in this ~”others” category that look bad.
Do they repeat anchor text too much, are they on poor sites, are there just too many of them. No blame, no judgement just something like:
We have created 34 links in the last 60 days for your site, our reporting software shows a further 200 created, probably by people visiting your site and sharing. However, I’m not happy with where these are being shared and the metrics they have. I’m going to ask for them to be deleted by the sites they are on as they do represent a moderate risk to the health of your site as they might be setting it on the path for an algorithmic or manual action penalty. Here’s the list of links we have created, and a second list of the suspect ones.
All but the dimmest client will get the message.
If they insist on getting involved, offer a training session, and charge appropriately for it ($1000 per day is not unusual here)
My Way Is Safe
Here is where you point out the facts of life to your client. Many people have a gut feeling, one they know is not entirely true, but invades everything they do. It creeps into conversation and you can see decisions being based on this instinct.
You can point out the error of thinking this way to others, only to find it creeping into your own though process. It’s wrong in so many ways. and it’s something your client needs to be very aware of from the outset. So make these 3 following points clear from the outset.
- “Google is not the internet”
- “Google do not police the internet” Qualify it with the simple statement of fact
- “Google are a 100% for profit website. Self serving, self centred, profit oriented. They are just a website, just like yours but probably bigger – their remit on the internet begins and ends with what goes on on their website – just like your remit and your website”
- Nothing that is effective is completely safe.
You can say these things yourself one minute. Then that creeping feeling that that just isn’t the case comes back again.
While from a day to day use point of view a gut feeling like this does no harm really, in the world of internet promotion and digital marketing services it is absolutely vital that this is completely understood. No one can guarantee anything inside Google other than Google themselves (and they refuse to do it for anyone).
They do change their mind on things often.
They are interested in a a clean and spam free index of the internet AS LONG AS a clean and spam free index coincides with them making more money.
The minute the effort to remove low quality content and spam from their index costs more than it makes?
They won’t do it.
It’s not their job to do it, they aren’t tasked with doing it by any third party and they aren’t morally obliged to do it
Google will do just about whatever it takes to make money, and that means changing often, responding to outside influences and trends all the time.
There could be any number of things about your site, its content its links that are considered “De rigeur” one day and “site non gratis” the next.
No warning, no apology.
Google are a business whose profit model involves having a website (Google itself) that lists other websites in a way that makes them the most money when people search using it. Regardless of the quality of your digital marketing services.
That’s the beginning, middle and end of it.
If ranking another site above yours makes Google more money – they will do it. Period.
Nothing personal, nothing vindictive. Just business.
A good example here is the way none responsive sites that don’t scale well to mobile devices have been dropping down in SERPS over the past 3 years.
Some great sites with fantastic information and a great history of clean SEO and great interaction metrics have slowly been dropping down the rankings through no fault of their own.
With well over 50% of information searches now taking place on mobile devices, and the bounce rate for sites that don;t scale well to small screens being very much higher than those that do…
Google are just playing the numbers. Over time the numbers change.
What you can say to customers is the simple and obvious truth. Google are not the only player in the game.
Building brand presence on niche blogs and forums, using other social media where appropriate and possibly dabbling with some well managed PPC all brings traffic and has a great potential for profit.
Yes you want to rank high in Google – but it isn’t the be all and end all for most. And if it is – sorry, start again, fix the site. There is normally a way back. Digital marketing services is so much more than Google ranking.
The important thing here is not to play the blame game. If it is understood by all how the ranking game works and what Google are all about from the outset, then making the changes to fix anything that comes up is possible almost every time.
None responsive site getting penalised for high bounce rate?
Create a responsive site.
At least make it clear to the client what the problem is and then offer a solution. If they won’t go for it, then you’ve done your best and can leave head held high. It’s not your game, you don’t make or change the rules, you just play it the best you can.
Julie Joyce puts it very well in the article:
You don’t just get grandfathered into Google’s good graces because you’re an innocent or uneducated victim. They really don’t care.
…and they really don’t.
Keep An Eye On Natural Link Building
Free links can destroy your site. A classic example recently involved businesses that created WordPress themes and put a footer link back to their business in the bottom of every WordPress theme they sold or gave away.
They became literally victims of their own success as, in some cases, tens of thousands downloaded and used these themes and consequently linked back to the developers site – causing a penalty.
Worse than this, all search engines are aware of the push to mimic the viral spread of content through Black Hat methods.
Natural Attention Is Not Always Good Attention
Using sock puppet accounts to look as if content is being shared and linked to more often than it naturally would is an example of how some BH methods try to game the system here. Sometimes it works, but the search engines are aware of this practice and try and nip it in the bud. Unfortunately, in their attempt to curb this, the search engines identify some false positives and genuinely spread content that really has gone viral has been mis-identified as spam linking or sharing and the originator site penalised for it.
Running your linking reports often Asking for poor links to be removed – maybe even getting in a a disavow request early should all be considered.
Remember to explain these links to your client regularly
So Long, Keep In Touch.
Understanding your clients business is pretty fundamental. You are going to need to know their potential traffic streams really well. Understand what keywords are relevant to them and staying up to date with product changes, promotions and their competition.
Alongside that, their is the potential of market forces such as niche seasonality, law and tax changes for the product or service – even – in some cases – fashion.
From a pure optimization point of view you don’t need to know their company structure inside out, but early on I find it good to offer to spend a day with them (if they can accommodate of course). Speak to the IT department if they have one.
If you didn’t create their website yourself, get to know whoever did and whoever is responsible for updating it. This last relationship has been one of the most important things I’ve learned over the years. I’ve had some disasters here where the web designed even refused to put in a proper XML sitemap… oh dear!
Regular Meetings. Keep Them Short And Productive.
Every quarter or half year there should be a full review of progress, this runs alongside the monthly reports you send to the client.
Ask them to let you know of any major changes and make sure they understand that keeping you in the loop with products, promotions, web changes and such like – will give them a better REOI for the money they spend with you.
Be part of the team for them – that way everyone benefits. Trust is built up, your real value as a marketer is understood. You may even get referrals for other clients out of it and having your value to their business understood makes you are far more important commodity for them.
Everyone wins.
Caveat?
These are not the tactics I would use on my own sites necessarily. Maybe, but maybe not. I treat clients on the safe side of the risk/reward equation and my own sites a fair bit further towards the risk end. Nothing is certain, but I want a clear conscious should the worst happen.