We handle many, many SEO campaigns, as you can probably understand from our customer list, but most of the time, apart from getting it ranked, we face two perception challenges.
- I hope from next week, my site will rank at the top for all the keywords we have chosen.
- I don’t need SEO, I am doing it just because people say it’s good. I can’t care less.
If you are an SEO Agency, you must have faced these mindsets from your clients as well. In this blog, we will talk less about the technicalities of SEO but more about these perceptions, mainly the second one.
Frankly, we don’t expect the owner of a painter and decorator agency to understand the impact of online ranking. That’s why we start by educating them. This is a game-changer. We need to make him understand a few points.
- SEO is not an expense: Seriously, no. SEO is an investment. It improves your ranking, people find you online and they come to you. You gain revenue and profit. See, it’s a simple equation. But, there are complications. Sometimes, people find the agency online, do all the researches and then reach out to the agency office to strike a deal. There can be 101 reasons behind this human action. However, it reduces the impact of SEO for the business owner. “hey, I don’t see many queries online. What are you guys doing?”.
You need to tell him, explain to him what is happening. A simple maths, how many offline calls were you getting? Do you see it increasing? Or, more objectively, why don’t you ask your offline clients, how they came to know about you. The answers to these will surely help your cause. - SEO is not magic: Thus, don’t expect to see the ranking from tomorrow or next week. However, a better way of telling it would be to educate them about SEO. How does SEO work, what are the types of SEO, what do we do in SEO and how can SEO be effective are some of the topics? While rehearsing the answers is a good thing, a more effective way would be to prepare a document that explains every step. Add examples, not an imaginary example but a real-life example of a client who benefited from SEO. Add graphs, use colours and make it fun to read. You must understand, a painter and decorator agency owner would be reading it, not an SEO veteran. Using complex jargon might sound erudite but it would not serve the purpose at hand.
We always do this. In fact, we have a professionally created FAQ sheet which we freely share. It illustrates SEO in detail and answers the most important question, “what’s in it for me”.
These are the steps to convince the client to engage in serious SEO and not to cut down on the expenses. They will happily pay you more for blogs and articles to be prepared by professional writers or infographics to be made by a designer after research once they see that these ‘expenses’ are actually investments to get more clients, online and offline.
