In the first meeting you have with a potential client, you want to cover three
main areas. You want to:
- Learn about them
- Present them key information about you
- Communicate what you can do for them
Learning about the Client
The first time I meet with a client (either in person, over the phone, or via
video conference) my priority is to learn as much about the client as
possible. To craft the best SEO plan possible, I need to know what the
potential client is trying to accomplish on a high level. At this point you
should review the client’s site with them and point out of the areas for
improvement you saw in your earlier research.
You did review the potential client’s website before meeting with them,
right?
Most recently this tactic has been helpful for a training supplements
company I worked with. I figured that they must already have a clear
understanding of SEO because they ranked #1 for all of their products.
Given their link profile and the competitiveness of their niche, their rankings
surprised me. After our first meeting, I found out that
they were actually manufacturing all of their products and they didn’t
actually have any direct competition on a product-by-product basis. This
explained the rankings. If I hadn’t learned this, I would have spent a lot of
time looking for sketchy tactics that didn’t exist.
Because of revelations like this, you always want to make sure to cover
the following talking points in the first meeting:
What does your company do? This is extremely important
because it can reveal disconnections between the company and how
the company’s website presents itself. It also helps to identify
company priorities and allows you to see what drives the potential
client.
What do you want to accomplish with search? I am almost
always surprised by the answer to this question. Obviously every
client wants more traffic, but this is only a means to an end. This
question is designed to identify what that end is. Do they want to sell
more products or influence more people? All of this information is
extremely important when you do your keyword research later on in
the process. For example, if the client wants to sell more products,
your keywords will be product-related, but if your client wants to
improve its reputation, you might not target a single one of their
products. The answer to this question can make a big difference in
how you spend your time.
How is your team organized? This is helpful for logistical reasons.
It helps identify paths for making changes to the website. You don’t
want to waste your time (and the client’s) by explaining technical
details to a copywriter or marketing tactics to a developer who
doesn’t care. This question helps you work more efficiently by giving
you hints on how to communicate better with the potential client.
Your ability to create value for the client is directly related to the speed
and efficiency with which the client’s team can implement your
recommendations (and give you a valuable case study), so don’t
neglect this point.
What is the process for getting recommended changes
implemented on your site? Beyond knowing the people involved,
you need to know the process, too. Some clients can make changes
to their site on the phone as you speak, while others have to create a
development ticket, and you might wait a month or more to get
changes implemented. Most are in the middle.
What is the SEO history of your site? What worked, and what
didn’t? Asking this question can give you some insight into how the
term “SEO” has been perceived within the organization throughout
recent years. It’s important to know whether you’re the first vendor
that the client has used, or whether the company is coming off a bad
relationship with another firm. If the latter, your strategy and
suggestions may face increased scrutiny as the client regains faith in
the industry. You also need to know about any dodgy tactics that the
client used in the past, as part of your time might be devoted to
cleaning up the mess. If at all possible, read previous SEO audits
and reports.
What is special about your company? What unique value do
you provide your customers that your competitors don’t? The
answer to this question is very important, and not just to make the
client show confidence in the organization. A smart link-building
program will use this unique value to generate the type of interest that
will result in links. Whether the value is larger inventory, better prices,
more attentive customer service, or something entirely different, the
client needs to know that if they don’t stand out, the SEO task will be
significantly more difficult.
What sections are on your website? This is one of the most
important questions that I ask. When clients tell you about the
sections on their website, they almost always reveal what the
information hierarchy should be according to their priorities. This is
extremely important when trying to see their website on a high level
from their perspective. For example, if your client owns a website
about widgets and he or she spends all their time talking about the
different formats of widgets, it is very likely that their website should
sort widgets by format.
What pages are your biggest moneymakers? This helps you
align your priorities with that of the client’s. Your job should be to
maximize your Return on Investment (ROI). The client is spending
money on you, and in turn you should do your best to send as much
qualified traffic as possible to the pages on the site that will make the
potential client the most money.
What online resources (other domains) do you have to work
with? Many times clients will be sitting on powerful resources, and
they don’t even know it. I once worked with a media conglomerate
that had no idea it would benefit from linking between its different
child company websites. These websites happened to be some of
the most widely linked domains on the Internet and their relationship
to each other was being wasted.
Can I have access to your analytics? This access is vital
because it helps you in two important ways.
Don’t take “no” for an answer when it comes to analytics access. You
need it, period.
First, it helps give you an advanced view of how the flow of traffic
reaches and moves through the given website. It allows you to see
which pages are already driving traffic, which you can then use to
your advantage.
Second, it gives you a measuring stick for your efforts. It provides
you with the tool you need to show that you provided value to the
potential client.
Is your website registered and verified with Google
Webmaster Central? If the answer is no, you should register it to
see if you can identify any big problems. If the answer is yes, get
access to it so that you can make sure all of the settings are set up
properly. Specifically, you are going to want to look at the
canonicalization settings of the homepage and the filtering of
sitelinks. If no one from the organization has yet verified the site
through Google Webmaster Tools, then sorting through GWT’s
diagnostics data can be one of the first valuable services you’ll
perform for them.
How many pages do you think you have on your domain?
Although the answer to this is usually only a rough estimate (“oh,
about a million or two pages”) it helps give you context when you start
seeing how well the domain is indexed. If clients think they have one
million pages and the search engines are indexing a completely
different amount of pages, you have either uncovered a duplicate
content problem (engines have more pages indexed than clients
think they have) or an indexation problem (engines are not able to
index all pages).
Page Count Estimates
Frequently, online marketers simply have no idea how many pages there are on
a site, but this does not imply any lack of technical savvy or commitment to the
program on their part. Modern CMS and large corporate sites simply make that
answer both hard to find and not a particularly smart use of time.
Remember, too, that if their page count estimate matches the number of indexed
pages, that isn’t always a good thing. Many sites, through a combination of poor
crawling of deep content and duplication of shallow content, showed an index
count that was very near the estimated number given by the client. In other
words, the client said there were about 10,000 pages, and that’s about how
many were indexed. But it wasn’t the same 10,000 pages.
What subdomains do you have on your domain? This helps you
identify the breadth of the domain. As a result of how the search
engines treat subdomains, it can be hard to find them all without the
client’s help.
What areas of your site are off limits for me? This helps you use
your time more efficiently. I have run into situations where entire
sections of a website are off limits because the developers that run
them are in different departments. Furthermore, it helps you avoid
making recommendations that can’t be implemented due to legal
problems with things like licensed content.
Next article will be "Presenting Yourself to the Client" ,thanks for reading..
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment