The Challenge and Opportunity

It is more to keep than to find a SEO client. SEO, while being an amazing marketing strategy, can be challenging for small business owners to understand. Often even while results are great, clients get dissatisfied, creating problems and even leaving your agency. This happens as SEO is an intangible and hard to understand. Being such, business owners in ignorance can often blame SEO agencies for all manor of challenges with their businesses. We can be easy targets. Throw in other factors like the fact it’s a long term game, with regular distracting algorithm updates, things can get really tricky and it can become difficult to keep clients.

When managed well though, SEO clients can stay forever. Some agencies have seen SEO campaigns run longer than 10 years and then continue beyond the sale of the agency. Such success in client retention is rarely correlated to results against keywords. Most often, it is relationship and communication that makes the difference between these long standing campaigns and the ones that churn. And that is what this guide is about – setting up your communication rhythm to maximize retention of your SEO clients (i.e. to keep your SEO clients), and as such ROI on all your marketing efforts

1. ACCURATE EXPECTATIONS (a)

SEO is a long term game. One of the industry challenges are a plethora of agencies who offered short term results and guarantees. This distorted expectations across business sectors and also created an environment where short term, spammy tactics become common. Don’t be like that. Set your relationships up at the start to be long-term. Start an engagement by asking or demanding 12 months minimum to create value. You can even enforce this with fixed term contracts or guarantees

ACTION: ENSURE ALL YOUR MARKETING, SALES, ENGAGEMENT MODEL AND EARLY COMMUNICATIONS SET YOU UP FOR A LONG TERM ENGAGEMENT

1. ACCURATE EXPECTATIONS (b)

Something you will want to avoid is your clients watching their keywords every day. Keywords will adjust differently over time. Some go slow, some go fast, on some days rankings improve, other days they deteriorate. What we are looking for in quality SEO is positive, long term trend based improvements. Similar to watching stock prices, value is made over time, not captured in any given instant. Explain this to your clients and
limit their check-ins to period based ones.

ACTION: BUILD A REPORTING FRAMEWORK THAT CAPTURES TRENDS RATHER THAN LOOKS AT INSTANT RESULTS. DISCLOSE THE SCHEDULE TO YOUR CLIENTS

1. ACCURATE EXPECTATIONS (c)

One of the things you will need to deal with are changes in the algorithms. At the time of writing this article, we are experiencing 2 – 3 significant algorithm changes a month. These seem to throw results for impacted websites for 2 weeks or so before things go back to normal. These changes really scare business owners. So be up front, let them know it will happen and when it does, not to panic. As their agency, you can’t stop Google changes, but you will be there when it happens to move and ensure long term value.

ACTION: TRAIN YOUR CLIENTS TO EXPECT ALGORITHM CHANGES AND TO TRUST YOU AS THE PERSON WHO WILL TAKE CHARGE OF THE RECOVERY

2. EARLY LOVE

When a client starts with you, they will be excited and nervous. They are taking a risk, so they want to feel reassured. The absolute last thing you want is to have them think “I have no idea what’s going on”. The first 4 – 6 weeks of the engagement are crucial. As part of your onboarding, communicate and deliver something every week. Ensure you are seen every week. Design your first month’s work to maximise communication time.

ACTION: DESIGN AND IMPLEMENT AN ONBOARDING FLOW THAT ENSURE YOU TOUCH BASE WITH YOUR NEW CLIENTS WEEKLY FOR 4 – 6 WEEKS WITH DELIVERABLES. PUBLISH THIS SCHEDULE TO NEW CLIENTS SO THEY KNOW WHAT TO EXPECT.

3. REGULAR REPORTING

One of the most common complaints I see from clients is “I only hear from my agency when they are sending invoices”. There are so many agencies out there that just don’t report progress to their clients. DON’T BE ONE OF THESE GUYS. Report progress to your clients every month. Have a discussion with them about their results. A month is long enough to capture positive trends and often enough to keep people happy. It will also give you the opportunity to pick up on any dissatisfaction and rectify before it’s too late.

ACTION: SET UP A MONTHLY REPORTING RHYTHM WHERE YOU DEMONSTRATE TO CLIENTS THE VALUE THEY ARE GETTING FROM YOUR SERVICES.

4. SET EACH SESSION UP FOR SUCCESS

Once you have set up your reporting and communication rhythm, have a look at all the scripting you use to communicate these schedules and appointments. Use these communications as opportunities to create positivity about the value your clients are getting from you. Sales never stops. Every client is only loyal to the last invoice paid. So every touch point should aim to create loyalty to the next invoice. “I am so excited Mr Client to have our next meeting and take you through these results. When is a good time to schedule you in”

ACTION: REVIEW ALL YOUR COMMUNICATION AROUND RESULTS
REPORTING AND APPOINTMENT SETTING. BE VERY DELIBERATE IN
YOUR CRAFTING OF THESE MESSAGES SO THEY BRING YOUR
CLIENTS ALONG FOR THE JOURNEY YOU WANT THEM ON

5. SEASONAL STRATEGY SESSIONS

As an agency, to ensure the longest engagements, you want to position yourself as the client’s trusted adviser, not as an SEO administrator. The best way to do this is to elevate your conversation to strategy. Even if all you do is SEO, you should have a realigning strategy session at least once a year. If you offer other services, once every 6 months would be better as you will be able to find opportunities to add further value to the client.

ACTION: CREATE A DELIBERATE VALUE ADD STRATEGY SCHEDULE THAT COVERS THE MAXIMUM LIFETIME OF YOUR CLIENT. HAVE SOMETHING NEW TO TALK ABOUT FOR YEARS. DELIBERATELY BECOME THE TRUSTED ADVISOR FOR YOUR CLIENTS

6. Offer Free SEO Audit Tool To Your Client

Embedding a free SEO audit tool on your website, so that your SEO clients can visit your website regularly to check how SEO optimized their web pages are for certain keywords. Every time they use the tools on your website, you know they are engaged and you can explain your strategies with your clients in the next meeting.

ACTION: SIGN UP TO GET A FREE PIECE OF HTML CODE AND PASTE IT ON YOUR WEBSITE TO EMBED THE SEO AUDIT TOOL ON YOUR WEBSITE NOW LIKE THE ONE BELOW

SEO CLIENT RETENTION

In our experience, the key factor to ensuring maximum retention of SEO clients is relationship. Building a strong relationship through responsible expectation setting, careful onboarding and deliberate, strategic communications, results in clients who stay forever.

We hope you enjoy this article and take the opportunity to think about how your current strategy around client relationships is impacting your retention rates, outside campaign performance, and your ability to keep the SEO clients in a long run. We also hope you have found a few tips to implement for improvement.