Guest post: Managing Client Expectation in Search

Made Social on 12 July 2010 | View Comments

In advance of Social Collective, we have been inviting select people to guest blog and join the SoCol debate, hopefully offering a fresh point of view. We have been asking a range of people to contribute, including those working in social, client side, techies, journos etc with a view of building a wider picture. Any questions raised during this process will be addressed during a panel at SoCol in September.

Our second guest blogger in the series is, Chris Hyland aka @ChrisJHyland, who has taken a fresh look at tackling SEO:

Managing Client Expectation in Search
By Chris Hyland

100% guaranteed results! Sound familiar? That’s because if you put “seo” into Google, you will see a multitude of companies guaranteeing results.

What is the problem with this? Simply put, this does not manage client expectation – how can it? If I went to Google and found a company that guaranteed me results within four weeks, I would expect success too. But there are a few crucial points to consider…

Do these companies take into consideration what constitutes a successful campaign to each individual company? It does not appear so. It is so important that when any agency starts work on a client in any capacity, they map out a clear direction of where they expect to be in the short, medium and long term.

Resource

“If we spend more, will our results improve further?” I hear this a lot. The answer is yes, the more resource you spend on a client the more you can expect, there is no doubt that there tends to be a natural correlation with an increase in traffic supported by an increase in leads/sales/downloads. However the reality is that SEO and PPC are very different animals. SEO takes time; you may put money in today and not see the benefits for three to six months. Whereas PPC can be instantaneous – results can be achieved overnight.

Case Study

A good example of this is a client we won six months ago. Cut a long story short, their existing Search Agency (no names) had got complacent and had not done anything on the account for at least three months. When we were handed the account, all their organic rankings were heading in the wrong direction. As you can imagine this was a major problem and not the best way to start on a new client.

This is quite a predicament for us as an agency to be in because they had appointed a new search agency and they expect the results to improve, not to deteriorate. I spoke to the MD and Sales Director on a number of occasions and, while being very careful not to criticise their former agency (it’s the easy way out), all I asked is that they give us three months to show our worth and six months to get some tangible results. Luckily in our first setup meeting I explained that we expect to show progress on any new account after three months. Thankfully I am glad to say that their two core keyword targets are now up to position two and three in Google – the highest they have ever been and there is more to come.

Summary

From my past experience I believe that being honest with a client and managing their expectations from the outset will produce a long lasting trusted relationship. I believe this is the core reason behind the success of 4Ps Marketing and we are lucky enough to have great bonds with the vast majority our clients.

About Chris Hyland

Chris is the Director & Co-Founder at 4Ps Marketing and is predominately responsible for client retention for all the company’s SEO, PPC & SMO clients. Chris has a real passion for the search industry, and is excited to see where the ever changing market will go over the coming years.

View the first guest post in the Social Collective series from @StuartWitts here: Get Excited And Make Things