Managing Client Expectations When It Comes To Rankings

[JordanJCaron]

How do you manage your clients expectations? What do you say to them during your initial meeting(s) about what they can expect?

We've had a few clients leave us because they were not satisfied with their results.

During meetings I will say that after three months, they'll see improvement in their rankings. I send them monthly reports from Brightlocal. But I believe our problem might be in the reports. There are 12-20 keywords (mostly different variations of the main search term) on these reports. Mostly all of the rankings improve with some making bigger jumps than others.

So they'll come to and if they jump from the 22nd result to 15th, they think that's not a big enough jump or it's not fast enough. That and they haven't seen an increase in web traffic.

How can we prevent this from happening again?

Should we focus on 1-3 keywords per client? Something like "service+city+state/province" and a variation of their service name?

We've recently added guarantees for first page and top three. We say that if they they are not where they are supposed to be within the time frame specified, we'll keep working until they get there. I feel this is can make them more comfortable with their money and give them an idea on how long it will take to see results.

On a side note, we had potential client choose another company. They said it was a reputable company that many of their friends have used. Just for the hell of it we've kept their rankings report and the results very unimpressive. This leads me to believe that we are not alone here.

Anyways, I would love to hear your thoughts. This is one of the biggest concerns I have daily about my business.

 

[Nicholas Radoi]

Hi,

First of all, you need to convince your clients that SEO it's a long term strategy that need continuous attention. They have to understand that jumping from the 34th position to the 27th in the first month it;s a very big step and that this means that you are going in the right direction.
Second thing, if they want right away result try to convince them to use a PPC campaign until their website reaches a good organic position.

The most important thing is to tell them exactly what you can do for them ( ex: backlinks campaign, citations campaign, social media, On-site analysis ) in detail in order to create trust..

I hope it will be of help.

Kind regards.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Nicholas,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this!

Hi Jordan,

I'm sure you are not alone here and am hoping lots of other consultants weigh in too.

 

[JordanJCaron]

Good points Nicholas.

I'll focus more on the driving home the fact that SEO is a long term strategy.

One of our clients has seen the light of this and is a pleasure to deal with this. We've done two five month campaigns for him and his shop is very busy now. When I sent his last invoice he said he wanted to re-up for another year!

In regards to the Google Adwords, we presented this idea to a new client with a new website. In our meeting I told them it would take at least 6 months to get to the bottom of the first page. It's a small service industry that isn't competitive. They wanted to see faster results and are on board with running and Adwords campaign at the same time.