What Makes a Good SEO Client?

Too often clients are their own worst enemies when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO.) Either they are totally unknowledgeable about the SEO process, or they possess just enough knowledge to be truly dangerous. Or worse yet, they trust their website designer to know and understand SEO. This can lead to a lot of frustration as well as bad results.

Just as we listen at first, do our homework and get into our clients challenges, we expect our clients to do the same. Good clients listen to what we know, and let us do our jobs. Bad clients take weeks to OK something we recommend. What only takes us about two hours to do for a good client ends up taking a month or more for a bad client.

One universal truth is that clients expect instant gratification - no matter how much we explain that this is unrealistic when it comes to SEO. In the case of the good client, results start showing up in about 30 days from the start date. But in the case of the bad client, results start showing up in about 60 days from the start date. The good client is thrilled, and the bad client blames us for delays.

Sometimes it gets even worse. The bad client has a project traffic manager who is clueless. This person often vetos several critical steps to the SEO process because they can't seem to comprehend their necessity. For instance it doesn't matter how many times we explain that optimized copy has been carefully crafted for keyword inclusion, placement and density, the traffic manager sees themselves as a wordsmith so they endeavor to rewrite copy, leaving out keywords, ignoring keyword density, etc. Then, once again, they point to the SEO as failing when in fact it was their misguided efforts at writing that were the cause for failure.

How do bad clients become good clients? They understand that social media and SEO are simply the latest tactics being used online in marketing, and this is no different than marketing, PR and advertising was back in the old days. The Web is merely another channel in which to market through and we have many exciting new tools to use.

The bottom line is that what we do as marketing and PR professionals requires skills just like other professions, and if you didn’t study it back then, you probably won’t know how to do it today either. So good clients just let us do our jobs and report back with the good results we can now measure, unlike the old days where it was hard to measure the results. Check out the case history below for one of Mike's "good" clients, and see the "good results" they have been getting since 1996.

Challenge: In 1996, Pacific Islands Reservations represented three vacation rental properties in Hawaii. The challenge was to grow the business of Pacific Islands Reservations in a cost effective manner using the Internet.

Solution: Using SEO white hat tactics, PacificIslands Reservations has grown from one website in 1996 to twelve websites in 2006 while maintaining top ten rankings in Google, MSN and Yahoo! throughout the period. During the same period, Pacific Islands Reservations has increased the number of properties it represents from three to 250. As search engine optimization and marketing has evolved, so to have the tactics used. When pay-per-click made its debut with goto.com (now overture which is owned by Yahoo!) Pacific Islands Reservations was one of the first twenty clients. Pay-per-click advertising was dropped in December 2004 when the ROI could no longer be justified. Other tactics that have been employed with success have been blogs, RSS news feeds, electronic press releases, link building and continued application of white hat search engine optimization tactics.

Result: Pacific Islands Reservations has grown from one full time employee to six full time employees. Along the way it has bought out several competitors and is the acknowledged leader in vacation rental reservation services in Hawaii. Revenues have expanded 400 percent in the last three years alone.