I can’t believe it’s almost been seven months since I became a “client”. Maybe it flew by so fast, because I was occupied with some other things. In any case, while I’ve been at JC Whitney, I’ve learned a few things about how a search agency should and should not work with their clients and I wanted to relay a few of those things to those interested. And one point before I begin, at JC Whitney I manage numerous SEO specific vendor relationships on a regular basis, so I have exposure to several types of agencies and their deliverables. So here are five tips for SEO agencies out there wondering, “I wonder what I can do to be a better agency partner”:
Provide value
Man, going right for the jugular, aren’t you Jeff? When I say, provide value, I mean, just because we signed a contract and we’re all set to go with the first project, don’t think you’ve “won” the business and it’s time to slack off. You need to prove it day in and day out. We have a few agencies who we can consistently rely on to get an email when Google makes any algorithm changes or if they see something weird going on in our analytics. There are other agencies who we say “We need this type of report” and that’s exactly what they deliver. No more, no less. And in the case they deliver less, we continuously ask for less and less from them, eventually terminating the relationship. If you provide more than the client expects, you can get away with the occasional faux pas or miscalculation.
Provide insights
Anybody can look at a ranking report and say “Yup, your rankings increased”. What I need you to do is to conjecture, hypothesize, and theorize why our rankings/traffic/etc increased or decreased. The reason I hired you is because you are the “expert”. If you live and breathe this everyday, you should know more than I do. As a client, SEO is the bulk of my responsibilities, but I also have other projects that I need to be responsible for and can’t read every blog post out there and I certainly don’t have access to numerous other clients experience to draw from. I need you to provide me those insights.
Ask questions and tout your services
Who is your primary demographic? What search engine converts the best? Do you have a Bing / Yahoo strategy? How do paid and organic play off each other? I could go on and on. The reason I bring this one up is because I was new to many of the relationships we have with our vendors, as they were negotiated before I arrived. In any case, many of our vendors just accepted their role in our strategy and haven’t pushed beyond that or taken the time to fully explain all the services they offer. With a new client contact, you need to reemphasize the services you offer and how you can help your client. By asking questions, you can constantly be pushing and selling new services and offerings, which benefit both your client as well as your bottom line.
Be vigilant
The reason I bring this one up is that we have relationships with at least 3 or 4 agencies who are actively monitoring our site and our content. Out of those, if something goes wrong on our site, I might hear from 1 or 2 of them, maybe. Why don’t I hear from all of them you ask? Not sure, but it definitely figures into what projects I give them in the future. Especially in the case of search, there are so many tools out there, both free and paid to monitor traffic and rankings, I should hear from all of them every time something “major” happens, but instead, I’m only hearing from a few.
Be creative
And last, but not least, be creative. I understand search, especially organic search, isn’t always the most glamorous thing. There’s lots of data crunching, IT work, programming, database optimization, etc. etc. but that doesn’t mean we can’t talk branding, engagement, site design, usability, new site functionality, conversion optimization, A/B testing or a myriad of other marketing tactics out there. At the end of the day, SEO is one part rankings and traffic, but also one part site experience. The more users enjoy your site, the more they will link to it, the more they will tell their friends, and so on and so forth. So stop just thinking page titles and URL’s and start thinking about the entire site experience holistically.
So what do you think? Am I setting the bar too high for search agencies? I know when I was in the agency world, I was doing all of these things on a regular basis, so I know it’s not impossible. Let me know what you think in the comments.
Photo courtesy of chriscoyier