15 SEO Expert Advice on How to Improve Client Satisfaction
To help you boost SEO client satisfaction, we gathered insights from 15 industry professionals, including link-building specialists, CEOs, and digital marketers. From managing client expectations to providing personalized reporting, discover the top proven strategies these experts recommend for keeping your clients happy and satisfied.
- Manage Client Expectations
- Focus on Revenue-Based SEO
- Emphasize Content Quality
- Leverage SEO Forecasting
- Enhance Multi-Channel Support
- Ensure Transparency and Alignment
- Utilize Engaging Video Updates
- Educate Clients on SEO
- Adopt ROI-centered SEO
- Optimize for Mobile Devices
- Communicate Regularly and Clearly
- Align SEO with Client Goals
- Implement Goal-Oriented SEO
- Share Results-Driven Updates
- Provide Personalized Reporting
Manage Client Expectations
One proven way to improve SEO client satisfaction is to set realistic expectations from the beginning. Explain to your clients that SEO is a long-term process and that results may not be immediate. Be transparent about the work that you will do and what they can expect from your services. By doing so, you can manage their expectations and avoid any misunderstandings.
It is also essential to provide regular updates on the progress of the SEO project. Keep your clients informed about the work that you are doing and the impact it is having on their website’s search engine ranking. This will help to build trust and show that you are actively working on their project.
As a link-building specialist, it is crucial to be available to answer questions that your clients may have. Provide them with multiple ways to contact you and respond to their inquiries in a timely manner. This will help to establish a good working relationship and show that you value their business.
Sachin Tripathi
Link Building Specialist, Husky Hamster
Focus on Revenue-Based SEO
SEO is just another channel to drive leads and sales. So that needs to be your major focus in strategy and reporting.
Ask yourself, how can I improve ROI? What does the site need to improve sales? What changes are going to grow and convert traffic?
Ensure your SEO reports focus not only on keyword movements and the number of backlinks you’ve got. Show the $ value in your work too.
By focusing more on revenue, you can:
1. Show clients you care about growing their business.
2. Show clients you understand they want an ROI from their investment with you.
3. Demonstrate how powerful SEO can be as a channel, which might lead to up-scaling work.
Working this way might even change your SEO approach entirely, as you shift focus to what will move the needle financially too, not just what might move the keyword and traffic needle.
Ben Poulton
SEO Consultant and Founder, Intellar
Emphasize Content Quality
SEO client satisfaction is crucial, and the best way to improve it is by focusing on providing helpful content. Clients want to see tangible results from their investments, and by creating powerful, natural, and engaging content for their websites, SEO experts can deliver a vital aspect of these results.
Such content should offer useful insights, answers to questions about industry topics or products, and be valuable information to both website visitors and search engines. Writing articles or blogs that attract, retain and satisfy the target audience increases their interest and trust in the website, enhances their experience and interaction, and makes them more likely to revisit or even share it.
By focusing on creating valuable and educative content, SEO clients become more satisfied with their website traffic and conversion rates, and it also establishes SEO experts as industry experts, boosting their reputation and overall standing in the field.
Jefferson McCall
Co-founder and HR Head, TechBullish
Leverage SEO Forecasting
A good way to improve client satisfaction is to highlight SEO opportunities with SEO forecasting. Utilize SEO forecasting to more accurately predict, decide, and validate your marketing objectives, SEO goals, and business goals. By doing this, you can give marketing directors, business managers, or finance directors insightful information.
Find less obvious or hidden opportunities for growth through organic search, and use SEO forecasting to confirm them. You’ll demonstrate the opportunity’s worth and its significance as an investment.
Nicholas Altimore
CEO and Co-founder, SirLinksalot
Enhance Multi-Channel Support
Your customer satisfaction levels will increase if customers can reach you more easily. You must be present where your clients are if you want to provide multi-channel support. When buying something, consumers use a variety of platforms and tools. Because of this, it is important to be present across all platforms used by your clients. Among these channels are:
- Live chat assistance
- Social media assistance
- Support by phone and email
The major advantage of multi-channel support is that you can interact with your customers by learning about their favorite communication channels. So provide top-notch support through each channel. This enables you to increase client happiness and brand trust.
Alice Hall
Co-founder and Creative Director, Rowen Homes
Ensure Transparency and Alignment
SEO, often viewed as a mysterious and complex process, makes people naturally uneasy. The best approach I’ve found to address this concern is to maintain complete transparency and ensure that the SEO activities align with the organization’s key objectives. This approach can help put clients at ease by:
- communicating using the same KPIs as the rest of the business
- explaining the reason behind specific activities, such as “addressing these technical issues helps us achieve Objective ‘A’ quicker”
- providing progress updates using keyword position data and technical reports before site traffic is impacted.
When SEO activities are made tangible and less obscure, clients are more likely to relax and develop a constructive relationship.
Tom Pratt
Director, Albert Road Consulting Ltd
Utilize Engaging Video Updates
One proven way to improve SEO client satisfaction is to share regular progress updates through concise and engaging video summaries.
In your SEO agency, you have found an effective communication method by sending clients Loom videos every couple of weeks. These videos provide clear and visually appealing updates on the work completed, and the results achieved during that period.
By following up with a monthly call, you ensure clients discuss the progress and the plans for the upcoming sprint. This approach keeps clients informed and engaged, which ultimately leads to increased satisfaction with your services.
Jaya Iyer
Marketing Assistant, Teranga Digital Marketing
Educate Clients on SEO
Educating clients on SEO best practices and the rationale behind your strategies effectively improves client satisfaction.
By helping them understand the intricacies of SEO, clients are more likely to appreciate the value of your work and have realistic expectations of the results. Providing educational resources and explaining complex concepts in simple terms can empower clients and lead to a more collaborative and satisfying partnership.
Aysu Erkan
Social Media Manager, Character Calculator
Adopt ROI-centered SEO
Modern SEO recognizes that quality is more important than quantity for measuring success. While traffic was once the primary goal of SEO, it can be misleading, as having many visitors who don’t convert is less valuable than having a smaller number of visitors who do. Instead of focusing solely on traffic, businesses should concentrate on ROI, which can be achieved by utilizing behavioral analytics to understand consumer behavior online.
By analyzing what high-value visitors search for and integrating those insights into future content, businesses can refine their SEO strategies and attract valuable traffic. Ultimately, by concentrating on ROI, businesses can develop effective SEO strategies that deliver tangible results.
Léa Soller
CEO, Digiberries Paris
Optimize for Mobile Devices
At an unprecedented rate, users are abandoning desktop computers in favor of mobile devices. Because of this change, their online habits are evolving.
A mobile-friendly website loads quickly, has little to no horizontal scrolling, and doesn’t use flash (because most mobile browsers don’t support it). These elements work together to create a fantastic mobile experience that has a beneficial effect on clients, particularly on mobile devices. Users will leave your site if they cannot access it effectively on mobile devices, such as tablets.
Jason Berkowitz
CEO, BreakTheWeb
Communicate Regularly and Clearly
One proven way to improve SEO client satisfaction is to provide regular and clear communication. SEO can be a complex and technical field, and clients may not always understand the work being done. Therefore, it’s important to communicate regularly with them and explain the progress, results, and any changes being made to the strategy.
In addition, it’s important to be responsive to client inquiries and concerns. Make yourself available to answer questions and address any issues promptly. This helps to build trust and confidence in your abilities as an SEO provider.
Overall, improving SEO client satisfaction requires a combination of technical expertise, clear communication, and excellent customer service. By providing these elements consistently, you can create a positive experience for your clients and increase their satisfaction with your services.
Muhammad Waqas Ashfaq
Digital Marketer and Search Engine Optimization Analyst, Source Kode Solutions
Align SEO with Client Goals
You should always focus on delivering measurable results that align with your client’s goals, but this is something I see SEO consultants get wrong fairly frequently. You shouldn’t only be measuring your own metrics, you should have a clear linkage between your metrics and the ones that matter most to the client.
Sure, you can track and report an uptick in website traffic, keyword rankings, etc., but that’s not going to hold anywhere near as much water as showing that those have led to an increase in conversions and more revenue.
Onno Halsema
CEO, Contentoo
Implement Goal-Oriented SEO
One mistake most SEOs make is focusing too much on KPIs that indirectly affect the business goals.
For example, backlinks, keyword positions, impressions, and CTR improvement are important to evaluate SEO efforts in a specific period. However, the metrics that matter most to your clients are leads, conversion rates, revenue growth from search, etc.
So, always align the business goals with your SEO strategy, tasks, and progress.
Instead of creating your SEO reporting full of technical terms, charts, and graphs, try to show the correlation between your SEO and content efforts with the end goals.
This can involve showing how SEO efforts have contributed to lead generation, conversion rates, and revenue growth. This way, you can satisfy client expectations and help them understand the progress.
Harshit Gupta
Entrepreneur and Digital Marketing Trainer, GrowthAcad
Share Results-Driven Updates
Most SEOs always get this wrong. They always think you need to tell your clients that you fixed X amount of meta descriptions or tweaked X title tags. Really, your client doesn’t care about the nitty-gritty stuff. They want to know what’s impacting their business the most.
So if you see your results are performing for them, always be sure to tell them. Don’t even hesitate. New contact form submission from a blog post you created? Send it over. A high-value keyword jumped in rankings? Send it over.
They care about what’s working, not what you’re doing.
Taylor Scher
SEO Associate, TaylorScherSEO
Provide Personalized Reporting
After years of experience within the web development industry, I have found that personalized reporting is one proven way to improve SEO client satisfaction.
Most SEO agencies provide standardized reports that show website rankings and traffic progress. However, these reports can often confuse clients, leading to frustration and a lack of confidence in the agency’s capabilities. Clients don’t want automated or generalized reports; they want simplified ones that are precise and offer a clear roadmap to the end goal.
To solve this issue, we provide our clients with personalized reports that are tailored to their specific needs and goals. These reports focus on specific keywords or website aspects and are designed to be easy to understand and a project roadmap designed to achieve the main objective.
By providing this level of transparency and customization, we have seen a significant increase in client satisfaction.
Richard Kennedy
Managing Director, Arken Digital
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