Explaining SEO to a Client Means Your First Interaction
It is a professional conversation often mixed with some personal interaction and many times is a courtesy call too.
As much this call or conversation is going to be about your expertise and your services. It will also be about how good are your interpersonal skills.
You do not have to be too pushy about your services or expertise and at the same time you need to be keep your focus on the purpose of this conversation.
You cannot let this important first conversation slip as a mere discussion about SEO in general.
You need to help your client understand what is SEO and how it works.
Because you client needs to know how SEO works for a business like theirs, and what benefits they are supposed to get.
Here are few things which you can keep in mind and which can help you guide through this conversation with some purpose.
It is also like helping them to learn SEO fast in minutes yet effectively. So take your client as a beginner or learner and start how you would explain search engine optimization to a layman.
You need to explain search engine optimization in simple words to them.
It is perhaps the most important step which actually can be the first and a decisive factor whether you get your client to sign up for services or not.
For your client this is the introduction to SEO and the services.
You can develop your own way and style. This is where you start getting full value and worth of SEO learning.
Whatever way you choose you need to make it effective as that only builds your client list.
This will serve as the summary of SEO and services you provide.
Why Explain SEO to Client At All?
Yes. You may very well ask why you need to explain SEO to your client at all?
You can say or argue that if a client needs to hire a professional for their website ranking and optimization then they ought to know about SEO.
Still, you need to do this. Why?
It is not just about explaining concepts or things.
It is more like educating your client towards few important topics and concepts of SEO which actually can help both of you in their respective goals.
And the goal is actually common, SEO services, whether to hire or to provide.
This is the first and important step for both you and your client. It is where you understand many things about each other.
This is a step which will help you in building your client list and your SEO agency.
As a consultant expert in ranking websites higher on Google by optimizing web pages for search engines you also need to be good at explaining SEO as a process, as a technique and as a digital marketing channel.
What Should be the Goal
The ultimate goal why you would explain SEO to a client is to guide them to hire your expertise.
The focus however is to guide them towards your services and benefits.
You want to ease your client into coming on board. What will also help is allowing you and your client to understand each other.
So, here is how you should start and here are the list of things to do and things to avoid.
What to Know Before You Start Explaining to Your Client About SEO
Now you are going to be on call with your client explaining many things about search engine optimization.
But you cannot just go on talking about anything. You need points to discuss.
For this you need to know & understand two things about your client.
FIRST.
How much do they know about what is SEO and how search engine optimization works actually and what is their level of SEO knowledge?
How much do they know about search engines and optimization.
Chances are they are a layman or like a beginner starting to learn from scratch.
SECOND.
Now you need to understand what they need and what is their business about.
What do they want for their business.
Based on these two answers you can start explaining how SEO will help their business.
This is the bottom line. This is driving point.
You need to explain SEO to them in a way that focuses on the benefits they will get. You need to explain those things and that much which helps them understand that why SEO is important for their business, and why they need it. Show them the real worth of SEO.
After this you can explain to them how you can help them. And more importantly how you can help their business better with your SEO expertise.
Points that Help to Explain SEO to a Client Better
Here are some important points which can be part of your explaining and discussion about SEO.
SEO is a Process
The first thing you need to explain to your client is that SEO is a step by step process.
Clients may not have an idea about this.
They might think it is a short term or fast step.
Explain to them that SEO is a step-by-step process for a new website.
When you explain search engine optimization as a process then start with explaining what is SEO and how it works.
Believe me you may just clear many doubts or answer many questions of your client prospect which they have not even asked you yet.
And then when you are explaining the process focus on optimization, how it works and what all professionals need to do in that.
And as you go on explaining optimization you can touch upon the steps of SEO like on-page optimization techniques and link building techniques and how these help.
The most important thing to tell them is about SEO keywords and why are they so important.
SEO Takes Time for a New Website
This is the most important thing to explain to a client about SEO.
How much time SEO takes to give results.
Clients want to optimize their websites for search engines to see results.
What they are most interested in is to rank their websites.
And often they would ask you to rank keywords fast for their website.
And yes as you optimize you will improve their keyword rankings.
However all this takes time.
SEO never gives immediate results.
New websites take time to build search impressions.
And one factor that plays here again is the process a new websites requires to build search impressions and then build rankings.
Google is the Headmaster
When you are explaining to them the time SEO takes here is one very important thing which you should never miss explaining to every new client or client prospect.
SEO is like following certain guidelines created by Google.
Google is the largest search engine.
And when we do SEO we mostly do it for Google. That is where your client will get traffic from.
Google has its own process. And this the second and more important factor why SEO takes time.
You need to earn trust of Google. And for that it has some requirements.
As we keep fulfilling those requirements, we keep improving our search engine visibility and positions.
Few Things to Take Care of While Explaining SEO
Here are few things you need to take care of when you start to explain SEO as a service, as a practice and as your expertise.
Important to Make Things Clear
The most important part of explaining should be to clear out few or many things.
A client may not know at all about SEO.
And certainly they do not know about you, what you do, your expertise and more such aspects.
And take it from my experience, clients or companies have many fancy ideas about SEO and what they expect from it.
They do not know the facts of SEO. They come to you with their own expectations or needs.
You know you might find during or at the end of the discussion is that they do not want or need SEO at this time.
For example, if they are looking for leads and that too in short time or more immediately then what they actually need is PPC and not SEO.
So, making things clear at the start is very important.
You should not also make unrealistic promises.
And if your client has any such unrealistic expectations then you need to explain SEO properly to them and make things clear.
This can happen as they do not know about SEO and what they can expect from it.
Set the Path You Want to Walk
This is the stage where you can set the path you want to walk and also guide your client prospect to the path you want them to take or walk.
You can very well set the tone for further or future conversations.
This is also the stage where things can go sideways or in any way.
You can guide clients towards some goals.
At this stage everything is open.
There are no set guidelines.
Also nothing is clear.
One smart advice I would like to give here is to ask questions to know your client, listen more and talk less.
Help Your Client Understand Value of Their Website
The way I learned SEO also helped me learn and understand what is the real value of a website and how SEO helps enrich it.
What I came to know is SEO as one of the organic digital marketing techniques actually helps understand the real value of a website. And how content helps in all this.
You need to explain to your client how important website is for their business.
The importance of content in website is also something which needs explaining and due attention. How content helps to target search audience and build & improve search engine presence and rankings.
The targeted search audience comes to websites to read the content that experts write or optimize for them.
It is their website which then becomes their best marketing platform to bring leads for their business.
Do Not Over Explain
As I said in the previous section, you should listen more and better and talk little less.
What that also means is you do not need to over explain anything here.
This includes and covers over explaining yourself, what you do, how you do.
Here you need to keep in mind this too.
We said earlier to explain or touch upon the techniques.
However, there is no need to explain those techniques in too much details.
Like you may be tempted to discuss the 3 important on-page techniques.
Or may think you need to explain how to do keyword research in steps or the steps how do you find keywords with the help of research process.
And certainly your client prospect did not call you to know the SEO evolution and history.
You may just confuse your client prospect.
Do not give them information overload which they cannot handle right now.
What they want to know is how you can help. That is all.
Explain that to them. Or else.
They are more likely to go to an agency or consultant who keeps it simple for them.
Final Advice
Just Explain SEO simply to your client.