You’re an SEO expert, but when you engage with a new client, you’re not an expert in what they do. But you have to learn quickly.
Hopefully, the client is a subject matter expert with tens of thousands of hours of experience under their belt. As an SEO agency or consultant, you don’t need their expert level of knowledge.
But you need to know what they say. In most cases, you need to gain some level of insider experience if you want to earn their trust and make a real difference to their business.
To do this, you need to:
Get to the heart of why the company stands out in the market. Get inside the customer’s mind to gain an intimate understanding of their needs. Learn what makes the website work. Understand the competition, their advantage and their SEO strategies.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these steps that will take you from beginner to expert in no time.
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1. Customer research
To meet your new customer, your primary and most available resource is the people who manage the customer’s business. From executives to customer service call representatives, your customer will be a treasure trove of expert information.
Begin your expert learning process with an in-depth discovery interview with those who oversee the company’s marketing, product development, and customer service. You can do this in the project kick-off call, or you can break it up into a series of calls with different people in the company.
Conversations with customer service can be very valuable. Knowing what’s important to your customers can help you make recommendations on everything from content holes to site navigation. Answering common questions is one way to create compelling SEO content for a website.
Regardless, you need to create a question template for your customer research. You want to make sure you ask every new customer about their business and what they do.
Become intimately familiar with their products and/or services. You can even ask them to onboard you like they would a new hire.
2. Customer research
It’s important to know as much as you can about the people your customer sells to or interacts with. After all, a good SEO strategy is to be able to reach these people with the right messages on the web.
A good place to start is to create audience personas with the customer. Even better if they already have them. Knowing your audience will prepare you for the next step in prospecting: keyword research.
I like to say that fishing takes a few things: the bait the fish eat, fishing where the fish are, and hungry fish. People help a lot. By the way, many people think that they have well-defined people… like:
Highly intellectualAdvanced degree, hopefully PhDrespected. Extremely theoretical. Curious to a fault. Can make up when they are called a studious “white hair”.
So, beyond defining personas, keyword research is an important exercise in learning how your target audience searches for what you have to offer. This is a cornerstone of your SEO strategy; you want these searches to appear in search results with the best possible information.
3. Website search
A good SEO strategy is only as good as the website. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the state of the client’s website and what may be hindering search engine rankings. The best way to do this is usually through an SEO audit.
There are several levels of SEO audits, but the best SEO audit is an in-depth technical audit. This takes many hours (ours can take over 100 hours), but it provides the most comprehensive look at a website, from technical background to on-page optimization and beyond.
And beware, free tools are exactly that, and often waste your time focusing on things that don’t matter.
“Any SEO tool will spit out 10s or 100s of ‘recommendations,’ most of which will be irrelevant to your site’s search visibility. Finding the ones that make sense to work on takes experience.”
– John Mueller of Google
4. Competition investigation
SEO is about beating the competition in search results. And to beat them, you should know:
Who are they. What they are doing right and wrong with their SEO strategy.
This is why competitor research is essential. And there is quite a bit of it.
Start with your target keywords, then analyze who is showing them on page 1 of Google.
When looking for competitors, you can look at:
Market competition to assess your strengths and weaknesses against theirs. Online competition, including everything from on-page and off-page factors to linking profiles to the technical health of your websites to content and more. What keywords you rank for and the extent of your site’s content. This exercise often identifies keyword gaps on your client’s site.
Spying on your client’s competitors is one of the best ways to improve your client’s SEO strategy and how you present the client online.
Rinse and repeat
Even when you go from beginner to expert in your client, there will always be more to learn.
Establish a process to keep up and keep the listening channel open. Or, your SEO strategy could become outdated.
And invite your customer’s feedback so you stay on top of their evolving needs.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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About the author
Bruce Clay is the founder and president of Bruce Clay Inc., a global digital marketing optimization company offering search engine optimization, PPC management, paid social media marketing, SEO friendly site architecture, content development and SEO tools and education. Clay authored the book “Search Engine Optimization All-In-One For Dummies,” now in its fourth edition, and “Content Marketing Strategies for Professionals.” He wrote the first web page analysis tool, created the Search Engine Relationship Chart® and is credited with being the first to use the term search engine optimization. Bruce Clay’s renowned SEO training course is available online at SEOtraining.com.
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