What? How can the best SEO company be the wrong fit for you? If they’re the best, then what’s the problem? Often what turns agency/client relationships sour is poor communication. It can even start on Day 1 of the engagement. Whether you are an agency professional or a client, you’re bound to learn something from these (at least partly) fictitious case studies. I’ll present a few scenarios and then you can determine how you would have reacted – any of these issues could have been salvaged with better communication.

The Day 1 Danger Signs

Even at the best SEO companies staff members can miss cues from clients who are frustrated even before the campaign begins. ‘We’re way behind our competitors;’ ‘Just fix it;’ ‘You’re the pros, you tell me;’ these comments are shorthand for potential disaster. Here’s why: It’s crucial to set and accept realistic expectations. When the client provides insights into his / her frustration, especially at the beginning of a campaign, it’s important to address these. Some people cannot accept that Google does take up to six months or more to take SEO updates to a website into account. If you are the agency, from Day 1 it’s key to have the client know that discussing Google’s schedule is not a cop-out. This is a legitimate timetable that is not 100% predictable; in fact; it’s much less predictable than that. Best practices dictate that an SEO company should follow its white hat optimization process and by doing so, send signals to Google about the site’s authority and user-friendliness.

If you are on the client side reading this, patience is definitely important when rolling out an organic search campaign. If you want more immediate results, have your agency manage a paid search campaign for you. Then you can have some traffic coming in, while your organic campaign matures.

The best SEO company doesn’t always have the communication skills to work well with every client. The majority of agency/client relationships can be improved through a constant search for compromises that work not only for now, but that deliver value for the future.

The Best SEO Companies Don’t Put Their Clients’ Eggs All in One Basket

One exceptional outcome that the best SEO company can achieve by communicating well with its clients is diversification of assets. While we all know that Google traffic and more of it is what everyone is chasing, let’s not forget that there are other ways to drive qualified traffic to a website. Email marketing, social media, events (online and offline) – these are just a few ideas. If you’re the client, then tell your agency that you want to set up a diversified campaign. Discuss with your campaign manager what your goals are and then have the manager recommend a spend for each facet of the campaign. Your budget and the agency’s recommendations will likely meet somewhere in the middle due to resource constraints, but that’s okay. The main point is that as the client you are communicating your needs. If you are the SEO company then it’s your job to create a solid campaign, and you should be able to deliver a level of success that can build off some of the client’s earlier achievements.

Here’s an example: If a client performs a product demonstration at a trade show that proves popular, as the client’s agency it is incumbent on you to continue building buzz after the event is over. Sending direct mail pieces to interested parties, following through with email updates to attendees, and scheduling a followup webinar are all ways to keep the good feeling going. It all starts with open lines of communication. Let’s examine this chain of events again: The client tells the agency that it had a super demonstration at the trade show and people were signing up for email updates. The best SEO company will immediately begin the followup process, based on the client’s feedback.

Given Time, an Agency can Become the Best SEO Company for You

Aside from something egregiously wrong, there is some room for experimentation and growth within the relationship between agency and client. It is more than likely that within the first six months of the engagement that not all goals will be addressed. In fact, perhaps only a few will be even slightly improved. But the momentum is in place for growth. On-page optimization has been deployed; content marketing is on schedule, and link development is beginning to bear fruit. At each progress meeting the client is more assured that the campaign is humming along. Still, the agency is tasked with looking for chinks in the armor. There’s always room for improvement. For example, if the client says they want a less formal monthly report, with a minimum of charts and graphs, then by all means, the agency should produce that. As a result of the time taken to nurture communication, an organic campaign can start driving traffic for mission critical keywords, allowing the agency to reduce or retire some paid search keywords. Not a bad result from two parties who committed to keeping the lines of communication open!