Transparency and Honesty with Your SEO and PPC Clients

When working with clients, it is important to have a healthy level of transparency and honesty in order to achieve high client satisfaction and provide a better understanding of your digital marketing strategy.

Here are some pointers on how you can maintain a strong level of transparency and honesty with your SEO and PPC clients:

Set a Firm Long-Term Strategy

Plan a 6 or 12 month link building strategy where you can set milestones, standards and accountability for your team. These are stable timeframes in which you can see notable results in your campaigns. For example, determine a set number of links to build each month, what keywords to focus on or content updates to implement.

With PPC, you would want to decide on a long-term strategy with marketing KPIs such as reaching a certain cost per conversion, cost per acquisition or return on ad spend. Your client will usually set these KPIs themselves and you’ll build a strategy with them to achieve it over a reasonable set period of time.

Setting the Right Expectations

Never claim guarantees of ranking #1 on Google. Set realistic expectations with your clients and explain to them the factors that can influence results. For example, competitiveness of keywords, competitors in the market or budget and time constraints.

Do not over promise and then under deliver. A good way to set expectations and standards is to show your clients what type of approaches you’ve successfully delivered in the past. This can come in the form of SEO or PPC case studies and testimonials.

Share User-Friendly Dashboards

Limited AdWords account access can be provided to your client so that they can look at the account themselves. However, they may have trouble understanding all the terms and forming a picture of their performance by themselves. It is also difficult to display data in the way that you want on the AdWords user interface, so it is a good idea to set up your own dashboards on Google Sheets to visualise your results to them.

Write an AdWords script to run daily and fill in a daily report on Google Sheets. This daily report dashboard is great for sharing data to your clients so that they can see what’s going on for the month so far, including with current spend, sales and leads just to name a few.

Image Source: AdWords Scripts – Guides

Link building results should also be summarised so the client can see what types of links are being acquired each month. If you have a sheet for logging all your acquired links, you can also use some formulas to count the links based on categories (blogs, brand mentions, resource pages, directories, etc.) and date acquired.

Create a glossary of terms to help your client understand what all the metrics in your data mean. It keeps it clear what you’re conveying to them so they can see the performance for themselves on your dashboards.

Monthly Reports and Meetings

At the end of each month you should write up a monthly report for both SEO and PPC. For SEO reports, show your clients the changes in organic traffic and movements in rankings for keywords. Summarise where you’ve built links, identify opportunities or improvements and set focus keywords or content for the upcoming month. PPC reports on the other hand will consist of insights you derive from an analysis of the month’s PPC performance.

Always keep your clients on the same page. Conduct weekly or monthly calls or face-to-face meetings to go through the monthly report with them, review the month’s activities and plan for next month. Keeping clients in the loop helps them better understand how their money is being invested and what progress you are making with it. It also ensures a continued alignment of your digital marketing strategy with the overall strategy of the business.

Don’t Hide the Negatives

Imagine buying a used car but the seller had lied to you about the specs and hid all the problems with the car – instead only telling you the positives such as the car being cheap. These problems will be found out eventually. You wouldn’t want your clients to discover any hidden surprises like that when you’re covering up all the negatives in your digital marketing results.

It’s important to understand that results can’t always be positive all the time. When there are negative results, don’t go out of your way to hide it from your clients. The best approach is to admit to mistakes if there are, identify the key affecting factors, bring to light any barriers or problems that you face and devise a solution that fixes it.

Take the negatives as an opportunity to refine your strategy and to prove to your client that you are adaptable with problem solving and can continue to generate results even with setbacks. Work with clients the way you work with your team, share the ideas that work and what doesn’t, so that strategies can revised together each month.

For more tips on how to manage SEO and PPC campaigns for clients, please check out these related reads on Marketing.com.au below:

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Raymond Tang

Digital Marketing Specialist at Sparro Digital Marketing Agency

Raymond Tang is a digital marketing specialist at Sparro Digital Marketing Agency based in Sydney, Australia and has substantial interests in sharing his knowledge and insights in the digital marketing space. Working across SEO, PPC and content, he aims to improve the online presence of brands he works with, learning more every day and sharing tips with others in the field.