Setting Client Expectations for SEO

Show of hands: how many SEO professionals reading this have been asked whether they can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google?

We have. It’s a common misperception that getting a #1 ranking is a reasonable, achievable, and sustainable goal for pretty much anyone who puts their mind to it. And why wouldn’t clients assume this? There are plenty of ads promising guaranteed top rankings, usually phrased like a used-car-salesman pitch and with about as much credibility.

I mean, think about it. If these companies could always deliver what they promised, Google would need a horizontal display to accommodate the multitude of #1 rankings!

Seriously, though. When we’re asked for a guaranteed top ranking we have to respond with, “Of course that’d be great, and it’s certainly something we strive for, but we can’t absolutely promise that. And here’s why….”

Which is so much less compelling than an unqualified YES.

So if we don’t guarantee a top ranking on Google, what can we guarantee? If it’s up to us to define what clients should expect from a successful SEO campaign, what do we tell them?

A Question of Control

At times I envy my colleague Amy Konefal on the Paid Search side of our business. Compared to Search Engine Optimization, PPC is so concrete, so specific, so… controllable. It’s fast. Agile. Responsive - the Ferrari of Search. Want a top ranking? No problem, let me log in and ramp up that bid, or add some negative keywords to the Adgroup. There, try searching again. See? There we are at the top! High fives all around!

It’s really irritating.

It almost makes me happy to see Google’s Quality Score throwing a wrench into all that carefree PPC celebration.

SEO, by comparison, can seem mysterious and arbitrary to clients, a perception not diminished by unpredictable algorithm changes and Google’s often vague, delphic statements about what tactics work, what tactics could trigger an index ban, and what constitutes a quality, high-ranking web page.

So we do our best to set clear, realistic expectations up front, clarifying what’s possible and what the client will have to do to achieve it.

Great Expectations

While setting expectations is usually a custom exercise tailored to each client, here are a few of the common themes we make sure to communicate:

Expectation #1: SEO is not an exact science.

Communicating the inexact nature of SEO is an important first step. Rankings are affected by many factors, not all of which are within our or the client’s direct control. For instance:

• The SEO efforts of competitors
• changes to search engine algorithms
• a client company’s SEO-unfriendly CMS platform, directory structure, file-naming protocol, or META tagging standard that’s not going away anytime soon
• an upper-executive’s selection of keywords to target

All of these and many other uncontrollable factors influence the success of an SEO campaign.

Expectation #2: Rankings are important, but not the whole story

A narrow focus on rankings alone ignores other important considerations, ones that can make the business case for SEO much more effectively and concretely than rankings alone. For instance:

• Traffic from organic search. One of the major reasons for achieving high rankings in the first place is to increase the amount of traffic to a site. If traffic numbers increase noticeably after SEO improvements go live and maintain over time, SEO efforts can receive the credit.
• Conversions from organic search traffic. The quality of organic search traffic can be another measure of SEO’s success and value to an organization. One way to measure this is to track conversions (of whatever type your client’s site offers) from organic search traffic, and compare the quantity pre- and post-SEO efforts.
• Branding, credibility and competitive advantage. While less easy to measure directly, improved rankings (even if not the #1 spot) translate into more visibility for your client’s site and less for their competitors. Every results spot filled by a client’s page is one more chance for them to appear in front of their potential clients and customers.

Expectation #3: SEO is judged by improvement, not arbitrary targets

Moving clients away from a hard numeric goal (”We have to be #1 for ‘music’”) to one of improvement over time is key to managing an SEO project. While we may not guarantee a specific ranking, in our experience we can guarantee overall improvement in rankings, traffic, and visibility.

Expectation #4: Trends are important. Minor fluctuations are not.

Everyone’s experienced it. An optimized and link-built page finally hits the top five, only to drop three positions the next day. Panic time, right? No. Time to note the interesting little change and reassure the client.

Like a strategic stock market investor, we’re more interested in data trends than individual data points. We need a broader view than a single day’s worth of data to give quality advice. Yes, perhaps we dropped three positions today. But when we look at performance over the past month or quarter, what’s the trend? Of course, we slice and dice trends in various ways to gain as much clarity as possible. For instance, we might look at an individual page’s performance for its targeted keywords, or look at organic traffic trends for a group of strategic keywords. And of course we pay special attention to trends pre- and post-optimization efforts.

Expectation #5: Improvements depend on implementation

A caveat to Expectation #3 is this - our recommendations have to actually be implemented in order for them to work. For some clients this is no problem, but many have technical or other restrictions that limit the amount or type of tactic we are able to employ for them. So, to help set expectations in this area we set priorities, indicate which approaches would be most effective for the client, and clearly communicate the possibility of reduced results if the most effective tactics are not implemented.

Expectation #6: A ranking is more valuable if it’s for the right page

Here is an area where we differ with some SEOs, because it goes directly to visitor experience. We think a top ranking for a page that provides a poor experience isn’t much of a win because it’s not sustainable.

Visitors who click through a result listing only to find a confusing, difficult or irrelevant page aren’t likely to return. Or remember your company’s brand with affection, if at all. So what do you have to show for your top ranking but a bunch of useless, bouncing traffic? (unless, I concede, your business model is based solely on traffic numbers).

Success Through Education

We’re firm believers in SEO evangelism and education, which is why one of our service offerings is SEO training. The more a client understands about how SEO works and what factors influence success, the more they’ll spread the word and build consensus among their wider team. Which means when it comes time to change filenames, update the site directory structure, create new keyword-rich content, or get a budget approved, those involved will already be on board.

This, then, is our true long-term strategy for setting client expectations; to create educated clients who already understand what to expect.

There’s nothing I like better than when Google AdWords decides to make our lives as search marketers just a bit easier. If you’re interested in working smarter and improving campaign results, be sure to check out two of the more recent reporting roll-outs - Google’s new Placement Performance Reports and Search Query Reports.

Google Placement Performance Reports – Finally… We now have visibility and CONTROL over where our ads display in the Content Network given Google AdWords’ relatively new Placement Performance Reports.

For the sake of providing some historical context, there definitely has been an evolution in terms of Google’s Content Network offerings. We were granted some control years back when Google decided to let us set separate bids for Content v. Search (and by the way, if you aren’t bidding separately for the Content and Search Networks, you really need to make this change – these really should be viewed and managed separately, as they are entirely different beasts).

The ability to bid separately for Content and Search was definitely a big step towards more control.

Then, another not-so-small victory came about when Google decided to let us exclude sites – nice feature, and another step towards more control. But given that most account managers don’t take the time to dive into their log files, this didn’t help much for those who were clueless as to the source of their traffic in the first place.

But now with Google’s new Placement Performance report, we’ve got quick and easy visibility coupled with control. These reports allow you to see exactly which Content sites are sending you traffic and conversions, and therefore make the right decisions to improve your campaign’s ROI from the Content Network (as opposed to throwing your hands up in the air in frustration and pausing the Content Network all together as many of us did in the past).

For those sites that are driving costly traffic yet few or no conversions, go to your Tools link and choose the Site Exclusion option to eliminate future clicks from these lower performing websites.

For those sites that show up in your Placement Performance Reports as top performers, consider maximizing your exposure by setting up a Site Targeting campaign. With a Site Targeting campaign, you can explicitly choose which sites you want to appear on and therefore maximize exposure on your most effective placements. However, note that I say ‘consider’ Site Targeting because there is one major caveat – you end up paying on a CPM basis if you do this and in my experience thus far, this is a big downgrade in ROI. I’m personally willing to give up the increased control in order to keep my coveted CPC pricing model.

The Placement Performance Reports combined with Site Exclusion is definitely a great combination for increasing ROI on the Content Network… though I have to mention one big flaw. Domain ads. You’ll notice in your Placement Performance Reports that there are line items that say ‘Domain ads’, which refer to Google ads that show up on parked domains. In our experience, these parked domains drive lots of clicks and few conversions… yet currently, Google will not allow advertisers to opt out of domain ads, as you can with individual sites.

Overall though, a thumbs up to Google for granting us this increased level of visibility.

Google Search Query Reports – If you are using Broad or Phrase Match, then Google’s new Search Query Reports will definitely be your friend. Downloading a Search Query report will allow you to pull statistics including conversion information for the specific search queries that were used by the searcher who clicked through on your ad – as opposed to seeing metrics only for the term you were explicitly bidding on in AdWords.

I definitely recommend pulling this report ASAP if you have not already. You will be quite shocked at the terms that you are phrase and broad matching to currently. Many are so completely and totally off the mark it is not even funny - which in turn is creating a whole lot of buzz and well-warranted discontent regarding Google’s Expanded Broad Match (check out Expanded Broad Match Hurting AdWords Advertisers and Up The Creek With Google AdWords Broad Match).

Here are some suggestions for taking the Search Query report data and converting it into a positive in terms of ROI.

For those terms that are driving traffic yet not converting, set up negative keywords in your campaigns and/or ad groups; thus eliminating this ineffective traffic.

For those terms that are driving effective traffic and conversions within your ROI benchmarks, yet you aren’t explicitly bidding on them (the broad or phrase matched terms), go ahead and add these terms to your campaign. Even though you’re already showing up for these terms, you can maximize exposure and control by bidding on them individually.

Learn more about Google Placement Reports:
How to Use Google’s Placement Report and Site Exclusion to Cut Your Customer Acquisition Costs by 20%
Google Content Placement Performance Report Rollout

Learn more about Google Search Query Reports:
My Newfound Love: Google AdWords Search Query Reports
Searching Beyond the Paid: Google AdWords’ Search Query Report …

Bravo to Google for giving us the tools to increase ROI from our online campaigns!

The ability to perform A/B tests on ad descriptions and landing pages in paid search is truly a beautiful (and powerful) thing. If you are not testing ad descriptions against one another for conversion and ROI, then you are missing out on a huge opportunity to gain more sales and leads for your company within your given budget.

However, a lot of times it is tempting to throw 4, 5, 6 or more different ad descriptions into the search engines’ systems and test them all at once. Yet the key to drilling down to conclusive evidence of what does and does not work in terms of driving more leads or sales to your website is testing 1 element at a time. There IS a reason why they call this A/B testing – not A/B/C/D/E/F testing!

Take this example. Say you set up 3 different ads for testing in Google AdWords:

Suppose that at the end of 2-3 weeks the 1^st ad significantly outperforms the others in terms of conversion rate. Was it the ‘5 Diamond’ designation? Was it the fact that the rate was included? Was it that it stated ‘downtown’? You really can’t know for sure because no single variable was isolated. Each ad differs too much from the others and therefore you simply can’t draw any great conclusions from this test.

Instead, what if you were set this up on a ‘testing schedule’ of sorts. For testing in Week 1-2 (assuming this is enough time to gain actionable data… but definitely run the ads for longer if needed):

(note that the only variable tested is the use of a room rate in ad description)

At the end of Week 2, say the first ad with the rate emerges as the clear ‘winner’. You can now conclude that the inclusion of rates in the ad description is a factor that contributes to more online sales.

Week 3-4? Stick with the rate in ALL descriptions now that you know it is important for sales, but move on to a new isolated variable. Say that this particular hotel has a number of honors to work with as key differentiators and now you’d like to see which resonates best with searchers:

Week 5-6? Perhaps the hotel wants to test the use of special offers such as ‘Free Breakfast’ v. ‘4^th Night Free’. Week 7-8: maybe 2 different landing pages.

By patiently remaining systematic in this approach and letting the numbers provide the proof, you’ll have solid evidence of which ad elements and landing pages produce the highest ROI for your company.

One important last word of note though! In Google AdWords, much to the conversion marketer’s chagrin, Google will by default start delivering the ad that has the highest click-through rate – not the ad with the highest conversion rate. If your goal for paid search is to drive the most leads or sales, not the most clicks, then I HIGHLY recommend that you turn off the setting that so-called ‘Optimizes’ your ad distribution.

To do so go to your Google Account and:

1. Select ‘Edit Settings’
2. Under Advanced Options select the radio button to ‘Rotate: Show ads more evenly’

Happy Testing!

If you’ve ever presented the results of your SEO or SEM efforts to a client of yours then this scenario will be familiar:

You spend hours (or days) compiling the data. You conduct your analysis, create your graphs and package it up. It’s been a great month and you make sure to convey that in your email, though the charts speak for themselves. You send it off.

Questions like these are the ones that come back:

"What does this chart mean?"
"Why did our numbers go down here?"
"What caused this increase?"

Now, if you’re fortunate enough to have clients who actually read your reports, consider yourself lucky. An informed client is more likely to be a champion for you and your future efforts than one who never opens your attachments.

However, that also means you have a responsibility to anticipate your client’s questions and take the necessary steps to make your metrics meaningful.

How to do this? While there are many paths to the creation of meaning, below are 3 Must-Have Rules for any SEO or SEM report:

(Read the full article…)