SEO: How Much Involvement Should the Client Have?

You appoint a SEO agency to run your search engine optimisation campaign. You agree keywords, you’re happy with their strategy and you sign off. That’s it, right? It’s all in their hands?

Well, not necessarily.

The nature of SEO is such that some clients will want to be more involved than others. But it can actually hugely increase the success and efficiency of a campaign to have open channels of communication and regular face to face reviews with between agency and client.

Here’s what your SEO agency could benefit from you giving them.

Industry News

Your SEO agency should read up on your industry before the campaign begins. Look within their proposals for an indication that they understand at least the basics of your industry and your competitors.

However, they’ll never be as savvy on matters relating to the sphere you operate in as you will be. So if there’s a big change in your industry, let them know. And more to the point, let them know how it will affect you, your competitors and your target market. News like this can be used in content your agency may be distributing as part of your campaign and can also give them an understanding of certain trends that might be reflected in traffic to your website.

Lead Quality Feedback

It’s massively important for campaigns with a focus on lead generation that a client is feeding back. We can track web enquiries and even telephone calls. We can track the keywords generating them. But what we can’t track without feedback is the ratio at which a client converts those enquiries to sales.

For example, it could be that we think we have a winning keyword. We get into a great position with it and it converts to lead at a great rate. But what you might be finding is that the leads are poor quality. Conversely, we might consider some keywords to be resulting in a really low conversion to lead but then you find you convert such enquiries to sales at a high ratio.

All sorts of things can affect both conversion from visit to lead and from lead to sale. As well as just keyword, your site itself can affect this and your SEO company needs feedback in order to ensure maximum return for you on your SEO investment.

Special Offers or Events

If you’re holding a special event or you have a special offer on, let your SEOs know. Such an offer might result in a traffic spike and it would be useful for them to know. But in addition, this is something they might be able to use to acquire more links or online PR for your campaign!

PR and Other Marketing

If you are doing a lot of PR or offline marketing, this could result in more people searching your brand in the search engines or coming through direct traffic to your site. This could potentially be noticeable in the Analytics and letting your SEO know about this sort of activity helps them to understand a potential sudden increase in traffic of this nature.

Seasonality

Your SEO agency will be able to analyse search engine trends in and around certain keywords. But nobody will understand seasonal fluctuations in your industry as well as you. This information can be vital to the analysis of your campaign and progress measurement.

Monthly face to face meetings are great for discussing this sort of information and the previous month’s SEO report. And insights like this can be priceless.