A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post expounding the virtues of “pushing back” on a client that’s shooting down SEO recommendations. It chronicled the philosophy and methodology for undertaking such an endeavor in a sensitive and professional manner. Even still, I got roasted for it. Some asserted that confronting a client is never a good idea. Others went as far as to say that the only possible motivation for such a technique was pure ego. I also had some dismiss my entire premise by assuming that I simply must not have any experience working with large organizations. That said, the post generated some interesting and constructive discussion as well as a couple of key points to consider when engaging in the “pushback” technique:
- Only do so if you’re convinced that recommendation being made will deliver significant return on investment
- Make sure that you perform your due diligence in terms of research, analysis, and presentation
- Always strive to empower your client and find alternative ways to get recommendations implementing, leaving the “pushback” as a last resort
Another key takeaway that arose from this discussion was the concept of “baby steps.” In other words, often times the best way to overcome a client’s objections to a particular recommendation is to build your rapport and reputation by showing success with other implementations that have been given the green light.
Here’s an example: We have a client that’s in the HR resources business. During their last redesign (prior to our engagement) they decided to lump several offerings on each of their service and product pages instead of creating dedicated pages for each individual offering. As a result, it was fairly difficult to construct meta elements – specifically title tags – because there were so many disparate terms to target for each page. Moreover, the search traffic that did come through converted poorly because users that search for a particular business offering would often land on a page that offered four of five different services and/or products, so it was not immediately clear to the user that the page had content that was relevant in any way (especially if the particular business offering that was searched for appeared at the bottom of the page after three or four unrelated offerings). Lastly, you can just imagine how difficult it would be to secure natural inbound links for pages with this type of disparate and meandering content.
The obvious recommendation was to create dedicated content pages for each individual product and service. That way, we could then create copy and meta elements that were more focused on particular search terms, and our link building efforts would be facilitated.
Unfortunately, the client was unconvinced that the time, resources, and money needed for this undertaking would provide enough of a return on investment. So what did we do? You guessed it; we took baby steps. In a nutshell, we worked with the hand we were dealt and scored wins for specific search terms by optimizing the elements we could control; things like internal linking, page meta elements, server-side configuration, link-building, and a refined approach to analytics reporting. Over time, we were able to convince the client stakeholders that the path to SEO nirvana was content development.
Now this isn’t a new story. The idea of building trust and reputation one success at a time has been around long before SEO became a buzz phrase. I just felt that it was important to highlight this technique, because all too often, folks in our industry sit on their hands and use the “if they don’t implement my recommendations it’s their problem” philosophy instead of coming up with creative ways to make things happen.
I think this applies whether you’re a one-man shop working with a small business or a multi-national SEO agency working with a Fortune 500 company.
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