tedster - 5:41 am on May 28, 2002 (gmt 0)

> ...we don't have the flashy graphics and animations to present that wow the clients marketing manager

I fully relate to that. One thing we struggle with as an SEO industry transitioning to full project management is a lack of any obvious "knock your socks off" product we can point to that will impress the "lay" person.

In fact, the better we do our job, the more it may become seamlessly invisible, except for the server logs of previous clients, and they may be understandably reluctant to share such things.

The sites we develop may not be flashy because our research showed that the market we were aiming for responded better to basic stuff. We may not be going after the apparently obvious keywords but bringing in many times more traffic on hundreds of well targeted multi-word phrases.

A site we developed may have a brilliant Information Architecture, but only someone extremely conversant in that particular industry can appreciate it. In short, the exact target audience digs it a lot, but not someone from an unrelated industry.

I think we need to use strong testimonials from happy clients. They need to talk about improved results, fine tuned targeting, better ROI - things a marketing manager can relate to that are beyond the slick surface.

We also need to show the kind of marketing savvy points I mentioned above, in "knock your socks off" charts and graphics. In short, we need to champion the results we can get -- in exactly the kind of language that the marketing department (or even the CEO) can understand. And we can address those exact areas that may have been stumbling blocks to our prospects in their past efforts.