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I've been doing SEO on my own sites for about 5 years now and have never previously thought about offering my services to external clients but thats all changed.
I've just bagged my first client, its a multi-national company and they are huge. I have many years experience in SEO and the results on my own site are excellent. Its in a similar industry as my own sites so I have a good knowledge of what keywords etc they should be targeting.
As far as practical work goes, I'm fine, I can undertake the whole process no problem but on the business side I lack a bit of knowledge.
What steps should you go through with a large client? What should I show them initially, what should be included in my plan?
Its a large subject and I'm just looking for pointers on how to keep the client happy and not dissapoint the client.
I've thought about breaking it down into the following 3 steps:-
1) research
2) keyword analysis
3) implementation
Any advice from the professional SEO's out there would be excellent.
Thanks in advance,
Deester
Since you know this sector intimately...I would also include the following:
This could fall under "research"
competitive analysis - enlighten them on what their competition is doing in the SERPs and the onpage/offpage factors that allow their competitors to list well..
You may also be able to work up some reasonable estimates on what one or more of their competitors are making from their SEO (if they are in fact using SEO to list at all) efforts...
Show them the targeted sector keyword distribution and how their competitors are using this spread to bring in targeted traffic...
Equate this to any possible market and strategic initiatives your new client may have (you may not know this but use some deductive and intuitive skills to intelligently figure out)...and how targeting certain keyword phrases will "assit" them with new customer/business acquisiton.
Make sure to show them the natural as well as the PPC side of this equation..
Demonstrate a very good understanding of their targeted market by equating it to their service/product offerings...
Make sure you educate them on "reasonable expectations" about what any sector can return and the reality of the "moving target" in relationship to the SERPs and how they can continually change overtime...
link development - make sure you frame this around customer acquisition and business development .... not the benefits of search enigne ranking (this should be an added value concept)... educate them on the benefits of carefully researched and acquired strategic inbound links...
Tell them about the history of links .. they are the root of all traffic online...the search engines are a later development ...
Become their business development partner...not just a plain vanilla SEO'er...(boring)....
Congrats and good luck...
Links are definately all important not link farming but proper marketing of links in specific fields and demographics using just the right keywords in your string descriptions etc
The majority of what you will do comes under the heading Research so bullet point it with 4 major areas and bullet point links with a few fields and blah blah etc.
Really you should be looking at their website and SERPS to see what they need done so you don't have to ask that sort of question - It should be obvious to you!
