SEO Metrics – Retain Your Clients with This Simple Metric
SEO sales is hard, right? Search Engine Marketing is a competitive industry with lots of window dressing and false promises. When you win those precious clients you want to do everything possible to keep them happy and paying customers as long as possible.
Long term customer relationships, of course, start with setting realistic expectations and delivering what you promised. But you can’t stop at just doing the work, you have to make sure you effectively communicate progress and manage customer expectations.
To help manage expectations, we gather lots of data and provide full transparency of every link we build or content that we write. We provide monthly reports and access to a reporting dashboard that shows our clients how their rankings and organic traffic are improving.
Recently I had a client call and say that they weren’t sure if SEO was working for them. She said that all of her top organic keywords included her company name. This client did a lot of offline print and direct mail advertising that resulted in lots of people searching for their name.
My favorite tool for addressing this type of question is a trendline graph showing non-branded organic traffic. Let me explain how we get this. First, we take monthly non-paid keyword traffic from Google Analytics. We typically see some pattern that people use when searching for their company name. We then exclude any traffic from those terms. If you then look at the trendline by month you can see how much “category term” traffic has improved over time.
If you log the monthly “category traffic” number in a spreadsheet you can graph and use that as a metric to show progress. We have built software to automate this process and you can see the exact graph we use with our clients in this post.
In the client example above, once we removed her branded traffic it was very clear that the number of non-branded or category term visits has grown over time. I’ve included the graph we shared with her. She was excited to see the progress and is still a client today.
Chad Hill is the CEO of HubShout, an seo software and seo reseller, who works with web agencies to deliver online marketing services to their clients.
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8 Responses to “SEO Metrics – Retain Your Clients with This Simple Metric”
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With my SEO Company..I give me clients bi weekly updates on everything..from the link to their presents place in the search engine..I call them and keep them updated on everything..its a must..
“Black Seo Guy “Signing Off”
I just finished doing a traffic report for a client and I bet she will raise the same issue that your client has raised. How did yoy exclude their company name? Can this be done easily on Google Analytics or do I have to do this manually?
Having lots of data is good. I love data and so as many other SEOs like to collect data in order to keep a check on their strategy and traffic and other things…
But at the same time i do believe that sharing all the data to your clients can be Pain in the A** as client is not technical lot of data makes him confused and let him ask so many questions from you and in case of unsatisfactory answers (this happens usually) the client may decides to left you.
I believe on sharing the data that is important and necessary for clients.
Nica. It is pretty easy to do. In Google Analytics (assuming they are using GA) you go to the Traffic section and select Keywords. You can then select “non-paid” which means organic. At the bottom of the screen there is a filter option where you can either include or exclude keywords from the list. Scan the list of keywords and pickup some common term being used for branded traffic. If there are more than one you can build an advanced filter in GA (also at the bottom of the keywords screen).
I use an Advanced Segment in Analytics for this, so I can quickly compare non-branded organic against paid, etc. Works like a champ and you don’t even need an external spreadsheet. In fact, I have Analytics set up to email some clients that segment separate from their main report so they can see how it’s progressing.
Agreed. This can be done in Analytics without too much trouble if you are a more advanced user. We’ve found that many of our resellers are just not that handy with Analytics or spreadsheets. That’s why do it outside GA and in our software. Also, this affords you the opportunity to mix this valuable data with other data such as rankings, workflow, social media, sales leads, etc, etc.
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Having lots of data is good. I love data and so as many other SEOs like to collect data in order to keep a check on their strategy and traffic and other things…