Business is all about results and outcomes, this is why it’s quite natural that your client wants results and increase in traffic as one of the physical dimensions and extensions of SEO improvement. Though, unlike many other areas where you may show a deliverable or any other form of tangible results right after you finish the project, certainly this isn’t the case with SEO. As SEO, results may come months or years after the start and the worst is that they might never come at all. When there will be results, there will be definitely some sound indicators for that, however your client will hardly be happy to pay for no results.
What matters most is ROI but some clients will get it hard to understand that traffic is not the only important measure of SEO success or failure but for most of the majority clients it’s clear that traffic is just one sided part of the coin. Explain to your client what traffic is realistic to expect, you need to clarify with them before you go to the indicators of SEOs success or failure is what traffic is realistic to expect and when. You also need to clarify your client that it takes time for SEO results to become noticeable, in the case if they are not aware.
You have to keep your client up to date with your progress and its always essential and SEO campaigns are not an exception. It is recommendable to send your clients weekly or monthly reports about your progress during the period. These reports help the client know where you are. On the other hand, if the client has an idea about SEO, you can coordinate the tasks you plan to do in advance. This helps them to keep track of what’s going on with the project. In the case client has no idea about SEO, you might even have to explain to them the basics about how to get traffic to a site.
There are some indicators that show if you are on the right track or not:
- Better rankings for minor keywords – It is better, if you report better rankings for major keywords but hence this is a goal that may take years to achieve, you can go for the minor keywords as minor keywords are where you start because they are easier and faster to conquer, yet they bring a substantial amount of targeted traffic.
- Increased traffic from search engines – Increased traffic may be not only from Google but can be also from other search engines. Hence Google come number one but still traffic from other search engines is basically more targeted and it also counts.
3. Improved ranking with ranking services another indicator your client’s site for doing better than before are improved ranking with ranking services. These include Google’s Page Rank, Alexa, Domain Authority (DA) and other similar services. Among them Alexa is the most flexible.
