In the digital marketing industry, taking on new clients can sometimes become a daunting task. Especially once you become successful and are consistently bringing in new customers who all have different expectations and goals. Before you reach this point, it is important to put some standards in place that can make onboarding new clients seamless and handling and delivering on expectations simple. As an SEO specialist, there are certain procedures we perform with each new client that ensure we are on the right track before we began production. We call this an Initial Analysis Review and it helps us determine, quickly, if SEO is the right fit for the new client before they even sign up. This is a standard that can be used across industries and can keep clients from wasting their time and yours.
What’s Included in the Initial Analysis Review?
We think of the SEO process as a three-legged stool. The 3 main components, (the legs of the stool) are Content, Authority, and Technology. Each of these has equal importance in a successful SEO campaign and missing any of these components will make the stool unstable, and eventually topple over. The Initial Analysis Review (IAR) presentation will show the client each of these areas regarding their own business’ website and shows the owner where they are currently, as far as SEO is concerned, where they can go from here, and whether SEO will offer a good ROI if they pursue it. This presentation gives a ton of useful data to the business owner and gives them an insight on what they are missing as far as requirements of satisfying Google, as well as what they are already doing well. Each portion of the C.A.T. diagram is broken down further to highlight issues and red flags as well as opportunities available to the business.
How Important is Content to SEO?
In these reports about the business’ content, we view the keywords that pages of the site are currently ranking for. Most times this list is full of keywords that aren’t relevant or aren’t converting well for the business, which is why they come to us. We then show the customer the list we gather for them using our research and innovative tools. We find keywords that will give the business the most benefit if they rank for them and we use this list to plan a strategy to create content supporting these keywords in the hopes of ranking new pages, with valuable keywords that help the site satisfy search intent.
[bctt tweet=”It is the job of your content to make sure it is supporting the page and helping to ensure that when someone lands on the page, it is the page they are looking for and Google is satisfied.” username=”ThatCompanycom”]How is Technology Important to SEO?
Your Authority – Are You Popular with Peers?
In our reports, we also share the current “trust” score and “citation” score of the client’s business as well as every referring domain that is linking to you. Sometimes, at no fault of the business, the trust and citation can become low simply because of the referring domains linking to it. Backlinks take constant monitoring and there are procedures to have these links removed or disavowed, which is a consistent task for those doing SEO services on the site.
There is More…So Much More
While these reports pertaining to the initial analysis review is very important and help understand the business’ expectations and goals, the final report should tie all of the individual parts together and summarize the overall value that an SEO campaign can bring to the business. This review not only helps the client make a decision, once they can see there is an actually ROI with the campaign, but it also helps a white label SEO company who will work on the account to begin a strategic plan that will ensure the most current and beneficial data is being used to create content and which pages of the site currently need optimization or even deoptimization. While these reports here are specific to an SEO campaign, using the idea of an initial analysis review can easily be adapted to most industries and will always offer the same benefit. Learning expectations and goals of a business before a contract is ever signed and any work is performed. This is a common practice for those offering white label digital marketing services, however many others offering services can benefit from this simple procedure. The alternative is going in blindly, which is rarely effective.