Here is the terrible truth behind any web development project, rebranding project, or other big changes to a client’s website – they are expecting the new work they paid for to drive more business through their website. It doesn’t matter how you try to set expectations, or if you point out that the client is not paying you to do SEO.
This is both an opportunity and a threat. On the one hand, it is an opportunity for you to lengthen the duration of your engagement with your client exponentially, expand your list of services, and make considerably more money. On the other hand, failure to generate any real movement in organic traffic can lead to frustrated clients walking away, and even giving negative feedback to their friends or on rating websites. Why is SEO important even to web developers and marketing agencies that don’t specialize in it? Because it can color everything else you do.
SEO Importance as an Opportunity: Offering the Service as an Add-On
Good SEO takes time and costs money. That creates opportunities for a web developer or marketing agency to become an SEO reseller and get a steady, labor-free residual income stream. Most of the affiliate SEO resellers that we work with, tell us that the client came to them, either looking for additional ways to make money through their website or specifically wondering if the agency or web developer could handle SEO. It is also possible that you recognize the need and the potential for your client in search engine optimization. Many times, our new partner tried to hire someone internally to handle the projects, but this person was not able to deliver the results, or this person soon moved on to a larger agency such as ours.
If you are considering offering SEO as a service for the first time, we strongly encourage you to resell SEO, rather than trying to find the staff on your own, develop an entirely new set of policies and best practices for a field in which you lack expertise, and gamble your relationship with the client on an unknown entity. If you have tried to hire the right person to handle the project internally, you are familiar with the headaches. Why are there all these hidden expenses to purchase back-links and get the tools they say they need to be successful? What do we do when my lone SEO expert gets sick or goes on vacation and a frustrated client calls up? The clients aren’t satisfied with the pace of improvement; do they have unrealistic expectations or are we lagging? How can anyone from my team even know what best practices are and hold my SEO consultant accountable? Even a good SEO expert will run into problems sometimes. Who can they turn to for advice? Finding the right SEO reseller program can be even worse.
The biggest complaint we get is that communication with the private label SEO is almost non-existent. When you finally do reach the person working on the website, often English is not their primary language, and communication remains a problem. The person working on your account typically falls into one of two categories: a true SEO professional who can think strategically, but has so many accounts they can’t devote the team needed to your client, or an inexperienced SEO coordinator who can devote the time needed to your project, but only knows the basics of SEO.
That is NOT how we operate at That! Company. To learn how we are different, skip down to How We Do What We Do near the bottom of the page.
[bctt tweet=”Good SEO takes time and costs money.” username=”ThatCompanycom”]Why Is SEO Important?: Baking in the Service as Part of a Web Development Project
Another common technique, especially for web developers, is to include a few thousand dollars extra for an SEO project as part of the website redesign/launch. This can save you and your clients a ton of heartbreak and give you peace of mind and them the results they need. First of all, redesigns are fraught with SEO landmines. We have seen well-established clients lose 90% of their organic traffic overnight because of minor errors to 301 redirects, of sitemaps. We have seen clients suffer terribly because minor errors to images removed every ALT tag on the website. We have seen so many errors where a web developer is apologizing to the client and refunding money, and asking us to help solve problems after the fact. It certainly does not have to be this way.
We can sign low-dollar contracts that can help identify and resolve these SEO problems before the site goes live. Even if you know basic website SEO strategies, there will be intricacies that you might miss. What is the appropriate keyword density and placement? (In spite of what you hear, statistics say keyword density still matters, and because most lay-people don’t compute it properly, their pages often appear “spammy” to search engines.) Do you understand the role of internal link sculpting in SEO? The role of NAP in local rankings? How the latest Google algorithm change has impacted best practices? Not only is it unrealistic to expect your web dev team to stay on top of all this, but it would also be a waste of their time and your money. By choosing the right white label SEO reseller, like That! Company you can add a little to your profit stream and a great deal to your client’s success when launching or relaunching a website.
SEO as a Threat: Failing to Provide One Key Service In the Right Way Can Cause the Loss of a Client
The risk you run by not offering SEO as a service, or failing to provide excellent results is that you will lose ALL of the business a client does with you? Why should they split their time and resources rather than going to one agency that can solve all their problems? How can they trust an agency to be on the leading edge of the market if they don’t offer leading-edge services? Even traditional marketing agencies without digital divisions can resell SEO and PPC to their clients and see their relationship prosper.
We understand the risk from personal experience. One of our largest clients invited us to bid on a web development project. There was one element of the project we did not like, so we declined the bid. A few months later, they moved all of their business from us to the firm that built the website for them. This is in spite of the fact that we exceeded their sales goals and broke the company record for revenue.
Protect your relationship with your clients. Provide for all of their needs, and don’t let anyone else get their foot in the door.
How We Do What We Do
We typically hire people with strong marketing or writing or IT skills, and no SEO background. We teach them to do things our way. As the leading Florida SEO agency, all of our account managers are based in Central Florida and have English as their primary language. We use a team approach to train, strategize, and execute. Each client has both a primary and secondary account manager. These are paired so that each account has a high-level, strategic SEO, and a more tactical SEO with a little extra time to turn wrenches. The team meets daily to troubleshoot, share insights, and stay on top of the latest algorithm shifts. Each client receives regular reports and phone calls to ensure that communication is strong and expectations are met.
This is how we became one of the nation’s leading white label search engine optimization companies and an Inc 500 firm. By now you realize the SEO importance and opportunities for your agency. Please call us at 1 (800) 255-0396 to see if That! Company would be a good fit as your digital white label partner.
