Trust: The Foundation of a Successful SEO Campaign
As an SEO agency you live or die by the success of your clients. You want the best for your clients, for their businesses to thrive, not just for their benefit, but because SEO is a business and unsatisfied clients can soon become lost clients. As discussed before on this very blog: SEO is a long term investment. So how do you stop clients getting itchy feet before your campaign has even had a chance to start working? Well, in a word – trust.
The starting point for working with any client, like any other type of relationship, has to be trust. The client has to trust that you have their best interests at heart; as an SEO, you know that over the life of the campaign there will be lean times: keywords will take a while to rank, they may be unstable or even drop as the myriad factors that impact the rankings come into play. With trust you can work through it, without trust you may end up facing anger, disappointment, or worse.
So how can you build a trusting relationship with a client?
Be Transparent
You know that you’re doing the right thing, so why try to hide it from the client. The temptation, especially if the going is slow, can be to keep things quiet, don’t. They work in an industry just like you do; they’ll have their own experience of things not going quite as well as they could. Just explain and reassure. You know things will improve… so in turn:
Be Confident
There’s a reason that clients are coming to you to do their SEO, you are the expert in the field, and so have faith in what you’re doing. Let that confidence flow into all interactions with the client, if you don’t sound like you’re sure of what you’re saying, why should a client be?
Be a Person
Don’t be afraid to show a little personality on the phone and in emails. So long as you aren’t becoming hugely unprofessional, it can be reassuring to a client to know that they are dealing with a person and not just some SEO robot. If you can build a rapport, it will only help your efforts, as they’ll trust you not only as a professional but as an individual.
By cultivating a relationship of trust with a client, it will be easier to work together to build a successful campaign: to gain their blessing in taking risks, and to work together rather than against each other in making their SEO a success.
