Explain the Client’s ‘Room for Growth’ With Specific Metrics
Another crucial aspect for you to set a shared success definition is mapping the client’s search real estate.
Analyzing their status quo and their competitors on specific key phrases and topics will give you the chance to create a compelling business case. As Telford explained:
“As an integrated agency, at Clarity PR, we have a philosophy of thinking of Google as the world’s largest online newspaper. By taking a full-page view, our search, PR, and paid teams can work together to help a client get maximum coverage through the search results. We always ask: What about the overall keyword sphere? It’s not just about ranks, but picking topics and owning that space.”
One way you can set the stage for that growth to happen in terms of SEO is to use a reliable visibility metric as a “market share” indicator.
Calculated as an impression share weighted against search volumes, SEOmonitor’s Visibility metric, for instance, lets you define one key strategic input: the business’ room for growth in a specific space.
Taking the Visibility metric as a performance benchmark will also allow you to build trust in your agency’s reports.
Here’s how GroupM Turkey does it:
“Clients that are fairly new in the digital landscape want to be in full control of their rankings and online presence. Having the Visibility metric and its explainer at hand, we can check the status daily, look at competitors and see which keywords influence visibility shifts and if that’s an opportunity for our client.”
If you’re operating at an integrated communications level, then enriching SEO-specific metrics will further both the client’s understanding and your tactical creativity.
“We discovered we have fantastic results through mixing tools that are traditionally service-specific,” Telford said. “So enriching keyphrase research with sentiment analysis tools or help PR teams to spot subject opportunities using keyphrase benchmarking or SEO-ready coverage using backlink analysis. Bringing new angles to practices has helped boost creativity and client success.”
Leverage Your SEO Reports & Speak the Client’s Language.
As we’ve already hinted at, reporting is one other big part of an agency-client relationship that can be negotiated from the beginning.
“We’re all hands-on with the client,” Ng said. He pointed to their competitive advantage in having top management directly interacting with clients’ teams from day 1.
“Working with big clients who have their internal digital marketing teams and analytics needs, we constantly have to fit into their model rather than the other way around,” Ng said.
That’s why connective3 focuses on creating customized dashboards that serve the internal teams at every step of their collaboration together while enabling the client to make their marketing reports.
“Clients like to interrogate the raw data,” Ng said. “So we start the journey together by customizing that data and then becoming the insights providers. And I think that pays off in terms of educating them on our role and the client’s being able to feed their internal business intelligence tools as well.”
That’s where API access and custom Data Studio connectors come in handy. Your designated SEO tools should enable you to keep the client in the loop at every stage of their SEO campaign, thus making reporting another trust indicator.
After all, it’s all about constantly communicating that initial SEO value you promised in the pitching phase while tracking your shared success metrics.
The monthly reporting is not only an excellent moment to get the client’s pulse, but a space to restate expectations, troubleshoot the strategy, and even add to it, as you get more hands-on experience with the client’s business.
Conclusion
As our agency experts pointed out, you have multiple ways to showcase how SEO value translates to business outcomes throughout the campaign life cycle.
But it’s essential to set the common ground and negotiate what success means from the get-go.
Transparency, from the pitching stage through to reporting, is vital:
- A forecast will help you set realistic expectations and explain the client’s growth potential in a specific vertical.
- A visibility metric will support you explain how the digital landscape looks like for your client compared to competitors on specific keyword groups.
- Integrated Search and PR metrics will help you paint an accurate picture of the client’s status quo and potential to own a specific digital space.
- SEO reporting solutions and data accessibility will enhance your client communication and enable you to create even more value for their marketing efforts.
To support agencies in their quest of obtaining and managing more clients, at SEOmonitor, we’re offering unlimited API access and multiple Data Studio connectors without any extra costs, so you can personalize your campaign data any way you need.
Join us, and hundreds of SEO agencies clients, in the journey of bringing more transparency to the SEO industry.
fbq('init', '1988988684667614'); // custom pixel
fbq('track', 'PageView');
fbq('trackSingle', '1321385257908563', 'ViewContent', { content_name: 'seomonitor-how-agencies-prove-seo-value', content_category: 'seo sponsored-post ' });
