Your SEO Firm is Your Partner
There’s an art to choosing the best SEO firm for your business but once you do, it’s important to make the most of it. What you really need, though, is a firm that treats you like a partner and not just a client. However, it does work both ways. If you treat them as “hired help” and not like a true partner, you will miss out on an amazing opportunity to fully use the resources at their firm.
Look for a Firm That Wants a Partnership
We’ve had clients who, for whatever reason, didn’t fully understand that we’re looking to form a partnership with you because over the long term, it makes it much easier for us to execute a winning SEO strategy. There are many aspects to the process and with a true partnership, you respect each other and bounce ideas off each other while acknowledging that you both bring different forms of expertise to the table.
Understanding the Different Types of Clients
There are actually two extremes that we’ve experienced. There are those clients who, once they hire us, almost completely disappear. While it’s great that the client trusts we’ll do a great job, it does impede progress somewhat when they’re not kept in the loop. When we need feedback for things like blog posts, for example, we await that feedback before the post can go live. Waiting means that progress will be impeded. This isn’t a partnership; if it were then the client would be available for feedback when needed!
The other extreme is the client who tries to micromanage the SEO campaign. While it’s important to have a healthy dialog between your business and our firm, it’s not healthy to micromanage to the point where vital aspects of the strategy have been eliminated. Understand that when you hire a white hat SEO firm, it means that they’ll always do things that fall within Google’s “best practice” standards. Since we’re a white hat firm, we always use strategies that fall within Google’s guidelines. We simply won’t do something that a client wants us to do if it is considered “black hat”. In this case, the client isn’t treating the relationship like a partnership. They’re assuming we’re a “hired gun” that is required to do what they want.
It’s About Forming Relationships
Since businesses pay us to take care of their SEO, but we look at the relationship we form with them as one of a true partnership. We aren’t a hired gun necessarily. They aren’t strictly a client. Partners treat each other with mutual respect where each party brings something different to relationship. We have the proven track record when it comes to SEO, and you likely have an established marketing team that knows your company best. Together, we’re working to the same end goal – to build trust between you and your customers, to attract new business, and make sales. There are many factors that go into this and when we work together, it increases the chances that the end goal is reached. That’s what a partnership is all about.
If you take the time to build a relationship with your SEO firm, you’ll have a much better experience. It could also improve your results.
Categorized in: SEO
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