Had a conversation with a client regarding SEO recently, my notes are below and they are included here as its interesting and unusual to see that a potential client has good initial knowledge of SEO before we begin the project to promote his website. The ‘potential client’ already knows about.- Google Ranking (Google being the biggest Search Engine and knowing that higher ranking generally relates to more site visitors and more success)
- Broad range of Keywords (Demonstrating that they know you shouldn’t chase a single search term that is either very tricky to rank highly for or that is so easy its nearly worthless)
- Regular Updates (The search engines love fresh relevant content)
- Progress reports (We produce a comprehensive report of all work completed and this is important and reassuring for the client and a good record for our records)
It seems that the potential client has had a bad experience with an SEO and has learned about SEO the hard way, my advice is if you are thinking about promoting your site is to do some research on the subject first and then come to us and let us show you what we can do to increase your website visitor numbers and search engine rankings (SERPS) in Yahoo, Bing and Google
SEO inquiry
I need some professional SEO for my business website please.
I’ll start by telling you that I’ve paid for SEO before and wasted my money. I want someone who’s honest and realistic, and offers an attractive price. I need an attractive price, because my partner in the website wants a good return on his investment for your SEO project.
I chose you, because I know someone who used you to redesign their website, so it would be good to use you guys.
What I want, is the best SEO possible for my site…
- I want top three in Google (Don’t we all) for a broad range of keywords. Okay, maybe not for a broad range, but some specific ones that aren’t even too targeted by other sites.
- I want someone to actually do something on the site after they’ve taken my money.
- I want you to treat the website as if it was your own!
- I want regular updates on progress, and deadlines, timetables, and goals to be met.
I designed the site, but paid someone to code it for me, as I’m not a web professional designer.
Looking forward to hearing your ideas, and quote. Of course the ongoing monthly expenses for the first year will need to be included. I understand that SEO isn’t an overnight thing. I’ve tweaked it here and there, installed WordPress etc, changed bits. I need someone who (honestly) knows what they’re doing.
I’ve been taken advantage of by so called SEO experts before and need this to be a success.
Just for interest here are our replies to the clients points:
I like your ‘wants’ and thats nice to know but we need to know do you have your keywords in mind and if you really dont know we can tell you what your site is best ranked for now and what the competition is like. Recommending what search terms we want to go for is part of the SEO project.
Looking at your primary search term rankings we have seen that you are ranked in google.co.uk 102nd and in google.com 108th, so obviously got a lot to do to get you top 3 here. When we do an SEO project we do it ‘holistically’ meaning we look at everything and dont just concentrate on one aspect to the detriment of others, I looked at your code and its done ‘old school’ in tables and isnt W3C compliant. This isnt the end of the world and dont have any affect on SEO (probably) but these are things ideally we would want changing. These things are things we can fix / update but take extra time and obviously money.
You may / may not know that we own and SEO our own site for the PADI IDC (top 3 in every search engines for the search term ‘padi idc’ – with www.idc-guide.com) so you should know we are serious at what we do.
As such looking at your site and thinking about what you should be doing and where you want to be I would suggest that our standard SEO project would be a good starting place, obviously I would want to work with you and think we can improve your visitor numbers and search results massively so can start this project with 2 weeks we would need to take a deposit and the final payment at the end of the 3 months. As you mentioned regular updates and work we would recommend a monthly SEO update to keep the site going in the right direction, this can be negotiated at a later date, ideally once the first 3 months are over and we know what we are up against.
Looking at your primary search term rankings we have seen that you are ranked in google.co.uk 102nd and in google.com 108th, so obviously got a lot to do to get you top 3 here. When we do an SEO project we do it ‘holistically’ meaning we look at everything and dont just concentrate on one aspect to the detriment of others, I looked at your code and its done ‘old school’ in tables and isnt W3C compliant. This isnt the end of the world and dont have any affect on SEO (probably) but these are things ideally we would want changing. These things are things we can fix / update but take extra time and obviously money.
You may / may not know that we own and SEO our own site for the PADI IDC (top 3 in every search engines for the search term ‘padi idc’ – with www.idc-guide.com) so you should know we are serious at what we do.
As such looking at your site and thinking about what you should be doing and where you want to be I would suggest that our standard SEO project would be a good starting place, obviously I would want to work with you and think we can improve your visitor numbers and search results massively so can start this project with 2 weeks we would need to take a deposit and the final payment at the end of the 3 months. As you mentioned regular updates and work we would recommend a monthly SEO update to keep the site going in the right direction, this can be negotiated at a later date, ideally once the first 3 months are over and we know what we are up against.
