Managing SEO Costs and Client Expectations

Managing SEO Costs and Client Expectations

 

Growing Importance of SEO in Digital Marketing

online search is now more important than ever, with its implications meaning that search engine optimization should be an absolute must-have in any business's digital marketing mix. Many business clients, however, would really like to whittle search engine optimization down to next to nothing, and in doing so may actually undermine their own capacity for success in digital marketing.

Understanding SEO Costs and White-Label Services

As a digital marketer, one of your tasks is to set up adequate expectations of what you can deliver on behalf of any one individual client; that means helping them. Especially if you rely on white-label SEO services, you have fixed costs associated with your SEO products, and you should clearly communicate with clients about expenses and budgets. If this is something you're fighting with all the time, perhaps the following tips and tricks for setting client expectations on SEO costs will come in handy. Therefore, let's first summarize the cost of SEO for yourself.

Know Your SEO Pricing and Services

Many digital marketing companies use a white label SEO service, which allows them to have more streamlined operations and minimal costs while providing quality SEO to their clients. Unfortunately, this scenario has provided digital marketers with some blinders, meaning they do not understand the true cost of various SEO services since they never ran the service in-house.

You will determine first the agreed-upon pricing and fees with your provider for it to be offered to a client in white label SEO. For an instance, you need to know the price difference between a specific service with automated SEO versus managed SEO or local SEO versus organic SEO. It should give you a sense of the average cost of monthly SEO budgets of businesses of different sizes and how SEO budgets change over time. The more you understand how to price SEO, the better you will be at discussing the cost of SEO to your clients and what they should expect.

Understand Your Clients' Goals

As you can imagine, no two companies have the same goal for digital marketing. Ergo, no two individual clients will need the same thing pertaining to their use of SEO. It becomes your job as a leader of your client's digital marketing to understand how much of SEO might be necessary to achieve specific goals.

For this reason, you should discuss at length with your client what their goals and objectives are. It could be pretty smart to create a very detailed client onboarding process that collects a lot of information about the client's status, past attempts at digital marketing, and vision for the future. The more you know about your client — that is to say, what they need and want — the more accurately you will be able to identify the SEO services that your client needs, which, in turn, will assist you in obtaining an accurate estimate of their SEO costs.

Clarify Your Client Contracts

Spell out every detail of your relationship with your clients on contracts, so every party knows what to expect from their assignment. While you'd like to think that the reason contracts seem confusing is that they are complicated legal documents intended to keep something a secret, the opposite is true: The clearer your contracts, the likelier that each party will clearly understand its role and what's expected of it.

Clear Contracts: A Key to Client Satisfaction

Therefore you may then invest the time to simplify or at least explain any technical language in your contracts, particularly as it relates to paragraphs discussing payment. You can use a lawyer to ensure that your stripped-down contracts remain legal and you should reassure concerned clients with further explanation and even contract notations if appropriate.

Be Transparent and Open

No one likes hidden fees, and clients who perceive a sense of surprise about SEO expenses are unlikely to stay clients of your agency for too long. You should attempt to rule out the possibility of surprise and shock by being forthright about your agency's fee structure from the very first contact you have with potential clients.

As you open up about your pricing policies, you will realize that clients will become more trusting and easier to communicate with. Sometimes, when clear communication of costs is made to clients, they will not argue and are more likely to make on-time payments and in full.

Just because SEO is a core practice of digital marketing for most businesses doesn't mean it's going to come cheap. In fact, the more you can do to prepare your clients for SEO costs, the stronger your client relationships will be — and the more successful your SEO efforts will become.