Agency Marketing Archives Agency Marketing

Mar 26 2024

15 Tips For Onboarding An Omnichannel Client via @sejournal, @joshuacmccoy

Attaining a new client can be an exciting time. But there’s a lot to do before you begin. From organizing account handoffs to analyzing existing performance, this is the time when you set an account up for success.

You need to engage in basic SEO analysis, such as website performance, gain access to relevant accounts, and assess any existing channel-specific campaigns.

A successful omnichannel journey will ultimately be much less stressful if you take the time to establish a relationship with your client properly and lay a well-rooted foundation.

Therefore, before diving headfirst into execution, let’s explore the key factors and tips to ensure a seamless omnichannel experience for you and your client.

Ensure A Smooth Account Access Transition

In many cases, your newfound client relationship is the product of another vendor losing a client.

There may be outgoing vendors unwilling to collaborate with you outside of simple communication or email.

It is understandable, though – they are losing a revenue stream to you, and bitter people do exist.

For those who believe in good karma, you may encounter vendors willing to help you with your transition plan. If you’re fortunate enough to experience this, be sure to express gratitude for their participation.

Tips 1-2: Taking Over Accounts From Previous Vendors

Have a checklist of all access needs beforehand so that you are utilizing their time most efficiently.
Establish a clear timeline for both granting you access and removing the previous vendor from all relevant platforms.

Evaluate The Client’s Website Performance

Whether taking over one channel or several channels of advertising/marketing, you will inevitably have to modify the client’s website.

An in-house team may assign you ownership, but you may also be responsible for maintaining their website.

Nonetheless, gaining access to the website to make even the slightest website revisions using a content management system (CMS) is beneficial.

As it pertains to SEO, now is the time to learn a little more about how the website has changed over time.

This includes large increases or deductions in content, domain moves, mass redirects, or anything that may have altered organic search presence.

Tips 3-5: Evaluating Client Websites

If you are not tasked with owning all website maintenance, familiarize yourself with the development process, deployment schedules, etc.
Determine the necessary editing permissions and levels for different types of web edits.
If you inherit website maintenance from a previous vendor, request an audit of site subscriptions, plugins, integrations, etc. This helps you understand if site functionality is tied to payment methods that need transferring.

Analyze Client’s Current Marketing Efforts And Channels

Your success hinges on your ability to track your initiatives by channel. You will need to gain access to the client’s analytics platform, ideally with admin privileges.

Consider that to assess your campaign progress. You must also think about tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) and goal conversions.

This means that you will also need access to the client’s tag management deployment platform or establish it, if not currently present. This is often done via Google Tag Manager.

Beyond tracking data, consider the new client’s ask. If their goal is to generate sales over leads, inquire about their customer relationship management (CRM) platform access and understand its integration with the analytics account.

Tips 6-8: Evaluating Analytics Accounts

Once you have gained access to your client’s analytics account, review existing users and remove any irrelevant or outdated entries, such as old vendors, previous employees’ personal emails, or other access points that oddly stand out.
Ensure that previous goal tracking is set up properly by understanding the defined goals. Don’t let someone else’s inaccuracy be your downfall.
For transitioning Google Analytics accounts, inquire if the Universal Analytics data from pre-July 2023 has been warehoused for future callback of historical performance by channel, content, and conversion-specific metrics.

Manage Your Client’s Local Presence

Whether your omnichannel strategy will involve local SEO or Maps-specific paid search advertising, you will want to be granted access to your client’s Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Maps, and so on.

Tips 9-10: Establishing A Client’s Local Presence

Inquire about the client’s participation with any local listing provider services.
Discuss other local account considerations that might help drive store visits, reviews, website traffic, etc., from local social sources, such as Yelp and review sites.

Review Who Has Access To Ad Accounts

For those advertising for your new client, welcome to your workbench.

You are just now gaining access to where you will build great things.

If you are adopting an existing ad environment, establish all necessary access points and negotiate the highest permission level to perform your tasks.

Review who has access and remove any irrelevant users. Your first job in this area is to ask a lot of questions.

Are there any previous platform issues that occur often, like common ad disapprovals, etc.?
Why do specific people have account access? Do they pull reporting or manage success at some level?
Have there been any large-scale account structure changes?
Which platforms did they use, abandon, and why?

Tips 11-13: Acquiring The Tools And Assets You Need

Establish any needed payment method transitions, which may move to you or be billed to the client. Ensure the billing information is set up correctly. See to it that you are not billing an old vendor’s credit card or invoicing setup.
Save yourself some digging through change history by asking what strategic directions have been employed, why they were chosen, and how they turned out. You have a game plan, but this insight may spark new ideas.
Request access to all creative assets available. While you might use new images, GIFs, and videos, you may find use in repurposing old assets.

Improve Team Collaboration Through Streamlined Communication

Depending on the size of your organization, those who sell the service are not always the ones who will service it.

This is a great time to bring the salespeople and sales support in with all parties working on the project.

This provides preliminary insight into how to communicate with the new client, understanding their preferences (frequency and method) and level of marketing/advertising knowledge.

It also helps uncover any unspoken needs or questions that must be addressed.

Tips 14-15: Team Collaboration & Communication

Identify individuals who will sit at the table, not just the day-to-day contact. This includes the parties that need to be abreast of the value you provide so that you can continue to work with the client far into the future.
Determine how you will communicate with the client – by phone, email, or face-to-face/virtual meetings. Discuss reporting needs as well, and identify all stakeholders involved in online marketing and advertising and their direct digital reporting needs.

Setting Your Firm Up For A Successful Client Onboarding

Congratulations on securing a new client!

Hopefully, following the steps and tips outlined in this guide will empower you to assemble the right team, ask insightful questions, and understand how to best communicate with your new client.

Taking a moment to plan a smooth transition to your account ownership is a sure way to set a stable path forward in a long-term client relationship.

More resources:

Featured Image: insta_photos/Shutterstock

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Mar 20 2024

5 Ways To Leverage Business Coaching To Grow Your Marketing Agency via @sejournal, @jasonhennessey

As the owner of a marketing agency, it can be tempting to try and handle every aspect of your business single-handedly.

After all, your vision and passion are often driving your agency forward.

However, attempting to tackle every challenge alone can quickly lead to burnout and stagnation.

This is where many agency owners bring in their secret weapon: a business coach.

Many of today’s successful entrepreneurs — such as Steve Jobs, Sheryl Sandberg, and Eric Schmidt — were able to take their ventures to the next level with business coaching.

From providing invaluable guidance and accountability to offering fresh perspectives and strategies, a business coach can revolutionize how you operate and scale your agency.

Why Hire A Business Coach?

Many agency owners don’t realize that business growth starts from the inside out.

Rather than a toolbox of “strategies,” you need to re-examine how you perceive success, manage your team, and harness your unique strengths.

The right business coach will help you foster personal growth – then professional growth – to achieve long-term, sustainable results.

A business coach can provide:

An objective perspective on your business, providing insight into what is working well and what might be holding you back.
First-hand experience, advising you on the best strategies for scaling your team, reaching new revenue milestones, establishing your brand, etc.
Accountability, keeping you honest when it comes to your goals and commitments.
Skill development, spanning everything from financial planning and hiring to communication and public speaking.
A supportive environment for you to vent, navigate challenges, revel in successes, and discuss concerns in your business.

After hiring my business coach, I quickly realized that I needed to shed old habits and open my mind to new ways of running my business.

For example, I realized that losing myself in the day-to-day operations was not sustainable.

My coach advised hiring a COO to manage operations, opening up more time for me, the Visionary, to create our Vivid Vision, and explore new business ventures and speaking opportunities.

1. Lead Your Team With Confidence

As an agency owner, it’s time to shatter the illusion of self-sufficiency and embrace the power of teamwork. Even if you’ve taken the steps to hire contractors or employees, I would bet there are some areas of your business where you’re resisting giving up control.

A business coach will empower you to focus on the things you do best, whether that’s creative thinking, marketing your agency, speaking to clients, building a personal brand, etc.

They will also be honest in identifying areas where you can delegate tasks to team members, allowing you to scale your agency more efficiently.

Consider how much time and money are invested in you getting bogged down by tasks like social media posting, scheduling meetings, responding to emails, etc.

A business coach may advise you on how to hire great talent, lead with confidence, develop a strong company culture, and ultimately achieve better results.

2. Find Your “Trillion Dollar” Idea

Many business owners consider themselves to be visionaries, as it takes creative thinking to come up with a business idea and follow it through to fruition.

But these imaginative qualities can be hard to wrangle when you have too many ideas. A business coach can help you find clarity in the noise.

That might not mean discovering a literal trillion-dollar idea, but at least focusing on the idea (or ideas) that will have the most impact on your business.

That could mean launching a new offer, expanding to a new market, exploring speaking opportunities or brand partnerships, etc.

Shiny object syndrome is often the death of many entrepreneurs; a business coach will help you stay on track with the right ideas.

Beyond that, an experienced business coach will know how to quantify the success (or failure) of your latest venture.

If your efforts aren’t paying off, they can help you shift focus. If your project is gaining traction, they can help you capitalize on that momentum.

3. Avoid “Been There, Done That” Mistakes

It’s important to learn from our mistakes – but many mistakes are avoidable.

The value of working with a business coach is that they have made many mistakes before and can help you avoid preventable challenges.

For example, there is a ton of bad advice out there about how to “scale.” You might assume that, say, launching a digital product is the best next step for your agency.

But a business coach might have already launched a digital product many times over, and can tell you what to do and what not to do during the process – or whether you should scrap the idea completely.

Also, in a personal development sense, they can warn you of the signs of burnout or notice when you are out of alignment with your goals. They’ll help you stay true to your priorities and avoid getting sidetracked on your journey to success.

3. Get Your Finances In Check

Financial management is a common area of avoidance for many business owners.

The truth is that many of us have distorted beliefs about money, as well as general inexperience with how to manage it.

An experienced business coach has likely overcome many of the mental blocks that make managing finances difficult. They’ll have learned the ins and outs of business bookkeeping, financial planning, tax preparation, and when to hire financial services.

Your business coach can help you create a realistic budget and financial plan for your agency.

They might advise on how to forecast future revenue and expenses, set financial goals, and set key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure progress.

They’ll also likely have experience in cash flow management, helping to maintain a healthy influx of revenue to sustain your business.

They might suggest strategies for improving cash flow, such as developing passive income streams, enforcing payment terms with clients, or optimizing your internal processes.

Perhaps most importantly, business coaches can help with financial decision-making. This might mean advising on smart investments, expanding the business, up or downsizing personnel, integrating technology, or taking on debt.

The right coach will empower you to take control of your agency finances.

You’ll feel more prepared to dig into the numbers, incorporate best practices, and make informed decisions that benefit your business.

4. Know When To Trim the Fat

There’s a common trend in the marketing “agency” model of offering a wide, incohesive range of services. The result is a lack of point-of-view on what the agency does best, the audience it serves, and what it achieves for its clients.

Business coaches help agency owners “trim the fat,” so to speak, when it comes to what’s superfluous in the agency.

In other words, there may be several services that are generating little-to-no revenue and are instead causing a distraction in what is the core purpose of your agency.

Even Sheryl Sternberg’s business coach highlights this concept, with the appeal to “[not] fall so deeply in love with your own content that you can’t see that some of it is excess.”

Ultimately, your service offerings are most effective when they are clear, simple, and relevant to your target audience.

For example, perhaps your agency does website design, branding, social media management, and email marketing, but 90% of your revenue comes from websites.

Doubling down on your website design services may allow you to hone your offer, streamline your development process, increase your rates, and scale your new client acquisition system.

5. Expand Your Network Of Winners

One of the benefits of having a business coach that I wasn’t expecting was the networking opportunities.

My executive coach was able to connect me with so many professionals and mentors who ended up helping me and my business. I’ve also formed friendships with other CEOs, and that support has been invaluable.

Your business coach might introduce you to other winners in their network. You might not even realize you need their help.

You’ll be able to tap into a wider pool of talent, mentors, thought leaders, and, yes, even friends.

Again, the illusion of self-sufficiency can be a real killer in your business. Don’t assume that you can or should navigate this journey alone.

Networking with other industry professionals can help you avoid common pitfalls, overcome growing pains in your agency, and step into new opportunities for growth.

Finding The One

While it may seem intimidating to invite an outsider into your inner circle, the benefits of hiring an experienced coach are undeniable.

In hiring my business coach, I’ve gained invaluable insights and support that have allowed me to scale my agency to new heights.

Finding “The One” (i.e., the right coach for you) will look different for everyone. For me, I happened to stumble across a TED talk by someone who challenged the way I saw business success.

I read his books, followed his social media, and set a goal to work with him one day.

That speaker was Cameron Herold, and I’m happy to say that I was able to hire him as my coach. And, man, am I glad that I did.

In the early stages of our coaching journey, he illuminated a fundamental truth: While books provide valuable knowledge, a coach offers the swiftest route to implementation and tangible results.

With his help, we were able to take our agency from $5M to $10M in revenue.

Selecting a coach who is aligned with your specific needs is paramount.

Whether that’s doubling your revenue, scaling a team, fine-tuning your offer, or striking a work-life balance, find someone who has been where you are now and has made it through to the next level.

LinkedIn, Facebook Groups, Instagram, YouTube, and podcasts are great places to find people who are doing amazing things.

As an agency owner, you’ll quickly discover how coaching is an investment that can have significant returns for your business.

More resources:

Featured Image: Ground Picture/Shutterstock

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Feb 28 2024

How We Built A Strong $10 Million Agency: A Proven Framework via @sejournal, @hethr_campbell

Building a successful agency can be a daunting task in today’s ever-evolving space. Do you know the secrets to succeeding with yours?

Watch this informative, on-demand webinar, where link building expert Jon Ball reveals the closely guarded secrets that have propelled Page One Power to become a highly successful $10 million agency.

You’ll learn:

The foundational principles on which to build your business to succeed.
The importance of delegation, market positioning, and staffing.
More proven lessons learned from 14 years of experience.

With Jon, we’ll provide you with actionable insights that you can use to take your business to the next level, using foundational principles that have contributed to Page One Power’s success.

If you’re looking to establish yourself as a successful entrepreneur or grow your agency in the constantly evolving world of SEO, this webinar is for you.

Learn the secrets of establishing a thriving agency in an increasingly competitive SEO space.

View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.

Join Us For Our Next Webinar!

How An Enterprise Digital PR Firm Earns 100’s Of Links In 30 Days

Join us as we explore how to scale the very time-consuming and complicated process of earning links from digital PR, with proven case studies showing how you can earn hundreds of links in 30 days.

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Dec 8 2023

How To Secure And Defend Your SEO Budget For Executive Buy-In via @sejournal, @lorenbaker

In an increasingly difficult economy, do you know how to prove the value of your SEO and remain efficient, while maintaining the SEO budgets you need to succeed?

Will Critchlow, CEO of SearchPilot, joins me on the SEJShow to examine actionable strategies to doing more with less and maintaining the freedom to test, all while proving the positive impacts of your SEO work.

Using insights from marketing leaders, SEO specialists, and senior executives, you’ll hear Will and Loren break down the skills you need to keep your CFO happy while driving efficiency.

If you’ve found yourself having to defend your budget, pitch harder than ever, and work more to prove your results, then you won’t want to miss this episode.

There’s more pressure on ROI calculations, there’s more scrutiny on all of those decisions. SEOs are often shy of taking on targets, quotas, goals and so forth. But even forecasting is something that I think the industry is too naive about. –Will Critchlow, 06:04

Big companies are spending tons of money on this stuff. The fact that you are out there asking for a quarter of a million dollars, half a million dollars, whatever it might be, that’s actually totally achievable. –Will Critchlow, 09:38

Speaking of the funnel, we all know that SEO is not a direct response marketing technique. It’s not search keyword, find site buy done. There’s all kinds of touch points throughout the funnel, multi-touch attribution, which is massive. –Loren Baker, 16:16

[00:00] – Will’s background and expertise.
[08:44] – Integration challenges in long-term planning.
[12:30] – The importance of planning when dealing with CFOs.
[13:18] – Tracking multiple attribution points.
[16:16] – Google algorithm updates and their impact on forecasting.
[21:05] – Forecasting challenges influenced by various factors.
[23:32] – Beta testing’s effects on search results.
[26:41] – The evolving impact of AI-powered tools on search queries.
[29:28] – Strategies for SEO teams to improve forecasting.

Resources Mentioned:

SEO as a product discipline is something that we are seeing. And what that often means is squads of product managers, engineers, designers, all aligned to that objective. –Will Critchlow, 13:18

I think almost every SEO is testing beta testing, Google, SGE, and we have in our heads that when that query is done, everything’s going to be pushed down. There’s going to be an article, there’s going to be this, there’s going to be that, but we tend to forget that we’re the ones beta testing it, right? –Loren Baker, 23:07

And so the other reason that I’m bullish on there being organic links is I think there have to be ad links because I don’t think Google is going to turn off 98% of their revenue overnight. And I think they’re not going to go with only ad links because I think that’s a degraded user experience. So I think there’s going to be a combination of advertising links and organic links, and our job is to win the organic just as it always has been. –Will Critchlow, 27:37

Connect with Will Critchlow:

Will Critchlow is the founder and CEO of SearchPilot, a company dedicated to simplifying and improving SEO testing processes for large websites. He co-founded the SEO agency Distilled in 2005 and played a key role in expanding its services and the SearchLove conference series to the US, establishing offices in Seattle and New York.

In February 2020, he spun out SearchPilot as an independent business while Distilled was acquired by Brainlabs. Will is recognized for his expertise in SEO and digital marketing and often shares his insights through various platforms.

Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/willcritchlow/

Connect with Loren Baker:

Follow him on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/lorenbaker

Connect with him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorenbaker

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Oct 18 2023

Disrupting Agency Culture: Unleash The Power Of The Four-Day Workweek via @sejournal, @hethr_campbell

Are you ready to shake up your agency’s work structure and discover new productivity solutions?

Are you looking for ways to boost your team’s work-life balance, while driving performance and results?

With the Four-Day Workweek (4DWW) program, it’s actually possible to increase workflow efficiency within your agency without sacrificing employee well-being.

And in this on demand webinar, we’ll help you get started.

Join our panel of industry leaders and experts for a thought-provoking discussion on how the 4DWW model is shifting agency culture and reimagining success… from a team who have all made the move from five-day to four-day weeks.

In this exclusive webinar, discover valuable insights to consider when thinking about transitioning to a four-day workweek.

You’ll learn about:

Planning ahead and structuring your workflow: Prepare your agency for a seamless shift to a four-day workweek with comprehensive planning. Explore innovative solutions to boost efficiency and maximize productivity within your agency. Also find ways to trim excess fat in your workflow and reduce time spent on low-ROI tasks – such as limiting recurring meetings, etc.
Establishing and communicating boundaries with clients: Learn how to keep even your most demanding clients satisfied while transitioning. Plus, understand how to decide when to disclose your transition, and address client concerns about whether the 4DWW will impact performance, etc.
Balancing employee needs for maximum talent retention: Discover strategies for streamlining your workflows to enhance work-life balance for your team, empowering them to flourish with autonomy. Manage billable hours in ways that accommodate varying needs and preferences. Implementing creative solutions to ensure employee satisfaction will help you retain top talent during your transition.

This webinar features a brief presentation, followed by a thought-provoking roundtable discussion, where our presenters exchange ideas and best practices.

Presenters:

Jenise Uehara, CEO, Search Engine Journal
Elizabeth Harmon, HR / People Ops Manager, Search Engine Journal
Joe O’Connor, Director & Co-founder, Work Time Reduction Center of Excellence
Tessa Ohlendorf, Managing Director, media.monks
Claire Daniels, Chief Executive Officer, Trio Media

As agencies seek new ways to improve efficiency while prioritizing employee well-being, this webinar demonstrates how the 4DWW model can be the ultimate solution.

Watch this webinar and discover how the 4DWW model can be integrated into your agency’s workflow →

View the slides:

Join Us For Our Next Webinar!

Trends In Paid Search: Navigating The Digital Landscape In 2024

Join Sreekant Lanka from iQuanti and Irina Klein from OneMain Financial as they dive into the future of paid search and explore the trends, strategies, and technologies that will shape the search marketing landscape.

Image Credits:

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

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Sep 7 2023

4 Tested Website SEO Performance Boosts Your Agency Should Tap Right Now

Every digital agency is actively seeking new ways to improve their clients’ marketing performance.

While your digital marketing strategy may emphasize improving SEO, increasing click rates, and decreasing bounce rates, there exists an often-overlooked approach that many agencies miss.

There could be a hidden treasure trove for conversion rates right before you.

But first, you’ll have to clear the path by removing hidden barriers on your site.

Check your website for those violations now >>

Here’s everything you need to know about accessibility, and what you can do to boost your clients’ performance.

The Untapped Part Of Your Marketing Strategy

A powerful component of a holistic marketing strategy that has untapped potential to boost performance and engagement is web accessibility.

So, it’s highly likely that most of your competitors have not added this to their web strategy – giving you a potential instant advantage by implementing it.

But what exactly is web accessibility? And is your website accessible?

How Does This Impact Marketing Strategy?

By making your clients’ websites easier to understand, navigate, read, and crawl, you’ll naturally gain:

Expanded site reach: Significantly expand your client site’s reach, ensuring inclusivity and a superior user experience for all. In fact, 1.3 billion people live with some form of disability; by adding web accessibility you’re potentially gaining scores of new users for your clients’ target audience.
Dialed-in user experience: By refining the web experience to cater to every individual’s unique requirements, especially for those with disabilities, you naturally create a faster, cleaner experience for all users.
Improved navigation: By eliminating barriers that might obstruct smooth navigation, you’ll naturally create an optimized on-site link structure.

Do any of these sound familiar?

If you’re dialed into SEO and Core Web Vitals (CWV), you’ll recognize these as contributing factors of ranking signals.

So, when you’re looking to enhance your value proposition and amplify client results, web accessibility is a game-changer. Not only does it foster digital equality, but it also drives tangible marketing results.

4 Steps To Boost Website Performance By Improving Web Accessibility

Web accessibility and your agency’s marketing performance share the same DNA.

Think of them as two sides of the same coin or, better yet, as kindred spirits in the website world.

Here are four common performance-boosting components that are linked to embedding accessibility into your client sites.

Step 1. Add Alt Text For Improved Search Visibility

Search engines have a soft spot for accessible websites.

When your clients’ websites are accessible, they are also telling the search engines what they want to hear.

For example, properly labeled images improve both accessibility and image searchability. Alt text is critical to convey information in images and illustrations to make sure people using assistive technology can get the maximum context and understanding of the overall content.

How To Write High-Impact Alt Text

To improve your search visibility and increase the chances of your clients’ websites showing up higher on more search engine results pages (SERPs):

Understand which images are informative, decorative, functional, or complex.
Identify informative images, then write the text alternative for images using the essential information, describing it in detail. Don’t forget to include the emotional implications of the image.
Filter out decorative images, like a flourish or stylistic elements that lack meaningful context. Then, write the alt text as “null” as in, so that screen readers won’t waste users’ time by announcing it.
Take your functional images, which describe what happens when you click an image, like the ‘download’ icon. Then, make sure your alt text doesn’t describe those images but instead, denotes their functionality.
Grab your complex infographics or diagrams, then compose alt text describing the information laid out in the images.

The Easy Way

It’s labor-intensive to manually go back and write descriptions for the hundreds or thousands of images on your site. Instead, save time and money and let UserWay’s automated Image Alt tool generate the alt text for you, using AI. This is one of the most popular features of UserWay’s AI-Powered Accessibility Widget.

Alt Text Best Practices

To make sure your alt text provides your readers with everything they need to understand, and make sure search engines can rank your clients’ content:

Less is more: Ensure the length of alternative text is under 125 characters when possible, spaces included.
Don’t skimp on quality: Pay close attention to the accuracy of the information and insight the image provides in that short amount of words.
Don’t use images of text, whenever possible, except in logos. If used, the image alt text should include the same words as in the image.
For image maps, with multiple clickable areas, a group alt text gives the overall context of the map. Any clickable area should also have its own individual alternative text, describing the link’s destination and purpose.
Don’t ever assign a random, vague, or ambiguous alternative text description to an image simply to increase your accessibility score. This could lead to confusion and frustration for a screen reader user. Alt text accessibility is rooted in providing meaningful and functional alternative means of usability. Poor or random alt text descriptions can arguably be worse than having no alt text at all.

Step 2. Create Clear Header Structure: Best Practices For Increased Rankings & Better Content Understanding

Similarly, clear heading structures laid out in the proper order aid screen readers and search engine bots alike.

The result? You may see a boost in rankings that can set your agency a notch above your competitors.

How To Write Keyword-Driven Headers – Best Practices

A great keyword and header structure strategy can improve your clients’ performance in the long run, on more search engine results pages (SERPs). It will also help every website visitor find exactly what they’re looking for.

Place main and secondary keywords so that both search engine bots and readers can understand the content on your clients’ pages.
For keywords in headers, you need to balance your SEO and accessibility considerations. For example, while you need your target keywords to appear, it’s important to make sure the phrasing and context are also simple to understand and direct.
Structure your headers in the right hierarchy so that screen reader users, for example, can easily navigate content without wasting their time. That means tagging your H1 and H2’s so that content is read out in the right order, and more easily navigable.
Don’t forget that headings must be laid out in the right order, meaning, in a sequential way. So no skipping around from H1 directly to H3.

Step 3. Strengthen UI/UX: Scan For Accessibility Barriers To Improve Your Site For All Visitors

Accessibility directly influences a huge ranking factor of websites – the user experience.

With 88% of digital visitors vowing never to return after one poor site experience, it’s clear that accessibility isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s essential. Read on to find out how fixing accessibility issues has been linked to boosted performance.

How user-friendly are your clients’ sites, especially for people with disabilities?

Are you ensuring all users enjoy an intuitive browsing experience?

UI/UX Best Practices

These best practices range from employing certified testers using assistive technology to test your site, all the way to automated tools that instantly check your accessibility score.

Employ certified testers to create real use cases using assistive technology, like eye trackers, different brands of screen readers, or braille readers.
Schedule your manual testing on a recurring basis, at least once or twice a year, so that you can maintain your high standards of usability as your content evolves.
Augment manual testing with real-time automated scanning of web pages that can work in the background, and alert you to any changes in usability.

The Easy Way

Reputable digital accessibility platforms like UserWay combine the best of both worlds, from automated accessibility scanning, monitoring, and alerting, all the way to IAAP-certified auditors who do a deep dive into your websites. Learn about accessibility audits here.

Step 4. Naturally Improve Conversions

Nothing speaks louder than solid conversion rates.

They’re the definitive measure of a campaign’s effectiveness in turning interest into measurable results.

Let’s look at a case study of how one business builds accessibility into its client websites and sees improved conversion results.

Case Study: How Natural Intelligence Amped Up Conversions With UserWay

Meet Natural Intelligence, the company behind big names like Top10.com and BestMoney.com. Founded in 2009, they’ve made it their mission to simplify your decision-making, influencing 50 million consumer choices annually on their sites globally.

The Challenge:

While boasting a 60-strong product team obsessed with delivering top-notch consumer experiences, they hit a snag: making their sites welcoming for everyone. They tried to find a solution that catered to both web accessibility and performance but it was like ‘hunting for a unicorn’.

The Solution:

UserWay’s AI-powered Widget changed the game for Natural Intelligence, enabling them to achieve their accessibility and compliance goals. And the numbers? They speak for themselves. Within months of collaborating with UserWay, Natural Intelligence saw a significant boost in its metrics:

Click Rates: Up by 1.0%.
Bounce Rates: Down 0.5%.
Earnings per Click: Boosted by 2.4%.
Earnings per Visitor: A rise of 3.5%.

The connection between web accessibility and higher conversion rates isn’t just coincidental — it’s consequential.

Natural Intelligence’s client sites are now more inclusive than ever, engaging more users and racking up credibility points.

So, when strategizing for the next big boost in conversions and revenue, ask yourself: Is web accessibility a part of your digital strategy?

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Aug 22 2023

Your SEO Skills Are More Valuable Than You Think! via @sejournal, @rollerblader

If you’re a tech SEO, content producer, link builder, or general practitioner, your skills are more than just the SEO channel.

So don’t let imposter syndrome or irrational fears about AI and outsourcing worry you about job security. Take a deep breath and relax; your job is not going anywhere.

That’s what this post is here to help with. As an SEO pro, you can grow your company, and not just through sales or customer acquisition from search engines.

This is something we do when working with clients as projects finish up and there is a lag between tasks. These ideas can help you provide value to your company or clients year-round.

Here are three teams that are outside of marketing, but could use your SEO skills to benefit your company: HR, customer support, and the C-suite.

Human Resources

Human resources has a few objectives.

Bring new talent to the company, online reputation management to keep the company looking good, and help employees find the resources they need.

All of this can use SEO skill sets.

Candidates

Go to your company’s jobs section, and if there isn’t one, put together a proposal to build one.

By creating a jobs area, you can help attract local, national, and international talent.

Your pitch can include the estimated monthly searches for “sales jobs in XY city” and an estimation of how much HR can save by bypassing ad spend on some of the job boards. And there are a few skills HR does not have that you can provide.

Deploy job posting schema to the pages. This helps the search engines know the details of the job and may help you get the featured snippets.

Use your research and copywriting skills to scrape forums and communities to find what candidates are looking for or what they want in a job. Then provide this to the HR teams if they’re not including the important items in the job descriptions.

For example, if you find a Reddit forum for specific types of programmers, look for what annoys them and the perks that are talked about the most in their workplaces.

If your company provides these perks, or you have ways to avoid the negatives, incorporate this into the content on the pages. It is something the HR teams may not have thought of.

Now your job listings are speaking to the candidates about their needs vs. your company’s wants, and your website has a resources section that can attract them in.

In many cases, when I do this with HR teams, they had no idea they could “SEO” and “CRO” (conversion rate optimization) the jobs portal.

They are not marketing experts; they manage people’s work lives. Help them bring in and convert candidates, and you’ll become their go-to resource adding to your feeling of being secure in your job.

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

HR gets tired of answering the same questions that arise from negative reviews of the company and work experiences.

And if negative articles about executives are in the top search results, this impacts their effectiveness in recruiting new employees. Build a plan to suppress and address this.

If you’ve had to do the same for negative product reviews and customer experiences, use this as an example of how you’ve handled it for non-HR-related activities and share the similarities.

Start by asking HR which websites and negative comments get brought up the most. Then present how they can be suppressed and replaced. Put together an estimated timeline for effectiveness and what is needed to accomplish the goals.

You’ll be helping to reduce their pain points while protecting your company’s reputation. It’s a big win that makes you valuable to HR, the C-suite, and finance.

Read more: What Is Online Reputation Management (ORM)?

Internal Resources

At some of the larger companies and organizations I work or have worked with, there are internal search engines.

There are databases of studies, PDFs, and research papers that need to be retrieved for sourcing, referencing, and finding the correct policy for a specific situation.

With your knowledge of search operators and metadata like meta robots, you can help make some sense of the chaos. This helps IT as well.

Create a guide on search operators, keyword tagging, and topic clustering to build an employee resource for searching the database.

Next, see if there are resources or staff that are not busy and train them on how to sort, name, and tag the files.

Assistants, support, and virtual assistants (VAs) are perfect for this.

Then create an easy-to-use guide on searching the databases and retrieving the right information each time. It could include anything from published between, author, or a specific topic depending on the search operators used.

If you want to get really creative, shoot some videos of how to do it.

Now the company can reduce the time spent trying to find a resource, gain exposure for proper documents, and reduce waste in storage costs as well as time wasted searching through irrelevant documents.

Customer Service

Many of us don’t think of customer service when navigating a corporate structure, but they are the backbone of most companies.

They help your customers when they’re upset and provide the face and voice of the organization.

Most customers don’t feel emotional about the CEO when mentioned by name (unless you’re at Apple when Steve Jobs was in charge or have a celebrity owner). Still, they do feel happy or angry with the brand, depending on the support they receive.

This is where you come in. You can take pain points away from customer support to keep them happy. They can take better care of your customers when they’re less annoyed.

Access their feedback database and look for topics, feature requests, and usability ideas to enhance your onsite copy. Then upload them to a keyword cloud or n-gram tool and find the most commonly asked questions and concerns.

You’ll now have topically relevant keywords and talking points to add to product and service descriptions which may help increase conversions and prevent returns by sharing compatibility with other devices (stopping mistake purchases), which also results in lower logistic costs.

As a bonus, you’ll discover relevant themes for blog posts or consumer messaging that can also be used in email marketing, SMS, and social media.

But why would customer service share this with you?

Because you can make their lives easier!

As an SEO expert, you get to help with the FAQs on the website and product descriptions. You can make a case as to why the content and UX need to be updated.

Talk to customer support about the top questions they’re tired of answering, and ask them what they wish was on the website so they no longer have to answer it.

You’ll help eliminate the repetitive questions they hate answering, and you could increase conversions by pre-answering consumer questions and save the company money on returns and restocking fees.

Once you have the list, look at your company’s FAQs. Is the question and answer there? If no, add it. If yes, move it up higher or create a dedicated answer in a blog post or a resource somewhere so it is more findable.

Now go a step further and make sure your customer service and company FAQs page has FAQ schema, is crawlable, and that it indexes properly.

If it is all accordions and buried, redo the code (but watch your canonicals) to get stand-alone URLs for easier reference. Even anchor links.

Last, share these resources with the customer service team and create a quick guide to the individual pages and FAQs.

Their lives become easier because they have resources to send consumers to vs. having to keep answering the same thing repeatedly.

As an added bonus, they can begin providing you with a consistent flow of new content ideas and have projects coming to your desk which may help alleviate the feeling of “what do I do now” when you’re in a waiting period for projects to be approved.

C-Suite

The C-suite is concerned with appearance in search engines, but not just from a customer and revenue standpoint. Executives worry about future planning, investors, reputation management, and how the world views both the brand and themselves.

This means their focus is on knowledge panels, online reputation management (ORM) and PR, and attracting investors. That is where you come in.

Update the about us and bios pages and see if it makes sense to deploy advanced schema properties.

Look to see who does and does not have knowledge panels and create a high-level document on how to trigger them for the C-suite that currently does not have one.

This can be used to help them gain more speaking gigs, interviews with media companies, etc.

The added benefit here is personal branding and building a positive image for company leadership. That, in turn, can build investor confidence.

And executives like to feel special.

The added attention and demand for them as a person may sit well if they like the spotlight. You’re the person who is helping them grow their brand which in turn works for corporate future planning, and you become their go-to.

From doing this, I’ve had executives reach out to me later on in their careers as they’re in new roles and hire me for projects again.

And for ORM, the positive PR and branding work you accomplish can help to lower negative results from the first page of Google, protecting the company’s image.

In Summary

If you’re worried about AI or are feeling imposter syndrome, take a step back. You have ways to show your value to your company, even if it isn’t doing customer acquisition.

More resources:

Featured Image: ViDI Studio/Shutterstock

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Aug 11 2023

What Is Marketing Automation And How Does It Work? via @sejournal, @annabellenyst

Want to boost the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, create more efficient team processes, and upgrade your customer experience?

You need marketing automation.

Marketing automation has become popular over the past decade, and for good reason.

As marketers face an ever-growing number of channels and platforms where they need to meet their customers, marketing automation presents a helpful opportunity to save time. It allows them to offload manual tasks so they can focus on high-priority projects.

In this article, we’ll look into what marketing automation is and how it works, highlight some popular marketing automation tools, and cover a few examples of what it looks like in the real world.

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is a catch-all term for software and tools that manage marketing tasks, processes, and workflows without needing human touch.

Marketers have busy schedules and must accomplish many tasks on any given day. By leveraging marketing automation software to handle simple, repetitive activities, marketers can free up their time to focus on more important and time-consuming priorities.

This doesn’t just benefit individual marketers or marketing teams; it also helps maximize efficiency across an entire organization and, ultimately, boost your business’s bottom line.

Marketing automation can help businesses in several ways, including:

Speeding up marketing team processes and saving time.
Improving team and individual productivity.
Generating and nurturing relationships with leads.
Improving customer experience and retention.
Reducing operating costs.

From email marketing campaigns to prospect segmentation, marketing automation simplifies business processes to deliver a better customer experience.

Is Marketing Automation The Same As A CRM?

While marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) software are closely related, they are not the same thing.

The two serve different purposes – though, when used together correctly, they can be extremely complementary tools that supercharge your customer journey.

So, how exactly are marketing automation and CRM different?

While marketing automation is focused on automating and optimizing marketing-related tasks, CRM software is primarily used to bolster the efforts of your sales and customer service teams.

Your CRM provides a home for your customer and prospect data, such as information about them, their purchase activity, and notes from any interactions or sales calls. It provides a single source of truth for your sales, service, and marketing teams to oversee customer relationships across the sales funnel.

This is separate from marketing automation workflows – but both can be integrated to optimize your marketing efforts based on customer data.

Often, CRM companies will also offer marketing automation tools, as they are designed to work hand-in-hand.

What Does Marketing Automation Do?

Marketing automation enables businesses to optimize their marketing strategies and campaigns and contributes to lead generation and nurturing by automating marketing workflows.

With a marketing automation platform, you can create a more personalized customer experience without all the manual effort.

How?

You can set up the software to gather information about every lead or prospect and use that data to serve each individual the right content at the right time.

You simply tell your marketing automation tool what data to gather and how to put that data to good use.

A few common things you can do with marketing automation:

Boost your email marketing by automating your email campaigns. You can set up workflows where customers or prospects are sent timely, personalized emails based on particular actions they take. For example, if you go to a website and put an item in your cart and then leave, that business could use marketing automation workflows to trigger an email to you saying, “Don’t forget about that item in your cart!”
Optimize your marketing campaigns through workflows that serve leads with specific messaging based on where they are in their journey with your business and what channel you’re meeting them on – be it social media, email, in-app, or elsewhere.
Gather insightful analytics on the performance of your marketing campaigns and how effectively you’re generating and converting leads. Marketing automation can provide deeper insights into how well you’re engaging your customers, and where the gaps you need to fill are.

How Does Marketing Automation Work?

So marketing automation sounds great, but how does it actually work?

Every interaction you have with customers or prospective leads – whether it be an email exchange, a website visit, or a social media engagement – provides you with data on that person.

Marketing automation platforms don’t just store that data; they analyze it and then put it to good use.

With marketing automation software, you can segment your leads based on specific criteria such as interest or behavior.

Then, you can set up campaigns to automatically serve tailored messaging to these leads based on different trigger events, actions, or customer journey stages.

You can create workflows based on pre-configured templates or build them from scratch based on your specific needs.

Once you have set up the workflows you need, you can rely on your marketing automation software to do the rest. All you have to do is check on the analytics and reporting regularly to make sure you’re getting the most out of your workflows.

Marketing Automation Platforms

There are a variety of different marketing automation platforms that exist, offering a range of different functionalities and features.

For the sake of this article, we will highlight just a few.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a popular marketing automation tool that lets you pull data from channels like social media, live chat, landing pages, SMS, and more.

Some key features include:

Advanced reporting to discover which marketing campaign automation is working best for you.
Sign-up forms. With custom forms and landing pages, you can collect emails, segment your audience, and trigger automation.
Notification emails let you know when to follow up with your leads.

Klaviyo

With Klaviyo’s marketing automation capabilities, you can deliver personalized messaging to your customers at the right time.

Key features include:

Behavior-based automation that initializes messages based on specific data and events.
Advanced segmentation that allows you to target people based on a specific demographic profile.
AI-driven optimization that uses data prediction to help you proactively reach out to customers.

Customer.io

Customer.io helps you improve your messaging workflows by automating them for you across emails, push notifications, SMS, and more. Some key features include:

In-app message automation that can be combined with email, push, and text.
A visual workflow builder to help you design a better customer experience.
Ad audience sync that tracks your ad audiences across platforms and syncs them with your segments without any need for CSV files.

Mailchimp

Best known as an email marketing platform, Mailchimp also offers a number of different marketing automation tools, including:

Retargeting ads which are designed to re-engage people who have visited your site and encourage them to return.
A customer journey builder where you can create automation workflows that work best for your customers and your goals.
Transactional emails to communicate with your customers when they take a specific action.

Examples Of Marketing Automation

Now that we understand more about what marketing automation is and how it works, let’s cover a few quick examples of different marketing automation workflows.

Reminder And Re-Engagement Emails

You buy a skincare product from a brand. Based on customer data, the company knows that most customers will run out of the product within three months.

So, it uses marketing automation to automatically send you an email around three months after your purchase to encourage you to buy a new product.

Feedback Surveys

You attend a webinar hosted by a tech brand.

Once the webinar is over, you receive an automated email with a survey asking you to rate your experience and provide any feedback. This data is then submitted to the company.

Offers And Deals

You sign up for a loyalty program through a brand. You immediately receive an SMS with an offer for 15% off as a new customer.

Onboarding Information

You sign up for a new service. Within a few days, you receive an email offering tips for how to best use the service as a new user.

Enhance Your Marketing Strategy With Automation Tools

We could all use more time in the day, and this is especially true for marketers. With so many simultaneous responsibilities and tasks to attend to, marketers can use all the help they can get to streamline their day.

It’s no surprise, then, that marketing automation has become such a powerful and beneficial tool for businesses across industries.

With marketing automation, you can optimize your marketing efforts and give your team time back.

But more importantly, marketing automation can help you create a seamless, delightful customer experience that will turn prospects into leads, and leads into loyal customers.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Andrey Suslov/Shutterstock

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Aug 10 2023

Google Opens Beta For eSignature And Gmail ‘Email Layouts v2’ via @sejournal, @kristileilani

Google has announced the next testing phase of new features for Google Workspace users.

Having commenced alpha testing, Google expanded the availability of eSignature to provide a more seamless signing experience for individual Google Workspace subscribers.

Google also invited additional Google Workspace users to apply for early access to eSignature in Google Docs and Drive and “Email Layouts v2” for Gmail.

Google Expands eSignature Availability

Positive feedback and constructive insights have prompted Google to expand eSignature, which should roll out to individual Google Workspace subscribers over the next two weeks.

eSignature is designed to assist small business owners and individuals who often struggle with managing contracts, customer agreements, and other legally binding documents.

Integrating with Google Docs and Google Drive will allow users to request and add signatures to official contracts directly within the platform.

Google Opens Beta For eSignature And Gmail ‘Email Layouts v2’

Screenshot from Google, August 2023

It streamlines processes for requesting signatures, viewing the status of pending requests, and finding completed contracts.

For the recipient, signing a document within an official Google Drive eliminates the need to switch apps or tabs. A more straightforward process could decrease the time it takes to complete a contract.

Early Access Application For eSignature & Customizable “Email Layouts v2” In Gmail

Select Google Workspace business, education, enterprise, and non-profit customers can apply for early access to eSignature.

Also mentioned on the application is a test product for “Email Layouts v2” in Gmail that allows users to “…create, edit and customize email layouts in Gmail.”

Both features could improve contract management for Workspace users, from sending a contract by email with a customized layout to acquiring the signature from a client within Gmail.

Screenshot from Google, August 2023

Upcoming Plans For Workspace Test Products

Google has plans to enhance eSignature capabilities later in the year with features including a contract audit trail, the ability to request multiple signatures, support for signatures from non-Gmail users, and eSignature on PDF files stored in Drive.

For Workspace users with contracts and agreements, the new eSignature capabilities in Google Docs and Drive, plus customizable email layouts, could significantly simplify the process of acquiring signatures.

Featured image: Tada Images/Shutterstock

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Jul 12 2023

How To Perform An SEO Audit That Actually Helps You Win Clients

This post was sponsored by SE Ranking. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

If you’re hoping to win over new clients in 2023, the key is to demonstrate your expertise and value, right out of the gate.

Pitching a comprehensive SEO audit of your prospective client’s website is a great way to get your best foot in the door.

Don’t worry about potentially wasted time if a client closes a deal.

With the right tools in place, creating a proactive, comprehensive SEO audit won’t add much more time to your team’s plate.

In fact, it can be done in just six steps. Let’s start with the basics first.

What Is A Comprehensive Website Audit?

A comprehensive website audit goes beyond surface-level analysis; it delves into various components that contribute to the website’s success.

These audits can provide an in-depth understanding of the website’s current state and offer valuable insights for future optimization.

By conducting a thorough analysis of your client’s website, you can proactively:

Uncover untapped potential that will enhance their website’s SEO performance.
Showcase your commitment to thorough analysis and improvement.
Persuade potential clients to choose your agency for their business needs.

However, conducting a comprehensive SEO audit can be a resource-consuming process for agencies. This is why some agencies opt for sending quick automatic website audit results instead of investing in holistic analyses.

How Can I Speed Up The SEO Auditing Process?

By implementing a well-defined workflow and utilizing appropriate tools, your SEO audit process can be streamlined, simplifying the lives of your teammates and increasing your chances of winning over prospective clients.

In this article, we’ll delve into why holistic SEO audits matter and then provide a step-by-step guide to ensure you are fully prepared.

Now, get ready to win over clients during your initial pitch. All it really takes to achieve this is a solid understanding of the significance of these audits.

Step 1: Gather Sources & Prepare For The SEO Audit

To prepare for an SEO audit, it’s essential to gather relevant information.

Tools that make this step faster:

Google Search Console and Google Analytics (though, your potential client probably won’t be able to grant you access at this point).
Dedicated SEO monitoring and analytics tools, like SE Ranking, that will give you insights into site performance – even if you have no access to the site’s backend.

Get A Holistic View Of The Company & Their Website’s Performance

Start by collecting website analytics data and backend tool access. This data is foundational to the audit process.

Then, engage with them in open conversations in order to familiarize yourself with the clients’:

Business.
Goals.
Available resources.

For example, determine if they have a dedicated development team that can address technical issues and optimizations.

Finally, thoroughly analyze the client’s target audience and industry to uncover insights into their specific needs and preferences.

For example, in the case of an ecommerce client, understanding their audience’s purchasing behaviors and preferences can inform optimization strategies for product pages and conversion funnels.

By conducting thorough research, engaging in discussions with the client, and aligning objectives, you can piece together an effective SEO audit that uncovers the client’s specific challenges and paves the way for tangible results.

Step 2: Perform Competitive Research & Analyze Strategies

Thorough competitive research is a vital part of any SEO audit process.

Gain valuable insights about your potential client’s competitive landscape by evaluating the client’s primary competitors:

Visibility.
Traffic sources.
Keywords.
Backlink profiles.

This analysis gives you a better understanding of your client’s strengths and weaknesses.

It’s also great for uncovering successful keyword strategies, which are the key to developing a comprehensive strategy that sets your client apart in the market.

How To Speed Up Competitive Research

Dedicated SEO tools, such as SE Ranking’s Competitive Analysis tool, can streamline this process by providing comprehensive data and insights.

It offers information on:

It also helps in identifying the client’s closest competitors in organic search based on the keywords they rank for.

How To Perform An SEO Audit That Actually Helps You Win Clients

Image created by SE Ranking, July 2023

Competitive research equips you with actionable insights to position your client for success, leading to better rankings, increased organic traffic, and higher conversions.

Step 3: Conduct A Technical Website Audit

Now, let’s proceed to the next vital step: conducting a technical website audit.

Start by:

Evaluating various technical aspects, such as the page experience, broken links and redirects, sitemap and robots.txt files, noindex and canonical tags, and overall website structure.
Analyzing the website’s Core Web Vitals to uncover potential issues that could impact user experience and search engine rankings.
Communicating the significance of each detected issue to your client, highlighting its impact on website performance and visibility in search results.

If your client targets an international audience, address localization issues as well, including incorrect language settings or regional targeting. Ensuring a consistent experience across different locations is key.

How To Speed Up Technical Website Audits

You can streamline the technical audit process by using website audit tools, which provide comprehensive insights into these technical elements and help uncover areas for improvement.

Image created by SE Ranking, July 2023

By presenting the findings from the technical audit, you can effectively demonstrate how your expertise can yield tangible results and contribute to the client’s overall success.

Step 4: Analyze Keyword Rankings

The next step in auditing your client’s SEO performance is analyzing keywords.

Start by analyzing the client’s current keyword positions and their dynamics over time.

Identify keywords that are approaching the top 10 positions and can serve as foundations for further optimization.

Next, perform keyword research to identify new target keywords that align with the client’s goals and industry trends.

Compare the client’s keyword rankings with those of their competitors. Detect keyword overlap and gaps to pinpoint areas where the client excels and areas that require improvement.

Image created by SE Ranking, July 2023

This approach helps you craft an effective strategy that bridges the gaps and outranks competitors in relevant keyword searches.

Consider different ways to achieve this, such as optimizing existing content, creating new targeted content, or refining on-page optimization techniques.

Step 5. Evaluate The Backlink Profile

Begin this stage with a thorough backlink profile analysis.

Examine the number and quality of backlinks, referring domains, commonly used anchor texts, and the ratio between dofollow and nofollow links.

Image created by SE Ranking, July 2023

Evaluate the quality and relevance of the backlinks by considering factors such as domain trust, anchor texts, and the diversity of linking domains.

Next, compare the client’s backlink profile with those of their competitors to identify any gaps and potential opportunities.

This analysis enables you to develop a targeted strategy for acquiring high-quality backlinks that will enhance the client’s website authority and visibility in search engine results. This could involve outreach campaigns, guest blogging, partnerships, or content promotion.

Step 6. Gather Results & Prepare For The Pitch

After you’ve gathered the data, conducted a comprehensive website audit, and completed competitive research, it’s time to assemble the results and prepare for the client pitch.

Start by creating an executive summary of the audit findings, highlighting the website’s strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. This summary should provide a concise overview of the key takeaways from the audit.

Next, pinpoint actionable recommendations and optimization strategies based on audit findings. These recommendations should address specific areas for improvement, including technical enhancements and SEO practices.

Identify the low-hanging fruit, which refers to SEO tasks that have been overlooked or left untouched for quite some time. These tasks are often straightforward but can lead to a remarkable boost in organic traffic when done the right way.

Design a customized report and presentation that visually presents the data and effectively conveys your ideas and suggestions.

How To Speed Up SEO Client Pitch Creation

Utilize SEO reporting tools to create impactful reports, enhancing the client’s comprehension and engagement with the information.

Image created by SE Ranking, July 2023

Tailor the audit findings to the client’s specific needs and goals, aligning the recommendations with their requirements.

During the pitch, present the audit findings and key in on any actionable recommendations. Also, illustrate the potential impact and ROI of implementing these proposed improvements.

Emphasize how the recommended changes can enhance their website’s performance, user experience, search engine visibility, and ultimately drive business growth.

By showcasing the value and potential outcomes, you increase the likelihood of gaining the client’s trust and securing their partnership.

Now, It’s Your Time To Shine

Conducting a thorough SEO audit serves as a powerful tool for agencies to impress potential clients and secure new business opportunities.

By capitalizing on this valuable asset, agencies can demonstrate their expertise and win client pitches with flying colors.

Embrace the potential of website audits as a means to drive business growth and establish long-lasting partnerships with clients.

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by SE Ranking. Used with permission.

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