How to Make Sure Your SEO Client Realizes You’re Doing a Great Job
One of the most important things you can do for yourself as an SEO copywriter is track the effectiveness of the work you do for your clients.
Why would you leave it up to guesswork?
Your income depends on it!
With concrete proof, your client will clearly understand the value you bring to his business.
Which, of course, will result in more work and more money for you.
Earlier this year, I sent out a note on measuring the effectiveness of your SEO work. Afterwards I received some additional techniques used by SEO copywriters to measure their results.
So to make sure you have all the tools you need, here are four more SEO tracking tips on ways you can prove to your client your SEO work accomplished its goal.
Have Your Client Add You to Their Google Analytics Account
Web writer Melissa Arnold uses a feature in Google Analytics that allows your customer to go in and set you up as a “view reports only” user. (In the “User Manager” section, they simply click on “Add User.”) This allows you to log in and view their web statistic reports. You can download any report you’d like to your computer (in either PDF or XML file format). Do this before you start your work and then after – and compare the results.
Use the Free Tool From HubSpot.com
This free report gives you all kinds of great information about your client’s website, such as metadata, heading and image summaries, readability level of the site, the number of pages indexed by Google, the current traffic rank of the site (according to Alexa.com), the number of inbound links to it, and so on.
It’s not as detailed as the information you’d get from Google Analytics (or other analytic software), but it’s not a bad snapshot of your client’s website.
Once again, you’ll want to do this before and after. So, after you do your SEO work, simply go to the site and run the report again.
Track Your Visits by Keyword
Copywriter Roy Furr uses the “track by keywords” statistic, which is available in most analytics packages. This shows you how many times a visitor arrives on site by typing specific keywords or keyphrases into a search engine. In Google Analytics you can even break it down on a page-by-page basis.
Before you do your work, make sure you take a snapshot of this statistic in the analytics program your client is using. After you optimize a page, track this statistic and show your customer the increased traffic that’s occurring as a result of your work. Roy cautions that you shouldn’t use the measurement alone, but it’s certainly one of the leading indicators.
Use the Free Tool at SEMRush.com
Input your client’s website into the search field at the top of the SEMRush.com website, and in seconds you’ll have the top 10 keywords and where specific pages rank with Google. If you need more than the top 10, you’ll have to upgrade to the paid version (which starts at $19.95 per month). With one click of the mouse, you can export this information in Excel or CSV format. As with the other methods, make sure you take “before and after” snapshots.
Tracking your results takes relatively little time when you consider the pay off.
And to make sure you’re being consistent, I recommend you keep a detailed “before and after” journal of results for each client. Every time you make a significant change to your client’s website, print out a report (at regular intervals) and record it in your journal. Then input the data into a spreadsheet, and use that information to put together an SEO results report for your client.
A results report is a great way to prove to your client that they made a good decision to hire you. Plus, the same reports can be used to sell the value of what you do to potential clients.
If there is one area of web writing everyone should learn, it’s SEO copywriting. And Heather Lloyd-Martin, the pioneer of SEO copywriting, has made it very easy for you to learn. With her 6-hour, in-home training videos, you will have the skills needed to start getting clients on Monday. Learn more about the program here.
And if you’re already working with clients, but haven’t been tracking your results, go ahead and start taking the snapshots of their websites today, so you’ll have a benchmark to compare to in the near future.
The Professional Writers’ Alliance
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