Online search is more important than ever, which means for businesses, search engine optimization should be an absolutely mandatory componen...
Online search is more important than ever, which means for businesses, search engine optimization should be an absolutely mandatory component of their digital marketing strategy. Yet, too many business clients of digital marketing firms want to cut SEO costs down to nothing, impairing their own ability to achieve success in their digital marketing goals.
As a digital marketer, part of your job is to set reasonable expectations for what you can achieve for any individual client — and that means helping them understand the costs associated with the services they want and need. Especially when you are relying on white-label SEO services, you have fixed costs associated with your SEO products, and it is imperative that you communicate with clients clearly regarding expenses and budgets. If this is something you continuously struggle with, you might benefit from the following tips and tricks for setting client expectations regarding SEO costs.
Understand the Cost of SEO Yourself
Many digital marketing firms take advantage of a white label SEO service, which allows them to maintain more streamlined operations and keep their expenses low while also delivering high-quality SEO to their clients. Unfortunately, this can mean that digital marketers do not fully understand the true cost of different SEO services because they have never managed the service in-house.
Before you begin to offer white-label SEO to clients, you need to have a detailed discussion with your provider regarding their pricing and fees. You should ask about the price differences of specific services, like automated SEO versus managed SEO or local SEO versus organic SEO. You should get a sense of the average monthly SEO costs of businesses of different sizes and talk about how SEO budgets tend to change over time. The more you know about how SEO pricing works, the better you will be at explaining SEO costs to your clients and setting their expectations appropriately.
Understand Your Clients’ Goals
No two companies have the exact same goals when it comes to digital marketing, which means that any individual client’s use of SEO can vary depending on what they hope to achieve with their digital marketing campaign. It is your job, as the leader of your clients’ digital marketing efforts, to understand how much SEO will be necessary to achieve specific goals.
To that end, you should talk extensively with your client about their objectives. It might be wise to develop a comprehensive client onboarding process that collects a great amount of information about the client’s current status, past digital marketing attempts, and vision for the future. The more you know about your client — especially what they need and want — the more accurately you can identify the SEO services they need, which will in turn help you accurately estimate their SEO costs.
Clarify Your Client Contracts
Contracts should spell out every detail of your relationship with your clients, so every party involved fully understands what is expected of them. Though it is tempting to believe that contracts are tricky legal documents designed to keep information hidden, the truth is that the clearer your contracts are, the more likely each party is to understand their role and complete their assigned tasks.
Therefore, you might take the time to reduce or at least explain any legal jargon in your contracts, especially around paragraphs pertaining to payment. You can work with a lawyer to ensure your stripped-down contracts remain legally viable, and you should address any concerns from clients with further explanation and, if necessary, contract notations.
Communicate Openly and Honestly
No one likes hidden fees, and clients who feel surprised by SEO costs are unlikely to remain clients of your digital marketing firm for very long. You should work to eliminate any potential for surprise and shock by communicating openly about your agency’s fee structure from the first interactions you have with prospective clients.
As you become more transparent about your pricing policies, you will recognize that clients become more trusting and less difficult to communicate with. Often, when presented with clear and concise communication about costs, clients are less likely to engage in negotiations and more likely to make payments on time and in full.
Just because SEO is an essential digital marketing practice for most businesses doesn’t mean that it will come cheap. 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.
