Help Your Clients To Help Themselves!

Laura Ginn

There’s a fair few SEO experts out there, and I’m sure they would all say that they know the perfect recipe for improving the performance of literally any webpage they care to take a look at. I’m sure this is true in many cases, but being a good SEO guy is only the half of it. Want to know what really helps your clients? Your clients do! But only if you help them to understand how they can help themselves.

Photo by stockmonkeys.com
Photo by stockmonkeys.com

Client Education

Client education is one of the most important, as well as one of the most overlooked areas of any good SEO campaign. While you are running around, analysing backlinks, checking tags and researching the impact of their current social media campaign, spare a moment to think what happens when you go away. Most companies who enlist the help of an SEO company to propel their site into the stratosphere do so on a temporary basis. Unfortunately, a lot of companies out there believe that SEO is a bit like an inoculation – a shot in the arm every now and then is going to keep you healthy. This is true to a point, but if important rules aren’t being followed when you’re not around to monitor them, you are quite likely to find a mountain of problems and slipping rankings when you pay them another visit in a years’ time.

From our point of view, there are certain things that have to be done when dealing with clients which take into account the importance of their education in SEO.

What We Do

First off, we look at ourselves in a different light. We’re consultants, not just service providers! We absolutely do provide services, and a very many good ones, but if that was all we delivered, we would be selling ourselves short. We look upon ourselves as problems solvers, and that means making the problems go away even once we ourselves have gone away! If we only offered ‘services’, we would only deal with clients who wanted a quick fix. Because we openly encourage discussion and identification of issues, it gives us a natural way to get into communication, which has to be one of the ultimate goals if you want to help your clients help themselves.

We Educate About Content

Great content is one of our great calling cards, but we’re always here to help our clients understand the importance of their own content creation. While we are churning out insightful, helpful, and powerful content specifically for our client’s needs, they should also be engaging, creating, and generally writing about their brand and talking to their followers. We hope that our encouragement and guidance helps to create a stronger company in the long run, even if it does mean persuading our clients that they have to dip into the ink well too!

Finding the Right Client-Company Mix

Finally, finding clients that want to help themselves is something that’s important to us, and we do that by helping anyone thinking about using a service like ours by creating blog posts, newsletters and content of our own which shows that we are here to work with other companies hand in hand, arm in arm. When you work with someone instead of for someone, they get so much more out of it. We think we add real value with our services at Ink Elves, and if you’re reading this and agree, then why not drop us a line to see if we should be working together.