Managing client expectations with regards to Internet Marketing can be a rewarding experience, but more often than not its a painful up hill crawl to get them to see that, what they want, and what they need, are two entirely different things.
Most often, this comes in the form of what key phrases clients want to rank for, one of my clients for example is dead set on ranking for ‘designer clothing’ - which, as prestigious as it may be, doesn’t really benefit him or his business at all. Why, you ask?
Read on.
A few months ago, said client called me up because he had dropped from the number 2 spot to number 3 in Google (for ‘designer clothing’). He was, and I quote “very concerned about the ongoing success of his Seo campaign due to the significant recent drop”. Ironically of course, the opposite was true, while he had dropped one place for ‘designer clothing’ he was actualy up 36 positions overall from the previous month, and most of the gains were in longer (3 to 5) word terms. What I explained to him, is something that all Internet Marketing clients should ready have explained to them before they are taken on.
Short key phrases (for the most part) do not convert into sales.
While it makes you look pretty big and impressive to rank for ‘designer clothing’ - when it comes down to it if someone is actually doing a search with the intent to buy, they will be much more specific about what they search for.
In this case, ‘buy mens bench jeans’ was converting at an awesome 15%, while comparatively ‘designer clothing’ although drawing a reasonable amount of traffic, was converting at less than 1%. Of course sometimes 1% of a lot of traffic is still more money than 15% of very little traffic, but you have to weigh up the pros and cons. Spend all your time trying to rank for one high traffic, poorly converting term? Or spread your time over 10 lower traffic terms converting excellently?
My personal preference is always the second option.
So how does this relate to managing client expectations? Well often a client will have an idea in their head of what will make them more money online, and they expect you to do all the work and make it happen. This is of course so ridiculous that most of us don’t even take it into consideration.
In reality however, clients need a detailed explanation of what they need, and how this ties in with their own ideas. They also need it to be made clear that there is only so much you can do, this their business, and they need to promote it.
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