Increasingly blogs are sold to companies not just as a part of their website, but as a legitimate SEO tool to be added on to their website and bring them additional traffic and positions. In order for this to happen however, they do need to actually use the blog, and use it well.

In the spirit of this, here are 5 reasons to subscribe to your clients’ RSS feeds!

1. To See If They Use Their Blog At All
Its all very well telling your client how much they are going to benefit from having a blog and how much traffic it will bring them, but if they don’t touch the damn thing then they won’t be getting much benefit at all. I have a dedicated folder for my clients’ blogs and when I see that a week has gone by and their name hasn’t turned bold in my list (an indicator that a new story has been published) I start sending emails. This may seem like more hassle to you than to them, but if you want to upsell them a higher SEO maintenance package in the future then you need to ensure that you get them results NOW!

2. To See If They Use Their Blog Correctly
I actually once had a client with a band website who on occasion would blog about the weather… Don’t even ask. Because I wasn’t subscribed to the feed, I didn’t realise until about a month later. Make sure your clients are using the right content for their blogs, remember, writing is not their strength and its not what they were hired for, so don’t expect them to know exactly what to write just because it’s their company. Ideally their posts should be an authority on their industry, and not sound too much like a press release, nor a personal opinion, rather an objective concise article employing a journalistic writing style.

3. To See If They Are Using Internal Linking
Too often clients will happily blog away like little rabbits, only for me to come along and find that they have not linked to a single one of the pages on their site. One solution to this (for wordpress) is to use the A-Links plugin, which automatically inserts a link when it detects the use of keywords that you specify. I’m not a fan of this technique as it can often make a good blog post look very spammy, but done correctly it can work ok. Clients often forget to even use their keywords in blogs, let alone links, so its a great thing to check for when you get a popup notification from your feed reader for one of your clients’ blogs.

4. To Asses The Current Affairs For Your Client
When it comes to doing monthly maintenance for a client, it always involves at least a small amount of external link building. Often finding a subject to write about or to link from can be a pain, especially if your client’s industry is one that you are not actively involved in. Being subscribed to their blog means that you will always have a fresh set of up to date news on what’s going on in your client’s industry (provided that they are following #2)

5. To Capitalise On SEO Opportunities Right Away
Sometimes I’ll see a really good blog by one of my clients come into my feed reader, really well written, great content, great images, and very social media friendly (diggable, if you will). Then I look at the title and my computer-screen-damaged eyes drop in dismay, another crap title! The title of a blog entry is SO important, probably more so than any other factor – hell I could write and entire other entry on blog titles alone! (and I probably will). Make sure your client’s titles are catchy, clickable, and use keywords, and if they’re missing any of those things then get in there and edit them!

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If there is one thing that really gets to me about SEO, its when you find yourself stuck with a client that you wish you had never taken on in the first place. Their site uses tables for absolutely everything, sometimes even just to add an extra space between words, their navigation is all images with javascript, and their content management system means you can’t change a single thing without having to rebuild the whole site.

If you’ve never had a client quite that bad, consider yourself lucky!

Of course its not always avoidable, sometimes, especially working for a company rather than for yourself, where it is not you who gets to decide what clients to say no to – you get landed with these sites and there is not a lot you can do. In which case my advice to you is to asses how bad it really is, do what you can, and then get out of there.

But for the times when you do have control over whether or not to take on a prospective client, consider the following points:

Do they have a content management system?
If so is it open source, home made, or a company-build ? Open source will always be the easiest to work with, with something like Drupal or Wordpress there is a lot you can do with regards to applying an SEO skin to the site. A company-build content management system is where their web design company built them a content management system specifically for their site, these are usually a lot more difficult to work with, relatively closed, and the company in question are generally very sour about giving you access or permission to change their code.

The worst of the bunch by far though, is the home made content management system – where the client has a freelance web designer who has built them an admin area, and made a complete mess of it. In these cases the web designer will most likely be only to happy to let you into his code and tell you how great it is, but ask him how you are going to implement custom meta information for each specific page, and he will suddenly become very stand-offish. Steer clear!

(Side note – if you must take on a client like this, at least ensure that you have FTP access so that you can hardwire in any changes that you need to)

Does their site use tables, javascript navigation, or frames?
If it does, you may want to forget them altogether. Tables are the least bad, they just make content difficult to crawl – you will need to convert the entire layout to CSS, which will take a fair amount of time.

Javascript navigation is in the middle, search engines can’t follow JS navigation, the easy way around this issue is to replicate the navigation in a set of plain-text base links that search engines can follow.

The worst (unsurprisingly) is frames, which don’t display the full source code, and as such don’t let search engines in, you will definitely have to convert a site like this to CSS and PHP includes, which will take the longest out of all of them.

These types of sites are the ones that keep me awake at night, not out of worry, out of sheer manic frustration. God help you if you have a combination of Frames, Javascript, AND Tables.

Does their server have ISAPI / MOD rewrites enabled?
One of the biggest elements of my initial SEO skin for any site is doing file name changes, and URL rewrites. Now obviously these require 301 redirects, and server rewrite rules. It’s all well and good quoting a client to have this work done, but when you come to upload your .htaccess or httpd.ini file and it nukes the whole site – it gets pretty painful pretty fast. Check this beforehand.

Do they need SEO?
I have a real problem with doing SEO for clients that don’t need it. A cabbage farm for example, DOESNT need SEO. They are the wholesaler, they sell to the retailer, and the retailer sells to the consumer. The consumer uses a search engine to find the retailer, but the retailer does not use a search engine to find the wholesaler! That’s just one example, but if your client’s product or services aren’t directly available to the public, then why do they need to rank in search engines?

You may be thinking, ‘well why not?’ and that is a fair question, I would like to say something fitting like ‘to preserve the integrity of Google’s search listings and maintain the ongoing quality of search results provided the general public’… but I won’t. Its simply because everyone without exception, wants SEO, because they want traffic, and if they are paying you for SEO, they expect to see traffic. But number 1 for ‘cabbage farm’ will still yield no traffic because no one is searching for it, so the client gets frustrated, and you get frustrated. Save yourself the headaches.

Do they care?
Some clients are a dream come true, you tell them that SEO is an ongoing process and it requires a lot of their input, and they step up to the plate and get everything done that you ask them to. Others, can be downright rude, refusing to co-operate with any of your requests, and expecting to see results without them having to lift a finger.

Make sure your client understands what is required of them BEFORE taking them on, if they are not willing to do any updates then there is no point in selling them a blog! You may again think ‘why not’ and the reason is the same, when they don’t see results (due to no fault of your own) they will ask where all that money went that they gave you. Save yourself the aggravation, and set up the blogs for clients that will actively use them.

Finally…
I should make it clear that I am not advocating that you ‘duck out’ of any projects that seem like they might be more difficult than others. I am simply saying that you should asses the above points before taking on a client, or you may find yourself putting in many more hours than you had intended, or been paid for. Having sites that are near impossible to optimise isn’t just ineffective for your client’s business, it affects your reputation to. So play on your strengths!

Had any nightmare client sites of your own? Got any questions? Drop me a line in the comments!

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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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