The Typical SEO Workflow Process

The Client SEO Workflow. If it’s your first time working with clients or even just doing SEO, then it can be a bit overwhelming to try and figure out exactly where to start and to actually make sure you’re performing the right task. It can be really helpful to understand what the whole client SEO process looks like to ensure you have a strong foundation and you can better serve your clients. So in this video, I’m going to give you a bird’s eye view of the whole client SEO process. So this is what it looks like. We have quite a few different elements in there, five in total.

The first thing you want to start off when you take on a new client or you’re working with a new client is Keyword Research. So this one right here. Keyword Research is the first thing you need to be focusing on when you’re working with a client. The keywords are essentially the foundation of the whole SEO campaign. They actually determined the success of your campaign as well, and if you target a keyword which is too difficult, you’re not actually going to make the client any money. You’re going to waste the budget, and it’s also going to take you ages to rank on the first page of Google. Keyword research is super important.

You can find out new keyword ideas for your client just by using Google Auto Suggest, which is a free method. Or you can use some of the paid tools I showed you earlier on in the course to find keywords very easily and very quickly. So make sure you get the right keywords down from the beginning. Again, if you’re working with local clients, your keywords should be pretty obvious. It’s just going to be the service plus the location they are targeting, which is normally their local town, city or county and so on. So once you determine the keywords, it’s time to move on to the next phase which is Check the Rankings.

So sometimes what you’ll find when you take on a new client is that this client website already ranks for those keywords. The client website might be on page five. It might be on page four. It might even be at the bottom of page one. However, it’s always worthwhile checking where the client is ranking for the keywords that you want to target. And you’ll be surprised quite often. When you check the client’s rankings in this first instance, you can also see what URL Google deems to be relevant to that keyword. If you don’t do this check, what can happen?

You can end up creating a new page on a client’s website, targeting the same keyword and cause more issues for yourself, as you’re going to have two pages on a client website, both competing for the same keyword. So it’s really important you check the client’s rankings and do not skip this step. So once you Check the Rankings, the next thing to move on to is going to be Onpage SEO. So this is a whole process of optimizing a client’s website to ensure it clues those specific keywords on the actual pages you’re targeting.

Some of the Onpage SEO things you can implement on the client website would be updating the title tag, changing the H1 tag, adding another H2 tag, updating the meta description and so on, and so on. These are all changes you make on the client’s website, and as a result are classified as on-page optimizations. If you do a good job on the Onpage SEO, then it can make your life a little bit more easier when it comes to doing Link Building. Sites that have good Onpage SEO, typically need less links built. The reason being is because Google already understands what the site is about as the Onpage SEO is done perfect.

So once you’ve done the Onpage SEO, the next thing to move on to is Link Building. So this involves you going out there and getting your client website mentioned on external websites. So as you probably already know, a backlink represents a vote of confidence from one site to another. So the more backlinks your client website has the higher they’re going to appear in Google. Now do be cautious, as when it comes to backlinks, it’s all about quality over quantity. So focus on building high quality backlinks. And lastly you have Client Reporting. So this is when you send a report to the client, ideally at least once a month.

We send our reports at the end of the month, on the 30th of every month all our clients get a report. And essentially this report needs to detail all the work you’ve carried out in that month. It also needs to let the client know exactly where they are in Google for the keywords they’re targeting. So the whole idea is you’re targeting the five key words you said in your first report, and that keyword is on page five maybe. You send your second report in the following month, and that keyword might be on page four. And the following month, page three, two, one, and so on. So they get higher and higher.

So the whole idea is being super transparent with the client and let them know exactly what is going on and how the campaign is progressing. The amount of agencies that just send standard reports that have no information, no traffic, none of that stuff is really, really surprising. It’s also a good idea to show the client’s traffic to the website. So ideally as you’re working on a client campaign, the client site should be getting more and more traffic to the site month after month. As well as you’re working on the SEO and increasing the visibility of the site, the site is naturally going to attract more users and the traffic is going to go up and up and up.

It’s very important you do provide monthly reports to the client as I can’t count how many agencies there are out there, which do no monthly reporting. As a result, the client is left in the dark and they have no idea what they’re paying for. This is a situation you don’t want to put your SEO business in, as it’s going to put you more vulnerable to clients dropping off and having a lower client retention rate. But essentially this is the whole client SEO work process from a bird’s eye view.