I got such great answers that I have taken the top 17 and made my 17 commandments of setting SEO expectations, then at the end of this piece I link over to the question and answer format for all of their answers. Thank you to Rhea Drysdale, Lee Odden, Rand Fishkin, Scott Skurnick, Melanie Nathan, Lindsay Wassell and Garrett French.

Here are the questions I asked:

1 – Can you give me a time when you didn’t set a clients expectation properly and it came back to bite you, and more importantly how did you recover from it / what processes have you put in place to keep that from happening again?

2 – I have found that one of the hardest conversations to have with prospective clients is the “you don’t deserve to rank #1 for that keyword” conversation, do you ever have to have those conversations, and if you do, how do you handle them in a way that helps the client realize you are trying to help them.

3 – When a client asks you to estimate ROI on an SEO project or asks where do you expect us to be in 12 months how do you handle those types of questions.

4 – When someone says something to you like, I read a report that shows that 60% of the clicks go to the first 3 listings, so I must be in the top 3 spots – it makes all of us cringe, how do you address that logical concern?

5 – How do you set expectations about the number of links / quality of links you are going to be able to procure for your clients?

6 – How do you handle the situation when a prospective client comes to you and has the budget, but they have few linkable assets, doesn’t have time to create content, weak PR, etc, etc?

7 – Any recommendations on questions to ask a prospective client before you take on a project to sniff out if they have the resources to create GOOD linkable assets?

Based on those questions here are the responses I got and the commandments I developed: (here’s the PDF to print out!)

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Can you give me a time when you didn’t set a clients expectation properly and it came back to bite you, and more importantly how did you recover from it / what processes have you put in place to keep that from happening again?
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Rhea
Outspoken Media is a small agency, which means we physically do the work ourselves. As COO and a worker, I often have to re-evaluate the time I spend communicating with clients about work and time I spend actually getting the work done. I always want to address a client’s concerns and questions, but I’ve had to learn the hard way that it isn’t rude to explain to a client that the more they need reassurance, the less time I’m going to have to get the job done and demonstrate ROI. In contracts we now clearly state how often we will be available for calls and that if a client needs more time from us, they will be billed x amount per hour beyond their current services. It’s the only way we can ensure a happy balance between communication and work.

COMMANDMENT #1: Thou shall explain the balance between time spent talking about SEO and time spent doing SEO.

Lee
Early on when I was with another agency doing web development projects and web marketing, we’d take on a variety of projects that would involve new territory for us. That kind of scenario creates expectations issues and recovery deals mostly with owning up to capabilities and timeframes. However, with the agency I’ve had the past 10 years, we pretty much stick to what we’re best at, knowing our capabilities and limits. Processes are essential for expectations management with everything to how you market your company, public and media relations efforts designed to build influence and credibility all the way to hiring, training and implementation. Reporting makes a big difference as well and including mutually agreed upon objectives front and center of every program performance report keeps everyone on the same page.

COMMANDMENT #2: Thou shall stick only to what thou REALLY knows to avoid unforeseen client expectations creeping up.

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I have found that one of the hardest conversations to have with prospective clients is the “you don’t deserve to rank #1 for that keyword” conversation, do you ever have to have those conversations, and if you do, how do you handle them in a way that helps the client realize you are trying to help them.
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Rhea
We’re often brutally honest with our clients, which they usually love. Of course there are times when I do have to explain that their services/products/content just aren’t up to par and in some cases, it might simply be a matter of them not meeting user intent for a particular keyword. I’ve found that it’s easier to explain the situation to a client by letting the competition or search results speak for themselves. Instead of us voicing an “opinion” that the client needs to do x, we give them examples what strategy the competition is using to earn their placement.

COMMANDMENT #3: Thous shall be Brutally Honest! Use the current SERPS to explain what is/isn’t attainable.

Scott
Absolutely. When we were relaunching the Edmunds site a number of years ago there was a desire to rank highly for “Make” terms such as Ford or GM. Due to the competitive nature of these terms I didn’t think we would be able to achieve this even though our site is authoritative in nature. The easiest way to support your argument is by showing examples. When you can show people that the results are dominated by sites which you won’t be able to displace because they are either official OEM sites or Wikipedia it goes a long way in helping your cause. The other argument that can be made as that the quality of traffic going to such general terms won’t help your revenue goals.

COMMANDMENT #4: Thou shall stay focused on revenue primarily, not rankings, links, or traffic.

Lee
A prospective client once asked about pursuing the word “brain” using a new web site. It’s a pretty straightforward thing to share a few datapoints about the search marketplace for any given topic as well as a few specifics for the sites that are already in the top spots. Sharing the resource allocation necessary for uber competitive and broad topics in the context of the prospects online resources vs going after topics that better reflect an intent to buy is pretty useful. But the conversation isn’t effective unless you share alternatives that show how the company can reach their goals. Spend huge resources chasing a unicorn or spend moderate resources going after hundreds or thousands of catchable fairies. (Bad metaphor) but we get it Lee.

COMMANDMENT #5: Take a resource allocation approach – articulate the expected time and resources required to target broad words, which may never rank even with extreme effort.

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When a client asks you to estimate ROI on an SEO project or asks where do you expect us to be in 12 months how do you handle those types of questions.
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Lindsay
These are REALLY tough to answer and I doubt my answer is going to be very helpful. At SEOmoz we came across this question very infrequently. Most of our clients had already experienced success in SEO and were contracting us to take them to the next level. They already understood the ROI from experience.

Perhaps more helpful is my experience starting out as an in-house SEO. I had to work extremely hard to get my projects into the development schedule. 80% of my job at the time was education and communication. I eventually won over the executive team by convincing them to make an investment in a ‘pilot project’. I was sure it would make a big difference, but I couldn’t exactly pinpoint how much of a difference. I got my pilot project and achieved more than 400% SE traffic growth in 6 months. That paved the way and I could always reference that case study as an example of the potential ROI.

COMMANDMENT #6: Thou shall have results that speak for themselves, even if you start with a small project.

Scott
Luckily I haven’t had to deal with a ROI discussion in a while. Once you are able to prove yourself as an in-house SEO, the doubters become few and far between. I have been very fortunate that I have had the support of upper management over most of my tenure at Edmunds. Regarding a 12 month outlook, I always do my best to give an honest estimate. Some projects are riskier than others and I make sure that is known upfront. I am also very clear that I will not make any guarantees and that every project has the potential to fail. If I think I can give a ballpark estimate I will, if I don’t think it is possible I explain why. As an in-house SEO I think we have much greater liberties when it comes to these types of questions vs. agency SEO’s.

COMMANDMENT #7: Thou shall prove thyself early, and always be honest about limitations.

Melanie
Firstly, I never estimate an actual dollar amount (cuz that’s impossible). Instead, I try to focus on what the SEO project will potentially do for their exposure and their website’s usability, which in turn can lead to more signups or conversions. I also offer a list of past clients, the results achieved and an invite to contact any of them in regards to their project.

In every case though, it’s better to promise little and produce huge than to promise huge and produce little.

COMMANDMENT #8: Thou shall always underpromise and overdeliver!

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When someone says something to you like, I read a report that shows that 60% of the clicks go to the first 3 listings, so I must be in the top 3 spots – it makes all of us cringe, how do you address that or other logical concerns?
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Rhea
We usually don’t cringe, it makes sense. However, is the keyword right? Before we start with a client, we need to see their conversion reports if they’re doing PPC and we need access to their analytics. We want to know what’s driving visitors to convert for them and we prioritize which keywords we go after from there. If a client is starting from scratch we do our homework and make educated decisions on which keywords we will target. Based on performance of those keywords we’ll tweak our strategy over time. When we’re billing a client for so many hours, it simply doesn’t make sense for us or them to go after keywords that won’t convert and we tell them that.

COMMANDMENT #9: Thou shall be practical and consider the other person’s point of view, they don’t know what you know so take time to educate and explain.

COMMANDMENT #10: Thou shall not make ROI judgments without conversion data.

Scott
Funny enough I haven’t had to deal with these kinds of comments. I have avoided using rankings as a success metric for a number of years now. For us it is all about driving unique visitors to the site, giving them the best user experience possible and then getting them to convert. It is much easier to optimize your conversion rate than search rankings because conversion is 100% within your control. Obviously good rankings and traffic are highly correlated but we drive so much traffic via long tail terms that it is nearly impossible to accurately track rankings. Luckily we do rank in the top 3 for many of our core terms but even a slight drop or increase in these rankings doesn’t have a large affect on our overall traffic.

COMMANDMENT #11: Thou shall always optimize conversion rates because that is 100% within your control.

Lindsay
I work really hard to steer clients away from keyword and rank focus and towards overall search referral traffic growth. That said, I have to agree that top three placement is the only place to be. Even the traffic difference between second and first position is substantial. Most of my clients obtain traffic from 10s or 100s of thousands of unique keywords every month. Looking at rank for individual terms isn’t real common amongst these folks. They are (thankfully) more interested in top level figures like the SE traffic volume overall.

COMMANDMENT #12: Thou shall never focus on only one individual keyword.

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How do you set expectations about the number of links / quality of links you are going to be able to procure for your clients?
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Rhea
Clients that have prior experience with paid links, sponsored posts or article syndication often expect a large sum of links with exact match anchor text. In those cases we again have to be brutally honest about the fact that it is going to take more time for a natural link development strategy to gain competitive rankings, but they will have built a defensible brand. We tell them that they are going to see less links, but better quality and there isn’t the risk of being smacked with a penalty or worse. We don’t require six or twelve month contracts with our clients, but we explain from the start that for us to demonstrate return, they need to stick with us for six to nine months. Of course time depends on the industry, so highly competitive terms will take longer than less competitive longtails or smaller industries.

COMMANDMENT #13: Thou shall create a DEFENSIBLE brand that any human could review and approve of.

Lee
We’ll work with companies that are focused on outcomes from marketing. Links are measured, no doubt. But the emphasis is on moving the conversion needle. Some programs call for simple linking programs and others are more like media relations engagements. It depends on the nature of the program, industry and audience we’re trying to reach. All that said, goals are important and they must be set in order to achieve efficiency so past performance tempered with the level of competition in an industry become useful for link quantity/quality expectations management.

COMMANDMENT #14: Thou shall articulate that different goals require different effort. Start with goals THEN develop your linking plan.

Rand
My take on link quantities and quality is generally based on the types of queries the client is seeking to rank for and the competition in those search results. As you know, we do lots of work here at SEOmoz to build a web crawl and metrics about links that can be leveraged to make competitive SEO more of a scientific process.

When we look at a given set of search results or a site’s position amongst a field of competitors, we can look at a number of metrics around quantity of links and linking root domains, raw importance (metrics like PageRank or mozRank), quality of links (via proxies like mozTrust & Domain Authority) and anchor text distribution. This helps inform us of where the missing pieces lie and what we need to do to catch up (or stay ahead).

I did a WB Friday on this topic.

COMMANDMENT #15: Analyze competitors linking before setting expectations on your linking efforts.

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How do you handle the situation when a prospective client comes to you and has the budget, but they have few linkable assets, doesn’t have time to create content, weak PR, etc, etc?
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Lindsay
Don’t use poor content as an excuse to fail. If their content stinks, be sure to include content creation in the scope of work.

COMMANDMENT #16: Thou shall include content creation in the scope of work!

Rhea
To be honest, we probably wouldn’t take them on. We’re in the business of building high quality, natural links. We need something to work with to do that. If there’s absolutely nothing available to us and no room for improvement, we’re being setup for failure. You can’t tie our hands and expect aggressive results.

COMMANDMENT #17: Thou shall set expectations on what is possible based on what you have been given to work with.

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Oh and here’s a special part: a ton of questions you can ask clients before taking on projects:
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Rhea (wow, thanks Rhea, these are awesome):
Do you have a media plan? If yes, we’ll need to see it.
Do you have a newsletter? If yes, how do you determine topics? If you have a calendar, we’ll need to see it.
Do you have any videos (interviews, commercials, how-to’s, etc)?
Do you have photos or graphics? If yes, how are those created?
Do you have a blog or podcast?
Who currently writes content for the site/blog or runs the podcast?
Do they have an editorial calendar? If yes, we’ll need to see it.
Do you speak at conferences or other industry events?
Will you be exhibiting at any conferences or industry events?
Do you donate to non-profits/charities or are you a sponsor of an organization?
Have you run or do you have plans to run a contest or giveaway?
Have you sent out or do you plan to send out any press releases?
Who is your target demographic? What questions do they typically have about your company/products/service?
Do you have client testimonials or reviews?
How do you manage customer service online?
Do you manage any social profiles? If yes, what is your approach with those?

Garrett
I like starting with: “what’s working for you now?” …in terms of both link building and of larger markteting initiatives.

We spoke with a link building prospect recently with not much content on site. We asked how they generated prospects currently and they off-handedly mentioned their 10k+ email list that they’d been building over the past 10-15 years. They estimated that 10% or so of the list were active, industry-facing publishers (bloggers/site owners etc). We recommended they begin engaging the list, publishing conversations (with permission) and start leveraging the conversations for links.

We’ve found that it’s usually easier to build from what’s working already in some way than to generate something brand new. Another important aspect though is how well positioned in the company is your immediate contact… If they have networked well internally you will have better success, whereas if they’re new or not well trusted or respected yet you will have trouble getting to the appropriate resources.

Lastly, it’s vital to have a sense of what’s actually linkable in their market space. You can look at what assets have been proven to attract links on competitors’ sites, as well as industry-facing publishers’ sites.

Melanie
What unique value does your web site offer? What needs does it satisfy better than your competitors?

Are they part of any groups or associations? Are they acquainted with owners of any related businesses? Do they volunteer for or contribute to any charities? You’d be surprised at how many link opportunities most sites are already sitting on yet they simply don’t realize it.

A question I sometimes have my clients ponder: “Who are the specific group of site owners that directly benefit when they link to my site?”

Lee
If their resources are online, it’s pretty easy to find those. Otherwise, ask what public relations, advertising or interactive marketing they’re doing. Inventory digital assets and find out what the marketing plan is for the next 6-12 months. If a company isn’t doing any of those things, maybe they’re not a good fit for SEO.

Huge Thank yous again to:
Melanie Nathan – “Canadian SEO” | @melanienathan
Rhea Drysdale – outspoken media (I endorse for reputation management) | @rhea
Rand Fishkin – SEOmoz.org – Go check out their link analysis tools | @randfish
Garret French – Go read the link building book, I got a ton of good tips | @garrettfrench
Lee Odden – Toprankblog.com @leeodden
Lindsay Perkin Wassell – Keyphraseology.com | @lindzie
Scott Skurnick – Edmunds.com | @sskurnick

I feel horrible for them, but loved how they handled it. And stayed true to their “customer first” ways.

I encourage EVERYONE to read this then put on your manager/CEO hat. And when you read it you, and only you will TRULY know what your gut reaction is.

Your company just made a 1.6 million dollar mistake…you have a ton of different options, would you pick “take it on the chin?”.

When faced with EXTREME adversity, do you pick your customers first (as was done in this case) or do you pick the bottom line first (ahem Facebook). I for one hope (and believe) that their customers will stick with them b/c when “it” hit the fan Zappos stuck by them.

Agency types, consultants, workerbees, managers – take a good hard look at your company’s client retention numbers and ask yourself, when was the last time your company screwed something up and did 100% what was right, not some compromise, you just took it on the chin, said sorry and kept at it?

Zappos could have easily tried some “oops, we’re going to give you 50% off” or something like that. But they took the full BRUNT of the hit. That’s respectable.

People!!!! If your client retention numbers are in the crapper, you might want to think hard about why – maybe when it comes down to picking revenues or what’s right for your client you pick revenues. And when it comes their turn to refer a partner they pick someone who cares about them OVER YOU!? Leaving you wondering where your next gig is coming from. NEVER waver on doing what is right for your clients, sometimes losing money on a client project when you screwed up is how you build lifelong trust.

In business there will undoubtedly be major screw ups, luckily I have had a chance to share some of them with at this last SXSW in the Panel “We F*cked up” with Greg Hoy, Kevin Hoffman, and Grey Storey of happycog and Tracey Halvorsen of FastSpot.

Here’s my clip of the video on how I handle screw ups here at SEER form SXSW (I’m at 2 minutes 43 seconds in).

Here’s the presentation:

Anyway this video is a good one for affiliates to watch, but also for any SEO to watch as I discuss the types of queries that bring up universal search results, which often affiliates may have a hard time getting into (especially Google products). But I also talk about the types of queries that often have a lot less product feed distractions and still create opportunities. Take a look at the part where I discuss algorithmic results in product feeds for buying guides here’s an example for “ski boots“.

Well here’s the video, thanks for your support people!

All of us have been there, we dig in and start troubleshooting, looking backwards, checking for things like:
1 – Did the client undo something? No.
2 – Is there less search volume for the keyword? No.
3 – Is Google caching the wrong page? No.
4 – Did a bunch of competitors do something to boost their sites? No.
5 – Did the client site get hacked with some kind of PHP injection cloaking scheme? No.
6 – are we in some kind of bad link neighborhood and got penalized? No.

UNIVERSAL SEARCH MONSTER gobbling up rankings?

Then you realize sometimes it is the UNIVERSAL SEARCH MONSTER gobbling up your rankings and leaving your #5, #8 or #10 ranking as a lifeless, useless, shadow of its former self.

The issue with universal search is that Google is changing it up all the time, for instance here is an SEO roundtable post on Google removing local results for SEO queries for the last 18 month or so that wasn’t the case.

Suddenly our same ranking for local queries has more value. the local results were gone.

Once Google incorporated local search results for words like “Philadelphia SEO company”, it immediately devalued our top ranking for that term because the 5 local results were above us (even though one of them was a Korean Man, 4 of the results were companies doing SEO). Depending on the day we’d be up there sometimes in the local and sometimes not.

The question you should be thinking, is how can I know when universal search changes are made and how do I determine the impact that that those changes had on rankings, clicks, and conversions?

You can use Raven or any SERP tracker that captures a copy of the Google/Yahoo/Bing results page to triangulate the data points and take a good educated guess. Here’s how.

STEP 1
Set up your analytics tool to alert you anytime conversions from a keyword drop by more than 25% over a 1 month period, this is quite easy with Google Analytics Intelligence (Beta)

I would recommend using no more than 20 or so keywords, at least in the beginning. You want to select only some of your top traffic driving keywords or you’ll end up with too many alerts sometimes for a word that drove 4 conversions last month and drove 3 this month – which if you have a site that has hundreds or thousands of conversions per month you’ll flood your own inbox. Rendering this kind of intelligence useless.

Note: use your own % decrease I just like 25% as a starter, in the same way 20 might not be the ideal number of keywords, but they are good places to start.

STEP 2
Once the alert catches a keyword that is not performing as well as it once did (in terms of driving traffic) do your regular checks as mentioned above, for changes the client didn’t tell you about, decreases in search volume, hacks, etc. If none of them are the culprit then move on to step 3.

STEP 3
You got a keyword that fits the criteria no one; this is where your SERP tracker that captures images of the actual results page becomes a critical feature in your reverse engineering of what happened. I would start looking back historically at the previous SERPS. This hopefully will illustrate if universal search has become more prevalent over time, which could cause your same ranking to not drive the traffic and sales it once did, even though the ranking is the same. This is precisely why analyzing rankings is sooo 2002. The ranking NEVER moves, the impact that ranking had just fell through the floor.

If you are only analyzing rankings you’ll never catch this.

One very important thing to keep in mind in this analysis is to use top converting keywords, not top traffic driving keywords. Why? Simple, take the word motorcycle, which is a HUGE universal search result.

If you had the #5 result a year ago you are probably on page 2 now, which will hurt traffic tremendously.

Should you go out and create a ton of new content, shoot videos, develop link bait strategies, etc to get back on page 1 for the word motorcycle? Probably not, if that keyword didn’t convert well for you. That is the big IF.

So be smart with it, don’t go out wasting your time, but when universal starts impacting rankings, traffic, and conversions you’ll need to get crackin’ and hopefully I’ve just given you some ways to battle the universal search monster.

I’ll be speaking at SES NYC, SXSW on major client screw ups, and Pubcon South all in the next few months, come say hello!

As I set down over lunch with the guys and girl above, I started thinking about what I could share, given that my last post on hiring difficulties was well received I figured I’d write something that combines both. It begins with story of one of our biggest clients, who I at one time turned away…

I turned this client away the first time they came to us, I had met with the owner over breakfast. He found us through a search and had done a ton of research on what to ask a potential SEO firm. During our breakfast it became obvious that his expectations for how search worked and what it could contribute to his bottom line were off from how I understood them. So at the end of our conversation, I told him that we wouldn’t be able to work on these projects because I didn’t honestly feel like I could set realistic expectations. BOY WAS THAT ALMOST a MISTAKE – 2-3 people would not have jobs at SEER if he walked, but instead he didn’t…

He called me the next day and said…”you were the only guy who wouldn’t promise me they could give what I wanted, and instead took time to educate me on what to expect, you tell me what I can expect.” As a result, he asked me to come in and set his teams expectation on what search can do, which I did, and sure enough over the course of our 3 year relationship, its been fruitful for both sides, and this company is one of my favorites to look back at how we were able to help – the relationship has grown over the years, and we have had a very honest and smooth working relationship, they challenge us, we challenge them but all for the sake of growing their bottom line. So with that story behind us, lets get started on how to not take on jobs DOOMED for failure from the beginning – and if you do fail how to handle it.

Avoid jobs with unrealistic revenue expectations

Search marketing, social media marketing, conversion optimization, whatever it is that you do, you MUST avoid clients with unrealistic expectations, none of your businesses create miracles. You must also admit to yourself that you don’t walk on water, and there’s always a chance for failure.

It is part of your job to do the math with your prospective clients to at least give you and them an idea on what a goal you should both be shooting for.
In every initial new business conversation, ask the person on the other end of the line for their average sale value and a rough idea on margins. Starting the conversation there allows you to easily do some mental math while determining if the expectations are realistic.
Focus on how your client makes money – look at the searching universe if things don’t match up don’t take on the project, because even if you kill it in SEO they’re probably going to have a negative ROI and a negative sentiment about your company.

Want to avoid a major screw up later down the road?? Don’t fear letting a prospective client know that the numbers don’t add up, and as such they should seek another company.

Sometimes clients will say “don’t worry about our profitability, we’ll handle that, you bring the traffic we will worry about how to convert it.” We’ve had clients say that, and that is 100% fine with us – if they end up upside down on ROI later in the project we know we tried to help them avoid that reality in the first place.

Agree on success metrics before contracts are signed

We had a client for whom we increased their traffic 3x (yes they were already getting thousands of visitors) yet in spite of that they weren’t entirely sure we weren’t doing all we could to grow their business. I KNEW we were.

This was my fault, I should have done a better job up front of making sure we both were in agreement on what exactly success was. For me success was returning a positive ROI, for them, it was a positive ROI but more important was how many links did we build last week/month.

We ultimately had to let them go because the way they looked at success was obviously different than how we did. I am not saying they were wrong, but just not the right fit for us.

Assuming your upfront due diligence is done and you agree on what success is, and for some reason you just can’t get a great ROI at 6 or 9 months in, the first step is to admit to the client that you see that they have an upside down on ROI. Get the elephant in the room on the table immediately. At the very least you’ll earn their trust that even in the face of bad news you have the cojones to admit it. See below for some ideas on how to address failure with clients. By getting this issue on the table you give even the nicest clients the ability to now talk openly about the obvious failure. This doesn’t make them feel bad for bringing the obvious points up. When your results aren’t good you should never have to wait for the client to say something first, NEVER.

Don’t show your best hand

Why do you think might not be the best idea to lead in with your best case studies?
Prospective clients who ask for a case study may see an example for a site out there you were able to increase traffic by 10x and conversions by 8x and added $500k in gross sales.

Some people when they see those kinds of results think its typical and not an exception, so when you finish the project with a traffic increase of 80% and conversion increase by 55% with $180k in additional gross sales, that might feel like a disappointment to them.
If this happens, it is your fault.

You got the biz by showing your client your best case scenario of all time, setting their expectation that these results are not always typical is one way you can address this. Personally I’d prefer to show a prospective client the best, middle, worst case scenarios giving them a more balanced view of how SEO can work for them and outline why (if possible) those results happened.

Remove “magic server pixie dust” thinking in SEO

Remember this commercial from IBM? It’s time for clients to wise up to the fact that crappy links typically ain’t gonna get you that leg up on your competitors, we should be the people pushing that message. This means in the sales process you should be educating your client that you are going to need them, A LOT to be successful in building high quality links.
You are going to need budgets, access to project managers, give-a-ways, etc.

No project sucks more than the one where the client just thought they’d pay you, you’d sprinkle some dust and then they’d wake up with money coming out the whazoo.
Ok, so now that you’ve done all the work to set the clients expectations, congratulations. The real sad question is what happens when you do all the hard work spending night and day optimizing, link building, and the results never come?

Typically there are a few reasons why ROI can be in the pits – here’s the three most typical scenarios and how we deal with them at SEER.

If the ROI sucks because the client is slow

Solution – cut their monthly payments up to half (unless you bill hourly) – most clients know when they are the cause for the slowdown in results. But if their slow down is preventing you from doing a large part of what you need to do to help them be successful, it’s a good idea to cut their monthly payments, especially since you have less work to do and parts of your project are in a holding pattern. It may not be half, but you should show some kind of sign that says I am not comfortable billing you for work I am probably not doing.

If you don’t take this approach, you’ll likely keep billing them and they may keep paying, UNTIL someone asks “what we are getting for this”, which is not a good conversation to have once you’ve been put in defensive mode. Taking an “F you pay me” approach to a slow client is a guaranteed way to get the boot.

If the ROI sucks because you are unable to get rankings

This happens, SEO’s hate to admit it, but good ones aren’t and we’re no exception, yes at times SEER has not gotten the results I hoped for in the timeframe I hoped and sometimes it was not the clients fault. We may have just needed more time than expected at the onset of the project.

I strongly believe in the Vince Lombardi quote that goes something like this:

“We didn’t lose, we just ran out of time”

That’s my mantra. Personally I feel like I rarely lose because I’ll never give up, that does require patience on the part of your client. Again if you’ve done a great job of setting expectations up front and being honest, you’ll have explained to them that results come at different stages, so they should be expecting that late results is always a risk you take with SEO.

Any SEO that says they bat 1.000 and have never had a job that at times looked like a failure is probably not challenging themselves with difficult projects or they are just not being honest.

This has happened to me maybe 10 times in my SEO career. In every instance I proactively called the client, and said just this:

“When we sat down at the table and shook hands, you knew that I couldn’t guarantee rankings or results, yet you trusted us in the goal of helping you grow your traffic and leads through search. While we have some small victories to point to we are not at the level that both you and I expected. As a result we are going to halt your payments for 2-4 months (depending on how far away we are) while we are still working 100% full steam ahead on your project. Assuming we get the rankings (and I believe we will) we can make up the payments on the end when you can see a tangible impact.”

Clients are shocked when I make these calls, but it is just the right thing to do. That is how I’d want to be treated, and you would too.

If the ROI sucks due to less search volume / tighter margins

This is one of those things you as an SEO can’t do a whole lot about, but to maybe stretch out your payments for a month or two as a sign of client solidarity, letting your client know that you know they are getting the squeeze and that you are in this with them as a long term partner.

Good clients don’t abuse this, so make it your job to find the GOOD clients. GOOD clients also know that there is nothing you, as an SEO can do if less people search for their target keywords or if they have to cut prices, thus throwing off your ROI projections.

If the project sucks because there’s communication problems

So this is again your fault, unless you can point back to documented instances of you setting a clients expectation over and over again. Every time I’ve seen a major communications “F Up” at SEER I took responsibility for it, and our team does too. As such we are constantly working on process improvement, with the idea being that every time a client has an expectation we didn’t fulfill that its either our fault for not communicating or its MY FAULT for bringing in a client who I didn’t work on setting expectations with properly. Once we own the problem we own the solution – and that’s what we do, look back at the communication failure and figure out how can our processes be improved. If the process can not be improved then we know that we need to chat with the client about why they were wrong, if the process can be improved we let the client know that they have exposed an area of weakness in how we manage projects / communicate and let them know when they can expect to see an improvement.

SEO is an unpredictable business, we all know that, and I think that even clients (the good ones at least) are starting to realize that too. Good clients are not breaking backs in 2 months asking where’s my top ranking anymore.

Maybe I took the long way to just saying, just follow the rule you learned in the sandbox at age 5, treat others the way you want to be treated, and when tough business decisions arise – you’ll always make the right decision.

Admittedly most of this post revolves around ROI & Communication but there are several things I didn’t have time to go into like retention, having a great team, firing bad clients, etc that also help lead to SEO success.

I hope these tips help you avoid SEO failure from the get go, and for more on how to avoid colossal F Up’s – come see our session at SXSW.

I guess I have a bit of a unique perspective in the search space given that in the last 6 years I have hired over 30 search professionals/interns, do the math a lot of people don’t work out, but we try really hard to build a unique company that attracts the best talent. We’ve gone from me starting this out of my 3rd floor apartment to a company that is doing well, with a bright future ahead, but I like sharing the bumps, the turbulence, with others who are growing their companies as a way of helping.

I think having gone through those trenches has given me some insights worthy of sharing, as all of us struggle to find better and better people. Personally I don’t think there’s a shortage of search professionals out there, there’s a shortage of people who strive for greatness everyday in general, and that desire is so critical in search especially.

As someone constantly hiring search professionals, I hope sharing my learning’s illustrated in this post will help you in your journey of finding the right people.

Hiring Mistake #1 – Being too positive is a negative in the hiring process
I am one of those people that tend to believe in people a little too much. This is a very bad trait in the hiring process. Overly positive people will sometimes bestow on people values that they really don’t exhibit. When it comes to interviewing my advice is:

be hard
be tough
be honest

Believing in people too much in life is good, in hiring it is bad and can easily cause you to hire wrong – which you should blame yourself for.

Being brutally honest is key, in that way when your new hires come in, they don’t have an expectation that you / your company is something you are not.

How I am working on this issue
I am far from having solved this issue, considering the last two people who accepted offers flaked out right before they started (Thank God b/c our two newest people would smoke them, but still it set us back).

#1 Fire quick
We tell interviewees about our level of intensity for performance in search, or the required attention to detail (since I have none) and we let them know that people without those traits never last more than 3-4 months here. So for their benefit let them know your deal breakers. Always remind interviewees that if they leave their current job thinking they do have those critical qualities and get to your company and show that they don’t have those qualities that they are out of a job. It’ll make them think twice about leaving their current situation, which is a good thing.

#2 Get scientific
Less gut, more data is my saying. We apply ROI and KPIs SEO, why not bring data into the hiring decisions? I was lucky to have taken a DISC profile about 5 years ago and it pretty much nailed me exactly. I then had our people who were already hired take the DISC profile. Lo and behold the vast majority fit a certain similar set of traits.

Having now looked at 15 or more DISC profiles over 5 years, not everyone fits the same criteria, but the people who have consistently worked out as superstars all into the same top left quadrant. Would I not hire someone because of this? NEVER, but if I have 3 great applicants and I am looking for another factor to differentiate, you better believe I’ll use it. Its interesting that when I have offered someone a job that didn’t fit the profile they almost never work out, maybe I should put a little more stock.

Again, for our business it has been amazing to see how many of the people who have worked out well, and were profiled long after they were hired, fit a similar criteria. There’s a ton of variability within the quadrants from person to person, but for someone who is admittedly weak at seeing people for who they really are in interviews, it’s nice to have a bit of a scientific approach to back up the gut or SEO tests we give people.

Another great by-product is seeing how people take criticism. Inevitably, the results of a disc profile (here’s mine) won’t be all roses, and some people are adamant that its got them wrong, in my experience, every single person who had major hangups with the results of the profile, did not work out here. I LOVE people who can look themselves in the mirror and say yeah, that is something I struggle with. I’m not saying the DISC is 100% accurate, just sharing my experience.

Hiring Mistake #2 – Don’t send a boys to do a man’s job (or a girl to do a woman’s job)

Sometimes it’s just wrong to hire someone at the wrong point of their career. At times you need experience and if you hire someone that’s too green there’s a potential they will never be able to fill what you need. Which again is not their fault, it is yours.

I made this mistake once, hiring someone that was actually great even though we had to let them go. The job that we needed at the time was well beyond their skill set, it was way too early in their career to manage the tasks we required of them. Now that we have more defined roles, this person would be welcomed back in a heartbeat, just in a role that fit their skill set.

How do I deal with this issue? I don’t really, and here’s why. Luckily, if you take great care of your team, give them great projects, and great clients, you will have low turnover at the top. As that happens you’ll find that you won’t need people to fill top roles, because they are very rarely (if ever) open. As your top folks move on, you’ll find that you have some superstars below them ready to pick up the slack and show you what they can do.

Hiring Mistake #3 – Experience means less than you’d think

If you are in a constantly changing industry, that is a moving target, don’t overweight experience in your hiring decisions. The fact that your industry is a moving target is a blessing, this allows you to not require people with tons of experience and instead allows you to bring on people who are HUNGRY and green who are often going to blow right by the EXPERIENCED folks.

In my industry (Search Marketing) the day to day of search is done differently by so many different companies that if you truly feel your company is at the top of its game, you’d be amazed at how many people coming in with 3-4 years experience in your industry end up being outpaced by some of your entry level people. It has happened to me, I’ve seen a HUNGRY intern beat the pants off of a 4 year SEO vet, cause they had more hustle.

Many of the new jobs of today (like search) is about tenacity, NOT tenure.

I can teach someone the same things a 3-4 year search vet (at a slow moving company) knows in 6-8 months. What I can’t teach them the tenacity, attention to detail, the desire to push harder and harder for each client, each day.

I’ll take those traits over experience any day, and you should consider that too. There are a LOT of 3-4 year SEO’s who are working in companies that don’t push them.

These are the types of companies that are thrilled with 25% increases in search traffic year over year.

So be careful with “experience”, instead go for “expertise” and in SEO they are not synonymous. Take people like: Gab Goldenberg, Garrett French, Melanie Nathan, and Rhea Drysdale – sure on paper I might have 2,3 or 4 times the years of experience, but that means NOTHING! Don’t fall to the experience trap. Here’s how I have tried to avoid it:

1 – By taking great care of me existing team. (Yes, this will become a recurring theme).
Find ways to make your company retain the best people who come in your doors. They are more likely to stay around. The longer they stay around, the less likely you are going to NEED to bring someone in with 3-4 years experience because you won’t have ridiculous voluntary turnover with your best people.

The result of this in our company is that we are always hiring entry level people (who don’t need all the SEO experience in the world) as such we get to train them in “our way” and bring them up in our way from the beginning and avoid the 3-5 years of ego experience that someone else might bring.

2 – Hire more than 1 person for a job. Ok now this is risky and requires three things:

1 – strong cash flow
2 – comfort firing fast
3 – very strong pipeline (in other words you turn down a LOT of good opportunities regularly).

I’ll tell you when you are hiring people 1-2 years out of school or interns it is a lot easier to hire two people at once for one job. In this way you can test both of them out live in your company, with the assumption that one won’t work out in 6 months.

Remember, no amount of interviewing is ever going to replace actually seeing that person working in your company.

The approach above is better than hiring one person, finding out they weren’t great, and then to also find out that your #2 candidate is now at another company and unavailable.

In the rare instance that both people turn out to be ballers, then you’ve hit the jackpot. You have two A level players, and all you need to do is go find projects to keep them busy…if your company is truly good at what they do, you should be able to pick up enough projects to keep them both busy. We recently did this with interns, we hired 3, and kept 1. The one we kept is a MONSTER! Well worth the effort. Remember the key is hiring them all around the same time, so you are only training once really, which you would have to do if you hired 1, 3, or 5 people.

Disclosure – As I was writing this I started to think of the fairness of this approach. It requires YOU to be really honest with people during the interview process. That is how you can stay on the right side of this ethically, let them know!

For interns or very entry level people, start them as contractors with definite end dates, that is always fair because they know there’s a definite end. It would be extremely unethical to hire two people for a job, and have them both quit their current jobs when you know darn well you can only hire one, and that you don’t have a sales pipeline or the cash flow to keep them both.

Hiring Mistake #4 – Going for passion – fizzling firecrackers
Today with social media and everything else out there people can come to your company with all the misguided passion in the world. They will talk about wanting to set the world on fire they use words like “Crush it” “Kill it” “Passion” they use of buzzwords that we hear from some of our favorite social media personalities and we fall in love with them the same way we love our social media rock stars, like Gary Vaynerchuk. These people fizzle out like a cheap firecracker (to paraphrase Mike “the situation” from Jersey Shore). You must avoid these people, its hard to resist them because they sound right on the surface; they always say the right things. As you interview them you can easily become mesmerized, you’ll start thinking…”YES! They get it.” But be careful.

Here’s how I avoid them:
DIG DEEP – these people are like snake charmers! Don’t accept surface answers in their interviews. Most of these people have their hands in so many things that they’ve never concentrated on one thing, focused on it, and truly “crushed it”.

“And what else” is a critical question to ask in their interviews, you have to probe deep to see if they really are a rock star with real passion or someone who has passion for something for 6 months then ends up with a new passion, leaving you with a fizzled firecracker.

Watch them on Twitter, most of them are talkin’ loud and ain’t saying nothin’! Don’t take their number of followers or any metric like that as an indication. Here’s an analysis I did on some people in my post on social media strategists who are more like chatty Cathy dolls than strategists.

Using tools to analyze them like Klout which will help you see if these people are influentials who are really up to something, or just a fizzled firecracker.

Wanting to “crush it” and “crushing it” are two VERY different things. Remember that.

Hiring mistake #5 – The personality types to keep and train and the ones to fire immediately.

Personality Type A – Swamped Sally – this is the person who whether they have 1 project or 10 projects will always work 60 hours per week. These are the people who get value from telling their friends that they are always so busy at work instead of seeking ways to be more efficient they love being able to say they are swamped whether they truly are or not. In the past I have let people like this go, but have learned (the hard way) that these folks are often very good and just need some help. Here’s what I typically do.

Make it a priority of yours to sit down with them regularly and do a little prioritization of their tasks, so expect to spend more time getting them from point A to point B – it is worth it!

The investment is worth it because you’ll lower their stress level (which should help you retain them) and you’ll also be able to train them over time to self-prioritize as they see how you prioritize their lists. Remember hiring is as much about getting things done, as it is helping people grow as individuals and porfessionals.

Don’t expect these people to be your process improvement folks, truly great leaders when they get swamped start seeking out ways to improve processes to give them time back. So following rule #2, don’t hire these people and expect something of them that is just not how they are wired.

Personality Type B – Mr. ambiguous – I think most of us are involved in search because is a very provable medium. Every day, when you wake up, you look at numbers you know when you lost and have go back to the drawing board and improve. You also know when you’ve won. Have you ever heard an athlete say, maybe we won? NO! The score is the score. Great search professionals embrace this instead of running from it.

We search professionals hate ambiguity. The game is going to be won or lost and we are all okay admitting success and failure.

How I avoid these people

1 – At the resume level these people can sometimes be found out. Their resumes typically doesn’t include numbers, facts, and cold hard statistics. These are probably not people who get a rush out of knowing that they increased some metric by 200% or decreased a cost metric by 25%. Their resumes should give you an indication.

2 – During the interview, ask questions about the impact of the things they highlighted on their resume. If someone says they increased productivity / streamlined processes I want to know how much. I want to know the impact, and to be brutally honest, if I need competitive, never die, type of person, they will seek out ways to measure themselves as the basis for their impact on their companies / clients.

Again keep in mind the ideal folks PROACTIVELY let you know their impact, you shouldn’t have to drag I out of them / inquire a ton.

Personality Type C – The Design Junkies – You can sniff these people out in interviews, they are NOT direct marketers. They are design people at heart trying to force themselves into a search job, don’t hire them or if you want to test them out, test them out as an intern / contractor only.

Real search people, when we see a web site or paid search ad we think in terms of:
Page load times
Conversions
Path to conversions
Title tags
Keywords
Linkable Assets
Keyword – Ad – landing page symbiosis
Competitors buying their brand name
Bounce Rates

They will look at the same site or ad and think:
Colors
Brand messaging
Ideas
Icons
Time on site

There are some people who I say you should hire and work with them on their traits, this is NOT one of them. I know that I want to hire people who think links, rankings, traffic, bounce rates, and conversions every time they see a site. They hate ambiguity.

I want them to see the title tag and pagerank before they see color, design, or layout. That is NOT something you can train.

Personality Type D – The overly competitive

As with so many traits having that trait is great, having too much of it is a hindrance. Competition is one of these. The overly competitive interviewees will love numbers, they will have that “go hard or go home” attitude, and all the other traits I love. However those traits can at times can take over and cause people to compete with their own co-workers or be over confident with clients. As such I can typically sniff these folks out with one question.

That question is… If you could volunteer somewhere, where you volunteer?

The best people don’t hesitate, they know exactly where they would, because they have spent time thinking about others. Thinking about if they had the time what they would do to make this world a better place, not just their wallets fatter. To me this is the best catch of them all, someone who is wicked competitive when the time calls for it, and able to dial that down at times to think about others. That is why I love the fact that SEER requires everyone to pick a charity that they would like to work with, and we’ll give them all the time (during work hours or not) and money we can to help them help the world – check out where we spend our time.

Ultimately it gets better trust me, as you build AND RETAIN your best people, you won’t be hiring as often, but you must NEVER allow your clients to work with sub par people, and allow those sub par people to represent your brand. When you make a hiring mistake, admit it, let that person go and look in the mirror and try to figure out what you missed, so you can go back and refine the process again.

Using iGoogle to alert you automatically when new words are getting “hot”

Researching how a top ranking keyword can not drive real business results & what to do about that.

Using Google Insights for B2B marketers

How search trends can change over time, and how to find them

Check out my other in depth keyword research post using Google insights, with screen captures?

#1 Google Analytics API

Google Analytics team & Avinash to you I say THANK YOU! A few things we’ve been able to do this year using the Google Analytics API include:

Pulling referring sites automatically from client profiles, allowing us to work on optimizing anchor text for linking sites that are already linking to our target sites but with suboptimal anchor text.

This is valuable to us because as SEO’s we know darn well that seeking out referring sites to ensure we’re are getting maximum bang for our buck is critical, but checking all referring sites every day (or even every week) is a time consuming task that often doesn’t yield dividends worth the time invested, the API has made it worthwhile.

Using the API we are able to pull the referrers, score them (with other api’s like SEOMOZ’s MozRank), and then based on the scoring only spend our time evaluating the highest quality referrers. No more going to a referring site, to check its PR, Delicious Tags, Domain Age, etc. This saves us a lot of time, and helps us spend more time on strategy for our clients.

The other area where the Google Analytics API has helped is with my obsession about checking 3 client metrics from search every day:

Unbranded Traffic
Conversions
Bounce rates
And for e-commerce clients – (Revenue / Google Base Traffic / Conversions)

We use the GA API to pull this information and put it in one dashboard. This keeps me from having to go into Google Analytics, click on up to 30 different client profiles, and dig into the report to find how our clients have done the previous day (or open 30 e-mails every day with this information). I think this saves me about 15 minutes a day, which over the course of a year is almost 100 hours saved. This time savings allows me to work on link building strategies.

Thank you Google Analytics and the Google Analytics API team. Looking forward to having our team play around with the new gifts you’ve provided.

Oh one more thing, much love to the more mature but very useful Google Adwords API our work on automatically pulling top converters in PPC that are not ranking well in natural search will help us discover new converting keywords automatically, thus allowing us to spend our time developing strategies for clients to take advantage of these opportunities. Shout out to you guys as well, thank you!

#2 Googles never ending innovation

Google, while so many people complain about you guys, whether its personalized search, social search, sidewiki or your new innovations in older data sources:

Google Local – The attempt at buying Yelp, tells us all we need to know…Google must realize that there’s a ton more potential in local search and that they are not dominant there, thank God for people like David Mihm who keep us on top of it all. This is yet another area for SEO’s to research, learn, and help our clients gain traffic and sales.

Google Shopping Results – Google’s heavy inclusion of product feeds in the top results for queries from snowboarding goggles all the way to POS software is an exciting and new thing that so many of us need to keep our eyes on to help our clients get maximum exposure anyone can submit a feed, but the small changes in a feed can help you get so much more traffic and sales.

Google / Youtube Video Integration into SERPS – While this is nothing new, NO ONE that I know of has a strong handle on how to promote video in the top 10 organic consistently. People are producing video with blinders on as to how to get that video to rank well in the top 10 on natural search. This is another area where SEO’s need to test, learn, and optimize, your best bet to stay on top of video search is hands down reelseo.com.

Google Adwords w/ Product Listings – how does this pretty new feature impact CTRs on PPC ads, does not having images when many others do have a negative or positive impact on conversions? Is having a pretty picture in the PPC ad enticing more clicks? Probably, but is it enticing so many more that it is hurting your overall profitability? Is it a good thing or bad thing (for advertisers), who knows but we do know that this recent innovation is going to cause a LOT of people to spend time optimizing their feeds and understanding the impact of feeds on bottom line results in paid search channels.

Google Real time search – Personally I think real time search won’t be all that big in its current form, but who knows. Regardless, it is something SEO’s should evaluate for their clients to understand how (if at all) real time search is impacting their clients CTRs, rankings, etc.

Here’s why I am saying thank you Google. Your consistent innovation helps keep me and my team employed. Your consistent innovation on what shows up on the first page of results requires even more focus and dedication to understanding how search works. Just when people thought following basic best practices were enough you guys continue to innovate which helps not only keep us, but a lot of other people employed.

#3 There’s an App for that – My blogging to increase 2x

What many of you won’t know is that about 50% of this post was done via voice transcriptions with the Dragon Speaking App which is FREE – I started playing with it a few weeks ago. This handy little tool is going to help me do more than just use Jott to transcribe a quick 30 second idea, I am able to use this app to get 200-500 (or more) words out. This is great because it lets me get more of my thoughts down than just sound bytes, which Jott was good at, but by the time I got down to expanding on my thoughts it was often not flowing so well.

Tip for this app: Don’t go too long without reading the output of your brainstorms b/c there will be errors in the transcription and you’ll have a hard time reminding yourself of what you meant if you wait too long.

Looking for other great apps, here are two lists.

#4 Bing – we needed you!

Monopolies are bad and while I am thankful for all Google has done, in the eyes of many folks they are getting a little too powerful. Last month I switched to Bing as my default search engine just to get more immersed in how you compare. So far, so good. Keep at it. With you creeping up in market share, no one can afford to ignore you guys anymore. Your 10% market share is great news for search professionals everywhere, and for users. Now I wish I didn’t have to switch to Google to find that article above using date based search, which you don’t seem to have in your advanced search.

Keep at it though guys!

#5 Linkscape / Majestic SEO battle for link analysis.

I must say thanks to Rand Fishkin & Dixon Jones – thanks for giving us more scientific ways to look at link patterns, it has helped the us tremendously, by allowing us to focus our efforts more on certain aspects of link building for certain clients – I am really looking forward to you guys duking it out!

But I must say lately the use of pivot tables, and extracting your data and seeking trends is starting to look big, a lot of SEO’s are barely scratching the surface of both of your tools. A recent 10 hour dive into your data for a competitive space showed me a lot about uncovering areas of strength for the top 10 in a competitive niche.

Shout out to Will Critchlow, once we saw how you guys were using Excel it gave us a ton of ideas, thanks for sharing this insightful post on using excel for SEO, its a great read.

Ok that is enough thank you’s, happy 2010 everyone.