For me the search work has rarely been the hard part of this job. The hard part is the conversation around it: managing what a client expects to happen and by when, in a channel where the rules are set by a company none of us can ring up.
I want to keep this general, partly because every account is different and partly because the specifics of how any agency runs its accounts are its own business. But the broad problem is common to everyone in the industry, so it is fair game to talk about.
Most SEO relationships that turn sour were mis-set at the very beginning, before anyone did a stroke of actual work. A prospect comes in having read that SEO is “free traffic” and expecting the phone to ring within the month. If nobody corrects that picture early, you have signed up to a promise you cannot keep, and no amount of good work later will feel like enough.
The realistic starting position, in my view, is that search is slow, uncertain and only partly in anyone’s hands. You can do everything right and still wait months for it to show. You can also wake up to an algorithm update that reshuffles the results overnight through no fault of yours or the client’s. Saying that plainly at the outset feels like it might cost you the deal. My experience is the opposite: the clients who value you most are usually the ones you were straight with when it would have been easier to oversell.
A few principles I try to hold to:
- Talk in ranges and probabilities, never guarantees. Anyone guaranteeing a number one ranking is either naive or not being straight, and both are bad looks.
- Report on things you actually influence. Rankings bounce around for reasons outside your control. The work done, the technical issues fixed, the content shipped, the links earned; those are fair measures of effort even in a month where the rankings did not move.
- Explain the updates before they explain themselves. When something like an algorithm change hits, get in first with a clear note on what it is and what it means for them. Silence in that moment reads as either not knowing or not caring.
- Say no to the bad ideas. Clients sometimes ask for the very tactics that will get them in trouble. Declining, and explaining why, protects them and you.
The uncomfortable truth underneath all of this is that you are managing a relationship at least as much as a campaign, and relationships need more looking after than rankings do.
I do not think there is a neat trick to any of it. Set the picture plainly at the start, keep talking when the news is bad rather than only when it is good, and accept that some clients will still want promises you should not make. Those are usually the ones to let walk.
