Regards
Grace

A full service approach is certainly desirable – not least because, just like with doctors and electricians, there are a surprising amount of people who seem able to convince themselves they know better than the expert they are paying to perform a service for them. Taking the decision out of their hands means you don’t have to fight them every step of the way.

However, this model isn’t appropriate or desirable for every business. Consultancy advice generally needs to be there to take, leave or adapt as required. Just like a doctor might tell someone it’s advisable to have the surgery etc. There could be a very good chance they’ll die without it, but once the expert recommendation has been made, the final decision is theirs.

Unless you assume control, all you can really do is give someone the full picture and the likely outcomes of any action or inaction.

On the other hand; I hope these consultants are telling the client upfront and before they take the money, that it’s mandatory they implement the advice you give them. If they can’t agree to that, walk away.

I guess I come at things from a SEO and designer point of view. There is rarely a client who doesn’t need more than a simple phone consultation. I like the hands-on approach much better as that way you are not tied to what the client says you can do or cannot do. We make all changes ourselves and don’t take any no’s from a client. I drop them like a hot potato if they don’t take my advice… all of it. After all; the site came to you for help, and not the other way around. I’ve never tried to tell my Doc what they could do or not do, nor my plumber or electrician. They are the experts, not me. The SEO industry should not be any different than that. Too many in this industry seem to pansy out to a client when they should actually be more tough. Because of all the bogus information out there, it’s important to be tough with owners coming to you for help…….. and not lay down like a puppy or wimp.

Putting aside the insinuation that every SEO apart from yourself is money-grabbing and immoral, of course you need to exercise judgement when deciding whether or not to take a new client on.

If a firm took the money in the situation outlined, not only would the client be left out of pocket, the reputation of the SEO would also take a hit.

However, it’s hardly ever that ‘cut and dry’ as I’m sure you would appreciate. After all, future conversion rates can’t be accurately measured by the visual appearance of a website.

Client ROI is the paramount concern and it’s the duty of an SEO to give their clients advice which they believe will garner them maximum return on investment. However, this isn’t to say that the SEO company has suddenly assumed full responsibility for every aspect of a company’s online business.

Dave

“but if the client’s website is a dog and they refuse to do anything about it then conversions will still be pitiful. This is hardly the fault of the SEO consultant.”

Who’s fault is it then? The client hires some firm to help them. They really have no idea what they want, but one thing is for sure… they want MORE SALES. Isn’t it the job of that firm to find a way to get them more sales? If not, why not?

If you are a SEO firm and review a site that you know is crappy stuff; would you go ahead and take their money for SEO knowing that the site will not sell anything if on page one for many terms? Would you? Do you?

I think this is one of the most problem areas the industry has. SEO firms in general do not want to take responsibility for failure if it doesn’t directly involve a rank of some kind. If not the firm’s fault for taking the money from a not as knowledgeable person, who’s fault is it then? Come on now.

If you are a firm selling services that supposedly help site owners, it sure is your responsibility for that site’s sales, or whatever it is the site wants visitors to do. YEP; it sure is. If the site badly needs to be rebuilt, then find a damn programmer/designer who can do it for you! Don’t just take the damn money knowing ahead of time the site is doomed to failure. Sheesh.

I think the reason ranking reports are so popular is because clients are generally looking for a deliverable – something concrete to measure the success of an SEO campaign.

Keyword rankings certainly aren’t a concrete measure of success, but they’re perhaps easier to define and lay down as a yardstick than some others. For example, you might do a great job with the SEO and drive a lot of high quality traffic, but if the client’s website is a dog and they refuse to do anything about it then conversions will still be pitiful. This is hardly the fault of the SEO consultant.

Ultimately, ROI is the only meaningul metric but it doesn’t necessarily correlate directly to the success of the SEO campaign.

Oh, yes, I can understand why you are on this! A clever marketer can not miss such an opportunity to speak about RankSense

I am ready to hear you all laughing at me, but I use a SEO software (will not name it, I do not mean to defend or promote something). It works and helps me.

Nothing is blocked.

@Sean I agree. The quality (and quantity) of the search traffic is in fact the most important factor. I personally think it is wise to improving conversions. I am not sure I would consider conversion optimization as a subset of SEO, though.

@Addyon I have customers that rank for more than 10,000 keywords and they only receive five thousand unique visitors a day. I don’t think the traditional approach of pooling search engines can scale very easily in this case. If you study your log files you don’t need to guess whether you are ranking for some keywords or not. If somebody came to your site using x term, then you are/were ranking for that term for that particular user. I like your analogy, though

@Joe thanks a lot for the validation. Can I use your comment in my sales collateral?

@christian RS does not scrap Google for keyword research data, we pay for API access and we already have human emulation for the few things that need scrapping (like checking whether your pages are indexed or not).

@Doug I’m really glad to read your comment because I know you are strongly opposed to automated SEO tools.

I agree, the more quality search phrases the better. I think we are all on the same page that what really matters is the bottom line. Delivering the results that will benefit the customer.

Thanks everyone for your comments

There are many more cons from auto rank reports than there are pros. Pros vs. cons goes to the upside when you use all else at your disposal, and the client actually learns something as well.

Nice writeup.

I would equate checking that many rankings to buying all of the coins you can in the mint to hope that one of the coins is valuable enough in years to come to pay for the misuse of your time and money.

I think your point about quality of traffic is more important. Like you are pointing out- Running a ranking report is not SEO. For example, there are companies now that are focused only on conversion optimization using analytics data and optimizer tools. This is a subset of the optimization process. They are turning the work of converting existing traffic into some type of action, into a science. The conferences are not treating conversion optimization as its own category yet but I am sure it is coming.
If automated ranking tools are getting blocked then SEOs will have to write their own tools or do a little more manual work based off log file data like you are saying. I really don’t think this discovery is going to hurt SEOs at all. I didn’t know people were still using Web position gold? I thought that tool died a long time ago anyway.