In terms of expectations, the client usually expects miracles on short order. Of course, they don’t realize this, but that’s been the case nevertheless, in my experience. As a professional SEO company, it’s up to us to help the client understand how an SEO campaign really works and what to expect from it. We need to set the client’s expectations from the very beginning of the negotiating stage. This will save your client-vendor relationship from falling apart after the first 5 months or so. It’s at about the 5 or 6 month range that clients become impatient about dominating their market – unless you set their expectations. So let’s talk about what can happen during an SEO campaign.
One scenario is that you create thousands of links, all at once practically (by using link building software), and deliver fast rankings to your client. The other scenario is this: you build links very slowly over a period of time (say 8 months) and slowly climb the SERPS. The problem with the first scenario is that although the client’s site will experience dramatic ranking improvements right away, with many keywords suddenly showing the site on page one of Google, it has a tendency to “bounce” suddenly. When a site “bounces” that means that it no longer ranks on page one for a keyword or set of keywords. This has been referred to as the Google Sandbox. There is much debate about whether the Google Sandbox really exists. I don’t know why people debate this because, whether you call it the Sandbox or something else, the effect is real and predicable. Once a site “bounces” off of page one, it can take months for it to bounce back. Sometimes I have had to wait six, seven or even eight months before my site bounced back, which it almost always does. In the end, the site will rank even higher than where it ranked before it bounced.
The second scenario mentioned above is to link build slowly so as to avoid the bouncing effect as just described. The problem with this is that it takes 8 months or so to achieve the rankings anyway. It’s usually about the same time frame as waiting for the site to bounce back as described in scenario one. On the plus side, with slow link building you might be surprised at how few links you need to build. Just a few a days for three or four months and a site might rank for its keywords without experiencing a bounce.
You, as the SEO consultant, should decide how this link building process should proceed. Then, you need to make sure that your client knows what to expect. This will help you avoid having a disappointed client, and we all know that a disappointed client is a terrible thing indeed. Risk is a major objection in selling SEO services. That is why pay for performance or performance based SEO services are becoming more and more popular.
Pay for Performance SEO packages are services that you pay for after the desired result has been achieved. There are some tricky SEO companies out there that will say that you don’t have to pay unless your keywords are ranking. But, what the client doesn’t usually know is that some of these performance based SEO companies charge for ranking keywords on page three and page two. There is virtually no traffic on page two or three so it makes no sense to pay for services that provide these results. Clients should pay for page one rankings only. Page two and three are useless, practically, and certainly not worth any real money.
A small business should expect to see real results across a broad spectrum of keywords at around the eighth month. If your SEO company runs a quick SEO campaign then you should expect to see fast results followed by a severe drop in rankings, followed by an eventual return to top rankings.
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