Customize the Emails

Customize the Emails

If you are sending out automated emails from software and think you are doing a good job: STOP. You aren’t. You absolutely have to send customized emails that are relevant to your clients. Your clients might not be SEO whizzes, but they aren’t dumb. They can see email templates and dashboards. It is fine if you use a dashboard — but make custom notes in it. Maybe even do mandatory monthly meetings or bi-weekly meetings to discuss the automated dashboard monthly report.

However, you cannot send an automated dashboard report and templated emails and expect to have a high customer retention rate. Spend the time to really understand the report, think about what is going to be important to the client, and then report on those different items.

I usually spend 40-45 minutes on each report, compiling data and thinking it out, and each of my emails is like a long blog post. Then I try to jump on a call, if possible, to talk through it.

If you do not charge enough, then maybe it is time to start charging more to include time to do those reports.
Summary of Work Completed Related:GroupBuy SEO Tools

One thing that will drastically improve your SEO reports is a summary of the work that you have completed in the past 30 days and what you expect to do in the next 30 days. Clients love accountability and transparency. The more you can do that, the better.
Reporting Failure

The last tip I want to discuss is how to report failures. Listen, this is never easy, but you don’t want to just send positive emails with whatever data is convenient for you. You will have bad months; it happens to the best of us. If you have three months in a row of 15% month over month increases and then you go down 5% one month, from a compounding perspective you are doing amazing! You need to communicate those things to clients.Related:GroupBuy SEO Tools

However, if you have 12 months of no results and no increases, then you obviously need to change something. As long as you are doing the best SEO practices, it may take longer. It took my agency 16 months to get a company to the first page for a keyword that had 300,000 monthly searches. For 15 months, there was no progress and then, in month 16, we went from page 4 to the #3 ranking.

SEO takes time, but I will admit that the entire 15 months that we had to report “failure” wasn’t easy. Luckily, they stuck with us because we didn’t hide anything and we used excellent SEO practices.
Conclusion

Reporting is difficult, for SEO, but, with these tips I have learned throughout my years, you will be able to retain clients longer and make them happier. It doesn’t matter how good at SEO you are. If your reporting is bad, they will think you are bad.