SEO’s and really even digital marketers in general have a problem. No one likes us. That’s putting it mildly in some cases. Here's what we can do to help change this perception!

1. Why SEO’s Are Hated
and 50 Things You Can
Do About It
By Workado

2. Who We Are
 www.workado.com was founded by a former SEO agency. It was created out
of necessity in order for us to manage our campaigns, inform clients of the
work we were doing, and more.
 We realized this was helping our “image” and set us apart from the rest of
the SEO crowd.
 We have now made the tool available for other digital marketing agencies to
help their marketing teams stay organized and keep their clients paying
them!

3. Easily Explain What You Do
 This can be difficult for some people, but you have to ‘dumb’ things down.
 If you’re talking about link building and optimized content, you are going to
go right over their heads. Even with they are nodding at you.
 Tell them you want to make sure the website content speaks to the visitor so
they are more likely to convert which will help get people talking about them
instead.

4. Show What You Do
 Sometimes it isn’t just about Google Analytics and the latest keyword ranking
report. Show them what you actually did for the month. If you don’t feel
comfortable or don’t think it will be enough…you’re probably right.
 Document EVERYTHING. We used Workado in-house before deciding to launch
it publicly to report on these things and keep the team organized. Sometimes
clients just need to know what it is they paid for.

5. Show Your Results
 Combine the above report with Google Analytics and whatever performance
tracking metrics are important (see the next bullet point) and you’ve got
yourself a winning combination.
 Early on in a campaign when results aren’t exactly ‘impressive’ having the
second bullet point above works well!

6. Do Things That Matter
 Stop spending time on repeated directory submissions and other outdated
tactics and instead focus on how you can generate quality content.
 Content that’s 2,000+ words with supportive imagery, visual content
(infographics, hilarious memes even), etc. It takes some effort, but even in
boring industries it’s possible.

7. Align Your Work and Results with What
the Client Wants
 If the client is after more leads, don’t just focus your reporting on keyword
rankings. Conceivably you can show them how more traffic leads to more
leads, but if you can setup goal conversions for quote form completions – do
it!
 If you’re working on an e-commerce site, they’re probably more interested in
sales versus traffic numbers so make sure you have access to this information
as well.

8. Be Proud of Where You Work
 If you work from an office, let clients know! So many times their perception is
built around someone working from home in a basement somewhere. It will
lead to legitimacy. However, even if you are working from home – explain the
advantages. Maybe you have a team in multiple locations and you didn’t want
to be restricted by the talent pool of a single city. You can let them know you
have less overhead and you can pass along those savings to them.
 Don’t hide from wherever you work, be forthcoming with the ‘why’ and you’ll
find it doesn’t matter. Our agency went from an office with 8 people, to
deciding to go remote which immediately allowed us to bring on 2 more team
members. Thanks to this book for helping make that happen.

9. Over Communicate
 Calling and emailing your clients regularly is MUCH better than nothing at all.
Even if results aren’t coming as nicely as you’d hoped, this is even MORE of a
reason.
 Chances are those results aren’t coming because you need better content. In
order to get better content, you probably need to get them involved. Which
brings me to #8…

10. Get Clients Involved
 We would schedule monthly meetings with clients (either in office or over the
phone) and we called these Help Us Help U (HUHU for short and pronounced
‘who who’) meetings. Our HUHU’s were very productive and we always had
an agenda.
 There are ALWAYS things clients can be doing to help their own efforts and
you’ll be surprised at how much they want to take part if they just knew what
to do.

11. Support Your Clients
 Does your client have an event coming up that they need attendees for? How
about a charity or fundraiser?
 Contributing to these things goes a long way to secure your revenue for the
long term why also positioning you as a really good person/company.

12. Go Above and Beyond
 Don’t just do what you’re contracted to do…help them in other areas. It can
be something like setting up a Google Alert and social tracking for their brand
and letting them know about things people are saying.
 Find a bad review online? Let them know how to handle it professionally. See
that their domain is coming up for renewal and make sure they know how to
renew it. These little things don’t take much time and can be a life saver in
the eyes of a business owner.

13. Tell Clients You Care
 Letting clients know they are important is critical for long term success.
Sometimes you just have to tell them how much their business means to you.

14. Show Clients You Care
 Sometimes just telling them isn’t enough though, your actions speak louder
than words. Dropping off donuts to their office every once in a while, or
sending them a gift for their birthday can help you show that you’re thinking
about them.

15. Invite to Webinars
 Continued education is important. Inviting prospects and clients to webinars
and showing them different things they can do (such as how to interact and
engage people on social) can really go a long way to them helping you get
better results while giving them insights into how the industry works.

16. Invite to Seminars
 Like the webinars above, but if you are a part of any local chamber of
commerce’s or networking functions – they will also typically have
educational opportunities. You can invite your clients.
 This gives them the idea that you are well respected in the industry. This
obviously makes them happy with their purchase decision and they get to
boast about how they work with you.

17. Drip Educational Content to Clients
 Setting up a drip system is an important way to hit the inbox of clients every
couple weeks with educational content. It’s a valuable ‘touch’ as we used to
call it. So get a free MailChimp campaign setup and put together some helpful
content catered towards your clients (not how SEO strategies necessarily).
 Something like “7 Ways to Get the Most Out of 1 Single Piece of Content” will
help them to know not only can they use their content for a blog post, but
maybe even use it for their own drip campaign to increase sales. If you can
give something that spawns an idea, you’ll get the credit.

18. Read Blogs
 Google Reader isn’t in play anymore, but setup a reader (I LOVE Feedly) and
start subscribing to a great list of blogs (here’s 101 inbound marketing blogs
to get you started).
 This is not only good for self-education, but also for great ideas! The Feedly
app is on my home screen and is something I review every morning when I
wake up and at the end of the day as well.

19. Read Books
 I have read some great books on all spectrums of online marketing and
entrepreneurship over the years.
 As long as you continuously think about how the ideas on those books relate
to your situation you’ll come out of a good book with 20+ great ideas you can
start implementing immediately. Have a notebook or your phone nearby to
take notes and write them down as they come to you.

20. Stay Up-to-date with Changes
 By reading the latest blogs, you’ll know when a massive Google update is
coming. There are usually some tweaks you’ll need to make to how you go
about doing things.
 If you’re still building links with the same anchor text – you’re way behind the
times.

21. Continued Learning for You
 Adwords has a certification program. I felt the same thing needed to be in
place for the SEO side of things. I wanted a test I could give to my employees
to see where they were at and where I could help direct them for more
education. So I started creating a certification program that will be launched
here on Workado soon.
 It was built to help SEO’s stay up-to-date on how to actually implement
industry best practices. It will be a free way to ensure you, and whoever you
have working on client campaigns knows the industry best practices.

22. Don’t Hijack Sites!
 If a client leaves you, don’t try keeping their website under wraps. This does
NOTHING, but give off a bad impression.
 You aren’t going to get more money for it, they are going to tell everyone
they know, and you are just going to look incredibly bad.

23. Dress to Impress
 If you are meeting with a client or prospect in person, at least dress business
casual. Showing up with a beanie, a beard that isn’t trimmed, an Iron Maiden
t-shirt and khaki shorts is not going to help the cause.

24. Respond to Email
 If they send you an email, don’t wait a week to respond to it. Try and
respond by end of business.
 Even if you aren’t able to do anything just yet, let them know you have
received the email and will look into it.

25. Answer the Phone
 If they want to talk to you about something, take the call. Now I know some
clients can go overboard with this so use your best judgment.
 Ignoring their phone calls is just going to upset them.

26. When Times are Tough, Face the Fire
 These can be the toughest calls to handle, especially when results aren’t
quite there yet.
 Let them know what you’ve been doing, better yet if you can show them (see
#2 on this list) and be confident in what you’re doing. Often times they will
feel better just having been heard.

27. Don’t Overpromise
 I know it can be tough selling SEO these days when you are competing with
seemingly millions of so called experts.
 However, the moment you try telling them you can get them millions of
visitors and millions of dollars, you are setting yourself up for failure and
ensuring the business community continues not to trust anyone in the
industry.

28. Set Realistic Expectations
 In your conversations with prospects, you should be setting the table for the
campaign and giving them some indications as to what their existing situation
looks like.
 If they have a brand new website, have hundreds of spammy backlinks – don’t
be afraid to tell them the harsh realities of their situation.

29. Use Real Data
 If you are going to be showing visitors ‘hits’ and not ‘visitors’ you need to let
them know what a ‘hit’ is. I have had a mom and pop local business tell me
their web guy says they were getting 50k hits per month.
 Given they had no online presence at all, I knew this was not the reality. They
showed me some fake reports that were put together in Excel as ‘proof’. As
ESPN would say, “C’mon man!”

30. Don’t Charge Them Without Them
Knowing
 Seems obvious, but I’ve heard from business owners who end up getting
random additional charges billed to them when they had no idea.
 If you are going to charge for customer support calls, you need to let them
know in advance. I’m not talking about just some small font in the original
contract either!

31. Be Upfront About Pricing
 We will be going into much more detail regarding pricing structures in future
blogs, but you need to have a straight forward pricing presentation. Let
clients know exactly what they are paying for, and how much they will be
needing to pay.
 If you are going to charge hourly (which I don’t suggest), then give them a
range of hours with a “not to exceed” clause so they aren’t shocked when
they see your invoice.

32. Don’t Nickel and Dime Customers
 Helping a client setup their email signatures, or renew their domains can
seem tedious. However, it is a legitimate problem most non-tech savvy
business owners face.
 Give them a hand and you’ll have a customer for a lot longer than if you were
to charge for the 10 minutes it would take you. What’s worth more to you? 10
minutes of billable time or several more months of payments?

33. Talk Nicely About Others
 It can be tempting to join in the bashing of another provider (or anyone for
that matter) when the prospect or client is letting his frustration be known.
 However, all you should really say is that you understand and explain how you
will be able to overcome those frustrations. Do not feed the negativity as it
will just leave them filling as though this is what to expect in this industry.

34. Implement Best Practices
 As a general rule of thumb, stay away from the blackhat techniques. Don’t
stuff sites with keywords, or hide keyword using the same color backgrounds,
or even use several heading 1 tags (or style h1 tags to regular font size) as you
are only risking more damage than good.
 Short term gains might be had, but you risk massive long term losses.

35. Stay Organized
 This can be trick when you have several campaigns going on. Using a
campaign management solution like Workado, can help you keep organized
with all your client’s tasks every single month of their campaign.

36. Know What’s Going On
 When a client calls you unexpectedly to discuss their campaign, you better
have an idea of what is happening. Even if you are not the one specifically
working on their campaign.
 This is again where some sort of a tool or system in place will help everyone
be on the same page.

37. Report Problems First, Don’t Let
Clients Find Them
 We once had a client that went through a rebrand and ended up finding an
old video on a third party website discussing their old company name. This
client got upset with us because they somehow felt we could control that and
we should have let them know about it.
 Although these things are outside your control, you can setup Google Alerts,
or I’d highly recommend Mention, to watch for branded terms and inform the
clients if there are things they might want to know about.

38. Don’t Work Only at Night
 If you are a solo SEO and a night owl, it can be nice working at night. You
don’t get distracted and you can easily focus on work.
 However, unless you are also willing to take phone calls from clients during
the day, it usually isn’t a good idea. Having some overlapping hours is
important.

39. Work Well with Third Parties
 Often times clients have their own web developer or IT person that they’ve
worked with for awhile. You are inevitably stepping on some toes here so you
will need to make sure you have quality relationships with their vendors as
they can be huge assets to your campaign.
 Winning them over will help ensure a long and healthy relationship with the
client.

40. Share the Knowledge
 Learn a new tactic or strategy that you’ve found successful? Share it with the
community. I know this can seem like you are arming your competition, but
believe me – there’s enough business to go around.
 You are ultimately just positioning yourself as an expert while at the same
time building trust and credibility not only in the industry, but to business
owners as well.

41. Use a Professional Contract
 Having a thorough contract can save you tens or even hundreds of thousands
of dollars. We were fortunate to have such a contract when we had a client
make updates to their site and they also figured ‘more SEO’ would help so
they hired some backlink spammers to build more links.
 These things dramatically impacted their results in a negative way and they
tried coming after us for losses and future losses. Luckily our contract
language prevented this. I know some SEO’s who have no contract, or a
simple one page scope of work arrangement.
 Although it may seem easy, having a professional contract gives off the
impression that you mean business and are indeed professional.

42. Use a Professional Proposal
 We used to go back and forth on how to best present information. We
dabbled with tools like Proposable (though we liked it, clients didn’t seem
to). We also spent hours on end with Power Point presentations.
 Ultimately, we came up with a presentation process that we delivered the
proposal through and then went straight to contract. You might have your
own process to deliver a proposal, but whatever it is – just make sure it’s
done professionally.
 Use Fiverr.com or a site like Elance or oDesk to work with a professional at an
affordable rate who can really pretty it up.

43. Practice What You Preach
 We knew an important part of the sales process was that we needed to be
able to rank for keywords ourselves. When we had attained page 1 for “Small
business SEO” that helped add tremendous credibility.
 When you are competing against SEO’s for rankings, try localizing your focus
at first and going from there. You need to make sure your site itself is also
optimized. Basically, make sure you are your own case study.

44. Be Forthright
 Hiding things from clients can come back to haunt you. If you outsource work
to third parties, let them know which of the things will be outsourced
(content writing, web programming, link building, etc).
 This helps you later when you have to have a conversation on these topics and
you might need to say “I don’t know, let me look into that.”

45. Stop Making Excuses
 When it comes to getting work done, or getting results for your clients – stop
making excuses for why it hasn’t been done or the results aren’t there. They
don’t want to hear how you’re sick all the time, or any other excuse you are
coming up with.
 They just want their frustration heard and want to know that you are going to
work to resolve the problem. So embrace it and comfort them by letting them
know you have a plan.

46. Get Speaking Engagements
 We held monthly seminars through a great networking platform here in
Phoenix called NetworkingPhoenix.com. In addition we would speak at
Chamber of Commerce events for North Phoenix and North Scottsdale where
people who were interested in learning how to do SEO for their business
would attend.
 Naturally we would get a few leads, but more importantly it allowed us to
invite clients and prospects and show them that we were trusted by great
organizations.

47. Organize Events and Invite Clients
 This can be tricky to pull off, but if you are able to organize an event this
makes you look great to clients and prospects. We held a poker event at a
local sports bar and we donated all the proceeds to a charity.
 We partnered with a video company, a branding company, and a printing
company to provide prizes and had sponsors for food and drinks.

48. Have a Professional Business Card
 Sorry, but a flimsy VistaPrint card or a perforated homemade business card is
not going to get the job done. Whenever I received these, I immediately
through them in the trash.
 If you can’t invest in your own business, I don’t feel comfortable doing
business with you. Other business owners feel the same way.

49. Have a Professional Website
 You might only specialize in SEO, but clients feel you are so closely related to
web developers and designers that it is expected you at least know how to
make some basic updates to their site when needed.
 If your website looks like it was built 10 years ago, you are hurting your
chances of landing legitimate business.

50. Have Professional Collateral
 Similar to 46 and 47 above, you need to have a professional piece of
collateral. Work with a designer, don’t try to do this yourself. Try limiting the
text and showing as much as you can visually. All you need to let people know
is you can help them, but so many SEO’s try to stuff everything they can into
their brochures.
 Break them up and get multiple brochures if need be. I saw a tradeshow
banner at a networking event that was literally filled from top to bottom with
text. I couldn’t believe it…the thing was 8 feet tall and almost 2 feet wide
and was just completely covered in text. If you think anyone is going to read
it, you’re crazy.
 If people are taking pictures of it, it’s not because the content was so
powerful it moved them, it’s because they want to laugh and blog about it
later.

51. Try and Understand Where They’re
Coming From
 Look at your presentation, your emails, and your communication in general
through their eyes. Chances are they have no idea what you’re talking about
from a technical standpoint. Chances are also really good that they have been
burned by a bad SEO experience in the past.
 So speak to those things by letting them know you completely understand
where they’re coming from and you have a plan to help them. They don’t
need to necessarily know about the 404 error pages you’ll fix and the
robots.txt issues blocking certain pages. Demonstrate your understanding,
but don’t go into detail.

52. Blog
 This is the number one thing I tell business owners they need to be doing. I
tell SEO’s the same thing. Blogging helps you practice what you preach (#41
above), builds credibility for you, and allows you to demonstrate your
knowledge.
 Our SEO agency received more traffic through its blog than any other method,
so it’s worth the effort. They don’t all need to be 4,000 words like this blog
post is, but shoot for at least 1,000 words. It’s hard to really make an impact
with 500 words. 2,000+ words is ideal. In fact, Neil Patel ran an A/B test for
QuickSprout and came away realizing that the average page 1 result on a
SERP contains over 2,000 words!

53. Have Other Ideas?
Leave a comment on our blog for the rest of the community to hear:
http://www.workado.com/why-seos-are-hated-and-50-things-you-can-
do-about-it/