7 Lessons From Leading SEO at a Digital Marketing Agency

Choose Your Services Carefully Don’t Go All Out With Every Prospect to Win the Contract Don’t Write One-Size-Fits-All, Massive Deliverables Be Mindful of “Not-Invented-Here” Syndrome Balance Work On the Business vs. In the Business Performance-Based Deals Are Tricky Think Carefully Before Signing Exclusivity Agreements To Your Agency’s Success! Before co-founding my current company, I lead the SEO team at a digital marketing agency catering to SMB clients for six years. I had no prior experience running a department, let alone a company. Naturally, I made a lot of beginner’s mistakes. In this article, you’ll find the seven most important things I learned about leading SEO inside an agency — things I wish someone had told me back then. 1. Choose Your Services Carefully We positioned ourselves as a full-service digital marketing agency but looking back, we weren’t. Not by a long shot. We didn’t have enough experience or staff to be great at everything. And even if we had had all that, I (now) strongly believe that you need to carefully pick your niche and become really great there. Advertisement Continue Reading Below So, we weren’t really a full-service digital marketing agency. Frankly, we weren’t great at the full spectrum of SEO services, either. We did wonderfully when it came to technical SEO, keyword research, and strategy, but were lacking in creating content, building links, and doing digital PR. As a consequence, our recommendations sometimes didn’t reach their full potential when implemented simply because the content wasn’t great enough and the supporting links weren’t there. Not only did this negatively impact the overall perception of our SEO work, but it also spilled over into web design and the other services we offered. Interestingly, the clients who absolutely killed it were content-minded and PR-savvy themselves. Together, in a symbiotic relationship, we created great content while gaining links and PR — all atop a solid technical foundation. The lesson: We shouldn’t have been offering content creation, building links, and doing digital PR. These weren’t our strong suits. We should have partnered with true specialists in these areas instead. Advertisement Continue Reading Below 2. Don’t Go All Out With Every Prospect to Win the Contract Unless you have a massive sales force and you’re going after an enterprise contract where you need to go all out, don’t invest too much time with every prospect to win their contract. Prospects will often want you to do a lot of unpaid research prior to their possibly signing. Unfortunately, sometimes they’re really just looking to get free ideas. This happens throughout the entire consulting industry and has been happening for decades. I know, it’s a shocker that this was happening in SEO, too… what can I say? I was young and naive back then. At first, we were going all out and writing a detailed proposal for every prospect. But the ROI on that was too low. Sure, we did win contracts — but we lost plenty, too. Sometimes we got a clear “No,” but other times we were ghosted entirely and knew the prospect had probably just waltzed off with our ideas. Over the years, we refined our lead-scoring process and made sure to let the prospect know about ballpark prices early on in the process. We used case studies that described what we did, how we did it, and what we achieved for other clients. And when we were picking up positive signals, we’d provide a rough but tailored outline as to what the prospect could expect from us. If we were still good, we’d describe it in a formal proposal. By the time we got to that stage, we knew we had an 80–90% chance of winning the contract. If the prospect wanted to get more ideas and research from us during the sales process, they’d have to sign. No exceptions. If they couldn’t commit to the full package right away, we’d start with something small to give them an idea of what it’s like to work with us and take it from there. The lesson: If you’re low on sales resources, be careful about how much time you spend winning prospects. Create an efficient sales process that works for you and leads to a healthy ROI on the time you invest into winning contracts. Advertisement Continue Reading Below 3. Don’t Write One-Size-Fits-All, Massive Deliverables Massive deliverables often end up unread – and their recommendations unimplemented. Who you’re writing the deliverables for should be your first consideration. If it’s a small business owner, do they need to understand your 40-page Technical SEO audit? No, of course not. If you’re writing recommendations for a developer, do they need to understand the full content strategy you’ve put together? Probably not. Give them some background followed by the recommendations that are relevant to them, such as how to improve the internal link structure. Write your deliverables with an eye to the folks who need to act on them. If they are in different roles, write different deliverables. Keep them brief; include mainly the essentials, but give them the option to dig in further and learn more about the “why” behind the recommendation. And of course, every deliverable should contain a prioritized summary of things they need to do, accompanied by the investment required and the expected impact. Advertisement Continue Reading Below If you’d like to dig deeper into this, check out Areej AbuAli’s article on the topic. The lesson: Write all of your deliverables using an outside-in approach, and keep in mind that less is more. Enable those who want to dig deeper to do so, but make this optional. 4. Be Mindful of “Not-Invented-Here” Syndrome As an SEO expert, it is vital that you keep trying new things – to build tools yourself, to push yourself to do better, and to improve your processes. However, be mindful of the “not-invented-here” syndrome and don’t avoid things that you didn’t create yourself. This applies to research and processes just as much as tools. Remain open to saying goodbye to the things you’ve created if a better alternative comes along. This could be as small as redoing your keyword research process when a new team member joins, or as big as moving away from a custom-built CMS. We saw this happen several times when working with our clients’ development partners. They were holding on to old tech they’d built themselves when there were much better alternatives out there at a lower price. Advertisement Continue Reading Below What they thought was their strong suit turned out to be their kryptonite. The lesson: Don’t hold on to something when you know there’s a better alternative out there. Don’t get too attached; always be ready to move on. Keep your eyes on the prize: providing the best service you can. 5. Balance Work On the Business vs. In the Business Agency life is busy, chaotic, and thrilling. It’s dangerously easy to get distracted. I’d always neatly plan out my week, but would rarely ever finish the essentials. It’s hard to strictly focus on your planning when a potential dream client calls you up and wants you to consult on their SEO strategy. Or when a big client suddenly cancels a contract. At times, I didn’t have a good balance between working on the business versus working in the business. I was the lead SEO, and our relatively small team looked to me to keep improving and refining the SEO services we offered. In that role, I needed to spend enough time in the business, or things would go downhill in the SEO department. Advertisement Continue Reading Below Things got a lot better when I hired an experienced SEO. That brought back the balance for me. The lesson: Carefully balance how you spend your time as an agency owner or team lead. Don’t let the business side of things suffer while you keep your SEO offerings cutting-edge. 6. Performance-Based Deals Are Tricky Prospective clients would frequently ask us if we were open to doing performance-based deals. We often declined but when we did say yes, we ended up getting into some that barely made us money. Performance-based deals are tricky because you need to settle on which KPIs will determine your performance. Is it just leads, or is it qualified leads or sales? What do you get paid during that initial period where you’re investing and building up organic traffic but seeing few results? What happens if your client’s company is sold? What if they want to stop working with you, or vice versa? Performance deals can feel like a complicated marriage that can easily go awry. Advertisement Continue Reading Below To add to that, these performance-based inquiries are sometimes a sign of a struggling business — or even their last gasp before going under. You don’t want to go down with them. Maybe the peers I’ve discussed these types of deals with and I haven’t figured out the right way to do performance-based deals. What I can tell you though is that they sure are slippery. The lesson: Discuss every aspect of these deals with your potential partner. Talk about what makes for a successful partnership, and what does not. 7. Think Carefully Before Signing Exclusivity Agreements Clients may ask you to sign exclusivity agreements, preventing you from working with other companies similar to theirs. They don’t want their competitors to benefit from what you’ve learned by working for them. While that has always made sense to me, keep in mind that: By agreeing to this, you’re potentially losing out on business from their competitors. You need to ask enough in return to make the exclusivity worth your while. Advertisement Continue Reading Below We signed exclusivity agreements with several clients and most ended up being wildly successful. Even so, in most cases, the exclusivity agreement cost us way more revenue in the long term than it brought in the short term. Clients’ competitors and companies in adjacent niches (which were excluded, too) noticed this success and approached us. Yet we couldn’t work for them. There were times where one client was spending 50K/year with us, but we were turning away 200K/year in revenue. We had been so eager to sign this client that we didn’t put enough thought into making sure that exclusivity kept making sense for us, as the client wasn’t upping their budget. In another case, the contract value of a client actually decreased while a bounty of inquiries flowed in from competitors and businesses in adjacent niches. When this happened, it was clear to me that we hadn’t thought this through. Signing the exclusivity agreement was a massive commitment from our side, and we should have asked for a significant and comparable commitment from their side, as well. Advertisement Continue Reading Below We should also have negotiated shorter exclusivity periods and stipulated that if their commitment waned, they would lose the exclusivity. The lesson: Don’t be blinded by the short-term reward when a client wants to sign an exclusivity agreement with you. Think about the downsides for you, and make sure the exclusivity agreement leaves room to address them. To Your Agency’s Success! We all start somewhere and learn a lot of tough lessons along the way. Hopefully, these seven lessons of mine will help you keep from repeating these same mistakes. Or at the very least, they may make you think twice before signing that performance-based deal or exclusivity content. To your success! More Resources:


Why User Experience Is Vital for Quality SEO 

© Maskot | Getty Images Long gone are the days of boosting rankings through keyword stuffing and backlinking. Search engines are shifting their focus to human behavior and experience. Improving your website’s rankings means you need to focus on your site’s usability just as much as other SEO tactics, maybe even more. CONSTELLATION BRANDS, INC. SEO and user experience (UX) go hand-in-hand when it comes to creating a high-ranking website. High-ranking websites follow SEO best practices in combination with an intuitive UX design. Good UX design improves engagement, site traffic and, eventually, rankings. There are already several aspects of UX design integrated with SEO best practices. These include having a site that loads fast and is mobile-friendly, easy to navigate and complete with engaging content. Here’s why UX is vital for quality SEO in your websites. Related: Be Sure to Balance SEO and User Experience in Your Web Page Design Why UX and SEO are so important UX optimization is a branch of design that focuses on the user after they reach your website. This type of UX is onsite and is different from the offsite user experience, which happens away from your website and is mainly called customer experience. Website UX encompasses everything from the design and layout of a site to how the user interacts with it. Before UX played an important role in SEO, most web designers focused on creating sites for search engines, rather than users. Seamlessly adding keywords, quality conten and backlinks to a webpage was plenty for search engines to boost your site to the top. Today, search engines — especially Google — are focusing on user behavior to offer users the best search results. Search engines collect user and website data to improve their understanding of users. They look at how users interact with a website, and if they don't like the data, you can bet your ranking position will suffer. One of the biggest UX signals that Google can measure is pogo sticking, which is when a user visits a site from Google search, doesn't find what they were looking for and clicks back to Google only to go to another search result. Users repeat this process a few times until they finally visit a site and never click back. Pogo sticking is a clear sign that users are unable to find what they’re looking for on the site and generally goes hand in hand with a high bounce rate. Websites with a higher bounce rate, or greater pogo sticking, are lacking something the user wants. The search engines don’t know what on the website is causing the high bounce rate. They only monitor user traffic and will rank sites accordingly.  The websites with lower bounce rates are usually doing a better job of helping users find what they’re searching for. These sites will typically rank higher, often on the first page of results. Enter: UX design There are several reasons why users may be bouncing from your site. One such reason is the lack of good UX in web design. A website with easy navigation, user-friendly language, fast loading times and a clear purpose are all parts of UX design. These same aspects of UX are a critical part of SEO. Both UX and SEO share a common goal: giving search-engine users what they are looking for. Improve your site’s UX to make a user’s visit the absolute best experience you can offer. If users are having a great experience when visiting your site from Google, you'll be rewarded with higher rankings from the search term. SEO and UX best practices Since search engines can’t tell you exactly why visitors are bouncing off your site. They might have a good idea, but it’s your job to find out the reaons why. The best way to start this process is to audit your site and then improve its UX design. Follow these SEO and UX best practices to ensure your site has quality SEO: Mobile-friendly pages. More than half 50% of web visitors use mobile phones. That said, you need to pay close attention to the layout, look, feel, text, images and experience of your mobile site. Those who don’t have a mobile-friendly version of their site need to take the time to create one. Users and search engines alike will judge a site by its mobile layout. Every element in your mobile site affects SEO. Focus on creating user-friendly navigation with clear and consistent buttons. Keep the overall design simple and to the point, focusing on usability and content along with good design. Get fast. A fast-loading site offers a better user experience. Therefore, search engines consider site loading time an important factor in ranking. You can improve your site’s loading time by compressing images, learning clean code and using a faster web-host server Optimizing the different elements of your website will reduce loading times and boost SEO. Easy site navigation. A problem with focusing only on SEO and rankings is websites tend to have complex navigation and robust site architecture. Simple navigation makes a site easier to use. This helps the user complete their task in less time with less confusion. Having more web pages isn't always the best. One web page with quality content and user-friendly organization is often equally good for SEO. Robust multi-page sites are still good for SEO, as long as they’re easy for users to navigate. Use headings. Headings are a great way to identify content, use keywords and boost SEO. Users look at headings first to check the site offers an answer to their search. Search-engine crawlers use headings to understand what your site is about and interpret the content. Each page should have only one H1 tag. The rest of the headings can use H2 through H6 tags multiple times to help organize the page’s content. Use the heading tags as needed in a way that makes sense. User-friendly layouts. Layout design, content organization and text size can disrupt a site’s SEO. UX design can meld the aesthetics side of a website with SEO to improve usability and boost traffic. You can do this by including images and video; use call to action throughout the site; using clear headers; organizing and formatting content to make it easy to digest; or adding links to other relatable content. You can even leverage a content or iamge rotation script that will randomly change website content with each visit. Following these tips along with the UX design best practices will help boost SEO. A clear logo. A logo, or site ID, is one of the first elements a user will see when arriving at your site. This ID should be clear, obvious and not mucked by clutter. The logo or tagline should share what your site is about and connect to the user’s needs. Test, test, test. One of the best ways to improve your website is to keep improving its SEO and UX. Understanding how UX and SEO work together will help you make smart decisions when you optimize your site. From there, continue to improve these areas of your site to offer users a great experience. Related: User Experience Is the Most Important Metric You Aren't Measuring SEO and UX are tied at the hip now. If you want solid rankings for your website, you're going to need positive UX to complement your SEO. Luckily, you don't need to be a jsx expert or anything close. There are some solid website builders that non-coders can use to build quality sites with great UX design already built into templants. Just remember to leverage these tips above and you should have a huge head start.


Actionable SEO & PPC content training at SMX Create — just $149 

Actionable SEO & PPC content training at SMX Create -- just $149 Your privacy means the world to us. We share your personal information only when you give us explicit permission to do so, and confirm we have your permission each time. Learn more by viewing our privacy policy.Ok