How Can I Educate My Clients on Local SEO?
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Before you get to work understanding your client’s problems to be solved, you’ll first need to educate them on local SEO. To appreciate the value that your agency is going to provide, the client must understand the ins and outs of local SEO, and how you deliver that will vary greatly based on their knowledge level, learning style, and resources.
In this month’s Advance Your Agency guide, I’ll talk you through how best to educate clients on local SEO, so you can get to work on improving your client’s prospects and showing value.
Contents Why is education important?It can be tempting to want to dive straight in with a new client and begin showing value right away, but without the education step, your hard work could go completely unnoticed.
Educating clients is important for several reasons:
- It builds trust. Your client knows they are in safe hands and working with someone who truly knows what they’re doing and has their best interests at heart.
- It saves time. In the long run, educating your clients will save heaps of time. Instead of facing endless questioning as you work to improve their local SEO, your client will understand what is being done, and most importantly, why it’s being done.
- It shows value. Building this foundation of education with your client will help prove value and solidify why your services are important to their business and worth investing in.
First things first, you’re going to want to assess your client’s knowledge level. They’ve reached out to you for a reason, so we can speculate that they’ve got some ideas about local SEO, but it’s important to get an understanding of where they’re really at so you can begin to fill in the gaps.
This should be a fairly simple process. You can begin by asking them if they know what a local (or “nearbyâ€) search is, if they’re familiar with Google My Business, and if they have an understanding of search engine optimization on the whole, too.
Some agencies might actually opt for a pretty thorough process here and even go as far as to provide their potential client with a quick survey to fill out. This is a great way to work out your client’s local SEO knowledge “score†before moving onto other things.
If you do go down the survey route, try not to get bogged down in the nitty-gritty, but instead, offer broad questions that can be expanded upon in a one-to-one phone conversation if needed.
Just remember, it’s worth taking surveys like this with a pinch of salt as some clients won’t necessarily want to admit where their knowledge gaps are. And let’s be real, sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know (just speak to any college student ever).
Next, depending on your client’s knowledge and understanding of local SEO, there will be a few different ways to proceed.
Whether they know nothing or have a decent knowledge, it’s still important to be confident in the way that you communicate, as education is undoubtedly going to play a part somewhere down the line.
Uncover their learning styleWhile getting an understanding of your client’s local SEO knowledge is arguably the most important step, it’s also vital to shed light on your client’s learning style. After all, different people will respond better to different approaches.
Is your client pragmatic, matter-of-fact, logical, or creative? Are they time-poor, under-resourced, or ultra-involved? All of these things will play a part in how best to communicate with them.
Time-poor clients might not have time to sit on a call for an hour while you go through the process, can you fire over a doc for them to peruse in their own time instead?
Creative clients might prefer to get involved in a collaborative discussion on the matter, while pragmatic people just want to do.
We’ve drawn together a few examples to help you out. Once you know your client’s learning style, simply cross-reference it with this quadrant below and you’ll be able to identify the best learning methods for them.
The simplest way to determine your client’s learning style? Ask! There’s no shame in asking them how they best absorb information — you could even include this in your knowledge survey at the start of the relationship.
However you choose to ask, knowing your client’s learning style will help a great deal down the line. You’ll know how, and with what, to engage your client, which takes the guesswork out of the equation.
Educating your clientOkay, onto the really important bit.
Now that you understand your client’s knowledge level and how they learn, you can cater your education methods to your client.
In this section, we share our top tactics for effectively communicating with your client. Through these you can educate clients on the basics of local SEO, as well as the very real benefits it provides.
Know your stuff Do your researchYou’d think this is a given, but it’s worth saying anyway — do your research! You’re going to need to try to explain and educate on local SEO as simply as possible, and we all know that you need to understand something inside and out in order to communicate it in the best possible way.
So before you begin, make sure you’re in the know about everything you ought to be, and that you’re aware of any recent changes.
Doing research also goes beyond just the realm of local SEO. Make sure you’re familiar with your client’s business so you can tailor your communications to them. Personalization is a priceless tool that can help things feel more relevant and memorable to people, and you won’t be able to use it without knowing the client’s business properly.
Leverage FOMOWe all know that fear of missing out (FOMO) can be a powerful tool when used correctly, and when it comes to educating clients on the benefits of local SEO, it can be even more helpful. That’s why it’s important to have a grasp on your client’s competitors and how they’re performing, too.
I spoke to Bowler Hat’s Marcus Miller to get his take on educating clients, and he said:
Often, fear of missing out is a powerful motivator, so by understanding that if you are not well optimized, other less local businesses may appear above you, then you are losing potential customers that could have been yours. Ultimately, local SEO is the new phone book – when someone Googles for a service provider, typically in a traditional local business category, there is location intent there, so be optimized, be visible, or be ignored.
You’ll notice that Marcus also brings the concept of local SEO back to the real world. Phone books may be a thing of the past, but local Google searches really do work in much the same way (except there’s less alphabetical favoritism!)
Don’t just rely on one format Use videoVideo can be a great way to educate clients quickly and simply. If you don’t have the resources or desire to create your own in-house videos to serve this purpose, there are plenty online that you can use.
SearchLab‘s Greg Gifford provides a shining example in his ‘What is Local SEO?’ video for SEMrush Academy.
Or, for those more logically-minded, this simple math video, also from Greg, could do wonders. For logic-lovers, it’s hard to argue with basic math, and you can bet this example will be retained.
Using video can be a quick and effective way to educate clients on complex matters. If your client is time-poor you’ll want to share short, snackable videos like the ones linked to above.
If you’ve got the luxury of a more involved and time-rich client, you might want to point them in the way of a webinar or two to further expand their knowledge.
Either way, don’t..
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