My boss wants me to prepare a proposal to run SEO for clients. Where do I start?
Hey everyone, first of all, I love this community, it's my go-to forum for everything related to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). As the title states, I work for a start up and my boss wants me to do SEO for our clients (start up is gaining traction so right now we only have 1-3 clients). How do I go about presenting and organizing SEO for multiple clients at once? This potential opportunity for me presents itself like an SEO agency, but note that the start up that I work for does much more than that. I will strictly be focusing on SEO. I'm asking everyone on here how they run SEO for multiple clients at once? Where do you start with setting goals? Keyword research? Rankings? I have done SEO for the start up I work for and I'm familiar with the strategies, but doing it at scale is another plate all together which I would love some guidance from. Seriously, anything will help. Love everyone on this subreddit and SEO! 33 💬🗨
ForgotTheLogin Are you looking to get paid by your clients for this or just doing this as a complimentary service? Knowing this will help break out how to organize your work loads, time investments, etc…
Tac0man99224 ✍️ We offer SEO as part of a package deal. So the money our clients pay, only a fraction will go to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and that's if they choose the packages which contains SEO
ForgotTheLogin Okay, so important to outline how much money is coming in for each site and what you think a fair hourly rate is. Then you decide how many hours each month. Next figure out what your tech costs are. What are you going to track keywords with, what spider are you getting, what keyword research tools, etc… This could be a total cost of $0 or this could be $3-4k/mos. It just depends on your tools. Now that you have hours and tech costs sorted, figure out what kind of reporting, if any you are going to provide and how often. Lets say you meet bi-weekly and you want to update a pretty detailed dashboard that tracks keyword movement, CSV, Tech Audit, Task management, etc… You should say 30-60 minutes per meeting and 1-2 hours of dashboard updates and general traffic and site analysis per meeting. So now you are at 1.5-3 hrs every two weeks. or 3-6 hours a month. Now if you decided that 15 hours is your max cap, then I would focus on tech audits first, address HTTPS, re-directs, robots.txt and canonical stuff. Ensure your site is setup as well as it can be to get indexed. Then focus on content optimizations. Anything you can get done is based on what is in place for hours. If they want more done, they pay more for more hours. This keeps everything cost effective, sets expectations up front, provides insight as to what your doing and how the site is responding. From a goals standpoint, this all really varies but a safe bet is to go back a year or more for your dashboard numbers and focus on increasing YoY numbers for the organic channel in regard to traffic, goal completions and revenue. This helps protect you from seasonality increases/decreases on a MoM projection. Hopefully this makes sense and gets you started. Tac0man99224 ✍️ Thanks for the lovely answer, exactly what I needed.
TheMacMan Goals first and foremost every time. You don't know if you're moving in the right direction unless you know what that direction is and where you're looking to get to. Then you need to define the services you'll offer. What specific type of work will you do? There's a lot that can be done within the realm of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Define how you reproduce this across multiple clients. What will be the cadence of these tasks and how often will they be repeated. Look at how much time each will take you. You need to understand how many hours you'll spend on this work each week/month. This will help you understand what you need to charge. Far far too often SEO users promise they'll do all these amazing things, only the find it'll take 10x longer to do what they've promised and they've changed 50% less than they need in order to make money doing all of those things. That's when they fail to accomplish what was promised and everything falls apart. This part is hugely important to setting expectations and making sure you make money on this. It's easy enough to customize things for clients when you only have a few but you will want to look at how you turn those things into processes with documented steps and expected time for each if you want to scale.
Tac0man99224 ✍️ I was thinking following this guide: • Do website audit (SEO strategy) • Local Competitor audit (SEO strategy) • Keyword research • Apply changes to client website. • Layout future road map for them.
AnotherSEOGuy I think a lot of people replying are missing the point here, what I'm taking away is
How do I do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) at scale, operationally and in terms of processes
Not
I don't know how to do SEO pls halp I want clients
They are two very different things, you can absolutely be fantastic at something but not have the internal processes to understand how that something scales. Don't need to bash somebody for asking a pretty simple question. How you do SEO at scale is: • Have a defined SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) which you will use for every single client. This will layout the beginning of a project operationally, so when you hit scale, people below you can easily pickup new clients without having to be trained. • Outsource/hire-in for the simple stuff. Don't waste time prospecting 5,000 websites/month for clients, automate or find some good Virtual Assistants (VA)s. • Outsource/hire-in for the complex stuff. Identify your strengths and weaknesses, if you're a killer content SEO, stick to it, hire in somebody who can marry their technical SEO skills to your content skills and create a good partnership. SEO is an ever changing beast, if you're a 1-3 trick pony, you're gonna have a bad time at some point. • Make productivity your best friend. I'm not sure how good you are at it ATM, but using tools like Trello, Pivotal, Asana, Basecamp etc to manage SEO projects, client-by-client, will save you a tonne of time and even more headaches. • Follow the SOP. And that's about it, the rest of it is stuff you should already know, how to fulfill for an SEO client, how to strategize etc, if you don't know that, sadly the other people are right and you shouldn't be looking after clients. But let's have benefit of the doubt and assume otherwise. Any specific questions feel free to ask!
Psyrkus This comment right here is what I'm talking about. Nailed it. Tac0man99224 ✍️ Thank you for understanding! Many people were quick to judge my knowledge of SEO which is a little frustrating, but I guess it was my fault for not wording my post correctly. Thanks for the incredible lengthy comment. It answered my questions. People like you make this subreddit worth going on. LemmeTakeAperture SOP is the biggest thing most people probably aren't doing here. Even if you are a sole proprietor or don't outsource anything yet – you should be defining every process you do more than once or twice a week. These are things that can eventually be handed off to someone. Most things you do have a process that can be written down step by step. Do it! Write them all down.
