Joy detailed five learnings from working with clients this past year:
1. Have a process to flag underperformance — The divorce lawyer
For this client, Joy first looked at pages that were declining. She looked at an example term, e.g., ‘Florida divorce,’ optimized her client’s page for that term, and saw their ranking improve. But when looking at other keywords, she found they were underperforming for many other keywords where the SERP had been won by websites such as Reddit.
As a result, Joy came up with important questions to ask clients, including: Are leads up MoM? Are leads up YoY? Is the client happy? Does the client trust us? We need to have a process to flag underperformance.
2. Encourage clients to understand what you do and why you make decisions — The insurance agent
At the beginning of working with this client, they dominated the market and got the majority of their leads from their Google Business Profile (GBP), but the client was adamant about link building. To make the client happy, Joy looked at how links impact local pack vs organic rankings. Links ended up making a large impact on organic rankings but a small impact on local pack rankings — the client wasn’t thrilled.
Joy decided to start hosting webinars and invited clients to help them understand more about why her agency makes specific SEO decisions. This client came back after one of the webinars, and they won the client back!
3. One agent and an ideal customer — The criminal lawyer
When Joy’s agency got this client, they firmly told the agency they wanted to focus on DUI cases. Joy started researching and worked on target keywords relating to people with multiple DUIs, but the client wanted the angecy to focus on first-time offenders.
So, she started to think about how they could prioritize the things that make the most money. Sterling Sky made a couple of changes — they minimized contact to one agent rather than two. And, made sure to ask the business who their ideal customer is.
4. Show how long-tail keywords can help dominate the SERP — The locksmith
The client wanted to focus on the keyword ‘locksmith,’ and Joy thought it made sense. If there is a business close to you, Google would prefer to show that business than a business further away. There were 131 locksmith businesses in Indianapolis, which is a lot to compete against when you only have one location. Joy decided to focus on the keyword ‘locksmith Indianapolis’ instead, focusing more on long-tail keyword optimization. But the client didn’t care.
Joy decided to start showing clients how they can dominate the SERP by targeting long-tail keywords:
