Times are tough. COVID-19 has affected almost all types of industries across the globe. People have money, but they just don’t want to spend it like the way they used to spend just 8 months ago. The circumstances have changed drastically. SEO people are finding it difficult to get new clients. This is the fact, and as part of this beautiful and challenging industry I cannot shy away from admitting the truth.
Perseverance is the best weapon to beat all odds, and that’s the best possible way we all can recover.
This last Saturday, our Technical team, R & D team and some people from the Management sat together to find the way forward. Since it’s become hard to find new clients now, we have decided to boost the lifetime value of our existing clients in order to survive and recover from the crisis.
There are some things that we all have to consider when trying to increase the lifetime value of existing clients. I’m going to share those exact same ideas that we’ve discussed in our internal team meeting. I’d also share with you a couple of important tips that I learned from a bunch of great articles online. These ideas that I’m going to write about will definitely help small search agencies or digital firms like us to actually increase the lifetime value of existing clients.
I’d appreciate if you share your experience in the comments after using these helpful tips and suggestions.
Okay, so here are my tips and suggestions.
First, communicate
The very first thing you need to do is to communicate with your clients during this economic disorder. Ask about their physical and mental wellbeing. You need to make sure you’re really caring for them. Earn more trust from them.
Once you’re sure they are safe and are doing well move onto discussing about their business. Learn what they are experiencing today, and how they are seeing the future. Has anything really changed in the way they used to operate their business? And, how are they planning to operate in the future? Is there a plan in place to combat the crisis? Learn about that as well. If you feel that they’re struggling to prepare a good rescue strategy, offer your help and expertise for free. It will help you earn goodwill.
Once you’re sure you have enough knowledge to be able to provide better help and service to them prepare your documentation that will guide you and your team members along the way in the next few weeks or months.
Offer value-added services
Besides SEO link building techniques, there are a lot of other services that digital agencies can offer. Website design, Graphic design, Content writing, Email marketing, Retargeting / Remarketing, Content repurposing, Ads management are to name a few. You need to decide if there is anything that your clients need and if you can offer it as a value-added service to them.
Crisis communication that we discussed above will help you understand what has changed in your clients’ businesses, and what is that they are going to need additionally. You can have your internal team meeting to determine the additional services that you can provide to your clients. If an additional service doesn’t cost you money or a lot of effort, you can offer it for free to help your clients combat the crisis. This will help strengthen your business relationship.
For example, if a particular client needs 2 blog posts urgently, you may write those blog posts for free. Writing only 2 blog posts or a few social media posts should not cost your team anything other than just a few hours of research and writing work. So, you think of offering something for free to your clients as long as it doesn’t involve much effort or money.
Moreover, if you think a client could be benefited from email marketing, you can propose them to do that at a reasonable price. Up-selling is always a good idea to generate some revenue when finding new clients gets difficult.
Do a more exhaustive market research
Doing an exhaustive market research is very important in economic crisis times because most offline stores are compelled to start online booking and home delivery service. Those who cannot start the online service are bound to close operation or their shops due to the drastic decrease in local customers.
You may see a lot of local restaurants begin online operations and even home delivery facility. If your clients have been compelled to switch to online service, it’s safe to say that there would be a great change in their customer behavior, intent and motivation. This huge change in market should also affect the SEO link building strategy you’ve been implementing so far.
You should quickly alter your SEO techniques and build a new strategy based on the data obtained from the exhaustive market research. Your content team should also get notified about the change in the market, the change in your clients’ business operations, and the change in your marketing strategy.
Review the competitors and target keywords
An exhaustive market research should be followed by a thorough competitor analysis and keyword research. Since your client’s customers have changed the way they used to purchase, the competitors would most likely change. This should result in a change in the keywords as well.
So, you should run a strong competitor analysis and review the keywords, and start targeting a completely new set of keywords. You may not charge anything to your client(s) for this competitor analysis and keyword research as a goodwill gesture, but this is completely your choice. Anything good that you bring to their table will surely make them stay with you.
If you know your client has money and they are willing to pay you for this, it can give you a chance to generate some revenue for your company. And, it’s not an unethical way of earning at all, so take it!
Strongly consider Google local
This pandemic has made a lot of businesses go local. Those who already had some presence on Google local are trying to strengthen their positioning and dominance. And, those who didn’t even try the local visibility are eager to get visible in places like local searches, Google maps etc.
Google likes to see businesses active for local search visibility, so if your client has not explored the power of Google Posts yet, now is the time. Do everything to manage and optimize their Google Posts and show their content, photos, news, offers and other information on the section provided by Google Posts feature. Your customers will like to see their content on those places. You can charge them a small amount for this as well, so it’s a win-win.
We’ve seen a decrease in our conversion-rate in the past few months just like any other agency has faced. But it looks like things have started to return and we are recovering fast. There is a significant growth in online services and it’s going to continue growing, so it’s a huge opportunity for SEOs.
All that we need to do now is find out the pain point of each of our clients, propose them a feasible solution and convince them of the importance of SEO now than ever before. Increasing your existing client’s lifetime value is utmost important in these tough times. Things are going to be back to normal soon! So, if you do ethical SEO that brings in successful results, things are going to happen in your favor. That’s what we believe at SEO Extent.