Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Online Marketing Consultant

So you’ve been working for months (or years) and now you’re #1 for that keyword you’ve been trying to rank highly for in Google (and any other search engines). Congratulations! You tell the client, you tell your friends, and everything is coming up roses. Then all of a sudden, the client says “Well, I guess we won’t be needing your services anymore.”

You: Uh…..I…..oh damn.

Here are five tips you can use to prove your worth to your client, beyond just gaining rankings:

1. Additional keyword optimization.
   This is pretty obvious, but just because you are #1 for “yellow widget” doesn’t necessarily mean you are #1 for “yellow widgets“. Make sure to continuously research additional keyword opportunities for your clients so you can have them on hand when they ask for them.
2. Competitive Analysis and Intelligence.
   Just because you are #1 today, doesn’t mean you will be tomorrow. Google is finicky about their search algorithm and likes to change things up every few years, just so everyone has as a fair shake (and so they can make a few extra dollars from their own services). Put yourself forth as providing competitive intelligence to both fend off and outmaneuver your clients competitors.
3. Optimizing additional media.
   Maybe you were just optimizing pages on your clients website. Maybe you were only doing press releases. Regardless, there’s always another opportunity out there to optimize something else your client didn’t think to put on their website. Maybe they have some corporate PDF’s laying around on their intranet, which their customers would love. Maybe they have some old corporate videos that are both informative and ridiculously campy. Put them on YouTube and see if you can get some viral traffic going.
4. Reputation Management.
   Your client may appreciate ranking well for “widgets in Chicago”, but they probably don’t appreciate the fact that they also rank well for “worst company in Chicago”. Let them know you can give them a hand with that as well using SEO as PR, SEM, social media optimization, and other techniques to present their side of the story.
5. Internal Education.
   Although, some SEO’s might feel like this is like giving away the keys to the kingdom, in most cases, your client doesn’t have the time, manpower, or technical knowledge to do this on their own, that’s why they hired you in the first place. So reaching out to them and offering to train their internal personnel on best practices for optimizing a press release or webpage isn’t going to take away your next paycheck. In most cases, it will actually provide you with additional opportunities, as those personnel go home and tell other co-workers, their friends, or their spouses about “the great stuff they learned today and how it can help their company.” That co-worker/friend/spouse turns around and tells their boss, and voila, you have additional leads coming in for more work.

In any case, as a good marketer, you should always have something else on the table beyond just gaining search engine rankings.