Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

No matter how often you talk with a client or how in the loop your agency is, there will always be things that slip through the cracks in terms of information coming from the client. Whether it’s “Oh, I forgot to tell you. Joe’s been transferred to Omaha” or “Man, you guys should have talked with us last week. We had a bunch of fires to put out.” Each one of these is a lost opportunity to assist the client and improve your existing relationship, but it’s also lost revenue for your agency. Well, there are many ways to stay more in the loop as a result of information constantly being posted online, specifically your clients.

The following are three ideas of how you can stay more in the loop, better service your clients, and improve your bottom line at the same time.

Job alerts
You’re probably thinking, what am I going to learn from job alerts from my client? Well, the first thing you’ll learn is whether they are going to be a client much longer or not. As marketing is often the first place cuts are made, when your client stops hiring, it often means their bottom line is flattening or starting to decline and hence your relationship may come into jeopardy. Second, it will clue you into things that are going on within the organization that you are often not privileged to as a third party. Are they hiring in sales or marketing? Product development or HR? Are there trends or is this an ongoing thing? For example, if you are constantly seeing the same position come up within the marketing department, does it mean the department is growing or do they just have a lot of turnover? Do you need to make other inroads and obtain other client champions in case your client contact is transferred, laid off, fired, etc.?

Ok, you get the point, so how do you do this now? Well, the first place I would start is:

Indeed: Indeed provides job alerts you can set up for free to be delivered to your inbox, or via RSS feed.

SimplyHired and Careerbuilder also allow for the same functionality. By having these job alerts coming in, you can get a feeling for where they are growing the most, what sectors of their business are growing the fastest and also clue you in to things happening internally, which you may never find out otherwise.

Search Monitoring
Search monitoring is also something you can setup quite easily, but many of the free tools are a little difficult to aggregate together, so I’ll also recommend some paid search tools. In terms of search monitoring, I’m talking about a noticeable rankings increase, decrease, new competitors in the space, or other changes, which the client will most likely not communicate to you, or which they themselves may not be aware of. This is of course, assuming they are not already running a search campaigns, paid or organic, which they are actively involved in. And even if they are, and you are not running it, it’s always a good idea to show your client that you are acting as a third party validator for their current search provider.

So how do we set this up? Here’s four tools you can use:

• Google Webmaster Tools: If you have direct access to your clients web hosting, you can set this up and get an idea of their web rankings for the queries driving most of the traffic to their site.
• SEO Book Rank Checker: This is a free add-on for Firefox, which allows you to run ranking reports against multiple domains, multiple engines and multiple keywords. All of which can be exported as an excel ready spreadsheet. The problem with this is that you have to manually assemble any kind of report for multiple competitors.
• Zoom Rank: I actually don’t have experience using these guys, but it appears that they have everything needed for this kind of reporting as well, but for $7.95/month, which isn’t too bad considering they automate this entire process for you as well as archive rankings for historical reporting.
• AdGooroo: As I’m sure you’ve seen me mention them before, our friends at AdGooroo are back. They provide a highly comprehensive solution for both paid and organic search listings, but they are definitely more pricey than these other products.

So with this knowledge in hand, you will be able to better optimize press releases, web content, link building efforts, and much more as opposed to flying blind and just making up a headline, which may ultimately have no real influence on their bottom line. These days, it’s all about demonstrating an integrated approach, even if you don’t manage everything inside and out.

Social media alerts
And last, but certainly not least, where would I be without mentioning social media alerts? What happens if your client releases a new product line and the blogosphere/twittersphere tears it apart? Or some press release comes out and your competitor starts picking apart the research laid out in it? Even if you are not the PR agency or in charge of social media efforts, the client will ultimately be grateful if you are the first to point it out, and even happier if you have a solution in hand. The first thing I’d recommend is to have a social media emergency plan in place. Once you have a plan, you’ll need to actually implement it. There are a ton of free products out there to do this:

• Twilerts
• Tweetbeep
• Filtrbox
• Google Alerts
• Twe2

And if you have some a budget associated with your efforts:

• Radian6
• TNS Cymfony
• Nielsen Buzzmetrics

And here’s some previous posts where I outline many of them in more detail:

• 5 Online Reputation/PR Management Tools ~ Watch your brand in real time
• Real Time Firefighting – Justification for Social Media Monitoring

Really, all of these come down to servicing the client better, even if you are not the agency of record. Once you have these tools in hand, it then becomes a matter of aggregating, automating, and accelerating. This is how the nimble agencies will succeed and the stagnant will disappear.

Image courtesy of Asim Bijarani