Are your SEO Customers Truly Happy? 3 Ways to Improve How Well We are Pleasing our Clients

Author: April Hall

Internet Copywriter

The goal of every SEO company is to make our customers happy, right? But, how successful are we really at doing that? Is customer happiness measured just by the number of longstanding accounts we have? If so, what does that say about our ability to land new accounts? When was the last time you got a random card or email of appreciation from one of your customers? Before we can know if our customers are really happy, or if they are only content, a few definitions are in order:

Happy: Enjoying or showing or marked by joy or pleasure or good fortune

Content: Satisfied in a limited way

Which one of these adjectives would you prefer your customers use to describe themselves? We all want happy customers, but too many of us provide SEO service that offers limited satisfaction and customers who resign themselves to remain simply “content”. Sometimes our clients stick with us out of a sense of comfortableness with our work, and not necessarily out of happiness with our service.

How do SEO and internet marketing companies know if our customers are happy?

• The only emails we get are ones that thank us for our great projects
• We don’t get repeated requests for our clients to gain administrators’ access in order to make site changes and additions
• We begin getting client referrals without specifically requesting them
• Our clients become loyal enough that when they are ready for a complete content overhaul, they don’t hesitate to turn over the entire project to us

Besides offering quality SEO service, using only well-proven and ethical SEO strategies, what can those of us in the industry do to gauge how well we are pleasing our clients? It begins with making ourselves familiar with all of the resources and training available, of course, but it also includes:

1. Adding a quality control staff member. The sole mission of this staff member should be to ensure that every piece of work that your company produces is of fine quality. This mission includes checking to make sure links work, double-checking all outbound links, ensuring pictures are appropriate for the content included, and all other aspects of quality control. It’s a big job, and its also vague in some respects; so choose someone who is familiar with many different areas of internet marketing.
2. Concentrate on improving your good ol’ fashioned customer service. Are you available during the off-hours and on weekends? Can your clients get in contact with a live person, or are they limited to cold, impersonal email forms? In our rush to the forefront of internet marketing and our drive to make it to that all-important first SERP, let’s now forget that your customers want you to value their patronage about all else. Treat them with the respect and appreciation they deserve, and you may be surprised at how loyal they become.
3. Ask for customer input. Don’t forget that sometimes the best ideas come from the customers themselves. Ask them point-blank if they are happy with their service; and don’t send out a mass survey, for goodness sakes! Make a point to contact a few clients–by phone–every week. Ask if they would like to see more updated content, better pictures, perhaps some video. Would they prefer to stay constantly updated with new site content, or do they like to just get a regular analytics report? Would they like to make a contribution to the content? And, a big one, how interested are they in learning some SEO strategies of their own? Remember, the project runs two ways, and your clients don’t like to be treated as just an account number