Over the past 2 years I’ve been increasingly busy with larger corporate clients. When we started we took on small local businesses, nowadays we only take on larger national ones. Why? Has our process changed? No. It’s the understanding about the businesses and the ROI that we now have changed. For example: in early 2016 we took on a client that wanted to rank for a variety of keywords, and as usual didn’t know about what budget. They talked about funny keywords like card access systems and key fobs, when they really wanted to rank for the big ones. But the issue wasn’t knowledge, it was the understanding of keywords and long tail keywords.
That’ why today I’m going to talk about our card access systems client and why I personally believe they are the single reason we now make 7 figures a year in turnover. Because they helped us talk to individuals who didn’t or don’t know much about SEO, and only understand ROI (Return on Investment.)
The Importance Of Long Tail Keywords
When most clients come to us (as probably with many other digital marketing companies) they say “We’ve got these keywords we want you to rank us for.” Now that’s a great starting point, but it is only that. A starting point. Let’s take our client example above and let me talk about what and why this is the worst way to go when it comes to keyword research.
Point 1: The keywords your clients give you are usually cr*p. Let’s be honest. They are good at whatever they do. In this case it was security and access control, and they are great at that. But the keywords? They are just things they think people have searched. Instead you should ask clients if they know their most profitable keywords, highest converting traffic, best landing pages, and if they run PPC campaigns, ask for the highest converting phrases from these. This is the best way to do it rather than to simply ask what people what keywords they want your company to rank you for.
Point 2: Short tail keywords are more expensive to rank, take longer to rank, and in the end will provide the lowest ROI for your client (and hence earn yourself or your company less money) by this I mean the following – I have a client in this industry that had 21 “core” keywords they wanted to rank for. Now that’s a lot of keywords, we are also talking highly highly competitive phrases here too. Now instead of simply quoting them £5,000 a month and watching them say “this is out of budget” – I took a different approach.
I still made the large quote but it came with a secondary quote and a reason behind why this is so expensive. I also outlined how I knew this would be out of a budget and why I think it wouldn’t be the best way to go anyway. Instead I outlined that we take 5 of these key-phrases and make longer tail keywords from them. For this I would charge 1/5th of the price and they would see results faster, cheaper and not only that but would generate a higher ROI in the end too. This benefited all parties involved and they came on as a client. It was a win-win for both. These are the situations that we love.
Conclusion
So in conclusion – Educate the client on what is best for them, not in terms of rankings, or in terms of what will line your pocket the quickest, but instead talk about return on investment both short term (3 months) and longer term (12 months) – They can then go and make a calculated decision to what they want to look into.
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