Once the project is delivered, the client goes away.
There are few things that are more satisfying when you deliver a high-quality project on time that satisfies your customer. Everybody wins. But have you ever tried to think about the ways to expand and strengthen your relationship with your customers after delivery of the project?
One way to do this is by taking advantage of some online trends for 2016: Online marketing and SEO are the areas where small and medium enterprises want to improve and are willing to invest.
80% of traffic to a website begins with a survey (Source: Formstack)
You are in a prime position to take advantage of this opportunity as you will be developing a website, working with front-end, or designing the UX. The most obvious incentive you have to optimize your client’s site for the search engines, in addition to generating new business by attracting qualified visitors to your site is to publicize the work of websites you have developed. The customers probably have little or no knowledge of SEO and best practices to build a website. That’s where you come in.
So what specific actions you can take to provide value-added service to your customers, and with the development / or website design?
First, you have to understand what the specific goal of your client is. You obviously already know this if the objective is discussed with you. You should deepen the goals that the custom has with the site (Is it an e-commerce website that is set up in order to sell or offer a service, build a brand or maybe a news blog?), and analyze the competitors. If you have limited knowledge of SEO, it is worth searching good SEO practices on Google before beginning your project. Now if you want to build a website, your task list will be slightly different, but anyway very much worth investing a little time to learn the best practices and deliver the best possible design to your customer.
Ideally, SEO is something you should think about in the beginning of the project so that the site you build is search engine friendly. In addition, some developers are left with a bad reputation for developing a website that does not get visitors as per client expectations. The website design is beautiful but cannot answer the three questions at once: “Who am I? What do I do now? Why should I do?”.
When a visitor accesses your site, you have a few seconds to convince him that he has clicked the right link and you have what he is seeking for. So it is always important that a page always answers the three questions and that it guides the user to take an action.
SEO leads have a 15% conversion rate, very similar to direct traffic rate, and well above referrals (9%), paid search (7%), social media (4%), and outbound leads (2 %). (Source: Marketing Charts)
Let’s say the site has been launched and you need to make a diagnosis of how SEO is done. You need not and should not try to do it manually. The easiest way to do this is to automate the process using an online SEO tool. There are many on the market, some are free to use and some are paid. You can use tools like Moz or MajesticSEO to have a 360˚ view of your website, and depending on the results, oh yes opt for a paid version that will monitor your site continuously, so that you can optimize your site in the best way. You will be able to do Some of these tasks yourself without problems (such as meta tags, headers, H1, H2, etc ..), as for other more specific tasks, you will have to align yourself with your customer. You should not offer to create content or manage the social aspect of the page, which is beyond your scope (unless you provide this service of course), but you can advise on how to do it.
Remembering 3 things:
- You are optimizing customer website for people and not for search bots.
- It needs a relevant content for achieving the target constantly. In many cases, this means creating a blog. The Blog needs to have a content strategy with 2 or 3 goals at the most. Understand what wants. Whether he wants to build a brand, generate traffic, publish news or want to focus on building a local community.
- You cannot do the magic to let the customer website rank first on Google for all keywords he wants. To get there, it needs hard work and commitment. To include SEO in projects to help your customers, you have to educate them sharing good practices and extend your relationship with them.
Conclusion
Investing some of your time to learn a little more about SEO and finding some good tools to help you in the process will make a huge difference in between you and other developers. Adding new skills will also help you to add value to the relation with your customers and projects.
And this is how everybody wins.
