Working in the real world offers some unseen challenges, but the experience is worth the effort and the financial rewards can compensate…

Recently I have been incredibly fortunate to work with a great client Kalamazoo on the reworking and redesign of their website www.kalamazoo.co.nz

One of the really great things about kalamazoo is the people, I have been fortunate enough to have a client that gives me virtual free rein with their project. This is meant that I’ve been able to use tools such as IBP to fine tune and quick pages and when I’m finished or at least when I get to a good break point I published a page and they provide me with some feedback. In general though they have trusted that I know what I’m doing and have left me to get on with it. It has been great for us and the working relationship is moving from strength to strength.

But it isn’t always like this,  some clients quite justifiably want to have a high level of control over the content on their website. And it pays to remember that at the end of the day, it is their website and they do have the right to choose what is and what isn’t published.

The problems start when a client simply won’t listen to your advice, you’re the expert right? And they’re paying you to your knowledge and expertise. Don’t be afraid to remind your clients of this fact, they won’t thank you when their site is nowhere to be found on Google and they aren’t getting the return on investment that they had hoped for. Just remember to keep your argument  constructive and helpful and always use facts and figures if you have them. For example, if you use a tool such as IBP it helps to educate your client, show them their ranking before and after your proposed changes and asked them to trust you for a couple weeks so that you can show them the before and after SERP. If you are right then their page rankings will improve and you will build confidence with your client that your suggestions are worth consideration.

One mistake that is really easy to make, is to tweak your page relentlessly and to use words that might give you a good search engine score but doing nothing towards helping your client win more business. Ultimately the purpose of a website can be many things but in general is there to help people do more business. It does this by explaining the product or service and taking the client through a sales process that ultimately ends in asking for an order. There’s a saying in selling “ABC — Always Be Closing”. So look at how you go about inviting the visitor to become a customer by buying your products

If your web page has been tweaked too much it also runs the risk of not being readable and that is unlikely we knew any new business. It can’t all be done over night. Most of my SEO clients pay me on a retainer basis. I offer to review the pages every week / month and check their performance. I record the SERP every week (Monday morning to be exact) and I use the results to fine tune my efforts. On the Kalamazoo site featured below I still have lots to do in terms of visitor to customer conversion. I am busy implementing an online store and that has changed how I want to tackle this. On the visitor security pass page I have a PayPal buy now button which is working really well but once the store is online, many more common products will be linked through to the store.

Here are some examples of the SEO work that I have been doing recently for Kalamazoo

http://www.kalamazoo.co.nz/index.html

This homepage puts the information that the casual browser is looking for instantly at their fingertips. There’s no need to dig through 10 pages to find out whether this company does in fact supply business stationery or cheques or continuous stationery. When a visitor comes to the site they can instantly see a summary of the major product groups covered by kalamazoo if they are interested they can drill down into the individual product pages where they will find more information.

http://www.kalamazoo.co.nz/visitorpass.html

Kalamazoo provide visitor security passbooks that cover the legal requirements to record visitors into a place of work so that should there be a fire vendor file warden will be able to ensure that everybody is evacuated and accounted for. This page has been optimised for the search term “visitor security pass”. As Kalamazoo are based in New Zealand I have optimised this site for Google New Zealand. This search term they now rank number one and this has taken about eight weeks.

http://www.kalamazoo.co.nz/printedproducts.html

Kalamazoo one of the largest independent printing companies in New Zealand. The purpose of the printed products page is to discuss business stationery printing high-quality commercial Fliers leaflets and brochures and so on. This page has been optimised for the search term “colour printing” and is steadily making its way from completely unranked and is now in the top 100 and I confidently expect it to be in the top 10 on Google within a few weeks.

http://www.kalamazoo.co.nz/businessstationery.html

Obviously optimised for the search term “business stationery” this page was quite difficult and I spent quite a lot of time getting this to rank highly. It is currently around 22 on Google but I think my recent batch of changes will have is moving onto the front page when the next 2 to 3 weeks.

Working on SEO for a client is very different from working on your own site. If you want to make changes to your own site then it’s very simple we just fire up Dreamweaver (or your preferred tool set) and off you go. Working in the real world offers some unseen challenges, but the experience is worth the effort and the financial  rewards can compensate somewhat.

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