Vendors need accountability for you to get the absolute best return on your investment. As the owner of an agency and working with clients in multiple industries, I can tell you that, with a few exceptions, our best results came from clients actively involved in our work.
I know, you’re busy. You don’t want to have to manage your vendors. But…you must. Or at least if you want to get the most for your money.
Since starting to work with lawyers to oversee their SEO vendors, I’ve developed a 14-part template for working with vendors every month. This allows me to hold the vendor accountable to what they said they’d do, make sure we’re keeping the SEO team’s work and the firm’s goals aligned, and identify opportunities to get more results.
Use this as a guideline. It will, at the least, give you greater confidence in your SEO investment. At best, this will help you generate more cases.
Oh, and no, don’t rely on them to just fill out a report and send it to you. This is an interactive process. You need to engage with them to make this work the magic.
Your Monthly Call with SEO Vendors
Work Accomplished Since Last Phone Call
This allows you not only to see where your investment is going; it might show things your team is doing you didn’t realize. Or, perhaps, you’ll notice a disconnect between your goals. Maybe it’ll jog your memory to share something that could help your team.
In the event of a subpar vendor, this allows you to document what they’re doing and what they say they’re going to do.
Results
We all want more cases. You need to be working with your vendor to track calls, form fills, and chats coming in through your website. If you’re getting a lot of leads and not a lot of cases, the problem is either with the quality of your leads or the effectiveness of your intake.
Technical Changes
This is not going to be something very common. When changes are made to your website or other online systems, it’s possible that there will be some data lost in tracking. It’s important to note when this happens so you can make appropriate decisions surrounding your data.
Any Major Changes in Rankings?
For which keywords are you moving up or moving down in your rankings? Which keywords should be focused on that may be of better quality? What are the pages getting the most SEO traffic?
Yes, lots of questions! It’s not enough to just see a rankings report. It’s valuable to take a moment to step back and assess what’s happening and which keyword improvements/drops you should care about. Going up on rankings is only as good as the quality of traffic it generates.
What’s Working/Not Working
Unless you’ve found the secret sauce to marketing, your vendor is going to do things that work and things that don’t. It’s the nature of marketing. Participating in the process and hearing what’s working and what’s not allows you to offer insight that can help your vendor make better decisions.
Again…everything here will help you get more out of a good vendor. If your vendor isn’t producing results and isn’t taking the proper steps to get you cases, this will allow you to document and make clear decisions when switching vendors.
Monitoring
I love to monitor all the little things on websites. Much of the time, your monitoring won’t find any major issues. That’s good! That means your vendor is good. And because you’re dealing with technology and humans, things will sometimes get messed up.
I recommend setting up a free, third-party account where you’ll receive notifications if your website goes down, if the load time increases, and many other potential problems. This allows you and your web team to respond immediately when things go wrong.
I strongly recommend tracking the user’s behavior with software like Hot Jar. That will produce videos of behavior and heat maps so you can see how people are engaging with your website. Use this kind of information to drive design changes. I don’t care who likes the design. The only question that matters is: does my design help move people from A to Z?
Next Month we will continue with these questions:
Any Content to Prune or Delete?
This is a bit more controversial and will come down to your SEO team. Many experts throughout the SEO industry are adamant about ruthlessly pruning content that has little to no traffic and doesn’t provide clear, specific value.
Other teams, ones that I respect, do not share this perspective. Those teams prefer only ever to add content.
No one knows how all Google works. Just make sure your team is doing things purpose-fully and is data-informed and keep the conversation rolling.
Next Month in Part 2, we will continue our discussion on these topics.
Until Then…
