One of the busiest weeks I think I’ve ever had as a business owner. We have a lot of projects starting and finishing all at once as we close 2016. This week we presented website strategies to two of our newer clients, which includes delivering a document detailing all of our thoughts on content, keywords and SEO, navigation, creative direction, and positioning vs. the competition. This is a new thing for us, we’ve presented four of these in the last month and it represents one of the big things I’ve changed this quarter in how we approach things.
I have never liked developing “reports” for clients. I’m not a paperwork kind of guy and I feel like most of the stuff that agencies prepare for clients (especially in the small business space) is smoke and bullshit.
Still, I feel that this change has done a couple of important things for us. First, it’s enabled us to charge clients to make recommendations that, previously, we had done for free. This is a big one, because clients often ask us how we would approach a certain problem, whether from an architecture or SEO standpoint, and we’d basically outline it for them. This enables us to upsell that strategy piece and minimizes our exposure to having to deliver free consulting to clients who don’t want to pay us for it. Second, it helps us define terminology and gets the client speaking our language which is also very helpful. Finally, it gives us an opportunity to check ourselves on a strategy before we start putting plans into action. Often, when we sit down with a client in a sales process, we don’t have a lot of facts at our disposal, we advise based on feel, i.e., “Based on what I see here at first blush, we might consider trying X.” But we’ve found instances already where deeper research forces us to change our position.
One client we presented to this week was in that exact situation: initial research showed incredible opportunities for great organic search rankings, but our SEO guru Greg dove deeper and found a unique situation where, despite high search volume and low competition, the existing competition for her keywords were primarily universities and large research organizations. Imagine trying to run a football into the endzone where there are only two people between you and the goal line. You feel like your chances are excellent. But if I then told you that the two people you had to beat were both Broncos linebackers, you’ll realize that no matter how open the field is, you still won’t score. But with high volume and primary competition almost exclusively in non-commercial sectors, you can run a surprisingly affordable AdWords campaign with a tremendous upside.
So, essentially, we were able to course correct before any real work had been done and show the client exactly where the clouds and the silver linings were before any content had been written, before a single pixel of the site had been designed. I feel like that’s a tremendous win for us.
I’m also right now preparing three sites to launch on Monday. It’s not uncommon for me to work on Saturdays, oftentimes doing the sorts of things that are hard to focus on with the phone ringing and the constant stream of new emails that come in during the week. It’s a quiet time to do prep work that I might screw up during the week with all the distractions. Two of the sites are for lawyer clients that we have served for about seven years, and the third is for a German company in a healthcare-related industry. That project, in particular, has been more difficult than we had hoped.
We have worked with business owners all over the US, Canada, and the world over the last 10+ years, so dealing with language and cultural differences is not really new to us. However, I think this is the first time we have done a project of this scope for someone whose first language was not English, and there have definitely been miscommunications and issues along the way. When we speak on the phone, he always seems to understand exactly what we need from him, but then when we receive things via email we see that there has been a disconnect. It’s been a long and frustrating process, but it is actually a very nice site and we will be happy to see it live at last.
Today is New Year’s Eve, and tomorrow is 2017. On Monday, two of my contractors become employees. It’s a big change, both exciting and a bit terrifying all at once. The last time I had employees in this business, it did not work out. But I’m determined to make this time different. I’m a better business owner than I was then, a better leader, and I am confident in my ability to grow the business this time.
More on all that soon. In the meantime, my son and I are about to start packing specially etched rocks glasses into gift boxes for client gifts.
Happy New Year 🙂