Local SEO is the basic business need for anyone, who is operating in the market. Every company, small business, or even enterprises have a few regions or geographical regions where they want to gain more and more buyers. The only difference is that – small businesses need to implement local SEO for one or a few locations while big businesses need it for dozens or hundreds of locations separately.

From above elaboration, you must have understood that if you are a Local SEO agency, you are clearly in high demand already. Still finding it difficult to pitch in new and valuable clients? Maybe you are not doing it right then. Check out a few great ways to figure out the best ways to set client expectations, fulfill them and gain regular clients:

Hence, keep these things in mind while on-boarding a client:

IWe will make you as reputed as Apple overnight’, an SEO expert says. Do you think any client is foolish to believe this core marketing statement?
We don’t think so.

Hence, tell your Local SEO marketing team to adopt for a more personalized and reality-driven talk to impress the client. Strategize the local SEO strategy for your client and drive them through that so that they can set their expectations accordingly to your quotes (genuine ones) only. Remember – setting too high expectations and not fulfilling them isn’t the right way to get the client. Now or later, you will lose the client if you cannot do what you told them you could. Therefore, better in to set realistic benchmarks.

Local SEO isn’t something standalone. It’s affected by a whole lot of aspects, related to business’s activities. From the paid reviews to business listings, there many so many things which contribute to the website ranking.

There are fair possibilities that you client has old fake reviews or multiple similar web entities with similar content. Believe it or not, if it’s so, your all efforts will take too much time in causing any benefit to the client’s business. And the worst part is – it’s not your fault.

To avoid such things, you should create a Local SEO requirement gathering questionnaire for small businesses, keeping your client’s industry and business type in the mind. Getting everything filled in written will keep you away from all mishaps.

You must have seen your clients struggling with the questions, like:

• What is Local SEO?
  
• What could it do to a location-specific business?
  
• How can Local SEO help a business grow?
  
• Why should I get registered in Google My Business? Is it compulsory?
  
• Why reviews and directory listing matter to you?
  
• How much time will it take to show up the results?

They obviously know what they are doing but giving them a brief understanding of what you do won’t be a bad plan.

You can start with telling them about ‘why they need Local SEO’. Some statistical information, like added here, can help you in this:

SEO is unexpected, just as the physical calamities or even more. So if Google released a sudden update and client’s site start ranking from 50th to 150th position, your Local SEO Agency should have something to tell about to the clients. Why don’t they that prior? Aware your Local SEO customers about the uncertainty of scenario!

Don’t be a typical marketer, not in front of your clients at least. Clear state what could be done and how much are you confident about the project.

Businesses can’t stand out if they do not have a long array of long-term clients they can proud of. It lets you maintain a good market reputation, lesser efforts in finding work, regular revenue, etc. Therefore, it is necessary that your Local SEO Agency retains more and more clients for longer times. A few tricks, you can learn to make this happen, are:

Create excel sheets, use time tracking tools and fully utilize the project management tools to record what you are doing. As you have asked for at least 2 months or three, your client must understand what you are doing it this meantime to make them rank higher.

As you will proceed in the project, your needs and project’s understanding will keep on changing. Keep your client in the loop to understand whether you are in the right direction or not. After all, they know their audience and customers well.

Keeping the track of progress and changes will help you in making a dynamic and workable plan.

Though the questionnaire, as suggested in a previous step, may help you a lot, but documenting the client’s expectations and requirements can help you understand everything better. If you are taking proper notes and documenting it all, explaining the project to your colleagues or team won’t be a tough task. Overall, it will help in creating a better level of awareness about the project in your organization.

Your clients must be from various industries and backgrounds. Their needs, customers, products, services, and expectations will always differ. To satisfy them and come up with the desired results, your Local SEO Agency needs to understand everything clearly.

Analyse client’s industry and end-user behavior thoroughly to prepare a better strategy. As deeper as you will get the understanding of their business, you will be able to deliver more efficient results in lesser time. From their products to services, B2B scenario to B2C scenario, market to target segments and from client’s definition of success to his conversion expectations – there is a lot you could work upon.

Conveying every project related information to the client will help you in getting regular feedbacks. With these feedbacks, you will be able to understand, whether or not your team is meeting client’s expectations or not. By gauging the dissatisfaction early, you will have more time to take actions as required. It is often that client’s satisfaction level will increase if you adopt for this practice.

Your clients are your first resource. They can tell you the current situation of the market, they have a lot of insights about their competitors, and they can load you with all the necessary data you must be looking for. Why not utilize them instead of wandering for collecting a whole lot of tough-to-gather data?

Hiring happens if your client finds you worth their money. If a Local SEO Business doesn’t find you experienced or quality-driven, it is very much probable (100% in most of the cases) that they won’t hire you.

The only method, through which you can prove your market value and efficiency, is:

There is no other choice for you. You will have to bring more traffic, more conversions, more leads and every good thing ‘more’. Then only, your client, who is a small business owner, will value your work and remain happy.

At the end, everything depends on the results and thereby, on your skills. Your Local SEO Company or team need to showcase the best proficiencies and certifications in order to impress clients with work and qualifications. To run a campaign or project well, your team should the best Local SEO strategies and methods for the clients.

Some of those Local SEO methods are:

A good team is necessary to understand your client’s all needs and act according to them. Hence, better will be to stay careful while hiring and double careful while training fresher employees. Their mistakes may cost you a lot. You can train with right data, such as:

In the case of Local SEO, long-tail keywords can bring you the cake while short-tail keywords do not perform that well. Adding the name of location(s) is variation helps in building a better online and search engine reputation. You should try understanding what a user may query and thereafter, pick the right set of long-tail keywords to seal the deals.

As told earlier, client’s industry and end-users should be at your agency’s watch list. By keeping your keen eyes set on them, you will be able to render better results.

Do you know what the best way of doing so is?

It’s obviously the competitors and changing market dynamics. As client’s competitors are already gaining good results, you can learn it from them to bring in the clients.

Using the right mix of on-page SEO and off-page SEO can definitely help you in capturing more traffic. Hence, your campaigning method, social media channels, guest posting efforts, and every such practice should be set before you actually do anything. Also, set the frequency of publishing content for each of these channels.

Innovation is interesting and therefore, useful for your Local SEO Agency too. If your company is able to engage the end-user through likable stuff and posts, sales and leads will start sprouting on their own.

It is required that you keep a check on what you and your team are doing. Take a break to self-inspect. Analysis where you are in the game and what you are lacking, do it time to time. By keeping a check on your SEO actions, you will be able to control them better.

A few more Local SEO aspects, you should care about, are:

• Customer Reviews
  
• Addition of Local Business to Google Maps
  
• Optimization of client’s website for voice searches
  
• Figuring out the ways to keep the Mobile end-users happy
  
• Getting Citations
  

With a recent update, Google has increased the importance of Google My Business direction listing for local businesses. No social channel can compete with it at the moment. Explain your client why is it important for them to be there and make sure that your client’s all information is updated in the GMB directory. Provide complete information about the services and locations in other directories too.

That’s easy, right?

Disappointed a client is way easier than keeping one happy. So, your SEO experts could read these points to make sure they do not disappoint the client by making such mistakes. Read what could disappoint your clientele:

• Not telling about the penalties or bad consequences, caused due to Local SEO actions.
  
• Not conveying the leads to them (after all why are we working so hard, huh?)
  
• Showing no results after weeks of work.
  
• Posting bad content on their company’s behalf.
  
• Downgrading their site’s ranking on local searches.
  

Not disappointing is also satisfying for the clients; Just saying!

• Google has reduced the number of local search results from 3 to 7.
  
• Meta-descriptions are almost double the previous length now.
  
• Google My Business is getting preference, not the Google+ and other social media platforms.
  

Wondering why are we repeating all these things, which your SEO experts already know?

Here’s the point to ponder then –

With these and search engines’ other ever-changing algorithms, the competition is too tough in the Local SEO domain. At the same time, it is a proven fact the conversion is multi-times better in this SEO genre. So, keeping a watch on your clients’ expectations and fulfilling them without a single failure is the only way to succeed.

Follow our suggested methods to fulfill your clients’ expectations or talk to our Local SEO experts through the comment box, if you have any query to resolve.