What to do When Your SEO Client Hates Your Content Ideas?

All SEOs have been there before, no matter what you propose or how much you pay an expert to write a great piece of content, your client never thinks it is worthy of placement on their website. There are a number of different reasons a client may see your content ideas this way which we will discuss. However, for as many reasons not to post something on your site there are an equal amount of counterpoints. As SEOs our job is to convey this message in a way so that the client sees value, allowing us to do our job and bring results, creating a long term relationship and client for life.

Reasons Your Content Ideas Aren’t Getting Past the Gatekeeper

Hyper-niches

Some clients operate in such a specialized industry that as an SEO or content writer, you will never have the expertise to generate valuable content to the searchers. Finding writers for these niches can cause your margin to disappear completely, forcing you to raise prices before you even get going. They’re worried about misinformation being posted on their site before they can correct it and risk embarrassment to legit customers or the competition.

No SEO Priority Internally

No matter what business the client is in, they will need to provide some notes for content creation. Additionally, they usually want to approve all posts before going live with any new information on the site. Having no internal contact with a priority on SEO can cause a backlog of content pieces waiting for posting but never getting the final approval.

You

This is usually the cause. The way you present the data and the opportunity to rank is not clearly laying out the time-cost benefit. SEOs constantly get lost in the ambiguity of search engine algorithms and can over explain certain metrics or not provide enough context on the ones that matter.

Solutions

Hyper-niches

If your client operates in a hyper niche like a specific medicine or law, getting good content up and then building links can take so much time, effort and money that you risk losing the client by not delivering in a reasonable period of time. Instead of shelling out to have a 5,000 word blog post written that takes up half your budget and will take months to rank, consider leveraging the staff at this business. If there are any interns or lower level employees that show promise, these could be your keys to content success.

The following are a list of content ideas that a touch point inside the business can provide you which you can then turn into a SEO masterpiece with some on-site work and link building:

• FAQs - Easily add hundreds of applicable words to a page, all while helping your clients navigate your site and allowing Google understand what you do
  
• Case Studies - Take a recent job and turn it into free content
  
• Location pages - Create a page that encompasses everything the business does and build location specific pages and start building local links
  
• Resource pages - What information do customers of this business need? Word definitions? A list of government links? A list of medical studies?
  

No SEO Priority Internally

This is the hardest of the three to overcome because a lot of it lies out of your control. If there is no SEO priority internally you need to have an “intervention” style meeting and let the client know that a workflow for content needs to be approved otherwise efforts on all sides are wasted and you are better off bowing out of the project.

Tools like Surfer SEO can help put your new content pieces into easily read and transmitted SEO focused documents that can do a lot of the hand holding for approval.

We have also heard of agencies who have stipulations in their contracts that allow them to post content on the client's site within X number of days.

You

This can really be the cause of both issues above. If the client doesn't believe you can put out relevant info in their hyper-niche that falls on you. If the client is unmotivated by SEO, again, that falls on you as the service provider.

The best way to convey your message early on in the onboarding process of this pesky client is to show real world examples of what you have created and how it has brought users to that site which ultimately converted into sales. If you are new at SEO you can use tools like ones we have discussed in this blog to show an example of someone else who has used content similar to that which you are proposing to propel their business.

Metrics Business Owners Care About (in our experience):

• Revenue/conversion rate
  
• Users
  
• Time on page
  
• Bounce rate
  
• Word count range to rank on page 1
  
• Backlink count to rank on page 1
  
• Image count to rank on page 1
  
• Value of position 1 and 10 in CPC
  

SEO is not a game of hitting numbers like word count, backlinks, and search volume. But you’re not selling your services to SEOs. The last 4 bullets in the list above are some of the best metrics you can use to convince someone a piece of content is worth pursuing. Use these to get the ball rolling and then introduce things like authority of each link and heading structure after the client is excited and see the benefit in this new content.

Conclusion

At the end of the day if you aren’t creating content regularly that has a purpose, your SEO efforts will struggle to amount to much. There is often a fountain of convincing information that lies in the sites of the competition. Combine all 3 tactics above for success: present the information through a value lens, build a workflow with the client that works for everyone, and find a touch point inside the business that can help move these SEO efforts along.