Give Your SEO Partner a Hand!

Writing by Nick Stamoulis

In my experience, the best SEO vendor-client relationships are the ones where the site owner treats their SEO company like a partner, and not just a service provider. And being partners with someone means doing your part! Your SEO partner is there to offer expertise, knowledge, advice and guidance to give you the best SEO campaign possible, but a little help on your end can go a long way to taking your campaign to the next level.

Here are 4 things a business owner or marketing manager can do to ensure their SEO Partner can do their job:

1. Implement onsite SEO recommendations.
I’ve worked with many clients over the years that don’t implement a single onsite SEO recommendation (which is their prerogative) I give them and 6 months later they want to know why their website isn’t doing better in the SERPs. You can’t hold your SEO partner accountable when you don’t follow through on your end! If you don’t have the internal bandwidth to implement the changes yourself, chances are your SEO partner has a developer on their end that can take care of things for you. A well optimized website should be the first step in any SEO campaign because what’s the point of sending quality traffic with your link building to a site that isn’t ready to handle them?

2. Be on guard for link building opportunities.
Even the best SEO partner in the world can use a little help finding link building opportunities every now and then. The Internet is a big place and there’s a lot of spam and rubble to comb through to find those great sources of links you want and need in your link profile. If you stumble across one in your day to day then let your SEO partner know about it! Maybe a blog you read put out a call for guest bloggers; maybe you found a niche forum that is worth investigating. If you aren’t sure if it’s a good spot to get a link or not don’t just dismiss it—let your SEO partner decide and take it from there!

3. Keep the content coming.
If you haven’t also outsource your content creation to your SEO partner than be sure to keep them supplied with a steady stream of quality content that they can use for link building, content marketing, and social media marketing purposes. Do you have a company blog? Make sure you’ve got at least one post going live each week so your SEO partner can leverage it to help your SEO. Let them know when a new white paper or webinar goes live so they can share and promote it. Got a press release going out? Give them a peek before it goes live so they can optimize the content and add a few links with anchor text back to your site.
Without content to propel it along, most SEO campaigns will start to plateau after a while. Fresh content keeps things moving and gives your SEO partner more resources to work with!

4. Keep your SEO partner in the loop.
So many client-SEO partner problems can be solved with good communication. The more in the loop your SEO partner is the better your rapport will be. Let them know what’s going on internally—are you about to get a new VP of Marketing that wants to change directions with your messaging? Are you thinking about launching a new website? Do you need to add more content to your website? The more your SEO partner knows the better their recommendations will be and the stronger your SEO campaign will become.