SEO Training For Clients: 5 Reasons Knowledge Beats Ignorance

Magicians don’t reveal tricks, publicists don’t share contacts and consultants don’t teach. Those are the industry standards that has kept all three in business. I get it. I can appreciate how keeping people in the dark keeps them coming back as reoccuring business.

This is obviously the part where I disagree with the mentality that consultants, or at least SEO consultants, can train themselves out of a job.

Educated clients are not a threat; they are an opportunity. Read on to see why this is true (and not some Jerry Maguire-like nervous breakdown).

Advantages of SEO Training for Clients

1. Buyer’s Remorse. Buyers regret purchases when cost exceeds perceived value. Remember your first car? That unsafe-at-any-speed money pit taught so many lessons in value. For subsequent purchases, experience, knowledge and a new appetite for consumer research were used to select a vehicle that provided value–and you happily paid more for it. SEO training provides all of that insight without the hard lessons (like keeping tow truck business cards in your wallet). Training gives clients experience, knowledge and research tools to appreciate the value of SEO and how to measure its ROI.
2. Taking Care of Business. Every SEO project starts with babysteps: keyword research, on-page optimization, 404 redirection, etc. Those are a given. But the speed at which those to-dos are crossed off depends on the client-consultant relationship and how quickly it can implement changes. An educated client knows enough about SEO to expedite the little things so more time is saved for the bigger and better, which pays dividends for both parties later when reports in Google Analytics show traffic, conversions and online revenue climbing toward the upper right of your computer screen.
3. Trust me, I’m a SEO. After the Optimization 101 work is done, and it is time for more complex practices and strategies, educated clients trust that teacher knows best, even when things exceed their expertise. Plus, when it comes time for a full explanation, their foundation in SEO makes it easier to discuss advanced technical issues. “Anchor text recla-what?” can be tough to explain when starting from scratch. Without a working knowledge, those conversations would require one whiteboard, two pots of coffee and three focused hours of “So, then the search crawls the blue text…”
4. More-the-Merrier. Training the Online Marketing Marketing Manager (or whoever works with the SEO consultant) is a huge help. Huge! But what about the CMO? IT Coordinator? Site developer? Each point of contact with an understanding of SEO is another asset to the project. Ideal clients have developers that grasp rel=canonical, content writers that include images with alt text, janitors that monitor domain authority… Well, maybe the last one is excessive, but you get the idea. Company-wide buy-in and successful inbound marketing campaigns are always correlated in my experience.
5. Jerry’s (Idealistic) Mission Statement. SEO Training -> SEO Knowledge -> Optimized Content -> Superior Indexation -> Improved Search Experience -> Better Internet for All Mankind. SEO training makes the Internet a better, faster, safer place to share and search for information. We all must do our part. Do yours by learning more at our SEO training page.

Do you agree with Jerry and me? Let me know in the comments below.