Clients Keep Googling Themselves

[GuardianOwlDigital]

Hi, I have a common problem with my clients where they google their own business name or keywords they want to rank for and freak out when they don't show up on the first page of results. The same is true for my paid search clients. Is there a good way I can explain to them how Googleing themselves is not the best way to know if they are performing well? If there is an article out there that explains it that I can share that would be even better.

[Moreleads]

Hi Jenna,

In relation to the client searching their Business name, that shouldn´t be a big issue (unless they have chosen highly competitive generic words for their business name like "low interest loans") as EGOL mentioned they should rank fairly fast for this.

For adwords you can show them this http://www.tbkcreative.com/why-you-shouldnt-google-your-own-ads/ .  Many times though the clients will still continue to search anyway.  One of my clients only stopped after i showed him in his account that the keyword he was constantly searching had a ctr of 4% where all others in the account were more close to 20% and that it was the only one with a Quality score 3 points lower than the rest.  After this i showed him the results of him having stopped searching and he hasn´t restarted.  In this case though we were talking about 15-20 searches a day minimum.  Sporadich searches shouldn´t impact that much.

You need to also setup a regular reporting where you can show the results and this should be part of the inicial agreement.  Here you can show either data from analytics, GSC, Adwords, Moz etc... that will assure them there are actual results from your work. And be very clear from the start about what they can expect.

[EGOL]

their own business name

In almost every instance page one organic position should be possible in a reasonable amount of time... and if they are a local business the time required for them to be in the #1 organic position should be quite short.

keywords they want to rank for

Some keywords have brutal competition and in many cases page 1 organic rankings will either be impossible for the business or so costly that acquiring them will not make economic sense.   The problem that many clients face is that they have hired an SEO who doesn't really know what is required to attain the desired ranking, charges the customer a certain amount per month, and the SEO does not have the ability to pull of the desired ranking even if the budget was 5x as much.  In these cases the client is left in anticipation that goes unfulfilled.

So, the SEO needs to:  1) know what the client wants; 2) determine the business reward for acquiring it; then, 3) explain the probability, the cost, the timeframe for acquiring it (making disclaimers that aggressive efforts of other businessess in the space can move all of these goalposts at anytime).  Then the client is fully informed and they can search search search with little concern to the SEO that they are looking for to deliver results.

[iugac]

Hi Jenna,

in terms of organic search, you should probably explain to them your current positions for all the tracked keywords and your long-term strategy for gaining advantage. From my experience, clients will never stop searching for what they want and I would argue that this is not a bad thing. However, you need to make them understand that you are in control of what you do and the timeframe in which you expect to have better results.

In terms of paid advertising, you can just give the official tools to check what they want. For example, for AdWords you can point them to https://support.google.com/adwords/troubleshooter/1711301?hl=en. They already trust Google's brand so they will accept their response much faster.

Best of luck!