How many SEO clients do you handle?
-
I work in a small web & design agency who started offering SEO 2 yrs ago as it made sense due to them building websites. There have been 2 previous people to me and I now work there 3 days a week and they also have a junior who knew nothing before she started working for us. She mainly works for me.
My question is, how many clients do you think would be reasonable to work on? We currently have around 55 and I have been working there for nearly 5 months now and haven't even got to half of the sites to do some work on.
I've told them the client list is way too big and we should only have around 15 clients max. However they don't want to lose the money from the already paying clients so won't get rid of any and keep adding new ones
Their systems were a mess and had no reporting or useful software so I had to investiagte and deploy that, along with project management software. Their analytics is also a mess and have employed a contractor to help sort that out too. It's like they were offering SEO services but had no idea or structure to what they did. Meta descriptions were cherry picked which ones to be done, so say 50/60 on a site not filled in. So it's not like I have 45 or so well maintained accounts. They're all a mess. Then the latest 10 new ones are all new sites so All need a lot of work.
I'm starting to feel incredibly overwhelmed and oppressed by it all and wanted to see what other SEO professionals thought about it. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
-
I am saying this as a business owner and as a former employee who has foot prints on his back....
The business owner should be well aware of the number of clients, the amounts that they are charging, and the number of people who are on staff to do this work. It seems to me that a choice is being made to collect payments rather than to provide service.
Some people might not like what I am going to say, but if I was the employee here, I would find another job rather than work in an effort to improve this company. Their actions are likely deliberate.
You have a very generous attitude and ethic that deserves a better work situation. I hope that you discover an employer who deserves you!
I wish you all the best.
-
Thanks to everyone that has responded so far.
I have already stated about it being too many clients and they said very similar to what Miriam said but there has been no sign of reduction in clients only an increase!
We had another email today asking why a site isn't performing well. We're going to have a meeting but my boss isn't there (on holiday) but will strongly make my points based on the above to the others.
I need them to take this seriously as the bad reputation thing looks like it could be happening as so many sites haven't even had basics done right and if these clients go elsewhere this will be easily discovered.
I can understand it's hard to let go of clients (like relationships!) but I really need them to take action If this mess.
I have been looking into copywriters and link building externally today also.
It was meant to be an nice little job 3 days a week but I have turned into an SEO Manager with a junior! You won't even believe I'm only an a contract too! Although I highly suspect they'll want me to stay on
-
"it does sound to me like your agency has enlarged its client stable without making the necessary hires to enlarge the staff"
The agency may have a misguided understanding of how SEO works and thinks you can add a few tags and easy-to-acquire backlinks and their clients' sites will magically skyrocket to the top of search results and convert. You might have to do some education at the same time. I'd prepare some simplified and relevant examples to try to get your points across more convincingly.
Good luck!
-
Hi There,
I really like Donna's answer, and I think, on an even more basic level, the fact that you are feeling overwhelmed and oppressed by the workload is a clear indicator that the agency has bit off more than it can chew.
Unless the business was doing consulting ONLY (in which case 3 hours per month of consulting for each client might be tenable), it does sound to me like your agency has enlarged its client stable without making the necessary hires to enlarge the staff. A larger agency could certainly be handling 50 clients, but your company is small. The business sounds like it is at an important turning point at which it should consider:
-
Reducing the client list
-
Determining to take fewer but more lucrative clients
-
Determining to continue to grow the client stable, but only after making the necessary hires to grow the agency
I'd be completely frank about this with your agency - let them know it's causing you genuine stress because you don't feel you can deliver quality because the staff is being over-tasked. If the agency is committed to building a respected brand and lasting success, wise decisions are necessary here, and you could be instrumental in helping to protect the brand from earning a reputation for poor quality work. Good luck!
-
-
This is a really good answer.
Don't allow your clients to learn how many hours per month they are getting.
-
Let's just do the math.
Let's say you can productively work 8 hours a day, 21 days a month. That's 168 hours total.
Divide that by 55 clients and you get 3 hours a month.
I haven't added in any extra time for your "junior" as he/she is probably already using up some of your 168 hours as it is in managing, mentoring, training time.
There is no way you can achieve anything measurable on 3 hours a month, regardless of what the client has signed up for, regardless of the role and responsibilities you've been assigned. Furthermore, if you flip it around the other way, would you want to accept a client that was only willing to pay you 3 hours a month with the expectation that you could "move the needle"? I know I wouldn't.
-
Same question for you Kris, How many clients/website can a single person handle? of course Im talking just SEO campaigns
-
Im agree with you, just to know your opinion, How many clients/website can a single person handle? of course Im talking just SEO campaigns
-
50-60 SEO clients is a healthy amount. But of those 50-60, how many are full SEO campaigns? In the SEO world, there are multiple levels of "SEO"...from Google My Business management to heavy link building. In my opinion, you can effectively handle 50-60 SEO clients, but it depends on the package they are signed up for.
Link Building, Google My Business Optimization, Directory Listing, Citation Listings, Guest Blogging, On Page Optimization, on page content, blogging, internal link errors. If you are implementing a full SEO campaign and not delivering, ultimately, you will only frustrate your client and lose them.
Organizing your time and communicating in a transparent manner are the most important factors when running an SEO business. Besides knowing how to implement SEO of course.
-
I personally believe that that is far too many clients for one person (or two people with the person training under you). If they are paying you for SEO services and you haven't touched some of them in 5 months, that's a problem. These companies want to see results, and if no work is being done and there's no difference in their rankings, traffic, etc., then they will most likely leave your company. Retention is very important and it looks like the way things are structured there that you will certainly start to have clients leave...
-
In my case to make a really good job 10 sites are my number. I mean is not just some on page basic optimization. keyword reserach, post optimization, linkbuilding and so on. So if have to handle 45 websites in a month and your team is you and a newbie, well my friend you are in a searius problem.
In think a good team, needs be conformed as this way 1 developer (to see technical aspect) 1 Designer, 1 Social Media, 3 seo specialist and the leader, I think with that Team you can handle until 100 websites. In the other hand you need to add some premium tools to make the work more efficient. 1 Tools for reports (such as mix panel), I use moz and semrush for SEO, Mailchimp and Infusionsoft for email, Unbounce for landing pages, Wordpress for blogs, shopify for ecommerce and Limelight CRM
By the way this is just my perspective of how small agency needs to be
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What's your proudest accomplishment in regards to SEO?
After many years in the industry, you come to realize a few things. One of of the biggest pain points for us at web daytona was being able to give clients a quick keyword ranking cost estimation. After multiple trial and error and relying on API data from one of the most reliable SEO softwares in our industry, we were able to develop an SEO tool that allows us to quickly and accurately get the estimated cost for a given keyword (s) using multiple variables. Most agencies can relate to that story. It’s something my colleagues and I at Web Daytona have been through before. Finding the cost and amount of time needed to rank for a keyword is a time consuming process. That’s why it’s a common practice to sell SEO packages of 5-10 keywords for about $1000-2000 / month. The problem is not all keywords are equally valuable, and most clients know this. We constantly get questions from clients asking: “how much to rank for this specific keyword?” It’s difficult to answer that question with a pricing model that treats the cost of ranking every keyword equally. So is the answer to spend a lot more time doing tedious in-depth keyword research? If we did we could give our clients more precise estimates. But being that a decent proposal can take as long as 2-5 hours to make, and agency life isn’t exactly full of free time, that wouldn’t be ideal. That’s when we asked a question. What if we could automate the research needed to find the cost of ranking keywords? We looked around for a tool that did, but we couldn’t find it. Then we decided to make it ourselves. It wasn’t going to be easy. But after running an SEO agency for over a decade, we knew we had the expertise to create a tool that wouldn’t just be fast and reliable, it would also be precise. Fast forward to today and we’re proud to announce that The Keyword Cost Estimator is finally done. Now we’re releasing it to the public so other agencies and businesses can use it too. You can see it for yourself here. Keyword-Rank-Cost-Ectimator-Tool-by-Web-Daytona-Agency.png
Local Website Optimization | | WebDaytona0 -
How to approach SEO for a business with three distinct focus areas
I have a client who has asked for the development and optimisation of three websites for a business located at one address. They offer specialised skin care, have a make-up artistry division and also a luxury portraiture/photographic service offered to clients. I have suggested one website, based on all I have read in this community (Possum etc.). Their concern is that they will seem like a "master of none" and envision three sites interlinked. Before I push back and categorically say that this is a poor idea, I wanted to gain some insight from those of you who may have dealt with this scenario before. I need to explain how one domain can be structured to present all three these areas as distinct, given that the home page will speak to all three. Any ideas regarding site structure and optimisation strategy would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Local Website Optimization | | flashie0 -
Even after doing every possible thing required for SEO my client's website is not coming on top.can you tell me where i am lacking?
_ Hi team_ I have been working on a website called signboards.co.in since 4 months.it was not in top 100 but now below 50 for 2-3 keywords.even after submitting in many directories after competitor analysis moz shows only one external link in its link metrics.apart from this every possible thing required for SEO is done in a proper way,but still it is not giving results.can you help me out?all my other clients work is going good except this one.can you please let me know what is going wrong with my project?As the project submission date is near i need your help as soon as possible. Thanks Najia jehan
Local Website Optimization | | Najia-ali0 -
Best SEO Option for Multi-site Set-up
Hi Guys, We have a Business to Business Software Website. We are Global business but mainly operate in Ireland, UK and USA. I would like your input on best practice for domain set-up for best SEO results in local markets. Currently we have: example.com (no market specified) and now we are creating: example.com/ie (Ireland) example.com/uk (united kingdom) example.com/us (united states) My question is mainly based on the example.com/us website - should we create example.com/us for the US market OR just use example.com for the US the market? If the decision is example.com/us should we build links to the directory or the main .com website. To summarize there is two questions: 1. Advise on domain set-up 2. Which site to build links to if example.com/us is the decision. Thank you in advance, Glen.
Local Website Optimization | | DigitalCRO0 -
Local SEO Best Practise?
We are planning to localize our website by launching CCTLD. But there is a little confusion about some aspects, which are: Should we track location and take our visitors to their native domain? Or do we need to take our visitors to .com domain and show a Popup, if they want to visit the native region website? What is the best case study for localization?
Local Website Optimization | | UmairGadit0 -
Image URLs changed 3 times after using a CDN - How to Handle for SEO?
Hi Mozzers,
Local Website Optimization | | emerald
Hoping for your advice on how to handle the SEO effects an image URL change, that changed 3 times, during the course of setting up a CDN over a month period, as follows: (URL 1) - Original image URL before CDN:www.mydomain.com/images/abc.jpg (URL 2) - First CDN URL (without CNAME alias - using WPEngine & their own CDN):
username.net-dns.com/images/abc.jpg (URL 3) - Second CDN URL (with CNAME alias - applied 3 weeks later):
cdn.mydomain.com/images/abc.jpg When we changed to URL 2, our image rankings in the Moz Tool Pro Rankings dropped from 80% to 5% (the one with the little photo icons). So my questions for recovery are: Do I need to add a 301 redirect/Canonical tag from the old image URL 1 & 2 to URL 3 or something else? Do I need to change my image sitemap to use cdn.mydomain.com/images/abc.jpg instead of www.? Thanks in advance for your advice.0 -
Nominet have made the geographic new TLD available for UK. How will this affect SEO?
Nominet have made a new TLD available, the .uk TLD. Some might argue that this is a cynical move by Nominet to get more money out of British businesses, but either way, we need to decide how we handle this. As I see it we have 4 options. 1. Do nothing - At the moment, only websites can register their .uk domain. That won't last for ever though, and eventually, if we don't register it, someone else will.
Local Website Optimization | | Stewart_SEO
2. Register a domain but do nothing with it.
3. Register a domain and simply redirect it to the existing .co.uk domain. I suspect this is the best option.
4. Register the .uk domain and redirect the .co.uk domain to the new domain. From a technical point of view, what is the best option? For businesses that have multi-lingual sites the 4th appears the best option but why do we need to act when we do not even know the SEO value of any of this, and where Google sit regarding the new British TLD?1 -
Will subdomains with duplicate content hurt my SEO? (solutions to ranking in different areas)
My client has offices in various areas of the US, and we are working to have each location/area rank well in their specific geographical location. For example, the client has offices in Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas & St Louis. Would it be best to: Set up the site structure to have an individual page devoted to each location/area so there's unique content relevant to that particular office? This keeps everything under the same, universal domain & would allow us to tailor the content & all SEO components towards Chicago (or other location). ( example.com/chicago-office/ ; example.com/atlanta-office/ ; example.com/dallas-office/ ; etc. ) Set up subdomains for each location/area...using the basically the same content (due to same service, just different location)? But not sure if search engines consider this duplicate content from the same user...thus penalizing us. Furthermore, even if the subdomains are considered different users...what do search engines think of the duplicate content? ( chicago.example.com ; atlanta.example.com ; dallas.example.com ; etc. ) 3) Set up subdomains for each location/area...and draft unique content on each subdomain so search engines don't penalize the subdomains' pages for duplicate content? Does separating the site into subdomains dilute the overall site's quality score? Can anyone provide any thoughts on this subject? Are there any other solutions anyone would suggest?
Local Website Optimization | | SearchParty0