SEO: invest a couple of hours in customer retention

Almost all SEO companies, companies involved in contextual advertising, display advertising and other similar services to attract traffic to the site, have one big problem. This problem is customers who are dissatisfied even when all obligations under the contract are fulfilled 5+. Managers have to essentially re-sell the service every month, and each time it becomes more difficult. The most unpleasant thing is that you can’t argue with the customer’s arguments - there are no orders from the site. Let's talk about solving this problem.

First, let's deal with the reasons
(we look from the point of view of the head of an SEO company)

Is there a problem in the work of the advertiser-optimizer (production does not pull)? On the contrary, he will provide hundreds of pages of reports confirming that he did everything great (but where else in seo?). The position of the site in the search is simply sky-high. Advertisements at minimum rates on special placement positions. Even targeted traffic to the site is plentiful and stable (although under the contract you report only for positions, and you can score on the volume and quality of traffic).

Is the problem with the client side managers who process requests and work with buyers?I really want to appeal to this, but it's not the same! To work with buyers, orders, letters and calls from these same buyers are needed, which are not there. And let the customer, a reserved person, but he openly declares that your services cost him more than the site brings money. And in general, he is no longer thinking about changing the agency, but about completely abandoning advertising on the Internet.

Is the problem in your management that works with the customer? Again not true. Give them a bonus, since in this state of affairs they manage to keep him on the subscriber for a month. Once the SEOs kick in, so that not only the site is well searched, but also the traffic is targeted.

So what is it? In fact, you can identify the reasons for zero (or close to that) conversion in a couple of hours. Since no one is to blame, take another look at the site from which everyone is waiting for orders (in a smart way, this is called an audit site, or rather, an express audit).

Looked? You can usually be scared in this place

It's amazing how much advertising budgets are wasted promoting bad sites. But even if at first glance everything is fine, you need to pay attention to the following points:

1. Is traffic distributed correctly across pages? Are people coming to the right pages? Do users find what they are looking for on the page, or do they have to roam the site? I have seen many times how all the traffic goes to obscure articles hidden deep in the bowels of the site, or, as an option, to the main page. Minus one.

2. Is it obvious what is sold on each of the pages of the site, what does the company offer in general, what actions are expected from the user? If in 5 seconds the user does not understand what's what, he will most likely leave. Minus two.

3. What is the overall impression of the site? Oddly enough, many serious corporate sites look like warez portals or sites of mediocre psychics.

Thanks to a freelance student, the director's aesthetic tastes, or, in this case, a design template that saved your client a couple of months of promotional budget (at best!) at the expense of development costs. But for at least three months, the money for promotion after that was simply thrown away (awesome savings!). Rarely, this problem comes up before the third month, when the client starts to sound the alarm. For some reason, SEOs are absolutely insensitive to the appearance of promoted sites and their content (I can even guess why). And the project manager is more concerned about fulfilling the contract. In short, minus three.

Of course, it's a shame, but there will be only one cure - to redo the site again. In whole or in part - depends on the neglect of each specific case.

4. Is company contact information easily accessible? Sometimes you have to dig through the floor of the site to find how to contact. At a minimum, the phone number and the feedback form should be visible at first sight (on the header, for example). Otherwise, minus four.

5. Transparency of site navigation. Check whether it is easy to find information on the site about a product or service that is of interest to visitors. One day a client came to us for promotion, whose clients (judging by the website statistics) tried long and hard to find something in a catalog with a dozen levels of nesting and half of empty pages. Quite desperate, visitors went to the search pages and site maps (haha, links on the header, in the most prominent place). So, the sitemap duplicated the main menu of five items. And the search didn't work. Definitely minus five.

6. We read texts. If the site has text that will suit any company in this industry (and sometimes texts that will suit any company at all), or seo footcloths, or the copywriter did not understand for whom he was writing, there will be no sales. Therefore, alas, the texts will have to be rewritten to be interesting, selling, understandable and necessary for the potential buyer. And let the optimizer get out as best he can, because positions in the search for a site with bad texts will not give anything. It will be minus six.

7. The quality of the presentation of services and goods on the site, including photographs, readability of tables, etc. As clichéd as it sounds, a good photo alone can sell a product. Even without text. I will not count the cons further, and so it is clear. OK?

8. Is the order button clearly visible on the product and service page? Is it easy to understand price information, or pricing principles? There are a lot of sites in Runet where there are product catalogs, but there are no prices in these catalogs. Their owners apparently expect the buyer to call or write to find out the price. Only here 90% of buyers are too lazy to do this. To me, definitely.

9. If the site has a shopping cart, order forms, etc. - we check. Fuck-ups can be embarrassingly funny. And in general, the refusal of the client at the stage of the order is the most useless throwing away of the budget to attract him.