Seo+for+agencies+2014

1Creative Commons 2014 www.linkdex.com Some Rights Reserved
SEONOW. #SEONOW

SEONOW. #SEONOW
Welcome to SEO Now for Agencies
If you’re an agency, SEO Now is exciting. It is exciting because Organic Search
is the channel consumers turn to most often, all the way through the purchase
funnel, and your clients need this business critical channel to perform.
Because the number of interactions customers have with brands via Organic
Search is much higher than most other channels, the importance of the channel
for brand building and reputation management are also being talked about and
becoming better understood.
The moment for brands to seize this opportunity is now. SEO has come of age.
However, Enterprise SEO is complex and presents a diverse set of challenges.
Having the right agencies to navigate the challenges necessary to move from a
market challenger, to a market leader is key.
This book captures some of the challenges of Enterprise SEO for agencies and
shows how Linkdex can support you to grow your clients’ traffic, revenues, and
brand equity.
Matt Roberts
Co-founder and Chief Strategy Ofﬁcer
Linkdex

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Dennis Goedegebuure
Head of Global SEO, Airbnb
“SEO is no longer about optimizing for the search
engines, but for people. It’s about interactions and
engagement from people with the search engine
as a means of growing the organic channel.”

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The Agency SEO Journey
Working with a client follows a typical journey. From RFPs, responses,
pitching, and the day-to-day management of an account - search agencies
need to balance a range of objectives across a large book of clients.
It can be a delicate set of operations to get right, and it’s important to
properly understand the brand landscape with regard to organic search,
and to optimize relationships with clients.
Negotiation
The RFP
The Response
Pre-meet
Business development Schedule
The Pitch
GO!
Onboarding
Ongoing processes
“SEO Now is as much about optimizing Agency-Client
operations as any of the technical elements of SEO. By
optimizing agency processes you can ensure both you and
your clients succeed”.
Matt Roberts,
Chief Strategy Officer,
Linkdex

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The RFP
Here’s the thing about RFPs. Putting together a great response tailored
specifically for a particular brand takes time and investment. With only one
prize to offer, coming in second - while fantastic for building relationships
- amounts to a rather expensive exercise in networking.
No client ever tells an agency they were miles off -
it’s always a case of coming in a ‘close second’.
So on one side, agenciesare faced with committinga largeamountof budget
and resource to commit to a win. On the other, they face the possibility of
getting nothing but a ‘thanks but no thanks’ for their efforts. Sometimes
you might even be proposing the best solution, but a competitor was able
to offer a cheaper service or day rate. With this in mind, qualifying the right
RFPs and spending resources efficiently is crucial to any agency’s business.

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10 Considerations for Qualifying RFPs
1
Are you certain you can meet the
brief? Is there a reasonable budget,
and are the goals achievable?
2
Are the timescales generous
enough? Sometimes you might
get an RFP on short notice - is
there enough time to do it justice?
3
Why was an RFP issued at all?
Is the client unhappy with their
current Agency or is this part of a
mandatory cycle or procurement
process?
4
Is there evidence that you’ll have
the support of the in-house digital
marketing team? Does the request
seem overly procurement led?
5
Do you get the sense that they see
an agency as a commodity, or do
they appreciate the value a leading
SEO agency could bring?
6
Do they have sensible yet ambitious
growth targets? Growth you feel you
can achieve.
7
What are the people like? Do you
know, or know of them, and do you
get the feeling that they are ready to
do great work?
8
Istheretherightratioofbrandbenefit
to agency margin? It will depend on
the client and the opportunity, but
ideally the brand should understand
that agencies need to make margins
just as they do.
9
Do you like their ethics and corporate
social responsibility? In the era of
social business, this can be very
important.
10
And last but not least, is the brand
exciting? Because if you like them,
so will your team and your audience!

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“
“Every client is unique and I’d like to treat them as such. But in
general, the process is usually the same, that is to get familiar
with stakeholders, the site, goals, and so on. Managing usually
entails weekly or monthly status meetings to get on the same
page, as well as a separate one for reporting on goals and KPIs.
We always look for opportunities to introduce new offerings or
technologies to clients along the way.”
Jordan Kasteler
Senior SEO Manager
Red Door

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7 Elements of a Winning Response
You’ve qualified the RFP, assembled an awesome team, committed the
time and resource, and everybody is raring to go and get stuck in to building
and winning response.
The response is an incredible opportunity to show a brand what the agency
is all about, as well as the solutions you have on offer.
Depending on the brand and the requirements of the RFP, the response
could be highly technical, creative, and often a perfect fusion of both of
these, with lots of concepts, ideas, plans, forecasts, and new technologies
to introduce and communicate to the client. While individual responses
may differ, there are certain elements that should be part of every winning
response.

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“
“Occasionally there can be a misalignment between client
objectives and that which can be potentially harmful to an
SEO strategy. For example, a CMO or marketing director might
do a search on Google and find that they’re not on page one
for a specific keyword. That message gets passed on to the
team, and eventually filters its way, via a RFP, to the pitch stage,
wherein the wrong objectives are actually driving the pitch. In
these cases, if the objective is to rank for a specific keyword,
as opposed to revenues, conversions, or signups - the things
that actually drive the client’s business - at this point things can
actually go quite wrong at pitch level!”
Adam Skalak
iCrossing

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Telling a Compelling Story
There are a lot of reasons why this is so important, but long story short it
is simply the most effective way to get across a message that sticks. We’re
genetically tuned as humans to respond to a narrative better than a bunch
of facts and figures.
So does your response have a beginning, a middle, and an end? Where’s the
conflict? The journey? The resolution?
After all, everyone appreciates a good story and we all tell stories to our
friends and families quite naturally. Getting under the skin of a client
with a story that gets them excited is simply the best way to kick off the
proceedings. They’ll also be more able to tell colleagues the stories they’ve
heard.
1
SEO Now is about winning the moments with consumers that matter the
most. Brands are looking to win these key moments in their markets. How
are you going to use the assets at a brand’s disposal to give them an unfair
advantage?
2 Finding the Unfair Advantage

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This is really about understanding the client, and appreciating the challenges
they have on their side. The better you anticipate these, the more time and
resource that can be spent on the actual solutions.
These two go together. It’s important to present data that shows you
understand the client’s business and their market at both macro, niche, and
hyper-niche levels. Share some details about how you will find opportunities
and grow market share.
Insightful and timely reporting is key to any successful partnership. It helps
clients feel in control as well as being in control. Clients that are in control
invest with confidence.
Helping identify new areas of opportunity can be really exciting for a
client, and showing them what they could be achieving is a great way to
demonstrate current and potential value.
The onboarding process is about both the agency and the client
communicating with one another and creating the best possible synergy
between teams. It can involve getting used to new reports, new KPIs, and
collaborating on technology together. It’s worth going into how these
areas will be developed, and also into some details of the actual campaign
execution. For example, what will the short and medium-term targets look
like? And who will be involved?
Anticipating Objections and Barriers
Data & Confidence
Speed of Response and Reporting
Research and Discovery
3
4
5
6
Onboarding and execution7

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The Perfect Pitch?
Unfortunately, there’s no magic formula for a perfect pitch. Clients might
have a particular scoring criteria, that they may or may not have shared,
or they might not have one at all. Often the right balance lies somewhere
between what the client wants to hear and what they need to be hearing.
Ultimately, a successful pitch depends on starting with the right ingredients,
getting a great team together, and most importantly, correctly identifying
what is really causing the brand problems, and proposing solutions that ring
true with the client.

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Rhea Drysdale
CEO, Outspoken Media
“Keywords are becoming less important. A high
profile brand like Coca-Cola doesn’t need to rank
for a term like ‘soft drink’. But they do need to be
there on their brand term, and they need to be
visible to their consumers at different touchpoints
where their consumers are seeking them.”

SEONOW. #SEONOW
Onboarding, Managing,
and Developing Clients
Onboarding is all about understanding what the client’s current processes
are. What do you need to do to get technical recommendations pushed
through?
It could be that one or more of the teams doesn’t see how SEO should
be part of their day-to-day operations. Or it could be that the client has
a really complicated change request system. In these cases it’s the role of
the agency to find out about how to best go about making changes to
embedded processes.
“There’s normally a huge amount of history and legacy to
consider when onboarding a client; there are often reasons
why things have been done in a particular way and these
need to be properly understood. We need to first consider
the marketing and business objectives and second the more
search specific details.”
Ed Lamb
Propellernet

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“On the whole digital questions have not yet
reached board level. There is very little interest or
knowledge at the higher levels of an organization.
It is surprising how brands continue to separate
theirbusinessesbychannelanddepartmentsinthe
way that they do. The way humans communicate,
the way audiences, and social psychology
operates is not based around a structure like these
departments.”
Sara Clifton
Founder, Search Integration

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Optimizing The Day-To-Day
There are three key ingredients to establishing, delivering and maintaining
effective SEO operations. Smooth campaign management requires a
blended focus on Strategic, Operational and Relationship activities. Getting
this recipe wrong risks enduring bitter accounts, stale relationships, and
burned bridges.
Strategic
Considerations
Relationship
Building
Operational
Management

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Strategic Considerations
Strategic considerations focus on the development of unfair advantage.
Of ensuring that your strategy is ambitious, but pragmatic and achievable.
Understanding the limits of resources, the impact of shifting markets, and
the wider business context. Too much focus here, and nothing ever gets
done. Not enough, and you may look back to find that you’ve been moving
in the wrong direction.
Relationship Building
Relationship building is about stakeholders, collaborators, and wider teams.
Education, open communication channels and integrated working is vital
to successful campaigning. If decision makers don’t trust your vision, it’s
difficult to get sign off on large and long-term strategies. Be sure to balance
client happiness with impacting commercial KPIs, however, to ensure that
you’re making a difference to the bottom line.
Operational Management
Operational management focuses on the practicalities of getting things
done. The technologies, processes, data, decision making, planning,
timelines, and execution. Getting lost in the detail risks a culture of busywork
which doesn’t move the needle - but a lack of planning creates bottlenecks,
risks and confused priorities.
Different agencies, clients and scenarios may weigh these differently. The
focus and needs may change over time, too. There’s no perfect recipe for
everybody. You’ll need to build your own recipe and tweak it over time.

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Managing Change
Delivering effective enterprise SEO as an agency isn’t just about your clients
and ways of working. It’s about your own organization, too. Your culture,
your processes and your teams will influence your clients’ success just as
much as the strategies, recommendations and campaigns you deliver.
You need to manage your resources carefully, balancing time and effort
against budget and resources. You need to plan ahead, but react to external
changes - which are frequent, and may often leave you scrambling on the
defensive. You need to develop teams that can communicate effectively
both internally and externally, and that resource and expertise is distributed
efficiently.
Further up the chain, you need to effectively manage your sales and
management teams to avoid over-selling, or over-committing on resource.
Management and sales teams need to be well-educated, and to understand
thechangingworldofSEO.Clientexpectations,ambitions,andrequirements
must be effectively managed. Account managers must negotiate realistic
deadlines and deliverables. There’s a lot that can go wrong.
Even with all of this in place, you still face an enormous challenge - that
accounts, projects, and relationships tend to decay over time. For brands,
the idea of fresh thinking, alternative ideas or tactics, and the validation of
new pitches and options is alluring - and becomes more so over time.

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You need to continually re-invent yourself. You need to bring new thinking,
fresh eyes and ideas to the table, and continually challenge your clients’
thinking faster than they challenge yours. You need to plan for the fact that
you might run out of technical tasks, content ideas or budget, and make
allowances for the different life-cycle stages of accounts.
You need to be ready for the next Google update, the newest social network,
and changing ways of marketing. First and foremost, you must be prepared
to react to change, and to remain relevant and effective.
The agency ecosystem is complex and nuanced, and to lose control of
any aspect is to introduce risk into relationships and projects. It’s a lot to
ask. Getting it right depends on having a positive, collaborative relationship
between brand and agency. On placing the focus on connecting with
consumers, and building brand equity. On embracing SEO Now.

SEONOW. #SEONOW
Linkdex for Agencies. Designed for SEO Now.
Linkdex is proud to be used by most of the world’s leading SEO agencies.
With Linkdex everything you need is all in one place. Which means
you can manage and scale your agency with ease.
You can’t get the data that Linkdex provides anywhere else. And no other platform in
the world offers you such completeness.
If you’re looking for that unfair advantage when pitching, the insights needed to formulate a
winning strategy, or the platform you can launch and manage campaigns from.
Linkdex is the answer.
www.linkdex.com

Getting Onboard is Easy
Linkdex can get your clients onboard and provide training to ensure you and your
team will make the most of the platform.
We’re committed to ensuring you get the most from the technology and your
relationship with our team.
Get in touch today and ask for a demonstration.
www.linkdex.com

SEONOW. #SEONOW
Discussion
How can we improve the RFP process?
After all, one, they can be restrictive, and two, it can be a really inefficient
way of communicating what should be a highly specialized, unique and
expert service.
But while ad-age has plenty of stories about accounts won by agencies
who refuse to respond to RFPs, for most these scenarios are likely the
exception rather than the rule. Most can expect to fight for every piece of
work, and often, getting a handle on the process is in knowing when to
build a response for a project, and when to politely pass. The question is, do
we really need RFPs at all? Or is there a better way to tender relationships
and win business?
“On some occasions, the process can kick off on the wrong
foot because of assumptions that agencies have to make in
lieu of actual data. Only if a complete picture is shared with
the agency can an accurate response to a brief be produced,
which in turn will improve the speed in which the process is
run, and help the most worthy agency to prevail.”
Stuart Tofts
Director
White.net

SEONOW. #SEONOW
”“
“When an RFP comes in we try to figure out the real story
behind the RFP. Maybe it was a blind RFP, or maybe an agency
wrote it for them. We try to qualify it through something as
simple as a quick conversation with the client because the last
thing we want to do is invest time and resources in committing
to an RFP process where we have no chance of getting that
business.”
Marty A. Muse
Chief Executive Officer
Digital.Relevance.com
“Because content promotion is an emerging industry, the
vast majority of RFPs we receive are outdated tactically. For
example, they might talk about guest blogging at scale, which
tactically died in January. The ideal RFP might talk about
content promotion but it’s not often we see brands requesting
this. When an RFP is prudently aligned to the types of services
an agency delivers, it feels like the RFP was written for them.”
Chad Pollitt
VP of Audience
Relevance.com

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”“
“RFPs are generally a disservice to agencies and the
communication of their services. They are also a disservice
to the companies that prepare them in that they are typically
canned and written by people who are disconnected from
the ask completely. The result is an agency trying to shoehorn
their offering into something that is largely not indicative of
what they do or how they do it. RFPs, however, are a necessary
evil, but they are improved substantially by allowing the agency
to present their capabilities and the prospect to present their
needs in a discovery phase before the response is completed.”
Michael King
Digital Marketing Consultant
iPullRank
“Our largest challenge to bring on prospects and clients
that meet our criteria. As much as the prospect is vetting us,
we’re also vetting them; we’re making sure we’re bringing on
prospects that everyone feels positive about. The trust needs
to go in both directions, and that way there’s level of comfort
in making sure staff aren’t being dragged down by projects that
will be losers out of the gate.”
Mark Jackson
President and CEO
Vizion Interactive

SEONOW. #SEONOW
Discussion
What Makes a Winning Response?
Individual clients require individual responses to their briefs, and creativity
and narrative should never be underestimated. Here’s what the experts think
on the some of the things that will tie together a response and presentation,
and make it stand out from the rest.
“A modern SEO proposal should actually show a little bit of the
strategy. In the past, we’ve won pitches without lending any of
the process, but increasing these days, clients know what SEO
is and there isn’t a need to demystify it. Instead, you have to
illustrate how you will solve their SEO problems.”
Andrew Girdwood
DigitasLBi
“Every presentation should have what we call a ‘thread of steel’.
That is a consistent thread from start to finish which we keep
referring back to. It might be the concluding point on the last
slide, the one thing that you want a client to take away with
them, which also shows why we’re the right people for the
job.”
Ed Lamb
Propellernet

SEONOW. #SEONOW
”“
“The key to putting together the perfect pitch is to put together
the perfect pitch team. Ideally some of that team would have
been involved with putting together the RFP response.”
Andrew Girdwood
DigitasLBi
“Agencies with a proven pitch response framework enjoy the
flexibility that more open client selection processes provide.
They will look to develop rapport, hold discovery/chemistry
meetings, and hold tissue calls prior to pitching. A brilliantly run
pitch process can make a huge difference with the two parties
having a really clear understanding of each other before the
final pitch, and an open pitch will allow creativity and expertise
to be demonstrated by the agency. Even with all of this in place
it is still essential to plan thoroughly and deliver above and
beyond what the client is expecting in the pitch.”
Stuart Tofts
Director
White.net
Discussion
What’s Your Secret for a Winning Pitch?
In many cases, it’s best to design a unique scoring criteria for each individual
pitch. The points should be based on correctly identifying the core values
of the client. But what are the key tips and tricks that agencies bring to each
presentation?

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”“
“Pitches go well when both parties are educated on the
problems and solutions at hand. Both parties have a correct
set of expectations and understand the pros and cons of the
strategy planned. Pitches go awry if there’s failure to get on the
same page about expectations or if values misalign.”
Jordan Kasteler
Senior SEO Manager
Red Door
“A perfect pitch is really a perfect plan; a very specific roadmap
for delivering on the clients goals. The key ingredient is to
be extremely focused on the client. What are their goals,
objectives and needs? A client might be interested in how to
improve rankings, but the real solution needs to be focused on
the things that really drive the business value such as increasing
leads, revenues, and driving more qualified organic traffic. The
key is to focus on the whole and that’s how we approach all
our strategies and engagements.”
Justin Garvin & Michael Wall
Manager, SEO & Director of Digital Strategy
Rise Interactive

SEONOW. #SEONOW
“
“Flow makes a winning pitch. Pull all the ingredients together
and have a Plan A, a Plan B, and a Plan C. Great insightful data
showshowyoucanthinkcreatively,butbackitupwithnumbers.
It’s also important being personable and not salesy, and not to
be negative in tone when speaking about competitors or what
the client is doing wrong. Most of all show that your job is to
make their lives easier.”
Michael Bonfils
International Managing Director
SEM International

SEONOW. #SEONOW
Discussion
What are your tips on getting C-level
support for SEO?
You can often tell how much the client values SEO by the individuals
involved with the pitch process, but often for really large, global brands the
CEO or CMO can be several degrees of separation away.
Things can be tricky if the objective is to future-proof a client’s SEO, or there
are ambitious plans for a huge growth in revenue; often that requires buy
in from a C-level marketing director as having that buy-in opens the doors
to the other internal teams and the marketing activities. How do agencies
win that support?
“Always speak the language of the C-Level when you’re talking
to them. For example, talking about links and domain authority
is going to result in a very short meeting. If you for example
speak in terms of Share of Voice and market segments and how
you’ll use Search to improve the company goals you’ll connect
with the C-Level. For example, I had to get buy-in from a team
to fix their broken links and I gave a dollar value to every link
that was pointing to a broken link target with regard to how
much it would cost to buy those links from a link vendor. The
number was in the hundred millions and they got on board
right away.”
Michael King
Digital Marketing Consultant
iPullRank

SEONOW. #SEONOW
”“
“Building trust and speaking to what the C-Level is concerned
with can build rapport and support. Specifically, the messaging,
the data, and the things that matter to a C-level is quite
different than that of the day-to-day manager. The data needs
to be elevated to specific wins/losses/opportunities rather than
getting in the weeds. Forward thinking needs to be more of a
topic – a long-term vision to maintain that performance is also
helpful in order to set up future asks, budgets requests, etc.”
Jon Clark
Founder and CEO
FuzeSEO
“One of the easiest ways to get C-Level support is through clear
communication. We used to create massively detailed, and to
a degree, convoluted reports that our contact understood (at
least for the most part), but couldn’t be shared up the ladder to
the C-Level. Making an easy to digest report for the C-Level,
and a more detailed report for your marketing manager makes
a huge difference.”
Josh Patrice
Director of SEO
Portent

SEONOW. #SEONOW
Discussion
What Does an Ideal Onboarding Process
Look Like?
Onboarding is where a agency can really make a difference to a client.
Every agency will have a different set of processes, a different style. Here’s
a window on the kind of approaches agencies can take.
“
“Each White.net post pitch client relationship begins with a
‘brand immersion’ meeting, at which the brand or business
unit present to us on all the areas that might be relevant to our
work for them. This includes not only technical information,
development cycles and tracking but also goes into extensive
detail about the brand guidelines, tone of voice, trademarks
and their usage, commercial conditions, priorities, and
sensitivities that might impact on our work. It’s also essential
for us to understand what can cannot be achieved, as there is
no point in recommending a whole raft of changes that can’t
be implemented.
By going through these points in such detail with each business
unit we build up a comprehensive map of different operating
procedures relating to these individual business units to ensure
that they are treated according to their unique needs.”
Stuart Tofts
Director
White.net

SEONOW. #SEONOW
“
“We start by establishing a framework and conducting training
across the organization where applicable and necessary. This
begins with identifying key partners for: marketing, social, IT/
Development, content, legal/compliance, etc. With these folks
identified, stakeholder interviews can take place that allow for
standardized optimization frameworks to be established. This
framework provides an agreed upon framework, policies and
process across all stakeholders. Lastly, training and education
across the organization can take place – each designed to
train and educate each stakeholder.”
Jon Clark
Founder and CEO
FuzeSEO

Seo+for+agencies+2014

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