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Preparing For A Pitch Research Techniques to Impress Clients

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Some quick tips and tricks to get rapid data for a pitch that will impress clients and show that you have gone the extra mile towards understanding their particular SEO issues

When It Comes To Pitching – Things Get Stressful

Pressure of tight deadlines!

Added pressure on resources!

Pressure to win new business!

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We’ll Be Pitching Against Agencies Offering

POSITION 1 RANKINGS

PAYMENT ON RESULTS

FREE OF CHARGE WORK

GAME-CHANGING IDEAS

IMPROVED ROI

COMPLETELY NEW APPROACHES

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Against All This - We Need To Stand Out

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We Have to Demonstrate A Clear Results Driven Strategy

From here

To here

AND THIS IS HOW WE’LL DO IT

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#1 The State Of Play

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Difficult To Gauge Perspective

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Comparing Against Competitors Adds Clarity

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Inform Of Decreasing Brand Searches

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Increasing Interest in Generic Growth

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Show Total Place In The Market – All Channels

*Source – Hitwise, Avg Monthly Visits 2013

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#2 Quantify Performance

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1. Take all the keywords we want to target – estimate traffic

2. Calculate where we can get them to – estimate traffic

3. Work out the difference

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This Basically Means

The key to calculating the return on a campaign is to identify the websites existing rankings.

You can use

Google Webmaster Tools – Export for your region/web only.

Google Analytics – may be integrated with GWT data.

SearchMetrics – Run a report.

Manual ranking checks – Not ideal particularly for larger numbers

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Getting Started – Where Do They Rank

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You wont want to project every keyphrase they rank for.

Try the following:

1. Do you have PPC keywords automatically categorised? Use these actual categories

2. Use excel to choose keywords that contain a certain phrase

3. Use “allintitle:keyword” to identify competitiveness

4. Look at the clients website – are they more relevant for a certain market?

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Identify Campaign Focus

“We’ll improve your visibility in the 4x4 and hybrid car markets”

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These Targets Define The Pitch Story

“We’ll improve your visibility for these random, high volume keywords”

Nicer story that resonate more with the client – Try to use categories

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Run Every Keyword Through Google Keyword Tool

Sign in to increase the keyword limit to 2500

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Align This Next To Your Keywords

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Multiply By CTR At That PositionAn easy way to do this is add CTR for Positions onto a new tab and use VLOOKUP to get corresponding CTR.

The total of these estimated traffic volumes is your benchmark.

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Repeat The Same But For A Projected Position

The total of these projected traffic volumes is your target.

From these two figures you can then easily calculate the ROI dependant on the proposed cost.

Calculating the % visibility, rather than using traffic numbers can make a more compelling story.

You may want to annualise these figures if traffic volumes are low.

Note – Remember the projections are target monthly volumes, meaning you wouldn’t expect to receive this level of traffic until the end of the campaign.

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Finishing It Off

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnwC2yfsObkSdFVsZFFac2RZbDVFNXE5U1dNUXpsbFE&usp=sharing

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Google Docs Template

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Toyota.co.uk Case Study

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Toyota.co.uk Case Study

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#3 Taking The Initiative

Keyword research

Competitor analysis

Link building

Ranking reports

…are all phrases they will have heard before

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We Need To Go Beyond Just Fundamental SEO

Clients want ideas on how to make things better.

Content Initiatives Enhance Great Fundamentals

Fundamental SEO Content Initiatives

Technical optimisation

Slow burn, on-going improvement

Build a broad range of links

Content led initiatives

Something that people really want to use

Much more likely to be shared and linked to

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Content InitiativesLandmark content initiatives should allow us to take their campaign to the next level

Bring Specific Ideas The Pitch

Upload on siteo2.co.uk/tools/widgets

Distribute

Create

With A Plan For Distribution

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#4 Real Quick Wins

Find pages with link equity that produce 404 errors.

Find areas of their website that are redundant and could be integrated back into the main website.

Find title tag improvements and prove the potential traffic that comes from aligning them to something else.

Find technical opportunities (such as canonicals) that could be fixed very easily.

Try to always keep things positive. Opportunities not issues.

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Some Real Quick Wins

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O2 Example – Link Equity

freesim.o2.co.uk www.o2.co.uk/freesim

Reverse proxy

O2 Example – Reverse Proxy

Do we demonstrate total expected revenue from markets/improvements?

Is there an explicit breakdown of costs?

Is there an explicit breakdown of potential revenue?

Does it tell a coherent story?

Are we being committed, impactful, honest?

Does it instil values of being better than average?

Demonstrate the bigger picture?

Is language simple?

Transparency - what we will do, what we have done?

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Questions To Ask Yourself