Who isn’t happy to hear a client’s positive feedback? It’s even better when it’s detailed and has suggestions about improving your service. Our post today is about exactly that: an interview with one of our long-time clients. They shared their SEO experience and expertise with us, and now we’ll share it with you, our readers.

Meet Robert Holzler, Director of Web Development at Grapevine Communications, a full-service SEO agency in Sarasota, Florida. We sat with Robert to discuss his company’s trials and successes, and here’s what he told us.

Q: How long have you been working as an SEO agency and how long have you been in the SEO niche?

A: Grapevine started offering SEO in 2014, so 6 years. Our web developer has been doing SEO since the mid 90’s. We started offering SEO as a service shortly after he came onboard in 2014.

Q: And what is your global mission?

A: Grapevine’s mission is to put the interest of our customers in the forefront and to seek business relationships that are mutually fulfilling, while providing growth and profit for both parties.

Q: Do you remember your first steps? Did you start with a few tools for different purposes or with an all-in-one SEO platform?

A: Our Director of Web Development started working on SEO before there were any all-in-one SEO platforms. We have seen the industry develop from basic word counters, to keyword density analyzers, to placement trackers, to full-fledge SEO platforms.

Q: What SEO tools are a must for you or any SEO specialist?

A: WebCEO is a vital tool in our SEO toolbox. We also use a host of browser-based tools like Web Developer, BuiltWith, and Keywords Everywhere.

Q: Have you tried other SEO platforms? What was the decisive factor that made you choose WebCEO?

A: Yes, many. WebCEO’s full featured, holistic approach to SEO was the key deciding factor. Instead of using two to five different tools, we get everything we need in on platform.

Q: When was the first time you started using WebCEO? What SEO tasks have you solved with this platform?

A: We migrated from WebPosition Gold to WebCEO in late 2016. While the initial move was due to the termination of WebPosition’s platform, I am very glad we made the switch. WebCEO is a much better product in every measurable way. The branded reports and portal immediately impacted our bottom line by reducing the labor hours needed to produce client reports. It also increased sales by providing us with an effective pre-sales evaluation tool set, allowing our sales team to target and speak knowledgably about a potential clients’ current optimization and placement status.

Q: How does WebCEO help you with your work?

A: It is an essential tool for analyzing client websites and tracking placement over time.

Q: Which SEO tasks eat up most of your team’s time?

A: Content optimization takes up most of the labor hours for SEO. Blending effective SEO content seamlessly with a client’s existing content takes time and skill.

Q: What are your top 3 most used WebCEO tools?

A: Site Health is my favorite tool. We use the Site Health report, landing page scanner and automatic report emailing most.

Q: Are there any features you would like to see added to WebCEO? Do you have any recommendations from your SEO team on how we could improve WebCEO to help manage your SEO workflow?

A: We recently suggested a tool that would scan pages on sites and compare them to the cached/indexed content at Google to let us know if/when recently optimized pages had been found and indexed. That way we are not re-optimizing content before the impact of the work has yet been seen.

It would also be good to have Bing analytics and Bing My Business integration. While Bing is significantly lower priority than Google, we still consider them important to a well-rounded SEO program.

Q: Are there some SEO hacks for gaining high rankings and driving traffic to a website that you can share?

A: We don’t believe in using hacks of any kind for our clients because we see them as both short-term solutions and potentially dangerous to the client’s long-term placement goals.

A proven SEO technique that we recommend is the creation of micro-sites and doorway pages. If a client needs placement for a set of keywords that are difficult to integrate with existing content, these methods are a great way to build periphery content and focus the attention of searchers on that content.

Q: How exactly did WebCEO help your SEO team save time and costs?

A: Having all the tools in one place and the ability to create detailed, branded reports for our clients with the click of a button saves us a huge amount of time each month. By saving time on reporting, we can spend more time on optimization, which means we get better results and clients are much happier with the results. The branded portal access we provide clients help educate our clients and provides a level of accountability that our clients really like. This also saves us time and money because we can refer clients to the portal when they have questions about placement and optimization progress.

Q: I bet you also send SEO reports to your customers. Could you tell us more about it?

A: In conjunction with access to the branded online portal we create a summary cover page for the branded report that WebCEO generates. That provides clients with both the high-level information owners need and the in-depth information their in-house web team needs.

Q: Which WebCEO functionality really helped your agency grow the most?

A: The automatic, branded email reports have been great for Grapevine. We use them as pre-sales tool, and for billing support and customer retention.

Q: Is there anything you find unique about WebCEO?

A: It is, hands down, the most full-featured SEO platform we have used. It is the perfect combination of developer tools with a well-designed UI, which provides our team with a fantastic user experience.

Q: Let’s talk about your SEO agency some more. Could you tell us about your most recent success?

A: Last month we had a client go from 12 #1 placements to 140. The same client saw an increase of 198 top 5 placements leading to a month-over-month increase of 39% in organic search traffic.

Q: That’s really impressive. Having so much work, did you ever miss a deadline?

A: It is an extremely rare event that we miss a deadline. Our production manager meets with the team regularly to get the status of projects and keep our team on track for meeting deadlines. Our production team regularly cross trains so projects can be migrated to the colleague with the capacity to complete it on time and budget.

Q: What advice can you give to SEO Agencies to avoid the pain of missed deadlines?

1. Set achievable goals and timelines.
2. Set client expectations before the project is started.
3. Don’t over-sell your capacity.
4. Plan for failure so you are prepared when it happens.

Q: With so many clients, how do you keep an eye on their profiles?

A: The WebCEO All Project Dashboard is a great way to get a bird’s eye view of all our SEO clients.

Q: Let’s hear your professional opinion. How often do you recommend SEO & technical audits? How often do you usually schedule reports?

A: Depending on the size of the site and how long the client has been using our SEO services, we may perform technical audits anywhere from 8 times a month to once a month. We find that multi-hundred page sites with lots of external links need the most attention.

Q: Could you tell us about the most remarkable challenge that your SEO Agency faced?

A: Our biggest challenge for providing SEO services was finding a software vendor that was as dedicated and reliable as we were. Finding and partnering with WebCEO was one of the best choices we ever made for growing our SEO business.

Q: What is your agency like now compared to how it was when you started?

A: We are growing in every sense of the word. In the past six years, we have grown from a primarily traditional media marketing, advertising and public relations agency into a full spectrum agency with over half our production team engaged with digital marketing and advertising. In a time when other agencies are laying off and downsizing, we are adding production capacity and taking on new clients.

The post SEO Agency Success Story: 198 Top 5 Google Positions in 1 Month appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Most people who try to optimize their website for SEO by themselves struggle with it. That’s what allows SEO agencies to exist and prosper in the first place. However, this business is no walk in the park, either. Sites need to be thoroughly analyzed, issues need to be found and fixed, and reports need to be ready on time. Handling all this work is the only way to make a profit.

So how do SEO agencies stay afloat? I can best speak about the one where I work. Our way of solving problems and keeping our customers satisfied lies in using the right SEO tools for agencies – in our case, WebCEO tools. This is a story about how they helped us go from being limited both in the number of clients and in the level of analysis, to an SEO agency with a greater capacity to serve more clients and a raised level of analysis and deliverables.

Specifically, there are three factors that made the difference of which I will speak on this occasion: reports, analysis, workflow.

Reports for clients

As an agency, we work with online SEO tools and send monthly reports to clients. These reports include data on traffic and ranking and we always prepare a detailed report of the activities we carried out in the past month in favor of the client. Before working with WebCEO, we used to fulfill our tasks on a Word file, cutting and pasting screenshots of different tools and platforms such as Google Analytics, Search Console, IBP, Facebook and more. It really had a very bad appearance, but the most important thing is that it took us a long time to make these reports, which limited the entire operation and affected the number of cases we could take as clients.

When working with WebCEO, the generation of reports is done in a single click, and the outcome looks much more aesthetic and professional. The fact that you can link WebCEO with other tools means that the report you generate already includes data from these tools and everything looks homogenous.

To summarize, before WebCEO it took us at least 3 hours to generate a report and today it takes us approximately 30 minutes to generate a report (including its review). I did not mention that the whole interface and therefore the reports are available in the language I need (Spanish).

Some characteristics of the reports that especially help us are:

1. Content control: There are endless topics and sections that you can include in the report, but you do not always want to include everything (either because you do not want the client to be exposed to certain information or because you want to offer different content at different levels for clients). The WebCEO platform allows you to easily include or remove sections of the report, at the client level. You do not need to define a format for every client but rather customize the content of each one. The level of content control does not end with whether you include a section or not. It goes further and allows you to define what type of view you are going to show for a tool (for example: with or without technical explanations, data order, etc.).

2. Report branding: I can add a well customized cover, a header with our logo and our slogan, a footer with our contact information + an adaptation of report colors to our logo. Personally, I like to change the cover often by featuring special topics on holidays or special occasions. I also use this flexibility of appearance to do SEO work for other digital marketing agencies that are not specialized in SEO – I give them reports with their own logo and slogan.

3. Shipping and automation options: Reports can be scheduled to be generated automatically on a certain date and sent automatically to the client.

Analyzing fast

The SEO analysis includes, among others, a review of code errors, competition analysis, backlinks analysis, and other factors which usually require several tools to review, some free and others paid. You can link your Analytics, Search Console and Facebook accounts to WebCEO and have everything joined together. In addition, they have alliances with third parties such as Moz and Majestic, so I don’t have to pay a lot to have all these tools separately.

As an agency director, I’m able to quickly see and analyze the situation of all my clients in a few minutes through a control panel; I can filter according to several criteria to detect clients that have not advanced as we expected, a client that suddenly has an unexpected jump in the amount of backlinks, etc. This control panel is also accessible to my account executives so that they can oversee their specific clients.

The platform has 16 tools to execute SEO (from technical audit, analysis of backlinks, SEO optimization, loading speed, etc.) but I am going to talk here about 4 that I find really worthy in my daily work:

Rank Tracking: I very much appreciate here the possibility of reviewing mobile vs. desktop computer browser ranking and the possibility of reviewing rank positions in very specific geographical areas such as cities. I love the different options that I can see in the results: by word, by URL, by label, comparison with different dates, seeing the track records of the ranking of each word and seeing the actual SERP results.

Dangerous Competitors: I love this tool because it helps me quickly see who my competitors are on Google and with what keywords they are competing with me. I am also using this very broad report to provoke my prospects by showing them who their competition really is; they are always amazed.

Competitor Backlink Spy: Lists the best backlinks of my most dangerous competitors and lets me know when one of these competitors just received a new high quality backlink.

Internal Links Optimization: This tool helps me analyze in minutes the architecture of internal links on the page, as well as understand the hierarchy of internal pages regarding authority. I’m even embarrassed to say that before WebCEO we did not analyze this type of thing and today I cannot analyze a client without examining this aspect on their website.

Workflow and other extras

I have dozens of clients in my agency. Several account executives take care of more than 10 clients per month each. You can calculate that an executive dedicates approximately 7 hours a month to analyze each client and to perform tasks that have to do with this client (in addition to the account executive I have a support team that performs tasks such as link building, copy writing, etc. which are not included in these 7 hours). Before WebCEO, I could have never analyzed a client in 7 hours, this means I could have never reached this number of customers. WebCEO made my work process easier, so I could suddenly attend to more clients without leaving aside the level of service that I give to each one and without affecting the results.

WebCEO has several features that help me manage my agency. I’ve already talked about the reports that save me a lot of time and the control panel that helps me see the situation of all my clients at a glance. But there are many other functions:

User profiles: I have created user profiles with different permits and views. My executives have a certain profile, I have another, other members of the team have another profile and I even facilitated access to my clients with a special profile where they can see online only some of the tools and see their ranking results, their report, etc.

Tasks: Task Manager is a section where I can generate different task lists and assign them to different members of my team. For example, I have created a list of steps and tasks to perform in case of migration to https (you will be surprised how many tasks are involved in this migration if you do it with SEO in mind). I can assign this list of tasks to a certain account executive to work on for a certain client.

Alerts: I have programmed alerts that notify me and the account executive if a client has a suddenly lowered position, if his competitor has risen in position or if the website suffers from a technical failure.

Free evaluations for prospects: I added a button to my web page where I am offering my visitors a free evaluation of their web page. It is fully automated, and I am not aware that it is happening until I get a notification to my email with the report and contact information that was also sent to the prospect. It’s a good way of turning visitors into prospects without much effort.

I have been working with WebCEO for 2 years now; what impresses me the most is its support capacity. The possibility of contacting them directly with such ease and the willingness of the team to help you is something that I do not see much in other companies, whether they provide SEO software for agencies or not.

The post SEO Tools for Agencies: Pro Functionality & Unlimited Users appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

There is a term called “breaking the fourth wall” which refers to the imaginary wall between a theater stage and the audience of a performance. Normally, it’s like a real wall because the actors and actresses never acknowledge the existence of the audience until the applause at the final curtain call. But some, such as the playwright who called himself Shakespeare, have been very good at directly communicating with the audience during a performance. This can make an actor, play, movie or TV show very popular. If you watched the “Deadpool” or “House of Cards” or “Fight Club”, then you have witnessed the breaking of the fourth wall. Marketers use this term to show that one must effectively talk directly to the consumer when presenting products and services.

SEO reports are often sent with a “check-box” approach that leads to losing touch with your clients. On the one hand your reports should be well-tailored for customers and on the other hand, clients should see the value they get from your SEO services. Graphs and pie charts with visitor traffic, keyword rankings and backlink quality trends are not the objective so much as the means to communicate to clients the status of their site performance.

Conducting SEO and reporting to clients is very similar to a theater production company putting on a great performance of a true story. It’s important to “break the fourth wall” and speak directly to your customers in order to engage them, earn their trust and make them take action.

In SEO reporting, breaking the fourth wall is possible. There are several customer-centric features built into the Web CEO SEO reporting software. Before breaking the fourth wall between you and your clients, don’t forget to sign up for a 14-day Free Trial in order to see our tools in action. Let’s talk about the techniques for doing this:

Ask prospective customers “How’s it going” with an Express SEO Audit Report

Pitching your SEO services with a well-tailored express SEO audit report would be a good welcome speech to your SEO leads. How can this help you break the wall? First of all, an express SEO report is much better than a generic proposition like this:

“Hi, I am SEO expert and I can help you bring your site to the top of Google. Would you like to know what issues you have on your site?”

C’mon guys, this is usually a giant pass for many people. You will go to the spam box every time. Folks hear such propositions every day. You will not break the fourth wall this way.

What sets an express SEO Audit report apart from most initial SEO propositions is that you are providing fascinating information to people upfront while providing a professional look and personal approach. The report your prospects will be provided with should not be just a once over SEO performance overview. A good SEO lead generation report should deliver a prospect-tailored SEO analysis with coverage of important on-page and off-page SEO analysis assets. The report should help educate customers on the current SEO status of their site with detailed advice. All you need to know is their website URL and the email address to send a report to. Once you express concern about your prospects’ sites by providing real issues with possible solutions on how to fix them, the wall between you and your prospects should open up in many cases.

Using the Web CEO Lead Generation Tools which enable the automated generation of a branded SEO audit report, you can easily capture, analyze and convert high quality SEO prospects. Here you can find out how to generate qualified SEO leads and turn them into your loyal customers.

Break down the changes in your existing customer websites via the SEO Events marks on SEO report graphs

SEO reporting has little or even no value when spikes and declines on SEO report graphs are delivered to clients without the context in which the changes took place at those specific times.

Don’t prepare and send regular SEO reports without explicit notes on the graphs which explain changes in rankings or backlinks. You should take client reporting seriously unless you want to lose customers because of a lack of transparency and poor communication about which SEO actions affected client sites.

The Web CEO Journal of Events can great improve communication and transparency within SEO reports that are automatically emailed to your clients. The journal of SEO events can be used in the following cases:

• Make announcements to all your clients about the dates of Google Updates on the charts of SEO reports
• Keep an SEO diary, describing your own actions in each of your projects, where you can decide at any time whether or not to make them visible to individual clients.
• Leave SEO notes or tasks for your team for more effective and coordinated team work.
• Auto-generate notes about when you emailed manual and automatic PDF reports.

Stay alert when your clients’ websites go wrong

Being timely, pre-emptive, empathic and decisive about dealing with any negative issues of your clients is also a strong “breaking the fourth wall” technique. A good SEO service provider should keep a close eye on the following SEO factors that negatively affect site performance:

• Website rankings drop
• Competitors outranking keyword positions
• Technical SEO issues such as dropped backlinks

The Web CEO Email Alerts tool can help you get you or your SEO clients alerted as soon as a new tool scan detects negative changes in a client’s ranking positions or technical off-site/on-site SEO issues, like broken internal links and lost important backlinks. Once you set up alerts for Rank Tracking, Technical SEO issues or lost backlinks, they are sent instantly every time a specific tool scanning is complete.

Go the extra mile by speaking the translated language of your customers.

Destroy the fourth wall inalterably by speaking in the native language of your customers. Talking with your foreign or domestic customers in their actual language will help you remove any language barrier and save a lot of time and money on translators. Besides, by providing non-English SEO services, you can take control of a new local SEO market where your competitors may have fumbled the opportunity.

WebCEO is used in 196 countries! We have built a multilanguage wiki community with the ability for everyone to crowd-translate our service interface tools and reports into 146+ languages. Read about our amazing Crowd Translation tool.  This tool is available for all subscription plans including the Free plan. You can already provide SEO services in Brazilian Portuguese (99.9 % translation completed), Spanish (88.1% translation completed), Italian (83.8% translation completed), Dutch (73.5% translation completed). View a sample of an SEO report translated into Brazilian Portuguese.

Let’s break the fourth wall together!

We are all ears and we are constantly working hard to break that fourth wall ourselves in order to hear your needs and the needs of your clients. Should you have any suggestions, feel free to contact our Support Angels at: www.webceo.com/support.htm or tweet us at @webceonews.

The post How to Create Client SEO Reports Which Break the Fourth Wall appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.