When I was at Trader, one of my tasks was to be on the conference call during a client’s SEO review. To this day I’m not 100% why I was on those calls. I guess it was to be a known voice on the call to make them feel comfortable that it wasn’t just some pimply-faced punk regurgitating stats to them from the SEO team. 90% of the time I said nothing because you know what mom used to say…
“If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.”
What I typically found was that the representative of the SEO team basically talked non-stop and threw out a bunch of SEO jargon… in other words, B.B.B.… BullshXt Baffles Brains. Dealers really know what they are supposed to ask so they typically didn’t ask anything at all.
There is one dealer in particular that I dealt with who was super engaged. They always asked questions and felt that they knew exactly what was going on. There was a problem though…
When you don’t know what questions to ask, it simply lets the SEO vendor off of the hook for the work that they are apparently doing. In this case, they were spending $260/week for SEO ($13520/year) for a service that they could have accomplished for half of that… at least. They felt it was working, which is was BUT, for that sort of dollar (for a period of 3+ years!!!) they should have been getting WAY better results.
But how do you ask the RIGHT questions?
Well, that’s exactly why I offer Vendor Advocacy services.
Not only will asking the RIGHT questions give you the answers you need to determine if the product or service is actually providing you a proper Return On Investment (ROI) but will also allow you to free up a lot of your time listening to pitches and ideas that really only have one purpose – to increase the amount of money you spend with a particular vendor.
Don’t was TIME or MONEY on going through the motions in regards to your current vendor meetings OR prospective ones, allow me the opportunity to help drive your marketing efforts in the right direction.