Regaining Trust: Lessons Learned From Losing a Local SEO Client
The author's views are entirely their own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
It was a sad moment for me last year when one of my first clients canceled. He had been with me since the year I started Sterling Sky (2017) and was one of the best clients to work with.
In this article, I'm going to highlight some of the problems I identified as reasons why we lost the client, how we learned from it, and ultimately, how we won the client back!
Problem 1: What do you do when you’ve maximized your existing market and target keywords?
We managed to dominate the local search results for this business early on in our relationship.
We also set up a completely separate practitioner listing that brought in another 80—90 calls a month without competing at all with the client’s main listing.
However, it’s not easy to keep the leads increasing at that same rate forever. Sometimes, having early wins like this can set expectations that things will continue to climb at the same rate over time, which is very difficult to sustain.
One of the ways we learned from this was to dedicate a lot of resources to continuous testing to find new keyword patterns that delivered both search volume and leads. Once we identify a keyword pattern that we’ve never seen before in Google Search Console (GSC), we create content around that topic and see how much traffic and conversions it gets. If it’s successful, we add it to an internal list that is broken down by industry.
In the last year, we more than doubled the list of keyword patterns that do this for most local businesses. Two examples of these would be cost keywords and “near me” keywords.
Problem 2: We spent too much time on link building
The client loved getting links and often asked about them. Because of that, we spent quite a bit of time on link building for them. Link building is definitely a method we use to help increase traffic from Google. However, this particular business, at the time, got the majority of its leads from its Google Business Profile. The issue with us having spent so much time on link building is that links do not impact local pack rankings as much as they impact organic rankings.
Here is an example of a test we did in the last year that helps illustrate how much more links impact organic rankings than local pack rankings. In this test, we added a single link to a website using a specific keyword as the anchor text. Then, we altered the anchor text to something else.
The below image shows how organic rankings improved when we added the link and then tanked when we changed the anchor text to a different keyword.
While local pack rankings had the same pattern, it was nowhere near as drastic. Instead of seeing lifts from position 10 to 3, it only rotated between position 4 and 3.
We have done a ton of other tests that showed the same behavior, so this was simply one example.
On-site optimization has a larger impact on local pack rankings and should have remained the biggest priority.
Problem 3: We didn’t educate the client enough
While I knew that link building shouldn’t be the priority, I failed to communicate it properly to the client so they could understand why.
As a solution, we started a series of free monthly webinars, and we regularly invite our clients to attend. We believe that educating clients is important and are always looking for ways to improve how we can do that. It just so happens that this particular client attended one of these webinars and ended up coming back to us just a month ago.
Lessons learned
Through continuous learning and testing, knowing where to focus our efforts for the best success, and communicating effectively with the client, we were able to win back their trust while also learning valuable lessons.
This case study is one of several that I’ll be covering at my MozCon talk this year. Make sure you get your tickets to hear the rest!
