Speaking Skills To Help Your Prospects & Clients Understand SEO
Good speaking skills make you a better search engine optimizer. Why do I say this, and how is it possible that speaking skills can help or hurt you as an SEO professional? Let's see why.
SEO is still poorly understood by the average business owner who has a website. There are web owners who think that SEO is simply putting keywords that describe what they do randomly all over their website. At best, nothing will happen to their site in search results. At worst, Google will think they're playing spammer games and de-rank the site.
Good speaking skills will get you more work. If you can explain SEO simply, in plain language, you've already gone above and beyond what most optimizers can do. I can't tell you how many SEOers I've interviewed to consider for contract support, who cannot tell me in simple words what we do.
SEO is scary to those who don't know anything about it. Think about it - if you go out business networking and someone asks you what sort of solution provider you are, what comes out of your mouth can either make a great impression and show that you can connect with others outside your industry, or those words will scare off people because they're intimidated by technical language.
Creating, practicing and using some simple sentences isn't that hard, but if you've never tried it, this is a tough exercise.
Here's my simple explanation:
"I teach people the things they need to do their web pages to rank high in Google search results. For those who don't want to, or don't have the time, they hire me to do those things to their web pages to make them rank higher with Google."
I once heard someone say that if your elderly relatives can understand what you do for a living (assuming it's technical), then you won't confuse anyone. I think that's good advice!
Speaking Skills To Explain SEO To Clients
The other big communication issue I see is explaining reports and the work you've done to clients. Making a simple elevator speech is just the start. Once you do some SEO work for a client and produce reports, you have to communicate clearly and plainly what numbers mean.
If you're talking about bounce rate, you need to explain what it is, and why it's important on a per page basis. Similarly, talking about landing pages, entry/exit pages and user paths, you'll need to take time to prepare easy to understand explanations for the client. It's poor customer service to simply talk over her head and expect her to believe or trust what you've said.
So, practice what you're going to say. Anticipate questions with good explanations. Use analogies and comparisons. For example, when I'm first talking about 301 redirects, what I say is think about when you're moving from one home to another. You put in a change of address card with the post office to let others know your new address. A 301 redirect tells the search engine crawlers that this old URL has now moved to this new URL, and here it is, here's where to find it.
It's a real challenge to develop good speaking skills to explain search engine optimization. But if you don't, what you do is scary to them. In turn, that makes you a scary person professionally.
Do your best to be approachable and understood by those who don't do marketing for a living. It's the right thing to do!
If you want to know more about bounce rate, 301 redirects and landing pages, let Invenio SEO teach you how to do search engine optimization. You'll be glad you did!
Until next time, stay safely between the ditches!
All the very best,
Nancy McDonald
Image courtesy of pixabay.com
