Sometimes, we’re not sure if it is because of the LOVE component in our company name, or if it is simply because Live Chat is such a quick, and anonymous, method for users to communicate directly with a company. The point is though, some of these transcripts are just begging to be shared.

The transcript below occurred today, the Visitor located us by typing in Seo Agency and thought we needed to buy what it is he was selling (Google Quality Guidelines (?)). We found it funny enough to call him/her the ‘Off-the-Back-of-the-Truck-Salesman‘. What a winner, enjoy:

Saturday, 24 Mar, 2012
[4:42] Visitor 922639087: Hello
[4:42] Dave has joined the conversation
[4:42] Dave: Hello, thanks for initiating a chat, how can we help?
[4:44] Visitor 922639087: I have new versions of the Google Rating Guidelines. In total 395 pages
[4:44] Visitor 922639087: In addition I also have a number of training videos and webinar recording
[4:45] Visitor 922639087: Everything ranging from page quality rating guidelines to video and image rating guidelines
[4:45] Dave: That’s nice.
[4:45] Dave: What can we help you with?
[4:46] Visitor 922639087: Would you be interested in them?
[4:46] Dave: heh
[4:46] Dave: Thank you, No.
[4:46] Dave: Is there anything else I can help you with?
[4:46] Visitor 922639087: Can i ask why>
[4:46] Visitor 922639087: ?
[4:46] Dave: I have a used pair of socks.
[4:46] Dave: Are you interested in them?
[4:47] Visitor 922639087: Everyone went mad for the 2011 leaked document and now here’s a revised version with new material too
[4:47] Visitor 922639087: Can I just stress this IS NOT the 2011 leak
[4:47] Dave: Thank you. We are not interested.
[4:47] Dave: Will there be anything else?
[4:48] Visitor 922639087: Why is everyone so smug about having the 2011 version when it’s been changed a number of times?
[4:48] Visitor 922639087: there’s an extra 20 pages
[4:48] Dave: Why are you attempting to sell something that you do not own?
[4:48] Visitor 922639087: and that is only one aspect of the rating process
[4:48] Dave: It isn’t about being smug, It is about having ethics.
[4:49] Dave: But thank you again. We are not interested in buying access to content, that you do not own the rights to resell.
[4:49] Visitor 922639087: Thanks anyway
[4:49] Dave: Bye
[4:49] Dave has left the conversation
[4:50] Visitor 922639087 has left the conversation

We hope to nail down an appropriate space before the 1st of April, at which point we intend to commence the hiring process. Interested in a career change? Or know someone looking for a new opportunity? Get in touch, as we need to fill the following positions:

Search Marketing Exec. (3 Positions)

You are a marketer. You get excited about Ad Creative and Campaigns that just work.

You are passionate about learning more about all forms of online marketing including; SEO, SEM, social media, usability, analytics, live chat conversion and email marketing. You are also geared towards providing exceptional customer service to prospects and clients online.

You are a friendly and attentive individual who is able to think quickly and formulate clear and concise answers about SEO Marketing and PPC Management. Our Support Executives answer questions about our service offerings through a live online chat system 24×7-365, and all chats are initiated by people who visit one of our websites. We receive inquiries from potential SEO or PPC Management clients and partner companies from around the world, so our offices are open 24-7/365 to support them.

Day to Day:

• Developing, implementing & optimizing Google AdWords PPC campaigns
• Analyzing campaign effectiveness and resolving issues that hinder client objectives
• Conceptualize, initiate, and maintain high-volume paid search campaigns
• Supporting and improve campaign profitability through ongoing analysis and optimization of pages
• Managing the tracking and maintenance of campaign ad spend budgets
• Planning, developing, and implementing key word selections while prioritizing expansion efforts
• Ensuring all marketing and initiatives align with the client’s strategies & message
• Manage accounts through quality checks and regular client feedback
• Communicating and reporting ongoing performance as required
• Chat online with prospects to understand their needs and advance them through the sales pipeline
• Propose solutions that will help clients resolve their immediate challenges
• Prepare for and participate in regular in house training or production meetings

This position will require some in-depth search engine optimization knowledge and experience in order to answer chat support and sales questions quickly and with confidence. With that said, comprehensive SEO & PPC Management training is provided to the right candidates. We’re looking to hire great people, not just great employees.

This job does not require travel, and a significant amount of time is spent in front of a PC in a fast paced and challenging work environment. We may need to send you to industry conferences, and put you up in killer boutique hotels

It’s a bonus if you have:

• A knowledge of HTML, CSS, and other common formatting languages & CMS systems
• A comprehensive understanding of advertising and marketing terminology
• The ability to read, analyze, and interpret industry/trade magazines
• Excellent interpersonal communication skills
• Excellent time management and organizational skills
• A desire to not only solve problems, but deliver lasting solutions.
• A valid driver’s license
• A strong attention to detail

Details:

• Shifts Available: 9am – 6pm & 4pm-12am
• Start Date: April 2012
• Particulars: Full Time Position, 40 hours per week
• Remuneration: Negotiable based on experience.

About LC

Internet Marketing is an exciting sector and we live for this industry. We’re truly passionate about what we do and we strive every day to be at the top of our game. We are the only global Search Engine Marketing firm open 24×7 – 365. We never close. We are a team of experienced marketing entrepreneurs with consistent industry recognition and some of the strongest technology and advertising network partnerships in existence. Our collective experience in both online and offline integrated marketing, is bar none. We have extensive experience delivering exceptional return on investment for clients across a wide range of industries. Our SEM clients operate in more than 35 countries across the globe. We are a global player in the SEM space.

Ok.. as always our wish-list is rather intense, though do get in touch if the role is of interest. At a minimum we can have a quick chat to determine if there is a fit?

We want to hire you today.

LoveClients is now hoping to attract some of the developer talent coming out of the region though some would suggest we have an uphill battle, given the exodus of developer talent from the Baltics over the past couple of years; yet we think times are changing.

If you haven’t had the opportunity to visit this gem of a city, and deal with its small but burgeoning startup population – then you haven’t experienced the lightning speed with in which you can get things done. Unlike in any other city we have launched offices in, the responsiveness of the local tech community has been astoundingly welcoming.

It’s a small city, so everyone seems to know one another, though that tends to make for a pretty tight nit tech scene of like minded go-getters whom are determined to not only make their own startups work, but to aid in helping others do the same.

It’s almost a sense of national pride, the developers here know they have the skills, but are yet to have the opportunity to showcase their talent based out of local offices. Put bluntly, there has been a trend of talent leaving for cities like Dublin and London; though the tides are changing. Unlike its neighbouring country Estonia which produced Skype, Latvia is yet to have a big win on the board. We’re hoping to change that.

In comparison to the experience of opening our London office not so long ago, the overall sentiment here in Riga toward startups (in an economy that has only seen constant decline over the last couple of years), has been an almost polar opposite experience to what we were expecting.

Thank you Riga, for your warm welcome. The Baltics are hot right now, and we’re determined to make it work.

We’re now hiring for the following roles (see below)- so if you live in the region, or care for a change drop us a line!

Node.js/Javascript Engineer (4 Positions Avail.)

With offices in London & Vancouver, LoveClients is a technology company operating in the B2B ‘software+service’ space. Our mission is to provide the best conversion-focused service experience anywhere. As a result, we get to build an array of awesome systems at scale, including search, concurrency, content organization, real-time metrics, deployment, and event-driven, low-latency, concurrent apps. Our current systems are mostly built around PHP, mySQL, nginx, and Node.js – though we would like to hire you to help our existing team on projects that focus almost completely on Node.js both on server and client side.

LoveClients is seeking experienced and intelligent software engineers that are excited about working with in closely integrated teams to push the boundaries of what is expected of a B2B service firm. We focus on fast, iterative development (over 150+ deployments just last month), and collaborative, interactive programming. Developers work with in small cross-functional teams of 3-6 crew that rely on one-another to champion their project goals and in setting their own priorities are expected to build and deploy applications quickly and iteratively.

Qualified candidates have:

• Experience in developing real-time web applications
• Knowledge of PHP, Javascript, Object oriented programming
• Knowledge of (any) Node.js framework concepts will be considered as an advantage
• A good command of English, both spoken and written

What we offer:

• Interesting and dynamic work in a rapidly growing company
• International experience
• Independent working environment, where you get to champion your role
• Modern office in Riga’s Old Town Centre
• Competitive remuneration
• Motivated team and career growth opportunities

Skills you will need:

• Advanced JavaScript skills
• Deep understanding of CSS inheritance
• Strong understanding of Mysql including schema design and indexes
• Strong knowledge in any one of the following programming languages
• PHP
• Ruby
• Python
• Perl
• C / C++
• Strong linux experience

Would be an asset if you have:

• Knowledge in MVC architecture
• Knowledge in HTML5 and CSS 3
• Knowledge in Comet/ Push Ajax/ Reverse Ajax
• Knowledge in RESTful API design and development
• Experience serverside javascript programming [SSJS] (Node.js, APE, etc)
• Experience in NoSql databases (MongoDB, CouchDB, etc)
• Experience in-memory key-value storages (Memcached, Redis, etc)
• Familiar with source control principles (SVN, GIT, etc)
• Experience working with Nginx

Would be a Bonus if you have:

• Experience in using SproutCore
• Experience in using the Express Framework(Node.js)
• Experience in handling high traffic scalable web properties
• Experience in Agile development environment (Scrum, Pair programming)

Ok.. so we know our wish-list is rather intense, though do get in touch if the role is of interest.
We want to hire you today.

With that said, no matter how hard we try, how hard we work, or how good our intentions may be in delivering our promised service offering, we still manage to upset at least a handful of clients each year. Given our scale, and the number of clients we service, that is a very small %, though wouldn’t it be great to get that number to Zero?

Sometimes it’s a misunderstanding, often it is human error or bad expectation management, and oftentimes it’s ego or finances weighing in on the kerfuffle. The point is, regardless of how hard a company tries to keep every client as satisfied as possible, there are always going to be problems that arise from both sides of the fence.

Why do disagreements occur between customers and businesses?

We don’t think there is any one reason, other than that there are human beings involved in the collaboration. We all have our own ideas, opinions and expectations of one another in a working relationship, and even though we have spent literally hundreds of thousands of dollars building a custom collaboration system (TheHub) to manage the accountability and work flow process of the campaigns we run, no piece of software will ever have an answer for a client, employee or contributor who is having a bad day.

We’re human, we all experience those days.

But, isn’t the customer always right?

This old adage is heralded by any well trained customer service rep that did their training in the last 30 years, and for good reason: without customers, there IS no business. What’s key however, is to remember that the customer is right only so as long as they are still a customer. At some point, a customer can change roles. Should a shoplifter in a supermarket still be treated as a customer?

As a business owner, you’re in business to be in business. And when in business you do not have to accept every customer. In fact, you can and should draw the line at customers lying to take advantage, stealing, or being abusive. As a business owner it is in your interests to know which type of customers you should service, and which you should simply not cater to.

That may sound harsh, and go against anything you have read about customer service – though isn’t it far more advantageous to spend your time servicing the right type of customers, and having the time to service them well, than trying to be everything to everyone?

We love our clients, and we love the campaigns we work on for them, but unfortunately when most businesses think that “the more customers the better”, they’re usually wrong. Some customers are quite simply bad for business.

Surely, every relationship can be salvaged

In a perfect world, every customer relationship could and should be salvaged in the light of confrontation or disagreement; but only up until the point that the value of the relationship outweighs the risk.

There is a reason why a credit card company freezes credit, or a Telephone company cuts the line if bills go unpaid. They are weighing up risk. It is in their respective interest to keep their paying customers, if the customer is meeting their side of the arrangement. The moment the risk gets to be too great, is the exact moment the relationship becomes unsalvageable.

Know when to say No.

A story I overheard in a hotel-lobby bar from a Southwest pilot passing through, has stuck with me to this day. He spoke of a female passenger who traveled frequently with his airline. The woman was apparently in a constant state of disappointment with every aspect of Southwest’s service. So much so that within the company they began to name her the “Southwest Pen Pal”, as after every flight she took, she would spend the time to send the airline a written complaint.

The complaints varied from problems with in flight meals, to the flight attendants’ uniforms, the check in counters and seat allocation. Each time she wrote, as company procedure required, someone within the organization had to investigate each matter & take the time to reply.

Her final letter, littered with a shopping list of complaints, was finally pushed up the tree and landed on the CEO’s desk (Herb Kelleher), requesting that he reply personally.

Swiftly he wrote back and said, ‘Dear Mrs. Crabapple, We will miss you. Love, Herb.’”

There are a bucket load of factors (more than 250 some say) that influence rankings within the search engines, no singular company can even remotely claim to control each. Good rankings are best achieved with great research and flawless execution, but there are simply so many external factors involved with getting a site to #1 for a certain key term, to make such a claim from the outset is completely misleading.

Search Engine Land‘s news editor, Matt McGee states: “The only way to even possibly come close to guaranteeing rankings is if you’re doing it on the paid side and happen to have a term that you’re willing to bid high enough on and to get high enough click through to sustain top spot. Also, personalisation comes into play: what you see might be different to what I see, so there’s absolutely no way to guarantee a number one ranking on Google“.

SEO is a competitive landscape, that is constantly changing, not a one off project. As with any other form of marketing, a company needs to keep the fly wheel spinning. Continually tweaking and iterating for improvements, while monitoring the results of those changes with professional tracking, and reliable metrics. Let me outline that again for you, just incase you missed it: SEO is not a ‘one off’ project, it never ends. As an SEO Company that charges a low monthly fee, we would question as to how any agency could possibly charge a one off fee for a service that effectively requires resources to be allocated on an ongoing basis.

Should you be of the thinking that all your SEO objectives have been met, then we would be the first to put our money on the fact that you are not making the most of the investment you made in your website & your ongoing marketing initiative. There’s always more that can be done, and always a wider audience to reach. Adding new or improving existing pages, or targeting more terms each month is far better than waiting for your competitors to trump your previous efforts. Gaining rankings is step 1, maintaining and expanding those rankings is a whole other ball game.

Readers, please, if you take only one morsel of knowledge from this very short and abrupt post – it is to question your SEO Company (including us) about their methods, their promises, and their guarantees. Only hire a transparent agency, that is happy to guide you through the process & execute each and every task with complete clarity.

Don’t fall for the shallow promises, there is simply no such thing as a Ranking guarantee. Period.

One of the benefits of running an SEO / PPC Management firm, is the access and insight we gain from managing our client campaigns. We get to test A LOT of campaigns. Whether it be within Adwords, Yahoo, Bing, AdBrite, Miva, 7Search or LinkedIn and Facebook. We test ‘everything’, on all networks.

To add, we consider ourselves pretty well versed when it comes to running PPC / Paid Placement campaigns. I mean, that’s what we do right? Given the experience our collective team has, and the number of campaigns we manage on a daily basis, you would think that an experienced, hard working team could make a campaign work on the largest social network on the planet. Unfortunately, not so.

The truth is : Facebook Ads, and the cost of paid social traffic, has such a low conversion rate that regardless of what we or any of the partner agencies we work with have tried, the overall CPA (Cost per Acquisition) is abysmal at best.

On average (across over 400 campaigns), we have found that an advertiser needs at least 10x as many clicks, to acquire a lead or sale. The problem however is that the click costs are not 10x less expensive.

Here are some of the reasons why we think this may be the case:

Targeting is So off target

If you have ever visited the LoveClients website, you will notice that our entire conversion funnel is focused on “chatting” with customers prior to signup. Given that the agency is open 24×7-365, there is always someone here to man the chat.

Now, if you have ever used live chat software, you will note that they almost always incorporate live visitor monitoring, allowing the operator to track precisely which geographic location, the visitor was referred from, here is what we see when using our live chat application (Blurred client names for privacy reasons):

So, when placing Facebook ADS, with the following targeting, why do we seem to attract visitors from Sweden, Italy, Japan and Australia:

• - who live in one of the countries: United States, Canada or United Kingdom
• - age exactly 23 and older
• - who like advertising, advertising executive, business owner, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, independent business owner, lawyer, marketing, marketing manager, marketing sales, sales, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, seo, small business, website design, website developer or women owned business
• - who speak English (UK) or English (US)

Screenshot from within Facebook Ads:

Facebook Ads are Interruptive

With a search campaign, if you target your audience, keywords and Ad Creative correctly, then there is a very high chance, that the visitor is specifically seeking information about the product or service the advertiser offers. Though with a Facebook AD campaign, the only real targeting is by demographics, it is interruptive advertising.

Search Marketing is a solution finder, Facebook Marketing is not.

ADS really do not belong in a social environment

In the real world, nobody likes to be sold to. Especially not from your friends, or in the middle of a social activity. By its very nature, Facebook has become a virtual social outlet, what we like to refer to as the ‘procrastinator’. Admit it, we all spend A LOT of time looking up our ex girlfriends/boyfriends on ‘The Book’. The issue however, is whether you are really in the mindset to buy a new phone, book a trip, or order flowers in the middle of perusing through photos of what your work colleague just had for lunch.

Regional Targeting is all wrong

Working in a global agency like LoveClients, I travel between 4 continents on a quarterly basis, rarely do I spend more than 30 days in one place, and seldom do I get the chance to get back home to visit friends and family. Home, being Australia.

To add, I haven’t lived in Australia for over 6 years, though that is where I set up my Facebook account. My country and city are set to the UK in the settings, though I continue to see ads like the one on the left. Why am I exposed to Hyundai Australia ads? I do not live in Australia, nothing on my settings states I live in Australia, so why would I be seeing Australian ADs constantly? Surely the ad planners at Hyundai couldn’t be that silly to target an AU based campaign to a global audience. This adds fuel to the point I made above, we attract visitors from the wrong regions even when we explicitly specify them in the Facebook AD panel.

What my friends/family like, isn’t really what I like?

Most of the people on my facebook are old friends from back home, the occasional acquaintance I meet in my perpetual travels, and an ex boyfriend or two.

The only thing we really have in common now days is the location where I grew up, but not much else. I mean, do we really still have things in common with a kid you shared lunch with in the 3rd grade?

As adults we inevitably grow apart, partake in activities and interests that are more suited to our individual likes and dislikes. So just because my friend Harold whom I haven’t spoken to since 1991 likes Dear Pringles, I cannot fit my hand inside your tube of deliciousness, I’m not sure that really translates so much to me wanting to purchase pringles anytime soon. (Am I the only one who despises the smell of pringles?).

Facebook needs to completely up their game if they intend to compete with the likes of Google or Microsoft for share of local Ad Spend. SEO Agencies like LoveClients are the gatekeepers for a lot of their potential clients, but if the relationship-gatekeepers can’t make campaigns profitable; we can’t continue to recommend that our clients spend on the platform.

Michael Arrington posted as much on TechCrunch, and Aaron Wall forecasted a similarly depressing trend on SEObook.

The alarmism over this subject is warranted, sure, but here’s the fundamental issue — the idea that good, hand-crafted content will disappear is premised on the idea that nobody wants to read a properly researched, well-done article.

And that’s just not true.

Why Quality Content Can’t Just Disappear

Sure, if you’re looking for “donating a car in Dallas” and Demand Media can provide you with a 5-part video series on how to do it, fine. But in forecasting the end of all quality content, we’re assuming that the search engines only care about generic responses to keyword searches, because that’s how they make their money.

Right now, a pretty good argument can be made that that’s true (from a revenue standpoint), but looking at the way social media is continuing to change the way we find content, it’s clear that generic search terms relying 100% on Google’s static-XHTML algorithm are not going to be the only way people get their information into the future.

Will People Settle for an Ultra-Generic Internet?

I’m not convinced — a world where every single obscure question anyone could ask on Google gets answered by a low-paid freelancer cranking out AdSense-optimized pages is not the internet people will settle for.

Right now it’s happening with consumer electronics, where it’s near-impossible to find a non-affiliate link just by searching in Google, and as this happens more and more, people will get frustrated. As they do, they’ll stop going to these pages, Google will stop making ad money off them, and realize (if they haven’t already) that these practices are diluting the quality of the web severely.

And then where we will turn? I hope it’s back to hand-crafted, quality content that gets shared and linked and passed around. The stuff we knew was great in the first place. This doesn’t solve the problem of how people who create that content actually get paid to keep doing it, but that’s a larger problem currently being faced as the issue of “content” goes through a kind of revolution, and we intend to keep talking about it here on the blog. It could all end badly, of course, but the world of marketing — and that’s what a lot of this is, in the end — has its ups and downs, and no one can exactly predict the future.

The McDonalds Analogy

Just because McDonalds exists doesn’t mean great restaurants (and mediocre restaurants, and charming-but-average little osterias, and so on) necessarily have to go out of business. The internet is a big place, Google is a gigantic player, but just as the Big Mac didn’t sterilize the American palate (despite what some people might suggest), Google’s embracing of Demand media and their keyword-heavy formula doesn’t signal the ultimate end of quality content online.

For a look back in time, and a further take on some of the reactions to Arrington’s piece, take a look at Carl Franzen’s post on the Atlantic or Sonia Simone’s take over at Copyblogger.

If you have a billion users, and a mere 0.1% of them have an issue that requires support on a given day (an average of one support issue per person every three years), and each issue takes 10 minutes on average for a human to personally resolve, then you’d spend 19 person-years handling support issues every day.

If each support person works an eight-hour shift each day then you’d need 20,833 support people on permanent staff just to keep up.

That, folks, is internet scale.

We are often asked in our Live Support Chat ‘Do you guys ever sleep?‘ or ‘How can you afford to offer 24×7-365 live support, as a start up?‘. The answer is simple really, and it all comes down to the foundation of this very business.

To put it bluntly, the SEO industry for the most part totally sucks when it comes to client service and accountability. Agencies and ‘celebrity’ (spew) SEO consultants that work the speaking circuit tend to spend more time promoting their capabilities, their new book or their personal brand, than they do focused on delivering value to their customers. Which is where LC is a little different.

In short, we are well aware that this business is nothing without our customers. Evidently so, as we named the company LOVEclients. So how do we keep up with the demands of 24×7-365 live support, scale the business, and still deliver a quality service that our customers have become accustomed to?

It is a mix of the following:

Technology (The HUB)

Every LoveClients campaign is managed within a custom built application that acts as a central communication tool for everyone working on the campaign.

The hub, which is what we call it internally, is a place where clients can login to track progress, provide their input, approve process elements, and communicate directly with the team 24×7-365. It keeps everyone accountable, and campaigns on track.

All reporting, communication, trackable metrics and and site analytics are conveniently located in one place, so as to make daily decision making an informed, and simple process.

Multiple TimeZones

When LoveClients first started trading, we opened a 24×7 production facility based out of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We thought we would take advantage of the low production and operation costs, and access to great talent. It didn’t work however, here’s why:

In under 12 months, we came to realize that the type of people that were willing to work the ‘late shift’, really were not suited to the level of fanatical support that we have for our clients, and their respective campaigns. To add, due to the timezone difference our best team members were working the day shift; while our clients were sleeping. When clients awoke, they were then dealing with the team on nightshift.

We are still paying for that mistake, but it taught us many, many valuable lessons. We adapted quickly by opening offices within the TimeZones our clients trade in, and scaled KL down.

Now we operate separate offices and production facilities in Vancouver, London, Riga and Melbourne, taking advantage of the differences in timezone to offer a true 24×7-365 service offering. Each office now has an overlap, of a few hours, so as the team in London is coming toward the end of their day, the crew in Vancouver takes over, and as Vancouver is calling it quits, Melbourne is fresh and ready to be of service.

So.. No, our clients are not serviced by half-asleep crew in stale offices that stay open 24×7-365 – but instead by opening strategically placed global offices, and a custom built central communication tool (The hub), we are able to offer 24×7-365 live client service & support, by mother tongue, english speaking professionals who keep normal hours!

Mother Tongue client service

When I called to query a charge on my AMEX bill last month, I was routed from Vancouver (Canada) to Bangalore, India. The representative that took my call was helpful enough, and for a task as simple as checking a transaction on my statement, I completely understood why AMEX would use a facility in India to cut down their customer service costs.

Though when it comes to providing high-level, often culturally sensitive, marketing advice; the timezone and cultural differences between say Birmingham, Boston and Bangalore can play a massive role in the quality of advice you receive from your SEO Agency. Even though the human resource costs are high in cities like Vancouver & London, we have found that keeping customer service, strategy planning and research on-shore has played a massive role in the overall experience for our customers.

There are many great SEO companies that operate throughout places like India and the Philippines, though there is a notable difference between simply delivering a shopping-list of tasks for a customer, and actually getting involved in a clients business, understanding their objectives, the cultural sensitivities and their specific audience requirements.

Don’t try to be Everything to Everyone

Love the clients you have, and service them well, but don’t try and tackle tasks that are way out of scope of your offering. If you were to walk in to a McDonalds Restaurant, and order a plate of Spaghetti Bolognese, they are not going to hop out the back and do their best to whip up the sauce, to keep their customer happy. On the contrary, they stick to what they know best & deliver what they know works.

As a small business providing a professional service offering you can’t be everything to everyone. Know your limits and deliver a brilliant customer experience to those customers that suit your service or product offering, trying to deliver something that is way out of scope or simply not part of our core competency will only end in tears.

Manage Client Expectations

For starters, don’t even begin to promise #1 rankings as a reputable SEO Agency. A sure fire way to lose a client is to promise deliverables that are out of your 100% complete-control within a timeframe that is totally unrealistic.

Not only will you not keep your customers happy, you will lose them for good. Prior to building LoveClients the founders of this company worked in the web design & advertising space so we are all very well aware of how the promise of a deadline that is not met, can ruin a working relationship in less time that it took for you to read this blog post.

As a service provider, if you provide realistic expectations from the outset and explain your channels of communication, then life will be a great deal easier for all parties concerned.

In our instance, we have three very specific forms of communication. Live Chat, The Hub & a 24×7-365 Live Call Back service. No power-point presentations, no long-winded lunches & no, we will not write you a proposal. As outlined on our Contact Us page, we simply don’t do meetings.

Although DeWitt Clinton makes a valid and interesting point about the true human cost of scaling client support, it is still arguably possible to manage at scale if expectations are managed correctly, the technology is in place to communicate efficiently & of course if the company has hired the right people (in the correct timezone) that are dedicated to client satisfaction, & not just client service.

The primary purpose of CRO is to assist you in expanding your online business and reaching your goals in relation to revenue and profits, market share or site membership levels. If you own and promote a special interest website, your main objective is most likely that of increasing your user base and membership. For these reasons, conversion rate optimization data is based on real business metrics, not simply on abstractions such as click-through data and bounce rates. Currently, most Internet marketers using CRO as a tool to generate better returns from their online investments, agree that strongly increasing website conversion rates proves to be the fastest and most dependable method of making the most of the visitors you already do have.

What Are Some the Simple Mathematics Related to CRO?

The conversion rate of a domain or webpage is equal to the percentage of visitors who achieve a particular goal during a given time sequence. Usual goals include making purchases, requesting services and joining newsletter distribution lists. In order to improve your site’s homepage conversion rate by 25%, you must accomplish a 2.5% improvement involving ten of these elements: company tagline, main headline, introduction text, photographs and graphics, product and service descriptions, offers, usability, guarantees, site navigation, call to action, site layout, pricing, testimonials, and product return/refund policies; just to name a few.

When performing a basic A/B split test on a webpage, the Google Website Optimizer software does the math for you. Half of your site visitors will view Headline A while the other half view Headline B. Each visitor will be shown a different combination of site elements, such as text, images, banners, prices, and special offers. Afterward, the software will compute an average of the top performing site components. These results can be a great help in creating the ultimate dynamic presentation and Web presence for your site and business interests. This comprehensive method of site testing is known as multivariate testing.

What Other Kinds of Testing Are Common in CRO?

A number of different kinds of testing and analysis are commonly used in conversion rate optimization, including the following:

- Web analytics. The basic site overlay feature of Web analytics reveals where on your website visitors click, where they don’t click, and at what point they exit the site. In other words, this useful feature reports what your site traffic is doing.

- Usability testing. This highly effective test lets you know why site visitors are doing certain things.

- Eyetracking. This CRO component alerts you to which site elements visitors see without clicking, and what items people fail to click because they simply don’t see them. For this, you will need specially designed hardware. Currently, a startup group, GazeHawk, offers discounted eyetracking by using normal webcams.

- Clickmapping. There are two main areas of this CRO activity, Crazy Egg and Click Tale. Crazy Egg helps you monitor which areas of your website visitors choose to click and just how far down the page or into your site their degree of interest takes them. Click Tale enables you to see flash movies revealing the individual activities of each visitor to your domain.

- Both customer surveys and cooperative competition (offering the products and services of competitors for sale on your own domain, often as an affiliate) are additional good aids to learning more about the conversion rates achieved by your market competition. Live chat sessions can also be eye-openers in this area.

What is the Role of CRO in the Course of SEO Campaigns?

While the major focus of SEO campaigns is directing as much targeted Web traffic from the search engines to your website and business domain as possible, the purpose of CRO is to increase your conversion rates appreciably. Simply put, SEO drives visitors to your site and CRO turns them into valuable customers or website members. Most online business owners are familiar with the primary aspects of effective SEO—professional level site construction by experienced Web content writers and designers, and then authority building from the greater web pointing in. Additional resources such as top placement in search engine directories, use of Google Adwords and other online advertising and keyword aids, pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns, and building a presence via social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and search engine social media sites like YouTube are highly efficient and proactive elements of expert SEO. However, in order to transform all the new traffic this finely-tuned SEO has driven to your site into conversions, what is then needed is the uniquely combined creative and scientific effects of CRO.

What CRO Methods Are Most Often Recommended by Web Marketing Experts?

The majority of CRO system experts highly recommend various testing methods to find the most accurate and productive way to achieve higher website conversion rates. There is, however, a second school of thought which is more focused on studying and interacting with a target market by means of remarketing, remessaging and retargeting (attaching cookies to site visitors to later serve them with site-and-product-related banner ads and messages long after they have left a website without conversion). At this point in time, the general consensus is that while different varieties of behavioral targeting can lend a valuable boost to SEO-CRO campaigns, results of comprehensive CRO system testing will undoubtedly lead to the highest conversion rates possible.