After my 2years experience in SEO I found that there is a 4 types of client in SEO. 1. Client who want Traffic on site. 2. Client who want Leads. 3. Client Who want PR upgrade. 4. Client who want ranking in major search engines.
Yeah,You are absolutely right. All 4 points are co-related to each other. If traffic comes on your site then automaticaaly leads or enquiry are coming and ranking related for given keyword is also shown.
They all want that, Prof.stan. The thing is though, they don't exactly understand why - like a kid in a toy store, they just "know" they "have to have it". If the client wants more traffic, promote and market the site to those in the client's target market (search engines shouldn't necessarily come into play, unless the people the site is being marketed to need to use a search engine to find it - in which case you better have optimized the hell out of it). If the client wants leads to increase sales, you advertise, market and promote the site to those that will find the site useful and want to buy the products/services offered on it (even better if the site can be tied into a brick and mortar establishment). If the client wants a PR upgrade, tell him or her that the information in the PR toolbars is stale data, usually about 3-4 months old. A good way to explain it would be to compare the PR toolbar data to light coming from a star a 1,000,000,000 light years away. The light from the star shows us what it looked like one million years ago, not right this instant. Also explain that the real PageRank data is updated on a nearly daily basis, but is held as a tightly guarded secret by Google, which does use the data to help place the site in its results pages when a person conducts a search for topics that the site covers. Then work on getting more quality relevant links pointing back to the client's site, preferably links from authorative sites in the client's market or niche (and don't forget to optimize the site's internal linking structure as well to minimizes the PageRank flow loss from each page and to maximize the flow of PR into your site's pages throughout the rest of the site). The last one is a no-brainer. Build a good Web site the right way, and then promote it, both online and offline. Get people to talk about the site.
actually most of them just know that by optimzing the site their website comes up in the search engines
Think most clients want it all even though they request one, at least if you ask them ('do you want traffic or rankings?') One of the problems in how clients perceive SEO work is the vision of everything being very short term. Its like you should see all the results in 2 weeks.. which is not gonna happen (though you can see some results..). I think SEO needs to be carried out long term (talking 3 months, maybe even 6 months minimum active work) to be done in an optimal way. Communicating that to a client can be a challenge.
No kidding, verbie. I can't stand it when people "want it all and want it all now" - that's not how they built their business, so why is it they want their sites done that way? (Yes, I actually know the answer to this.)
I find that my clients' needs and expectations are all over the map. Some have no idea whatsoever of what they want out of seo. Others want to be on first page just because their competition is there. However most all of them expect seo ranking to be fast and to last forever