I Turned My Company's Biggest Weakness into Its Biggest Strength

By Jason Hennessey, co-founder, EverSpark Interactive, Atlanta, Ga.
From the start, our search engine optimization company, EverSpark, delivered excellent results to our clients. So we were confused when we lost one of our biggest clients just a couple months after we launched our business. The reason? We never built a relationship with the client.

The client told us he wasn't receiving the attention he deserved -- especially considering how much his company was paying us. He was right. We had thought we could get away with paying less attention to our clients as long as we delivered better results than the competition. It turns out that wasn't the case.

Before we lost any more clients, we decided to tackle the problem head on. Not only would we improve our customer service and client relationships, we would make them the cornerstones of our business.

We meet our clients in person -- and stay in touch
As soon as we close a deal with a new client, we will often put a project manager on a plane to fly out for a day-long, in-person planning session. We determine what our client expects of us, and go over the steps we are going to take to get their company more online visibility. This starts us off on the right foot with the client.

But once we've made that initial meeting, we stay in touch via weekly progress reports to our clients, as well as regular phone calls to keep them apprised of how their Web site is ranking.

And we make sure to keep up with them personally as well as professionally. We learn the names of their family members and when their birthdays are, and most importantly we get to know their lexicon. For example if they work at a law firm, we learn the words they use to talk about their practice. Search engine optimization in particular relies on using the right keywords, so learning our client's vernacular is especially important -- it helps us drive the right kinds of customers to their sites.

We let clients peek behind the curtain
Many SEO companies are secretive with their customers. Our industry basically makes a living by studying the Google algorithm that determines how Web searches are listed. Once a company thinks it has that algorithm figured it out, it won't share that information -- it's their competitive advantage. But we realized in order for clients to understand the value of what we are doing, they have to have some understanding of what we do.

So we educate our clients about how SEO works. We send them reports with detailed analysis of all the links we have built for them in a given week -- building back-links is one of the major ways we drive traffic to their sites.

Theoretically, once we teach clients how to optimize a homepage, they don't need us: They could do it on their own, or outsource the job on the cheap to a third-world country. That's what other SEO companies are worried about. But the truth is that Google is constantly changing its algorithm, which means we are constantly updating our techniques. Anyone can go out there and read a book on SEO, but most likely it'll be outdated very quickly. There's a reason people hire professionals. So we don't worry about protecting our trade secrets anymore.

In fact, with many of our clients, we'll visit them a second time to teach their entire staff how to improve their company's online presence. We'll also bring a camera crew and film employees and clients talking about how we've helped them improve their online presence, and we'll use that as marketing material. As long as we have happy clients, we might as well take advantage of it.

We get all our business from referrals

One of the big benefits of focusing on customer service, is that it generates free marketing. The majority of new business comes from referrals. We've gone from having 20 clients when we started our business at the beginning of 2010 to 60 clients, and from generating $500,000 in sales to $2 million -- all with almost no marketing budget. I can give a prospective client the number of any one of our current clients and have confidence that we'll get a good review.

-- As told to Harper Willis

Before co-founding EverSpark Interactive with his business partners, Chris Watson and Dave Hallock, Hennessey was a practitioner of SEO for over 7 years, and worked as an executive at the SEO training firm Stompernet.
Resources:

• Great advice on how to build meaningful relationships with customers and clients.
• Read about why educating customers is a good marketing strategy.