How to Win More SEO and Digital Marketing Business with Pre-sales Audits

Pitching new business is often one of the most expensive things an agency does – expending resources to do research and legwork to prove why they’re the How to Win More SEO and best choice for the client. As the list of agencies competing for business grows, potential clients have started asking for more and more work up front, often unpaid, to prove agency capabilities and client fit.
For agencies, this means quickly and affordably getting access to insights around potential clients, their competitors, and their industry. Conducting a pre-sales audit is a popular way to communicate an understanding of current issues on a site from an SEO standpoint. What started as a simple list of identified SEO problems as part of an agency pitch, has now expanded to include content marketing data points and recommendations.
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In this blog, I’ll answer some common questions about pre-sales audits, including:

How can they help my agency win business

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What’s included in a pre-sales audit?
What are some potential drawbacks?
How can we provide pre-sales audits easily and effectively without spending a lot of time and money?
How can a pre-sales audit help my agency win business?
For most agencies, there’s a review process that happens when clients are considering bringing on outside help. Whether it’s for creative or technical skills, or both, there are lots of options available and many different agency styles, team setups, and individual philosophies for tackling problems.
A few of the most important elements for creating a lasting client / agency partnership are:

Understanding the real goals of the client

Stated goals
Goals your client is being measured on that they may not have told you.
Knowing their expectations and how your team will meet them.
Who is involved in the day-to-day process.
Who has ultimate decision-making authority.
How you’re uniquely qualified to help reach their goals.
For search and content agencies, a pre-sales audit can help to position the agency as a partner for reaching corporate goals.
To communicate your understanding of the company and it’s challenges, use the pre-sales audit to:

Set a shared baseline of current site and

Give insight and detail into the client’s expectations around improvements in traffic, rank, conversions, and other performance metrics.
Understand the market situation, including direct and indirect competitors.
What’s included in a pre-sales audit?
First, let’s talk about setting a baseline of current site and content rank and performance. A baseline provides a shared starting set of metrics which you and the client can discuss. Often, prospective clients will disagree with your findings. You may also discover that your standards and the client’s standards for good content performance do not match on all types of content. You may also find that prospects have unrealistic expectations for traffic, conversion, rank changes, and other metrics that cannot be accomplished based on their budgets, resources, other competitors in market, or other significant factors. It’s good to have these conversations early in the relationship to avoid painful mismatches in expectations later.

Besides providing insights into

the client’s site and content, use the pre-sales audit to help the client understand the competition. Agencies often include competitive data, but too often I see agencies focusing on how a brand’s direct competition is performing without expanding their view of who the real competition is to include competition at the content level. When we’re looking at an entire site, there are often different types of content there – whether it’s at the feature or product level, based on audience personas, or just the difference between educational content and support information. To do the best job of understanding a prospect’s site performance, agencies need to create some content groups.
Content groups help get better insights into:

What keywords are driving traffic to specific types of content

Who the competition is for traffic in each content group
What improvements need to be made by content group
Which groups or types of content are the highest priority now
When we’re talking about finding competitors for content at the group level, what we’re looking for is not just other brands that are vying for dollars, we’re also looking at any content that is taking traffic away from your potential client.
For example, if you’re working with Nike’s running shoe department and you know that Brooks and Asics are competitors, what you’re also likely to find is that “Runners World” and other publications are also garnering a considerable amount of traffic for your keywords. While you may not be directly competing with them for the sale of shoes, you are competing with them for education and attracting customers. Knowing what content other brands are creating that’s resonating with your target audience will give you powerful information on what to focus on.
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How you set up your content initially and in your analytics system determines how well you’ll be able to measure it. In addition to tracking your own content, rankings, and findability, you’re most likely trying to keep an eye on the market and other competitors in quicksigns your space. Tracking their content and findability metrics alongside your own comes with challenges.
Depending on the size of your site, competitors may not be relevant for every product, feature, or location – meaning you’ve got different competitors that align more closely with different groups of content. We talk a lot on the show about keyword and content groups, but this last week we focused on competitor groups and why they’re important.
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How do competitor groups work

Competitor groups are a way to understand how specific competitors or particular competitor content is coinciding with your content across a variety of areas, including:

Products
Features
Geographies / locations
Campaigns
Audience personas
Content type (blog, white paper, case study, advertorial, video, etc.)
One way to simplify this process is to create keyword and content groups that match marketing needs (likely the items listed above or something similar) and then to use Competitor Discovery to figure out who is creating competing content. These may be existing competitors that you’re already tracking or you may find new competitors that are specific to these areas.
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So lets back up to content and keyword groups. When you create keyword and content groups you can segment out various areas of your marketing efforts to compare and contrast how audiences are interacting with your brand.
I’ll use Nike as an example to explain how this works. Nike makes a lot of different athletic products. Obviously the type of person who is buying basketball products may not be the same as someone buying running shoes. But, even within the category of running shoes, there are many different types of audiences. Including:

Avid marathoners

Trail runners
Gym members
Joggers
Walkers
And various ages including:

Children
Young adults
Adults
Seniors
For each of these potential content groups (content can belong to more than one group), you can have keywords that are associated with driving traffic to that content. The keywords for adult trail runners versus senior joggers are likely very different, even if they’re all ending up at running shoe products. Creating content groups helps you figure out how people are talking about their needs specifically so you can target your marketing and content efforts more accurately.
Now, we can move on to competitor groups. When we’re talking about who the competition is for your audiences, we’re not just talking about the people usa b2b list who are directly selling competing product and services. We’re also talking about anyone who’s taking traffic away from what you’re specifically creating to get attention. In the case of Nike, competitors may include reviews of running shoes, articles about how to buy running shoes, or any other content that uses the keywords and phrases Nike is trying to rank for.
If you’re able to discover your content competitors, you can create competitor groups to reflect direct competitors versus indirect competitors. This may mean grouping your competitors by things like “Brands” versus “Publications” or by various locations. Using competitor groups you can segment your competitors in a variety of ways and then add them to multiple groups for analysis.

Why are competitor groups important

If you match your competitor groups to your keyword and content groups, you can understand which competitors are taking traffic away from you and which content they’re using to get audience share. Before you spend a lot of time creating more marketing content, you can make better decisions based on specifically how competitors are taking traffic from your content and what they’re creating that’s getting more audience attention.
Although it can seem a daunting task to set up content, keyword, and competitor groups, it doesn’t have to take a lot of time and resources, if you’re using a tool like Ginza Metrics. Using the setup wizard, you can input matching rules using specific keywords and phrases. Then, we gather all the content and keywords that fit and add them to the group for you. Of course, you have the ability to edit and can add or delete keywords and content from groups without disturbing your ability to get individual metrics on that particular asset.

competitor groups for content marketing

Competitor groups work the same way. Once you’re tracking a competitor, you can just check them off and add them into the groups. This feature works really well with our Competitor Discovery feature. Competitor Discovery isn’t just looking at the brands that you’re already aware of, it also identifies any piece of content that’s taking traffic away from you and where that content ori