Why Your SEO Company is Losing the Clients’ Trust

Reliablecounter Team

It’s almost every manager’s nightmare – one day you wake up and there is a one-star review for your service. After just a couple of days, that number is now two. By the end of the month, you see your review scores have declined significantly across multiple reviewing platforms. What will you do next? How did it happen so suddenly? Can you recover from this? Here are some strategies you can use to tackle your clients’ discontent with your service and turn your business’s public image around. It won’t be an easy task, but with persistence and determination, you’ll surely succeed.

Asking Your Clients Directly

What’s the best way to get to the root of a problem? Simple – by asking the client directly.

Particularly, if a customer has gone into enough trouble to write a negative review, that means they care enough to get their voice heard. This usually translates into the customers being receptive when you contact them, apologize, and urge them to tell you the issues with your services. Providing services like SEO or bespoke software is different from normal products, and it is more difficult to find out where the problems are.

If you want to learn about the problem, make sure you hear every client. Contact them, apologize, and make sure they tell their story. While a single customer might just be petty, getting multiple bad reviews means there is most likely a real issue that needs addressing.

 

Addressing the Root Causes

After you’ve determined the root causes of why you’ve received bad reviews and your clients are losing trust in your business, it is time to start fixing things. If the root cause is something small and negligible like a bad employee, an out-of-date piece of software, or a non-functioning small business process, you can fix it directly without any problems.

On the other hand, sometimes the causes of the problems are rooted in the business and all its divisions. It’ll disrupt your whole business if you fix it quickly without any care. Here’s what you can do if you want to minimize damage and interruptions for your business:

  • Come up with a plan to combat the issues without putting the spotlight on anyone in the business. You can come up with a detailed plan fixing the issues in stages without forcing any confrontations. This usually leads to better results.
  • If you have a company vision, updating it to reflect the new issues might be a great implicit way to bring attention to the issue and motivate your employees to tackle it without any disputes.
  • If you think a certain division or group of employees are the core cause of the problems – instead of firing them directly, you can slowly phase them out by redirecting their responsibilities to new people. This helps your business’s operation to continue smoothly as you make major changes.

Reconciliation

The next step you can take is reconciling with your clients. The cost of acquiring a new client is 4 times the cost of retaining a client – that’s why it is vital for you to try to appease the clients that were affected by the bad service.

  • The first thing you should do is apologize for your business’s failures and mistakes, take responsibility for them and try to assure them it won’t happen again.
  • Next up, you can incentivize them to do business with you again by offering them substantial discounts. Taking into account the costs of acquiring new customers, you’re most likely saving money even if you give them a large discount. You must take the bigger picture into account.
  • Lastly, you can form a contract with another SEO company, such as Neadoo Digital SEO agency to help you handle your workload for a while. Fixing the issues might disrupt your workflow and having a contract with a similar company will let you process clients better, more efficiently, and with fewer problems.

 

Progress Estimation

It’s not only important to change things in your company and hope your clients trust you again, but you must also find ways to measure your progress in combating the issues.

One major way to measure progress is review scores, but these might be slow to come in, and you have to wait a couple of months before seeing any progress.

You can always create your own indexes that you think might make sense and measure your progress through those. If the variables you’re trying to measure are relevant, the index would be a reliable indicator.