Why can’t we be honest and direct with SEO problems? It seems all of our reporting is just the good stuff. Yesterday, I saw a PPC report from an agency that was managing over 20,000 keywords. The main report showed the 20 best-performing keywords and ads and some engagement graphs, and that was it. There were a number of words that were underperforming, but no mention of them, and no one had asked for a full report.
I have seen this with SEO too – all the good stuff then all the issues dumped into some checklist without calling out any major problems the team indicated they needed to to get support from senior management.
Thursday, I received a call from the kennel where we board Duke when we travel. Since we have an upcoming reservation, they called to say they had a dog infected with Kennel Cough and that they were closing part of the kennel and their daycare to sanitize and work with the city to ensure it was all cleaned. About an hour later, I walked into the living room to catch the weather, and the leading story on the news was the kennel and the outbreak. I was impressed they got ahead of it. On Facebook, many customers also praised them for being honest about the problem and doing all they could to take care of it.
Why can’t we do this in search? I have been in far too many meetings where everyone dances around the real issues or does not want to challenge a redesign that will impact search. I believe if senior executives knew more about the real problems, especially with the workflow, they would want to change them. In nearly every case where I broke ranks and had a grown-up conversation with the senior execs, we broke log jams. Yes, people’s feelings got hurt, and others’ jobs were impacted, but they should have been before this project.
I wrestle with this all the time. One of the things I have been noted for is my honesty and directness. I have lost business opportunities and some clients for essentially telling them their baby is ugly. At IBM, I had several potential “career-limiting moments” when telling senior executives what they needed to hear and not what they wanted to hear.
Recently, I met with a senior executive of a large global company and mentioned that I had noted a few areas of suggested improvement during the prep for a custom training program for them. He was skeptical that I could improve their program as they have a “competent team,” and a half-dozen agencies and top consultants are helping them. Opening Pandora’s box, he wanted to know what I had found. The junior execs in the meeting squirmed in their chair and suggested they review them and develop a proper brief. The executive, now curious, asked me to give a couple of examples, which I did and went through the entire list. This resulted in a large consulting project to help them return to the fundamentals.
Again this week, a prospect told me they would not use my software, DataPrizm, because it points out too many bad things. They told me you would need to hide the Cost of Not Ranking and Co-Optimization Reports in our version so our management would not see them. When asked why, they told me that they have to spend a lot for paid words due to low-quality scores from bad landing pages and a need to bid for the #1 position. In organic, they don’t have the resources and executive support to make the necessary changes, so they don’t perform well. Ironically, the very reasons both reports were created in the first place.
I am an advisor for a couple of agencies and tools, and they do the same thing. One has a cool diagnostic tool, but they were nervous about showing the users all the incorrect things their diagnostic tools had found. They, like most tools, only wanted to show the good things. The actual response from the Client Services Team was, “The customer won’t be happy if they open the tool and see 100 problems. “My suggestion was to rename it “Warm Fuzzy Kittens and Bunnies Report since you are only showing them things that are good.
I have had other clients that had me do process and current state audits and then present my findings of all the issues as “Opportunities as they don’t have problems but opportunities.
We need to find a way to constructively show the issues impacting our search performance and ensure that we get top executives’ support. We must break these log communication jams caused by scared managers who do not want to rock the boat or be a bearer of bad news.
