2015 - Mondovo Blog

How to effectively deliver bad news to your SEO clients and yet keep them happy?

Make SEO Clients Happy & Retain Them

This is the second post in a two-part blog series. If you haven’t already done so, do read the first part about how you can use the Rank Drop Quadrant to analyze why rankings have fallen.

If you are an SEO consultant or professional, it is an unfortunate but ultimately unavoidable situation: something goes wrong, the client’s search rankings drop and you then need to communicate the bad news to your client. After all, it is part of your job to manage your SEO clients expectations and to keep them happy. Retaining your client can be hard at such times, especially when you would be the first person they would blame for any sudden drop in their rankings/traffic. So it’s important and necessary that you deal with such situations tactfully and communicate such bad news carefully.

As we covered in the first part, if you are dealing with lost google rankings for your SEO client, you may first want to use the Rank Drop Quadrant to analyze what could’ve gone wrong. It’s good to be able to map the situation out in your head and know how bad (or not bad) the situation is before communicating such news to your client.

So, now that you have gone through the Quadrant and understood the possible reasons for the drop, it’s time we communicate this information to our client/boss in the right way. After all, the cost of losing a client is much higher than acquiring new ones.

1. Skip the Denial Stage

Imagine the situation: you go into the office on a Monday morning only to find that your client’s website has dropped for all keywords in the SERPs. What do you do?

The inclination is probably to tell everyone that if anyone calls, you’re not in the office. In truth, that’s the absolute worst thing you can do. You need to call the client before they call you. Yes, they might get very vocal about their level of disappointment and unhappiness but they will also appreciate the fact that you noticed straight away when things went wrong. Communicating bad news is always better when done as soon as possible, you then have enough time to deal with recovering from the situation instead of wasting time denying the situation. Read More

Mondovo – 10 minutes setup for 10 times more insight!

In the early 2000’s the market for portable music players was virtually untapped. People, me included, were quite content with early versions of ‘MP3’ players and quite frankly we didn’t give an alternative much thought. Not surprisingly, we, I, the world were just not ready for the bombshell that was October 23, 2001 which was when Apple launched the first generation of its music Goliath – the Ipod.

Since then, Apple has launched over 20 versions of the Ipod in varying degrees of memory capacity, colors and user interactions. What this tells us is that Apple clearly knew back then, as we do now, that there is no guaranteed formula for product success – you need to constantly innovate, tweak and critique.

Although I cringe at calling our most recent update Mondovo 2.0 (oh the cliches), it is as apt as it is significant because it puts even greater emphasis on time being spent on analyzing the data vs merely collecting.

We achieved this by turning the campaign set up on its head and really taking a good long look at the user experience. Hard questions were asked and hard answers given; is this step really necessary? Can we make the overall process simpler? The result of our efforts is the new campaign setup process that’s in place today. Here are the reports that can be generated within 10 minutes of Signing up for Mondovo through the new campaign set up process:

Site Audit Report, Comprehensive Competitor Back-Link Analysis, Keyword Research, Ranking Monitor, Overall Metrics Comparison (You vs Competitors), and comparison of Social Accounts Performance on Facebook and Twitter

In this blog article, we’ll outline the new process and clarify any doubts that might exist.

Lets get started. You can login to your account here if you would like to follow along:

If you’re a new user or an existing user looking at setting up a new campaign, here is the first screen that you will encounter. Winston Churchill once said “You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks” – valid point. We have a similar approach and ask users to focus on their most critical requirement first – Improve Rankings or Manage Social Media Read More

Why Should I Use Mondovo?

For digital marketers and business owners trying to carve a niche for themselves in the digital marketplace, there can be no resource more precious than time. The unfortunate hallmark of many digital marketing tools available today are that very few, if not none, actually offer you the ‘all in one’ convenience without sacrificing data depth and accuracy. Although we might be a little biased, we believe we’ve created something special in Mondovo because: Read More

Too much data, too many reports…where do you start?

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that right now, things couldn’t be going better. You’ve managed to find Mondovo amidst a sea of less attractive alternatives and now you’re bursting at the seams to get started. So off you go, full of the enthusiasm and glee that only exploring a new software can provide (if you’re a techno buff like most of us here, you’d relate).

Cut to a few minutes later and your reports are ready to be analyzed (the industry’s favorite term). Only one small problem, being new to the tool, you’re still slightly unfamiliar with the data layout and how to get the most out of the report as quickly as possible.

Here’s your answer. Highlighted below are the key sections that you should look at under each report. The other micro-details can be looked when you have more time.

Rankings Monitor:
All of our tool sets in Mondovo have a ‘Summary’ option so that you can quickly get the gist of whatever the report contains. For the Ranking Monitor Tool, be sure to check the ‘Top 3 Keyword gains and losses’ in addition to the ranking movements under ‘Quick Summary’

Scrolling down a bit, you would find the meat of the report, handily categorized under 4 main tabs i.e. data on ‘Your Website’, ‘You vs Your Competitors’, ‘Full Search Results’ & ‘Competitor Ranking Pages’. We would recommend starting Read More

2-Minute Overview Videos on each of our Tools

Rankings Monitor

Track your search rankings on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Measure and analyze your rankings for important keywords and keep tabs on the competition. Get alerts on major ranking changes.

Website Audit

Identify issues that plague your website and take corrective actions that can improve your rankings. The audit tool can spot missing title tags, broken links, duplicate content, and many other on-site SEO related issues.

Link Research

Analyze the backlinks of your competitors. Understand their linking strategy and identify possible Read More

How Not Checking My Site’s Metrics Cost Me $70,000+ in Lost Business

I’ve chosen to keep the website url anonymous because it could affect the brand image of the site but I thought it’s important to share this lesson.

They say, ‘ignorance is bliss’. You can’t be stressed by something you don’t know or don’t think about. So here I was, living this wonderful stress-free life, happy and content with everything going on with my real estate website because I had a few sign ups here and there and things “seemed” to be going alright. When you’re in such a state, there will come a time, and hopefully reading this article will be that time, when you realize that this ignorance of not tracking or measuring key metrics can be the cause of many a pain in the future…

Even though I would consider myself to be quite tech savvy and also aware that keeping a tab on your stats is important, I never really got down to looking at any of my site’s stats for a long, long time. I was only looking at sign ups, sales and enquiries and the numbers always used to be volatile, so nothing struck me as being abnormal. I was not aware that the traffic to my site had actually been on a steady decline. I was slowly losing rankings for my key terms. A few of my older articles had links to sites that did not exist anymore (I later realized there were 14 broken links spread across 173 of my blog posts).. In short, things were not going well and what’s worse, I didn’t realize any of this.

Then, doomsday struck. Read More

Getting Started with the Keyword Research Tool

Mondovo’s Keyword Research tool allows you to generate a list of relevant keywords from a set of keywords or URLs you enter. It consists of 2 sub-tools viz Keyword Research & Content Ideas. The Keyword Research tool helps with the following:

Researching and discovering new and effective keyword opportunities for your marketing campaigns

Fine-tuning your SEO on-page strategy

Coming up with new content ideas

Monitor trending keywords

We will discuss in detail about “Content Ideas” in the later part of this tutorial. For now let’s focus on “Keyword Research”. Getting started with the Keyword Research tool is an easy task and is explained in detail in the following steps:

Step 1:

Login to your Mondovo account and select Keyword Research (under SEO Tools) from the left menu. In case you’re a new user, you can create a new Mondovo account in less than 2 mins.

Mondovo’s Website Audit Tool allows you to inspect every micro level aspect of all your website pages and chalk out strategies to address the same thereby increasing your SERP rankings and visitor conversion rates. Some of the issues that you can tackle with our tool are:

Missing meta titles and description tags

Finding out about duplicate content issues

Managing broken links

Tweaking slow loading pages

Analyze internal linking structure

Getting started with the Website Audit tool is an easy task and is explained in detail in the following steps:

Step 1:

Login to your Mondovo account and select Website Audit (under SEO Tools) from the left menu. In case you’re a new user, you can create a new Mondovo account in less than 2 mins.

Mondovo’s On-Page Analyzer tool allows you to analyze one page at a time and compare that particular page with up to 2 other competitor pages. There are 4 primary functions that our tool performs which are listed below:

Summarizing key metrics about your page, like the title/meta description etc.

Highlighting your linking structure giving a break-up of the internal, external and if any, broken links

Highlights the prominent keywords used in the page along with details on how they’re used

Checks for how the page fares against 25 rules: Over optimization of title tags, meta description presence, page load speed or image optimization check etc. You can see more of these details in the report that you will ultimately run.

Given below is a detailed step-by-step procedure on how to go about using the tool as well as the takeaways from it. One important thing to note here is:

Steps 1-4 are common throughout irrespective of whether you’re analyzing your home page/inner pages/your page + your competitors’.

So let’s get started:

Step 1:

Login to your Mondovo account and select On-Page Analyzer (under SEO Tools) from the left menu. In case you’re a new user, you can create a new Mondovo account in less than 2 minutes.