There’s a fantastic piece from Lee Odden on What Makes an Ideal SEO Client. He discusses two back-to-back prospect calls with some significant modifications.

For some reason, the majority of inbound sales calls (either from past or present interest) seem to find themselves on my phone. And much like Lee, I’ve become adept at smoking out what could be a great client relationship from what will almost certainly haunt my dreams.

Of all the prospects who call us, very rarely will we agree take on a client solely focused on SEO. I have no problem with a client who wants to go 100% interactive, but anyone who chooses to put all of their eggs in the Google basket is just asking for trouble. Companies really need to have a mix of other marketing channels to support their brand (which, when done correctly, supports the SEO function anyway).

If you are an integrated marketing agency, consider the Who, What, When, and How Much when speaking to a prospective client:

1. WHAT? Request clear, concise and quantitative goals: Telling me that you want to improve your search engine presence is useless. Telling me you want more sales is useless. Telling me that you want more unique visitors to your site is useless. Who doesn’t? Some examples of clear goals are:

· We have 10,000 pages on our site. Google has four indexed. Help us get the rest crawled.

· Increase my conversion rate from 2% to 3% on my paid search campaign.

· Increase sales by 15% on our new product line.

2. WHEN? Determine the timeframe of the campaign(s). It could take 2 weeks or 2 years to increase sales on a product line, depending on the ferocity of promotion. Tactics for a short-term plan and long-term plan are night and day.

3. WHO? Does the client have an accessible leader as point of contact? If it’s not the person on the other end of the phone, then what is that new person’s focus within the organization? Can he/she affect change effectively? Can he/she be counted on to champion your recommendations?

4. HOW MUCH? As in how much of a marketing budget has been earmarked to meet the goal? This certainly affects consideration #2.

Your clients have expectations of you. Make sure you can handle them. You have expectations of your clients. Make sure THEY can handle them.