A pet peeve of clients who work with agencies on search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing projects is that the agencies take a long time to deliver on the results they promise.

And, these might even be professional agencies.

Professional agencies do this because they know that getting search rankings takes time, several months at least. The same is true for content marketing results.

When agencies pitch such solutions to clients they often end up not signing because they want fast results and not sure about the usefulness of the keywords you propose. Even the agency owners are not sure and often take a calculated guess.

If you are an agency owner you can use a hack to solve for this.

Ask the client for a small ad budget to pre-test the effectiveness of an SEO campaign. This budget should only be a fraction of the project cost. Then run Google ads for the keywords you plan to use for your SEO or content marketing efforts. Do it for a week or two. The ad campaign will quickly tell you how effectively the traffic from those keywords will convert.

This way you’ll find the right keywords to go after. Now, backup your big pitch with this data and win client trust. It is likely that you’ll increase your closing rate by 100% or more, all other things being equal because now your pitch will be based on data and not empty promises.

And, when you run your campaigns this way, the client will win too. That means longer and more valuable retainers.

Think about how a double conversion rate will look like for your business? 

Will you like that?