Stop saying it’s not Important: Your Customer Cares

I’ve recently been working on the development of a new service which distils twenty plus years of web development and SEO activity into a single audit to help clients navigate that murky world of black hat SEO.  

I ran our first report for a client who has been having considerable issues with their website developer and has reached a point of frustration that can only be described as “gritted teeth”.  

We ran our report. Their site did not score well. In fact, it had the poorest score of a site I’ve seen in a long time.  

The client delivered the report to the web developer and was immediately met with a defensive response about how these things did not matter.  

Well, they matter. To the customer. And they matter to search engines. And for all of you out there who think SEO is dead because AI has taken the front seat, think again. It’s more important than ever because it’s those search engine crawls that are driving the AI responses. If the technical setup of your site is poor, you are in serious trouble.  

I hopped on a call with the developer on the client’s behalf, and challenged them (nicely) on their technical performance. The client listened in because they actually really care that their £150k investment in technology is working for them.  

The developer responded to our technical know how, realised we weren’t trying to steal their client, but enhance their work, and they’ve just implemented some technical fixes that has removed over 16,000 errors from the site, half of them JavaScript errors. This in turn has improved the overall site audit score from 27% to 98%, and the Google Page Speed Insights score by at least an additional 20%.  

But they needed the evidence first. And a strong push back from someone who understood the technical stack. The client didn’t have that knowledge. The client shouldn’t need to have that knowledge. They are paying you for that. They did, however, feel their concerns were being dismissed.  

I’ve been around the block long enough to know that clients can be challenging. That they’ll say no to services that they need, in order to save money in the short term, and that you rarely have the full picture as a third party of that client/agency relationship. I’m respectful of both when entering conversations like this.  

If there’s a commercial reason for not doing it, then I’m ok with that. We can then advise the client that particular service is potentially worth paying for. But if it’s just a lack of attention to detail on the agency’s part, I’m less tolerant.  

I pointed out significant gaps in their core coding. They were unaware. They had blocks set up on Cloudflare that were unnecessary and causing errors. They blamed it on Cloudflare until I told them we had Cloudflare on our sites with no such issues and that this could be fixed. They had structural level 404 errors that were replicating right across the site. These are now also fixed. Better experience for the customer, better experience for the client. All issues previously dismissed as not important.  

Important to whom? Because if your customer cares, then it’s important.  

Stop dismissing their concerns. 

 

There’s more where this came from. I share more of my thinking on Cunningly Good Marketer on Substack. Subscribe to get my opinions, experience and real-world lessons straight to your inbox.