Around our office, we like to say Yalla is the dream and its sister company Lemonade Stand pays the bills. We launched Yalla a few months ago to simplify collaboration and client communication for marketing agencies like us. Building, growing and managing our clients’ digital presence is still a big part of our business.
We’re a little obsessed with process here, because we always want to improve our value to customers. Monthly search engine optimization work has always been a sticking point: How do we show clients the value of what we do? And how do we make sure we’re not going through the motions?
Before we found SEMrush, our monthly SEO work was hard to explain to clients. Check Google’s Search Console for any crawl errors on the site. Poke around and see if any pages are missing strong meta descriptions. Use our monitoring software to watch for any troubling dips in rankings, and identify potential areas for growth. Our customers saw results, but we wanted more metrics to show them in our monthly reports.
Enter SEMrush. In just a few months, it has wildly improved our transparency and made us better at our jobs. I can honestly recommend it for agencies, freelancers and anyone else in the SEO industry.
SEMrush has tons of features, but I’m just going to focus on one. This is the tool that instantly convinced us SEMrush was worth the price of a subscription, and it’s what we use to wow both long-standing clients and potential new ones.
Introducing the SEMrush Site Audit.
This is an interactive dashboard that measures everything related to your site’s SEO health. Meta titles and descriptions, duplicate content, the text-to-HTML ratio on individual pages…all of the rules you’re supposed to follow to do well on the SERPs. After crawling a site, SEMrush assigns it an overall health score out of 100.
Here are a few reasons this is awesome:
Clients get it
I can spend 20 minutes explaining the importance of meta tags to someone and they still might not grasp it. That’s fine – there are plenty of things I don’t get, either. But everyone understands a grade.
The power to tell a client, “Here’s an objective ranking of your site’s health, and here’s what we’re doing to improve it” is invaluable. It stops internet marketing from being this nebulous thing only pros understand, so the clients know they’re getting their money’s worth.
Plus, every month we get to go back to customers and say, “Hey, check it out! Your health grade increased. That’s because we did x, y and z for you.” Which leads me to the next point…
It gives our team concrete objectives
Our monthly SEO servicing objectives in Yalla (the software we use to manage our workflow in our agency) really only need to say one thing: Work SEMrush. The site health audit removes the guesswork from the servicing process. Account managers just log in, check the dashboard, and fix the issues the software identified.
It’s helped us land clients
I’ve sat across conference tables and watch potential clients’ eyes light up when they see a site audit we ran before meeting with them.
“What do you mean our site health is 65%? They said it would be perfect!”
Of course, it’s about more than pointing out flaws in their current site. SEMrush is an integral part of our proposals now, because it lets us track what potential clients’ competitors are likely spending on pay-per-click ads – and whether they’ve invested in content marketing.
We’ve always included some sort of competitor analysis in our proposals, but SEMrush presents everything so professionally it’s just impossible to match.
Do I sound like an infomercial? Trust me, SEMrush didn’t pay, convince or encourage me to write this post. I just love their product and wanted to show them some love in return.
We pay $xxx per month for SEMrush. In the past few months, it’s helped us earn xxx times that in new monthly revenue. Do yourself a favor and sign up.