How to explain SEO to clients in plain words

To explain SEO to clients, use short answers they can repeat to a partner or a boss. Start with what SEO is, then the kinds of search, then what a link does, then how soon a change can show. Google's own pages give you plain words for each one, so you don't have to make up your own.

How do you explain SEO to small business clients?

Explain SEO to a small business client as two jobs: help search engines make sense of the site, and help people find it. Google's SEO Starter Guide says SEO is "about helping search engines understand your content, and helping users find your site". It adds that SEO helps those users decide whether to visit the site through a search engine.

That gives you a script a busy owner can follow:

1. Say what SEO is in one line, in the two jobs above.
2. Tie each job to the client's own site. Name one page and what you'd change on it.
3. Say what the client will see each month. Point to the report. Make no promise about results.
4. Ask the client to say it back in their own words. Fix what they got wrong before you move on.

Keep trade words out of the first talk. If one slips in, give its meaning in the same breath. For what an SEO client gets each month, see SEO deliverables.

Use the same plain words in the monthly report, and write it so it can be followed with you out of the room. For why a report with your name on it matters, see Why is white label SEO reporting important?.

How do you explain the different types of queries in SEO?

Explain the types of queries as the reasons a person searches. Google's guidelines for the people who rate its search results name four kinds of intent behind a search: Know, Do, Website and Visit-in-person. These guidelines are a guide for raters. They aren't a ranking rule, so don't present them to a client as one.

Then make it real for the client. Take a handful of searches their customers might type, and ask which kind each one is. Then ask which page on their site answers each search.

How do you explain an SEO backlink?

A backlink is a link on another website that points to a page on your client's site. Explain it as a path. Google says it mostly finds pages by following links from pages it has already crawled. In many cases, it says, those are other websites linking to yours.

Google's guide also says the vast majority of the new pages it finds each day come through links. So the plain line for a client is short: a link from another site is one way Google comes across a page.

Stop there. The lines we read from Google say how it finds pages. They don't say what one link does for a page's place in the results, so don't tell a client that they do.

Questions a client may ask next, and a safe way to answer each:

• "Can we buy links?" Say what your agency does and doesn't do, and put it in writing.
• "How many links do we need?" Give no number. Say what you'll do, and how you'll report it.
• "Who gets the links?" Name the person or team, so the client knows who does that work.

How do you explain how long SEO takes to show?

Explain the wait with Google's own words, and don't give a flat number of months. Google's SEO Starter Guide says each change you make takes some time to show on Google's end. In its words, "Some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months".

The guide also says you'll likely want to give it a few weeks before you judge whether the work helped in Google Search results. And it says not every change you make will show a clear effect in search results.

Three lines to say out loud in the first month:

1. We'll tell you the date each change goes live.
2. A few weeks after each change goes live, we'll go over it with you.
3. If a change shows nothing, we'll say so, and say what we'll try next.

Week one is the time to say all of this. For what to promise an SEO client in week one, see SEO client expectations.

If a new account is in that wait now, plan for it. For the slow first months of an SEO account, see how to retain SEO clients.