Posted by David Mihm

In its recent report on “Yelp’s Rocky Relationship with Small Businesses,” PBS Media Shift was the latest mainstream media outlet to cover one of the most controversial topics in all of local search: search engines’ filtering of customer reviews.

The topic first came to prominence four years ago in Kathleen Richards’ landmark piece on Yelp’s aggressive sales pitches — or extortion, depending on your perspective and whom you believe. While I was never fully convinced of corporate misbehavior on Yelp’s part, the company hasn’t done itself any favors by continuing to allow its field operatives to use deceptive sales tactics. Despite its best efforts to educate both business owners and everyday users of the site, the poor reputation of Yelp’s salespeople continues to contribute to confusion around review filtering among the small business community. I hope to be able to clear up some of that confusion with this post and offer a few tactical tips to help avoid the frustration these filters can cause.

Why review filters exist

As local search usage among the general public has exploded over the last several years, more and more directories have (rightly) seen reviews as a way to:

• Gauge the offline popularity of a business in their algorithms
• Provide better insight to searchers into the experience at that business
• Increase the “stickiness” of their sites by increasing the sense of community
• Get out of Google’s Panda/Farmer purgatory by adding unique user content

In many ways, Yelp was ahead of its time on all four of these bullet points, and as a result, it had to tackle the inevitable review spam that accompanied its popularity.  

Its answer was arguably the first widespread local review filter: an algorithm for detecting and removing spam or suspicious-looking content.  In Yelp’s own words: 

For those of you who couldn’t quite keep up with Yelp’s version of Micro Machines man, the primary reasons are:

• To make sure reviews are left by actual people (not robots)
• To make sure reviews are left by customers and not just hired third parties
• To make sure businesses don’t leave reviews of themselves

Yelp’s CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman, recently gave his own slower version of this rationale in a company-produced video:

How review filters work

While I don’t have any detailed knowledge of Yelp’s review filter specifically, many comparable filters seem to kick into action if any of the following is present in the content of the review:

• Use of extreme adjectives or profanity in the review
• Over-use of keywords in the review
• Inclusion of links in the review

Another criterion that also tends to trigger filtering is a sudden burst of reviews preceded by or followed by a long lull between them.

Some of the more sophisticated review filters, including Yelp’s, take a look at user characteristics, too, including:

• Total number of reviews a user has left on the site
• Distribution of ratings across all of a user’s reviews
• Distribution of business types among all of a user’s reviews
• Frequency of reviews that a user has left on the site
• IP address(es) of the user when leaving reviews

“I Can See the Future of Your Google Reviews”by Margaret Shulock is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at blumenthals.com

The algorithms behind review filters are far from perfect, as many readers probably know, and Yelp is far from the only local search engine with a review filter. In fact, Google+ has probably accrued more ire from business owners as a result of its filter in 2012 and 2013 than any other site.  

Unfortunately, these filters frequently:

• Lead to less-informed consumer decisions about the experience at a business
• Remove legitimate reviews, especially from less-sophisticated, less-active customers
• Discourage new users from leaving reviews

All of which leads to frustration from the standpoint of a small business owner.

Avoiding review filters

Yelp is probably the most aggressive of its peers at enforcing its business review guidelines, which also happen to be the most onerous guidelines of any local search engine.  Yelp’s filtering is so aggressive that one in five reviews written on Yelp never shows up on the site!

To sum up those guidelines:

• Don’t ask anyone to review your business on Yelp.
• Don’t ask anyone to review your business on Yelp.
• Don’t ask anyone to review your business on Yelp.

O ye business owner who disobeys those guidelines, beware!  You run the risk of a public shaming.  

Although Yelp’s guidelines are considerably more onerous than its peers’, Google+ is not far behind in stringency. However, many local search engines are far less prickly about soliciting reviews from customers, or even incentivizing them, and some (including Google) have even engaged in this behavior themselves.

For those who have been caught in the Google+ review filter, Mike Blumenthal has covered your travails par excellence and has authored a most reasonable response. Miriam Ellis and Joy Hawkins have also given excellent advice on this front.  

Review guidelines at major local search engines

Here are direct links to those guidelines at a few of the biggest players:

• Google+ Local
• Yelp
• Foursquare
• Yahoo
• Citysearch
• YellowPages.com
• UrbanSpoon
• TripAdvisor
• Facebook (Guidelines for Page Promotion; to my knowledge, guidelines for reviews have not yet been released by Facebook.)

The review filters of the future

While the search engines may throttle their level of filtering from time to time, the review filter is a local search institution that is here to stay.  

The primary methods of these filters, though, I think will change pretty dramatically. Rather than judging a review by its content or looking at website behavior (e.g. how many reviews a user has left for other businesses), the explosion in smartphone adoption is enabling a couple of far less easily-manipulated criteria to judge the veracity of a review.

• Any local search platform operated by a handset maker (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, …Amazon?) could register the device ID at the time of review and tie it to a bonafide human being.
• Any local search platform that has implemented mobile payment processing (Google, Apple, …Amazon?, any Square/PayPalHere partner) could disable the ability for a user to leave a review of a retail-category business unless he/she had completed a transaction at the storefront.

And even for those platforms without the handset or payment-processing advantage, requiring location-awareness for users of mobile applications prior to leaving a review seems like a no-brainer (which Yelp has already implemented and Google may be well on its way to doing).

For those sites that are more desktop-dependent, widespread adoption of primary social logins (Google+, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) could lead to a baked-in layer of spam-fighting.  

As Eric Schmidt recently said:

“Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”

In some industries (e.g., DUI law, plastic surgery, psychology), anonymity may be a pre-requisite for any user reviews and these local search platforms may need a Plan B. But for most industries, requiring some sort of verified social profile would solve a lot of problems.

Facebook, of course, has a huge leg up on everyone else based on its knowledge of a user’s social connections. Google+, meanwhile, could look at a user’s activity across Google’s entire range of products (web search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.) to stop spammers in their tracks.  

While consumer privacy concerns around these mechanisms for review filtering may arise, many business owners would likely rejoice at a truer, less bug-ridden filtering algorithm and a more accurate and complete representation of their customers’ experience.

Well, that’s enough out of me for this week! How about you? What are some of your strategies for avoiding these dreaded review filters? What other methods of filtering do you see coming to Local Search?

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by Nick Herinckx

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

This is a follow-up post to my Advanced Wordpress SEO Mozinar. Thank you so much for those who joined me as we discussed the inherent SEO issues in Wordpress and how to solve them.

Wordpress SEO is an exciting topic, and I received a lot of great questions during and after the Mozinar that I didn’t have time to answer live. As I started to read through your follow-up questions, I realized that a lot of them were about the same topics, so I decided to include responses to these common questions in this post for all to see.

Of course, there are multiple ways to address these issues in Wordpress as it’s such a flexible platform. I chose to focus this post on the solutions I’ve used in the past, but please include your ideas in the comments section of this post so we can all learn from each other.

Proper permalink structure and limitations

During the Mozinar, we talked quite a bit about how you can run into significant site speed issues by having your permalink structure for blog posts start with something other than a number.

In other words, www.site.com/blog/2012/awesome-post/ runs quickly, while www.site.com/blog/online-marketing/awesome-post/ actually results in site speed issues, particularly as your blog grows. This happens because Wordpress has difficulty deciphering where in the database to pull the post from without a number in the first directory. The team at Wordpress have themselves publicly acknowledged this issue on previous Wordpress versions.

A number of listeners were quick to point out, however, that newer versions of Wordpress have actually solved this issue entirely.

Indeed, if you have Wordpress 3.3 or later, you can actually forgo needing to begin your posts with a number and use whatever permalink structure you want! No speed issues to worry about.

I didn’t mention this difference between Wordpress versions on the Mozinar, and want to clear that up here. The best practice for permalinks (if you have Wordpress 3.3 or later) is to use something like /%category%/%postname%/, or even just /%postname%/, as it is both more user-friendly, results in a more logical site hierarchy, and is also can be more SEO-friendly.

Of course, if you haven’t updated Wordpress or are stuck with an older version for some reason (needing expired plugins, significant platform customization, etc.), not starting your blog post URLs (the permalink structure) with a number actually can result in some serious site speed issues. I suggest that either a Wordpress upgrade needs to be completed, or you should consider changing your permalink structure to ensure you have a quick site for users and search engines.

Proper way to change permalink structure

What are the best steps for changing your permalink structure? Maybe you need to maintain and older Wordpress version, and thus need to update your permalink structure due to site speed issues. On the other hand, maybe you just used the default permalink structure when you built your site, but now want to change for SEO or user experience reasons.

Updating your URLs is always a delicate change that requires good planning due to the huge impact this can have on your search engine visibility. We always want to make sure that we 301 redirect old URLs to their new counterparts to not just ensure a good user experience, but to properly communicate the change to the search engines in a way that allows them to attribute rankings and link equity to your new URLs.

Without establishing 301 redirects, you can really harm your search engine visibility.

Wordpress is great in how it allows for easy URL customization due to its very powerful URL re-write controls. Unfortunately, if you change your URL permalink structure, Wordpress implements 302 redirects from the old URLs to the new ones, rather than the necessary 301 redirects.

I’ve watched more than a few rankings tank due to this Wordpress quirk, and I don’t want this to happen to you!

Fortunately, there are two solutions that don’t involve you having to get crazy with redirect-rules or 1to1 301 redirects:

Solution #1: Update .htaccess file code

If you’re changing your permalink structure to /%postname%/ (and ONLY if you’re moving to this permalink structure), I recommend updating your .htaccess file to handle the 301 redirects from your old permalink structure to this new one.

I like this approach because working within the .htaccess file is quicker for your Wordpress installation, and keeps your installation from getting bloated with more plugins.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Copy your .htaccess file as backup in case something goes wrong and you need to re-upload the old one
2. Get the .htaccess code snippet you need by scrolling to the bottom of this page on Yoast SEO’s website (I have no relationship with Yoast SEO outside of being a user) and click on the orange button that says “Generate Redirects”
3. Fill out the form fields and click “Generate Redirect” when done to output the proper code
4. Copy this code and place it at the very top of your .htaccess file
5. Change your permalink structure to /%postname%/ from within Wordpress’ interface
6. Verify that the redirects from the old post URLs to the new ones are, indeed, now 301 redirects. You can do this by spot checking a your old URLs with a 301 redirect check tool like the one found here (again, no relationship outside of being a user)

This allows for a quick update to your .htaccess file without too much mess. If it doesn’t work, just change back your permalink structure and re-upload your backed-up .htaccess file.

Solution #2: Use a redirect plugin

If you want to use another permalink structure besides /%postname%/, then a simple .htaccess update is out of the picture.

Instead, I recommend using a Wordpress plugin to give you the control you need to take care of the 301 redirects. Of course, there are numerous 301 redirect plugins available, but I recommend Redirection by John Godley (again, I’m just a user and have no other relationship with Redirection or John Godley).

This plugin automatically 301 redirects URL changes while also allowing for implementation of 1 to 1 301 redirects and even the creation of redirect rules based on regular expressions! All of this from within the Wordpress interface, making it a relatively easy solution for managing a permalink structure transition.

Just install this plugin before changing your permalinks, and then once the change has been completed, verify that the 301 redirects were properly put in place.

Of course, there are multiple other SEO ramifications to consider when changing URL structure (see http://www.seomoz.org/blog/should-i-change-my-urls-for-seo for some more discussion on this), but the above solutions should cover how to properly change your permalinks for most Wordpress installations.

Multilingual Wordpress site implementations

This was a very common question I received after the Mozinar, and surrounds the best way to implement multiple languages on a Wordpress installation so that www.yoursite.com/fr/ returns French translations of your content, and www.yoursite.com/de/ returns German translations, for example.

Although Wordpress doesn’t support multilingual sites or blogs out of the box, there are multiple methods for implementing and running multilingual installations. Wordpress provides a detailed overview (including pros and cons) on five different methods to impellent such an installation themselves (just visit http://codex.wordpress.org/Multilingual_WordPress for a list of all available methods), so I won’t rehash all of their great commentary.

Instead, I’m going to review my preferred method for setting up a multilingual site, which is to include all available translations in a single page or post, and then have Wordpress automatically choose which one to display based on the language directory selected (such as /fr/ or /de/).

Solution: WPML plugin

I’ve always used the WPML plugin (no relation outside of being a user) to handle this for the following reasons:

• It allows for easy governance of all of your translated content by allowing all translations to sit within the same post page in Wordpress
• Easy to add new language variations if you want
• Automatically implements the hreflang tags on all pages, reducing any potential duplicate content issues while also following new multilingual SEO best practices
• It allows for the use of language directories, sub-domain or domains, and is thus very flexible and allows for good Google Webmaster Tools setting integration

Just visit the WPML site to purchase and for detailed configuration and installation instructions. Installation is just like any other plugin, and this is the best solution I’ve used for multilingual Wordpress blogs.

There are other ways!

I hope I’ve been able to clear up some common questions about handling Wordpress. I love the platform, but it’s not perfect and requires customization to ensure that’s it’s as SEO friendly as possible.

This post outlines what I typically do to address the topics discussed above, but there are, of course, other ways to make the changes we talked about. Please be sure to comment below and let the community know of ways you’ve been able to address the above topics yourself.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by Phil Sharp

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

I want to tell you a true story about a discount store from the 1970s called D.B. Sales.

Now, before you start yelling…

“Join me in the 21st century, Grandpa! We have the Internet, Snuggie blankets and millions of cat videos to watch.”

…give me a chance to explain. I promise to make it worth your while.

D.B. Sales was run by Morris and Tessie Benatar — friendly, hard-working folks who were trying help their small business succeed. The problem is, in the mid-70s, their business wasn’t doing too well. Sales were down, money was tight, and tensions between Morris and Tessie were rising.

Sure, they look nice, but you wouldn’t want to get Tessie angry. She had a mean right hook.​

Like any good businessperson, Morris doggedly tried everything he could think of to increase sales. He changed the window displays, ran promotions, offered free delivery, and placed ads in local newspapers. But, nothing worked.

Then, one day, everything changed.

Morris finally had a promotion that worked. In fact, the promotion worked so well that he ran it year after year for the next 10 years:

You don’t actually have to go out of business to have one of these sales, do you?

Now, why did I tell you this story? Because I think it contains a valuable lesson about how to increase the conversion rate of your website.

Morris spent a lot of his time testing out different ideas until he finally (and luckily) came across something that worked. As online marketers, we do the exact same thing.

We test different button colors, call to actions, headlines, images, and everything else we can think of. Occasionally, on our good days, we come across something that works and we feel good about ourselves.

However, we should learn from Morris. He could’ve saved himself a lot of money, stress, and dirty looks from Tessie, if he would’ve talked to his customers. They could’ve helped him answer one of the most important questions:

Why aren’t people buying from me?

This was an easy question for Morris to ask because customers would walk right into his store. But, as people who manage websites, how do we find out why people aren’t buying from us?

In my mind, this is what a website visitor looks like. It makes life more exciting.

That’s why I want to share with you my patent-pending approach* to finding out what your website visitors are thinking.

*Okay, you got me, it’s not patent pending. Does that make it “patent pretending”? <Insert Drumroll>

Five ways to find out why your customers aren’t buying from you

1) Chat transcripts

If you have a chat feature on your website then you can get really helpful feedback RIGHT NOW by simply reading through your chat logs. Whenever we’re going to revise a page at UserTesting.com we always start by searching for all of the chats that happened on that URL.

This is an easy way to learn about your customers’ main questions, concerns and objections.

If you don’t have chat on your site, but are considering adding it, then check out SnapEngage. They’re who we use and we’ve been very happy with them.

Chat logs make it easy to find out what questions your visitors ask on specific pages.

2) Surveys

If you have a question for your visitors, or want some feedback, then often times the best thing to do is ask. Use tools like Qualaroo, SurveyMonkey or 4QSurvey and ask open-ended survey questions like: “If you didn’t sign-up, can you tell us why not?”

Sometimes the easiest thing to do is ask.

3) Talk to your sales and customer support people

Your sales and customer support people spend all day communicating with your site’s visitors. This means that 1) they’re amazing people and 2) they understand the objections of your web visitors better than anyone.

So go talk with your sales and support people and ask them how they overcome the common objections. You can then take this learning and apply it to your site.

4) Eat your own dog food

Spend time pretending to be your customer and use your website and product. At UserTesting.com we have one of our team members pretend to be a customer each and every month, write up their suggestions for improvement, and then email them directly to our CEO.

This isn’t quite as good as unbiased feedback from someone in your target market, but you’ll be surprised at the amount of good ideas your team will come up with.

5) “Think aloud” testing

Look, I’m biased, but this is definitely my favorite way to find out why customers aren’t buying. With “think aloud” testing you can watch people in your target market speak their thoughts out loud as they try to accomplish common tasks on your website or mobile device.

When you run this kind of test you can see with your own eyes where your users get stuck or have problems.

You just think you know your users.

Remember, the people visiting your website are actual human beings – they’re not “uniques” or “pageviews”. To understand how to make your website better, you need to learn from Morris Benatar: either pretend to always be going out of business, or talk to your customers.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by Phil Sharp

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

I want to tell you a true story about a discount store from the 1970s called D.B. Sales.

Now, before you start yelling…

“Join me in the 21st century, Grandpa! We have the Internet, Snuggie blankets and millions of cat videos to watch.”

…give me a chance to explain. I promise to make it worth your while.

D.B. Sales was run by Morris and Tessie Benatar — friendly, hard-working folks who were trying help their small business succeed. The problem is, in the mid-70s, their business wasn’t doing too well. Sales were down, money was tight, and tensions between Morris and Tessie were rising.

Sure, they look nice, but you wouldn’t want to get Tessie angry. She had a mean right hook.​

Like any good businessperson, Morris doggedly tried everything he could think of to increase sales. He changed the window displays, ran promotions, offered free delivery, and placed ads in local newspapers. But, nothing worked.

Then, one day, everything changed.

Morris finally had a promotion that worked. In fact, the promotion worked so well that he ran it year after year for the next 10 years:

You don’t actually have to go out of business to have one of these sales, do you?

Now, why did I tell you this story? Because I think it contains a valuable lesson about how to increase the conversion rate of your website.

Morris spent a lot of his time testing out different ideas until he finally (and luckily) came across something that worked. As online marketers, we do the exact same thing.

We test different button colors, call to actions, headlines, images, and everything else we can think of. Occasionally, on our good days, we come across something that works and we feel good about ourselves.

However, we should learn from Morris. He could’ve saved himself a lot of money, stress, and dirty looks from Tessie, if he would’ve talked to his customers. They could’ve helped him answer one of the most important questions:

Why aren’t people buying from me?

This was an easy question for Morris to ask because customers would walk right into his store. But, as people who manage websites, how do we find out why people aren’t buying from us?

In my mind, this is what a website visitor looks like. It makes life more exciting.

That’s why I want to share with you my patent-pending approach* to finding out what your website visitors are thinking.

*Okay, you got me, it’s not patent pending. Does that make it “patent pretending”? <Insert Drumroll>

Five ways to find out why your customers aren’t buying from you

1) Chat transcripts

If you have a chat feature on your website then you can get really helpful feedback RIGHT NOW by simply reading through your chat logs. Whenever we’re going to revise a page at UserTesting.com we always start by searching for all of the chats that happened on that URL.

This is an easy way to learn about your customers’ main questions, concerns and objections.

If you don’t have chat on your site, but are considering adding it, then check out SnapEngage. They’re who we use and we’ve been very happy with them.

Chat logs make it easy to find out what questions your visitors ask on specific pages.

2) Surveys

If you have a question for your visitors, or want some feedback, then often times the best thing to do is ask. Use tools like Qualaroo, SurveyMonkey or 4QSurvey and ask open-ended survey questions like: “If you didn’t sign-up, can you tell us why not?”

Sometimes the easiest thing to do is ask.

3) Talk to your sales and customer support people

Your sales and customer support people spend all day communicating with your site’s visitors. This means that 1) they’re amazing people and 2) they understand the objections of your web visitors better than anyone.

So go talk with your sales and support people and ask them how they overcome the common objections. You can then take this learning and apply it to your site.

4) Eat your own dog food

Spend time pretending to be your customer and use your website and product. At UserTesting.com we have one of our team members pretend to be a customer each and every month, write up their suggestions for improvement, and then email them directly to our CEO.

This isn’t quite as good as unbiased feedback from someone in your target market, but you’ll be surprised at the amount of good ideas your team will come up with.

5) “Think aloud” testing

Look, I’m biased, but this is definitely my favorite way to find out why customers aren’t buying. With “think aloud” testing you can watch people in your target market speak their thoughts out loud as they try to accomplish common tasks on your website or mobile device.

When you run this kind of test you can see with your own eyes where your users get stuck or have problems.

You just think you know your users.

Remember, the people visiting your website are actual human beings – they’re not “uniques” or “pageviews”. To understand how to make your website better, you need to learn from Morris Benatar: either pretend to always be going out of business, or talk to your customers.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by CraigBradford

If you’re a consultant, you may not realise it, but a large (and difficult) part of your job is to manage people’s attitudes and behaviours. This task is made even more difficult because it is usually most apparent when clients are unhappy or disagree with you. Even the best consultants will have to deal with challenging clients at some point in their career. I want to share some of the things I’ve learnt from my experience so far as a consultant.

I firmly believe that when it comes to keeping clients happy, prevention is better than a cure. Most of the tips I’ve shared look at how to prevent clients from ever becoming a problem, but I also cover some tips to help resolve the problem as quickly as possible if things do go wrong.

1. Communication solves all problems

At Distilled, we have a saying that communication solves all problems. Over the years, I’ve found this to be true. If the problem can’t be solved by communication, it can almost always have been prevented by it. I don’t mean to recommend phoning your client “once a month” as standard, because good communication is a frequent a mix of formal and informal subjects. Don’t just call your clients regarding work; call them on a Monday to see how their weekend was and on a Friday to wish them a good weekend. These little bits of extra effort can make a big difference in the lifetime of a client relationship. As a general rule, I like to speak to my clients at least twice per week and meet face-to-face at least once-per month if possible.

If you have clients abroad, speaking frequently might not always possible, but even so, you should still make the effort — especially if they are a long standing client. For example, I’ve just spent the last two weeks in Cape Town visiting one of my clients. Obviously South Africa is a long way to go, but we’ve been working together for quite some time, and the value we both got from finally meeting face-to-face was invaluable. Lots of the consultants at Distilled have success stories that are sometimes directly related to a turning point in a client relationship as a result of taking them for a beer and getting out of the office to an environment where you can both relax and talk off the record. In general, the more communication, the better. It may feel strange at first, but you can always find an excuse to call a client.

2. Have a genuine care for the success of the business

Communication is closely related to my next point, because care generally comes as a result of regular communication and getting close to a client. If you speak to someone two or three times a week, you get to really know them — not just from a client point of view but what they like, what motivates or demotivates them, and even what they’re up to at the weekend. Hopefully the result of that is that you really want them to do well, and that the success of the business means more that just a job to you. You’ll enjoy your job a lot more if you genuinely care about the success of the business as much as the client does. Anyone that’s been in SEO for a while will know that it’s often not a 9-5 job; quite often, it’s evenings and weekends. Unless you really care, you’ll start to resent working with that client. Reaching this point in a client relationship is invaluable. Let me explain a bit further.

There are always going to be ups and downs with clients, and in general clients, will react in two ways to bad news. They either get angry, shout and scream (usually via email), or say it’s entirely your fault. The second reaction is to pick up the phone and talk about how it can be resolved. If your client knows that you genuinely care about the business, you’re more likely to get the second reaction. It means they are more likely to skip the shouting and pointing fingers part and start trying to find solutions to the problem. They know they don’t need to tell you how bad it is because you’ll also feel the same. Getting to this stage of honesty with a client is rare, but it’s a great place to be. This is what turns retainers into lifetime clients and testimonials.

3. If I do this, will you be happy?

You may recognise the following scenario: you get to the end of the month, you’re happy with the work you’ve delivered, you send the monthly report, and the client is disappointed. While this is a bit annoying, it’s easy to stop it from happening again. At the start of every month, create a plan of what you expect to get finished that month, show it to the client, and ask them, “If I deliver all of the things on this list by the end of the month, will you be happy?” If the answer is no, you have a bigger problem. If the answer is yes, then as long as you deliver what you said you would by the time you said, then it’s less likely they’ll be disappointed. As a side note, the things you say you will deliver should never be results. Only promise things like documents and meetings, and never promise results or outcomes as they are outside of our control and you’re likely setting yourself up for disaster.

4. Document everything

One of the most basic things you should do as a consultant is keep a record of all conversations. After every meeting or phone call, follow up with an email to the client and summarise the main points of the meeting. This is a pretty thankless task 99% of the time, but it can be your most important piece of evidence should the clients record of events ever be different to yours.

5. Never go above your contact

Another common problem you may run into as a consultant is struggling to get things done on the client side. This could be rolling out changes to the site, getting more budget, or just getting some budget in the first place. Whatever it is you are struggling to get done, never try to go above your point of contact to their superior. Not only does this come across as bad manners, it makes your main point of contact look bad to their management. Don’t forget, one of your roles as a consultant is to make your point of contact look good, not the opposite.

6. Provide useful and tailored monthly reports

Let’s be honest — writing monthly reports isn’t fun, and it’s made even worse by the fact that after you spend time writing them, they often don’t get read. However, they’re very important as part of the prevention phase. It’s even more important the closer you are to your client. Even if you speak to your client regularly, you still need to send a summary of what you’ve done every month, as well as the results. Put simply, if you don’t send reports, your clients will forget what value you added that month. For example, I’ve been in the scenario in the past where a client sent me an angry email and questioned the results from that month; I pulled up analytics to show that things were actually going very well. His response was, “Wow, that’s amazing, I had no idea we were doing so well. Unless you constantly remind me that we’re doing well, I’ll continue to moan at you.”

That’s pretty much a direct quote (you know who you are).

He was right; I fell into the trap of thinking that because I spoke to them most days, I didn’t need to send a report. Don’t make the same mistake I did. Use reports to show what you did, what the results were, and get sign off on the next month’s activity. Writing reports also helps to keep you accountable for your own work. By writing at the start of the month what you plan to do and showing it to the client, you’re more likely to get that work completed if you know that you’re going to review it at the end of the month with the client.

7. First mover advantage

Imagine the situation: you go into the office on Monday, only to find your client has dropped for all keywords. What do you do? Tell everyone that if anyone calls, you’re not in? Flee the country? No — you need to step up and call the client before they call you. If you don’t call and try to fix it before the client notices, you’ll end up with an angry client for two reasons: first, because of the drop, and second, they pay you to notice when things go wrong and they noticed (in their eyes) before you did. Always use the first mover advantage and call the client to let them know. It’s not going to be easy, and they might shout and scream, but they’ll appreciate that you noticed it straight away. Tell them the situation and that you already have the team working to find out the cause and find a solution.

The second part of the post focuses on finding a cure when things do go wrong, despite your best attempts to prevent that happening. For the purpose of this post, let’s assume you’ve received an email from an unhappy client, and they’re threatening to leave; let’s also pretend it’s an unjustified complaint, meaning you genuinely think you have provided value and there’s just a misunderstanding. Here are a few tips that have worked for me in the past in resolving the problem:

1. You can’t win an argument

I’ve taken this from How To Win Friends And Influence People, but I’ve found it to be true through life in general, so it stuck with me when I read the book. It’s always my first tip in resolving a conflict with a client. Don’t argue, because you’ll never win and even if you do prove the client wrong, you’ll lose the contract as a result. As Dale Carnegie puts it in the book:

“Why prove to a man he is wrong? Is that going to make him like you? Why not let him save face? He didn’t ask you for your opinion. He didn’t want it. Why argue with him? Always avoid the acute angle.”

Does that mean you need to let clients say whatever they like and walk all over you? Of course not, but you do need to help them see your point of view, not force them to see it otherwise you’ll just get resistance. I typically start with accepting it’s my fault in some way or another. This doesn’t need to mean it’s actually your fault; I usually word it as my fault for not explaining something clearly, or presenting information in an ambiguous way that was easy to misunderstand. Doing so helps to put the client at ease. Clients like to feel that they call the shots, and it makes them more willing to listen to your next point, which hopefully is the answer.

2. Delivery method

In the majority of cases, clients will deliver bad news and complains via email. Regardless of how nasty or challenging a client may seem, people generally don’t like conflict via the phone, and even less in person. Use this to your advantage. It’s too easy to fire off a counter aggressive email rather than pick up the phone; resist the urge to reply by email and try to arrange a meeting instead. I like to respond with something immediately to acknowledge that I’ve received their email but make it clear that there’s been a misunderstanding and that email probably isn’t the best medium to explain. In order of preference, try to respond by:

1. A face-to-face meeting
2. Skype, G+ hangout, or something that you can see the person’s face on
3. A phone call
4. An email

If you are able to arrange a meeting or a phone call, you’ll dramatically increase your chances of coming out with a success story than trying to resolve via email. If you do manage to get a meeting or a phone call, ensure you have your ducks in a row and responses to all the questions the client is likely to have. To help with this, something I’ve found useful is to actually write out an email like you would have responded, but don’t actually send the email. I’ve found this useful in working out exactly what I want to say and to be sure I have all the answers to their questions in a way that makes sense.

3. Disarming honesty

If you’ve messed up, admit it. Nothing says “I’m an idiot” and gets clients angry like coming back with excuses and trying to pretend that it’s not that bad. If you made a mistake, or even if the results just aren’t as good as you were expecting, admit it, your client will appreciate that you’re in this thing together it adds to the genuine care in the business as well if you’re first to go to the client and say you’re disappointed with the results. Otherwise, you’ll have a client that thinks he’s going mad because you see value that they don’t.

4. Know when to say goodbye

Finally, if none of the above is helpful, know when it’s time to say goodbye. Not all client engagements will work out the way you want them to, but it’s important to breakup on good terms. Even if you’re not the right solution for them at the moment, you could be at some point in the future, so take care not to burn your bridges. You never know where your client could end up working in the future.

I hope you’ve found my tips useful. All relationships are diverse, but I’d be interested to hear about any tips you have for dealing with challenging clients. Thanks to Caitlin Krumdieck for letting me pick her brain about previous Distilled clients and adding to the ideas above. Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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