Nikolas says: “Today, I thought we could talk about the non-SEO side of things – so, all the things that make SEO important, whether you're working in a company or as a freelancer like myself: building relationships, showing empathy, and understanding what the client is about.

Not just doing SEO for SEO, but for the client's sake.”

So, the non-SEO side of things that impacts SEO.

How do you measure the ROI of building relationships, talking to your clients, showing empathy, and those kinds of words that you used?

“How do you measure the success? I believe there are different types of metrics that you can use.

Of course, there is the quantitative side of things. You will always need to track the visibility of your client across different platforms, engagement, or monitor conversions – which are, in the end, what's important for the client because if you don't bring them conversions, whether it is sales, sign-ups, or leads, this is one important part.

You also need to be aware of the quantitative metrics. For example, if you conduct surveys or take feedback from your stakeholders or the client themselves to see if they're satisfied with the progress so far. Evaluate it every time and say, ‘Okay. This is what worked with the engagement. This is what didn't work.’ or ‘This is what the brand perception of the client is after we've done the planning.’

The last part is that it's important to have a lot of case studies, tests, documents, and experiments (whether they are available publicly or not), to make sure that everything that we're optimizing is well-optimized and that you have basically succeeded in enhancing the customer journey and the task points, and actually achieved what the goal of the client was in the initial engagement.

That's what I think are the most important things that you should be aware of every time.”

Is this empathy, this relationship-building, nice to have or would you say it's probably one of the first things that you'll focus on when building a new campaign?

“I wouldn't say that it's a ‘nice to have’. I think it's very important in terms of understanding your client. I mean, it's one thing to actually do your job and be an outsider but, if you are actually into the business and care about what the business is about – about their objectives, their goals, or what each department is doing – I think that's more important to understand.

In SEO, you might have a lot of dependencies. It's important to be part of the business in terms of understanding. Don't enforce an initiative or a technical deployment, for example, if you see that there is a dependency of a client in terms of technical limitations. It's better to bring it to their level and understand what you can do now versus where you want to go in the future and better improve them.

I think it’s pretty important to keep in mind every time.”

You talk about the importance of being part of a business but, if you're an agency and you have clients and those are the businesses that you're talking about there, how involved in the client's business can you actually be?

“That's a good question. It depends on the client. You cannot always be involved 100%. What you will rely on more is building relationships with the different stakeholders, either with the client themselves or when it comes to the different teams.

If they have different teams – like a developer team, a designer team, a content team, and so on – to be able to speak their own language and basically explain better what you want to achieve in their own terms so they understand, and it’s not just you blabbing about SEO jargon that wouldn't make sense otherwise.

Also, understand if they have bureaucracy. If you want to enforce some initiatives, if there's some legal limitation, you need to speak to the legal department. That’s actually happened a few times with me as well, where I wanted to promote some initiative and there was a legal limitation and I had to sit down to with the legal team and understand, from their own perspective, what the problem is and, from my own perspective, make them understand what we want to achieve and why I want to do anything that we want to do.

I think that the most important part of this (especially if you are on the agency side, a consultant, or a freelancer), is that you need to be aligned with the company, like I mentioned before. You need to be aligned with their goals, not just enforcing, ‘Okay. This is what you do. This is SEO. Do it.’ Be even more receptive to what they want to achieve and align with their own goals.

Otherwise, there's no sense. If I'm doing one thing and they want to achieve another, it's not a successful engagement in the end.”

I like your example of drilling down inside a business and finding what the real challenge is.

You talked about legal issues, potentially, within the business, so not necessarily taking problems at face value but seeing why they occurred and whether it's possible to stop them from repeating in the future.

“Yeah. Exactly. That would be a great approach. It's one thing to put on a Band-Aid and fix an issue, but it's another thing to stop something from happening.

I actually had this discussion last week with a client, and we were talking about how to actually fix a thing and how to stop it from happening again. So, exactly that. That's part of the engagement and understanding on their own side.”

You talk about building as close a relationship with the client as possible. When you onboard a new client, is there a certain system or series of steps that you go through in order to actually build that relationship as quickly as possible?

“Yes. Usually, in the beginning, it's important to have a list of questions that you start building with experience.

For example, what are their objectives? What is their capacity? Have they done any SEO work before? What is their budget? Things like this that you want to understand. Also, give them the opportunity to explain how they see their business.

Many times, I will have a list of organic competitors that are good for them to compete with from an SEO perspective but, from their side, they might have a different perspective on what business competitors they want to compete with. For example, if there is a small store and they say that they want to compete with Apple, I will tell them, ‘We have to find some middle ground somewhere, and be more realistic on what we need to do.’

After that, we have the first discovery, sit down together, and set some more realistic goals based on their answers, their capacity, and everything.

Also, be flexible with their budgets, their timelines but, at the same time, try to stick to them. If you set a timeline, do not let them procrastinate and not do anything. Otherwise, you will lose them. If there's a very big gap between one SEO initiative and the other, which happens a lot with enterprises, sometimes you lose them.

Make sure that you're there with them. Take their hand, like they’re kids on their first day of school, and guide them through the process. Make sure that they understand what needs to be done.”

If a client is unrealistic with their expectations (you used the example of wanting to compete against Apple for certain keyword phrases), how would you go about persuading them that their own objectives aren't realistic and the right ones to be focusing on?

“I think that it's important to manage expectations, from the beginning, of what I would be able to do for them, as an SEO professional, in order to for them to know.

If they tell me something unrealistic – that they want to be number 1 on the first page of Google against all their competitors in 1 week – I always have to present to, first of all, keep them to a more realistic level, and manage the expectations that this is not possible.

The best way to do it is either with past use cases or with actual data, and explain to them how long it takes and what needs to be done with either real data or past use cases to show them. ‘This is what needs to be done to go to 1st place on the 1st page of Google. It cannot be done in 1 week.’ It needs time and SEO is more for the long-term game. That's what they need to be able to understand.

Break it down for them, that these are the steps we need to do and it's not possible to do it in one day. I usually use the example of building a house or when you have back pain and then you need to follow a physical therapy plan. It's a step-by-step process. It's not done directly in one day, and that's it. It's not like PPC, where we press a button, and everything works directly. These are important things to keep in mind.”

Is it possible that building relationships and having greater empathy can have an impact on traditional SEO metrics?

Are there some metrics that you can track in conventional analytics dashboards that indicate to you that you've done a good job building relationships and increasing empathy?

“Let's say that we have a list of 10 tasks that you need to do. If you see that the completion rate is 2 tasks every 2 months, it means that they're not taking things so seriously or there's a problem that you need to fix somewhere. Either way, there is some action for me to do after that.

But if you see that they're actually working very fast – they are completing the tasks that you give in a reasonable time, within the timeline that you have set – it means that they're actually investing and want to invest in SEO, and that they understand that this is important for them.

Also, what we mentioned before about brand reception. If you see that there's a lot of customer satisfaction and that people perceive the brand as something very good as opposed to when you started, I think that this is a very indicative metric that things are going well. People are recognising the brand and the company, not just from an SEO perspective or from a product perspective or whatever, but from their own customer perspective. They see the value in this company.

I think those are the most indicative ways to see if things are working and whether what you're doing, the empathy and all of this, is actually a good thing or not.”

What percentage of an SEO's time should you spend on building relationships, empathy, and the areas that you're discussing here?

Also, how do you incorporate empathy into an SEO strategy?

“That's a good question. I think, for the first part, I will say the usual answer that all SEOs use: it depends. It depends first on the level that you're working on. I mean, usually, on an enterprise client, it might be up to even 80% talking to people, building relationships, and working with teams, and another 20% doing the actual work.

Also, it depends on your level. If you are on a lower level, like a specialist or in an in-house team, maybe you take more time doing the work and learning, which means that it depends also on your own level. If you are more junior and you want to learn, you put in a lot of work towards the actual work. Then, as you start building your ‘soft skills’, if you like, you start working towards these types of softer skills, like empathy.

It depends on the client as well. If you are an enterprise, it is most of the time. If it's a smaller client, maybe they don't have the capacity, they don't have the team, and they don't have the know-how, so you might need to spend 50% of your time doing the actual work and another 50% pampering, actually talking to them, and working closely with them.

I think it depends on the client a lot as well.”

How do you justify spending so much time on this to your boss, or even to the client, when they're just telling you to focus on the activities that you agreed to do for them, like content or links or whatever you're focusing on as an SEO?

Can you not just spend 100% of your time doing that?

“You could, but the reason you're there is also that you have the knowledge to understand some things better than they would. You have the knowledge of the SEO work, or how to do things and the methodology, that you cannot teach them in one day.

From my perspective, you would have the know-how and the methodology. You are more like a strategic adviser who knows how to do things, and then you go from the strategy to the actual actions that they will need to do.

You mentioned the content. If you see that, in the beginning, they were only producing 1 article per month and you asked for 30, but you slowly start building up this frequency and they actually manage to produce 30 articles per month instead of 1, this is also a win for you. You're actually up in productivity, in terms of SEO and also from a strategic adviser perspective, which is something you can measure with the traffic they bring, the internal links, and all these things that you build. That actually help towards SEO, as an example.

If it's a development team, are there a lot of issues that you fixed that you can measure as having impacted SEO in a good way, and they actually bring some ROI to the client or improve their performance? This is indirectly something that you can actually prove, and that means actually chasing a developer team to do the things that you want.

It's important for them to fix things in the end, because they might not know. They might not have the capacity or the knowledge that many things are dependent on fixing this stuff.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“I think that many SEOs have the tendency to get stuck on isolated metrics. For example, only keyword rankings, only domain authority, or only click-through rate – only one metric that, on its own, might not mean much.

If you put it into context and take into consideration the intent of the customer and also, as we mentioned before, the business goals – if you put them together and you give them context, it should make more sense because this way you build a strategy that contributes to the broader customer journey, and you actually help the client achieve this customer journey.

As an example, you should stop creating content only for keywords. This is one thing that I think SEOs are doing wrong. They create content for SEO, not for the content itself. Stop focusing only on the keyword that you will use in the content. This is what gives the industry a bad name.

Instead, you should develop resources that actually address the user intent and give an answer to what they're looking for. Stop chasing goals and keywords and actually show value to the client.

One last thing: a lot of people get stuck on algorithm updates. Instead of getting stuck on every algorithm update, you should build a resilient strategy for the client and make sure that they're future-proofed as much as you can, to your capacity.

Basically, like we said, they should be working towards user satisfaction, long-term visibility, customer satisfaction, and all of these things, instead of just getting fixated on one small thing. I think this is what people should stop doing.”

Nikolas Monti-Potsolakis is an International SEO Consultant, and you can find him over at NMPConsulting.co.