Get the most from the client-agency relationship by working together

Anthony says: “I’m going to explain how to get optimal results from an agency and how an agency can get good results from their client.

It’s all about working together and focusing on that relationship.”

What does an optimal client-agency partnership look like in 2025?

“Traditionally, it would just be: ‘We pay you, you do work.’ Then, sometimes, the client won’t actually know what you’re doing and it just keeps on rolling and rolling.

Some agencies focus on communication, priorities, accountability, and honesty. If they’ve got good people working in-house with good experience, the clients will then know where to challenge the agency to get optimal results for the business and help them achieve their goals.

Where it sometimes falls down is when SEOs get focused on the SEO-y bit: ‘This is cool. I can use this in a case study for SEO.’ They sometimes miss the point. They’re there to help build SEO for this company or this brand so that they can make more money, complete more forms, build their business, expand into other markets, or whatever it may be.

I want to focus on things like understanding a client’s resources, understanding their business priorities, understanding what they want to achieve over the short, medium, and long term – and how SEO can be a part of that.

SEO is just another channel in a lot of channels that they will be using to try and grow their business. The accountability is on both sides. Who’s responsible for what? That leads to honesty. What can you do and what can’t you do? As an agency, you’ve got to tell them what you can and can’t do. Don’t sell them things you can’t do because you’ll get found out further down the line.

As a brand or as a company, tell the agency what your budgets are. Tell your agency what resources you’ve got. Have you got a developer? Can you do content? Then, they’ll be best placed to put together a pitch or plan that will work for your current situation. It tends to fail when people don’t want to be honest, and egos get in the way because they don’t want to be seen as not having those resources.

That honesty and accountability allows you to focus on the company goals and how SEO can help to achieve those. At the end of the day you, as an agency, are getting involved to help them improve their SEO, their PPC, or their marketing channel.

The team internally knows what they need to achieve. They’ve got that from the C-suite, and they know what the P&L is. Then you can determine how that marketing channel can help to achieve their goals.”

Is it the account manager’s responsibility to determine these business goals and ensure that SEO activities are meeting those, or should SEO consultants and executives be involved as well?

“It’s twofold. It starts in the sales process, the lead process, and the discovery call. Whoever’s doing BD should be asking these questions at the start, and probing these people. You want to make sure that it’s the best fit for you as an agency, but also for them.

Sometimes, people working in businesses don’t have the full picture. It’s up to us to probe and ask those questions. They might not know all the answers right now but, by asking those questions, you’re getting them to think about it and getting them to ask the right people in the business to get the answers.

As an agency, you want to make the best decision for you and your team. You want to be able to work with people you can actually make a difference for, and you don’t want your reputation to get burned. We’ve all done that when starting out with your business. You’ll sign people thinking you can really make a difference, but you don’t have the full picture, and you haven’t asked the questions so that you can put together the right pitch. Then it goes a bit sideways because things change, and you didn’t have the full picture.

It starts from the sales process and being able to get the right information and provide the best pitch possible with all the information you can get. If you’re already working with an agency, as the account manager/SEO consultant, you want to try and focus on potentially reworking that campaign or roadmap by asking more of those questions.

Ask the brand, because the marketing manager might not be aware of everything that’s going on in the business. They’re most likely not going to know the P&L. They know their budget, (they should know their budget, sometimes they don’t), but you can ask them those questions.

Then the marketing manager, CMO, etc., can go and ask who they need to and give you a better picture of how to structure their campaign. Do you need to pitch in content? Do you need to pitch in more technical execution hours because they don’t have the devs? Do you need to make referrals to partners to help out the client? You can then reassess what the playing field is. As an agency, we’ve got a bit of responsibility to do that.”

If you’re asking the right questions, what are some warning signals that something might be an unrealistic objective?

“As an agency, if you like to execute, jump in, and do things – and if you’re creating content, doing link building, and a few other things – a client might have their own devs. That sounds great but, if you ask to work with those devs, they might say they’re only on a small retainer and they can only do certain things. That’s a red flag. You might struggle to get some of the things you need to be done.

Custom CMSs with a dev team that gatekeeps? Problem. You’re not going to get much done. That’s another red flag, where you have those types of systems. It doesn’t matter how much money they have in the budget. If you can’t get anything done, it’s going to be a very short leash, and it probably won’t be a long-term client.

Another red flag is budget. Budget is always a tough question and people want to be a bit coy with their budgets. I get it. However, that budget or range gives the agency an idea of what to pitch. If you don’t give them that budget, they could go wildly off the reservation in terms of price. Then they come back into that proposal meeting and go, ‘Those blokes charged us an absolute fortune. How dare they?’ That’s because you didn’t tell them what the actual budget was. If you tell them that, it could save you a lot of time.

With a budget, the agency can then explain their pricing and what they can offer. It gives you a more tailored approach, which saves everybody’s time.

In the UK, you can look at Companies House. People under-utilise that. I’m not saying you have to be an accountant but, in the UK, you can look at the books of clients and see whether this partnership is feasible, because SEO is a long-term prospect.

Look at their books and look at your minimum price. Do these people have enough for a yearly budget of X for your services? Go into that, not just from an SEO perspective, but from a financial perspective.

Also, brands and companies who are looking at agencies in the UK should do the same. Look at their books and think, is this company going to go bust on you? Do they have some money? Do they have some resources? Have they been there and done that? Everybody does that by looking at case studies on an agency’s website, but finances run things.

Companies House gives you a bit of a picture. It’s not giving you the full P&L, but it gives you enough of a picture to then ask the questions when you’re in those discovery or follow-up calls and get a bit more information. You don’t want the client going bust on you, and the client doesn’t want the agency going bust on them either, especially in these times.”

What are great objectives that you like to work on with a client?

“It’s great when clients have clear goals: ‘We’re an e-commerce brand. We have a plan for the next 3, 5, and 7 years. We want to hit X amount in revenue. These are our goals. These are our marketing channels.’ The marketing manager or CMO is probing you and asking the right questions. They understand where you’re coming from. They’ve got an understanding of how agencies work.

Having clear goals and business objectives is great because that gives you a goal as well. It enables you to see how SEO or your marketing channel fits in to help achieve that goal. A lot of people are vague about their goals. They might have a goal of ‘growing’, or an agency might say their PPC needs to be reduced because budgets are tight, so they need to find a cost-effective solution.

Clear goals give you more of an indication: ‘We need to improve our margins by X.’, ‘We want to improve our dominance in the UK by Y.’, or ‘We want to focus on bringing Z product ranges to market over the next 3 years.’ You can then look at it from an SEO perspective and think, you could increase traffic but, if it’s not the right traffic and you’re not bringing in more form fills, contacts, sales, etc., then is it impacting the P&L?

These days, everyone’s looking at the pound and how they can squeeze more out of it. Budgets are tight. People are getting made redundant. Agencies are going down. You want to be able to talk their language and say, ‘You want to achieve these goals? You want to be the biggest X or sell the most of Y? Great. This is how we, as an agency, can craft an SEO strategy, PPC strategy, social strategy, or whatever to help you achieve those goals.’ That’s more important than fluff.

At the end of the day, that CMO, marketing manager, executive, or whoever has got to report to the C-suite, and the C-suite are predominantly finance and operations people. They’re going to be held to the numbers. You want to make their lives easy by asking what their numbers are. What are their goals? What’s the C-suite telling them? You’re not going to give them everything, but you’re trying to make their lives easier.

You’re matching up your strategy to help them achieve their goals, which will make them look better to the C-suite. They get a bit more budget, or they might get a pay rise or an increase to the size of their team. It’s a win-win-win.”

How do you know when to push back on a client and what’s a good way of doing that?

“The sales process always helps. When you’re going through that discovery call, you’re just trying to probe. As you get older and grow as an agency and as a person, you build experience and confidence. You build your backbone and learn how to say no.

If they’re an existing client, there might be new people coming in on their side, or they’re ruffling feathers because budgets are tight. This is where you need clear communication and clear meetings. You’ve got your account managers or your SEO team who have done those reports and have that evidence to say, ‘We’ve done all of this. We’re responsible for this. We agreed that you’re responsible for doing XYZ.’

That might be content, or they might have an internal dev who should have got things done but didn’t. You can push back because you have the evidence. Build your confidence and say, ‘We’re trying to do our best to provide value to you, but we are getting roadblocked here, here, and here. How can we help alleviate that?’

Everyone thinks it’s always somebody else’s fault or there’ll always be someone to blame. Agencies tend to cop the brunt of that because the client is paying their bills. Clients tend to get defensive because they’re paying you. However, as you grow as an agency and you gain more experience, you realise that they’re people at the end of the day.

Nothing’s stopping you from standing on your own two feet and saying, ‘We did what we said we were going to do. That’s what you’ve paid us for, but we’ve been limited in our ability to provide business value to you because you said you were going to do content, and you haven’t done anything for 3 months. You said you had a developer, and nothing’s been done.’

To do that, you need to make sure you have that evidence – you have those reports and that email communication – and you are diligent in tracking what you do and where the roadblocks are, which is what you should do in reports and calls. Also, keep on top of that through communication. Like life, if you let things fester too long, then there’ll be a bigger problem down the road. Good luck trying to solve that.”

What trends are you seeing in terms of what clients like to do in-house and what they prefer to outsource to agencies?

“Content is always going to be a big one. If you’ve got a decent-sized brand who wants to protect their tone of voice, their messaging, or how they speak – or they’re just experts in the field because it’s a niche real-world topic – then they keep it in-house. They’re the experts.

Where an agency could come in is by helping to provide that SEO expertise: ‘Here’s how to structure it. Here’s how to do the brief. Here’s the keyword research. Here’s where you should link to.’ You give them the skeleton that they can work from.

In terms of dev, if they’re a bigger client, they’ll sometimes have a retainer agency. That’s where you work directly with the dev and try to save the client from being the middleman. You tell the dev directly what needs to be done. They’re the two biggest things.

I’ve seen a couple of clients who try and do link building themselves – which is hard for an agency, let alone in-house when they’ve got 400 other things to do. That’s rare. it’s traditionally content they’ll keep, which is understandable. We’ll help support them on that, edit it, review it, research it, etc. The other thing they’ll sometimes have in-house is dev.”

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?

“If an SEO is struggling for time and things are not happening. Stop. Reassess the campaign. Look at what their company goals are. Have a chat with the client. Tweak the strategy to work on the priorities that matter.

SEOs can get caught up in SEO things that might make a great case study for LinkedIn and make us look really cool, but aren’t actually moving the needle for the client. You can get stuck in the weeds wasting time on little things that you might pick up in an audit.

However, the big things that might move the needle for the client are the fact that their service pages are no good and they need to be redone. Their product pages are terrible. There’s no social proof or EEAT going on. The client’s not moving so you need to have immediate conversations with the client to rework your campaign. All of those will provide you with things to do in the short term.

You will be seen as a helping hand, and as focusing on the priorities that they care about but might not know how to communicate to you.

Stop getting caught in the nitty-gritty, focus on the priorities, and focus on the things that matter to your client. There’ll still be enough SEO work to do, it just might be different SEO work. At the end of the day, you should be providing more business value to that client. If you’re executing it right, that client will be happier.”

Anthony Barone is Co-Founder and Managing Director of StudioHawk UK, and you can find him over at StudioHawk.co.uk.