The Most Common Client Questions About Working With Us

Concise answers to the most common questions we get from clients and prospects every day. Read the Intergrowth® Client FAQs today.

pat tyler intergrowth photo

Why Create a Client FAQs Document?

We often recommend clients write about frequently asked questions they receive. We call them “Revenue Preservers.”

But then it hit us: That’s a bit hypocritical, isn’t it?

We recommend this to clients. Yet, we don’t do this ourselves?

We drew straws. I lost.

So here I am: sitting down on a Friday afternoon, writing the first draft of the most common questions we receive.

But hey, life could be worse. I’m enjoying a beer and burger while I write this.

cheers

Jokes aside, we care a lot about transparency (we use the phrase “No bullshit” in our Company Values).

If you have questions about working with us, we want to make it easy for you to find the answer.

See something we haven’t covered yet? Email me.

You’ll be doing us a favor. Chances are other people have the same question, and we haven’t taken the time to share a response yet.

How to read this:

We’ll make this as concise as possible and link out to other resources when possible to spare your time.

We’ve broken this into a few sections to make it easier to find what you’re looking for.

Table of Contents

  1. FAQs About Our Sales Process
  2. FAQs About Our Growth Strategy
  3. FAQs About Day-to-Day Communications with Us
  4. FAQs About the Content We Create Together
  5. FAQs About Reporting + Growth Expectations

1. FAQs About Our Sales Process

Let’s say I want to hire Intergrowth. What does the sales process look like?

We start by scheduling a consultation call to learn about your business. We map out whether you want a do-it-yourself solution to content marketing or prefer to hire a team of experts.

  1. If you want to take the DIY route, we’ll share actionable advice and relevant resources to help you grow.
  2. If you want to hire a team of experts, we’ll learn about your business, growth goals, marketing budget, and more to share our thoughts on whether we’re the right team to help.

We hold a second Growth Planning meeting for those interested in working together. Here, we map out the opportunities for you to grow your business through content marketing.

We walk through where you currently stand, what we recommend doing, and share metrics we’ve seen working with businesses similar to yours within the same marketing budget.

We decide when to start and put together an agreement to get services kicked off.

Some clients sign on for services within two weeks of our first consultation call. Others may take 12+ months.

The Intergrowth® Content Marketing Process

We give a much more granular breakdown of our sales process here.

Are your growth packages customizable?

Yes. We list pricing on our content marketing services page to give you a benchmark of what to expect to invest in working with us.

With most clients, we have two consultation calls to decide how much you should invest in content marketing and build the customized solution that will drive the best results for your business within that price point.

Some clients invest $4k/month to work with us. Other clients invest $15k/month to work with us. Pricing depends on the quantity of content and links we’re generating for your team every month, the degree of technical SEO maintenance needed to maintain your site, and how involved you need us to be in meetings with the rest of your team.

What are your agreement terms?

We ask for a 12-month commitment to work with us.

Most of the ROI from our content efforts comes from search engines.

SEO is a long-term investment. We expect gradual growth for the first six months of working together and exponential growth beyond that.

SaaS Insurance SEO Enterprise Growth Service Results

Results from the first 11 months of helping one insurance business grow through our Enterprise Growth service tier.

Twelve months will give you a better picture of what to expect in working with us beyond that initial agreement.

What if I’m not happy with the services?

We offer a 90-day opt-out in all of our agreements.

Whether you’re getting acquired and need to boost profit margins to boost your valuation, or a recession hits and you need to cut marketing spend, we’re going to make it easy for you to get out of the agreement.

The 90-day notice gives us time to wrap up all initiatives we promised you. We’ll do our best to wrap up sooner than that.

Do you offer discounts?

No, we don’t believe in discounts.

In order to offer discounts, most businesses increase their starting price to give the illusion of a discount.

A $50 pair of jeans looks a lot better when you see it listed as a $100 pair of jeans that’s 50% off.

So let’s say we need to charge $5,000/month to work with you. We have two options:

  1. We set the pricing to $5,500/month and allow you to negotiate for up to a 10% discount,
  2. Or we charge you and every other business $5,000 for those specific deliverables.

We’re going to save you the hassle and charge you $5,000 instead.

If what we quote you is out of your price range, we’ll discuss the deliverables we need to remove to build a growth plan that falls within your budget.


2. FAQs About Our Growth Strategy

What’s the overall strategy for the first 6-12 months?

We focus on driving more traffic and conversions (sales, demo bookings, contact form submissions, etc.) to your site.

We specialize in a five-part strategy:

  1. Identify themes your customers search for online every day before buying from your competitors
  2. Prioritize those themes based on how feasible it will be for your business to rank for those themes
  3. Write the best resources on the internet about those themes
  4. Build high-quality backlinks to those articles to expedite the process of getting them to rank
  5. Drive more potential customers to your site and funnel those visitors to service pages, product pages, and more to bring you more customers.

In the early months, we place most of our emphasis on educational subject matters. This helps us to enhance our ranking potential and rank for more valuable keywords.

More on how this approach drives sales.

What keywords/search themes will we target in the first 12 months?

We focus on a mix of short-term and long-term ranking goals.

If you’re a newer brand, you’ll struggle to outrank your largest competitors for high-value themes when we start working together.

In the early months, we focus most efforts on themes you’ll start ranking for within 3-6 months. We place a minor emphasis on the long-term ranking goals that may take 12+ months to achieve.

As we rank for these initial themes, we’re able to target more competitive themes that will be more valuable to rank for.

More on our keyword research process.

As we collect more data on the themes that drive the best results for your business, we build pillar pages based on those themes. We then enhance our content strategy to focus on the subtopics within each pillar to maximize your rankings for those themes.


3. FAQs About Day-to-Day Communications with Intergrowth

Who will I be working with on your team?

You’ll have 7-12 members of our team working toward growing your business.

You’ll have direct contact with a dedicated SEO Strategist and Project Manager to keep you informed on our progress and answer any questions you have.

Behind the scenes, SEO specialists, content marketing specialists, writers, editors, publishers, link building outreach specialists, and link building coordinators will all be working towards growing your business.

How often will you share content updates?

You can expect daily to weekly content updates, depending on the quantity of content we produce together.

You’ll also receive emails whenever we create new outlines, have the final draft of an article ready for your review, and publish a new article on your site via the Growth Hub (more on that below).


4. FAQs About the Content We Create Together

How involved will we be in the content creation process?

This depends on how much time you can commit to the process. Some clients are very hands-on. Other clients go 12+ months without reviewing an article we write for them.

When we first kick off the relationship, we ask about your ideal level of involvement, ranging from “I want to be as hands-on as possible” to “I have a lot on my plate. I’d prefer to be completely removed from content review.”

If you prefer to be hands-on, we’ll look for your feedback and approval during three phases of each article we write:

  1. Topic Ideation: we pitch the topics we recommend writing about each month. We map out our suggested themes with a short summary of each topic (1-2 sentences). We’re looking for any feedback on the broad topic.
  2. Outline Approval: we map out the skeleton of the article — the main subsections we plan on writing about and the main resources we plan on referencing to write the article. We’re looking for any feedback on subsections to add or remove, notes from specialists on your team that you’d like to incorporate to better showcase your expertise, or additional resources you’d like to reference.
  3. Article Approval: we write the first draft of the article, optimize it for readability and search engines, and send it to you for final approval. We’re looking for your feedback on how we can better convey your brand voice, verbiage that you’d like to rephrase, and opportunities to improve callouts for readers to take a specific action (contact you, view your products/services, etc.)

P.S. Here’s a quick walkthrough of this process if you’d prefer a video

How do we share feedback on articles?

When we start working together, we set you up on our Growth Hub — the platform we built to give you full visibility into our growth together over time.

Here, you’ll see the status of all articles we’re working on, access all strategic resources, and share feedback on all articles.

We write articles in Google Docs to make it easier to leave feedback directly in the document if you prefer.

For those who prefer, you can also share any article feedback via email.

Intergrowth™ Content Marketing services


5. FAQs About Reporting + Growth Expectations

Will we be ranking for [insert keyword] in 12 months?

Our primary goal is to grow your business.

You might come to us saying you want to rank for [insert keyword]. We’ll dive deeper to understand your goals behind that ranking and share our thoughts on the best way to achieve your deeper goal.

Some keywords won’t be feasible to rank for. Other keywords may require a massive investment we don’t believe is in the best interest of growing your business.

In those cases, we’ll push back and advocate for targeting different search themes that will be more feasible to rank for that will still help you to achieve your goals.

How much will we grow in the first 12 months?

We benchmark growth expectations based on data we’ve seen for clients across all industries. For a business seeing 10,000 website visitors/month from search engines, we expect the following:

  1. 50% year-over-year growth in organic traffic on our Standard Growth Content Marketing Service
  2. 100% year-over-year growth in organic traffic on our Rapid Growth Content Marketing Service
  3. 200+% year-over-year growth in organic traffic on our Enterprise Growth Content Marketing Service

Growth percentages will be higher for those with less than 10,000 organic website visitors/month. Growth percentages will be slightly lower for those with more than 10,000 organic website visitors/month.

Traffic growth follows a consistent hockey stick growth pattern across all industries we’ve worked in:

  1. Months 1-3: we see minimal growth as we build our growth strategy, publish content, and climb through search rankings.
  2. Months 4-6: we see gradual growth. We start ranking on the first page of search engines for a handful of relevant search themes.
  3. Months 7-12: we see exponential growth as we start hitting first-page rankings for dozens of keywords.

 

B2C Ecommerce SEO Rapid Growth Service Results

Results from the first 12 months of helping one B2C client grow through our Rapid Growth service tier

For more on this, we document client growth metrics across different service tiers on an industry-specific basis in the following articles:

SaaS SEO | B2B Content Marketing | Insurance SEO | Ecommerce Content Marketing | B2C Content Marketing | Construction Marketing | SEO for Accountants | SEO for Lawyers

How do you report on our business growth?

We hold monthly consultation calls with you and your team.

We use these calls to:

  1. Assess how your site performed over the past month, quarter, and year
  2. Identify initiatives that led to business growth or failed to drive results
  3. Double down on what works and cut back on anything failing to drive results
  4. Take an outward look at your competitors to uncover new opportunities to evaluate for your business.

Prefer video? Here’s a 3-minute walkthrough of our reporting process.

For additional visibility, we build a real-time reporting dashboard to give you more visibility into your metrics.

We consolidate data pulled from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and SEMRush into a dashboard for your team to access at any time.

You can see a sample reporting dashboard here.

Do we need to hire another SEO agency to monitor SEO errors on our site?

No.

One of the elements we incorporate into our reporting and consultation is ongoing monitoring and fixing of site issues that jeopardize your rankings.

During the SEO foundation process, we fix high-priority issues we uncover on your site.

The internet is constantly changing. You add new content to your site; other sites remove content. The result is that new errors will pop up on your site.

We run weekly site health audits to identify and fix the newest errors when they occur.

We email you those weekly site health reports so you can see how your site health is trending.

Over time, you can expect a trend similar to the following:

Intergrowth™ SEO error fixes over time

You’ll see a few hundred outstanding “issues” in the example above.

When we kicked off the relationship, we agreed that several hundred of the errors on their site wouldn’t affect their rankings. As a result, we decided not to invest the resources to fix every flagged item we identified.


Interested in seeing how we’d help you grow your business? Share a bit about yourself and we’ll schedule a consultation call to build your growth plan.

Have more questions for us? Fire away!

You can reach me via email here.

Want to hear our newest insights before your competitors? Join our email list.

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The Most Common Client Questions About Working With Us