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If you’ve been invited to a meeting, conference or conference call — whether about SEO, operations or finance — have you noticed that being late is almost OK?   You’re in the moment, or you’re trying to satisfy many bosses (customers, clients, patients, shareholders, bosses — and that’s just our work world), and you end up being late for scheduled appointments.

Top SEO agencies know that getting ranked by Google, or doing SEO for Bing and Yahoo aren’t an hour-by-hour program, so being a little bit late isn’t as bad as not responding to your client or patient as you planned to.  Yes, your SEO program can wait a day; the question then becomes can it wait a few days, a week or a month?

Talking with a very knowledgeable friend at Microsoft who helps large companies use Microsoft’s collaboration software like Skype, Yammer and Sharepoint, she concurred that “being late is almost OK yet we hate it.  We don’t like being late, and we don’t like waiting for others.  Yet we’re compassionate.”

Here’s what we concluded, and then we’ll apply it to top SEO agencies and online marketing like Google AdWords (aka pay-per-click), social platforms like Facebook, and email.

To avoid being late:

• Plan for the niceties. People are human, so allow time to (re)connect with the people.  Not only is it more enjoyable to work with a person who shares interests like golden retrievers, exercise, sailing, or in her case, wine, it gives you context for what impacts your meeting topics.
• New vs. ongoing relationships are treated differently. Late is less acceptable for new clients and prospects than your ongoing clients.
• No back-to-back meetings. If you can’t leave 30 minute buffers, then make meetings 20 minutes instead of 30 long; make 60-minute meetings just 45 or 50 minutes.

Applying this to top SEO programs and Google AdWord programs

• Plan for the niceties: Businesses are live entities.  They shift and evolve as do their customers, marketplace, employees and suppliers.  For an SEO program or email message to be effective, SEO needs to reflect changes that the business is experiencing. Plan for time to hear and discuss how the end-users and marketplace are evolving and shifting.
• New vs ongoing: SEO tactics evolve.  Manage new SEO program elements (changes) closely.  As you find success, you can be more relaxed because you know how they perform.
• No back-to-back meetings: Allow yourself time to research, develop and test SEO tactics and Google AdWords offers.  Schedule your reviews and make decisions – both you and your SEO agency or marketing consultant need to prepare.

We also agreed that technology can create a delay in starting a meeting as much as technology makes meetings more efficient.  This too applies to top SEO agencies who integrate with website design, website development, creating landing pages for Google AdWords campaigns, and of course for social media and email programs.  Technology makes all of this more efficient, yet you need to plan for technological complications, which testing and monitoring will do for SEO and website development.

Being late is almost OK.  It may be OK for the average person or average company.  As a market leader, or a top SEO agency, we’ll agree that OK isn’t good enough.

To learn more about improving your Google AdWords or SEO program, call tracking and recording, A/B testing and other ways to win the marketing wars, NicheLabs invites you to schedule a consultation with us by calling 888.978.9254, or completing our website contact form.