Project Management for Freelance SEO Consultants

Welcome to a new, very fun edition of Crawling Mondays.

And I mentioned fun because it can be done in so many different ways, managing your processes. In this case, managing SEO processes, right? And to join me today, I am bringing 2 other SEO specialists who have been also in the brand side, in the client side, in agencies, and are now running their own independent consultancies, whether as a freelance or a part of a small team. So on one hand, I have Jo Turnbull, independent marketing consultant. Hello, Jo. Thank you very much for joining.

Hello. Hola.

Hola, hola. Hello, Nick Wilsdon is the guest today from Torque Partnership.

Pleasure to be here. Hello, Aleyda. Yep. Hola.

Thank you so much for coming.

So let's start with the The topic, right? I actually already went through this topic earlier, but from the agency side of things. How to deal with SEO project management scenarios, issues, challenges from an agency perspective. But unlike agencies, when you are an independent consultant, you don't have account managers, you don't have dozens or hundreds of clients at a time. In fact, clients sometimes choose us us in particular because they want to be working with you. So the relationships and coordination and communication is not something that you will likely delegate to another person, right? So I want to start by asking you, how important is SEO project management as an independent consultant? And which you would say is the share of time that you allocate to management and dealing with the management side of things with clients and projects? Versus when you were in the agency side or in the brand side?

So in terms of how important is project management for SEO, the success of being a freelance, I think that it can never be underestimated. I think perhaps when you're working agency side, the main difference I found was the fact that maybe someone else is allocating that project to you and they are the ones that are speaking with the client. Sometimes it's the biz dev team or perhaps the activation team that don't work in SEO and SEO is a side project or an add-on So they don't know the details and how long each task takes. So as a freelancer, you have the communication, you are doing the coordination, and you're also doing the prioritization. And the other really important aspect within project management that's different freelancer to agency side, I would say, is the communication, because you can communicate as much as you want to the client. So if there is something that, you know, you're not sure about, you can communicate that. was agreed that you discussed about and you wanna change it, it's much easier to do so as opposed to maybe in an agency side when maybe you're a junior or maybe even when this is just a side small project, even if you are an SEO director there.

I think it is very different doing prioritization, time management from an agency perspective. And certainly if I think back to my days when I was in agency, it was more operational. We were in charge of making deliverables to the client. So you're right, you had the account managers who would then be focused more on how those deliverables were given to their expectations and to meet the timelines they had. But that changes dramatically when you become a consultant, because you're not only responsible for the insight, you're responsible for how that's deployed and how you actually cross the kind of hurdles that come up from an audit or from a piece of work. So you're working kind of hand in hand with the client to progress that through. So you absolutely have to get better at project management. And I think this is the key difference that I've seen, having worked in consultancy for 8 years now, is the emphasis that you have at consultancy level on project management and planning, and also that they charge for it, which is really important. I think when I was in agency, we didn't charge for planning. We would talk about planning, but it was a throwaway thing because we were getting paid for deliverables, so you don't think about that. In consultancy world, planning is a deliverable, so it's something that you're expected to spend time on, you're expected to have deliverables come out of it, and you're expected to present roadmaps and everything you need to progress this through and make it succeed. So that's a— it's a very big difference.

I think that you have already touched a couple of points that for me are critical.

And in this particular case, on one hand, when you're an independent consultant, as Joe mentioned, you're at the end of the day more in control of the client that you choose to work with because it's you who handle the sales process. You validate yourself, also validating that you will have a really good ongoing relationship because there is a good feeling going on. Then on the other hand, also as independent consultant, there are only so many clients that you can take at a time and therefore time allocation, planning, making sure that you leave enough room just for coordination and communication and prioritization is so much more important, let's say, and critical and fundamental because it will go through you at the end of the day too. So I see definitely on one hand like a lot of pros. On the other hand, I see like no cons, but yes, how critical it might be to have a really good understanding of what it takes to coordinate and support the clients, which can be very, very different depending on the characteristic and the maturity and if the client has had previous SEO processes in the past or if they are very well-versed or if the team is very small and agile implementing stuff, or if you are working with a very big brand in which like half of your time will be just to help your counterpart to make good cases to win support internally to develop things, right? Which other areas or aspects do you think are critical or important to take into consideration when allocating time, allocating resources? How do you do to be accurate enough To avoid overworking or to avoid charging too little because of all the work that goes connected to this task.

Basically to avoid this mismanagement of time or sort of projects and trying not to overwork because that's the reason why, you know, one of the reasons perhaps that people have decided to become SEO consultants or consultants in general is I base some of the project work on what you have done in the past. If maybe you haven't worked in that particular section or sector, I would still be— I would still encourage people to go ahead and move forward with that. But perhaps you can meet with others in different business networking groups. So we don't have the obviously face-to-face now, but there are a lot of business groups. Obviously people have been doing Clubhouse to discuss business. There's lunchtime other sessions. So I would do that. And also, if you're finding as well that perhaps you have given too much time in the past or you have not given enough time, I would actually perhaps use this moment that we all have, perhaps for those that maybe don't have a lot of home commitments, to do some self-analysis. What are things that you can work on yourself? What are the strengths that you can build so that you can be a better consultant? Because if we can't focus on ourselves now in the time that, for those that don't have high home commitments, a lot of home commitments, then when can we? So one would be like, well, you mentioned yourself actually, Nick, that you had a great manager. So not everyone's in the position to have a great manager to learn from. Maybe what you could do is get a mentor and really hone in on the skills that you need One type of skills is CliftonStrengths. You can look to see what are you good at and build up on that. But I would really, to go back to your first question, is how you can avoid this and avoid overworking. See what worked well and what didn't and try and build on that so you don't overwork yourself again.

That is something very important that I want to highlight, right? Like, I think whenever you become an independent consultant or a freelance, nobody tells you that, but Like literally like half of your time and effort should go on learning, improving, refining those management skills, managing time, managing expectations, communication, your unique selling proposition, a little bit of not only the business side of things, but actually how you handle the day-to-day interaction with clients, how you communicate, how you deliver, the format, which can be very heterogeneous and different based on your particular client profiles, right? This is so, so very, very important because I can definitely see how, for example, if you work with small businesses, you might need to pretty much deliver things pretty much done just to copy paste sometimes to your clients that have zero knowledge of SEO or directly handling things with the copywriters or web developers to implement stuff that is directly implemented into WordPress. But if you work as an independent consultant, as an advisor, or supporting in-house SEO teams at the brands, the type of deliverables will be different and the time that you will need to allocate to explain things or to communicate things.

So I think it is very important when you're validating and assessing the scope of the project that you always think on what's next or what will be needed to actually make happen what you are committing on or the goals that are expected, right? Because I think we always underestimate the effort and the resources and the time that it will take not only to develop an audit or develop the recommendations or doing that 1-hour weekly call with the client, but how much it will take to prepare the call, to gather all the data, to gather— to do a lot of the legwork that is required just to communicate in the way that you need for that particular client to become connected or fulfilled or to understand your point. So there are a lot of activities like this that require soft skills. They are fundamental in this case, but also the time to invest in them, to build them, because they definitely compound over time.

Yeah, absolutely. Soft skills, I always call that, Aleyda. And you're right, as technical people, we inevitably just take on too much work and we get swamped and, you know, These skills are hard to learn. And as you say, if you move, especially if you move away from agency, because you're used to the client servicing people doing these things for you, and you no longer have that layer. So you do have to learn these soft skills. It's the first trap that I see people fall into when they think they're going into consultancy, and effectively they're becoming freelancers, and they're expecting the client to give them work. They just get given tasks, and they just, you know, they naturally say yes, because it's their first client, and they get swamped, they get swamped. That isn't consultancy. Consultancy is taking a step back, as you say, taking the time to plan, to talk to the client about what they're really trying to achieve, and then coming back to them with a plan and saying, this is how I'm going to help you achieve it. It's a very different power relationship almost. It's not— you're not just taking tasks from the client. And, you know, when— and I'm often on calls where I'm with clients where I'm saying, you know, this sounds very interesting, this comes into our methodology, you know, are you adopting kind of sprint methodology? Are you doing— you should learn about sprints, you should learn about agile, you know, and the client will come back to you with something, you'll say, okay, This is very interesting. Let's examine it. Let's put it into the backlog. But we do have to keep an eye on the, on the work streams that we're doing, because at the end of this consultancy period or this contract, I'm getting judged on the KPIs or the things that we signed up initially to. So you can be the most helpful person in the world and get overworked, do as much as you can, but if you haven't met those initial goals, it's a painful lesson to learn.

So thank you very much for bringing this topic, because that was going to be the next question, which are the dos and don'ts that you have seen people struggle with in the past, those don'ts that you have seen happening again and again in previous projects, and which are those particular like guidelines that you always follow because you know that this is the way. So for example, in my case, I really try to be really consistent in the way that we communicate and set the expectations right from the start. So for example, Oh, let's, let's use email. No, no, no, let's use a project management system. I am actually quite flexible on which, but let's be consistent to leave proper documentation all the time of everything what has been done. And then weekly calls. Okay, let's do weekly calls, but we set and we allocate the time and we all know that we are going to touch base on that date, date and time, and the communication is going. So for me, consistency and setting expectation is key. Because this is how you avoid those random messages over WhatsApp. Sometimes I have heard these horror stories. No, there should be communication protocols. What happens when things go bad? There should be communication protocols and expectations. How fast you will answer certain requests or what is an urgent request that your client can expect that you answer in a few hours? What are your, your dos and don'ts?

It's really important in any situation to always set expectations or manage expectations that you mentioned. In terms of the dos and don'ts for freelance, I like to start at the beginning. So that even comes before actually taking on a project. So do you fit well together? Do you not? And you have those discussions before about the communication. For me, it's always overcommunication is a lot better than too little. So in your project management, in your proposal, you put aside time for emails, or what's it called, account management, for emails, calls. And in terms of weekly calls, we don't need to make it for— have a call for the sake of it. It's called— about a specific agenda. We only have a call if there is an agenda for that. Otherwise, you can end up spending all your time in calls. So really, the dos is to have the communication clear from the beginning. Outline in your proposal what includes project management, so that's— or account management. That's emails, that's calls, that's being part of the newsletter, that's, you know, and then you'll also be given updates of what's happening. Of course, if people are subscribed to your email newsletter, then they won't be missing out on any old news or any news that they didn't actually read. In terms of the don'ts, I would— what I thought was better really to have is to focus more on the dos. So you outline all the beginning, and in terms of don'ts, it would be more like, yes, the not WhatsApping late at night or the communication over the weekend. I think everyone, especially now, is a lot more, I would say, tolerant and more understanding specifically about, you know, having your work, personal time separate. So your times, you have clear about what times you're going to be online, when you'll be responding to emails. But of course, it all comes down to that project, to the outline and the proposal. And you can use your platform. So use your Trello if you would like that, or Asana. But if, and going back to what Nick said, you can always get asked other things and you can be the most helpful person in the world, but if it's distracting you from your KPIs, you're more than in your rights to go back to it, which is why it's so important at the beginning to have in that proposal what actually it involves.

That is critical. I think also because, well, depending on the client, right, they can always bring back to certain questions and at the end of the day, it's understandable, or concerns, but it's always to come back like, why? Why is that? Is that really important? Let's come back to the goals, the actual goals that we had set for this project, to see if it is actually worth your while to just like even go into those issues and allocating time to those rather than focusing on those that you know that will make an impact. Then, on the other hand, something about overcommunication is tricky on times like this in which we are all sort of stuck at home, right? And I have been working a lot for a long time remotely, but I have, yes, indeed noticed since last year, because it's also clients that are at home working from home all the time, this need of overcommunicating, which definitely let's better overcommunicate than under, that for sure. But then also, how do we manage to set those times and ways and protocols to communicate and sometimes even overcommunicate without them to be intrusive with our day-to-day, right? Some clients that for— if it was about them, every communication will be a call, And many of these calls could have been, like, very easily made into simple messages or texts over the project management systems, right? So I think that that change of ways to communicate sometimes is needed, or to set clear protocols to make the communication asynchronous first. And then, on the other hand, also, in my case, because I understand that I want to have thinking time or analysis time, and I know how my brain works, I try to leave like my calls to be made, like, or very early in the morning or very late at the end of the day, to have like the chunk of the time during the day to actually focus on, you know, thinking and analyzing and auditing without having to think that, oh, in an hour I need to go back and forth and switch across different issues.

I think, yeah, setting those boundaries that you talk about and not being afraid to say no and not being afraid to push back. And I think that's what clients expect from me. And you just have to be organized. I think the thing that— the big lesson I learned was how to value my time. And having come from— again, it's going to sound quite harsh to all the people in agency, but you know, you get what needs to get done, you get done for the team, and it doesn't matter if you're there till late at night. And certainly Arena, we worked some very late nights. So when you're a consultant, you have to start evaluating your time, because if you're going to get better at time management, you have to know what an hour is worth to you. And what day's worth to you. And you have to get very, very clear at that. So putting in those processes, absolutely. So getting them talking about communication channels, talking about focusing on what you're doing the project for, keeping it on track, taking that time that you're charging them for to plan and do that strategy, strategic part to keep it online. I do all those things to keep me sane. I'm actually a big proponent of— because you talked about kind of deep work, and this is the problem that you can end up doing a lot of different bits on different things. And so I love the Pomodoro method. which works for me fantastically. And I use Pomodoro app, which is the one that I love, which again is a very cheap app, but it integrates with everything. So it integrates— and this kind of comes back to which system do you use? Well, whichever your clients are using, because you're integrated with them. So that'll integrate into Jira, it'll integrate into Trello, and it'll pull all those different things into one central place for me. And then I can sit there and chip away and do 25-minute, 15-minute increments on a task to get the deep work done. And I found, especially with, you know, this COVID times, that motivation is a big issue. So having that Pomodoro approach really works for me. And then you do the prioritization. I think the— again, I got really into time management and performance improvements, and one of the simplest things that you learn in terms of performance is just pick a number of things each day. So pick the 3 things, the 3 most important things you have to get done every single day. And actually, if you stick to that, you've got a pretty good system. So get your Todoist or whatever thing that you're using to dump everything into, just collect into some sort of platform, doesn't matter what it is. And then just take a little bit of time every morning to work out these are the 3 things that need to get done today and nothing's going to interrupt me and then block out the time and work through them. That works for me.

Love it. Having a good prioritization system on tasks that you will or you need to deliver per week and per day is definitely critical. Before moving on to the next topic, I think that you also mention something that for me is critical. A lot of people feel bad when saying no to clients, right? And especially when the relationship is with you directly. But literally, if they hire us, it's to advise, to achieve certain goals. And sometimes, in order to be able to make that happen, we need to say no to avoid doing something that won't pay off. Sometimes people have a hard time also telling clients when they request something that is out of scope. There was an interesting point made by Mark in our previous session that we did about this topic, but from the agency side, that is to revise the KPIs and revise the scope and revise the goals every quarter or so. Because for example, like in a year like last one, for example, with COVID like very quickly in the year, like all projections and all expectations and budgets and resources changed completely from one day to another, right? And what made sense to do in February didn't make sense at all in March or in June. So it's important that we are reasonable. We have a proposal and we have some initial goals that— but we also had some certain conditions saying, hey, we will revise this periodically every quarter or so to check if this really makes sense to continue doing or so, how resources are updated or allocated, etc., based on what we are seeing that is happening.

I think that's absolutely essential. I got really good at that actually when I was working for Vodafone because every single one of my contracts over a 7-year period was 3 or 6 months. So you literally worked in those blocks. And I know that sounds horrific to anyone who wants any kind of degree of stability because you literally wouldn't know at the beginning of the, you know, one of those blocks whether you're going to be working at the end. But it is— that rigor is really useful because then you're you're really readjusting the whole time and saying, you know, is this working? What do we need to do next? How do we pivot? And that's especially true right now. We need to be very, very agile in the way that we're helping clients. And so I'm a big fan of these kind of quarterly retrospectives. So do sprints, work through sprints, look, do a retrospective at a set period, and then see if it's working.

Yeah, I just wanted to say on that as well, like, yeah, being a contractor or freelancer, you know, basically do month by month really. And I always sort of have monthly reviews with clients. We go through What we said we were going to do, what was the result, what can we change, what is working, what isn't. So it comes back down to the communication. Do you have a good relationship as well with your client? You know, you don't need to, as I said, always set those weekly meetings, but I would definitely say you've got a monthly to review what you have done. And well, situation, action, yield— what you have done and what the results are. And then you can actually you know, change that going forward. Nothing is set in stone. And that's the good thing about, I would say, being a consultant is that you don't have to then go through the client activation team or the biz dev team and change all that. If it's not working, well, you can change it.

Indeed. So to move with the next topic, you already started to mention a few of your favorite tools. I haven't found yet like the ideal SEO project management system that has it all and is flexible enough for SEO, but I know that there might be a few tools out there that you have found particularly flexible with the right features that can highly facilitate the day-to-day with clients.

Which are these tools?

Yeah, I can tell you, I mentioned some of them. I mean, firstly, I'll kind of preface this with if you're a consultant, you have to largely work with the tools that the client has, and the part of your learning and your growing is also learning how those tools work. So if you don't know how Jira works, it's free if you haven't got— if you've got under 10 people, it's free. Download it, learn how it works, because at some point with a large enterprise client, you're going to have to use Jira with them. Same thing with Confluence, it's free. You know, Trello is great, but it's fairly lightweight. If you're working with technical teams, you're not going to be using Trello. So you need to have an awareness of these, these tools that are commonly used, you know, Slack, etc. And I know we share a mutual dislike of Slack, Aleyda, but you know, you have to adapt to how—

You know what, I want to clarify something. I have nothing against Slack as a product itself, but it's how people use it. That is the problem, is how you use it. And if people end up like tagging you in every single communication or this type of thing, or expecting that you reply in less than a couple of hours rather than a much more, yeah, not urgent type of matter. So at the end of the day, it's how we use the tools, isn't it?

I'm coming around to it. I've got a few, a couple of clients who are very good at it. You know, eBay is very good at using Slack. So, you know, they're bringing me around to it. But then what I do is I understand how these tools work and I'm a big fan of using a tool just to dump in. So I use Todoist, which is great. And you can literally— I'm sitting there on my phone at any given point just putting down things into the backlog and then assigning them into project folders. And then, as I said, I use Pomodone app, which then is a layer which kind of goes over the top of it that gives me the Pomodoro method. But then it integrates into all these other tools that may or may not be used by my clients. So that kind of gives me that layer. And that gives me the flexibility Because you can't get too pulled into one specific method because if it doesn't work then with your client, you end up, well, you know, it's not comfortable. So you have to be agile on it.

You don't want to add friction to that communication. So especially when you are a consultant, you want to be as flexible as possible. Of course, with certain principles of communication happening to keep things organized in a way that is logical to you. But Yes, you want to keep it flexible.

I think Trello is good just to say, okay, this is what we're gonna get done this week, but you do need to not dump everything in it. You can have your planning list, okay, this is what we're gonna do next week, but just keep that updated. In terms of Slack, actually, I quite like it, but then I'm not tagged all the time. And if someone says, oh, did you not see my Slack message? I say no, because I don't have it on all the time because I'm doing the work So I think Slack is good to avoid always maybe having calls, and it's just to send a message. I see it as like having a coffee or drink with someone at work, you know, like at the water cooler. So I would probably just use Trello, which I do use, or Asana. There are other time management softwares that's quite good too to use, but I think it's just— I would put it down— I'd like to work in like 45 minutes to an hour time slot.

Perfect. Yes, in my case, from time to time, I agree on having a Slack with a few of them, but it's important too, in order to make it work well, to set the right expectations on how fast will you reply, what it should be used for. Definitely not as a replacement of the project management system. It's more of a replacement for emails in any case, right?

Yeah.

So I think this is definitely important, and one tool that I have started to use more now is Loom to record myself, or even Zoom in an asynchronous way to record myself explaining things that I will later upload to the project management system. So the person in charge will watch whenever they wake up or make sense, et cetera. So it's things that are complex, and usually you will tend to explain in a meeting or in a call, can be done asynchronously in a much more productive way. So to start wrapping up, I would like you to share with the audience a last tip, SEO project management tip, particularly important for freelancers or independent consultants.

I think it's really important of communication. So we touched on it, but what I wanted to say was communication in terms of listening to others. I think we're in a world where many people talk about what they want and they want to get a point across, sort of their point and how they think SEO will help that client and what they suggest. And sometimes they don't always listen and that also goes for the client too. So there are exercises that people can do to be more open to listening. Actually, improv is a great one. I did improv, been doing off and on for about 5 years and it really helps you to listen to others digest what they've said, and then reply. Because, well, you can see that next time you have conversations with people, not just clients, see, are people paying attention to what you're saying and responding to that, or are they just giving you your opinion? So I would say communication about listening on both sides is something really important for people that are in agencies, but also very important for people that are freelancing too. And it ties into the soft skills that we Yeah, I'd agree.

And again, it's about developing those soft skills. You may be the best technical SEO on the planet or the best link builder on the planet, but you have to work on these soft skills and you have to do this. This is a constant process of improving this. And I'd say the— I was thinking about this before I came on and how I've kind of improved it. I've read a lot around this. I think I pulled out one of my old books here. Books from here, which was 25 Time Management Techniques, which is great. It's a really cheap book, but that summarizes about 100 books for you, uh, because every— all these different books have different nuggets in them that are useful. And, uh, if you get something like, uh, Blinkist, it's very useful again for those sort of time-sensitive people. Uh, you can go and listen to— I love it— and you can go listen to like Deep Work by Cal Newport or any of these books in 9 minutes, and you'll pick up little bits of information, little tips that will help you become better. And it has to be something you're working on. So together with becoming technically better or all the other requirements that we have in being in modern SEO, you have to develop this side of you as well, especially if you're a consultant or a freelancer.

100%. So for example, you're not going to communicate in the same way to a C-level when trying to come up with a case to invest more in the SEO process Versus when you communicate with the development team or the copywriting team. So it's important to be empathic enough and know how to communicate with the different profiles that will be stakeholders in the project, right? And if you don't enjoy doing it, I can definitely see an issue there. So it's important that if you are an independent consultant or a freelance, it is something that you enjoy doing.

Thank you.

Thank you very much. Both of you have been particularly helpful and all these recommendations and advice that you have shared are super helpful and hopefully those who are watching also, if you have any questions, if you have any doubts, please don't hesitate and leave the comments here below. You can follow Jo and you can follow also Nick over Twitter, over social. They are always very active. Jo, she also organizes her own online events, Turn Digi, right, Jo?

Yep, Turn Digi. We had our first one in French this week. And we have Search London and I'm also an I Am Remarkable facilitator. But I share that on my Twitter @SEOJoeBlogs.

Amazing. So follow definitely Jo and Nick.

Anyone wants to contact me for advice, more than happy. @NickWilsden is my Twitter handle. But yeah, very happy to help.

So thank you very much for joining today and thank you for watching. And if you liked the video, remember to like the video and keep watching. Many more of these videos will come with handy SEO advice. Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

Chronic Mondays!