The Importance of Understanding Your SEO/GEO Deliverables (A Client’s Guide)

I was speaking with a potential client the other day, and they told me how they’ve worked with two separate SEO providers for their healthcare business. However, they didn’t fully understand what those providers were doing for them or what results they’d gotten.

In the client’s mind, “SEO” was sort of a mystical service that you have to pay for in order to show up in search results, yet at the same time, it wasn’t fully comprehensible.

That’s generally not the fault of the client; it’s the fault of the SEO providers.

You don’t need to be an SEO/GEO expert to understand what your SEO/GEO provider is doing, why they’re doing it, and whether it’s helping your business.

Here are tips for SEO/GEO clients, based on my experience having worked in agencies, in-house, and now as an independent consultant for 10+ years:

Ask basic questions

You’re paying for SEO/GEO services, which means you’re entitled to understand the work that’s happening. I mean really understand it, not just have a list of deliverables that you can’t decipher.

Some clients are afraid to ask basic questions because they don’t want to appear uninformed, or maybe they’re afraid the SEO/GEO provider will take advantage of them if they seem vulnerable.

But asking questions doesn’t make you uninformed. It makes you an engaged client.

If an SEO/GEO provider says they “optimized title tags and meta descriptions” and you as the client don’t know what that means, ask what was involved, why it was done, and how it’ll benefit the business.

You’re entitled to answers, and often that starts with basic questions.

Understand that SEO/GEO deliverables and results are different things

Deliverables are the work undertaken to get results. While some deliverables are best practices and hard to tie back directly to ROI, like schema optimization, for example, you should at least understand how each deliverable is intended to benefit not only your organic visibility but also your business goals.

If an SEO provider tells you, “we optimized five service pages this month,” that tells you what they did, but it doesn’t tell you how or why they did it, and what benefits they hope to achieve that align with your business goals.

A better answer would be, “we optimized your top five service pages by adding semantically coherent paragraphs, internal links, and FAQs in hopes of improving rankings and citations/mentions for core queries or prompts along your target audience’s buyer’s journey in order to increase qualified leads and ultimately sales.”

And if that’s too technical, ask for a simpler explanation, like “we improved your five most important service pages by making their content more helpful, answering common customer questions, and making it easier for visitors to find related information. Our goal is to help these pages appear more often in relevant Google searches and AI-generated answers, ultimately attracting more potential customers to your business.”

Make sure the strategy aligns with your business goals

As a consultant, I customize every strategy I work on to the brand I’m working with because I believe every business situation is unique from an SEO/GEO perspective. That said, I’ve seen and heard plenty of stories of SEO/GEO providers relying on generic strategies or following checklists of deliverables.

Ultimately, the SEO/GEO strategy should focus on your business goals. Organic visibility in search engines and AI assistants is likely part of those goals, but for most businesses, the end goal is a conversion of some type.

Make sure the metrics being reported align with your business goals

We can generally break SEO/GEO metrics into three buckets:

• Activity metrics: Content published, pages optimized, issues resolved.
• Visibility and engagement metrics: Impressions, clicks, rankings, organic sessions, AI visibility scores.
• Business metrics: Qualified leads, demo requests, sales, revenue influenced.

Ideally, activity leads to visibility, which leads to business outcomes. Your SEO/GEO provider should be reporting on a holistic view of the metrics that enables you to tie back their services to your business goals.

When it comes to AI search in particular, measurement isn’t a solved problem in my opinion, so it’s important to understand which methods of measurement your SEO/GEO provider is using, such as prompt-tracking, self-reported attribution, and indirect signals like trends in direct or branded traffic.

Get regular reporting that works for you

Most SEO/GEO providers will do monthly performance reporting. This shouldn’t just be a list of numbers or charts. It should tell a story, and specifically, it should tell the story you need to understand how the services are helping your business.

What was done, why it was done, what changed, and what’s next are all valuable elements of holistic reporting. Make sure the reports you receive are comprehensible and useful to you.

And when results fall short of expectations, your provider should be able to explain what might be happening and what adjustments they’re considering.

Outro

Outlined above are just some of the tips I have for SEO/GEO clients to feel like they’re understanding and getting value from their SEO/GEO deliverables and strategies.

But we could sum it all up by saying that good communication is foundational. A knowledgeable SEO/GEO provider should be able to break down complex topics into simple explanations that allow you to feel confident about their work.

If you’re in a position where a provider is doing SEO/GEO work for you, and you don’t fully understand it, start by asking basic questions. Here are five questions you can ask your SEO/GEO provider:

1. What specifically did you work on this month?
2. Why did you prioritize that work over other opportunities?
3. How does this work support our business goals?
4. What results have we seen, and how confident are we that the SEO/GEO work contributed?
5. What are we doing next, and why?

If you consistently don’t get great answers, it may be time for a switch.

And if you need help with your SEO/GEO strategies (including taking a look at your current SEO/GEO work to provide guidance), feel free to contact me. I’m an independent consultant helping brands and agencies.

Until next time, enjoy the vibes:

Thanks for reading. Happy optimizing!

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