When you’re optimizing a client’s website, you will spend a lot of time doing research and discovery, website audits and analysis. After that you have to implement, or oversee best practice implementation of your processes, keywords and research. All of this is time consuming, but it doesn’t beat what comes next.

Fact: Waiting is the hardest part.

SEO Tip: Inevitably with any new implementation, the websites performance goes one of two ways: it stagnates at a ranking very similar to its early one, or it falls steeply. These scenarios will upset your client, who just dropped a chunk of change on you to ensure his website gets higher rankings. The correct procedure is to forewarn your client of the time and the possible results, and to assure them along the way that these are normal happenings and not permanent.

Here is a good time to start meditating, because you may keep running analytics after analytics and webmaster tool after tool and see nothing but a great big homepage drop in rankings. Instead of getting discouraged, try making sure XML sitemaps, link building efforts, title tag duplication, or even 404 redirects are all running properly. After that, you need to keep assuring your client that you are maintaining the websites performance and monitoring all of the changes in their rankings and traffic.

The thing is (unfortunately for our kind), a drop in rankings and traffic generally accompanies a homepage/website re-do. If nothing else, advise your clients to do it on their “off season” so it doesn’t impact sales, and forewarn them (and possibly have something signed) that it takes about two weeks to see a change, and about a month to determine whether the change was good or bad, and how to proceed from there.