If you begin a consulting engagement, you need findings that help you recommend the next assignments for the client. Use the first two weeks of a consulting engagement to develop specific findings about the client's market. OppAlerts supports campaign setup, search tracking, market research and content checks.
Day one: write the campaign from a call, not the website
A campaign needs a business description of 10 to 50 words, three personas besides a neutral one, and the client's brand and site. Every report then selects results against it, so a vague definition produces vague findings everywhere.
Use a twenty-minute call to establish what the client sells and who buys it. Ask them to describe their best customer, name the competitor that won their last lost deal, and identify difficult questions prospects often ask.
Locking is permanent for the campaign and persona text, so write it as though it were.
Day two: start collection, then read the market
Set up a small prompt set from the client's real buyer questions and let it collect. It takes days to become meaningful, so start it before you need it.
Meanwhile search the news, blog and podcast index by meaning rather than keyword, describing the problems the client solves in the words a writer would use. An hour of that gives you more of the market's vocabulary than a day on competitors' websites.
You are looking for three things: which publications cover this subject, which questions keep arising, and who is quoted as an expert.
Day three: map what the market expects
Run a link gap against three or four direct competitors of similar size, not the largest names, whose placements were earned through recognition your client cannot obtain by asking.
Read the result for patterns rather than as a task list. Directories everyone is in, publications covering all of them, associations they all belong to. Those patterns describe what this market expects of a credible participant, which is exactly what a new client needs to hear.
Day four: find what nobody has taken
Search by opportunity type for placements no competitor holds: podcasts in the subject area, award programs, speaking submissions, expert roundups.
A gap report cannot suggest these, because it works from links that already exist. An opportunity nobody in the market has taken is both easier to win and more distinguishing.
Day five: check their own material
Take their two or three most commercially important pages and compare each against the audience category you would have chosen.
The common finding is that pages are written from the supplier's perspective rather than the buyer's. It is specific, demonstrable and fixable, and it gives you something concrete to present that is not a generic audit observation.
What you can present
- What answers currently say about the client and their named competitors.
- The placements this market expects, and the ones they are missing from.
- Two or three opportunities nobody in the market has taken.
- A demonstrated problem with one of their existing pages.
Every item names a page, a publication or a question, which is what separates it from an audit.
What not to present in week one
Tracking data from a few days as a baseline. Answers vary between runs and a short series is noise. Say collection has started and the trend follows in a month.
And no visibility promises, since nobody controls the services being measured.
When presenting the initial plan, explain which buyer question each assignment addresses. Attach the source evidence and identify who will complete the work.
See the sequence in detail, writing the campaign, or running several clients.