Nothing comes from a poorly matched client-agency relationship except a whole lot of wasted time, pent up frustration, and a laundry list of lessons learned.

Most agencies get fired because they shouldn’t have paired up with a client in the first place. The relationship went sour because expectations weren’t properly set during the sales and onboarding process.

Luckily, there’s a way to prevent an impending client-agency breakup: conduct a proper assessment at the very onset of the engagement.

A proper inbound marketing assessment combines:

• an audit of the prospect’s current marketing efforts
• and a conversation that allows your agency to both educate them on the benefits of inbound marketing, and ask them the probing questions to uncover their marketing goals and challenges.

Nope, I didn’t make that number up—online marketing agency digitalrelevance (previously branded as Slingshot SEO) really did grow their revenue that much, that fast. Here’s how.

Aaron Aders, Jeremy Dearringer and Kevin Bailey were high school buddies in the late 1990s who used to design websites for lunch money. After going their separate ways for a few years, they reconnected professionally to form Slingshot SEO, an SEO-focused agency in Indianapolis.

They originally focused their efforts on traditional SEO services—90% of their work consist of technical website optimization. But then came the Google updates. Between Google 2009’s Caffeine, 2011 Panda and 2012 Penguin updates, the search engine giant had fixed many of the problems Slingshot SEO was trying to solve for clients. Aaron Aders, Co-founder and Market Research Director, explains, “Those three updates changed SEO forever because they overcame the search engine’s major shortcomings. We realized we couldn’t create relevant brands for our clients without expanding our definition of SEO”. With their business model quickly becoming obsolete, Aders and his team had to rethink their strategy.

The idea of Inbound marketing comes along with very specific expectations – getting found, getting leads and closing sales. The beautiful aspect of inbound marketing is that you can make changes to your marketing execution right now and see results today, tomorrow and next week.

That being said, inbound marketing is a long term play, the longer you do it, the better the results. Marketing is a marathon, not a sprint and you need to be constantly marketing. You should never consider marketing finished. You should never “take a break.” Do it every day!

However, there are real improvements that can be made today that will impact your results in a positive way all through the rest of the year. Here are 10 of the best ways to use inbound marketing to drive results this month:

Getting traffic to your site is half the battle.

However, even after people have taken the time to open your email and click through on your call-to-action, you can still lose them at the landing page. What makes this loss all the more painful (#marketerproblems) is that all of the steps it took someone to get to the landing page underscore just how much they’re interested in what you’re offering. They are 80 percent there and yet they come to a stop. It is precisely this snag that leads good marketers to test and retest their pages for optimal conversions. Here are some common at risk spots for losing your potential leads.

1 – Confusing Headers