How To Sell SEO Services To Clients

Selling search engine optimization (SEO) services is not as challenging as people claim it to be. For sure, you’ll face more problems selling SEO than you would selling something like vegetables, but you can still manage through hard work and consistency.

The type of company you are determines how difficult or easy it is going to be for you to sell SEO services. Some company owners know that they are good at selling services, so they enter this field. On the other hand, there are also some owners and craftspeople who excel at and specialize in the services they wish to sell. It is substantially more difficult for the latter to sell SEO services to clients.

Having knowledge of the product or service you sell is definitely helpful. But, in order to sell it, you don’t necessarily have to be a subject matter expert. We’ll revisit this when we talk about the misconceptions around selling SEO. For now, however, let’s discuss the scenarios in which you might have to present SEO as an option to your client.

Three Scenarios of Selling SEO

SEO can do wonders for any company, and we are all well aware of this. But some companies still have yet to opt for it. Here is an outline of three scenarios in which you could suggest clients use SEO. After this, we’ll dive right into the misconceptions.

Selling to the Leads Who Have Requested It

The clients in focus here are warm leads. For example, imagine someone visited your website and asked for more information about something, or that you just got a referral for your SEO services. Out of all three scenarios we are going to talk about, this one is the easiest and has the highest closing rates.

One crucial thing to understand here is that the client has shown interest in something that you want to sell. This means that you are already free of having to make them understand why SEO can be beneficial for them. Your only job is to show those clients why you are better than your competitors. If you can do this successfully, then those clients will be more than happy to work with you.

Selling as an Add-On to Other Services

Selling SEO services as an add-on to other services unlocks the potential of a business to grow at a faster speed. In this scenario, you would have an existing relationship of some sort with the client – you might have provided a service for them in the past, or you’re just a trusted partner. You have identified that their business can reap great results by using SEO.

In other words, your clients are already sure about how good your services are – it’s why they work with you. You just have to convince them that SEO is beneficial for their business, and it’s a done deal.

Selling to Cold Contacts

This is the trickiest and most important scenario for scaling your business to another level. Here, you prospect and identify the most suitable clients for you who could also benefit by adopting SEO practices in their business. These clients do not know how SEO can help their business, and they don’t even have any idea of how you, as an agency, work. As such, you’ll have to convince them of both these parameters to seal the deal.

Improve the Way You Sell SEO

There are more SEO agencies than Batman costumes for a Halloween party. With competition being so fierce, you should constantly work to improve the way you sell SEO. Here are four tested things strategies you can start working on today to see better results:

Write Irresistible Cold Emails

For many businesses, cold emailing can become a tough row to hoe. And with time being one of the most important aspects of one’s life and business, most of these cold emails end up in trash. This makes it essential for you to refine your process of writing cold emails in order to take your email template closer to perfection.

To stop your emails from going into spam or trash, you need to work on making them stand out from the rest. One thing that helps you stand out the most is the subject line because that’s the one thing readers see before deciding if it’s relevant or not. If you can somehow use the subject line to allure them, you can consider most of your work done. The second important thing is the template, and to improve this, you can perform A/B testing and find out what works best for your business.

Try Using Case Studies

Do you think that successful sales can survive on their own? The simple answer is NO. You must produce exceptional output to retain older clients and attract new ones from the market through word of mouth. By using SEO case studies, you’ll be able to present your successful projects to the world, which can help clients judge the scale that you can manage.

Case studies can help you solidify your marketing narrative, and it also acts as proof of your skill. SEO is mainly about the final outcome, and if you are consistently generating great results, then it is worth putting it out there in front of your audience.

Gather Testimonials From Clients

Okay, so now we’ve taken care of cold emails and case studies. Now, let’s talk about the importance of getting reviews from the clients you have worked for. In this digital world, there are few things more important than positive feedback or recommendation.

You can tell your potential customers stories of how good you are and how you can do wonders for their businesses. But the truth is, those stories do not create as much impact as a simple positive testimonial can. It is something that your SEO clients will find easy to relate to.

Moreover, if you have really done a good job, your previous clients will be more than happy to write positive feedback for you. You can add these testimonials on your social media, marketing collateral and even on your website. You can even use the link to these testimonials in the cold emails you send to potential clients to position yourself as a reliable brand.

Social Exposure Always Helps

In order to gain a reputation – a good one, that is – in the market, you need to have a robust social media strategy in place. Digital marketing would not be as relevant as it is if not for social media. This makes it essential for companies to be present on various social media platforms to gain as many clients as they can.

If you can become a key contributor or a social media figure in the sphere of online content, then clients will subconsciously start believing that you are the best company for all the services you are producing content for. Moreover, any of your connections from social media may need your services in the future, so instead of treating social media as a burden, try treating it as an exercise with long-term gains.

Tips To Sell SEO Services

Penetrating this market by making a huge impact in the industry is something that does not happen too often. So, the best way to sell your SEO services is by being patient and consistent with your work. Here are five tips that can help you in selling your SEO services.

Niche Identification

No matter what type of industry your clients belong to, if they have an online presence, they’ll need your services. You, as a business owner, will have to be quick to reach your clients on various platforms.

If you are not new to this SEO industry, you can easily identify your niche by figuring out what type of clients are most likely to visit you and what percent of them are a part of the same industry. If the majority of your clients are from one specific industry, then it implies that you should pay more attention to that particular industry.

However, if you are new in this industry, it would be best for you to do research on the industries that need SEO services. Then, you’ll have to figure out what industry you are most comfortable with.

Providing Solutions for Clients

Most businesses face identical online issues like not ranking high enough or difficulty building brand awareness. You, as an SEO seller, might be tempted to draft an offer based on these general SEO problems. And this is exactly where most sellers go wrong.

You should wait for the clients to define their problems in SEO. And before you take the discussion further, you should research the specific problem of their website and social media. You can then discuss these particular issues with the client and show them how you intend to solve the issue.

To check how a website is performing, you can use one of the various SEO software available in the market. One such tool is SE Ranking, which you can use to check the ranking of a website and also perform an SEO audit. Using this advanced tool, you can find out what’s wrong with your client’s website, and with the help of the insights it generates, you’ll be able to solve those issues easily. And when you’ll go with a specific problem instead of a template, clients will feel that you actually care about their business – and this will increase your chances of getting a deal.

Avoiding SEO Jargon

When you are communicating the plans, try to use very clear and precise statements. There might be a temptation to use jargon to show your clients that you have a deep knowledge of the work, but it is best to avoid this if you do not want any confusion.

However, if you use jargon, you should also break these terms down and help your client understand what it means. The aim here is to help clients understand the problem they are in, and the solution that will help them come out of it.

Defining UVP

By defining your unique value propositions (UVP), you can take your SEO selling game to the next level. These propositions are a set of very clear statements about how you can benefit your client, how you’ll work to solve their problems, how you will meet their business goals and, more importantly, how your service is better than what your competitors are providing.

In simple words, by going through your UVP, your clients should be convinced that they will prefer your service above anyone else’s. 

Conclusion

Business owners now realize how important it is to have experts guiding their way in the journey of SEO. To sell SEO to your clients, you’ll need to have a distinguished image. However, all these things matter a little less when you are providing great services and results. Thus, in this article, we tried to outline some strategies that top SEO selling companies use to sell SEO. We hope that you’ll find it helpful.