SEO professionals are highly sought-after on the web, and there is a reason: SEO is a very important component of online marketing, and SEO standards and guidelines are constantly changing at an ever-increasing pace, so much so that it might be quite hard to follow for a business owner or an entrepreneur.
Enter the expert, somebody who deals with SEO across the board on a daily basis. If you’re an SEO professional looking to sell your services, you might find the task a bit challenging, particularly if you are a freelancer or independent professional. Here are a few tips that will help you effectively sell your SEO services and find clients.
- Embrace the freelance community: freelancers are seen as the “lone wolves” of the internet, but it doesn’t have to be that way. You can network with fellow professionals, join dedicated forums and online communities, as well as sign up to one (or several) of the many platforms that allow people to make money online with their services, including SEO-work. Think Upwork, Fiverr, Freelancer, etc.
- Identify your niche. The guys over at Consulting.com have said that a freelance consultant often doesn’t want to specialize in a niche. Why? because they fear ‘losing opportunities’. Actually, specializing in a niche offers more opportunities – you will be able to position yourself as the ideal solution to a specific problem and can also charge premium rates.
- Manage your time: time is money, and in your case, quite literally so. You can’t really profitably offer your SEO services if it takes you a lot of time to get things sorted out.
- Manage expectations. Precisely because SEO is pretty confusing for most people, your clients might have unrealistic Page 1 expectations or other demands that you have to clarify before you start working with them.
- If you want to offer the SEO services, without knowing SEO, take a look at reseller programs. If you want to brush up your knowledge while you work, consider the Agency Pack, where you can manage the SEO for your clients in one centralised platform and issue reports with your branding.
- Don’t sell SEO. Sell an increase in customers, more leads increased visits to your online and offline business. Show them the competition and why they are losing!
- At the bare minimum, guarantee a monthly data report and an explanation of what you have been up to.
- Do great work: it goes without saying, but if your customers don’t see results, they won’t be coming back, or worse, they will discredit your reputation with a bad review. It is important to keep your standards high and build solid relationships with your existing customers.
What tools can you use to sell and maintain your SEO services?
Automating your SEO to-do Lists for Clients
If you’re an independent SEO Professional or are part of an Agency and are interested in working with an SEO tool while managing your client’s accounts and reporting under a single platform, check out our Agency Pack! White label reporting, consolidated view, measurable progress view, and much more. Don’t clutter your digital workspace with an excess of tools and aim to streamline and automate as much as you can.
Using an SEO tool to Generate Leads
We work with Agencies and one of their better lead generators are free SEO audits of a site. They will run a report on a list of leads, and then use the information to cold call and indicate how they could help the site’s online performance. Another way is to have a free SEO report tool on their site and then use it to get emails and enter them into a drip campaign or call right away.
In Spain we had a digital agency see about 20% conversion from website visitors into hot leads, and eventually a 3,4% conversion rate (becoming paid clients) coming in from this free report.
