Selling SEO Services
When I originally created this guide, it had no information about selling services. The two main reasons for that are (1) I was bad at selling services (I tended to underprice them until I brought on a partner), and (2) as time passes, most of the most successful SEOs end up moving closer to the profit stream by setting up their own e-commerce or affiliate sites, or partnering with local merchants they know.
If you want to sell services, I highly recommend talking to Dan Thies. Taking his 16-week course or a one- or two-hour consultation with him would likely help you develop a brand strategy and help you scout out leads. Below are tips I can offer from my experience selling SEO services.
Some sites, like Elance.com, run auctions that allow people to buy various services. Most of these auctions will be from the following types of people:
• Competitors looking at how to price their services
• People who are not interested in or do not know the value of quality
SEO
• People looking for a steal. These are customers who will waste your time and never be happy, even if their $100 spend makes them $10,000 or more.
I personally only ever placed a few bids at online auctions, but the things you want to look out for when trying to sell services are to make sure that the leads have the following characteristics:
• Lead you would want to take (i.e., Would I feel comfortable marketing this?)
• Leads you have the technical know-how and time to work on
• Leads from people that appear willing to listen to feedback and have reasonable expectations
• Leads that are interested in bid quality instead of bid price
You cannot expect to learn everything, especially when you are new. One of the fundamental flaws when I started learning was that I thought it was my job to learn marketing, HTML, graphics, SEO, PHP, ASP, MySQL, etc. In trying to learn everything, you can spread yourself too thin. The time I have spent editing ASP code would have been spent much better doing other things. ☺
The nice things about forums are that you get to learn and teach at the same time, while building friendships and your reputation. Some of your posts can act as mini sales letters that will drive targeted leads your way. Reading other threads will help you learn nuggets. On top of selling and learning, you also get to make friends and learn who knows what. This can help immensely when issues come up that you are unsure of how to handle, and I have referred many leads to friends I met from SEO forums.
I usually try to stick with smaller to mid-sized forums off the start as they are easier to get noticed in than in large forums. Forums like Cre8asite and SearchGuild might be good places to get started.
Not everyone is a good writer, but I believe most people can be trained or practice to become at least decent ones. I do not write articles as much as I did in the past, but for a while, I was featured in WebProNews almost weekly.
The key to writing articles is to write something so compelling that people will want to link to it or write something decent and work to get it syndicated on networks with many eyeballs.
When I started SEO, I was exceptionally poor. It took a while for me to get around to writing articles, but when I did write one, I noticed a flurry of leads the next couple days. Three hundred dollars was a lot of money to me back then, and it was not uncommon to make that in consulting to leads generated from each of the articles I wrote.
Well-executed research articles tend to get significant media coverage:
• Kalena Jordan did a study on the lack of search engine visibility of the top 100 New Zealand companies and got many leads from it.
• Fathom Online created a Keyword Price Index rating that tracks PPC ad prices by category each month. Many search-related sites give Fathom Online free exposure every month by mentioning these statistics.
• SEO-PR was the first SEO company focused purely on public relations. It is easier for them to get links from other SEO sites than it is for most other SEO businesses because they are not viewed as direct competitors.
• Brad Fallon created an SEO radio show that makes it easy for him to get on-topic links.
In an industry with a rather tarnished reputation, the value of having a voice that is seen or heard by many is a strong competitive advantage. For example, there is probably about a 99% chance you would have never bought this e-book if I did not write the associated blog.
There are many ways to find customers for SEO. One of the common problems is that many people do not know they need SEO services or what those services are. If you think of prospects in terms of the ideal prospect, what would be their common characteristics?
• They have a profitable business.
• They are in a market position that is not hyper-saturated.
• They sell non-commodity products or things that are not easy to get elsewhere.
• They already have websites.
• They already rank (in the top 100 or so) for some of their keywords.
• Their business model makes sense for the web—item is cheap to ship or requires customization, which makes it more convenient to buy online than to hunt at various offline stores.
• They are well established on the web.
• They are willing to spend enough money to see results.
• They already know a bit about SEO.
• They have reasonable expectations.
• They are a similar-sized business or one that you would feel comfortable working with.
Odds are that most leads are not going to line up with all your most desirable characteristics. Some people will align with many of them though. You probably do not want to spend the same amount of effort on all leads. Instead, it is wiser to place more effort on leads that seem close to conversion and leads that seem like they are a great match for your business.
It is also important not to rely too heavily on any one potential client. Some people may just be feeling out the market or trying to learn as much from you as they can for free before doing their own services or trying to replicate your business model
Here are some common places to look and things you can do to find clients:
• Search the Business & Shopping categories of What’s New at the Yahoo! Directory. These people have spent $300 on a single link and are actively promoting their websites.
• Utilize services (used mostly for e-mail spamming) that track sites that are newly accepted to DMOZ.
• Engage pay-per-click ads for somewhat expensive keywords (make sure you do not click their ads to visit their sites)
• Attend local business meetings
• Create lists, answer questions, or review products on Amazon.com
• Leave testimonials in proper places
• Go to product demo meetings from companies like WebTrends, Verizon SuperPages, or Google AdWords; watching them demonstrate and sell their products will help you learn how to sell, and you will be surrounded by qualified leads
• Register for conferences on issues and areas related to SEO
Many times clients will not tell you of past experiences. Research the clients before accepting the job. Following are some things to find out about a potential client:
• How old is their website and company?
• Have they had their site banned?
• Do they have any past SEO experiences?
• Do they have shadow domains and/or duplicate content or other problems?
• Do they think they know everything already? Will they give you room to breathe and to do your job correctly?
• Who makes the decisions? (There are limits to how blunt you can be, but you need to find out.)
• What is their baseline? You’ll need it to compare the outcome of the SEO campaign to their current market position.
• What are their goals and payment structure? Agree on these before commencing work.
Make sure you understand the short- and long-term goals of the client, and make sure that they are willing to listen to you and provide you with the resources necessary to make their goals possible.
It works best if they understand the process and have their expectations in line with what you plan on delivering before you accept the project. It also works out best when you work with people you feel you would like to work with.
• Why does their company deserve to be ranked as the top resource? What is their unique sales proposition?
• Is their business healthy? Are other disruptive technologies entering or replacing their market? Are they continually losing market share?
• Do they plan on launching new site technologies?
• If they contacted you, what prompted them to think they needed a SEO consultant now?
• Do they intend to use search engine marketing as one of many marketing channels, or are they expecting their whole business to succeed or fail based on SEO? Is their site good other than search engine marketing? Are they willing to accept your feedback on usability and other issues related to conversion?
Some of the stuff you cannot know fully, but your gut can get a good sense of how flexible the company is.
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