How Do You Sell SEO Services to Clients?
To help you understand how to effectively sell SEO and convert prospects into clients, we reached out to marketing professionals and business owners for their insights. From emphasizing transparency and engagement to using humor to boost conversion rates, here are the top eight sales strategies shared by these experts to help your agency succeed.
- Emphasize Transparency and Engagement
- Host Community Workshops
- Incorporate Storytelling into Sales
- Align with Customers and Set Goals
- Personalize Your Consultations
- Offer Free SEO Audits to Prospects
- Leverage Instagram Ads and Success Stories
- Use Humor to Boost Conversion Rates
Emphasize Transparency and Engagement
At Webserv, a healthcare marketing agency, our sales process for SEO revolves around transparency and active engagement with potential clients. Our sales team initiates the process by scheduling a meeting with the lead, using SEO tools to present a clear picture of their current SEO status. This interactive walkthrough allows us to address any concerns upfront and build trust.
Once the client shows interest, we conduct a more extensive SEO audit for a deeper understanding of their situation. This audit is followed by a meeting where we outline a general strategy based on our findings. If the client is ready to proceed, we send them a personalized proposal, detailing an SEO strategy tailored to their specific needs.
This hands-on approach ensures that our clients are not just buying a service, but entering into a partnership based on trust and mutual understanding.
Kevin Hall
Marketing Operations, Webserv
Host Community Workshops
Host community workshops focused on educating small businesses in the local area about the importance of SEO for their online success. This approach helps establish your agency as a thought leader in the community and builds trust with potential clients.
Face-to-face interaction is often more effective in converting prospects to clients compared to solely online interactions. For example, a local SEO agency can partner with a local business association or chamber of commerce to host a workshop on SEO best practices for small businesses.
This can not only attract potential clients but also establish the agency’s reputation and credibility within the local business community.
Ben Lau
Founder, Featured SEO Company
Incorporate Storytelling into Sales
One approach that people typically wouldn’t suggest for selling SEO is to incorporate storytelling into the sales pitch. This could involve sharing a client’s journey from having poor search rankings to achieving significant growth and success through SEO.
By framing the sales pitch as a narrative, potential clients are more likely to connect with the emotional aspects of the story and envision themselves achieving similar results. Additionally, storytelling can help to differentiate the agency’s approach from competitors and make the sales pitch more memorable.
Roy Lau
Co-founder, 28 Mortgage
Align with Customers and Set Goals
When selling SEO or content services, the sales process is multistep and contextual. The main takeaway is to always be aligned with a potential customer on what you’re offering, where the opportunity is for success, and how you’ll achieve that success.
To get there, answer these questions: Is there a large TAM? Is it a hypercompetitive space? Is there a PLG motion that can leverage content and SEO to help provide an effective funnel? Are budgets aligned? Do they have the bandwidth to work with you?
These are just a few of the questions to answer before you go into a sales meeting.
During the meeting, we find it useful to look at the engagement through the lens of “what is the real opportunity here, and what do we need to do to be successful?”.
If a company wants 100x growth in clicks over six months, is in a hypercompetitive keyword space, and has a domain rating under 25, then it might not make sense to start an SEO program unless you can align on more realistic goals.
Nelson Brassell
Head of Business Development, Ten Speed
Personalize Your Consultations
I always tailor-make my pitch for each business. I don’t believe in one-size-fits-all SEO solutions that apply to everyone. Every business has a unique need depending on a lot of factors. It depends on their niche, current industry trends, marketing goals, and such.
This is why I offer free consultation calls first before making a pitch on what services to offer them. On this call, I identify the client’s needs and goals. Then, I personalize a content marketing strategy that addresses these. I explain to them how I can achieve these goals with the resources and services I can offer, and that’s when we close the deal.
This process has landed me many fruitful conversions with happy and satisfied clients at the end of it.
Khris Steven
Owner and Marketer, KhrisDigital
Offer Free SEO Audits to Prospects
To generate more leads for your sales pipeline as an SEO agency, you can:
- Generate a list of companies who need your services (for example, dentists in your hometown)
- Find the contact details of your target companies (email, LinkedIn, etc.)
- Send them a message asking to whom you can send a video audit about their website, where you explain how they can improve their website and generate more organic traffic
- Follow up with everyone who doesn’t respond to the first or second message you have sent (follow-ups are highly important when doing sales, never stop after your first try!)
- Create and send the video to the target companies who have shown interest
The advantages of this technique are it shows you are willing to provide value upfront by creating a free SEO audit, and you won’t need to create tons of videos, but only for the ones who showed interest
Daniel De Vries
Founder, LeadHQ
Leverage Instagram Ads and Success Stories
To market the SEO services we offer, we make use of Instagram Ads. The great part about this type of marketing is that its success is measurable. With the help of analytics, we can determine the number of users we have been able to target. The sales process is simple; we ask our clients about their expectations and deliver results to them. To convert prospects into clients, we make use of our success stories.
By displaying them to prospects and showing them the effectiveness of our services, we are able to boost conversions. We make use of infographics for this purpose. This has proven to be an incredible strategy for our business so far.
Brian Hardesty
Owner, On Display Signs
Use Humor to Boost Conversion Rates
Injecting humor into your sales pitch can make potential clients more receptive to your message. Use funny videos or posts that demonstrate the importance of SEO in a lighthearted way, or in your one-on-one sales meetings to build rapport and ease tension.
This approach makes your agency approachable and relatable, which increases the chances of converting prospects to clients.
Jason Cheung
Operations Manager, Credit KO
Submit Your Answer
Would you like to submit an alternate answer to the question, “How do you sell SEO? What’s your sales process look like? How does this sales approach help your agency convert prospects to clients?”