#1stPost. I wanted to share my experience and the process closing high-ticket SEO clients ($10K/Mon +) at my past company (I am No longer in client SEO biz). Happy to provide proof to mods if needed. This is useful for SEO Agency owners / Freelancers struggling to make sales. While SEO is still a high-demand skill with no shortage of businesses willing to pay for it, agencies / freelancers have hard time closing customers. From what I have seen, most agencies are still using the old old traditional approach and gets turned down by business owners. I don't really blame business owners for that, they were either burned by past agencies (Off-shore) or don't have enough understanding of how SEO works or why they might need it. This happens if your pitch or reputation is weak as an agency or you are selling SEO in a way which promises too much / sounds too good to be true. Ideally, the "Need for SEO" should come from the client. Either from their own research or based on the education you provide them which should include - Organic traffic data for their top competitors with top keywords & competitor ranks on them Industry keywords (include high low and mid size keywords) with their search volumes & expected traffic gain if ranked in <5 (Based on historical CTR data) A rough strategy on how you will get there. Mention how you found few low-handing fruits and few areas where long-term work is needed. Example of low hanging fruit - put their website in your favorite SEO tool and find out all the keywords they rank between position 6-10. Filter based on certain search volume (Depends on the industry). You will quickly see a bunch of pages you could either improve the on-page or build few external links and push them in top 5 or 3 which will quickly increase the CTR / Traffic to those pages. Example of long-term work - Create dedicated pages for the most important keywords, create a strong interlinking strategy, create blog content to attract more visitors, create & promote linkable assets to gain mentions/links or details of anything else you plan on doing with their site. An examples of how you took a website (Preferable in the same industry) , did x y z changes in them and how the traffic improved / or the keywords moved. incredible if you could just google stuff and show them the results right in front of them. From that point, Let them do the math and figure out how much additional xx, xxx traffic a month will increase their business and by how much. Based on that, they have to decide whether to do SEO or not. Don't talk about pricing or anything else until that point. Once they are convinced they need SEO, after and only after you have to pitch why you are the right choice. If they are not convinced, just move to next and don't try to hard sell, it will back-fire sooner or later. At that point it's just you selling snake oil and they will be right to be skeptical and ask for guarantees / money back etc. Anyway, Once they are convinced they need SEO and ask for a proposal, Your proposal should include : - Detailed Case studies of 3 or 4 past results, OK even if its from different industries. This is to enforce it's not just pure luck but a process which works. Testimonials from few of your past credible clients. Bonus points if you have testimonials from the same industry clients or someone known. A way for them to contact your past / current customers (If they want to check you out) A subtle and important mention that SEO is a very dynamic process and Google's algorithms changes pretty much every day. Even though you have been doing it for x years and are confident (after throughly analyzing their site) you can make significant improved in x, y and z areas - it's not guaranteed that what worked yesterday will work tomorrow and that everything you will do will be on the best-effort basis, keeping the activities transparent. That, giving them results is in your best interest in this business and you are willing to put a certain percentage of your fees bases on performance (if you were to charge $5K a month, make it $6K with $2K variable) based milestones. From my experience, this last line becomes the deciding factor in mid-large proposals. It basically assures them that you have the skin in the game. And if even with all these, if they insists, just walk away and go back to finding customers who really needs SEO (There are plenty in every industry) rather then gunning for a hard-sell which typically ends up in ruined reputations, burned-bridges and even worse a bad-review. While this might sound like a lot of work, anything worth doing ain't easy anymore :) Does this help ?
☰