How to Sell SEO Services to Local Businesses
This is the complete guide on how to sell SEO services to local businesses If you’re exploring to dramatically improve the revenue of your agency by selling SEO services, you’re in luck as this guide will walk you through the best tips and tricks for closing the deal. After reading this guide, you’ll manage to perform these sales tactics positively based on our experience of working with hundreds of agencies all over the world for the past two decades.
We’ll cover everything in this guide related to SEO services, how you can bring clients, what you should say on the phone, how you should price your services, and how you can close deals and keep clients. We will also cover the cost of SEO knowledge you must have to sell SEO services in the current market. The good news is that you don’t require to be an SEO mastermind to be successful and won’t require extra people to get your business up and running.
How to Find Potential Customers
Digital marketing professionals and companies these days face more competition than ever, and it’s leading to a big problem—all the potential clients you want to target have likely already been swamped by other pitches. Search Engine Land surveyed small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) on how frequently they were contacted by someone selling their SEO services.
Even back then, 35% stated they were contacted at least once a day, and another 22% said they were approached at least once a week. Digital marketing has only improved since then, so those percentages will likely be even higher now. That implies you have to be smarter with how you find and approach your prospective clients.
You have to understand the thoughts and pain points of small business owners in your area, so you don’t make the same mistakes as most agencies. There are three ways you can take that you can mix and match to find the best sales plan that works for you.
Establish Yourself in as a Specialist
What can help you stand out from your competitors when you’re starting is specializing in a niche? It can be restaurants, health-related infirmaries, car dealerships, B2B businesses, eCommerce stores, and so on. If you’ve ever had any experience or knowledge of a specific industry in your past, use that to your advantage! Being able to understand the ins-and-outs of a business that’s unique to one sector is a significant selling point.
It also assists you to understand the local business owner when you approach them — you’ll know the pain points they have, and how to address them in a way that they’ll understand. It’s an excellent way to establish trust with prospective clients they won’t have with general agencies.
Create a Strong Reputation
It takes a long time to cultivate a reputation as the go-to SEO provider amongst local businesses. You have to establish yourself as a leading authority, so your clients and customers will spread the word that you’re the best of the best. When people inquire you out, they’ll come with a trust they wouldn’t have with any generic agency.
The first step is to go out there and put yourself in front of local businesses — but not in a sales can you buy prednisone over the counter for dogs manner. Look up your city or town’s chamber of trade. They will occasionally hold events and seminars where experts address companies that choose to attend on several topics related to business. It might require you a bit in time and money, but start building relationships with the Chamber of Commerce members who hold the events and see if you can ultimately become either a speaker or even a host or sponsor.
Being able to give out advice and tips to other business owners on subjects relating to SEO helps you establish your expertise in the field. You might even have any of them come up to you after you speak to inquire you questions, so you can start building relationships that might eventually lead to them contacting you for your services.
Leverage your relationships
Networking and relationships drive the business world. Being able to use the connections you have and make new connections over time can help your business grow. If you’re starting your own SEO business, make sure you put it out there that you are open to allowing family, friends, former co-workers and other professional connections that you’re available for business.
Possibilities are there aren’t many degrees of separation between you and someone you are connected with who works as a manager at an SMB. Even if there aren’t many people you know who own a small or medium business, they might know someone who requires help.
How to Approach Potential Customers
First impressions are essential, which is why you should spend a lot of time refining how you first approach a customer. Many companies go for a quantity over quality process, just sending out the same generic emails or cold calls to any business in the area that they can find. Unfortunately, the inundation of those sorts of calls and emails means your job is a lot more complicated. Your customer is apparently already tired of hearing from people like you.
You can take a simple approach by focusing on marketing. Put your information and your business out to people online using the same SEO and digital marketing techniques you would use on for them. Make social media pillars, white papers, press releases, and newsletters that get people to sign up to receive more information. That way, you are bringing people and businesses that have an active interest in what you can offer. It makes selling your services more comfortable.
Then there’s the extra direct approach, which involves finding and reaching out to local businesses yourself. It is the most tedious and most challenging way to do it, but if you can do it well, then you can get the most reward. Please do your research into their business so you can figure out what approach might work best for them. Try cultivating a relationship with them first. Seek them out at events they treat or are attending, so you have a reason to approach them in person.
Don’t just spam them with emails. It’s very impersonal, and they already receive them daily. If you do send them an email, customize it to deliver their needs and their industry. You can play around with various subject lines that get to the point, but that are personalized for each business.
