Search Engine Optimization - 11 Steps to Sell SEO Services
By Christian Neeser
There's a lot of competition out there for SEO experts who are selling SEO Services.
Prospective clients know that they should talk to several companies before choosing someone
to conduct their SEO services. If you are going to close those SEO leads, you have to know
your stuff and go the extra mile when putting together your proposal. Putting together an SEO
service proposal that contains good research will help your client feel confident about your
abilities and help you close the deal.When making a comprehensive proposal for prospective
clients, follow these tips to help you develop an strategy and give you a clear road map should
the client decide to move forward.
1. Make an Initial Evaluation of the Prospective's Project
It's important to build a relationship and get information from prospective clients,
so don't jump into your first conversation with a lot of sales pitches. More often than not
that will just leave the prospective with the impression that you are more interested in their
money than helping them.
It's best to take a look at the web site in question before contacting the prospective.
That way you will have a basic idea as to what they are selling and how you can help them achieve
better rankings and traffic.
If you don't know anything about the client, then you will need to get some basic information
about them. You can find most of the information by researching the company online:
o How big is the site?
o What types of services and products does the company sell?
o Is the company most interested in a local, national, or international campaign?
o How much traffic does the site get each month?
o How competitive is this niche market
2. Do a Keyword Search Volume Analysis
A keyword search volume analysis will help you determine what keywords the prospective
should focus on. If the client has shown interest in a geo-specific campaign, then you can
try using this geo specific keyword research tool. Once you have the results, export them to
an Excel spreadsheet and eliminate the keywords that aren't relevant to the client's needs.
In general, I usually eliminate any keywords that have less than 1,000 of monthly search traffic
on Google. You can also delete those that aren't niche specific or are too broad to have real
meaning. This can still leave you with more than a 100 keywords. You will probably only be
able to target 20-30 of them initially, but keep the remaining ones for when you try to up-sell
Phase II SEO services.
This information will also help you start putting together a budget for the project.
If the CPC for the keywords is high, then you're dealing with a competitive market that will
need to have a higher SEO budget in order to get results for the client.
3. Run a Preliminary Keyword Ranking Analysis
You will need to run a preliminary keyword ranking analysis to find out how far along
this site has come in terms of ranking results. The SEOBook toolbar comes with Rank Checker,
which works very quickly. It doesn't however give you the most accurate results, so spot check
suspicious results with Google. You can also use WebCEO to make a comprehensive, accurate report.
Your preliminary analysis should help you determine how much work it will take to get
first page rankings for relevant keywords.
Keep this preliminary report handy so that you can include it in your proposal. It's
always useful to show clients why you think they should focus on certain strategies over others.
Of course, your prospective client isn't going get 100 percent of available traffic no matter
what techniques you use.
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