How to Generate Leads for Your SEO Services

You can be the best sales person in the world and still struggle to make sales if you have no leads coming in.

Grant Cardone says it best when he mentions that most sales people don’t have a conversion problem, they have a volume problem.

The way you stop caring about losing one prospect is to have 20 others in your pipeline. The more leads in your pipeline the more sales you’ll make and the better you’ll be in your sales conversations.

This article covers how to generate SEO sales leads so that your pipeline and pockets remain full.

Video Audit Strategy

The most predictable and quickest lead generating strategies utilize an outbound approach.

You can wait for a client to come to you or you can go to them.

However, most people have some limiting beliefs around cold outreach. Plenty marketers refuse to do cold outreach because they believe it will tarnish their image.

First off, there are so many businesses to sell in this world that it’s very unlikely you’ll make a big enough splash in a market to justify total ostracisation and or lawsuits… these are extreme worries the human brain jumps to justify taking no action.

Second, cold outreach is only spammy if you are spamming people…

It’s better to take a more custom approach to outreach anyways. Differentiate from your lazy competition by leveraging video audits.

Cold outreach to companies either by phone or email and pitch them on auditing their existing marketing strategies rather than trying to sell right away.

For the prospects who show interest, create a short 4-7 minute video audit of what they have and how they can improve their systems. Add actual value for the business.

Embed this video on a landing page with trust signals and a way for the lead to schedule a call with you to learn more.

Then, email the links to the prospects and watch as sales calls start piling in. The best thing about this strategy is that the prospects will be much warmer by the time you sell them over the phone.

Blog Content Marketing

The search space is notoriously competitive, especially for high intent searches such as, “seo company [city].”

Target these phrases but don’t make this your only strategy.

Instead, find long-tail keywords early in your customer’s buying cycles to target with blog content. Create truly helpful content rather than the average “10 tips to ___” style articles you see littered throughout the search results.

These articles will bring in small drips of visitors but don’t concern yourself too much with search volumes. The average value of one client to your marketing company is so high that even an article that brings in 5 clicks a month could land you a client in a year and produce amazing ROI on your time.

Further, even if your visitors don’t immediately turn into a lead for your SEO business they can still be leveraged.

Build an audience around the visitors to your blog that don’t become leads and retarget them all around the web with offers. The bigger this audience gets, the more data you’ll be able to give platforms such as Facebook to create lookalike audience that help you create an even more effective advertisements to cold audiences.

Build a Social Audience

I’d suggest using this strategy at the same time as building your blog.

Some of the keywords you produced will also perform well on YouTube and other platforms because the keywords themselves indicate what the audience is struggling with.

Repurpose your blog content into video, social posts, images, and infographic content to distribute your content to more areas of the web.

The rich content you produce for blog posts improves post engagement, it’ll help the reach of your social content, and will drive traffic back to your website which will ultimately help in the overall rankings/authority of your site.

Networking Events

The old strategy of networking is still as strong as ever, if not stronger.

There are endless industry-specific events for you and your team to attend every single month of the year.

Search Google for, “your target niche” “events/conferences/workshops/etc.” and this will bring up a long list of events you can attend.

Also, you may want to consider investigating the website, Meetup.com. This website lists local events for you to easily attend. You can even find/host your own workshops directed to local business owners around learning marketing strategies.

Advertising Funnels

Personally, I’d suggest building advertising campaigns off the audiences you build with long-tail blog and social content. In this case, your campaign will perform more effectively than if you advertised to a cold audience because your own visitors/viewers have already interacted with your brand.

The second thing I’d do if you want to open up your reach beyond just your own audience is to leverage lookalike audiences using Facebook and Youtube ads.

Build an audience off of the people who visited your website, leads for opt-ins, as well as past and current customers. You can then target users that share similar traits to your list; greatly increasing the effectiveness of your campaigns to cold audiences.

Third-Party Vendors

As an SEO you may be familiar with the term, parasite SEO. This phrase refers to a strategy where you use the authority of large, established platforms to help rank your own properties.

It turns out, you can do something similar in something I coin, parasite lead generation.

Every month large platforms such as Upwork and Fiverr get MILLIONS of visitors looking to hire for marketing services. Optimize profiles on these large platforms to take advantage of this traffic and syphon leads into your own sales funnels.

You’ll likely have to perform initial work on the platform itself before pitching the client on moving of site. Also, keep in mind that this goes against their policies so make sure to extremely cautious with your approach.

Putting it In Practice

These are only some of our favorite methods of generating leads. There are likely dozens of other lead generation strategies for SEOs that we may have missed. The above mentioned strategies are not necessarily the best ways to find SEO clients but are simply the ones we implement ourselves and have found most effective. We wanted to stay away from suggesting anything we don’t personally do ourselves.

The next step for you is to start testing for yourself. Find out what works best for you, your agency, and the industry you serve. Then, come back here and share your results; we’d love to hear back from you!