How to Sell SEO Services to Local Businesses – Client Sales Tips (2019)

SEO services are notoriously challenging to sell to local businesses.

The difficulty in selling SEO to clients is in the fact that new websites generally take several months to generate a return for the company.

On top of this, small business owners have been continuously duped by shady marketers, giving the entire industry a bad name.

But, don’t let this discourage you!

Simply understanding the objections is half the battle in winning the game of sales.

This article helps you overcome these hurdles by providing 10 quick tips to help you approach and offer SEO services to local businesses.

 

1. Know your standards

For some reason everyone neglects to start here. I think it is because most don’t appreciate the value of knowing exactly what it is you are looking for.

The first tip to more effectively selling SEO packages is to know what you will and won’t do (your standards).

Start at the end and decide how much money you want to be generating each month. Then, backwards engineer this to determine how many clients you want to serve and at what price point.

Next, figure out the psychographics of the people you want to interact with.

Building an SEO agency is a LONG process and you are going to be spending a lot of time interacting with clients.

It’s important to know the type of person you want to help.

Better yet, the more purpose behind why you’re serving the audience the more your message will connect and the more consistently you’ll move towards your goals.

 

2. Choose the right niche

You just figured the amount of clients you want, at a determined price point, and who they are psychologically.

Now, figure out which industries/niches this client exists in.

Make sure that the niche fits the psychographics and demographics of your ideal client.

Figure all this out before looking at competition.

When you deeply care about something, there is no competition.

 

3. Prospect for low-hanging fruit

Don’t try and sell a television set to an amish person…

People without websites are probably not your target market. In fact, people with websites are not necessarily the ideal client.

The easiest person to sell is someone who has already been sold.

Look for companies that are already investing money in web design, listings, and advertising as they are already sold on the value of digital marketing.

One of the easiest things you can do to sell SEO services is look for businesses using Google ads and not ranking on the first page of Google.

 

4. Customize your initial outreach

Prospecting and outreach take a lot of time and are extremely boring (at least to me).

Marketing agencies constantly try to overcome low effort with mass quantity.

Although this approach may work sometimes, it’s not the most effective.

However, there is truth to everything. You must have both the right quality and quantity of outreach in order to get good results.

In general, you should always be including as much personalization as possible in every touch point with cold/warm prospects.

Don’t just get a list and blast it with a single generic email….

First, enrich your list of contacts with personal & business information. Then, segment these contacts into groups so you can treat each one differently.

Let’s say you categorize contacts into two different piles: Yelp Advertisers (Not Ranking) and Google Advertisers (Not Ranking).

Now you can send specific emails to each of these lists selling the company on an alternative solution.

Also, don’t just end it there, continue to break up each segment into smaller batches in which you can test different headlines, bodies, calls to action, etc.

 

5. Send website audit videos to leads

I highly recommend testing customized video audits as a tool for landing sales calls.

Send qualified contacts a short email pitch and mention you made them a video detailing improvements they can make to their site to improve rankings.

Ask if they want you to send it to them.

Wait to create the video only for the warm responses (people ask for it).

Then, go through their website, social profiles, etc. and create a quick 4-6 minute video describing improvements you would make to the site.

Embed this video on a landing page with an about section, past results, testimonials, etc. and have a link for them to schedule a consultation with you.

 

6. Fill your pipeline

The biggest antidote to fear of rejection is abundance.

You fear losing sales because you don’t have enough sales coming in.

Think of it, if you had back-to-back sales calls all day every day, you would not dwell on a sale you lost the day before.

Most of the time we think there is a sales problem but really it’s just a pipeline problem.

Grant Cardone lives by this!

The answer to fear is 10X action. You will literally drown out fear the more action you take.

 

7. Speak their language

No one cares about your SEO jargon.

We become so acquainted with the world of SEO that we forget it is a foreign language to 95% of the public.

Don’t say I can improve your rankings, say I can increase revenue. Don’t say I can get you more leads, say I can get you more customers.

Know the terminology of the niche you’re targeting and start using their language whenever possible.

People trust other people just like them and the way you talk says it all!

 

8. Make comparisons to their competitors

People are obsessed with groups.

When you point out that their competition (outsiders) are winning and they aren’t, it stirs people up.

Most people are moving through life in a habitual haze. Something needs to be done to shock them out of this.

Leverage primal emotions, such as competition, to spur clients into action.

 

9. Have a clear proposal ready to send

Preparation separates the professional from the amateur.

People can sense, from a mile away, whether or not you are organized and prepared (aka an expert).

On top of this, there’s generally is a small window of time when people are ready to take action.

The worst feeling in the world is bringing a client to the point of action on a phone call, thinking you got the sale, hanging up, then they start ghosting you.

Send clients your proposal while on the call.

The quicker the client acts the less time they have to rationalize excuses.

 

10. Learn from the best

The more you refine your SEO sales pitch presentation the higher conversions you notice over time.

Additionally, you’ll also start spotting patterns in key phrases that turn prospects on to your services.

You can go through the trial-and-error period of trying to find all this out on your own or you could invest some time in learning from the best.

We highly recommend looking into the agency owner named, Kotton Grammar.

This guy has seriously cut his teeth in the field and shares this information for free.

In fact, his last post was so valuable that we took notes and shared ever major point in our article, how to sell SEO like Kotton Grammar.

 

Conclusion

These are some of the most important tips we found when it comes to selling SEO to small businesses.

Hopefully you found these helpful!

Please, let us know which ones you plan on implementing today by commenting in the comment section below.

Cheers,

Clicks Geek