How Do SEO Agencies Get Clients?
- Thread starter macromj88
- Start date
Much less, actually. I currently take a $0 salary from the company.
[ I have no need to seek validation from you, my advice is my advice. If people want to ignore it then so be it, I don't give a shit. ]
Selling seo is all about giving client and $ figures to the business owner. Does a business owner care about how many/what type of backlinks he gets? No, he cares about how many new clients he can get from your method of promotion.
It's also much easier to rank then sell rather than sell then rank. Rank a site for keywords you think a business owner would be interested in and then turn it into a lead capture or sell them the whole site. You have much more control and you don't have to deal with stupid clients.
You're charging $6 for 100 words for content that an US writer can do for $2 - what do you expect?
Sell a good service at a reasonable price and there's more than enough people to buy it in the BST.
It's also much easier to rank then sell rather than sell then rank. Rank a site for keywords you think a business owner would be interested in and then turn it into a lead capture or sell them the whole site. You have much more control and you don't have to deal with stupid clients.
You're charging $6 for 100 words for content that an US writer can do for $2 - what do you expect?
Sell a good service at a reasonable price and there's more than enough people to buy it in the BST.
The problem with the advice thrown around in here is that this accounts mainly for 1-2 personality types. There are 16 personality types, and your tactics need to vary between each personality. Mituozo gave a brief overview for 1-2 personality types, but that still leaves a huge market gap. Also, fuck cold calling.
Oversell...like your services which you fail to deliver and string people along??
Pretty rich advice coming from you man.
What do you mean by the personality type thing?
Selling is selling. Different people will require different levels of detail of what they're getting and so forth (a thinker is going to want more detail than a feeler for example) - but for the most part selling the benefit is what closes the deal. Whether they're an INTJ, ESFP or whatever is irrelevant. Lots of personality types don't end up as decision makers in businesses anyway.
People that want to know all the detail and think they know a lot about SEO for example aren't people you want to be selling to. They'll be telling you how to do your job, expect everything for nothing "because they could do it themselves" and are just generally bad clients.
Cold calling isn't nearly as bad as you might think, too. I sit in the office all day with my partner who's making the calls, and he has lots of good chats and people are receptive if you're not pushy and coming across as a desperate sales person on commission reading a script. So long as you target it properly, don't come across as a douche and actually listen to the person on the other end of the phone, you can soon warm things up.
I guarantee you that cold calling local businesses will generate you vastly more sales from better clients than promoting SEO in an SEO forum signature
.
What do you mean by the personality type thing?
Selling is selling. Different people will require different levels of detail of what they're getting and so forth (a thinker is going to want more detail than a feeler for example) - but for the most part selling the benefit is what closes the deal. Whether they're an INTJ, ESFP or whatever is irrelevant. Lots of personality types don't end up as decision makers in businesses anyway.
People that want to know all the detail and think they know a lot about SEO for example aren't people you want to be selling to. They'll be telling you how to do your job, expect everything for nothing "because they could do it themselves" and are just generally bad clients.
Cold calling isn't nearly as bad as you might think, too. I sit in the office all day with my partner who's making the calls, and he has lots of good chats and people are receptive if you're not pushy and coming across as a desperate sales person on commission reading a script. So long as you target it properly, don't come across as a douche and actually listen to the person on the other end of the phone, you can soon warm things up.
I guarantee you that cold calling local businesses will generate you vastly more sales from better clients than promoting SEO in an SEO forum signature
Personality types are irrelevant in sales? Lmao. That's an absolute joke. If you think pitching to a C-level and a local business owner are the same, then you're doing it wrong. A simple G Scholar search tells you how foolish that statement is. This is also true for tacit knowledge.
Cold calling is terrible. I did it when I first started and absolutely hated it. I refined my delivery and tactic so that I was able to reach more prospects with higher net worth with less effort. It was a form of old school direct mail mixed with a few things that I won't get into.
And it's humorous you believe my sig is targeting the same type of client as your cold call is. Last I checked, apples =/= oranges. I also wouldn't assume that my sig is indicative of my client roster.
Please do... :food-smiley-002:
I'm guessing you've automated your marketing with something like this?
24 hr prerecorded bonus > bonus if you leave your info > email/direct mail sequence
Some of the marketing is automated, but the vast majority of it is not. Automated marketing doesn't work for my target market, as each piece needs to be customized pretty extensively.
Just realised I entirely misread your first comment on my post, and that you were referring to the quote I gave with a particular sales scenario only working for 1-2 personality types.. I read it originally as "cold calling only working on 2 personality types" which led to my reply, so sorry about that. Of course personality types come into it and how you approach moving to the next step in the sales process / how you guide the conversation.
Cold calling works. Direct mail works too. Just because you personally don't like cold calling doesn't mean that it's not an effective sales method though.
Wasn't saying your signature is indicative of the clients you have either, just that people here are for the most part "bad clients", and much worse than clients you can acquire in other ways. Certainly from what I've learnt from people I know who've tried to sell SEO on WF, it's not particularly fun or financially rewarding.
Fair enough, you had me a bit puzzled. RE the sig; I qualify people first. If they're micro managers, I don't work with them. My services also aren't cheap. It's fruitful, and gives my new employees decent experience in some deep trenches with the niches 90% of the people on here are in.
$80,000
And then when they agree slap in the face and say you don't want them as clients and walk out the building. If there is a large plastic tree or water cooler be sure to knock it over on your way out.
This is called positioning and it's the secret to selling se3 services.
Pricing "high" strips out bad customers and allows you to therefore offer a better level of service to the customers you do get. Trying to compete on price is a fool's game.
Generally speaking a combination of: how much work I think is involved for us in the office + how much I'll spend outsourcing + how much I think it's worth for the client.
For example, if I was pitching a furniture company for reputation management, their front page was full of poor reviews and they received ~5000 searches a month for their brand name. One of the questions I'd ask would be what the average sale is worth to them. Say they turn around and say £500. Lets say that even a tiny number like 10% of searchers are being turned off by the bad reviews (it's likely higher than that).. That means that in lost sales it's worth £25000 per month to them.
Their margin might be something like £5k or so on that. So me coming and quoting say £15000 over 3 months to do the work, then £1k a month to maintain is a great deal backed up by the logic above.
Another example, say an office builder. Their average office costs £300k. Their front page is full of bad reviews about how shit their floorboards are and how they have damp problems after buying the office etc.. Their brand gets 5000 searches a month. Say 2% of those were potential buyers who were put off by the reviews [far less proportion will be actual buyers for a company like that].
100x£300k = £30M. So their bad reputation could be costing them £30 million (likely miles off in one direction or another, but the figure is probably millions) a month.
If I then come in and quote them £50k to fix the mess, that doesn't seem like too bad of a deal, does it?