Whether you’re looking to refine your own knowledge of SEO, package and sell it to your clients, or improve your service offering with this key skill, you’re in the right place.
Our co-founder, Andy, recently hosted a webinar dedicated to how agencies, freelancers, consultants, and more can start selling SEO as a deliverable product.
You can watch the whole webinar below, or alternatively, read the post below which details all its key elements.
Why sell SEO
First things first, let’s clear up any doubt you may have on whether or not you should go ahead with selling SEO. If you’ve ended up here, you’ve obviously been considering it already – but just to assuage any concerns, we’re delighted to confirm that…
- Selling SEO makes for a great retainer model. It can generate consistent, recurring revenue, and is best packaged as a monthly retainer. After all, this works in tandem with Google, and with a monthly retainer, you get the opportunity to show consistent improvements and continuously generate revenue. There are no instant solutions with SEO, but clients can be presented with monthly progress once they’ve committed to the retainer.
- It can win new business opportunities. Even if clients don’t come to you specifically for SEO, you’ll have the knowledge and expertise that shows you’re capable of helping them to attract greater organic traffic to their website. This, in turn, will help you to generate more interest in your firm’s other products and services.
- SEO can help you to upsell to existing clients. SEO can become part of the conversation you have with your current clients, or even rekindle old links. For instance, if you previously built a client’s website, or you’re handling their Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, you’ll have another service to add to, and upgrade your current offering.
- Having this extra service can improve client retention. It’s a simple equation; better service + better client ‘stickiness’. The greater and more holistic an offering you can provide, the less likely a client is to go elsewhere.
- SEO can reduce competitor risk. The nightmare scenario would be if a client opted for another agency, freelancer or marketing professional, simply because they offered a service that you don’t. But with SEO integrated comfortably into your portfolio, this risk is reduced, while you’ll have a broader offering for new clients, too.
Who should sell SEO?
If you have any lingering doubt as to whether selling SEO is right for you, then rest easy. Those who are willing to offer SEO to their clients – and do it right – can sell this product to their clients. So, just to confirm, ANYBODY can sell SEO.
Plus, and this will clear up a common misconception about SEO – it isn’t rocket science. You don’t need a PhD to do SEO. As long as you’re keen to learn, you can make SEO work for you and your clients. All of these rumours of “SEO is dark magic” are completely false. You’re not tricking people, or Google for that matter. SEO is nothing more than a process and data-driven combination of strategy and techniques, applied to help your clients’ businesses to succeed.
However, not all businesses know that – so by delivering SEO for your clients, you’ll in turn be helping to make SEO itself a little more transparent (and not so mysterious!).
At the end of the day, SEO still drives more than half of all traffic on the Internet, and therefore remains a crucial part of the marketing mix. If you can meet the following criteria (which you undoubtedly will!), there’s no reason not to think that selling SEO should be for you.
- Are you a digital agency, freelancer or professional in the digital industry?
- Do you have an existing base of clients who buy your digital products?
- Do you want improved cash-flow?
- Do you already use a retainer model in your sales?
This last one is optional – you don’t need to already be selling digital services with a retainer model. But as we mentioned above, SEO fits so well with this model that it simply makes sense to do it this way.
How to build an SEO product
Similar to any other service, there are many different elements that make up the SEO mix, and you need to be able to deliver on each one. Think of it a little bit like baking a big, digital cake. There will be ingredients, volumes, timing and precision.
These parts are as follows:
- Strategy (including keyword research, content research and competitor analysis)
- Onsite (including keyword research, content research and competitor analysis)
- Technical (including meta data changes/updates and optimising content)
- Content (including landing pages, blogs and Google My Business, or GMB, information)
- Backlinks (including PR, competitor link building and auditing existing links)
- Local (including GMB optimisation and review management)
- Reporting (which is key to showing your clients their month-by-month progress)
Individually, none of these will much help you or your clients to rank. And if you remove any of these from the mix, you’ll be making life difficult for yourself, and not so rewarding for your clients. Does this feel complicated so far?
Don’t worry, as it won’t feel that way for long…
How Hike SEO can guide you through the essentials
When you join our Facebook group, Hike SEO for Agencies, you’ll have access to a wide range of training materials and regular webinars that will guide you towards selling SEO for your clients. You’ll learn how to build an SEO strategy, deliver an SEO campaign, and effectively and continuously sell SEO.
We’ve even got two templates for SEO products ready to download. These detail, very simply, how much time you should dedicate to strategy, onsite, and all of the above each month. Plus, as we’re so sure you’ll be able to sell this product in a retainer model, our templates cover an entire year of your clients’ SEO campaigns.
We’ll also explain how to price an SEO product – based on time, not results – and reassure your clients that even though they won’t be ranked number one next week (that’s impossible!), what you are doing works.
For more information, drop us a message on our site right now to discuss how we can help not just you, but also your clients with SEO.
