What is needed to start selling your own SEO services?

The thing is that selling your own SEO services is a really tough thing to do. Seriously, while you may have a sufficiently deep understanding of the concept of the Search Engine Optimization itself, I’m betting that you must have never considered yourself to act as a real salesperson – providing your own SEO services, right? That being said, let’s get down to the point – as I already outlined, to run a successful and fully profitable business with your company providing SEO services is something very much unlike the way of doing optimization as if you were working in a good team of qualified SEOs. So, given that really good SEO can definitely sell itself, here are some practical suggestion and simple ideas for you to make things a little bit easier. After all, providing your own SEO services isn’t selling a given item or service that can be bought, for example, on Amazon. 

How to Stay in Business with Your SEO Services 

Before anything else, let’s face it – if you want to avoid getting into a burnout with the whole business of yours, it should be offering only organic search optimization, in line with paying enough attention to Local SEO. It means that ideally, no paid tactics will be allowed for your SEO services – neither Google AdWords, nor any other means of pay-per-play online promotion (for example, paid ads on social media, or conventional Pay-Per-Click advertising – just forget it all).

• The right way of selling your SEO services is educating your clients and always keeping healthy relations with them all, with no exclusion. So, the more you know about the realm of SEO and exactly how it works – the better your mutually benefitting conversation will be. At the same time, however, each potential client must clearly understand at least the very basics of the process – namely what your company is going to do every day, weekly, monthly or on a quarterly basis. Ultimately – to make your customers happy with their progress, that must always be consistent with their common expectations.

• Transparency and trust – are the key elements needed to successfully set up a new company and stay in business with your SEO services. I mean that it’s actually impossible to act even as a consultant (not to say a full-stack SEO agency) – unless you are ready and willing to be completely honest with your clients. Just let your potential employers know all they want about what exactly you are going to do for their websites – make sure you’re enough prepared to handle scheduled audits and make any details completely clear and transparent. Of course, it doesn’t necessarily mean that every client must know all the technical aspects of SEO that are managed for a given project. But you should stay well-prepared for any cause of events, anyway.
• SEO typically is a lot of time-consuming and labor-intensive work to do. Given that getting well-optimized with a given website or blog (and, of course, doing that organically, with White-Hat SEO solely) – is never a quick-fix to be completed within a few weeks, not to say days. It’s simply unachievable – at least without applying for those illegitimate means of Grey-Hat/Black-Hat SEO. No need to purposely lead your customers to deception – forget about any sort of honeyed speeches or loudly-voiced statements promising to have everything in place, quickly and at ease. Only dry facts and cold figures – make sure that your client understands that your SEO services are actually nothing but an overall endeavor with a long-term strategy, that takes time under any circumstances. That way, keep in mind that some really competitive niches, topics or industries – might as well take years of your hard work to get a sufficient level of organic visibility, only with gradual ranking progress to be achieved over time.

• At last, make sure your client fully recognizes the importance of investing in high-quality content. Seriously, what’s the point of ranking you well – of course, from the viewpoint of the search engines themselves – when your content is far from being really unique, not properly structured and fails to deliver additional value to the users, right? It means that you’d better make all things clear at once – don’t hesitate to openly state that the client will need to invest in website content anyway – either paying with own time and money, or by way of including a default content writing package in your custom SEO services from the very beginning.