As your partner, we’re here to help take your business to the next level. Today, I want to share some tips on how to go from being good to great at selling SEO. Use these tips as your guideline when scaling your SEO business.
Diversity is the Key
Present-day consumers want to save time and money by finding all the solutions they need in one provider. The very first thing you need to do if you want to become a great SEO provider is to diversify your offerings. Make sure you offer a complete range of solutions to your niche, so if they need anything other than SEO – web design, social marketing, local marketing, paid search management, or custom solutions – you can provide it to them. You also benefit from diversifying by adding to your profit stream.
If you are ready to go beyond diversifying your product line, diversify your expertise. Adding a new niche to your expertise can take time, but may reap many benefits. You add to your income and widen your market, helping your business grow faster.
Go Beyond the Average
Being great at selling SEO comes more naturally if your solutions are already great. Selling average SEO to average people does not apply – you need solutions proven to give the best results. Refine your methodology regularly to get sustainable organic results. Another thing you should remember is it’s not enough to simply be good. Know everything you can about your market, and modify your techniques based on their needs, the algorithmic updates, and upcoming trends in online marketing. These will be great selling points for your future clients.
Build Your Brand
Proper branding is important because your brand is one of the first things – perhaps the most remarkable thing – your prospects will remember about your business. Build your brand by sparking different marketing movements. Get your target market to participate in conversations and share their insight while guiding them through the buying process. Use brand storytelling to maintain your audience’s interest.
Tap into an audience that already believes and cares about what you have to share. When building your brand, you have to remember that your audience isn’t just the new leads – your current and returning clients also monitor how you position your brand. Include them in your marketing movements, and maintain a good relationship with them using your content. Happy clients refer more business, and more business means growth.
Don’t Forget the Basics – Search Engine Optimization
Make your website the perfect example of your competency in search engine optimization: do proper SEO on your site. Don’t get too wrapped up in getting new clients without improving your website first. Bill Slawski recently shared a series of tweets listing the basic things you should do with your website. I’m sharing the tips here for you to use as your primary checklist:
- Make your site work faster. To do this, you need to run Google’s online PageSpeed, follow the suggestions it provides, and modify and test elements in your website that may be slowing down its loading time.
- Choose your preferred domain and use 301 redirects to point to this version. You can also use Google Webmaster Tools to set your preferred domain.
- Check that all bad URLs send 404 server error messages properly, and that they are not sending soft 404 messages. Use the Fetch as Google tool to test if your bad URLs are sending the proper error message.
- Build a user-friendly custom error page. Make sure it shows the error message correctly, and if you have your own search feature on your site, add it in the 404 page.
- Find and fix broken links and redirects. You can check for broken links in the Google Webmaster tool or use third-party tools to scan and find these broken links and redirects. If your website is on WordPress, remember to install the broken link checker plugin.
- Spell check your home page. To add to Slawski’s tip, check every piece of content that goes on your website. You’ll never know how many misspellings and grammatical errors you will find. Proofread one more time to make sure your information is accurate.
- Remove the Revisit Meta Element now.
- Do not use your logo as your page heading – you will benefit more from a descriptive <H1> than from putting your logo on the <H1>. Similarly, don’t use header tags (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc.) as sidebar navigation headings – they’re meant for pages, not for your sidebar navigation.
- Describe the page adequately on your title. This will help people find it on search engines. Remember to use more than one word, but keep it within a few words for the SERPs to display it completely.
- Put your brand everywhere – not just in images, but in text. Consistent branding is important in promoting brand recall. You should do this whether you’re already a household brand name or a business trying to build a brand.
Keep testing different ways to engage your target market, and follow these tips to becoming great at selling SEO. Contact your account manager for more tips, and if you’re not yet our partner, don’t forget to sign up for free to get started. Also read our blog post where we recap our SEO site audit training webinar. Check back tomorrow for more updates and tips on SEO!
