How to Sell SEO (With Expert Tips)

You can find prospects using inbound marketing, e.g., your website, SEO, PPC, Facebook groups, communities, referrals, email marketing, and outbound techniques such as email and telephone outreach.

Then you qualify prospects using the right questions regardless of your marketing channel.

You can use a qualification sequence like the one below when pitching prospects.

You can email your subscribers asking the first question and a similar sequence to qualify prospects:

In this example, Cecilia clicked the “More clients” option and indicated she’s looking for 11–20 more clients:

Then she scheduled a call by completing the form you saw earlier.

In this outbound example, I phoned Richard, a director in an insolvency practice company for whom I’d previously built a website.

In previous conversations, he told me that he gets paying customers from other marketing channels and how much he pays for a qualified lead and customer.

He is a qualified lead, as he told me he has a budget and needs more customers. Now it’s time to pitch to him.

If you’ve qualified a prospect before a discovery call, you’ve already got the information you need to propose an outcome for them.

(Otherwise, the call is going to use the questions in step #2.)

With Richard’s permission, I’ve done my best to recreate our telephone conversation to give you an idea of how this can go.

Me (text): Can I bounce something off on the phone?

Richard (text): Call me.

Me: Hi, Richard. So we’ve talked about how much you spend to get new customers. Ideally, how many new customers are you looking for each month?

Richard: 20.

Me: So you have a very high customer conversion rate from these other channels. But let’s say your website can generate qualified leads, and your team can convert 20% of those leads into customers.

That means you’ll need about 100 qualified leads from the website a month.

Richard: Correct.

Me: Let’s say the website can convert 10% of its traffic into qualified leads, meaning it needs 1,000 visits a month.

Richard: Yes.

Me: So I checked out Google Ads for target keywords like “debt management plans” and “business insolvency,” and your customers’ search. And the cost per click was £16 a click.

So you’d need to spend £16,000 a month with Google Ads to get your 1,000 website visits— based on the above calculations.

Richard: I’m not spending £16,000 a month (laughs).

Me: So let’s look at an alternative solution. I was looking at the website traffic of two of your competitors that generate qualified leads from their websites.

One gets 5,700 visits a month; the other 7,200 visits a month from the organic results, not the paid results.

So you’re a finance guy. You know it takes ongoing investment before you see a return, right?

Richard: Right.

Me: So to get that kind of traffic, I’d need to identify the right things people search for. I’d need to pay someone else with expertise in your industry to write the right content for those things. And I’d need to invest in earning links from authoritative websites.

Richard: And we only want people looking for company liquidation, not personal liquidations solutions.

Me: Exactly. So what would you invest each month instead of spending £16,000 with Google Ads to get the 1,000 visits?

Richard: Well, quickly off the top of my head, probably about £2,000–£3,000 a month.

Me: How did you come to that number?

Richard: I’m the finance director. We can afford to invest £24,000–£36,000 in a year where we don’t need to see short-term results.

• 20 clients
• Divided by 20% conversion
• Equals 100 leads
• Divided 10% traffic conversion
• Equals 1,000 visits
• Keyword CPC equals £16
• £16,000 Google Ad spend to get 1,000 visits

When the call naturally ends, you can finish the conversation with, “So where do you think we should go from here?”

There are only three outcomes of asking this question:

• They’re not interested.
• They want to see the scenario you explained to discuss with others.
• They want to schedule a follow-up meeting with others in their team.

So I wrapped up the call with Richard and said I’d draft up the scenario we discussed.

Fortunately, I’m working with the person who makes the final decisions and the one who approves payment.

Clients may get cold feet if you can’t provide reasonable assurance for their future traffic performance. But equally, SEOs can’t guarantee results. There are just too many uncertainties:

To forecast traffic at a keyword level, you can use Traffic potential (TP) to provide a quick indication of potential organic traffic available for your client’s top keywords.

TP shows the sum of organic traffic that the #1 ranking page for your target keyword receives from all the keywords it ranks for, which acts as a good predictor of the traffic your article could get, if it performs well.

If you want to forecast sales for a particular keyword, then you’ll need to know your customer conversion rate plus your average order value.

Here’s a simple way to do it: TP * CR * AoV 

If your potential client is looking for a more detailed forecast or a competitor forecast, it’s worth putting together an SEO forecast using multiple data sources.

Cold emails don’t have the best reputation, but they are one of the ways SEOs told me that they got their first clients.