Disclaimer: Before you begin always make sure you’re not promising things you can’t deliver in order to win a client - it’s not good for you or them and only leads to a bad situation in the end.
Secondly, be prepared to demonstrate value upfront in order to get the sale rolling. This is not a one-off project fee, therefore you need to be prepared to put in a bit more work and value up front so that clients can see the value in the future.
Part 1: Existing Clients
Not all clients are a good fit – so with existing clients you are in the driving seat to pick and choose the clients you want to work with.
Our SEO sales cycle for existing clients:
- Retained agreements are mentioned in project proposals, but no prices or in depth information is given. We’ve planted the seed, but not all clients will be a good fit.
If their new website is still in production:
- Upon training for their new website (it’s not live yet, but we’ve decided they will be a good fit for an SEO agreement with us):
- Highlight all the SEO elements that are required in their site / Demo the tools (we do this anyway)
- Highlight the workload and ramifications if parts of the SEO work are over looked
- Start to mention that you offer these services as an ongoing basis (cite initial project proposal) and offer to put an agreement together for when the site goes live (or even before if you can handle the workload)
- Upon going live
- Monitor and track the new website through launch and for the next 30 days or so.
- Send regular (weekly) updates to the client commenting on their search position
- After 3-4 weeks resend proposal for SEO as their website will have settled into its new position
- Highlight any areas where you would start (i.e. high volume terms that are on the top of page 2, for example)
- After 3 months
- Run a free (to the client) audit report on the website after 3 months of activity
- Demonstrate their site health and SERP positions since the site has gone live (positive and negative)
- If you can, find the data on their main product / service and offer a critique on that (i.e. I know your main service is X and it’s currently on page 3 of the results. Improving this would have a significant impact on your leads).
- Re-offer the proposal one last time (at the original cost) and make the point that should the website health deteriorate significantly, then the proposal would need to be readdressed in the future
If their website has been live some time – ie. a new service
- Run a free (to the client) audit report on the website
- Demonstrate their site health and SERP positions since the site has gone live
- Highlight that in terms of site health you’d normally run clients with 90%+ – and their site is X%
- Document that in order to make their website really work for them, they need to be:
- A - keeping their website healthy
- B - generating / updating their content regularly to build authority with the search engines
- C - proactively seeking links to build trust with the search engines
- If you can, find the data on their main product / service and offer a critique on that (i.e. I know your main service is X and it’s currently on page 3 of the results. Improving this would have a significant impact on your...
