Sales, sales, sales, MORE SALES. The word that we are programmed to think performs best for us when we come to offering our services to clients. We approach clients as if we are the silver bullet. However, we never take the least effort to understand what the client’s problems are and what they are struggling with.

We offer the best SEO services! Buy our products! You NEED to get killer keywords and here is our insane Keyword Finder pro for only $[put your price here]! DESTROY, OUTPERFORM!

Remember yourself? If you’re still not getting any clients or conversions by the end of the month and your buzzwordcabulary is drying out, maybe this is the time to question your selling strategy.

How to approach clients to start closing sales

There are two types of clients:

1. Those who are aware that their SEO could have been better;
2. Those who think that CEO and SEO mean the same, but they desperately need the latter.

How to work with clients who know about SEO

The clients who understand what search engines are, they have a problem which your agency can advise them to solve. When clients come to an SEO agency, often they are attacked with solutions and prescriptions on what they should do and how much money they must spend on it.

What a client does after surviving this avalanche of you must, you need, we are the best, they just leave in a horrible disappointment.

Here is the thing, when a client has already come on the recommendation, they already chose you and they don’t care about you saying why you’re the best, they already know it. This is the best time to “shut up” and do your job.

Don’t sell before you figure out what a client needs. It’s never about you it’s about your client.

Learn about your client:

• What is their website? (If it’s a cafe they might need only contextual ads)
• Is it new or old? (If somebody worked on the website already you don’t want to lose previous positions)
  What customer acquisition channels do they use?
• Do they run ads?
  
• Do they have an Adwords account?
  
• If yes, what’s their budget?
• Have they ever used other SEO services?
  

Identify the root problem:

• What is going on in their business? (traffic, conversions)
• What problems are we trying to solve? (not enough traffic or traffic doesn’t convert, business is losing money)
• What categories are their priorities? (If it’s an internet store, there are only some specific products you can target because you can’t promote everything)
• What is the region that a client wants to target?
• What is their target audience?

See to the expectations:

• What are their milestones? (How much traffic and/or conversions do they expect to get by the end of the year?)
• What are their financial expectations of the project?

Take a room to breathe

This is now time to wrap up the meeting, and the best way to close it is to say here is what we’ve learned. Go through the points being discussed and make sure you and your client are thinking in the same way. Make an alignment and identify if there is something doesn’t fit in or converge.

If everything is clear, it’s the right moment to say that you need to take time to think and do your research, analysis and other preparations to help a client’s business meet their goals.

And, of course, you don’t want to turn a meeting into an interrogation, so make sure after a couple of questions you recap what you’ve just learned and share your expertise and the way you see things.

Second meeting

Use your client’s words to show them their own business goals and expectations from your SEO agency. You may say: “Okay, here is what we are going to do to solve the issue that you currently experience and this is how we are going to do it.”
Very often, clients may change their minds on their goals, etc., but by mentioning their own words you can stay safe.

Also, you want to make sure to set time frames on when it’s going to happen and when a client is going to see the results because it won’t happen overnight. Clients don’t think so, if they can’t touch the results tomorrow, they’ll start complaining. So, to avoid all the misconceptions it’s better to set the time expectations.

At the second meeting do your best to present your services and the solutions to the problem. You’ll go through all the expectations and goals to make sure nothing is missing. And here you will show your client the exact cost of your services.

Now, that is okay, if your client’s financial expectations at the first meeting are too low for you, you may decline the deal if you don’t find a way to raise them. After that, you may not even need the second meeting which is better, because you don’t want to waste time of both of you.

And in the third meeting you’ll close the sale, sign the contract and accept the payment. But this is an ideal world, of course. Sometimes you can only discuss everything for several months because there tough clients which either indecisive or looking for a cheaper services. If the reason is not money, then do you best to reassure them. Ask questions on why they are being indecisive.

Concentrate on bigger clients

What you should NEVER do is to work with clients who are not willing to invest. If they are not willing to invest in their own business to establish a better online presence why should you?

If you’re collecting low-paying customers, then it will be much harder to break this circle, so you MUST target only those clients who are willing to pay more.

How can you charge more for your services? You need to start solving bigger problems. It’s not about “we’re going to push you to the number one position in SERP for this keyword”.

It’s about “we are here to help you reach the quarterly revenue goals of your business, here is what we will do and this is how much we charge for it”. You must be completely aware of your own value, and if clients don’t agree with it, these might be not the right clients for you.

Some time ago I tried myself as an English teacher. I just started out and I didn’t know much about how to teach people, how to deliver the message so that they can hear and understand it. Which techniques I should use for them to progress faster and more sustainable. I didn’t know that. So I worked for a small price. I needed to gain knowledge and experience.

It took me 4 months to figure out the basics pretty quickly, and I started getting positive reviews and comments from my students. They told me that no one has ever explained grammar, vocabulary, etc., better than I did.

At that moment I realized that my experience and skills actually worth something. For all the students whom I worked with later the price was tripled.

Nobody objected to the price being high, because they knew that they were going to learn something and they were ready to pay for it. They were willing to invest in their own knowledge, and I was ready and happy to guide them all the way through.

If I were completely busy with low-paying students I would never have had time to find those who are willing to pay more. Later on, I concentrated only on those students who paid more because It allowed me to take fewer students but do my job 100% better.

Same with SEO. Don’t chain yourself to having a lot of cheap work. Take a risk to embrace the expensive clients only, and you’ll be just fine.

How to sell SEO services to clients who don’t know anything about their SEO

When you find a potential client somewhere on the web and offer them SEO services, obviously, the best way to reach out to them is to come up with an already-made report.

If you don’t have your own SEO agency yet, however, you’re familiar with SEO and would like to jump into that niche we offer you a great White-Label opportunity which allows you to use our platform completely under your own name. And I mean completely. You can set redirects to your own domain name and set up an email server and more!

When you have built a report and analyzed their website, even though you already know plenty of things about their business, you may also want to learn it directly from your client. You may have a meeting over the phone, skype or email, however, try your best to have a live conversation. It will increase your authority and reliability, and will help you figure out client’s needs faster.

So, you just start over, the same approach. Ask questions and show them that you care. Don’t try to sell your services, try to help your clients solve their problems and the bigger they are, the better. For example, a business in not reaching is revenue goals or even losing money these are the problems you should target to solve.

How to sell SEO services to an SEO software platform

Alright, let’s be honest here, selling SEO services to an SEO agency is stupid, well, and it’s also an amazing title to draw attention.

However, if you think about selling SEO services to an SEO software platform, it is possible. Those who have developed an SEO platform may have had previous experience in building something similar, and they know how to code but have no the least idea of how to do SEO.

There are hundreds or even thousands of SEO platforms on the web only few of them make it to the top. Why? Because their SEO might have been better. There are always technical issues involved, some on-page factors, broken and unfriendly URLs and all these sorts of things.

Here, we have selected a random SEO agency from SERPs and with the Site Auditor, we can see that they don’t do SEO for images and have some other issues on their website. They are missing some relatively important elements which are alt text for images, titles and also H1 tags and 24 unfriendly URLs. When applied on a large scale it can help them improve their rankings to some extent.

They seem to be offering plenty of tools on their website, however, they just as well need a thorough SEO themselves.

Conclusions

Stop selling. Start closing. The best way to make successful deals is to care about clients, speak about them and for them. Become a helping hand for them and when they say: “Look, I’ve got this problem, my company doesn’t hit my revenue goals how can you help me?” You’ve nailed it.