11 Steps to Sell SEO Services

There's a lot of competition out there for SEO experts who are selling SEO Services. Prospective clients know that they should talk to several companies before choosing someone to conduct their SEO services. If you are going to close those SEO leads, you have to know your stuff and go the extra mile when putting together your proposal. Putting together an SEO service proposal that contains good research will help your client feel confident about your abilities and help you close the deal.When making a comprehensive proposal for prospective clients, follow these tips to help you develop an strategy and give you a clear road map should the client decide to move forward.

1. Make an Initial Evaluation of the Prospective's Project

It's important to build a relationship and get information from prospective clients, so don't jump into your first conversation with a lot of sales pitches. More often than not that will just leave the prospective with the impression that you are more interested in their money than helping them.

It's best to take a look at the web site in question before contacting the prospective. That way you will have a basic idea as to what they are selling and how you can help them achieve better rankings and traffic.

If you don't know anything about the client, then you will need to get some basic information about them. You can find most of the information by researching the company online:

• How big is the site?
• What types of services and products does the company sell?
• Is the company most interested in a local, national, or international campaign?
• How much traffic does the site get each month? (compete.com)
• How competitive is this niche market

2. Do a Keyword Search Volume Analysis<

A keyword search volume analysis will help you determine what keywords the prospective should focus on. If the client has shown interest in a geo-specific campaign, then you can try using this geo specific keyword research tool. Once you have the results, export them to an Excel spreadsheet and eliminate the keywords that aren't relevant to the client's needs. In general, I usually eliminate any keywords that have less than 1,000 of monthly search traffic on Google. You can also delete those that aren't niche specific or are too broad to have real meaning. This can still leave you with more than a 100 keywords. You will probably only be able to target 20-30 of them initially, but keep the remaining ones for when you try to up-sell Phase II SEO services.

This information will also help you start putting together a budget for the project. If the CPC for the keywords is high, then you're dealing with a competitive market that will need to have a higher SEO budget in order to get results for the client.

3. Run a Preliminary Keyword Ranking Analysis

You will need to run a preliminary keyword ranking analysis to find out how far along this site has come in terms of ranking results. The SEOBook toolbar comes with Rank Checker, which works very quickly. It doesn't however give you the most accurate results, so spot check suspicious results with Google. You can also use WebCEO to make a comprehensive, accurate report.

Your preliminary analysis should help you determine how much work it will take to get first page rankings for relevant keywords.

Keep this preliminary report handy so that you can include it in your proposal. It's always useful to show clients why you think they should focus on certain strategies over others. Of course, your prospective client isn't going get 100 percent of available traffic no matter what techniques you use.

4. Analyze the Site's Traffic Data

Talk to the prospective client about getting added to their Google Analytics stats. This will give you the opportunity to study the site's current traffic. This conversation is also a great time to work on your relationship with the client. Talk about what your research has shown so far and ask them about their business goals. If the site is already getting some traffic, then you will want to find out where the traffic is coming from, how high the bounce rate is, and how much of the traffic is resulting in sales.

5. Check Search Engine Indexing

Some times client's have web sites that aren't indexing properly with search engines. The company can have really strong PR rankings and a terrific inbound link count, but the on-page SEO just isn't meeting expectations. It's best in this situation to check the site's indexing using 'site:www.YourProspect.com' in Google's search box. This search string will show you how Google has indexed this site. Some times you will find that only a couple pages turn up. If you know that the site has many more pages, you know there is a problem. Dig around a bit to see if you can find a site map. You can also ask the client to add you to their Google Webmaster Tools data. This will give you access to lots of useful information that will help you spot SEO problems and determine how to fix them.

6. Evaluate the Site's On-Page Content

When you check out the site, look for keyword-rich content. If you don't find it, then that could be the problem right there. That means you will need to include content development in your proposal.

7. Find the Site's On-Page SEO Issues

Many on-page SEO issues will jump out at experienced SEO professionals. Some of the most common things to think about include whether the site relies too heavily on Flash; whether the site uses non-SEO friendly URLs, duplicate content, or poor navigation; and whether each page uses unique tags.
Identifying these problems can help you create a proposal that targets the client's issues.

8. Check out the Competition

The amount of work that it takes to get a first-page ranking often depends on how much competition is out there. Search for keywords that are important for the prospective client's site. This will give you the chance to see what strategies the competition uses. One of the most important things to look at are inbound links. Link building is one of the most costly and time consuming processes of search engine optimization, so you want to know what you're getting into before you make an official proposal.

9. Check Google's Local Business Listings<

It's amazing how many organizations miss out on the easiest ways to boost traffic. That includes listing their site on Google Local Business. Google will rank local businesses over organic search results. That's something that you definitely want to take advantage of. It's easy and effective.

10. Include Business Profiles

Business profiles are a great way to boost a client's web site traffic. Google will rank biz profiles along with the company's web site, which means you can potentially dominate a larger chunk of first page results by creating profiles on web sites like Yelp and Hotfrog.

As a bonus, Yelp now has an iPhone app that will direct more phone users towards the client's site.

11. Preparing an Effective Proposal

Now that you have all of this information, you can prepare a proposal that targets the client's concerns. Include bits of research in your proposal. Doing so will show the client why you have made certain choices. It will also show that you have already put a lot of time into creating an effective plan for the company. Don't worry about charging for the information in your proposal. Just think of it as a relationship builder that will attract more clients now and in the future.

It's important for SEO professionals to realize that some clients don't know how much money it will realistically cost to get the results that they want. If the prospective balks at the proposal, then try to come up with an alternative plan that won't cost as much money. Some times you can suggest using one or two of the proposed methods to improve traffic. Or you can suggest that they simply hire you as a consultant while they implement the work in-house. The harder you work with and for potential clients, the more likely you are to build a solid relationship that will benefit your business in the future.

All About Title Tags

What Is a Title Tag?

The title tag has been – and probably will always be – one of the most important factors in achieving high search engine rankings.

In fact, fixing just the title tags of your pages can often generate quick and appreciable differences to your rankings. And because the words in the title tag are what appear in the clickable link on the search engine results page (SERP), changing them may result in more clickthroughs.

Search Engines and Title Tags

Title tags are definitely one of the "big three" as far as the algorithmic weight given to them by search engines; they are equally as important as your visible text copy and the links pointing to your pages – perhaps even more so. Yet, even though this has been common knowledge among SEO professionals for at least 10 years, it is often overlooked by webmasters and others attempting to optimize their websites for targeted search engine traffic.

Do Company Names Belong in the Title Tag?

The answer is a resounding YES! I've found that it's fine to place your company name in the title, and (gasp!) even to place it at the beginning of the tag! In fact, if your company is already a well-known brand, I'd say it's essential. Even if you're not a well-known brand yet, chances are you'd like to be, right? The title tag gives you a great opportunity to further this cause.

This doesn't mean that you should put *just* your company name in the title tag. Even the best-known brands will benefit from a few good descriptive phrases added, because they will enhance your brand as well as your search engine traffic. The people who already know your company and seek it out by name will be able to find you in the engines, and so will those who have never heard of you but seek the products or services you sell.

Title Tags Should Contain Specific Keyword Phrases

For example, if your company is "Johnson and Smith Inc.," a tax accounting firm in Texas, you would want your company's site to appear in the search engine results for searches on phrases such as "Texas tax accountants" and "CPAs in Texas." (Be sure to do your keyword research to find the best phrases!) If you prefer to work with people only in the Dallas area, you'd need to be even more specific by adding geographical modifiers to your title tags, such as "Dallas tax accountants."

Using our Dallas accountant example, you might create a title tag like this one:

Johnson and Smith Tax Accountants in Dallas

or you might try:

Johnson and Smith - Dallas CPAs

However, there's more than enough space in the title tag to include both of these important keyword phrases. I find that using 10 to 12 words in my title tags works great.

One way to include two keyphrases would be like this:

I've always liked the method of separating phrases with a hyphen; however, in today's competitive marketplace, how your listing appears in the SERPs is a crucial aspect of your SEO campaign. After all, if you have high search engine rankings but your targeted buyers aren't clicking through, it won't do you much good.

The idea is to write compelling titles as opposed to simply factual ones, when you can. But it also depends on the page, the type of business, the targeted keyword phrases, and many other factors. There's nothing wrong with the title tag in my above example. If you were looking for a tax accountant in Dallas and saw that listing at Google, you'd probably click it. (Note: Don't worry if some of your visible title tag info gets cut off when the search engines display your page's info; they are still indexing all the words contained within it.)

Still, you could make it a readable sentence like this:
I'm not as thrilled with that one. I had to remove the exact phrase "Dallas Tax Accountants" because it wouldn't read as well if it said:
It sounds redundant that way, as if it were written only for the search engines.

In the end, it’s really a personal preference.

Don't make yourself crazy trying to create the perfect title tag, because there's just no such thing. Most likely, either of my examples would work fine. The best thing to do is to test different ones and see which bring the most traffic to your website. You might very well find that the second version doesn't rank as well, but gets clicked on more, effectively making up the difference.

Use Your Visible Text Copy as Your Guide

I prefer to create my title tags *after* the copy on the page has been written and optimized. I need to see how the copywriter integrated the keyword phrases into the content to know where to begin. If you've done a good job with your writing (or better yet, hired a professional SEO copywriter), you should find all the information you need right there on your page. Simply choose the most relevant keyword phrases that the copy was based on, and write a compelling title tag accordingly. If you can't seem to get a handle on the most important phrases for any given page, you probably need to rewrite the page content.

I recommend that you *don't* use an exact sentence pulled from your copy as your title tag. And don't use the exact wording that's in your top headline. It's much better to have a unique sentence or a compelling string of words in your title tag.

You'll want to watch out for certain website content management systems (CMS) and blog software that automatically generate the title tag from information you provided elsewhere. Some, in fact, default to the same exact title tag on every page, which is the best way to kill your search engine leads! The good news is that most of today's CMS's and blog software have workarounds so that you can customize your title tags fairly easily. If yours doesn't, or your developer claims they can't do this, then you'll want to find a new developer or CMS as soon as possible!

A Logo Without Your Name... Can Be A Big Branding Pain!

I often get asked to develop a small business's logo as a symbol-only logo. But for many small businesses, this isn't the right choice for a couple of reasons:

Designing a symbol-only logo is a much more complicated (and often more expensive) process, because the symbol has to:

• Carry a lot more meaning — there's no text to help explain the business. It's important that your logo has some meaning and a role in explaining your business — and that's a lot for a little symbol to do all by itself.
• Be entirely unique all on its' own. I don't need to tell you that there are a whole lot of logos out there. A lot of the basic shapes — and even some of the more complicated ones — are already "owned" by big corporations. But you can still use variations or combinations of those shapes when they're designed into a logo with your company name.
• Communicate to your audience. The more obscure the symbol design that you create, the less likely that your customers will understand its meaning. Or they may interpret it incorrectly. Either way your clients will feel alienated — and that's never good.

If you do create a symbol-only logo, you'll have a couple of challenges with your brand identity:

• It will take a lot more time and effort to educate your target audience about your business. Think of all the symbol-only logos that are really memorable, like Nike or Apple. The reason that those are so memorable and well-known is that each of those companies has a very large advertising budget. They can afford to dedicate people and time to getting the word out. Their deep pockets build visibility and encourage recognition. Small businesses just don't have those kinds of resources.
• Trademark infringement can be more of a problem — from both sides of the fence. It can be very difficult for your designer to design a logo that won't look like any other trademarked logo out there, regardless how hard they try.
  • First of all, it's hard for a designer to comprehensively research all of the other trademarked logos just to see what you're up against. However, the Trademark Office has more thorough tools and methods of researching the other existing logos out there and they might find one that you overlooked.
  • Secondly, logos and trademarks can be a bit subjective. Just because you and your designer think that the design that you've created doesn't infringe on other logos, the Trademark Office might reject your application based on their interpretation of "similarity"
  • And you're not just worrying about what the Trademark Office thinks. Any other business with an existing trademark could also challenge your application. They can even ask you to cease-and-desist using your logo after it has been trademarked if they held their trademark to a similar logo first. While surrendering might not seem like such a bad thing, remember that you'd also have to destroy any existing printed collateral, forfeit your trademark (and the trademarking process isn't cheap!) and redesign all of your materials. You'll also lose the equity and memorability that you will have built up in your logo if you do have to redesign.
• If you do finally manage to design and trademark a symbol-only logo, you'll have to be extra-vigilant about making sure that other companies don't design a mark that's similar to yours. You are ultimately responsible for "policing" your own trademark and will have to stay up-to-date on trademark applications. Alternately, you could hire someone to keep an eye on new trademarks for you but that can be expensive.

You can easily avoid all of these complications by designing a combination logo that includes both a symbol and your company name. Once you've designed your combination logo, you should always use the components together. This helps avoid potential legal issues like those mentioned above.