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Why You Struggle to Sell SEO | Boostability

Why You Struggle to Sell SEO

SEO is the perfect product to sell if you’re looking to add something meaningful and popular to your product lineup in the coming year. It’s high yield, always needed, and easy to implement with the right partnership. But even if it’s an in demand product that can bring results to your existing client set, that doesn’t mean it’s a hole in one sale. 

There’s several tricks you need to know in order to make sure you can sell SEO specifically to your customers. This article will go through the specific pain points of selling SEO and how you can overcome them in order to successfully close the deal with potential clients and small business customers.

SEO is a Solution

Before you can even get started in your SEO product, you need to remember that SEO is a solution sale. You need to approach it differently than other digital marketing products. Yes, SEO is a product you’re selling. But this product actively works to solve problems your customers have. It works to bring them more customers, which is something we can all get behind.

A solution sales pitch has the following three things:

Essentially, a solution sale means you’re showing the client the value of SEO. You’re helping them understand how improving their websites relevance and trust, in essence, it’s authority, helps Google find them. Which in turn, helps their customers find them. If with some uncertainties, it’s not impossible to close the sale. 

Take a look at some of the most common pain points and how to assuage them.

Pain Point #1 – The Timeline is Off

Some digital marketing strategies like PPC or email marketing bring in instant results. They’re campaigns that you can just turn on and turn off. So it might be expected that a lot of digital marketing campaigns can work quickly. And that’s true for some, but SEO is not one of them. SEO is a long-term play. You’ve heard that old adage that respect is demanded, it’s earned. And that’s especially true of SEO. You have to earn your ranking. You can’t just instantly demand page 1. It takes time to get Google to recognize your site and boost it in the rankings. 

One of the most common pain points from clients is misunderstanding this timeline. There’s several steps you need to take to ensure your client knows what to expect when starting an SEO campaign and the timeline involved. First, you need to outline the process step by step. Help them understand why each step is important to the process and why it takes time in order for the steps to work.

It also is important to understand that first page rankings can’t be guaranteed. While we use tried and true methods with SEO that often achieve success, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will happen within six months time or at all. We’re confident in our process, but it’s important that no campaign is guaranteed.

Pain Point #2 – Digital Landscape Constantly Changes

The 21st Century waits for no man. It constantly evolves and moves onto different things. For example, the Google algorithm updates basically every single day. That doesn’t mean all these changes are noticeable, but small adaptations to the algorithm can cause slight shifts to rankings. Big updates come a few times a year and that also has a big impact on rankings. That’s why you can’t just build a website and leave it. Simply identifying keywords and building a few links won’t cut it. SEO is a consistent effort over time so that Google notices the work and notes that you’re working to improve your ranking on a consistent basis. Effort matters in this case. 

The constantly evolving landscape also needs to take your competition into account. There’s a good chance they’re also working on their own website and trying to reach the same customers you are. So why wouldn’t you want to try to get and stay ahead? SEO effectively targets competing businesses, but that number consistently grows, which means SEO efforts must be consistent and over the long-term in order to provide stable results.

Pain Point #3 – They Want to DIY their SEO

While many clients don’t know SEO, and that’s why they’re coming to you, there’s some digitally savvy ones as well. These often know the basic rundown or at least understand SEO and some of the tasks that go into it. So it might be a harder sell to convince them to let the experts optimize their site versus just working on it themselves. 

By going to an agency or a company that specializes in SEO, you get several benefits that you just can’t get yourself. First of all, if you can believe, outsourcing to an agency is actually more affordable. Forming a new team or doing it yourself takes time, training, learning, buying the appropriate tools, etc. All of that plus the learning curve can take a lot of time and money away from other things, like actually running the business. Outsourcing to an agency also provides consistency staffing and more expertise on each task. A client might understand good content with keywords or link building, but that’s just some of the picture. Specialists are called that for a reason. They know what it takes. And whether it’s a team of SEO specialists or just a couple, they can get your site ranking with a wide array of tasks designed to do one specific thing. 

As previously mentioned, the SEO field changes rapidly. So an SEO agency can help keep track of those changes and updates far better than individuals also focusing on their business. Most SEO agencies have their own group of strategists that watch for changes and keep track of what it takes to rank high. These experts know the analytics, and can best interpret it for your site. In fact, they already have the technology in place to create reports, show dashboards, show the work, and provide the data that shows a campaign’s success.

Pain Point #4 – Failure to see the ROI

There’s so many good aspects of a digital marketing campaign. All have their purpose to better attract people to the business and promote it. Social media, email, PPC, SEO, and so much more all come together to ultimately bring success. PPC and SEO often get confused or replaced one for another. PPC brings immediate ROI, but the downside is they only work as long as you run the campaign. 

So if you have clients that don’t understand why they need SEO when they could just get instant results with PPC, use these tactics. Help your customers understand conversion. You can set up milestones in Google analytics based on website traffic and conversion rates. This can show how SEO can take customers from one point to another. From there, you can see where conversions happen and optimize it, or find other places on a site that night need some additional work.

It’s hard to measure SEO solely by the ROI like you can with PPC or other marketing campaigns. However, it does have an unmistakable impact on engagement. Additionally, SEO & PPC don’t need to be at odds. They can work best when they work in tandem with one another. Then you can capture paid and organic leads to your business.

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