NOTE:  Since writting this post, I have joined the faculty of an elite Local Internet Marketing Education portal and we have since created an extremely valuable package to help teach to sell SEO services to businesses.  We know there is a need for this and this report is step-by-step with a video that follows.  Please read the updated post on How to Sell SEO Services.

This is a post on how to sell SEO using my website assessment.  There is a video for your reference below and tools.

When I started witting MLBO my first target audience was the local business owner and their employees.  I visioned a step-by-step process that practically anyone could use to begin marketing their business.  I learned quickly there is no 101 level, either you dive right in or you stand on the side of the pool, there is no getting your feet wet.

I begun starting to attract other Internet Marketer who wanted a business similar to my agency, providing Internet Marketing services to the local businesses.  It dawned on me, not only have I developed the processes to deliver such services, I have tried and tested processes in place to manage 100’s of accounts, employees and contractors.  I have well documented processes for operations, finance and most importantly sales.

Challenges in Selling SEO to a Local Business

Where do I start?  You are trying to sell something that someone can’t touch, or see results for six months.  You can not provide a single guarantee, you need a contract and generally, the buyer is uneducated on SEO.  You are selling a service that has a lot of spammers, unscrupulous people and generally, the SEO market place is not well trusted.  This is not a service to sell for $100 a month and you are asking for an investment in range of $5000 minimum over six months.  It’s a tough sell!

When you do close and SEO account though it’s pay off.  Our typical SEO client’s life is around 10 months.  They get their ROI by month five.  My margins are better than most companies.  If I were working for myself, I would only need 15 new accounts per year to make a decent income.

Selling is about Discovering the Prospect’s Unique Value

In my Internet Marketing Book, I discuss processes to achieve results for a local business.  I discuss how to research and discover how much business lies on the Internet for a local business.  I teach you the right tools to discover that ‘opportunity’.  The challenge is, does your prospect tie those into value for their business?  Most don’t.

I have this process I call a Website Assessment.  It’s a ‘free’ assessment of a prospect’s website, however we place a value of $200 on it because it takes us an hour to prepare and an hour to deliver.

I have created a FREE video for you!  Folks, this is gold, I promise.  The process described in the video has helped me sell $100’s of thousands of dollars worth of SEO services to local businesses.  My closing rate in my sales funnel is a whooping 58%!

Before watching the video, you need to understand your objectives.

1. Educate your prospects on what white SEO is
2. Educate your prospects on what a keyword is, how important keywords are and what we use them for.
3. Show your prospects exactly where traffic is coming from and how many searches are really happening on the Google network.
4. Show your prospects who their competition is and their estimated click through.
5. Show them if they are not in the top 6 spots for their ‘money’ keyword(s), they are NOT in the game.
6. Instill fear with them and scarcity, indicating that their competitors are receiving traffic, traffic is only increasing and they are losing market share daily by not being on the Internet.

Click on the image to the left to watch the video.  This is a training video that I created with a bad ass website for the purposes of setting up a website assessment.  You’ll note that I use WEB CEO to do this.  Web CEO is a great SEO application, however I only use it to genenerate rankings reports for my prospects and clients and use it for our Website Assessment.  There is a free version which is pretty good, however they lock you out of features required to run a business selling SEO.  Fork over the couple hundred for this tool, it’s the best selling tool you’ll use.

Also reference the chapter in MLBO (Chapter 5) that addresses the use of Web CEO.  I provide a step by step analysis of this product.

Download Web CEO here.

Watch Selling SEO here.