How to Start Offering SEO Services Tomorrow

February 7, 2013 | by | Category:

Welcome to our new series for Digital Marketing Agencies, “5 New Services You Can Offer Your Clients Tomorrow”

We talk to digital marketing agencies every single day and heard that one of the ways we can help you grow your business is to put together resources so you so you can expand the types of services you offer to your current and new clients. This month-long email series will cover ways you can expand the breadth of services you offer and ends with a webinar (on March 5th) that wraps up all the content we’ve sent you during the series.

The five part series is organized by type of service and will provide actionable tips and advice for you to expand your services – tomorrow.
————–

How to Start Offering SEO Services Tomorrow

Screen shot 2013-02-07 at 11.42.06 AMAs a savvy digital marketer, you already know why ranking on the first search engine results page is so important. Websites that enjoy high search rankings drive more organic traffic – that is also more qualified – in a sustainable way. You might have a harder time selling the value of SEO to your clients who only think of it as another marketing buzzword. There are real consequences if your client isn’t doing SEO – or not doing it well. SEO is a zero-sum game, which means if their competitors are doing SEO and your client isn’t, search engines will put your client at a competitive disadvantage. Without SEO a website can be lost among other businesses that are competing for similar customers. If they say they are doing SEO, but are pursuing the wrong SEO strategy, that can be a huge waste of resources.

Here are a couple guides for you to share with your client to help educate them on the importance of a strong SEO strategy: Dangers of Doing SEO or Benefits of Doing SEO

There are multiple types of projects you can offer today to start delivering SEO value for your clients tomorrow. Here are four types to get you started.

Search Persona Identification

SEO success starts with some key planning and research activities. Take time to talk with your client to understand their business goals and needs of their target audiences. Your client should have a clear understanding of their target buyer before starting an SEO campaign. Be sure they can answer questions such as: What are the pain points of your buyers? How many types of buyers are you trying to reach? What type of information do they consume? Where do they consume information online? We’ve put together a guide to help you conduct a search persona session with your client: 5 Steps To Building a Search Persona.

Building a Strategic Keyword Focus

Keywords are a foundational element of your inbound marketing efforts – so it’s important that you take a strategic approach to your research when building the focused list. It’s an art to look for keywords that are highly relevant to their business, have good search volume, are not to competitive and support conversion goals. Our 5 Steps to Building a Strategic Keyword List guide will give you step-by-step guidance to build a strong foundation for your client’s organic search strategy.

Technical SEO Audit

One of the first SEO deliverables you can offer your client is a technical SEO audit.

This audit allows you to dig into their website, keyword strategy and metrics in a detailed and significant way in order to understand what controllable issues you can attack right from the get-go to improve website crawl-ability, indexation and performance. This is a copy of our Technical SEO Audit Template for you to use with your clients.

Execute a SEO Campaign

If your client already is sold on the value of SEO and begging you to help them optimize their site- lucky you! Usually, selling the value of SEO is the hardest part. If you’re using Optify, we designed a simple work plan to help you build a SEO campaign in a structured way to execute the service.

And finally, we want to help keep your business profitable by taking on retainer-based clients rather than one-off projects. Since SEO isn’t a one-off project, we’ve put together a SEO project management template to help you manage your SEO services from the first kick-off meeting to ongoing monthly reporting.

Those are four types of SEO services you can start offering tomorrow. Our blog is also a great place to read more about SEO strategy, tactics, and tips you can offer your clients. Here are some of my favorite posts I think you’d also enjoy: