THE ULTIMATE

GUIDE TO
SELLING SEO

Call us to learn more today | 844-311-0880

 1 | The Ultimate Guide to Selling SEO

You’ve got yourself an awesome product. You’re

ready to roll it out to your customers. You even
have the perfect prospect to kick off your SEO
sales. You know they’re ready to improve their
online presence. So you’ve got a great pitch,
you wind up, and it doesn’t go nearly as well as
you’d hoped.

What happened?

Search Engine Optimization can be a challenging product to sell if you don’t have
the right approach. This guide will take you through every step of the process to help
you close sales for your SEO prospects, helping your small business customers
succeed, and helping your business grow.
 2 | The Ultimate Guide to Selling SEO

Which Businesses Buy the Most SEO?

Before you can sell SEO, you need to understand a little about the industry and the types of business-
es that buy SEO to improve their digital presence. Businesses who buy SEO:

• Spend 60% more time per week on marketing activities

• Have far more marketing experience than the average SMB
• Are more likely to come from retail and health care industries
• 47% buy Google Adwords, spending $43,836 per year on it

Compared to other SMBs, those who buy SEO are:

2x AS LIKELY TO
BE FRANCHISES

MORE LIKELY TO BUY

2x MORE LIKELY TO
OTHER TYPES OF MEDIA
MAKE UP TO $3 MILLION
(CLASSIFIEDS, OUTDOOR
MORE IN REVENUE
ADS, PRINT, SOCIAL, ETC)

This data comes from Borrell & Associates. They compared their expansive SMB marketing research
with the SEO customer data from Boostability and found SMBs who hire outside agencies for their
SEO needs have more experience with marketing than those who try to do it themselves. The SMB’s
who see the value of SEO understand they need outside help to do it well. And they tend to be over-
all, more successful than those who have not yet invested in digital marketing.

In addition to knowing some of these industry facts, there are certain types of businesses that gener-
ally spend more on SEO than any other type of SMBs. Generally speaking, the industries that
spend the most on SEO have either a high average transaction value or high average customer
lifetime value.
 3 | The Ultimate Guide to Selling SEO

For example, businesses like personal injury attorneys, dentists, vets, and window replacement
generally spend more on SEO than any other industry. Other successful digital marketing outreach
applies to businesses like child care, auto dealers, sports and sporting goods, accountants, stor-
age, appliance sales and services, tax services, jewelers, roofers, spas and salons, chiropractors,
and plumbers. That’s not to say businesses in these types of industries are the only ones to buy
SEO. SEO will be beneficial for nearly every small business in existence.

The Importance of an Organic Online Presence

Before you can sell SEO to your customers, it’s important to understand the process, and all about
why organic rankings are so important. Bottom line, organic rankings bring in more customers.
They’re the un-paid results that show up at the top of a Google search when you type in a query.
Achieving organic rankings is the bread and butter of internet search results. And because of that,
organic rankings are highly competitive.

Organic rankings, or organic presence

refers to the footprint size a business has
SEO
built in the online world. Specific to SEO, a
business’s organic presence gets mea-
sured by how often search engines deem
their site as one of the top answers for
information related to the services or
products they offer.

You can think of any business’s organic

presence as their ongoing relationship
with Google. But you might be asking
yourself, why does my or my customer’s
relationship with this tech giant matter?
It’s because searchers trust Google. It’s in
Google’s best interest to provide the best answer to every single search query typed in. And as a
result, with increased internet use year to year, consumers trust search engine results more than
any other informational resource available to them. Local Search Association first reported this
information in a report published in 2018. It showed 36% of consumers surveyed reporting
search engines trusted a search engine the most when looking for information. Only 11% of
respondents said they went first to a company’s website for information and purchased
directly from it.
 4 | The Ultimate Guide to Selling SEO

In our digital world where we get exposed to brand messaging thousands of times every day, advertise-
ments do two things for a potential customer. The first helps to generate awareness of a product or
service and shows consumers about a business’s solution. Sometimes this goes as far as helping
consumers see they have a problem they weren’t even aware of. The second thing advertisers do is to
create interest around a product or service already well known. We’re likely familiar with these types of
solutions like newspaper ads or commercials during TV shows.

So when people get ready to buy, they turn to search engines, or Google in particular, to figure out the
best product or service out there for what they want. Advertising brings in interest to a brand, but it’s also
important for a brand to show why it’s the best at what it does. And that’s where SEO comes in. It’s crucial
for businesses to understand the buying process from the viewpoint of a consumer, not just as a busi-
ness owner. Businesses can’t succeed just through advertising. That generates the interest in their
industry, but they could lose out to a competitor who organically ranks higher in the results.

The Ultimate SEO Sales Philosophy

Now that you know the types of businesses most likely to buy SEO, and why organic rankings are as
important, it’s time to learn the best ways to sell it. There are four elements that go into the ultimate SEO
sales process:

DISCOVERY EDUCATION SOLUTION BUDGET

PITCH RECOMMENDATION

We’ll get into every step of that process. But the overall goal of any SEO sales pitch is to give the
customer just enough information and understanding to make a buying decision on the first call
you have with them. This is done by selling customers on the successful SEO process itself. Many
proposals in the business world are long with lots of details. But short and simple does the trick when it
comes to SEO, there’s no need to overcomplicate things by adding in all the details for a potential
customer who doesn’t understand yet how SEO works.

Keeping things simple has several benefits. First, it saves time. Everyone always says there’s not enough
hours in the day. And the quicker you can move a prospect through the sales process and convert them
into a paying customer, the more time you have to work on other aspects of growing your business.
 5 | The Ultimate Guide to Selling SEO

Don’t over prepare for a meeting or a call with someone who isn’t actually a paying customer yet. Simplic-
ity can also increase the customer life cycle.

SEO is a Solution Sale

Solution sales is a unique type of sales methodology. Rather than just promoting an existing product, the
sales person will focus on a potential customer’s pain points and problems, then address the issue with
the appropriate offerings/products/services to solve those pain points. The problem resolution consti-
tutes a solution. So when you have mastered the solution sale, you can then own and take control of any
sales conversation.

With SEO specifically, small businesses have the problem of poor visibility on Google. They can’t bring in
more customers because they have a poor relationship with the search engine, or rather, their website
does. With billions of small businesses making up our economy, trying to increase visibility online is a
problem that will not go away. Businesses will always struggle to be found online. The solution sale for
small businesses will point out how SEO can help them improve that online visibility, and how you’re the
best one to fix it.

How to Conduct Effective Discovery & Qualify SEO Prospects

Immediately launching into a sales pitch the second you get a potential customer on
the phone will not bring you success very often. Part of the
solution sale methodology means you first need to learn
about their business in order to learn where their pain
points sit. This discovery process will shape the types of
solutions you will offer in your pitch.

Good discovery chats include finding out what that

potential customer does for their business, all about
their products and services, the best sellers and most
profitable items. It’s essential to find out what makes
them unique in their business and what sets them apart
from the competition. It’s also important to find out their
business goals, whether those goals relate to products,
new locations, more services, and anything else that
isn’t just increasing sales with more customers. You
also want to find out about what types of digital mar-
 6 | The Ultimate Guide to Selling SEO

keting they’ve tried already and why they believe it didn’t work. All this information will help you begin
to structure your solution sales plan.

How to Educate Prospects about SEO

Once you learn all about the business, you can transition into the education portion of the pitch,
which teaches the prospect a bit about how SEO works so they can make an informed decision.
Before a potential customer will buy SEO, they first
need to understand what SEO is. A good transition
question is as simple as asking about their current
understanding of SEO.

Educating them just enough to understand SEO and

why they need it builds rapport, value and tees up the
perfect solution sales pitch. You need to teach them
about how Google decides how to rank websites and
building their organic presence. The higher rankings
come through building relevance and trust for a
website. Relevance means a website is the right
answer to a searcher’s query. This comes through a
site’s code, keyword optimization, and high quality content. Trust comes through offsite optimization
through business directories and profiles, link building, articles, and blogs that point back to the site.

The Solution Pitch

To start your solution pitch, you need to emphasize three things about SEO:

1. How you will make their site the most relevant answer to search engines.
2. How you will make their site the most trusted answer.
3. Their business will grow as they reach page one of Google.

Now it’s time to show how your solution is the perfect one for these small business clients. It’s the
chance to show that you’ve listened to what they have to say, and that you understand their struggles
with digital marketing in the past. Because you understand, you can now pitch your products with
confidence knowing they solve the problems they face. You’ll go through how the specific products
you sell will solve the specific issues they face.
 7 | The Ultimate Guide to Selling SEO

It’s also important to give a few different solution options. All solve the problems, but likely at different
price points. This helps the potential customer feel as though they still have options to get their
problems fixed. Walk them through how SEO will build value for their website in the eyes of search
engines, which will then bring more customers in the door.

It’s important to finish your solution pitch asking if the potential customer has any questions
about your process and how it will help to improve their online rankings.

Budget Recommendations

The potential customer’s budget can always be one of the hardest parts of the sales process. Two
factors go into determining an SEO budget: market competitiveness and industry competitive-
ness. Before you can make budget recommendations, there’s several questions you need to ask
yourself. Things like what can they afford based on your profiling questions? Are they selling locally or
nationally? Are they a start up? How aggressive
do they want to be? You’ll have most of these
questions answered when you learn about their
business earlier in the call. This helps you struc-
ture a solution budget that accomplishes their
goals while staying affordable for their business.

The work offered by SEO companies often

comes in packages. The work stays the same,
but the price changes depending on the number
of hours spent on a campaign. Your solutions
sales pitch will offer them several options at
different price points, but help them understand
that conservative prices won’t move the needle as quickly as more aggressive campaigns.

Closing the Sale

A good majority of potential clients will likely take the conservative route to learn more about SEO and
how the system works along with learning about the platform. But it’s important to give the aggressive
plans as an option, and also to give a vision of what a potential plan could look like. It’s important not
to pause and let the client sit and ponder on things. Immediately move to continually build value in
what SEO will do for their site and transition to closing the sale. You’ll tell them how your team will
immediately get started researching keywords for their site and their business, and how the campaign
 8 | The Ultimate Guide to Selling SEO

will progress from there. In solutions sales, continually move the call forward into the next steps.

Sales Support

Even for good sales reps, sometimes closing the sale can be tough. If you offer SEO through a vendor,
it’s important to see if they offer sales support. This service uses SEO experts whose sole job focus is
to close a sale. They have all the tools necessary to talk as experts to your customers and get them
ready to buy your product.

Sales support works as though the SEO expert works right in your office. You can loop them in to any
call as part of the SEO team go over any questions and offer options to your customers. They can walk
a potential customer through the entire solution sale process. Sales support can be an invaluable tool
for closing the sale with customers who might not quite be convinced of the value of SEO.

Conclusion

Selling SEO can be challenging. There’s the

struggle of helping customers understand why
they need SEO. SEO rarely has measurable ROI
to show customers how it will improve their
website and their business.

But when you come in with the right tools,

strategies, and solutions, you’ll find much
higher success in closing the deal with the first
contact. It takes learning all the details about a
small business and why they haven’t succeed-
ed in digital marketing to this point. It takes
adjusting your pitch to fix their exact pain
points, showing how SEO will add value to their
website and their business. And you’ll demonstrate how your solution will help them reach the first
page of Google and attract new customers. This ultimate SEO sales guide will guaranteed help you
increase your sales and build your own business in the process.
 9 | The Ultimate Guide to Selling SEO

About

Established in 2009, Boostability was founded on a simple business model: to create affordable and
effective SEO for the small business marketplace. And it’s worked. Today, Boostability serves thousands
of small businesses, helping them elevate their digital presence and succeed online. Boostability
primarily works with partners that offer their white-labeled SEO and website services to their SMB
clients. Boostability serves more than 26,000 active clients and has over 400 employees based in two
offices in the Silicon Slopes of Utah and a satellite location in Berlin, Germany. It has been ranked in
the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America for four straight years.

For more information, visit www.boostability.com/partner

Call us to learn more today | 844-311-0880