14 Tested Sales Hacks To Boost Your SEO Sales

Selling SEO services can be pretty challenging for many reasons, and the most common ones are related to an incorrect strategy. The search engine algorithms and digital marketing trends are constantly changing. There is no way you can predict the outcome or the results of an SEO campaign, especially when it's related to your website's position on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Therefore, it becomes imperative to continuously educate the clients about the benefits of SEO and how far it can take them apart from talking purely about rankings and traffic.

SEO is more of a knowledge-based service, and therefore, you need to religiously inform the clients about what you are doing and its likely impact. In the absence of such interactive engagement between you and your client, you may not be able to explain the reason why they can't see an immediate rise in rankings and traffic. Therefore, it's recommended that you keep them informed and maintain transparency.

Even the slightest misunderstanding may lead to confusion, which may impact your entire SEO project and even jeopardize your relationship with your client.

So, whatever you do, keep it transparent and explain why you are doing it, what would be its likely impact, and the kind of results we can anticipate. SEO is not paid advertising where you can download the analytics and reports from Google or Facebook, and the client gets the complete picture.

You need not be an excellent salesman to sell SEO services. SEO is purely organic, and it's inevitable, so all you need to do is communicate the benefits of traditional SEO with your customer.

As soon as an update is announced, it would help if you took preventive actions to protect your website from any drop in rankings. You should also inform your client or prospective customer about the fixes required on your website to boost lead generation and conversion. With these measures, you'll likely win the clients and retain them without any extra effort.

Here are the 14 sales hacks every agency owner must know to boost SEO sales:

1. Talk Less and Listen More: Focus On Your Customers' Core Needs

There are different types of companies, and each one can be different in terms of their situation, their capacity to spend, product life cycle, industry, niche, and the target audience. So, a universal solution wouldn't work. You can offer a solution only after a preliminary need assessment, and most of the time, tailor-made solutions work best.

When you happen to be on the phone with a prospect, you feel compelled to speak incessantly about your services and how you can help that person. However, this is not a good practice from a sales perspective. So, even when you feel under pressure to pour out all the product knowledge you have, avoid it as it may overwhelm the listener.

Business owners know a lot more about their businesses than you may ever know. So, it would help if you took this opportunity to speak at length about their companies to get as many clues as you can. The more business owners reveal their needs, the better it is for you because it will help you run better campaigns and choose the right audiences. It's also the best way to know their customers' pain points, frustrations, and interests. You can, later on, use this information for full-fledged campaigns.

2. Avoid Over-Promise and False Commitments

Since SEO is both a science and an art, you can't say anything with conviction about SEO. Furthermore, SEO depends heavily on the ever-changing search engine algorithms sling with several other factors. Therefore, you should not over-promise and refrain from making false commitments, especially about rankings and numbers. Google warns against the agencies guaranteeing rankings or traffic volumes.

According to Google, nobody can predict the rankings based on their assumptions.

However, you can provide:

• Accurate information about how many hours you will put into a particular campaign.
• The number of reports you will generate every month.
• The realistic projections on a timeline backed by a sound strategy.

You should also inform them clearly that you can't predict anything. However, you can share the realistic expectations they can have using the strategy you're implementing. Always support your claims with your case studies.

3. Invest in Content Marketing

Investing in content is a brilliant idea, and you should use it judiciously both for your site and for your clients' websites. You can also invest in the content created for earned media and paid media.

For that, you should have an excellent in-house content team, so you can create valuable content intended to serve your targeted audiences.

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Establish yourself as an authority and showcase your knowledge by creating pillar pages and cornerstone content for your website. Create lots of content on SEO and the related topics.

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You can take inspiration from HubSpot's pillar and cluster approach to content creation. So, you can post both introductory and long-form content about SEO to create pillar content on your website. Such content will attract free traffic from search engines and establish yourself as an authority in your niche.

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Know the difference between pillar and cornerstone content before you proceed.

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Showing your expertise will always yield positive results. It will also generate a lead pipeline for your agency. So, while prospecting for SEO projects, if your lead asks you to provide specific information such as your approach to link building, you can send a polite email. The email should contain the link to a blog post on your website or some other resource, such as a YouTube video that explains your backlink strategy.

4. Educate Your Clients

SEO is a knowledge-based and active service, so you need to educate your clients from time to time if you want to retain them. You should also explain to them the secondary benefits of SEO and boost traffic and conversion in the long run. It will help if you share with them some strategies to establish your brand as an authority.

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Outreaching in the community and building links through it helps in brand building and increasing visibility. Similarly, it would help if you also communicated to your clients various local SEO activities that significantly impact your brand reputation and traffic.

5. Set Realistic Expectations

Nothing can be more frustrating than finding a client and working hard with them for a few weeks, only to find out that their expectations are entirely different from what you can offer. So, if you sit together and discuss the expectations before you commit your time and energy to the project.

SEO is a marathon and not a sprint, and you should make it clear up right in the beginning to avoid unrealistic expectations.

Apart from that, it would help if you also conveyed realistic expectations the client can have and the secondary benefits of SEO. It would help your clients stay realistic and avoid an unnecessary focus on rankings that might lead to disappointment later on. A clear understanding of the time frames required for different objectives will clear the path for a productive long term client relationship,

6. Share Case Studies and Previous Reports

It isn't easy to convince a client about hiring your services if an agency has ripped them off in the past. The right strategy for such a client is to share your reports and case studies. It will help you build trust quickly, win new customers and retain existing ones. According to a report, 42% of sales reps acknowledge prospecting as the most demanding stage of the sale process.

Here are some crucial facts about sharing the right content with the prospect during the consideration stage of the sales funnel:

1. Right content helps salespeople to take prospects down the sales funnel quicker.
2. But then you may wonder what type of content to send and when.
3. Make sure the content you share with your prospect addresses their specific situation and pain points.

Unfortunately, many marketers make a significant mistake when creating content for sales purposes. The content they create is usually about their brand, products, features, and services.

You can share case studies, previous reports, or specially created corporate demo videos, but these content pieces should address your prospect's pain points. If your content is all about your products and how great you are as a brand, it won't impress your prospects.

Here is an example of a demo video from the IKEA Place app. It reduces the need to explain things from scratch during your meeting with a prospect.

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7. Perform Competitor Analysis for Your Prospects

Use popular SEO tools such as SpyFu or SEMrush and proactively perform competitor analysis for your prospective client. You can use it during prospecting. It will help you form an excellent impression of yours as a professional agency. It also means that you are serious, know your job, and care about your customers.

Competitor analysis is a critical SEO metric that helps business owners lift their rankings and boost traffic. It shows you where you stand compared to your competition and your competitors' strategies to rank on top.

Competitor analysis offers the following benefits for the businesses:

• Enables you to do comprehensive market analysis
• Offers insight into the development of products and services
• Helps in identifying spot trends in the market
• Helps in understanding and analyzing competitor strategies.
• Helpful in exploring fresh and innovative ideas
• Useful for understanding your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT analysis)
• Useful in identifying and mitigating risks

8. Transform Your Prospecting Methods by Creating Instant Websites

As an agency, you can transform your prospecting methods by creating niche-based beautiful custom websites for your clients and stun them with your capabilities.

InstaSites, a DashClicks tool, helps you to bring the action-packed value that too within seconds.

The best feature of this tool is that you don't need to know coding to create websites.

Niche-specific templates

Now you can improve your prospecting methods by working with multiple niches. Choose from a variety of industry-specific templates to create an InstaSite.

Build single or bulk websites

InstaSites doesn't just build a single website at a time. You can instantly create multiple websites using its bulk website builder with the push of a button.

You can also create a conversion-focused custom website for your agency using DashClicks' Agency Website tool.

9. Use SEO Management Tools

SEO is vast, and it involves numerous activities. So, at times, it becomes overwhelming to manage your website SEO. You can use SEO management tools to simplify the otherwise lengthy and complicated SEO processes. DashClicks' beautiful white-labeled platform brings the benefits of these premium tools you need to succeed.

Source: DashClicks' White Label SEO Dashboard

SEO tools are pretty expensive if you buy an individual or agency account. For example, if you need help with local SEO or keyword research, you don't need to purchase different tools with high subscription rates.

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White label fulfillment services from DashClicks will use the best insights gathered from these tools to make your campaigns super successful.

Image Source: Google My Business insights on DashClicks dashboard provides cumulative data for easy comparison.

10. Automate Client Onboardings

Some tools can help you automate one of the most tedious tasks in an agency ā€” onboarding a new client. Onboarding is not an easy task, and despite your best efforts, it can involve a lot of repetition and wastage of time. Manual onboardings can eat up a lot of your productive hours.

Automatic client onboarding allows you to gather the essential information from your clients through an intelligent onboarding process. DashClicks' Onboarding Center allows automated client onboardings saving your time and hassle while also reducing the chances of human errors.

11. Try White Label SEO Dashboard

The secret sauce of a successful agency is organized efforts, streamlined operations, and repeatable processes. It becomes even more critical when you are scaling your agency.

DashClicks' white label dashboard provides all the information you may need about your digital marketing projects.

Let all the heavy lifting be done by the white label platform while managing your projects from a single dashboard. When you use DashClicks' white label SEO platform, you can upload your logo and favicon on the reports generated by us and serve your client as a 100% owner of the services provided. It syncs data from all channels, and you can access it in real-time.

Here is an educational video from DashClicks on How to Make 10k a Month.

12. Generate Automated Reports

Ask any agency owner, and they will admit that report generation chews up a lot of time in an agency environment. Automated reports will save you time, increase your productivity, and help you build a good impression of your agency. These reports allow you to depict data and insights using stunning graphics and tables.

It will take your employees a lot of time to generate such high-quality reports.

Check out DashClicks' automated SEO report sample here.

DashClicks' InstaReports is a tool that produces anytime-anywhere reports for you so that you can create beautiful stunning digital marketing reports with a single click of a mouse.

13. Harness the Power of Social MediaĀ

Social media is mighty these days, and marketers can use it creatively to their advantage. Most SEO service providers aren't very active on social media, although they have their profile pages on major social media channels.

The primary reason is the lack of a well-planned social media strategy built around engagement and relationship building.

It would help if you had a long-term social media marketing strategy and should employ highly social media savvy and creative people to manage your social accounts. If you are influential on social media, you don't ever have to worry about your sales pipeline or leads.

14. Implement Paid Advertising

In the beginning, most SEO agencies aren't able to attract organic traffic and sales leads online because they don't rank high on search engine result pages. At this stage, you must invest in advertising on Google and social media to attract qualified leads and traffic to your website. It will build your sales pipeline, which you can use for a long time.

Conclusion

This blog has discussed a few tips and tricks to boost your SEO sales in a highly competitive space. While honesty, transparency, and top-notch customer support are the keys to success, nothing can beat the leverage you get by hiring white label SEO services. It allows you to scale and focus on your core areas while offering the best results to your client at an affordable rate.