Develop an SEO Sales Methodology to Build Your Search Business

Develop an SEO Sales Methodology to Build Your Search Business – Part 1

November 6th, 2009 | by Peter Cullen |

Delivering search or seo services to the market place has long been a very subjective, and sometimes, very hit and miss affair. Depending on a companies approach, it can be very labour intensive, personality dependant, unpredictable exercise that results in sometimes a very good results and sometimes a very bad result.

I recently posed the question, ‘Why Are Your Organic Search Services Harder To Sell Than Pay Per Click Services?‘

I wanted to tease this issue out a bit more and examine how you might start putting a SEO Sales Methodology in place.

Are you a web professional? Do you or your company sell search services? Think back for a moment to a recent SEO campaign that didn’t really go well. When did the cracks start to appear in the campaign? Was it from the start? When the client was first engaged, how did you communicate the level of work required on their website? What methodology did you use to see and run the campaign?

Is there a consistent methodology you use to benchmark a website at the start of a campaign? Does a website owner really understand the level of work required to ‘optimise’ their website?

Think for a minute, if you’re doing an audit for a website of 10 pages, is it the same for a website of 100 pages, 1000 pages? Do website owners understand the work necessary to optimise a 10 page website as opposed to a 1000 page website?

As a web professional would it help you to benchmark a website at the start, generate a report and show this to a new client? How do you currently articulate how well optimised a website is to the client and thus explain to them why you’re charging X to fix the SEO issues?

Step1 : Engaging the Prospect

Before we look into what benchmarking a website actually means, let’s go back to the question, how do you first engage a new sales prospect? How do you initially approach a new prospect? Do you spend much time trying to attract their attention? Maybe you do a manual ranking analysis to see how well their website is ranked? Have you an automated approach to targeting new prospects? For me this is the start of the SEO sales process, the quality of the initial engagement.

SEO Sales Methodology

So, the question for you or your company is how do you initially engage with new prospects?

Do you use a repeatable process?

Is this process automated?

Does the process give the prospect a good feeling about your company, does it make you look good?

How much time do you spend on trying to get new business? Is the time of your technical people being sucked up by the business development guys?

Step2: Benchmarking the Website

You’ve engaged the prospect, what next? Do you run a benchmark against their website, a full complete analysis of their content, website authority, keyword visibility, competitors – both traditional and keyword. Do you communicate this benchmark to the client so that they know exactly where they stand? Do they have something to latch onto, something to measure your work by, other than just rankings?

[I'm not saying an SEO service should not be judged by their ability to get their clients good rankings, what I am saying is that it can take months between you first starting work on a website and your client seeing the rankings and traffic they are looking for.]

So what is a benchmark? If you asked 10 different web professionals what should be included in a website benchmark, you would most likely get 10 different answers. So, let’s just say a benchmark is an independent analysis against a website to determine how well optimised a website is.

I think the key word here is independent. If you can show a client that their website will undergo an independent analysis, an industry benchmark, then your client can feel that there is extra credibility in your service.

Independent Benchmark Analysis

How independent is your initial benchmark analysis? Does the website owner really trust your analysis – why should they.

Can anyone in your business run this benchmark?

Maybe you don’t think it should be independent? If you’re using any type of software to analyse/benchmark a clients website, then your benchmark is to some degree independent.

This point here is , are you building a search business, a business where you can forecast with, reasonably accuracy, how much effort will be involved in a typical search campaign, and secondly and most importantly, does your current approach allow you to scale, to grow your business?

What techniques do you use to engage a new prospect? What’s your typical win ratio in engaging new prospects? Is it sector focused, i.e. do you only engage new prospects in a particular vertical? Would you feel comfortable engaging in any vertical?

Do you think all web professionals basically deliver the same pitch to attract new search business? What’s the ideal duration of an SEO campaign, 3 months, 12 months?

In part two of this post, we’ll examine how to move a client through the SEO Sales Methodology, giving you opportunities to cross sell additional services as you move through the campaign and discuss the time involved in delivering an SEO campaign!

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