Do you want to learn how to sell SEO services to local businesses?
Does your current 9-to-5 job suck?
Want to fire your boss and consistently earn $10K a month?
You may think a "work from home" 6-figure income is far-fetched… out of your reach.
Well actually, it’s not.
Not when you know how to start a marketing agency and sell recurring subscriptions to an SEO service!
But there’s just one condition….
… you need to be a real master of local SEO.
You need to eat, breathe, and live local SEO all day, every day.
Need help gaining mastery of local seo, start with this post, here.
Already there? Awesome!
There is a huge profit potential in this business right now. A thriving SEO agency will create A LOT of revenue over time. But you need to know how to go about it.
Not sure how to sell SEO services to local businesses? No worries!
In This Article...
From how to market yourself, what services to offer and what to charge, everything you need to know to start selling SEO services to local businesses in your area is in this post.
Want local clients to line up outside your SEO agency? Read on…
How Do I Promote and Sell My Local Seo Services?
The great thing about SEO is that you can truly help local businesses and earn a nice profit for the service.
The bad thing about it is that many local businesses see ‘snake oil’ when you walk into their store trying to sell them your valuable SEO services.
If you know what you are doing and you know how to help them, then you can pitch it to potential clients… but there is no guarantee that a ‘traditional elevator pitch’ is going to work.
And you can also rule out cold calls, emails, flyers, brochures, etc.
Local business owners are bombarded every day by emails from SEO marketers around the world.
They don’t want that!
But you are different from your competitors. You’re local, and you need to play to that advantage.
And since you are local, face to face interaction gives you a huge advantage.
The best, most direct way to sell SEO services to local businesses is to build a relationship.
Your first goal is to get yourself around local business owners in an atmosphere where you can showcase your talents and deliver value.
That means meeting them face-to-face, and also offering something simple but valuable for free before you ask for the sale. These two things will go a LONG way in breaking the ice on a cold lead.
It’s called a lead magnet in internet marketing... and a lead magnet that delivers an experience is the fast ticket to making sales.
And the best tools to get in front of, rub shoulders with local business owners are Meetup.com, and local business networking events.
Here's what to do!
Meetup.com
Meetup is a website and an App that you can use to find, or create, awesome groups in your local area to meet new people.
Starting a local business Meetup Group is the perfect way to start meeting new prospects for your business.
What do you do at these meetups?
Do classes on all kinds of things related to business and marketing. You can cover topics and offer valuable tips like…
- How to post on Facebook
- How to do Facebook stories
- How to do Instagram stories
- How to make a video for YouTube
- How to write an optimized blog post
- Etc.
You go through all kinds of topics, and you teach people how to do it for themselves. (They never will do it themselves though they need to outsource it but don't know who to trust!)
You can swipe one of my 500+ YouTube videos teaching all of these skills on YouTube, create a powerpoint presentation based on them, and you’re ready to rock.
Do these topics sound too basic?
You would be surprised at how game-changing these tips are for local business owners.
Most of them have no clue how to do something as simple as going live on Facebook!
Collab with local CPA's, attorneys, and other B2B service providers and host valuable meetings that help local business owners through many of the problems they encounter every day!
Teach them for free, and you will work your way to being known, liked, and trusted fast!
How to Get Started on Meetup.com:
Step 1: Start a Meetup account. It’s cheap and super worth it.
Step 2: Start doing two free classes a month. You can host them at your local library, community center, etc.
Don’t worry if nobody shows up to the first one. Keep hosting them!
Share this event with people you meet and invite them to attend.
Step 3: Have everyone sign in at your free meetings with a name and email address to stay informed of your free marketing classes. This will allow you to start generating an email list!
This entire process does several vital things.
First, it helps you to build trust and relationships.
Second, it helps you to showcase your own talents and expertise to clients.
Third, it provides real, measurable value to local business owners.
Fourth… it provides the perfect opportunity for these business owners to walk up to you after the class and ask you if you would like to handle their SEO problems!
And fifth… it helps you to start gathering email addresses for a local mailing.
Join Local Networking Groups
Local networking groups can be another awesome way to meet people and showcase your talents and expertise to potential clients.
BNI is one networking group that has chapters in virtually every city. But you can also join other groups. The main objective here is to get involved in weekly networking events and to use those opportunities to invite people to your free Meetup groups.
Spread the word about your group on social media!
This basically enables you to give out free value at every networking event instead of trying to sell a $900 a month SEO package when you met someone only 7-minutes before that. Not going to happen!
And this continues the goal of getting people to know, like, and trust you.
This, once again, is the new way of marketing… and it is extremely powerful.
Start Building Your Own Website And Showcase Your Skills And Abilities
It’s going to be tough to rank for SEO in Orlando FL when you first begin, so don’t even worry about that.
Start a side hustle site that is fun for you and will prove you can deliver increased website traffic results!
Focus on something you love… like growing a garden, flying racing drones, or geeking out about homebrew.
Start a blog in a tiny super long tail narrow niche, gardening in an apartment, kids flying drones, share valuable information on homebrew pale ales and ipas, etc. and publish four or so 1,200 word KGR blog posts every month... and you will WOW potential clients at how fast you can get traffic to a new website.
Showing a graph like this on a website that's only a few months old, you’re on your way to selling effortlessly to your new fans.
From Fast Sales to Long-Term Contracts, The 3-Step SEO Services Value Ladder
What is a value ladder?
A value ladder is when you have inexpensive services that deliver fast results which lead into larger, and often recurring, higher cost products and services.
A value ladder is kind of like dating, you don’t ask for a hand in marriage after a couple of “meetings”, you grow into it.
You and your potential partner engage in low risk exchanges before committing to a long term, more valuable seo strategy relationship.
Believe me, you don’t want to be selling seo services to many of these businesses, some of them will drive you crazy.
Selling low commitment, lower value services to clients first, will give you plenty of breaking-off-of-the-relationship places before you are in too deep!
1 – Google My Business Setup and Optimization
This is a fairly easy first-step for businesses who want to succeed at SEO.
According to Databox, the most important marketing channel for a company is its website.
Guess what the second most important channel is? Their Google My Business listing!
A Google My Business account allows local companies to create a free business profile that they can use to easily connect with consumers across Google Search and Maps. They can share photos and offers to their business profile, showing what makes them unique. This way, companies can use their online presence to engage clients.
Thus, Google My Business is a powerful tool that local companies can use to increase user engagement.
So, How Do You Optimize A Google My Business Listing?
The tip of this Google My Business optimization iceberg is covered in this local SEO post but, Google has a never ending quest to predict everything going on in our heads and is always updating their algorithm.
For the most up to date advanced trainings, the Expert is Mike Blumenthal.
Mike Blumenthal's Expert's Guide to Local SEO is updated every 30-days and shows detailed guides on the current Local SEO and Google My Business step by step processes.
2 - Review Management and Getting More Reviews
Customer reviews are essential to SEO success for local businesses.
But there are three huge barriers that often get in the way of this…
- Local businesses may not have the proper software or systems in place for efficiently gathering customer reviews
- Local businesses may struggle to get customers to leave feedback anyway, because they don’t quite know how to do it correctly
- Customers are often more motivated to leave negative feedback than positive feedback
But as an SEO specialist, you can help local businesses to overcome this problem… thereby getting your foot in the door to helping them with even more local SEO issues.
There are even some Local SEO experts who specialize in this service only. In fact… selling this service alone can earn you $10,000 a month!
It is basically automating Google reviews for the local business, an online reputation management service that filters out bad reviews and helps to encourage all customers of a business to leave a review.
It only takes about an hour per month, per client, to maintain this service... and you can charge $79 - $250 a month!
This is an entire business idea right here!
If you sign up 10 clients at $200 a month… that’s $2,000 right there!
Here is a free training to show you how to sell this service fast.
This is so powerful. Every single local business needs this… and yet, so many of them just do not understand how to get positive reviews!
3 - High Value SEO and Ongoing Monthly Recurring Services
The third way is pure, hard-core SEO, both on-page and off-page.
This would be at the top of your value ladder. SEO hourly service changes range from $68 to over $100 per hour.
How to price your services is discussed in more detail next but the more valuable the results you can deliver, the larger the fees you can charge for your SEO services.
The fact that nearly 55 percent of businesses invest in professional SEO services clearly shows how much potential you have to establish yourself as an authority in this domain.
Need to level up your SEO skills to be completely ready to market yourself?
Gain a ton of confidence and knowledge with some education.
I personally recommend a course called Internet Marketing Gold.
Internet Marketing Gold is the most in-depth SEO course that was created by a man named Kyle Roof. I would not hesitate to call Kyle a cutting edge expert when it comes to SEO.
He is so good at SEO that he literally hacked Google’s algorithm and got a website to rank on page one that contained mostly “Lorem Ipsum” filler content!!!
He is extraordinarily knowledgeable about these things!
He is my personal SEO coach, and the stuff he is working on is eons ahead of what most ‘experts’ are doing!
If you want to go from SEO zero to SEO Ninja in literally a week or two… then Kyle Roof’s course is the way to go!
Get it for 50% off here.
Some of the SEO services that you can offer to businesses include:
SEO Audit
By performing an exhaustive local SEO audit, you can take a detailed look at your client’s existing strategy. You can evaluate your client’s website from an SEO perspective, exploring where it outshines and where it would need changes.
Via local SEO audit, you can evaluate your client’s site structure, redirects, and internal linking arrangement.
Monthly Blog Writing and Publishing
You can market your skills as a blog writer, or hire other blog writers to do this work for you, and deliver keyword researched, optimized blog posts that will help the business to gather momentum on Google search results for relevant terms.
This can be especially helpful in the local market, as Google rewards the businesses that keep updating their pages with new, fresh content!
Offer to publish two blogs a month to start with, though this can also scale and become more frequent.
On-Page Optimization
On-page optimization involves tweaking factors directly on your client’s website to optimize it for search engines.
For example, you can help them update title tags, meta-descriptions, and H1 tags. You can also help them with on page words, H count totals, schema and more by analyzing their pages and posts with tools like page optimizer pro, surfer SEO and more.
Off-Page Optimization
Off-page optimization includes playing with factors external to your client’s website that can impact their search engine rankings.
For instance, you can help them in link building by engaging guest bloggers who’d post articles on various websites linking back to your client’s website. You can also help develop shareable content for your client’s blog. Another area to focus on includes monitoring the client’s mentions across social media by users and influencers.
3 Ways To Price Your Seo Services
In 2018, Ahrefs surveyed more than 350 SEO experts to discover their average charges for SEO services, and the kind of pricing models they use to sell their services.
Here are a few key findings from the survey:
- 74.71% of SEO experts charge clients a retainer fee every month, which varies considerably depending on their country.
- 94.23% sell their services at a retainer fee of $5K per month (or less), with $501 to $1,000 per month being the most popular pricing tier.
- 40.8% of these experts offer numerous pricing models, while 59.2% of them offer just one pricing model.
- On average, SEO freelancers sell their services at $68 per hour, while SEO agencies sell at almost double ($134.66 per hour).
However, it’s also important to have a rough figure in mind to know where to start, here are three ways.
Mystery Shop Competition
Mystery shopping allows you to get a swift, consistent, and quality opinion from the perspective of your clients.
The best way is to look into your competitors and see how much they’re charging from local clients.
This will give you an idea about what’s happening in the local industry. Plus, you’ll get a rough idea of what to quote in your negotiations with clients.
Base It Off Of How Much A Lead Is Worth For Client And Closing Ratio
Here’s another great way to get a price estimate. Think about how much a new customer is worth for the local business you’re selling SEO services to.
For example, a kitchen remodeling business earns around $10k if they can close 1 in 10 leads, assuming an average lead has a worth of $1,000.
Depending on this number, if you suppose you can bring in 4 new leads every week, you can charge around 200 per lead. This means… 800 per week and 3200 per month!
You can ask for around 20 to 50% of the lead value based on how many leads you can get per month.
You can get an idea on the expected number of leads via keyword research.
Pull Numbers Out Of The Air And Test Them
Not really out of air…but look for relevant research and reports. You’ll find plenty of them online.
For example….
In case of monthly retainers, Forbes divided the price ranges into four groups: $250 to $500, $700 to $1,500, $2,000 to $6,000, and $10,000+ per month.
Of course, the pricing depends on how renowned your agency is, and which local company you’re approaching for business.
For example, you can’t charge a yoga business as much as you can charge a premium home construction company.
But, if you’re just starting out, you may start from the lower end of that scale.
For a rudimentary SEO audit (taking around 5 to 10 hours), you may charge somewhere between $600 and $2,000, depending on the work volume. For a more exhaustive SEO audit, expect getting between $3,000 and $20,000.
Forbes also recommends an hourly rate between $125 and $200 per hour.
Per-project, monthly retainer or hourly basis… which one should you choose?
I recommend hourly basis.
When I started out, I used to charge $25 per hour. So I went from a $20 per hour customer support job to doing $25 per hour WordPress development work, overnight.
Then, once I solidified my team and got my skills up to where I could do the same work in half the time, I was earning $50 - $75 per hour and more. And this was just the beginning…
Want more details on how I did it? Check out my step-by-step marketing arbitrage business plan here:
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Start Hustling Yesterday
There you have it, guys! Everything that’s needed for successfully building your own SEO business.
You’ve learned three areas where you can get started with something to offer, and have access to vital resources that you can now use to crush it in your own local SEO market.
When starting out, you may have better results focusing on one area… and then, step by step, you can include other services once you have a team with you.
Remember, selling your services in the vicinity is a straightforward process, as you have the home-ground benefit.
As an SEO expert, you can communicate with your clients in person and exemplify yourself as a thorough professional.
This way, you can set yourself apart from competitors such as external virtual assistants and spam communications…
This gives you a huge advantage… but you have to hustle if you want to leverage it!
If you have any other questions about selling local SEO, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts and drop them in the comments.