Search engine optimisation (SEO) includes all activities geared towards improving the visibility of your website to potential clients. It improves the ranking of your website, blogs and other digital resources across different search engines such that clients can easily find you. SEO services have gained popularity over the years as more and more businesses utilise different online resources to reach to clients across the globe. SEO can be classified into different groups based on the nature of the optimisation and the company providing the services. They include organic SEO, paid SEO, white label SEO, reselling SEO and so on.

When a website development company hires a search engine optimisation expert to provide services to their clients under their brand name, we call this White label SEO or private label SEO. It aims at ensuring that the clients of a website development and management company can get all their development, content creation and optimisation needs serviced under one roof.

Given the increasing number of SEO service providers in the market, companies must come up with sustainable ways to attract and retain clients. We take a look at how you company can sell these services to clients and how they can subsequently retain these clients over time.

How to sell SEO services

Identify the target market

Search engine optimisation is a robust field and therefore, you may not have the ability and the personnel to serve the entire market. By analysing your organisation’s strengths and weaknesses, you can identify the niche market to focus on. Specialisation gives you a competitive edge over other players in the market and helps you better sell SEO services.

Identify your unique value proposition (UVP)

Clients are willing to work with organisations that bring value to the table. Before you approach them, you must identify a unique value proposition that they easily identify with and that has been a pain point for a while. The unique value proposition communicates what you are doing, how you intend to do it, the expected results and the timeline involved. The UVP must be packaged in a manner that it invokes and retains your client’s interest.

Know your potential clients

You need to show all your potential clients that you understand their needs and care about their businesses. Therefore, you must carry out background research on them before any meeting in order to create a good impression. Before any meeting, your team must be able to answer the following questions: Does the client have any online presence and if they do, what does it look like? How about their competitors, what are they doing do to remain at the top? What strategy will propel your clients to the top?

Pricing

This is usually a sensitive area for most clients and especially small and growing businesses.However, you can make it easier by identifying what your pricing strategy look likes. Is there room for negotiation and customisation? You must also identify how you can sell your pricing strategy to clients to make the onboarding process easier and faster.

Be an Authority

Clients are more likely to trust and therefore work with experts who have established themselves as authorities in their specific fields. But how do you become an authority? One of the easiest way is to develop original and helpful content for the free consumption of clients. You can also become an authority by ensuring that your website is a depiction of what your claim to do for your clients.

The sales process

This should be easy to understand for clients who do not have any technical background in SEO or website development. You should therefore avoid or minimise the use of jargon and use simple, easy to use words to explain everything to your clients. The sales process should have a one on one strategy, a phone selling strategy and an email based strategy to ensure that you have a holistic approach to this.

The lead generation strategy must be well defined and understood by all those who are involved in any form of lead generation. Uniformity is essential since clients can easily identify gaps in you company that may result in mistrust. Remember that clients will only work with businesses that they trust and therefore your company must portray that the clients can trust you.

Retaining clients

Your business must strive to provide the highest quality of work to all clients such that these clients will not only remain loyal but also refer other people to your company. To do this, your business must ensure that it is delivering value to all clients. But what does this mean? First, your business must strive to perform beyond the expectations of the clients in order to exceed their expectations. Second, your business must charge prices that strike a balance between what clients in the targeted niche market can afford and prices that allow an appropriate margin level. This ensures that your business delivers high quality and affordable services at sustainable profit levels.