What exactly is SEO?
You’ve all heard some day or another that SEO (search engine optimization) is a prominent digital marketing tool, so it becomes essential to know about this in detail as the world of social media is grasping our lives quickly. In digital marketing, SEO plays a vital role in reaching out to the target audience. There are around 3.5 billion searches every day, and the volume is growing manifolds with each passing day.
Because of the growing popularity of search engines, it becomes a prime place to advertise your brand and its products and services.
Including SEO as a part of the digital marketing campaign enables the search engines to include your website in their search catalog. It makes your website visible to the target segment and directs more traffic to the website leading to more possible conversions. It proves to be a valuable tool to improve the brand presence, build new relationships, and position you as a trustworthy brand in a competitive world. Let us understand what SEO is made up of and why its role is vital in today’s times.
The crucial elements of SEO
SEO is made up of different elements. Knowing them all is the key to understanding why and how SEO will help in business growth.
Keywords
Keywords have always proven to be a crucial part of search on digital platforms. But what are keywords?
Keywords are the words that the audience uses to find relevant content, and the brands use them to connect with the target segment that looks out for these products and services. Keywords need to be well researched and carefully chosen. They must have high search rates. You may choose short tail keywords (for example, cat), long-tail keywords (such as Persian cat for sale), or local keywords (such as cute kittens for sale in Miami). You can also use keywords to optimize the titles, URLs, and other SEO items.
Content
It is the most vital part of SEO as this acts as the face of what reaches the audience. For example, if you own daycare for kids, you might publish series of blogs about kids’ activities, parenting tips, after-school craft, games, kids nutrition, and more. So whenever a person wants to search for daycare, yours would be the first to strike the mind. The content needs to be informative and fascinating, along with being relevant and engaging. Content comes in various forms like a web page, videos, blogs, podcasts, social media posts, e-books, and more.
Off-page and local SEO
An Off-Page SEO needs external optimization practices which involve backlink building to your website. These practices include guest blogging or mention by influences about your content. Local SEO is gaining widespread importance because nowadays, the searches are performed through a smartphone or tablet. So you use local keywords, go in for a regional directory listing, create location-specific tags, and have a page on Google+ or Google Maps.
Search engine marketing
It refers to the paid marketing done to promote your business through digital platforms. These include native ads; Google Ad words, social media paid ads, display ads, and more. The SEO strategy helps to reach out to a new target audience faster.
Importance of SEO for business
SEO’s role is to increase brand exposure and reach out to potential clients through search engines. Different SEO strategies are implemented to improve the ranking in search portals. Whenever a client is searching for a particular product or service that is relevant to you, you would want to make sure that your company tops the search results so that the client can reach out to you.
For example, a client wants to buy life insurance and searches for a term plan quotation on Google, and if your insurance company does not reflect on the initial one or two pages, then probably the client will not reach out to you. So the benefits of SEO are plenty. Let us elaborate on a few of them.
Brand awareness
With improved SEO strategies, the traffic to the webpage increases. Your brand gets noticed, and people start recognizing the products and services offered by you. It also leads to sales closure and increased revenues.
Quality content
The user experience on the website is highly rated by Google. If the user ranks the website to have quality content, the search engine prioritizes such sites.
Increase sales
People search for relevant products and services on search engines. When your web page appears high up in the search criteria, people tend to click and get all the relevant details. It increases the chance of sales closure as well as an impulse purchase.
Increased visibility and ranking
SEO makes it easier for prospects to find you. If you rank high on the search engine result page, then the chances of people exploring your page rise and increase web traffic on your page.
Concept of authority
It tends to refer to the fact that the website is trustworthy with high-quality and relatable content. The higher the authority, the higher is the ranking, and more will be the web traffic on the page.
Growth
The main reason that SEO is essential is that it helps achieve the target growth and fulfill the business goals. It helps build a long-term relationship with the client, improve the visitor experience, increase the web traffic, and makes you reach far ahead from the competition by gaining loyal customers for life.
- It provides you with the targeted and organic traffic relevant to the business.
- Helps gain brand awareness with increased visibility and exposure.
- Increase chances of conversions as it attracts more people to know the details about the offerings.
- Help achieve the growth targets and build trust with increased scalability.
So, in a nutshell, here is how SEO can help you drive your business.
Why start an SEO company?
It is very apparent that SEO is a vital part of the marketing strategy for many businesses. Starting an SEO company helps businesses grow in a meaningful way. It requires limited capital to start this business. You actively participate and collaborate with the clients and are not just another back-office company. The revenue generation is also consistent because all companies need to have a presence in the digital market.
Honest communication with the client helps you stand tall in a competitive environment. But as an SEO agency, let us evaluate a few tips on how to get SEO clients.
How to get SEO clients: The top tips
The most common question asked is, How do I get SEO clients? Here are a few tips to get the SEO clients to help in the brand’s growth and support your values and vision.
Work on the client persona
Who are you trying to target? Where do you find the target audience? Knowing clear answers to these questions and following a persona exercise offers excellent value addition and opportunities that you would have otherwise missed out upon.
Free SEO site audits
When you start with the SEO agency, you have no leads or clients initially. The first step needs to be to search for businesses that have SEO issues. Generally, almost 95% of small businesses struggle with SEO issues. It would help if you filtered such companies that are keen on spending revenue on developing their SEO. So you can run a quick SEO audit for their site and hand over the results to them. Catering to local clients is much easier. The potential clients have a trust that you are a local and not some fake SEO agency.
Specialize in a niche segment
Catering to a niche segment makes you stand out from the rest of the lot. For example, you can specialize in catering to creating backlinks for the clients needed in Off-Page SEO. Digital marketing companies need to stand out from the competition because almost all the agencies are doing the same job. They all have the exact offers, pricing, and branding details that are offered to the clients. When a client comes across your agency, he must feel that you are different and stand out by having a niche.
The memory of your brand must be etched in the mind of the client. You can choose the niche segment after analyzing your strengths. You may be good at technical SEO or E-commerce SEO. You may even specialize and create a niche depending on the clients you choose, as you work specifically for doctors, playschools, daycares, etc. You can mention this on your webpage, specifically on the homepage.
Partnership with other agencies
Partnerships are a good idea as it increases your reach to the prospective clients. Many agencies do SEO jobs for the clients, but their expertise may be different. When you collaborate, you both end up in a win-win situation.
Agencies that deal with designing, content creation, and social media marketing can offer an excellent partnership prospect. They have a suitable existing client base that can need your service. They, too, will be happy to partner with you and pass on the leads to you for a nominal fee.
Marketing conferences
Speaking at marketing conferences may not yield instant results, but it can get you good quality clients, in the long term. How?
Let us discuss its importance. Once you are at a conference as a speaker, you will have access to talk to a lot of potential clients. Whenever you are off-stage, you can interact with people and explain your offerings. You may even close a few clients there and then. High-quality people are sitting in such conferences, so you get good leads and build long-term relationships. You can also publish a link of your talks on social media platforms like YouTube for people to follow you and get to know you and your services.
Pillar content
Generally, all the content posted by SEO agencies is more or less the same. They write about generic topics like tips to grow through SEO, the importance of digital media, the collaboration of SEO and social media, and more such issues. These are generally for people who know very little about using SEO as a tool for growth. But posting such content hardly works. Wondering why?
It is because posting such generic content does not tell anything about your core competency or expertise. So publishing pillar content is a way better approach where you target advanced marketers. Your content may go all over the head of most of the clients, but anyone who comes across the post will surely want to know more about it. The people would wish to share such a piece of information and reach the potential client. People get to recognize you as an expert in that particular field.
Use of social media to share the SEO expertise
Sharing your content on social media helps get more SEO clients. One, your posts reflect in front of the potential clients, and by posting relevant stuff, you increase the odds of people liking your work. Two, the clients often check for your social media presence and build an impression about your work. If you do not post for long intervals, or if all the posts are just paid promotions, they generally don’t trust you and will not reach out to you. Social media helps build trust in the clients’ minds, and they see you as a legit expert in the SEO field.
One such place to find potential clients is LinkedIn. It would help if you were different from the crowd so that your messages do not get lost in the group. Here are a few tips that will work out for you
- While sending a message on LinkedIn, start with a personal note like the name of the person’s city or college that you can easily find in their profile.
- Your message must add some value. Using an SEO audit and sending out the results can be one such helpful way of communication. You can count on a few tips to optimize the site and refer to a few keywords also.
- Always have an excellent follow-up. LinkedIn is a busy, crowded place, so you need to have a strong follow-up for people to remember you.
Monthly SEO packages
Pricing is always an essential criterion in the minds of the client. Whenever a client visits your website, what they have in mind for comparison is price. Monthly packages can prove to be a magic bullet. You can have well-designed packages with slabs of the monthly pricing and mention all that the package comprises. Transparency works out well with people. Every client has different needs, and you may also customize the SEO packages.
The reputation of your agency
Reputation is the most vital factor that the client looks out for before zeroing down on SEO agency. You may add reputation signals on your site in the following ways.
Client case studies
You can mention a few client case studies in detail in the form of a blog. It gives a first-hand review to the potential clients who are looking out for guaranteed results.
Office address
You must reiterate the address of your office even if it is there on the company’s website. Knowing about the agency’s distance and location is an essential point in the clients’ minds.
Blog content
Helpful blog content will help push the visitors to your site for a quotation. It attracts new SEO clients, and they will find you through your blog content marketing.
Awards and accolades
You must mention all the awards and accolades won or conferences that you have participated in. It helps gain the trust of the audience.
“Featured on.”
You must mention all the places you have been featured on. All the magazines or industry blogs that have said about you prove to increase and enhance your brand image.
Few bonus tips that work
Apart from the tips mentioned above and tricks, here are a few bonus tips that can work out well for an SEO agency.
Video tutorials
Video tutorials made by SEO marketing agencies are a great way to stand out from the crowd. The video showcases the brand in front of thousands of people.
Asking SEO prospects the right question
You have to prove your agency’s worth, and you can do this by constantly educating the client and showing them how profitable the options will be. It would help if you asked them the right questions so that the client feels that you are the best fit for their needs.
Be articulate in your offerings and pricing.
The client is interested to know how your services will add value to the business goals. They need an answer to questions like, How will they generate revenues? Or How much cost is involved in all this? It would help if you were clear in answering all these questions. There must be no confusion at any price. You must also disclose the minimum pricing during the initial talks. The client must get an idea as to whether the offer is suiting the requirements and worth the money they will spend.
Tell them about your professional network
Your quality of work will only reflect once you start working with the clients. But before that, you can always let them know about your connections in the industry. They must feel comfortable about your niche, and don’t forget to thank those who have referred you for the work that you’ve done.
Get going
Push away the shyness and go out there with total confidence. Participate in conversations, ask questions, make sure you stay up high in the search results yourself and face all the challenges head-on.
Conclusion
So this is it! Nine key actionable and a few bonus tips that will get you many SEO clients for your agency. SEO is a simple way to enhance the digital marketing space, and the power of SEO is undeniable when it comes to fetching a good return on investment. To reiterate the strategies and tips, in a nutshell, all you need to do and focus on is:
- Connect with the target audience.
- List strong keywords.
- Look out for potential clients on SEO-related websites, Yahoo answers, or Quora.
- Identify the market and target segment.
- Pitch the services articulately.
- Don’t hard sell; build trust first.
- Be reliable and genuine in your work.
- Think strategically by presenting the business, looking out for a niche segment, connecting with Twitter, Linked In, or Facebook, and using local networking.
We wish you happy and lifelong clients and enjoy your SEO using these tips. These tricks will help you navigate and sail through the SEO business smoothly.
