Professional SEO experts earn huge amounts by using the SEO skills through their agency or freelancing. But, the major problem is to acquire new clients every month to not only improve the revenue on the monthly basis but also to maintain a sustainable income.
SEO is a long-term marketing strategy that can be used for your own agency or for yourself as a freelancer to acquire new customers on a monthly basis organically.
But, in this competitive era, you can’t rely on a single marketing strategy to acquire new customers. Hence, in this article, I will tell you 4 different ways that actually work to acquire new clients.
Before we start, let me clear some basic concepts.
Who Can Get An SEO Client?
SEO is an art and a skill that requires a marketing, analytical and technical brain at the same time. When business owners or students think to start their digital marketing journey they first try to get into the SEO field.
Do you know why? The two simple reasons are that it is a free method to get traffic and at the same time, people think that publishing quality content and backlink creation (especially bookmarking, directory submission) are the only activities that they have to perform and that’s the whole concept of SEO. These are misconceptions.
This is the reason that people don’t grow in the SEO field. Either they leave the industry or they switch to something else like Social media ads, search engine marketing or affiliate marketing, etc because they don’t see scalability in SEO.
Long story short, if you don’t want to learn SEO deeply and you think that you only want to acquire customers with the purpose of making money then these strategies are not for you.
Serious people who are willing to learn this skill over a period of time by practicing white hat SEO strategies are the ones who should acquire SEO clients and can retain them for a long period of time.
What Do You Need To Acquire An SEO Client?
To easily acquire and retain an SEO client you need these 5 things:
Update yourself with the latest trends: Google launches a lot of updates and if you want your client to stay with you even after the update then read them and implement the right strategy for your clients accordingly. If you ignore the updates then your client’s website could be hit by these updates and you may lose the client.
Be a good content writer or a web developer: Google wants to rank high-quality and technically strong websites. If you are a good writer then it would be an advantage for you as an SEO but if you are not then you need to be a good web developer to get the extra edge. So, you need to acquire one of the skills to impress your clients to sustain in the market.
Follow good resources to increase your knowledge: A good SEO expert should have knowledge about all the fundamentals and factors to build a 360° vision that helps to rank different websites fast. This does not only help you to learn new working strategies but at the same time, it helps you to build your own creative strategies.
Build your portfolio: Before you start finding and approaching your prospects to convert them into customers you need to build your portfolio. It helps you to gain the trust of your prospects and to give them a reason why they should choose you instead of your competitors. Start your own website or channel and do its SEO to show some organic traffic to your clients.
Never commit the results without seeing data: Novice and beginners usually use misleading phrases to acquire SEO clients like “I will rank your website in 3 months”, “we are building your links every day so you will soon see ranking improvements in your Google Search Console”. These fake promises can’t retain a client for long. So, never say something without analyzing the current position of the site, competition, and the work required for the ranking objective.
4 Ways To Get The SEO Clients?
I hope you consider my above-mentioned suggestions. Now, it’s time to share the 4 ways that you can use for your own agency or for yourself to get SEO clients.
1) Facebook Ads
Facebook has a large variety of customers and you can use this platform to acquire SEO clients. But, what type of ads should you run to get the best results?
You can choose conversion ads initially. And, campaign success depends upon multiple factors. 4 major factors that impact a campaign success are mentioned below:
- Service Type
- Compelling Offer
- Landing Page
- Campaign Objective
These 4 factors are very important if you want to generate sales through your campaign or in other words if you want to acquire SEO clients through your Facebook campaign.
Here, we want to acquire SEO clients so let’s use the site audit service as a lead magnet.
The next step is to create a compelling offer that people can’t refuse. If you are a beginner freelancer or if you own an agency then I would suggest you offer a free site audit service for 7-days.
This will attract your customers who are in the hunt mode to find SEO professionals to handle their sites. Once you perform the quality site audit then you can give paid services in the future.
Now, to build a lead magnet, create a Facebook campaign with the objective of conversions and select “Website” in the conversion event location. Create your campaign and drive traffic to a landing page where you mention how you give a 7-days free site audit service.
This process will help you to acquire new customers.
2) Cold Email Outreach
Cold email outreach is a process where you approach business owners or potential clients through personalized emails without knowing them.
To implement this strategy you need to keep three things in your mind:
- Collect useful emails from different platforms
- Use simple and personalized emails
- Offer something free to get the response
- Email marketing tool
Collect useful emails from different platforms: You can Google some of the local businesses and visit their websites. Go to the “Contact Us” page to collect their email addresses. Also, you can use social media platforms to get their contact details.
Use simple and personalized emails: Don’t try to design and create fancy-looking emails because they don’t work initially. Simply, write a selfless message like how you found their details, what is your offer, and what value you can provide them.
Offer something free to get the response: The most important thing is your offer which actually influences the readers to take an action. Provide something free and attractive initially as we discussed above. This does not only help you to reduce your cost-per-acquisition but also helps to win the trust of your users.
Email marketing tool: The most important factor to select an email marketing tool is its deliverability rate. As a beginner, I would suggest you go with Mailchimp as its deliverability rate is good and you can send 2,000 mails free for each month. After some response, you can switch to better email service-providing companies.
3) Tie Up With Foreign Web Development Agency
As an SEO agency or freelance SEO, you need clients who have websites but don’t know how to get traffic on the site.
On the other hand, web development agencies know how to develop a site but they don’t know how to provide great marketing services to their clients.
You need to find such kinds of agencies in the foreign countries so you can provide them with marketing solutions or SEO services at an effective cost.
You can do this by personal links, cold email outreach, Facebook ads, and more.
4) Linkedin
Linkedin is a goldmine of data if you have the art to dig it. It is a platform with millions of working professionals all over the world.
As an SEO, let me give you 2 buyer personas that you can find on LinkedIn to pitch them to be your client.
- Business owners: Find and pitch startup owners to get your SEO services. Keep in mind, don’t go and promote your services directly. Follow the same free site audit service offer as we discussed above to attract customers.
- Marketing managers: Keep the same offer and approach marketing managers if their agencies need an SEO specialist. This method also works and people acquire foreign clients via Linkedin.
SImply, find them on Linkedin and send a connection request. It will take time to find such contacts. Also, people won’t accept your request right away so keep patience.
Once they accept your request, write a personalized message to them with a free offer, and then after building a relationship you can start charging them.
Conclusion
Starting a business is not easy but the right approach, knowledge, and offer can reduce your hustle.
Also, provide the best services as much as you can to retain the clients for a long period of time. But, at the same time, keep in mind, no client would be with you forever.
Start acquiring SEO clients by using above mentioned methods and let me know when you get your first client. I am waiting for your reply.
