Whether you’re an SEO solopreneur or run a successful agency, there’s one challenge that every business ultimately has to deal with: consistently signing new SEO clients.
And here’s the biggest mistake people make.
They use the same cold calling, cold emailing, and advertising techniques that have a success rate of less than 1% (if you’re lucky!).
In this guide, I’m going to show you a completely different approach I have consistently used with a success rate of over 25%.
That’s not hype, and I’ll even show you a video where I got direct responses during a live webinar.
Let’s first look at why consistent results are tough to achieve.
The Challenge Of Cold Outreach
I have been doing client SEO for over 15 years now, and the traditional approach of cold calling and emailing inevitably brings you to three major roadblocks.
High Noise-to-Signal Ratio
Your emails and phone calls to potential clients will be just one of countless others that they receive on a weekly basis.
You probably get bombarded with SEO offers yourself, despite the fact that your business website is about SEO.
What I have found is that no matter how good your copywriting skills are, cold emails get consciously and subconsciously filtered out.
And you have to be prepared to make hundreds of phone calls a week to land one new client, which is going to take up a huge amount of highly frustrating time.
People say it’s just a numbers game, but it’s tough to stay motivated after hearing 100 straight “not interested” responses in a row.
Lack of Trust From Strangers
Even if someone opens your email or gives you a few minutes for your pitch on the phone, their trust radar will be on overdrive.
They’ve either received a similar message hundreds of times before or they have trusted someone in the past and got badly stung.
You probably behave the same way when a telemarketer calls with some new cell phone or cable TV package.
Yes, you could work on your sales skills, but that’s also going to take time and endless rejections before you master it.
Deliverability and Inbox Issues
Email is probably one of the most common tools used by digital marketing agencies of all sizes. Unfortunately, that has led many spam filters to become extremely sensitive to cold outreach for all types of SEO services.
What often ends up happening is that your emails land in the spam folder that nobody checks. Or, in a best-case scenario, they land on the “Promotions” tab, where you get ignored as well.
I’ve tried all types of cold outreach methods, from email to phone calls and even extremely expensive advertising campaigns.
But there’s only one method that still allows me to consistently get new clients for local SEO services.
My Scalable Outreach Process
I’m going to introduce you to my outreach method, which I regularly use to find SEO clients. You can even watch me land new clients on this webinar, where I received client responses in front of a live audience.
Identify Your Target Location Or Industry
The first thing you need to do is define the location or industry you want to target for SEO clients. There’s no point in going completely random and blind at this.
My favorite approach is to target a certain location. This can be a small city, a county, or even a highly populated suburb.
Ideally, this should be where you live, or an area you’re very familiar with. For example, I live in Beaumont, Alberta, and I like to target that area because people and businesses know me.
However, you can also target industry groups for different services, like plumbers, carpenters, or water damage restoration.
That’s important for the next step.
Find Related Facebook Groups
Once you make a decision on a location or industry, it’s time to research Facebook groups. There are countless groups for local residents and businesses, where people post questions or comments about things happening or recommendations for products and services.
Join several of these groups and start engaging with people.
The idea is to prove you’re a real person and that you have something in common with the other members in the group.
Only once you’ve added some value to the group is it time for the next step.
Post A Free Offer
The idea here is to offer a website review for local business owners, and you’ll be using Xagio’s Project Planner.
I would suggest that you don’t use the term “free SEO audits” in your posts. This often sets off the trust radar with people, because they’ve probably received many such offers.
Instead, offer a website review to determine gaps and opportunities for marketing improvements.
Also, don’t use a profile for an SEO agency to make the post. Use your personal account and mention that your business is in digital marketing to avoid alarm bells going off.
And don’t go straight in saying that you’re looking for new SEO clients. You need to approach this in a way that gradually builds trust with a subtle offer.
Experiment with a simple offer post, or copy the script I share in this MOM blog post.
Use Xagio To Provide The Free Service
The best part about this process is that it’s going to cost you practically no time, money, or effort. You’ll receive responses from business owners, and you simply use the Xagio Project Planner.
Essentially, you’ll audit the business website and run a competitor audit for a website ranking #1 in Google.
You can use these reports to show business owners where they are right now, and what they need to do for on-page optimization and additional content in order to get their site ranking higher.
Xagio even allows you to white label these reports with your SEO agency branding and contact details. You’ve now got a foot in the door and have gained some trust.
Make An Irresistible Offer
I recommend that you try to get on a video chat with the prospects and share your screen with the above reports.
It gives the business owner tangible proof of a gap between their website and their competitors.
Then, you can go ahead and offer SEO services that will close the gaps.
Don’t immediately approach this with a monthly service fee, but rather offer a set fee to fix the issues.
Let’s say the solution is to create and optimize five pages; you can easily charge $200 per page and use Xagio to do the work for you.
Once you deliver the technical SEO fixes, rankings should improve within a couple of weeks, and you can use the Xagio Rank Tracker to show improvements.
That’s when you can have another conversation with potential SEO clients to offer an ongoing service for a complete SEO strategy with link building and more content pages if needed.
Rinse And Repeat
This is a process that you can rinse and repeat across multiple Facebook groups and even report in each group every couple of months.
It’ll create engagement, and more people will recognize the value you provide upfront. What you’ll quickly notice is that potential clients are far more likely to want a conversation with you because you’re not taking the hard sell approach.
I bet no one else is using this approach on Facebook groups.
You might even get offers to trade SEO services for house cleaning and massages. Yes, that actually happened to me on a live webinar.
Start Scaling Your Agency With Xagio
If you want to get more SEO clients and you’re tired of the constant rejection from cold email and phone call approaches, then copy my process.
A simple Facebook post followed by a keyword and ranking report that includes your SEO agency branding is all it takes.
You can easily get five reports out a day, and you will see a flood of responses coming in.
These turn into solid SEO leads with a lot of trust.
All you need is a Pro or Agency account for Xagio, and you can have your first year’s subscription paid for by a single client.