in this video i'm going to talk about
how to sell
seo for absolute beginners it's going to
be my complete beginner's guide
to selling seo services to your
customers
or if you're already selling seo and you
want to learn how to improve your sales
process
for your current products then you
should continue watching as well
if you are an absolute beginner and
maybe you're wanting to start an agency
that's what we're going to talk about is
how to sell seo services that i learned
the hard way
seo is very competitive and the goal of
this video is to really help you
stand out in an extremely competitive
market
i know that customers have a habit of
trying to beat you down on pricing so i
want to try and avoid that
by talking about how we can find
customers that
not only value what you do but also
value
search engine optimization to an extent
and i also want to make sure that you
stand out enough in the crowd
so that you don't have to deal with like
competitors undercutting you
seo i think is a weird blend of
people think they know what it is and
customers think they know what they're
buying
we'll probably go over a little bit
about this triangle behind me but
if you want to stand out from the crowd
even if you're starting from scratch or
if you've been doing this a while you
want to stand out from the crowd and
start attracting new leads
and customers to your seo business
that's what we're going to be talking
about
especially focusing on rising above the
sheer number of new competitors entering
the marketplace and typically
the more people who enter a marketplace
the the lower the prices go and i want
to make sure that we stand out enough
so that we can keep our prices nice and
high and profitable so let's cover off a
few
seo sales myths the first thing is that
your customers don't
need traffic it's a really common
misconception that the only benefit that
seo
brings is traffic to a website and
while the main result does tend to be
larger volumes of traffic i can assure
you
that if you just focused on traffic and
gave your customers
just tons more traffic to a particular
page or to their blog or whatever
and it doesn't increase the number of
leads they generate the number of
conversions they get number of sales
they get or whatever
they're not going to be happy with just
higher amounts of traffic
so we need to dig a little deeper into
your customers
ecosystems and frameworks and understand
well
why do they think traffic is a problem a
lot of businesses think that traffic is
this fix-all solution
and that's not the case which leads me
on to my second point
you need to stop selling seo
seo is so broad as we're going to talk
about in a bit
it's so varied there's so much included
in the practice of seo
that it's not enough for you to just say
we sell seo or we are seo specialists
that's not a specialist saying you're an
seo specialist
you need to niche down and discover what
it is
that you are selling to the market and
to your customers that no one else can
offer or at least
do in a way that is very difficult for
people to displace
we'll talk about like how we can come up
with those examples
but if you call yourself a search engine
optimization specialist
you're not really much of a specialist
of anything that's still incredibly
broad
you also need to stop working with
customers who say i just want to buy
seo because those types of customers
treat
search engine optimization like a
commodity and they're like yeah i just
want
three hours of seo i just want i just
want a week's worth of seo i want six
months of seo and it doesn't work like
that
it's not a six month process it's not a
sprint process there's a lot of
different things that you could do
um in order to package up or
systemize the different kind of seo
outcomes that you're going to be
providing to your customers
and finally number three you need to
move away from selling to local
businesses
i don't know why seo seems to have this
obsession with only working with local
businesses
there are so many different markets and
industries and business types
that benefit from search engine
optimization local
seo is a really really
uh small tiny almost insignificant part
of the overall seo pie
that you could have we're going to talk
a little bit about the types of niches
that you can go after
but working just with local businesses
is
frankly i think it's dangerous because
all it takes is for someone else to come
in disrupt that market and take away all
your customers
a quick side note when i first started a
digital marketing agency
there was one company servicing pretty
much the
the local area and they were furious
that i started up an agency i didn't
start
up to piss them off i didn't even know
they existed that's the weird thing
i looked for around for competitors and
couldn't find anyone and thought well
i'm gonna do this as well
it got to the point where they were like
sending threats and they would turn up
to like networking events and like try
to like have a go at me and disrupt me
all because i was just doing a good job
this is the funny thing i didn't even
undercharge them in fact i was way more
expensive than them
in some cases i was 10 times more
expensive than them
and i wasn't even trying to take their
customers i just really understood the
market that i was going after i really
understood the problems
and i knew that i cared enough about the
solution to deliver it with me and my
team
so going after a local market and say we
just do seo for local markets in my
opinion is
massively restrictive and it's very
dangerous and it can be easily taken
away if you're
watching this now thinking well i've
sold you know seo to
local businesses for years and it seems
fine great that's
if it's working out then fine but this
video is to help with beginners
who want to understand how to start
selling
seo to a wider market and local business
is not your niche it's uh it's an
industry and it's not a very well
defined industry as well
cool so let's move over to the uh to the
whiteboard
this here is this kind of core triangle
of
like the beginning of your sales process
and the more i've used this the more
important i found it especially when
you're like i want to sell
seo or i want to make money selling
search engine optimization
this is where you really need to think
about starting so we've got the core
niche
the core question and the core function
these are three areas that you need to
focus in on if you want to be successful
and to make money especially during the
sales process i'm going to make the
assumption that you're not starting out
with like
a 400 person team or a 200 person team
or even a 10 person team
i'm going to presume you're either
starting out by yourself or in a very
small micro team
and even if you are starting with like
30 members of staff
you still need to have these three
specific areas
my book five figure funnels will help
you kind of with the follow-on process
but
this is the absolute beginners model
for selling seo services these are the
three things you need to focus
on so first of all we need a niche this
is essentially the
market that you're going to attract now
your market
is like that your niche kind of sits
down here
it's like a subsection of the market
another way of showing this that i've
used is
if we have this big long top bar here we
have the market up here
let's say that you want to work
specifically with
authors and we'll talk a bit more about
this you want to work with authors the
next thing that you'll need to
look at is the specific characteristics
and problems they've got
or actually just the characteristics
and then we look at problems and goals
and then we have you so these are
problems
and then this is you that's your niche
can you see this is all
authors and then we're only going to
work with authors of a certain
characteristic
and then we're going to only work with
people who've got a certain problem or
want a certain result
and then this is you your method down
the bottom here what this is going to do
is provide you
a statement something along the lines of
we motivate authors to
rank their best-selling books within 24
hours
or we motivate new authors to rank their
blog articles
to help sell more books something along
those lines we're going to figure out
that
you need a niche to start with if you
want to sell anything you need a niche
if you want me or someone like me to
tell you where to find more clients
you categorically need to have a niche
the next thing you need to be able to
answer is
what is their core question what's the
number one thing
that they are asking day in day out no
one wakes up thinking
oh my god i need a search engine
specialist what they're doing is waking
up thinking
i really hope that my next book launch
isn't a failure
i really hope that i'm able to outsell
the number of books that i generate
i'd love to move away from amazon and
start selling books
from my own website how do i do that how
do i cash in on merchandising
how do i and this is like this is all
stuff that seo can answer
how do i get my other media out there
there's a lot of authors who have also
got
a podcast or a youtube channel or a blog
and they don't know how to
get that other content out there how do
they do that
so they have a core question that
they're repeatedly asking
all the time it might change and evolve
over time that's
fine by that point you'll have developed
enough of a relationship with that
customer to be able to help them out
further
or you will simply just work with new
customers who have got this core
question
you can't be everything to everyone you
can do anything
but you can't do everything and you've
got to really make sure that you're
focused on what that core question is
because there might even be people
within this niche who
have got this question and there might
be some who have a different question
at the moment our number one question at
sell your service is
how do we acquire as much audience as
possible how do we acquire as big an
audience as possible that's the number
one question we're asking
some people might not know that they
have a call question but they do have a
call question
it's the thing they're constantly asking
your core question presumably
if you're um watching this is something
like how do i sell more services how do
i find more
clients how do i find more leads
something along those lines so we need
to be able to answer this customer's
call question or at least
know what it is and the last part here
this is a bit trickier
this is the core function so this is
what you do
this is what you're going to do day in
day out repeatedly
ultimately this core function is how
you're going to serve
the niche and answer the question you
might say
well it's seo services i want you to get
more specific than that
if for example we decide that our
broadest possible market is construction
companies
all right and i'd say a good one
actually
uh architects right
architects i think suit seo really well
because they don't have a lot of repeat
business
uh and you could really change an
architect's business if you
like help them rank and search there's a
ton of different ways and we're going to
talk about that in a bit
let's say you want to work with
architects the characteristics are
that they have to be regularly producing
video content
okay they have to be producing video
content with their
uh on their blog or for their proposals
or whatever it is like you need them to
produce
video content for your particular
process if you don't have a process in
mind
i want you to think about well what
would that customer need to have already
in order to make my job easier
do they need to have a website maybe
they don't maybe think well actually the
easiest way for me to do this is that
they don't have a website
maybe they already have at least 100
pages of content or 50 pages of content
maybe you're thinking they need to have
at least a budget of 10 grand or 25
grand or a thousand pounds a month or
something like that
you need to think about the
characteristics that that particular
market has
in order for you to work with them then
i want you to think about what are their
biggest problems
or what is the result that they want and
ultimately
architects want to win more bids
basically that's what they want to do
the biggest problem is they don't have
any recurring revenue
so they want to find more customers
consistently
and then your particular like solution
and problem is actually kind of a
mixture of these other areas so don't
worry too much about that so
a niche is a problem solved or a
result gotten for a particular group of
people with certain characteristics that
no one else wants to serve
sounds like a mouthful it's very simple
it's a problem solved
or a result gotten for a group of people
with certain characteristics that no one
else wants to serve and that's where you
come in
so you need to have that to start with
and i'll talk a little bit about this
later but i want you to understand the
highest level
overview of how to sell seo this is
going to be very different
from a lot of other seo videos that say
have your website do your pricing call
it a nice name
all of that don't worry about any
of that right you need to have a niche
you need to go after a specific niche
another area might be you want to work
specifically with people who sell
digital products maybe they don't sell
their own digital products
like affiliate marketing is a big one
and they need to have at least
one successful website already and what
you do is you help replicate a
successful website
via search engine algorithms to
duplicate the results that they would
see with a second product so
if they're currently selling x widget
and they generate this number of traffic
this number of leads this number of
sales this number of repeat sales
what you're going to do is repeat that
with a second product you say look we'll
take that off your hands we'll actually
take
the process off your hands if you're
currently doing this with trainers
and you want to do a fishing gear we'll
help you repeat that process
by looking at what works and replicating
it so you don't have to do that
it might be that you think well i want
to work with people who are already
generating a lot of content
but they're just not ranking or finding
the right number of leads
and so you think well the market
therefore is
uh and i hate the term service-based
businesses and we're going to get more
specific about that
maybe your background is financial
services and you think i want to work
with people who help generate wealth
so wealth-based consultants wealth-based
training and education consultants
the characteristics is they've already
got a lot of content
their biggest problem is they can't
generate leads on autopilot
and the result they want is more leads
so what you do is you help wealth-based
consultants who have already got
content but it's not ranking generate
more leads that's the niche that's what
you do
and their core question is going to be
how do i get more leads through my
business how do i get more leads
and your core function whatever that
might be
in this particular case for this
particular example is probably going to
be
to optimize that content as in to go
into current content
and make it the best that it could be so
it's actually
current content
is your core func function
and then you know that you're going to
do that
and you think in terms of generating new
content it's not our core function it's
not our speciality we're not going to
worry about that for the time being all
we're going to worry about
is looking at current content and we're
going to create a process
for like making this content as good as
it can be
so we work with keyword research and we
go back over stuff we look at what's
ranking et cetera et cetera
that's kind of how this framework works
and you might need to kind of
go away and do this a few times but i
want you to think about your core niche
the core question and the core function
the next part of the process is figuring
out well your process frankly
over here you've got your customer where
they're starting and over here
you've got your customer after working
with you they're happy
life's a rainbow there's butterflies you
know
everything is better but over here it's
misery it's doom and gloom
there we go your job is to help them get
from here to here now if we pick the
example we had earlier
which was wealth-based consultants
who already have content
they're not able to generate any leads
maybe their biggest problem right now is
they have to go to like networking
events and they're spending a lot of
money on like
adverts and stuff and it's just not
converting their core
question is how do i generate more leads
for the business without me having to
increase my workload specifically
you need to then think about well how am
i going to get them from a to b
so you're literally going to pick out
between five
and seven steps that they need to go on
in order to reach this these are not
necessarily things that you're going to
do
these are actually things that the
customer needs to do
your job is then well if you want this
and you don't have the time to do this
we can do this for you
this is this is a big flip to the
standard sales process which is
selling the future over here
rather than the features of the process
to get up to it
so the first mistake they make is
something like
uh oh we have to do an in-depth um seo
frog
like run through and then we're going to
look at your h1 and h2
tags then we're going to do a keyword
um like golden ratio review and you're
like whoa that's like
i don't understand that as the customer
i don't understand that
so what you need to do is you need to
write it out in a process
or a step-by-step kind of methodology
that
they could do and now you might be
thinking well they could just go away
and do that themselves
yet they could a certain portion of your
market will do
your job is not to say well actually
i'm not going to tell you how to do this
unless you buy from me
your job is to say here's the journey by
the way it's a up work and if you
want someone else to do it we can do it
for you
they already understand the process
they've already been sold on the process
your job is to sell them faster and
easier
so we sell the future not the features
and in that case it might be like well
the first thing you need to do
is to just see what's working you know
uh like what is ranking
where are your current leads coming from
how does that work
the next thing we're going to do is
we're going to do a little bit of
keyword research
so we're going to find out like what are
your customers searching for what could
you rank really really well for
we're then going to say um well what
have we got already
so we're going to do a little bit of
like a stock take
and the reason we have five to seven is
because it's just an easier number for
us to get through so if you come up with
six or five that's absolutely fine
try to keep it at five or seven anything
over that start stripping stuff out
these you can see these are very broad
categories
these are very broad terms keep it nice
and simple
just talk about it in the same way that
i'm doing here these nice broad high
level overviews and if they want more
they just have to pay for you that's all
it is if they want more depth
they can read your content so anyway
what's working look at some keywords do
a bit of a stock take
we then uh pick our uh
best players so we're going to look at
our best kind of
you know content or whatever
and where they're going to basically
kind of rewrite and optimize
and then we just measure
and if we can continue doing that
eventually you're going to get more and
more over to this side
so you can absolutely if you are a
wealth-based
consultancy and you already currently
generate
content and you want more leads that's
fine i'm going to show you how to do
that the first thing you need to do is
what's working where do you currently
generate leads from where you currently
get your traffic from
etc etc etc when you go through that
that package there
that process that's ultimately what
you're selling
because when you start to approach
customers and you
know that you want to work with more
wealth-based businesses you know you
want to work with people who are
already writing content that's easy to
find you can find
groups of these you can find entire
forums and threads
and other businesses that service those
types of customers
and start partnering with them that's
the easy part the next part is to then
let them know that hey if you want to
answer this question
this process here is how you do that
this is how you go along that process
this is a really easy way for you to do
this
so i just want to work on one final
piece here
if you have literally no idea on what
you want to focus on
or what you want to work on i want you
to try this one last exercise this is
also going to help with your niche a
little bit
i want you to start over here kind of
similar to the first
the the last diagram we've done
a to b in fact let's make that z all the
way to the end
i want you to write out every single
thing
that you do for the customer in order to
help them if you are just doing seo
so i want you to start with you know
this brand analysis
for example uh you know we would do
consultation
uh we would do a bit of a a we would
create a brief
we would measure first or do an audit we
do
keyword research going all the way
through you know
you'd optimize current content and then
we'd opt
and then we'd uh you know do targeted
creation all the way through right
and we need to go all the way through
and write as many things that you would
do
and then the next piece i want you to
think about
well first of all what do you really
love doing out of all of that
maybe it's the consulting and the the
kind of strategy element
maybe it's the keyword research you
really like or you know you can do so
you want to
pick things that you know that you
absolutely love
and things that you're really good at as
well i'm going to presume that if you've
got it here
they add some value to the process so
therefore the problem is not is it
valuable
the the question is which one do we go
after and you might think actually the
number one thing i love to do is keyword
research
and i also love to do consulting you go
fantastic
who then would benefit
who benefits from
consulting and keyword research who
would benefit from that
you might think well everyone i need you
to think harder than that
if you want to elevate yourself above
the competition and if you want to stand
out above the competition you need to
think harder than
everyone would people who so actually
i'll
suffice this even more who benefits the
most
people who are already driving traffic
to their site probably would benefit
more
from consulting and keyword research
people who have already got content
would probably benefit the most
and then you get to think as well well
who do i want to work with
i personally don't have any kind of
connection with like
hobby based businesses just it just
doesn't interest me for whatever reason
uh i'm not a huge fan of like racing
you're like sports car formula one
racing just doesn't interest me so i
wouldn't go after anything in that
market it's a huge market and i'll
assure you
that there is an seo opportunity for
someone to go after the formula one and
formula two
and so on circuits sport kind of
interests me so health
maybe you think actually the health
market overall
interests me maybe you think actually
i'm kind of more interested in money and
investment so it'd be the wealth side
maybe you think the psychology of people
relationships having better human lives
great so it's the relationship side
maybe there is a particular hobby that
you absolutely love i want you to think
about
who would benefit the most from working
with you
like your your areas that you love as
well as the parts of the process and
then what you're going to do is you're
going to
go back then with the keyword research
and the consulting
and i want you to do that that kind of
before and after again thinking about
well how would i do this then if i was
just going to do keyword research
to the point where i could give people
keywords
that they understood that they were
going to use to create content they
currently create content they know how
to create content they just need more
direction
i want to do it specifically for the
health market uh particularly i want to
work with businesses who have got
um like an influencer at the center
a health market's very easy for that so
they've got an influencer at the center
they've currently got products that they
can sell
you know again a lot of businesses seo
businesses they want to work with
startups and
businesses that haven't got any
customers and haven't got any sales
like all of the fault and all of the
blame if it doesn't work out will be
placed on you
so i want you to think about you know
who you want to work with
who benefits the most and then take
these two pieces and do that before and
after and again
five to seven steps you might think well
the initial consult
is actually just to understand what are
the aims like what are the goals
that you want to get the next thing is
you might think
okay who's your target market
you might then think well what's
currently most popular what are you
on your own site and your current site
and your competition like what's popular
uh what are the seed keywords or what's
the niche
what's the statement and then the
content type maybe i don't know i'm just
making this up as i go along but
you still need to be able to answer that
niche question
function question and this is going to
help your market
get from a to b all of this is the
benefits you're then able to say
well we're able to help you generate
keywords
that are going to generate you leads and
you're going to have more direction your
business we're going to help you go
after
certain keywords and certain topics it
might be that you think actually uh
we're really good at optimizing current
content and maybe that comes back i
think that's what we did kind of
previously
is you decided we're actually really
good at optimizing current content so
you need to have your current content
and that would be that other process
that we went through where you think
what's popular keyword research go back
and optimize stuff that we're working on
already have a process for that
that's what you're selling because
you're selling and remember the easiest
method to make a sale is to sell futures
not features a lot of people are like
yeah but i just don't know what i'm
selling
what's the future that you're bringing
tell me
what it is tell me how my life is better
in the future why would i smile in the
future
how am i going to feel in the future
that
imaginative and almost creative writing
exercise of saying
in the future after working with us you
have
complete direction on where to go with
your content
you're generating more leads and you're
also ranking for terms that people are
searching for
those are the benefits that's the future
that you're selling
stop selling features and start selling
futures
guys i hope that was useful as an
absolute beginner's guide if that was
way too much just let me know in the
comments down below
because i'm happy to kind of go into
more
less depth more depth i don't know how
you want to phrase that but let me know
in the comments below if it was useful
as well give me a thumbs up uh if you're
new to the channel by all means go ahead
and hit subscribe because i produce
videos like this every week
my job is to help as many people sell a
marketing project
for like 25 grand so i believe that you
have a 25 grand solution here
for your seo services i've actually got
another video that's probably going to
pop up here
talking about how to write proposals
really really quickly
if you want to go ahead and click that
it'll tell you how to write a proposal
like
30 minutes flat very very fast super
easy i don't spend more than like 20
minutes writing proposals
and they've had five figures six figures
it doesn't really matter
on the size so you can go ahead and
check that out in the meantime guys
thank you so much for watching
i'll see you on the next video have
courage commit and take