Starting a successful SEO agency and building a powerful SEO brand in the freelance and digital marketing space you need local as well as online SEO clients.
To make a successful SEO agency brand in beginning you do not need too many SEO clients. To survive you just have to work with 2 to 3 clients on a monthly basis or project basis. Once you start increasing traffic and leads to their business, you can start charging recurring SEO service fees on monthly basis.
Successful SEO agency owners use quality SEO tools, business automation, and a team of skilled SEO experts, and they make thousands of dollars monthly. To achieve these goals, you need regular high-paying SEO clients. But to get clients or attract them to your business, you have to stand out from the crowd. You have to try new and creative ways to get more clients.
It is because proven ways to get SEO clients are already tried and tested by many SEO agencies. Those ways are crowded and are not enough to grow your SEO business as a beginner or startup. That’s why you need to try new, interesting and creative ways to get SEO clients.
In this post, you will find out creative and low-cost ways to get local SEO clients without freelance websites or without online advertising.
So, let’s get started:
Top 5 ways interesting and creative ways to get local SEO clients:
1. Partnerships with local web development agency and freelancers:
Building partnership with influencers is part of the Digital Marketing business. You can partner with leading, or startups and local web development companies to get SEO clients. The point is simple, web development companies are not digital marketing companies. But they are great at building websites, mobile apps, web applications, and software. They work on PHP, Python, MySQL, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS and not on keyword research, link building, content creation, optimization etc. Some of them have digital marketing teams but not all.
Many freelance web developers or web development agencies have to outsource the marketing works of the clients. Or many times they do not work on marketing projects because they are Web development experts and many do not have time to handle marketing and SEO work.
While clients want results, so they try and research various SEO and marketing services. Also do not feel comfortable getting marketing and SEO done by the same company that developed their web application. Both works need expertise and specialized service.
So, if both of you can work together then you can provide much more and better services for small business owners.
When your SEO clients need web application development you can recommend them local web development partner and when web development companies’ clients need SEO and marketing services, they will refer them to your SEO company.
You can do it through agreement and share the commission as well with each other. And both of you have to list each other’s business and services as a partner on the website.
The benefit of doing this is that you can focus on SEO and getting leads for clients and the web development companies can focus on creating applications. Backlinks benefits are not included yet, but they will do as well.
And without any doubt, if both of you are startups or freelancers then this will help you to grow faster and use each other’s strengths for the success of your business and clients. And if both of you can keep working together and helping each other’s clients then you will not only be able to get regular SEO and Web development clients locally from referrals but also able to get leads online.
3. Create Groups and Communities on social media:
To get local clients you have to educate them about digital marketing, SEO, and websites. Most of them do not do the technical parts of SEO and websites. While they are interested to grow their business. Even some of them already invested in SEO but haven’t got the results.
You have to identify those businesses and startups. After that, you have to educate them about SEO and digital marketing on any social media and offline platform. You do not have to be in rush to just visit them and start selling your SEO services.
Instead, 1st understand their business challenges, and search engine competition, explore the market, and do the competitive analysis through SEO tools.
Once you did that and selected 5 to 10 businesses then create social media groups or find them on social media and connect with them. For this, you can use your personal networks and referral through relatives, and friends.
The best method is to create a local group for small businesses to educate them about SEO and online marketing. Share your blog posts, videos, and various other types of content on that local Facebook group or Pinterest or LinkedIn or YouTube or WhatsApp.
If you, do it then you will be able to attract more businesses interested in online marketing and SEO. You can message them and book an appointment to meet with them to discuss SEO plans to grow their business.
Even you can do it through a direct visit, but that’s not the right way. 1st book appoints through phone call and lets them know you need their 20 to 30 minutes.
3. Find clients on the 2nd to 10th page of Google search results:
A client who wants to grow traffic to their website or is already interested in SEO and has invested a good amount of money is on the 2nd to 10th page of Google search results. But due to a lack of SEO skills and good SEO services, their websites are not getting in the top 10 search results.
Use the right SEO tool to do the competitive analysis of their website, do the technical SEO audit, check the website speed, find out the errors on the website and analyze the opportunities. Once you did that, create an SEO report in PDF file and send that to them. Along with that, also send your SEO proposal.
This is much better than sending automated spam SEO services mails.
Yes, you need good communication as well as clients’ business knowledge and target customers. But this way not only you can target local websites and local clients but you can get clients from various countries and regions.
They will contact you because they are on page 2 or page 10. But they can’t make it possible to get on the top 5 search results on their own or by previous SEO agencies. So, they are the right SEO client for you. And if you can audit their website correctly and efficiently then you will get a message very soon.
But make sure you formatted correctly and created SEO reports of their website professionally.
4. Find local clients through google business listing:
This is the most common and genuine way to get clients. While many SEO agencies call directly to the business listed on Google my business or those are in the google listing.
Calling directly without researching on business and their target customers, without analyzing their website and current traffic and ratings will not work. Small businesses have hundreds of such calls on a daily basis. So they will simply ignore that.
You need to think about how you can help them to grow.
Your goal should be to create a plan that helps them to grow their website traffic and business. Your goal should not be to make money or just fool the client due to their lack of SEO knowledge. Be honest and research properly, audit their website, and keywords strategy, and then book an appointment to meet them.
In the meeting, you can show and educate them on what you have created and what is your plan to get their websites on the top 5 search results on Google and Bing. How soon they can expect to get clients organically through their websites if they hire you. How much return they will get after investing in SEO for your company.
You don’t have to force them to hire your SEO agency, you just have to attract them or make them interested in your plan and the ideas you’re sharing.
While your personality, SEO skills, listening skills, and negotiation skills will matter to close the deal successfully. You have to work on these skills as well and be prepared for rejection. And always answer and show solutions to the client’s questions and doubts. Create your own story.
If you’re able to do it on a daily or weekly basis then you will get clients more often and for a long time.
5. Promote your SEO services:
Whenever someone searches for the local SEO company you should be on the top 5 search results. If you or your SEO agency is not on the top 5 search results for local search results, then how you will convince others to rank their business and get genuine traffic to their website.
That’s why along with others things you should promote your SEO services on daily basis.
As you know you can use various online and offline strategies to promote your SEO agency online. You can get local as well as overseas clients by using these strategies such as
- Creating Website SEO tutorials and sharing them through YouTube channels, Blogs, and social media.
- Writing and publishing blog posts related to your target audiences such as if your target audience or customers are hotels then you can write a guide on “how to list your hotel on Google”, how to promote hotel business, “how to find local SEO agency” or anything that is important for hotel-related business and website.
- Other than you can use social media websites, offline events, and programs to build your network and communicate with business owners, CEOs, and managers. And many others that I think you already know to promote your business online.
So these are some of the best and most creative strategies to get local as well as online SEO clients.
To be confident in promoting and marketing SEO services you have to focus on learning and delivering results for clients. As I told above that even 2 to 3 clients are enough to earn $10000 of dollars monthly from your SEO services. Having only 3 happy SEO clients with a $3000 monthly price is better than 10 unhappy clients.
But that doesn’t mean I do not want more clients. I want more SEO clients and need to grow my SEO agency revenue. But I have to understand that 1st I have to deliver and make current clients capable of paying me $10000 monthly. Be honest with yourself.
Everyone thinks and creates strategies to grow their business per their skills and knowledge. It’s important to learn and improve your SEO skills and use quality SEO tools and understand or listen to the problem clients through meetings, social media, freelance websites, and keywords.
Read More: How to expand your freelance business to get more clients
If you can do it non one can stop you from getting local or international clients automatically and becoming the leading company in the SEO and Digital Marketing space.