It can be difficult and frustrating to come up with a winning SEO pitch, but it is totally doable when you know how to do it right.
You can easily create a winning pitch by covering as much as you can about the value of your SEO services to a client without getting overly technical and boring them.
You also need your pitch to be convincing, so make sure to communicate with clients in their own language to ensure they understand what you are speaking about.
If what you’re doing so far isn’t giving you the results you want, then use our 3 steps to plan your next SEO pitch.
- Establish Goals / Needs
- Measure results & metrics
- Define & propose a solution
1. Establish Goals / Needs
One of the main reasons most SEO agencies and freelancers fail at pitching is because they treat all clients the same.
If you want to pitch successfully, the key is to understand every client has a specific need, and once you know that need – you can pitch better.
When a client comes to you looking for SEO solutions, it’s because they need your help to reach their business goals.
To convince them you can help with their goals, you need to understand what they need to get there.
And to identify their exact needs, you must learn as much as you can about them.
Here are three important elements to find out about a client.
Get to know their business – What niche are they in, and how do they do business. What are their products and services, and how do they get leads and customers. The answers will give you a rough idea of what SEO solutions they might need.
Get to know their competitors – In SEO, researching a client’s competitors is crucial. If you do not understand what they are competing against, then you simply cannot offer solutions.
Current SEO – As part of getting to know them, it’s good to find out how much they know about SEO. Do they understand what it involves, and have they invested in similar services before? If yes, find out about their previous experience. Knowing what you’re competing against can help you win the client.
2. Measure Results & Metrics
Once the initial stage of getting to know a client is over, you should move on to collecting as much data and information as you can.
After all, you can’t help a client if you are clueless and data is crucial to an SEO pitch.
But, we don’t work for free and neither should you. So don’t spend hours researching a client, do a quick review that can give you a foundation to work with.
By looking at their website, traffic, ranking and sales, you can find out more about the current state of their business.
And by outlining and highlighting the problems vs competition, you can identify the next steps for getting them closer to their goals.
A quick ranking report – Doing a quick ranking report might seem a little too much, but sometimes it can really help win a client.
Most clients come to you because they struggle with their search engine rankings, but they have no idea what ranking is or how it works and just want to rank #1.
So to help them understand where they are and how you can build their online presence, you can use a small ranking report.
A website review – While we don’t recommend doing a website audit for a pitch, a small review can give you an idea of what needs to be done.
If you can’t identify at least a few problems, then your pitch will not sound valuable to your client.
Backlinks review – Don’t forget about backlinks. They have remained one of the top ranking factors over the past few decades and you should include them in your SEO pitch.
They can help you understand where a client should and could be building links for better search engine rankings.
You can also use SEO tools such as Ahrefs to take a quick look at their competitors’ backlinks to gain more in-depth insight and improve your pitch.
3. Define & Propose A Solution
If you’ve done a good job with getting to know your client and gathering data, then you can now show them how they will be successful with your SEO services.
Start by highlighting some of the problems that you found and propose solutions that will work.
Be honest and transparent about the services you are offering and make sure your solutions place emphasis on the value you can add to their business.
Make your points clear, and if you use an SEO term, then explain it in the client’s language.
To make your pitch more digestible, we recommend dividing the solutions into 3 categories:
On-site SEO – Outline and highlight some of the areas you can work on and optimise, which ultimately will improve their rankings.
You should also make sure that the client understands how important on-site optimisation is for both user experience and search engines.
Off-site SEO – By taking into account everything from their referring domains to the number of backlinks, you can pitch tailored solutions that cover what roughly needs to be done for their SEO.
Off-site SEO is about building authority, and if your client fails to understand and recognise its importance, your pitch will be nothing but more than a waste of time.
Technical SEO – Most clients, especially those that have never had any technical SEO, will need some work.
So make sure they fully understand how important it is to fix the technical issues and how it works hand in hand with on-site and off-site SEO.
Final Tip
To finalise a sale, we recommend using case studies and testimonials, and here is why.
Client case studies – When trying to pitch clients SEO, using case studies show that you can deliver results. If you don’t use them, your pitch is simply just a story.
With so many SEO agencies to choose from, it is important to show clients examples of previous work. It’s also good to include timescales in your studies to highlight what you are capable of in a given timeframe.
Use them to show how your services can improve websites and rankings over time.
Use reviews and testimonials – In the online world, reviews and testimonials are extremely powerful.
Especially testimonials because they can be just as good as word of mouth. They can really help with both pitching and selling.