How to Get SEO Customers

Attracting customers requires planning and research.

The SEO industry is extremely competitive, and if you want to succeed in your own SEO copy writing or site design business, you'll need to have a way of getting noticed by potential clients and turning them into customers. In order to do that, you have to create a reliable impression while establishing an action plan that lets your potential customers find you. Doing this will increase profits and help keep your SEO services in demand.

Instructions

1. Pick a carefully targeted niche for your SEO services, whether by industry served or by geographical location, and base your keywords and content on this niche. Doing this will make getting attention much easier. Using keywords for a carefully chosen SEO niche will also improve your organic rankings and make your pay per click advertising costs lower. The first will lead to more clients, and the second will lead to less costly client conversions.

2. Build a website that at least ranks well for its name and a couple of your niche keywords. Choose a domain name that contains at least one SEO niche specific keyword and try to rank high for this word or word combination. Also, pick at least one or two SEO niche specific keywords and use them strategically in your site content and site tags. Work to make these keywords rank well; doing so will increase your perceived qualification and your organic search engine rank.

3. Design your site in an SEO friendly way that complies with your optimization services. The site should clearly display your services, skills and contact information. An organized, well optimized website will make your business appear professional, encouraging visitors to become customers.

4. Search the web for the websites of potential customers, examine them for any improvements which could be made, note these improvements and cold call your prospects, offering them an optimized rewrite of their site content or an SEO friendly redesign of their site. This is a time consuming process, but it is a solid way to get clients and possible repeat work.

5. 

   Building a portfolio will make clients more likely to trust you.

   Create a portfolio of previous work; display it on your website in some form. Any clients you find will probably want to see samples of what you've done before, so it's important to provide an attractive presentation. Offer to do some free SEO work for charities or the websites of friends to use as sample material.

6. Ask previous customers for referrals to their business partners, friends, and acquaintances. Don't be shy about this, some of the best repeat work comes from word of mouth, so do your best to create value for your customers by improving their search engine rankings. Achieving this speaks for itself, and is more likely to encourage a client to refer you.

7. Offer a guarantee for your services. Although there is no way to honestly promise that your SEO copy writing or site optimization services will deliver exactly as planned, you can boost your clients confidence by giving them a full or partial refund guarantee if your SEO copy doesn't improve their website analytics by a prearranged amount within a certain time.

Tips & Warnings

• Offer discounts on future SEO work to frequent customers and those who offer larger work volume.

• Make deals with web design companies. Ask them to pass SEO design work on to your business in exchange for you recommending their design services to your clients.

• Join online SEO contests as a competitor; even if you don't come close to winning the learning experience will be valuable.

References

• Divine Write: Frequently Asked Questions; Glenn Murray
• Service Growth Consultants Inc; Developing Repeat and Referral Business; Dorothy I. Riddle, Ph.D.; 2008
• Google webmaster central: Design and content guidelines