The SEO Playbook for Social Media Marketing Agencies
The SEO Playbook for Social Media Marketing Agencies
Learn how to sell SEO contracts and entirely outsource the SEO work
Total Read Time: 11 Minutes
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SEO and social media marketing are so closely intertwined that if you already have a Facebook Business Page and a website for your client, then you already have some SEO.
If you currently run a digital marketing or social media marketing agency and want to learn how to get paid for SEO contracts without having to do the SEO work (so that you’re just collecting checks), then look no further, your chariot has arrived.
Outline of The Process here:
1) The Basics of SEO
2) How to Pitch & Sell SEO Contracts
3) How to Fulfill Client SEO Work
Why is selling SEO contracts a big deal?
The great thing about selling SEO contracts is that you can massively increase your bottom line. If you’re already providing customers with social media marketing, offering SEO is very sensible investment and any business owner who wants more customers will quickly understand the importance of being found on the internet. Organic traffic from the search engines is one of the highest quality traffic sources and should be a part of any company’s marketing plan.
1) The Basics of SEO
What is SEO? Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your website so that it can be easily found on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. This drives more users, traffic, and visitors to your website, that you can then turn into customers.
The primary focus of SEO is around content, keywords, and backlinks. Keywords are the search terms that people use to find your product or service online.
Some examples of keywords include: ‘San Diego best restaurants’ which gets 1,300 searches each month. If your client has a dog walking company in San Diego, you might target some keyword search terms like ‘dog walker in San Diego’ or ‘dog walker near me’.
There are a thousands of different ways to search for something online. In SEO, we want to be strategic and cherry pick the best keywords, the ones that a lot of people are searching for each month.
There are a number of online tools you can use to find the best keywords for your customer. The Keywords Everywhere tool is available in the Google Chrome Store and is free to use. Google Adword’s Keyword Planner tool is another great place to look up keywords.
Don’t overstress keyword research because at One Click Influence we can take care of all the SEO work for you. That being said, keyword research will come in handy when pitching to clients.
The other important element in SEO is backlinks. To keep it simple, a backlink is when a website makes a reference or mention of your website, ‘linking back’ to your website.
For example, if Forbes wrote an article about your website and ‘linked back’ to your website (as with the blue highlighted text in the image above). This, in turn, would create a ‘backlink’ (or mention) to your website.
NaturaLawn.com received a backlink from Forbes in the example image above.
Why are backlinks important?
We pointed 10 Influence Links to this website and it massively moved up many keyword positions onto the 1st page (as documented by the highlighted column above). The 11th position of Google is the 1st spot on the 2nd page. These keywords are now in reach of organic search traffic and it will continue to increase even more over time.
Having backlinks is an important part of SEO because each backlink acts like a ‘vote’ for your website. An easy way to think about SEO is that, the more backlinks, or votes, that your website has, the better candidate it is to be placed at the top of the search engines.
Not all backlinks are created equal however. Google looks down on ‘spammy websites’ and ‘backlink farms’ and a bad backlink can actually hurt your website’s rankings.
The great thing about backlinks is you really only need to ‘outdo’ your competitor. If they have backlinks from YouTube videos, YellowPages, Google My Business, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, then you should too.
You can also grab as many high quality backlinks as needed from One Click Influence, as we do offer Link Rentals and article postings on authority websites in all industries.
Ahrefs and SEMRush are great tools you can use to quickly find your competitor’s backlinks. They have a free version and also a paid version.
Now that you know what Keywords and Backlinks are, you can use them to create proposals and pitches for your social media marketing clients.
2) How to Pitch & Sell SEO Contracts
Creating pitches, proposals, and contracts for SEO clients is almost the same process as selling SMM, paid ads, or any other form of digital marketing.
If you don’t have any customers to sell SEO contracts to, you can make Facebook posts asking if your friends know of any good businesses in the area. Or you can make a post stating you’ll give $100 or $250 to anyone who refers you a business owner that signs a contract with you.
Think about your HOT and WARM markets. People you already know and work with, or people who want to work with you are in your HOT market.
Referrals, business introductions, and ‘friends of friends’ are your WARM market. Everyone else who doesn’t know you yet, but could use your services, is in your COLD market. It is going to be much easier to sell to your HOT and WARM market.
Start writing a list of all the people who are in your hot and warm markets that can use SEO. Once you have your list and have identified prospects, it’s time to start an outreach campaign.
Follow the Prospect Selling Sequence by taking your list and reaching out to them. The more personal you can make it, the better. Start by reaching out to your hot list and ‘catching up’. Be it by messenger, call, text, or email, work to build rapport right off the bat. Don’t pitch inboxes, make it personal.
Building rapport is huge in sales, and every touchpoint with your client gives them an impression of you and your services (along with liking bias working in your favor). Set up a time that works for both of you.
When it comes to pre-qualifying, you will want to make sure your prospect is someone who may need your services. Small companies, local business owners, and agency professionals will definitely benefit from being found online.
Here are some great ways to schedule a call or in person meeting:
“I have something exciting to speak with you about, do you have a time for a quick call?”
“How is Wednesday at 1pm PST or would Thursday at 3pm PST work better for you?”
If you already have monthly or weekly calls with clients, bring up the exciting new opportunity of being able to offer SEO to your client.
You can use any of our testimonials as proof to show your client the results of SEO.
It’s also a great idea to download a screen video capture tool to record a quick video of you looking up their best keywords and their competitor backlinks profiles. This way, you can show them how and why their competitors are doing better, and provide them a solution.
You can very quickly show them how the competitor has more backlinks, which backlinks you can ‘copy’, and provide value to your prospect by showing them ‘quick fixes’ they can make on their websites themselves.
The goal with the screen-capture video is to provide value and show how you will be able to get them results by using past proof (utilize One Click for that!) and analyzing their competitors. You can quickly build a blueprint and a road map for their SEO campaign to help make the sale.
Once you have your meeting scheduled, it’s time to propose your services. Make sure you have everything you need (a proposal and contract) to close your prospect on the day of your call or in person meeting.
Provide value by using the tools above to do some competitor analysis and show them different keywords and backlinks. When it comes to pricing SEO contracts, you can do a lot of damage with even a smaller retainer of $500-$750 per month, but definitely aim higher for $1,000-$3,000+ per month retainers as these are very normal prices for SEO work.
You can always start with a higher amount and close with them at a lower amount. The customer can always start a sort of ‘trial’ run with you, and increase the budget after 1-3 months. With a good set of backlinks like the 10 Pack of Influence Links, it’s very easy to get results for your clients in this timeframe.
Even if the client wants to trial with you at $500 per month to start, that’s $401 revenue bottom line in your pocket if you start out with just a 10 Pack of Influence Links. These 10 premium blog article backlinks are very heavily weighted and will be able to easily push keywords up the search engines.
Make your offer to the prospect and find out where they’re at mentally in the sales process. Look for ‘buyer’s questions’ from your prospect. These come up in the form of “what’s the cost?” or “how does it work?” questions. They should seem interested.
Dig for information early on so that you can pitch effectively. Start with questions like “what’s your budget?” or “how many new customers would like each month?”. This will help you gauge how quickly they want to grow, how much they’re able to spend, and which package will work best for them.
The structure for your meeting should be a discovery phase where you ask a lot of questions to see if you’re a good fit for each other and to ensure that your solution supports their needs. Once you’ve identified a good fit for your services, start to dig in deeper and find out their pain points and what results they would like to see.
From their pain points, you can determine what solution will work best for them. The goal then is to show how you can move them from their current pain (lack of customers) to a place of pleasure (plenty of customers).
Once you’ve identified why your services would be a good fit for them, it’s time to make an offer based on their exact wants and needs. You’ll be able to unearth these by asking your prospect a lot of questions, and showing them some examples of your solutions.
From a customers pain points, you can also kill objections. If they say they need to talk to their partner or it’s too much money, remind them of their pain points and that they need these services. Ask them “what would your partner say? They’d probably say yes, right?”.
If they object with “it’s too much money”, or ask you “what is the cost”, flip-the-script back on them with the response: “How much is it costing you to not be ranked on Google right now!?”. Responses like this are, not only playful and diffusing of tension, but also get them to think two things.
One: they’ll think you’re amazing at sales and even start to like you more. Two: They’ll realize you’re right. They are losing a ton of money by not being found online, and they do need your services.
Offer a solution to your client based on his or her needs. If they have a small budget, they will most likely not get your most expensive package!
Work with your client, not against them. Above is an example of a pricing table you can take with you into your meetings. You can get all of these services and more from One Click Influence (if needed!).
It is wise to give your client different options when making a sale. If you only give them one price, then the option is YES or NO. If you give multiple offers with pricing, as with the Pricing Table example above, the option is Bronze, Silver, or Gold.
Pricing tables will help increase your sales and your revenue. If the client has a small budget but still wants the $750 package from you, then give them an option to get the $750 for a discounted $500 per month (only if it will really help make the sale).
The real trick here is to lead a discount with a question, example: “Hey John, if there was any way I was able to lower the price, would you be able to move forward today” is a great way to lead a question to get the sale.
If they say “yes” then that means they just agreed to moving forward with you today if you lower the price!
This also works inversely. You can ‘sweeten the deal’ and throw some bonus items on top of their order, OR give them a variation of the gold package, at the silver pricing. Be creative, work with the client, close the deal.
Don’t be deterred if you’re unable to close the deal in that meeting. Try with all your might as if your life depended on it, to close the deal. But, in some cases, it really is just bad timing or the prospect is not a good fit for you.
By getting pre-qualified prospects (who are interested in your services) in front of you via phone or in person, it’s only a matter of time before someone takes you up on a deal. From here on out, it’s on to the easy part.
3) How to Fulfill Client SEO Work
Okay! Now that you know how to sell SEO contracts, let’s cover how to fulfill the clients SEO work and get them results. You can head over to One Click Influence to speak with an SEO Rep immediately, and to check out a wide range of SEO services that will be used to rank your customer’s site.
You can outsource all of the following work directly to us or use this guide to get started on SEO for your client.
How SEO works
To effectively rank your client, you’re going to need the right Keywords, Content, and Backlinks. If content is king, then backlinks are queen – and keywords are what make the magic happen.
There are different types of SEO, including: local, affiliate, ecommerce, national, regional, and niche focused SEO. Each requires a slightly different strategy, but the general concept remains the same.
This is why it’s highly recommended to speak with an SEO Rep over at One Click Influence to help walk you through the entire process (and also fulfill all the SEO work for you, if you wish).
You want to have unique, fresh content on your website that isn’t copied or posted anywhere else online. The more content you have, the better (remember, we want to outdo our competitors in every way) and it should be content that is rich with your main keywords that have a high monthly search volume.
You also want to have niche relevant and authority backlinks from authority websites in your industry. If you’re in the health niche, you should be receiving backlinks from health related websites. Again, we want to have equal to or more quality backlinks than our competitors.
Make sure your keywords are well spread throughout the various pages that you want to rank, on your website. You’ll also want to use them in descriptions, blurbs, and links back to your site from other websites.
How to have One Click do it for you
Now that you know how SEO works, you can order packages to start getting more customers and traffic from organic search results online.
A 10 Pack of Influence Links will get you 10 high quality backlinks embedded in 500 words of quality, niche relevant content. These articles will be placed on ten different authority websites. It’s one of the most valuable packages offered, and can do some serious damage for your client, right out the gates. Check it out here.
These niche relevant links are placed on the homepage of a network of authority blogs specifically built to boost your websites search presence online. Check out some of the results that thousands of others have seen by using our link service, here on the testimonials page.
It is always recommended that you speak with an expert to make sure your campaign is on track! We have support readily available on One Click Influence by live messenger and call appointments so that you’re never left hanging.
We also have SEO Reps ready to help look at your campaign with you, at a moments notice.
You can hire a Dedicated SEO Rep from One Click to help you build a proper campaign, get SEO consulting, learn SEO, or to help you outsource all of the SEO work and make sure your campaign is on track. We offer one-time sessions or you can meet on a bi-weekly and monthly basis.
The Dedicated SEO Rep packages come with quality backlinks, and everything you need to rank your website online. It’s how you can get constant interactive support on your SEO campaign, while working alongside an expert and the best part is it’s extremely affordable and specifically MADE for people who own Social Media Marketing Agencies and want to outsource SEO work.
With an SEO Rep willing to help you step-by-step, and proven strategies ready to launch at scale, you have everything you need to rank your website online with One Click Influence. You can talk to someone right now by heading over to the One Click website.
If you need help with anything, you can easily get immediate support by messaging Ingrid on Facebook.
Final Thoughts
Selling SEO contracts through your Social Media Marketing Agency is a very quick and effective way to increase your monthly revenue. With the done for you solutions available at One Click, you can easily outsource all of the SEO work and know that it’s in the hands of experts who’ve done this a thousand times over. You’ll receive white-label reports that you can forward to your client, and then you’re done.
What would happen if you sold ten $1,000 per month SEO contracts to ten of your current clients today? You’d be able to keep roughly 80% of that as pure profit margin, directly to your bottom line. And as their results increase, you can start to charge even higher rates.
Using this guide, you can now easily pitch to anyone who could benefit from being found online and guarantee the fulfillment of their SEO work.
We look forward to speaking with you in greater detail about your SEO campaigns. Reach out to one of our team members to get started right now!
