The world of SEO is highly competitive, ever-changing, constantly evolving and could easily be renowned for being one of the busiest industries in the world. So how to find SEO clients is something most of the businesses ask every day.
Today, we’re going to explore the ins and outs of finding and locating new SEO contacts for your SEO-related business, as well as delving into everything you need to know about contacting these potential new clients in the most productive and efficient way possible before securing the final deal.
Working on Your Own Company
As an SEO-specialist company, you’re going to expect that you want your own company to rank quite highly on the search engine results pages (SERPs), but there is only one top #1 spot. With this in mind, it’s important to take a look at your business to make sure you know exactly what you are and where you’re going to be looking for new clients.
However, as mentioned above, not every company can be at the top, so what are you supposed to do instead? For many of these consultancy businesses, the answer is through paid advertising, on either Google or social media, but that is not the only way how to find SEO Clients.
Nevertheless, the cost of these advertising projects against the return on investment isn’t great and can lead to major financial downfalls unless you’re smart and organized.
But, this is easier said than done. Below, we’re going to explore the many ways in which you can use the advertising and promotional channels that are available to you to boost your business, find the clients that you want to work for, in turn driving up your business traffic, your customer base and therefore your revenue.
Using Paid Advertising – SEO-Related Websites
Firstly, you’re going to want to check out business, SEO-related websites that help SEO consultancy businesses, such as yours, to promote themselves and link themselves with clients that are looking for search engine optimizations.
There is a broad range of businesses and websites out there that can help you with this, ranging from some of the more professional social media platforms to dedicated SEO websites, such as Moz, UKBusinessForums, DigitalPoint Forums and many more.
In essence, the process is simple. You’ll need to manually go through these websites looking for posts, comments and article listings that state that they are looking for similar SEO services that you are provided.
However, as you can see, this is an extremely manual way of doing things, and if you’re trying to expand your business, or focus your attention on more important areas of your business, this simply isn’t feasible. So, what can you do instead?
Find Your Leads with Bots and Social Media
As we previously discussed, making your way through potentially hundreds of posts and comments for clients is a long-winded and tedious task that doesn’t even guarantee to come up with any high-quality results.
However, using modern-day technology, more commonly referred to as ‘bots’, you can set up digital and automated preferences to scan social media websites, in this case, LinkedIn, for high-quality leads. This is far more effective than the method above and will generate far more business with much less effort.
For example, FollowerLike is another similar tool where you’ll be able to set up your personal preferences before moving on and letting your accounts automatically like, follow, unfollow, share and post with minimal effort on your behalf. If you’re looking for something LinkedIn specific, try looking into ProTop, another LinkedIn dedicated Chrome extension.
A Step-by-Step Guide to Using LinkedIn Helper Extension
In this post, we will show a step by step guide on how to find SEO clients using LinkedIn Helper extension
Please note, while there is a free trial available for this plugin, there is a payment plan when this expires. You can find the pricing terms and plans for the plugin here on their website.
Step #1 – Downloading the Bot
The first you need to do is to head over to the LinkedIn Helper Extension page. Please note that this bot is a Google Chrome browser extension and therefore you’ll need this browser for it to work. You can find the extension here.
The bot comes with a 1-week free trial that you can use to see whether the bot works for you before having to pay for the full service. Install the bot like you would any other extension by simply pressing ‘Add to Chrome’.
Once installed, you should see the little icon in the top right-hand corner of the screen within the Chrome browser.
Step #2 – Setting Up for LinkedIn
Now that you’ve installed the software, you’re going to want to make your way over to the LinkedIn website itself. As soon as you’re on the LinkedIn website, you’ll see a popup window appear on the bottom right-hand side of the screen.
Feel free to explore the tabs and the settings at your own free will to get used to where everything is and what the features do.
Step #3 – Setting Up Your ‘Connection Message.’
Now that you’ve done exploring and know your way around the extension, you’ll want to start thinking about setting up your connection message. As you might imagine, the connection message is a message that is automatically displayed when connecting with LinkedIn users.
As a few pointers when writing your connection message, you’ll want to make sure that it’s clear, direct and straight to the point as well as being concise. You can check this using free online tools like Easy Word Count or Citeitin.
You’ll also want to make sure that you make it very clear what services and value you can provide your potential clients, as well as making sure the potential client knows exactly who you are and what you want.
Any mystery that surrounds you as a business will simply cause the lead to dismissing you as spam. However, with these guidelines in mind, you’re also going to want to be creative and match the branding that your business has so you stand out from the crowd and are recognized as a business.
For more information on writing the perfect connection messages that get results, simply check out Essay Roo or State of Writing – online writing resources with all the information you need.
Step #4 – How to find SEO Clients
Now that everything has been set up, it’s time to start looking for clients for your business. To do this, all you need to do is to click on the ‘Collect 2nd contacts for inviting’ option in LinkedIn Helper, search the type of person you’re looking for such as ‘catering business’ or whatever industry you want to target and then refine your results by ‘people’ or ‘companies’. Utilizing B2B lead scraping tools can streamline the process of finding potential clients or searching for decision-makers on LinkedIn.
Step #5 – Sending Out the Message
Now that you’ve got a tonne of potential clients ready to message, simply click the ‘Connect’ button in the LinkedIn search results page and then click ‘Connect all in search’ within the LinkedIn Helper extension.
This will bring up a copy of your connection message so you can check it over to make sure that it’s perfect before sending and confirming the message.
It’s worth noting that there are several LinkedIn Helpers out there on the market, some paid, some are not. Some of these bots work for LinkedIn, some of them also work on other social media profiles such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google+.
And that is it, these are very simple steps on how to find SEO clients with LinkedIn Helper.
Building and Nurturing Relationships with Your Customers
Now that the messages have been sent, it’s time for you to really get to work as the leads start to get in contact with you and your business. However, if you’ve been messaging a lot of people, you’re going to need some help when it comes to building and, most importantly, maintaining these relationships.
Fortunately, there is another tool/service you can use to make this part of the process easy; Google Alerts.
In this section, we will take a look at how to find SEO clients With Google Alerts. You can set up notifications and track alerts to your leads so you can easily see what they’re up to and you can provide the best experience possible. You could track different and unique social media accounts, an email address, locational areas and even market trends in your industry.
It’s incredibly simple to set up a Google Alert by heading over the website and inputting the alert that you want to create, in this case, a LinkedIn profile. You can then customize your settings, so you’ll receive information whenever you want to any frequency and then save.
You’ll then receive an email whenever an alert is set off, helping you go above and beyond the call of duty and giving your clients the best experience your business can give.
Setting Up Meetings with Clients
Finally, since you’ve tracked down and been building relationships with your clients, it’s time to seal the deal and take this partnership to the next level. That means sending an email where you’ll be able to meet up with the client to discuss business.
So you don’t miss any opportunities, here are several tips you’ll need to know so you can write the perfect emails.
Firstly, you’ll want to make sure that your emails are clear, precise and straight to the point. If you try to include too much information into your emails, the client is just going to get confused and overwhelmed and won’t be interested in your services.
Instead, try emailing your potential client based on a few points. Start it politely with their name and then start a small first paragraph where you list the benefits and services that your SEO business provides. Then simply contain a small yet effective call to action, such as ‘Get in touch if you’re interested’ in closing off your email.
As you can see, this doesn’t need to be a complicated email. In fact, the simpler the email is, the more effective it will be. As a rule of thumb to remember, even the email you’re sending now is part of your customer experience, so you want it to be as effective and as great as possible.
With this in mind, put yourself in the shoes of your customers.
With the email that you first write, go through it and see how you would feel about reading through it if you received it yourself. Do you find yourself skipping sections because they are boring or too long? Is the email grabbing your attention or is it really misleading?
If you find your content negative, then so are your customers so make sure you re-read it several times to make sure that you’re creating and sending the perfect emails. You can also use copywriting services such as Grammarix and UK Writings for help with writing, editing and proofreading these initial emails.
When a Lead Says ‘Yes’
If all things go to plan, you should start to receive emails from your leads who are interested in your services, which means you’ll need to spend time creating a second return email. This is a follow-up email, and it’s vital to remember that you should never send this email is the lead fails to respond to your initial email.
Within the second email, you’ll want to include more information about your services, since you already know that the lead is interested in reading about them, as well as including a suggestion on a meeting time and date.
The keyword here is ‘suggest’ since you need to be giving the best customer experience and allowing them to pick a time that suits them. All the details can be ironed out at a later date since right now, all you want is for the lead to book a meeting where you can convert them in person into a client.
If you’re looking for more information on how to write the perfect email that can help you to set up and schedule a call, check writing tool websites such as My Writing Way or Boomessays as recommended on Huffingtonpost.
Back to you
After this process has been completed, it’s all down to you to have the meeting, sell your services and securing the contracts with the clients.
If you’re failing to see any results with this method, simply make adjustments to your emails, your connection messages and tweak the process here and there with the customer in mind the entire time. Or try other customer acquisition techniques.
Gloria Kopp is an SEO manager and a content marketer at Paper Fellows. She is an author of Studydemic blog for students. Gloria is a contributor at Semrush, Microsoft, etc.