Often times I’ll find myself pitching a person who is not even remotely technical for SEO services. I don’t do it anymore (frequently) as I’ve turned towards in-house projects. When we have space, we open ourselves to one or two client gigs. From a tattoo parlor to a full-blown hospital, I’ve pitched and converted dozens of small and mid-sized businesses.
The key of pitching, not only for SEO but for any given pitch, is to show the other person how can you get them what they want. To ease the case, most of the times(if not all), the thing they want is more money. So, in your case, you have to show your client that you can get money. In order to so, you’ll have to be clear in explaining what SEO is and how it is beneficial for businesses.
Now, I don’t know what other websites are suggesting in regards to this.
I’ll share here what has worked for me over the time.
How to Explain SEO to Client
To explain SEO to a non-technical client, you have to follow a three-fold approach:
| What do they do ? |
| How do You fit in ? |
| Pitch in their words |
1. What do they do?
It is important to learn what actually your client does. You want to know terms used in their business, how sales come and so on. You have to learn the words that they use in order to explain properly.
For example, if you are pitching a food startup, you should know what items do they make, where do they operate from, how far can they deliver (in case they do offer food delivery), and so on.
2. How will you fit in?
In order to persuade your client, you need to prove them that focusing on SEO can bring in more sales. Now, once you’ve understood their business, figure out how SEO fits into their business.
For example, in case of that food startup, you know that you can bring more sales by setting up a website and rank for keywords like “taco shops near me”, taco shops in Brisbane”, “best taco restaurant in Brisbane” and so on.
Now you know two things, what is their business, and how can SEO fit in their business.
3. Pitch, in their words
Now, for a food startup, they know how to make taco(assuming they do make tacos), but they don’t know how SEO is going to help them. Thereby, you have to fill in the blanks for them.
Figure out the monthly keyword search volume of the keywords you figured out in step 2.
When you go to the client, you have to tell how SEO works, not sell your service, tell how SEO works and how it will work in their field.
For example, Sir, taco shops in Brisbane has 1k monthly volume, which means 1,000 people lookup for it online every month. Now, since they are searching, this means that they want tacos, and you make tacos, which makes them your target audience. Since you are new, they don’t know the name of your restaurant. But what they do know is a taco. So, a total of 1k people search for it every month.
Like this, for every given search phrase, there are thousands of websites. So, search engines have to filter websites to display the best result. SEO is the strategies and tricks we use to get on the front page. If we do SEO for you, you’ll be able to get in front of that target audience and get more sales.
Usually, if you these 3 steps right, you’ll land on either of two questions:-
- How much money will it cost me?
- What do you do in SEO?
The answer to both of these differs from agency to agency so you’ll have to make up your own version of this.
How do I pitch?
Suppose you’re a company that produces hair fall preventing shampoo. Your target audience is people who have hair fall problems. Now, since you are a new company, they don’t search for your name, but they search for “how to reduce hair fall”. How to reduce hair fall has 12k searches monthly. These are the people that have hair problem and are looking for a solution.
Now, since there are thousands of blogs on this same topic, Google has to filter out in order to display the best results. In SEO, we form a strategy and set of tricks to get you on page 1. Now, assuming that you get on the first spot, you will get 4k monthly visitors on your website which are highly likely to purchase your shampoo. If you don’t have a website, I can even set it up for you.
Final Words
I hope that this article will help you in your next pitch. Remember, that my best bait, is offering them value as much as I can. No matter how good you pitch, if you don’t show those results in 1 month, they’ll not pay again.