I recently launched my own company and one service that I am offering is SEO, but how to do SEO for clients? Well, I am still working on that, but I am going to share a little story here. If you are not interested in SEO services this process is still interesting also for other online freelance jobs.
How to get SEO clients
I landed my first client after a few weeks after knowing I would start my own company. One thing is how to do SEO for clients, but how do you get clients? This specific client I got just by telling my surroundings that I am going to found my own company and that I will be offering SEO services.
Why did it work? Well, I think one important thing is, that the people I told it to have a great network and that they trust me. That is the foundation of every kind of relationship: TRUST. Also, for every potential client what I do is, analyze their website for free and give them a few inputs on what they can fix on their own. Then I have a meeting with them where I present the results and at the end, I offer them to do SEO with a fixed monthly fee.
In the next months I do want to expand my online presence and get to new customers through YouTube, Webinars etc.
How to analyze your SEO clients website
Well, of course, you are going to be using tools for that. There are many great tools out there that I am not using right now, but I will expand my toolset in the next month. Currently, I am only using Ubersuggest by Neil Patel.
It analyzes many aspects of a website. So, what I did is I added a new project for my client’s website and saw immediately what can be improved.
If you don’t want to pay for tools yet (I didn’t either in the beginning) and you are interested how to analyze a website in more detail, checkout the SEO checklist.
Page Speed
That’s the first thing I look at. If the page speed is poor, that’s not a good sign, but can be a quick win. I told my client to talk to the creator of the website and they improved the page speed together.
You can use Google PageSpeed Insight to check the speed of a website for free and the tool will also tell you exactly what you have to fix.
Backlinks
Then I saw that the website has already some backlink and that they organically grew during the last 12 months. This means it will take some work from me since the website is already popular and gets backlinks naturally.
This fact I also showed to the client and I got the feedback that they work together a lot with other individuals that link to the client’s website, perfect!
Which means a lot of contacts to get great backlinks from.
Keywords
The next thing I looked at was for which keywords the website already ranks. And it had over 500 keywords, but only a few low volume search keywords on the first page.
On-page SEO
This is one of the topics which I spend a lot of time on in the past years, and I immediately saw a lot of potentials, because the content wasn’t optimized. So, that’s what I started doing. Optimizing some content by researching better keywords and using the on-page SEO “rules”.
For more details checkout the OnPage SEO checklist.
New content
Now, this is the most interesting part. I did some research for possible keywords that could be interesting for my client and we found a perfect niche. So, we created new sites together with fresh content and after one month there are 3 new keywords on page 1 of Google!
How to keep SEO clients
Well, of course you will have to show that the money is worth it. I know many say you can’t promise results… BUT… My strategy is to only take clients were I know I will be able to bring results. I don’t promise it anyways, but show them! I am sorry, but if you can’t bring results, then this might not be the right path for you.
But of course there is much more to that. What I found in the end, is that business is just a part of life and the same things as in life count in the end. For me my values work very well! Communication and passion or my 2 main values and I believe it shows in all kinds of relationships.
The best SEO expert
That’s exactly what I am… NOT! I was always interested in SEO and I had a few little successes in the past years. Taking a client to do SEO for was a big step and a bit of a risk. BUT, I keep learning and researching every day! And I want my client to be successful, and after one month it showed, so I am very happy about that.
The message is, that if I can do it, you can do it too. You don’t have to be an expert, but you have to have the will to learn, to try and to put the effort in. Now with this specific client I already have a few upcoming projects and I am excited to do SEO for another client which deserves to be found 😉
Just wanted to share this little success story to motivate you out there 🙂
