We spend a lot of time discussing SEO tactics, but in a constantly changing industry, one thing that deserves more attention are the tactics agencies should employ in order to see success. From confidently raising your prices to knowing when to say no, Moz's own Russ Jones covers four essential success tactics that'll ultimately increase your bottom line in today's edition of Whiteboard Friday.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans. I am Russ Jones, and I can't tell you how excited I am for my first Whiteboard Friday. I am Principal Search Scientist here at Moz. But before coming to Moz, for the 10 years prior to that, I was the Chief Technology Officer of a small SEO agency back in North Carolina. So I have a strong passion for agencies and consultants who are on the ground doing the work, helping websites rank better and helping build businesses.
So what I wanted to do today was spend a little bit of time talking about the lessons that I learned at an agency that admittedly I only learned through trial and error. But before we even go further, I just wanted to thank the folks at Hive Digital who I learned so much from, Jeff and Jake and Malcolm and Ryan, because the team effort over time is what ended up building an agency. Any agency that succeeds knows that that's part of it. So we'll start with that thank-you.
But what I really want to get into is that we spend a lot of time talking about SEO tactics, but not really about how to succeed in an industry that changes rapidly, in which there's almost no certification, and where it can be difficult to explain to customers exactly how they're going to be successful with what you offer. So what I'm going to do is break down four really important rules that I learned over the course of that 10 years. We're going to go through each one of them as quickly as possible, but at the same time, hopefully you'll walk away with some good ideas. Some of these are ones that it might at first feel a little bit awkward, but just follow me.
1. Raise prices
The first rule, number one in Let's Make Money is raise your prices. Now, I remember quite clearly two years in to my job at Hive Digital — it was called Virante then — and we were talking about raising prices. We were just looking at our customers, saying to ourselves, "There's no way they can afford it." But then luckily we had the foresight that there was more to raising prices than just charging your customers more.
How it benefits old customers
The first thing that just hit us automatically was... "Well, with our old customers, we can just discount them. It's not that bad. We're in the same place as we always were." But then it occurred to us, "Wait, wait, wait. If we discount our customers, then we're actually increasing our perceived value." Our existing customers now think, "Hey, they're actually selling something better that's more expensive, but I'm getting a deal," and by offering them that deal because of their loyalty, you engender more loyalty. So it can actually be good for old customers.
How it benefits new customers
Now, for new customers, once again, same sort of situation. You've increased the perceived value. So your customers who come to you think, "Oh, this company is professional. This company is willing to invest. This company is interested in providing the highest quality of services." In reality, because you've raised prices, you can. You can spend more time and money on each customer and actually do a better job. The third part is, "What's the worst that could happen?" If they say no, you offer them the discount. You're back where you started. You're in the same position that you were before.
How it benefits your workers
Now, here's where it really matters — your employees, your workers. If you are offering bottom line prices, you can't offer them raises, you can't offer them training, you can't hire them help, or you can't get better workers. But if you do, if you raise prices, the whole ecosystem that is your agency will do better.
How it improves your resources
Finally, and most importantly, which we'll talk a little bit more later, is that you can finally tool up. You can get the resources and capital that you need to actually succeed. I drew this kind of out.
If we have a graph of quality of services that you offer and the price that you sell at, most agencies think that they're offering great quality at a little price, but the reality is you're probably down here. You're probably under-selling your services and, because of that, you can't offer the best that you can.
You should be up here. You should be offering higher quality, your experts who spend time all day studying this, and raising prices allows you to do that.
2. Schedule
Now, raising prices is only part one. The second thing is discipline, and I am really horrible about this. The reality is that I'm the kind of guy who looks for the latest and greatest and just jumps into it, but schedule matters. As hard as it is to admit it, I learned this from the CPC folks because they know that they have to stay on top of it every day of the week.
Well, here's something that we kind of came up with as I was leaving the company, and that was to set all of our customers as much as possible into a schedule.
- Annually: we would handle keywords and competitors doing complete analysis.
- Semi-annually: Twice a year, we would do content analysis. What should you be writing about? What's changed in your industry? What are different keywords that you might be able to target now given additional resources?
- Quarterly: You need to be looking at links. It's just a big enough issue that you've got to look at it every couple of months, a complete link analysis.
- Monthly: You should be looking at your crawls. Moz will do that every week for you, but you should give your customers an idea, over the course of a month, what's changed.
- Weekly: You should be doing rankings
But there are three things that, when you do all of these types of analysis, you need to keep in mind. Each one of them is a...
- Report
- Hours for consulting
- Phone call
This might seem like a little bit of overkill. But of course, if one of these comes back and nothing changed, you don't need to do the phone call, but each one of these represents additional money in your pocket and importantly better service for your customers.
It might seem hard to believe that when you go to a customer and you tell them, "Look, nothing's changed," that you're actually giving them value, but the truth is that if you go to the dentist and he tells you, you don't have a cavity, that's good news. You shouldn't say to yourself at the end of the day, "Why'd I go to the dentist in the first place?" You should say, "I'm so glad I went to the dentist." By that same positive outlook, you should be selling to your customers over and over and over again, hoping to give them the clarity they need to succeed.
3. Tool up!
So number three, you're going to see this a lot in my videos because I just love SEO tools, but you've got to tool up. Once you've raised prices and you're making more money with your customers, you actually can. Tools are superpowers. Tools allow you to do things that humans just can't do. Like I can't figure out the link graph on my own. I need tools to do it. But tools can do so much more than just auditing existing clients. For example, they can give you...
Better leads:
You can use tools to find opportunities.Take for example the tools within Moz and you want to find other car dealerships in the area that are really good and have an opportunity to rank, but aren't doing as well as they should be in SERPs. You want to do this because you've already serviced successfully a different car dealership. Well, tools like Moz can do that. You don't just have to use Moz to help your clients. You can use them to help yourself.
Better pre-audits:
Nobody walks into a sales call blind. You know who the website is. So you just start with a great pre-audit.
Faster workflows:
Which means you make more money quicker. If you can do your keyword analysis annually in half the time because you have the right tool for it, then you're going to make far more money and be able to serve more customers.
Bulk pricing:
This one is just mind-blowingly simple. It's bulk pricing. Every tool out there, the more you buy from them, the lower the price is. I remember at my old company sitting down at one point and recognizing that every customer that came in the door would need to spend about $1,000 on individual accounts to match what they were getting through us by being able to take advantage of the bulk discounts that we were getting as an agency by buying these seats on behalf of all of our customers.
So tell your clients when you're talking to them on the phone, in the pitch be like, "Look, we use Moz, Majestic, Ahrefs, SEMrush," list off all of the competitors. "We do Screaming Frog." Just name them all and say, "If you wanted to go out and just get the data yourself from these tools, it would cost you more than we're actually charging you." The tools can sell themselves. You are saving them money.
4. Just say NO
Now, the last section, real quickly, are the things you've just got to learn to say no to. One of them has a little nuance to it. There's going to be some bite back in the comments, I'm pretty sure, but I want to be careful with it.
No month-to-month contracts
The first thing to say no to is month-to-month contracts.
If a customer comes to you and they say, "Look, we want to do SEO, but we want to be able to cancel every 30 days." the reality is this. They're not interested in investing in SEO. They're interested in dabbling in SEO. They're interested in experimenting with SEO. Well, that's not going to succeed. It's only going to take one competitor or two who actually invest in it to beat them out, and when they beat them out, you're going to look bad and they're going to cancel their account with you. So sit down with them and explain to them that it is a long-term strategy and it's just not worth it to your company to bring on customers who aren't interested in investing in SEO. Say it politely, but just turn it away.
Don't turn anything away
Now, notice that my next thing is don't turn anything away. So here's something careful. Here's the nuance. It's really important to learn to fire clients who are bad for your business, where you're losing money on them or they're just impolite, but that doesn't mean you have to turn them away. You just need to turn them in the right direction. That right direction might be tools themselves. You can say, "Look, you don't really need our consulting hours. You should go use these tools." Or you can turn them to other fledgling businesses, friends you have in the industry who might be struggling at this time.
I'll tell you a quick example. We don't have much time, but many, many years ago, we had a client that came to us. At our old company, we had a couple of rules about who we would work with. We chose not to work in the adult industry. But at the time, I had a friend in the industry. He lived outside of the United States, and he had fallen on hard times. He literally had his business taken away from him via a series of just really unscrupulous events. I picked up the phone and gave him a call. I didn't turn away the customer. I turned them over to this individual.
That very next year, he had ended up landing a new job at the top of one of the largest gambling organizations in the world. Well, frankly, they weren't on our list of people we couldn't work with. We landed the largest contract in the history of our company at that time, and it set our company straight for an entire year. It was just because instead of turning away the client, we turned them to a different direction. So you've got to say no to turning away everybody. They are opportunities. They might not be your opportunity, but they're someone's.
No service creep
The last one is service creep. Oh, man, this one is hard. A customer comes up to you and they list off three things that you offer that they want, and then they say, "Oh, yeah, we need social media management." Somebody else comes up to you, three things you want to offer, and they say, "Oh yeah, we need you to write content," and that's not something you do. You've just got to not do that. You've got to learn to shave off services that you can't offer. Instead, turn them over to people who can do them and do them very well.
What you're going to end up doing in your conversation, your sales pitch is, "Look, I'm going to be honest with you. We are great at some things, but this isn't our cup of tea. We know someone who's really great at it." That honesty, that candidness is just going to give them such a better relationship with you, and it's going to build a stronger relationship with those other specialty companies who are going to send business your way. So it's really important to learn to say no to say no service creep.
Well, anyway, there's a lot that we went over there. I hope it wasn't too much too fast, but hopefully we can talk more about it in the comments. I look forward to seeing you there. Thanks.
Hi, Russ, Congratulations on your first Whiteboard Friday!
The old customers are important, they are the first ones who trusted us.
Increasing prices is the only option if you do not want to work too much and with low quality. Each person can work for a finite number of clients, if too many the results will be poor.
Charging more allows you to spend more time on projects.
You are right that the most important thing is the workers. With a good team you can touch the sky.
Selling tools with massive prices seems like a great idea. In fact, many agencies live on that.
But of everything you have said the most important thing I think it is to learn to say NO.That is something that nobody has taught us and because we do not know how to say it sometimes we do things that we do not like or that do not bring us benefits.
Great post!
Have a good weekend :)
Totally agree with the last point. Saying no is very difficult and very important to success at a time!
Hi Russ,
I've worked both agency and in-house (like many of us), so can see points from both sides.
The problem is, what you're saying is all good and well if you're good at what you do (which you obviously are). But applying those rules to a cowboy outfit could just end in more unassuming clients being exploited. Fine to raise prices if quality (and ideally quantity) of service improves, but not if it's just "let's make as much as we can and do the same work as before". Like you say, lack of regulation/certification means we're in an industry baked with abundant bull sh*t. In my experience, I have come across more low quality than high quality service providers.
Re month on month, from the client side, they don't want to be locked into a contract they can't get out of. As you know, no one really knows what it's like to work with someone until they actually start working, All the case studies, testimonials and meetings in the world cannot let a client understand what it's actually like to work with an agency until they get going.
For that reason, I think clients need to be able to pull the plug when they are not happy. They should obviously want to commit and invest in SEO (and that's so important to stick at it). But if you're stuck at it with cowboys and you have to keep paying them for doing sweet FA (or worse still, actually damaging your visibility and brand). All that to say - having a logical get out clause is essential and the client shouldn't be locked in for 6 or 12 months in my opinion. Find the right balance and show the client you're worth committing to, but don't force them to commit. You wouldn't want to keep paying for a builder to work on your house if you weren't happy with their work.
BUT, I agree with a lot of what you're saying ASSUMING the client is working with a good agency. I wrote this to help clients find good agencies: https://moz.com/ugc/34-questions-you-should-ask-be...
Have a good weekend.
Gill.
Thanks for your thoughts. Let me respond to a few...
> But applying those rules to a cowboy outfit could just end in more unassuming clients being exploited.
Sure, this assumes that the agency or consultant can take the extra funds and better their offering. This advice isn't meant for people who only intend to screw customers.
> they don't want to be locked into a contract they can't get out of.
Correct, so the contract should allow termination based on performance failures but not on an arbitrary date.
I'm client side but watch every whiteboard friday anyway...
From our (the clients perspective) we've learnt the value of your points:
1. Raising prices. If our agency is performing as we want, we would much rather pay more and stay with them. (Just don't tell them I said this :) )
2. Another thing our agency does well. For me, this has been essential 'ammunition' for when our CEO wants to know the results of our SEO efforts.
3. The expense of tools are hard to justify internally - if an agency provides them as 'part of the service', this makes their offering more attractive.
4. Please can all agencies listen to this! I think we (clients) all try this. "Whilst your on our site, please could you just.....". Agencies need to have the sense to say no, and explain how this distracts their focus on what's important. But now and then, if its a small one-off service they will do it as a favour which is different I think. And much appreciated.
Thanks Russ, interesting watch.
Thanks!
A very interesting article, I think is so useful to publish this kind of content, much of the user on this community works on agencies or work as Freelancers, so every info that helps to keep the business running and growing is very appreciated.
Agree Roman. And even for business owners like me, it's nice to know what a good agency should be doing, so we can analyse our suppliers and get better ones if that is the case.
Congratulations on your first WBF! Thanks for sharing this with us, I am not an agency but your whiteboard has been really useful, I think I might use some of your tips.
Great job!
Amen! Two things I will definitely recommend before you raise prices for existing clients is that you (a)create more touch points within the weeks ahead and (b) give the client enough notice. No client likes shock-treatment.
Agreed, but remember that discounting existing clients leaves you no worse off than you were before.
GREAT JOB!! I will add this comment for all the newbies. When you raise your prices, calculate loss of customers. If you have 20 customers paying $1,000 per month and you raise your prices to $1,600/ month... you might lose 6 customers. Always calculate about 20-30% loss. So you went from $20,000 per month to $19,200. I would prepare your customers in advance... 3-6 months so they can budget properly, get commitments before making that move so you can make $12,000 more per month and not end up with upset former clients and no $$ for the SEMRUSH upgrade :-)
It seemed totally counterintuitive at the time, but turning away potential clients that gave me an icky feeling (trust your gut!) and firing clients that were drains on my mental energy and time is what made the difference between staying stagnant and dramatic growth when I owned my small business. It took some very smart, unbiased colleagues providing outside perspective to give me the courage to start making a change, but when I did, it was extraordinarily positive - I was making more money, and I was happier.
Hey Russ,
Great advice I went through a long period of turning away clients without always talking the time to point them in the right direction. I really regret that, because anyone to take the time to reach out to you can be very helpful in the future. We are the people that should shepard clients just like any other business, if you’re not the best fit you should tell them who might be. I like how you brought up honestly I personally believe that while people can make money being dishonest that integrity will always pay off in the long term and your can live with yourself.
I look forward to seeing you at MozCon next month.
Hi Russ, thanks for sharing your 1st WBF.
At my company I get more reasons to raise money, it helps me grow my overall company performance and clients trust. Yeah sometimes I have loosed my loyal customers because of high prices but fortunately they came back to us. I hope this old customers discount idea will help me out.
I had faced a lot with these month-to-month contracts, we create full strategies, planning and suddenly they say we are done with this much. Saying NO to them will be the best decision. Sorry if that would hurt anyone’s sentiment.
Hey Russ,
Congratulations on your first WBF!
Telling our client that we are saving them $ really helps. We have tried this before and it really helped us to make the client feel that we are going good and they can rely on us for their busines growth online.
Further, saying NO to a client is always the hardest thing. But the Just Say No section of this post actually made me think that every company must follow this rule. It would actually help us gain the trust of the client.
Thank You for such a great post Russ! :-)
Russ - great WBF! Honestly, probably one of my favorite top 5 Whiteboard Fridays ever! Appreciate your insight since you've both been an exec at a successful agency, and on the software side.
This consulting/services/agency economics theme is sorely lacking for content in the industy, so hope to see more on this from you and Moz!
Great post I agree with the 'service creep' section have to deal with it like every 3rd customer.
The timing of this video is just perfect for me. I am getting ready to make some changes after a year of month to month contracts, heavily discounted prices and service creep.
I thought it was a great video all round and hope to see you doing more in the future.
Hi, Russ!
Thanks for today's Whiteboard Friday. I work at an agency and learned a couple of new things from the client perspective. I'm editing my SEO client welcome email to include the points about the tools we use and will do a little refining.
Keep up the good work!
I personally love your ‘just say no section’ - I completely agree. I’ve always been in the mindset that you need to get clients to sign up for a minimum of 6/12 months which is a bloody hard task and even more so when you have to give them the same ‘it’s a long term strategy’ talk every week. Therefore no lock in contracts makes life much more pleasant. If they don’t have the patience to wait for results and believe in your skills, their loss
Nice work, Russ!
I agree with estentor, that "learn to say now" was the most important thing.
It allows you to spend maximum time doing what you are good at. Maximum time doing the most profitable things. It helps you avoid some task delegating that employees don't want to do. Makes it easier to go to work because you know that we "don't do windows". (This applies to all types of work, not just SEO.)
And... there was another best part. Your graphics on the whiteboard were kickass. Reminds me of the kind of typography that should be put into a kickass webpage.
Looking forward to seeing you on WBF again soon.
E
Hi Russ - Congrats on your first Whiteboard Friday! I'm on the agency side and your thoughts on tools hit home.. We've always kept the tools we use close to the vest. I was surprised to hear that you would use them as part of your sales process. We'll add that to our sales calls. Thanks for the great idea.
Great WBF Russ Jones,
Just loved all 4 rules you share! Let's Make Money$$$$
Thanks for all your feedback, honestly for sometime due to high competition I even did some of the tings you mentioned we shouldn't as SEO consultant, but not anymore...! Say NO is more valuable than being silent and keep degrading our values.
Cheers
Ankit
That part when you say what has do be done Annually, Semi-annually, etc is a fantastic peace of content! I am not an SEO agency, I'm a business owner, but even for me it's useful so I can schedule better what I should be doing and how often! Thanks for the content!
Excellent read. I hit share and I don't do that often!
Great contribution Russ.
Hi Russ, absolutely great WBF! Although we're not an agency but I can subscribe to your advice of being honest and helpful with customers. Redirecting to somebody else rather than turning down customers is the best strategy in my view, too!
These are all great points!!
Can't wait until your next Whiteboard. :)
Meaningful suggestion mr.Russ jones. Definitely we follow your instruction. We hope which lead us to reach our target goal destiny. It really helpful article.
Hi Russ,
Thank you very much for this Whiteboard, really useful.
It was really nice to see the Schedule part you suggested, thanks!
I actually had a similar situation with your last example. I had a friend who came to me for help on 3 diferent requests (1 SEO tech audit, 2 GA Insights reporting and GA technical implementation). I am good on the first 2 points but not a pro on the technical requirements that needed to be done for her GA technical implementation, so I recommended somebody I knew for that piece of job.
The following year she got a job as a head of Marketing in a really good company and she asked me to do few jobs for her.
I think is very important to build trust with your clients and being honest but obviously on a good way and with respect.
Great content, Thank you very much!
Hey Russ Jones,
Really interesting topic " Lets Make Money"
It will help me out with my exiting client & inhouse project
Excellent discussion of how to make more money in consulting, whether SEO or other disciplines. I'm sharing this with my marketing consultant clients. Thanks.
Nothing happening since last year on my carving wooden furniture site with the back links and all strategies are failed. I am not getting enough Results for my business after a l lot of work. Can you please let me know where I am wrong
Nice video with cool t-shirt. I want to download it.
Well written and detailed enough explaining the important points. Unless you charge enough you cannot afford to make investments in tools or furthering your knowledge because all that costs money and it has to be funded by the return from your work. Secondly certain things like link profiles of competitors can be got only from paid tools.
In a lot of other things paid tools simplify your work and provide you with much greater detail than possible with free tools.
Hello,
congratulations to expose this tactic. Maybe it works, I would try to lower the price and get more customers, total more benefits.
This was a great read! Speaking to 'Service Creep' and 'Not Turning Away Opportunities'...strategic partnerships have helped us fill in these gaps significantly!
Build a portfolio of resources of the inevitable services your clients will want in addition to what you provide and you'll not only add more money to your bottom line, you'll accomplish the biggest goal which is keeping your client happy and inside your sphere of influence.
I recommend this article to all webmasters out there. My website revenue has improved tremendously as a result of applying every content of this article. Thank you Ross Jones
It seems that as long as you are doing a decent enough job that raising rates shouldn't be a bid deal to those clients who have been benefiting the most from your hard work. Sure some clients may not like it, but if you prep them ahead of time and deliver something "new" then the price is worth it to them. One way we have gotten around this pain point in the past is by setting up specific goals that trigger a larger investment at a specific date.
For example, we might calculate that a client will earn X by a certain date. Of course we cannot guarantee, but we can do projections based on really good data. Once we have our metrics to hit (not necessarily KPIs), then we will have earned enough revenue for that company to invest further into their campaign. So we literally write it in our contracts and structure our billing around it, FTEs, and Performance Goals.
simple, practical and always on point! 12 mins of gold while watching!
For seo webmastars never take monthly contracts, as seo takes uncertain time so we help our clients to take our seo campaign so that they dont have to worry on long terms of waiting time thus we also offer them monthly reporting but sometimes they get offended as it may takes more time for newer domains as it take a lot time to get authority in eyes of google and compete with ranked websites, as it depends on the competition of the campaign as well. For older websites it only takes on-page and a couple of months of link building but it gives you pain of there past technical seo to be corrected and 404s. This whiteboard friday helped us to improve our pitch to clients. Double thumbs up from Us. Keep Going.
Thanks Russ! Great hearing your perspective!
Great! We should call ourselves algorithm hacker and share our tactics insight to expose. I would like to try for more benefits.