In this week's Whiteboard Friday I talk about pitching SEO to potential clients and employers. This post describes the common elements that unite the successful pitches I have witnessed and describes how you can use them to your advantage. Also, I shaved my beard and now look like a 12-year-old boy. (I don't recommend that as a pitch tactic.)
Video Transcription
Hello, Mozzers. My name is Danny Dover. I do SEO here at SEOmoz. Today
for Whiteboard Friday, I'm going to tell you about something that I think
is extremely important, and you should, too. Pitching SEO. By pitching
SEO, I mean presenting the idea of SEO to either potential clients or to
potential employers. So when I am giving this pitch, I have a few key
points I make, and then I'm going to go through a couple of rebuttals that
people usually make back to me.The first key point that I make, and I always, always do this because it is
very important, is to acknowledge the snake oil salesman. SEO is an
industry where there are a lot of people who just kind of suck. They do a
very poor job of service and it makes the entire industry look bad. So,
you need to acknowledge those people exist so that the person who is
hearing the pitch takes into consideration what you are saying. You're
acknowledging that, yes, they are correct. But there is also this
alternative that they might now know about. My favorite way of doing this
is you just acknowledge it and then explain why, what proof you have to
show that is not how you do your service, be it past clients or
testimonials or actual data you can show from your results. I prefer the
latter if possible.Number two. Strategies are easy but tactics are hard. A lot of times when
I am explaining SEO, I will come into contact with someone who is like,
"Oh, yeah, I get it. You've got to build links and content." They're
absolutely right. That's correct. That's what you have to do. But what
they are talking about are strategies. Bigger ideas. Building content,
that is just a broad idea. The actual content you write and the way you do
it and the way it is formatted, those are tactics.In SEO, I think that the strategies are easy. They are easy to comprehend.
They're big and they make intuitive sense. But the tactics are hard. My
favorite example of this is URL rewrites. The idea is yes, we're going to
make all the URLs go from here to here. It turns out that doing that can
be very, very troublesome, and you run into lots and lots of side cases
just like anything you do with programming. So, I always try to
acknowledge that yes, the strategies are easy, but you are going to
probably want a specialist so that you make sure you nail all your tactics.Number three. PPC and SEO equals the top of the conversion funnel. To be
completely honest, there are other things at the top of the conversion
funnel as well. There's email. There's direct traffic. There are lots of
other things. The two that I focus on are PPC and SEO. PPC is pay per
click, which is the ads you pay for in search engines and elsewhere and SEO
being search engine optimization, of course.These are both tops of the funnel. So, you can either chose to pay on an
ongoing basis for PPC and get some traffic that way, or you can do it
through SEO and if you adhere to best practices, it can be free for you.
Just learn how to do it once, continue with the best practices, and it
costs you no money. The nice thing about this is that, while 90% of
budgets go to PPC, only 10% of clicks go there. The reverse of that is
only 10% of budgets approximately go to SEO, but 90% of clicks from users
are going to organic results and search engines. Huge opportunity here and
if you do it right, it won't cost you a dime.The next one, rebuttals. When I am giving this pitch, there are a couple
of responses I get from people that I think are very genuine and they make
a lot of sense. These are the rebuttals they give, and then how I help
deconstruct that a little bit.The first one being SEO takes too long. They are absolutely right. SEO
does take a long time. The way I break down SEO in my head is into
popularity, which is links, and relevancy, which is onsite, although there
is an element of links in that too. I'll write a little bit more about
this in the blog post below. The idea being that SEO takes too long.
That's true, but not for on page. If you want to just do on page
optimizations, you can have a lot of opportunity to boost traffic quickly.
Just do on page to start with. Another trick like that is just installing
a site map if they don't have one. I've seen that this is easy to do. You
can have an automated generator do it. Submit it to the engines, and within
a week or so you'll see results on that assuming they've never had one
before and other variables are not acting awry.Number two, it will happen organically. This is one of my favorites.
People will say, "Oh yeah, we're building links anyway. There's variety in
our content. We have professional writers. So it's just going to happen
organically." That is not true. I thought the same thing with my dating
life. Yeah, it will just happen organically. No, it's not happened
organically. Same thing with SEO. You can try to do all these things, but
unless you have some focus, some actual goals, and some plans, it's just
not going to happen. Search engine optimization, you're not optimizing
anything. You're just letting it happen. So by putting in just a little
bit extra effort, you can get a lot more results. That's usually what I
use there.The last one is, "I'm too busy." That's something I can totally
understand. Learning SEO is a complicated process. But, it turns out you
can have other people do this for you. If you are trading it for money,
you can just pay someone to do a little bit on it, SEO for you, do an SEO
audit, and give you some recommendations. Or you can trade, you can do
some bartering or something else. You can just make it happen. So, yes,
being busy is an excuse, but not with the potential there is to make a lot
of money with SEO and a lot of conversion on that.That's all the time I've got today. I appreciate all of you paying
attention, or some of you. Not that guy. I appreciate it, and I'll talk
to you next week. Bye.
Video transcription by SpeechPad.com
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If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!
Here are some few other tips:
1. Look excited but not needy.
Be excited while delivering a sales pitch. This shows that your are genuinely interested in the project. However don't look needy. Things don't look right then and element of disbelief creeps into the client's mind. "Why he is so desperate huh ???"
2. Do your homework first
Do some research about the client's personalty, business, industry and products. This help in building credibility as it shows you took the time to research and are really serious about the project. In this way you can give the client what he wants and can better engage with him.
3. Learn to shut up
When the client starts to talk about his requirement, its time to shut your mouth and listen. Often sales people cut off the client and continue their sales pitch. As a result the client doesn't get his answer and the sales doesn't take place.
4. Deliverables first, budget later
"What is your budget?". Don't start your conversation with this question as you haven't discussed project deliverables yet. It is a fire shot wat to put client off at the very begining. You first discuss project deliverables and then justify your budget.
I'm totally agree with you seo-himanshu. Specially with "Learn to shut up" and "Do your homework".
It's important to know what the client wants first, then, you can convince him the better way to do that.
I'm totally agree with you seo-himanshu. Specially with "Learn to shut up" and "Do your homework".
It's important to know what the client wants first, then, you can convince him the better way to do that
Learn to shut up
Really good advice Himanshu. The number of sales that have been made then undone by continuing to talk is huge (he sadly says speaking from experience)
As usual, a very good feedback with additional tips himanshu. Doing some homework about the client will really help a lot. It will convince the clients and will create a trust and confidence over the sales people.
"Learn to shut up" is really very important, which sales people often forget to do. But I would rather put the line this way, "Learn to listen". :)
Great tips again!
Number 3. Learning to shut up is the most important we have found. Proving that the client does not know anything or we know more is not only counter productive but can be veiwed as arrogance instead of confidence.
I like to talk about the budget in the middle of the sales cycle to see if the client is delusional about what they think SEO etc is worth.
"That is not true. I thought the same thing with my dating life. Yeah, it will just happen organically. No, it's not happened
organically." LOL....great dating advice today Danny.
That one made me laugh a lot too :)
That part was very funny! :-)
The rest was not funny at all, but very interesting. ;-)
I will add some of these in my SEO sales pitch. Thanks Danny!
1. The US landscape must be quite different to the UK, maybe due to the different historical context of growth of online businesses
I wouldnt bring up anything to do with snakeoil salesman if I had only X amount of time to pitch. For me thats an issue to address only if its brought up or if you specifically know that your customers have had problems in the past.
2. I sympathise on the dating front. Its obvious we need an industry wide marketing initiative to promote how sexy SEOs are. (Although your new Justin Beiber look may help you a bit...)
3. I am really surprised to hear the "seo is free" line from seomoz, I didn't realise you guys were a charity. By that logic, CRO is free, design is free and development is free.
Every SEO click costs you money, just like every PPC click costs you money. The cost just happens to be distributed differently.
S
Oh dear god...
This shouldn't surprise you too much. Our business model is to give the information away for free and charge for the tools. For us it seems like both the right thing to do (help people learn how to achieve online success) and an interesting business.
danny, i think that stephen was making a different point. SEO is not free, it just has much higher margins than PPC.
if you make SEO best practices a pervasive part of marketing, product management and web development processes, then you should realize gains in organic search traffic, and the overall ROI on effort expended vs. traffic and conversions should be very good.
but to stephen's point, the costs are distributed differently, and they can be significant. working with the product management and engineering teams as a new product is being built, and ensuring that the product is built according to SEO best practices, can be very expensive up front.
We have looked into the issue with folks having trouble loading the video. It appears that there may have been a minor issue with caching on our content delivery network that was affecting a small percentage of users in certain geographic locations for this specific video.
We believe that we have resolved the issue and that the video should be loading correctly for everyone now. Please let me know if you are experiencing any other issues.
I think the point about on-site being relatively quick is important. Even if the links aren't there to rank well on the most competitive terms, research and onsite work can usually deliver high rankings in niche words very quickly.
For the bigger picture and long-term effort, it's a double edged sword. Yes, it can take a long time to get to the top. However, that also means that once you are at the top it will be hard for competitors to knock you off unless you do something stupid.
For financial oriented types, I like to explain PPC as an expense and SEO as an asset. SEO is no different than buying an office building.It takes a while to fix it up and get it the way you want it, but once done it will just require some maintenance to keep it serving you well for years to come.
I like to explain PPC as an expense and SEO as an asset. SEO is no different than buying an office building
Really nice way to explain it dvansant. Mind if I steal it? ;-p
Do I have a choice ;-)
Have fun with it. Just be aware that if you are speaking to a non-finance person, they may look at you like you have three heads.
Nice, ill be using that too
PPC can be a quick way to get the phone to ring. Most small businesses don't care if it is PPC or SEO. We bundle this in to our monthly fee to make explaining it easier.
Danny, you viedos are certainly getting better. Your style of presentation is becoming more professional and you've worked on your handwriting for the whiteboard! It's legible! Huzzah!
One thing I'm not sure I agree with:
"If you want to just do on page optimizations, you can have a lot of opportunity to boost traffic quickly."
I think this is only going to be the case if you work in a particular niche, this won't be the case if your site/product/service operates in a mass market. What it can help with in the immediate term though is possibly local search (if that's relevant to your business model) and most probably your CRO. If you sort out your on page copy then at least the traffic you do get is going to be more likely to convert (however you set your conversions).
Apart from that it was very useful, particularily the rebuttal part of the video. Always interesting to hear how others answer the "yeah, but..." questions.
Hey Bludge,
Thanks for the encouragement. I still am working on improving these. Specifically I want to improve the audio, my presentation style (less "ugh"s) and more professionalism (but not too much!) better camera usage and clearer language. So thanks for your patience and I look forward to getting better.
With regard to:
I disagree here. While external factors are extremely important, In my experience, I have always been able to get quick wins by improving on-page keyword targeting and internal linking. This has been true for big clients and small clients across a wide variety of niches.
I think on-page optimization is especially useful when a client has indexation problems. If a few changes to keyword targeting and url structure can get more pages indexed and in the SERPS, you can definitely see quick improvements to rankings.
Debunking "it will happen organically" makes great sense. I love the mistaken belief that organic search traffic will 'organically' grow through word of mouth and happenstance link building.
If it happens "organically" then why hasn't it yet. I love the myth, because it assumes the competition is just sitting on their hands. I always remind people that this is a dynamic battle, you have to be better than they are, and that comes from strategy and execution.
Isn't there also a snowball effect? At some point unsolicited momentum is picked up in the best sites. But totally agree that the best way to start an avalanche is by making it happen yourself, anything else is just wishful thinking.
Video not working here in Minnesota either. The videos must be on the same server as the new web app. HEYO! Just kidding SEOmoz... you know I love you (and WB Fridays and the new web app). Can't wait to see a beardless Danny when the video is back up.
The strategies and goals are nice and lofty, but I agree. The effort had to be there whether or not it rests with one person or a team.
Hi everyone
Video here (Spain) works perfectly. I like the post
Video worked for me in Vancouver, Canada :-) Nice, easy, well thought out SEO pitch Danny. In my experience, what you say makes perfect sense to me. :-)
And they wonder just why SEO is costly... some clients can be a bit annoying
What I hear allot is "SEO Consultants are too expensive" (although I charge considerably less. I approach this with explaining th benefits and how it will save them time.
Pitching SEO is a HUGE hassle.
Loving the idea of acknowledging the snake oil salesman, going to pass that on to the sales guys at work.
It's weird not seeing a beard.
Excellent topic to talk about, Danny! This is hard sometimes to explain to customers...And I have to say that's very important for the not english native speakers to put ALL the text of the video. I celebrate this idea ;)
Im looking into the Abyss here
Very useful resource and so true. Thanks for posting.
Hey Danny,
Cool post I like the 90/10, 10/90 numbers that would really get someone thinking and concentrating on seo.
Hopefully by the time I get home from work the vid will be fix and can have a good laugh at your baby face :)
Have a good weekend everyone.
Nice post, I like your comment about strategy versus tactics. It is sometimes hard to convince potential clients that realizing good quality links takes effort, time and planning.
The video gives a black screen, just like others comment earlier. I'm from Tilburg, Netherlands and it gives 'waiting for distillery.wistia.com...
Hey….who turned the lights out?
Straight to Friday afternoon beers for me :-)
Win? :-p
OK so I went into tools in chrome and cleared the cache and refreshed the page and its now working, for anyone still having trouble.
nice video.
and i also got some ideas from yr video
Thanks.
A great post/video, but I believe you forgot something, a really important part.
Never, never, never use SEO language, without explaining it to the person.
If you will speak about CTR, long tail and black hat, you will be like a person speaking Slovenian to a British guy.
What I do is always use the "seo term" and right afterwards explain it in simple terms.
"With this, you will get more long-tail traffic, that means, more visitors to your website, that will use three or more words as a keyword that they enter into google. With that you will get a more broad range of visitors, and more possible buyers"...
I always use the "seo term" just to show that I know what I speak about and if the person has possibly heard/read about seo, he/she could get the meaning.
Something like this...
Great Point! I sometimes forget I am not talking to you guys but a client who knows very little about SEO. I heard a while back about an SEO firm (can't remember which) who would ask thier potiential SEO architects to, " Explain SEO to me like I am your 90 year old grandmother."
thanx for sharing!!
Very actionable tips that I'll be incorporating. One thing I overlook doing and the biggest takeaway is addressing the snakeoil salesmen first. I work with companies who have wasted money on bad SEO, and their opinions and budgets often eaffect their willingness to full commit to SEO as part of their culture. Addressing this head on would help.
And what about your dating life, Danny?
I didn't have some of the same trouble other's did watching this Video but I went over the note posted quickly. I like the pitch and yes SEO field is still covered with lots of snake oil sales people. I'm not a sales guy by trade or interest for that matter, but I do enjoy pitching to prospects once the various pre-qualification steps have been taken. Being involved in the process keeps me on my toes because while the prospect may need SEO or SEM 101, you'll need to go above and beyond that to stand out amongst the vendors you're competing with. The trick with pitches is going big but remaining realistic; focusing more on strategy and less on tactics; and following through after the initial pitch. I like to think I'm getting better at all of these things, but I certainly have room for improvement.
Excellent Post. This willreally help to pitch the client in a great way.
I would like to add 1 more point here that, Analyse the client bacground i.e. Whats his business, Whats his area of expertise/interest. Few days back,I had a chance to deal with a client who is very much interested in stats & analytics data & hence standard analysis report didn't worked with him. I felt, SEO Analysis report with some stats (in termsof mesurable outcomes)could have turned this into the deal. So, Lesson learnt was "Know your client before pitching the SEO"
Great post. The Pitching is same as you do when you develop some campaign from agency perspective, you need to know what is client problem and what is solution to help them.
Danny!!!
Thank you for this. We run into #2 all the time. Strategies are easy but tactics are hard. Can't tell you how many times we've heard
"Well it's just writing copy and building links right. Any intern can do that, right?"
Wrong.
Best,
BRLM
Great general tips for creating an SEO sales pitch. I think one of the most important parts of a sales pitch, however, is to personalize your presentation to your client's needs. As someone posted above, a financial advisor may have different needs than a web developer, etc. Know what your (potential) client's needs are, and use your time wisely to appeal to all of their needs/concerns.
thanx for sharing!!
Good Video!Strategies vs Tactics was a good thought. I think I might expand on this. I've learned SEO from you guys and a few other top sources as well as some experimentation over the years but sales has always been my core specialty.
Great post. Now I have some ammo to walk into the bosses office with. But perhaps I should leave my bottle of snake oil at home tomorrow.
The most efficient way to sell you services to a local or nationwide company I have found is to use a good formula that paints a picture in the clients mind. Allowing them to fill in the ROI blanks. Generally I give potential ROI however lead the conversation to a way where their own knowledge of the Internet can expand the possible opportunities of growth. By allowing the customer to relevant knowledge to imagine the power of possibility and leave the actual results to their imagination you can create a potential sale in their mind instead of mine.
I try to always let them sell there self’s.
Collin McAdams
https://www.pr-releases.whitelistmarketingfirm.com
I am unable to see the video?
Would love to see it
Great video really worthy.
Very Informative, I liked the section Strategies are easy however Tactics are hard, with so much information available on the internet clients think that just by adding content / blog and making links can rank them however the effort needs to go in the right direction.
Leon
https://www.unbglobal.net
Thanks for this great post...this is helpful for anyone working directy with SEO clients. It's amazing the amount of misinformation that is out there...either they think you are indeed the snake oil salesman and don't trust you at the beginning, or that you have all the answers and are going to triple their business overnight with some keywords.
Patience is important as well. Proof is in the pudding, so they say, so thoughtful, strategic, professional SEO will produce results, and happy clients!
Thanks for this great post...this is helpful for anyone working directy with SEO clients. It's amazing the amount of misinformation that is out there...either they think you may indeed be the snake oil salesman and don't trust you at the begining, or that you have all the answers and are going to triple their business overnight with some keywords.
Patience is important as well. Proof is in the pudding, so they say, so thoughtful, strategic, professional SEO will produce results, and happy clients!
Thanks Danny, true advice. I have used some of them and they work. You need to build trust first, you need to show you are not going to rip-off your potential client´s money. Show them some initial tips on how they can do it initially, that´s a great start.
Really good post. Convincing clients that seo takes time has always been the tricky part.
Video is also not working for me. I'm from the Netherlands and also it says "waiting for distillery.wistia.com".
You said that
"it will happen organically. This is one of my favorites. People will say........That is not true. I thought the same thing with my dating life. Yeah, it will just happen organically. No, it's not happened organically. Same thing with SEO. You can try to do all these things, but unless you have some focus, some actual goals, and some plans, it's just not going to happen."
will you please explain, how can we organize or any special spell that can be realy effective.
Hi Danny,
Very good one. I am fortunate, that the video worked very well for me. Good tips and ideas shared. The most difficult thing, I have ever felt in seo is convincing my clients and making them understand. It is not an easy task for everyone, and it differs a lot between various clients.
I liked your #2 advice. "Strategies are easy but tactics are hard". That is absolutely true Danny. When the tactics are properly excecuted, it beomes an easy task.
Good one. Thanks for the advice.
Great video Danny. All very true and good ideas about hitting the rebuttals up front.
By the way, don't be so hard on yourself about the beard. You look AT LEAST 14 :)
I am not sure if anyone wants to chime on this. I started working for a large real estate company in there corporate office (just graduated UCLA) :), and have had some really successful SEO campaigns in just a few months where I was able to achieve number 1 ranking for over 5 3-4 word keywords and rose are traffic about 1500% (it was very low when I started) for our California site.This was all done with the help of SEOMOZ and a little bit of outsourcing....:) Also 80% of our traffic is now from the search engines.
We just hired a new VP who is very against spending money/time on SEO because he thinks it's not worth trying to compete with the huge companies IE Remax where the majority of searches go. We are also a franchise system so he thinks our individual shops should spend money on online marketing for their respected areas.
I completely disagree with him of course and I think it's out job to increase brand awareness and drive traffic to our site and to our franchisee's sub-sites on our domain. However, I do agree that the individual franchisee's should also spend money on SEO/PPC (pref. hire me). Does anyone have any advice on how to approach this.
I'm currently making a presentation and using some of the parts of this presentation and the free charts from SEOMOZ. Our company just started expanding in the US as we are primarily based in Europe. 1500% growth is based on the fact we only had 30-40 visitors a day for our california subdomain.
Since no on one replied I'll reply to myself.
While the big competitors will usually dominate the short tail keywords the majority of the traffic goes to long tail keywords (I believe 70% according to Experian/Seomoz) and the conversion rates are also much higher. So I think gathering as many long tail keywords relevant to your industry is actually most valuable than focusing on the extremely competitive short-tail keywords.
-seomozer in training
Sometimes the HIPPO (highest paid persons opinion) is the only one that matters. Trying to convince them SEO is the best for them may be futile. Since you just graduated it might be better to start your own deal instead of fitting in with a potentially backward thinking company. Just my humble opinion.
Still not working for me in Malta :(
Craig,
When you say it isn't working, what do you see? Do you see a video player with a play button, do you just see black, or do you see a white blank spot?
I have a play button and when pressed in just stays black.
That seems to indicate that the video asset is not loading for you. If you had tried to view it when there was a problem, your browser may have cached a bad response.
If you try to view the post in a different browser, does it work correctly for you?
Cleared the cache in tools and now ok, Thanks
video is now working in Minneapolis. Great video this week - too many people ignore the value of SEO because of the commitment it takes. It may not be instant but it's a great 'bang for the buck' marketing strategy.
I'd be loving the irony if this was a post about Video SEO, but I kind of think we've established it's not a location specific reason why it's not working!
Years ago, I joined this web team and the first issue we needed to solve was why the ecommerce site wasn't visible in about 3 US states.
Weird.
So what was the solution Mike?
The short answer was that the backbone was filtering out a range of IPs. Never got into exactly why or how that happened but letting those IPs through solved the problem.
woohoo! working now,
cheers!
Hi Danny
Its not working for me either, its just a blank black screen, it wont play at all. Hope you get it fixed soon
Nice take on this very important part of running an SEO practice, Danny!
Liked it all -- especially the small "aside" where you noted that providing data - ie real serps for real clients (with no NDA 'course) is one of the best ways to show that you aint' no snake-oil salesman!
:)Jim
No go for the video in Toronto :( I'll check back later.
Video not working in Scotland. :(
quite intrested to see this as well ¬_¬
It`s definitely a tough sell to some clients if they are set on using PPC and I suppose it is only natural for them to think it`s a better option due to the time difference on results. PPC can turn results round pretty quickly however, as one comment pointed out only 10% of clicks may come from a result from PPC. Its a quick easy option to see a fairly immediate return and people choose this because there is no real risk with it whereas with SEO it does take time. It is absolutely critical that SEO is sold correctly so they know exactly what they sign up for and to manage expectations as well as there are no guarantees but with a bit of time and patience, the SEO rewards will be greater than PPC and will probably end up being more valuable. As SEO grows I would expect its popularity to extend to more and more businesses.
Danny, I could really use the advice...this is a terrible teaser
Not working in Memphis, Tn Either.
Not working yet in Minneapolis, MN. :(
Doesn't work here in Italy...
Can you be more specific? What doesn't work in Italy?
Unfortunately the video is not working for me either(London) but the post is great, thanks!
Nothing for me either.
Why not upload these to youtube as well? Then we can avoid this common event of all the players you are trying out not working
S
Video not working here either (Spain 10.15 CET)
I really like this post. I've faced the same arguments from my potential clients and I've used simillar approaches addressing them. Very nice to see this in an organized format. Thanks Danny.
I enjoyed the rebuttals section. It is always nice to hear how someone else overcomes the objections we all have (or will) encounter.
Too bad SpeechPad.com costs so much.
Can you do a post on video transcribing service options?
Thanks!
Video is working on me. I am in the Philippines.
To those not working videos maybe it has problem with plugins on your browser.
@Danny that is really awesome, short discussion but too broad ideas. I really like it.
I love read about your stuff and some basic fundamentals of SEO state of minds...but unfortunately I cant see your video...I am using mozilla/Ubantu Linux...
May be you are missing some plugins for your browser. Try installing the plugins for firefox and I hope that will work. It worked for me.
Hi danny
Video is not working, When we click on play nothing loads only black screen appears
Excellent post. I have been working in SEO for a few years and just decided to go into business for myself. So far so good, but posts like this are just priceless. Thanks a lot.
Congrats on making the jump! Best of luck :-)
Curious - where did you get the stat, "while 90% of budgets go to PPC, only 10% of clicks go there"?
It's probably over simplified to get the point across to a client, but many studies suggest organic results tend to attract around 70-75% of all clicks while the vast majority of a companies marketing budget is spent on PPC.
It's certainly true with some of my clients, however one or two have seen the light and realised a greater investment in SEO produces fantastic results.
Hey Jben,
Check out https://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-dominate-your-brand-search-engine-result-page#jtc118213 for more info!
Hey Danny,
You mentioned using automatic XML sitemap generators, do you have any that you would recommend? Ideally, I am looking for something that would update on a daily basis or as new content is created.
Most major CMS platforms have extensions create sitemaps and modify them upon the creation or deletion of pages. Here is a pretty extensive list of sitemaps generators, with CMS and non-CMS solutions.
I'd also recommend Xenu Link Sleuth. While it doesn't automate the process of adding new pages, it has some other important uses for SEO.
Agreed with Sean!
Although this is on the list, I should mention that at SEOmoz we use https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ standalone version.
Excellent topic to talk about, Danny! This is hard sometimes to explain to customers...
And I have to say that's very important for the not english native speakers to put ALL the text of the video. I celebrate this idea ;)
Thanks Sean and Danny. Really appreciate the info
Video not working here either, but as the SEOmoz team are largely based in the States it'll be a few hours before they're awake to fix it :)
I'm looking forward to it though, this is a topic that everyone could do with getting better at.
Video not working for me? 8-12-2010 @ 10:41PM PST :-)
:-(
Would you mind sending me a screenshot of what you see (or don't see) as well as your location (city)? danny at seomoz.org
Not working here in Norway either.
Screen shot sent :)
Hey Danny,
The Vid just seems not to load, after the play button is pushed just nothingness :(
I have tried it on FF, Chrome and I.E, doesn’t seem to be browser related.
Marc
Press play and nothing happens, have refreshed and tried in a few browsers, no dice.
Same here..
For the moment I'll leave the screenshots to others as we seem to be experiencing the same issues viewing the video.
I'm in Dearborn, Michigan (SE Michigan, metro Detroit area.)
Thanks everyone :-)
The problem is now solved
Video or no video, I love the transcription! But I also miss the bulleted summaries that have been added lately. If I had to choose, I'd pick the bulleted summary (with a link to the full transcription, of course) For SEO purposes, I suppose the transcription is better?
Actually, thinking some more Id bet my bottom dollar thats not how SEOmoz used to pitch for clients.
Show us your real pitch and not 3 random suggestions
If you disagree, feel free to elaborate
I appreciate your skepticism but that is actually exactly how I pitch SEO. I did that pitch at least 5 times last week.
so your pitch for seo work covers only 3 angles?
Hey Stephen. In my very first sales job (many years ago, I made a presentation to a prospect for our product. We talked for 30 minutes at least and he had a laundry list of items he wanted out of his new purchase and a dozen reasons why my product wouldn't suit him.
The next appointment I made with him I brought my manager. My manager just started talking to him about everything but our product, and in 15 minutes (no lie) the customer was signing a contract.
My point is that though my manager didn't talk about what I thought he should (all the features and benefits), he ended up getting the sale because the prospect ended up putting his faith and trust in him after talking to him awhile.
In my many careers since, all sales related, I've found that you can have 10 different salesman selling the exact same product or service in 10 completely different ways. And all of them successful. It's all based on the chemistry that's created between you and the client.
Getting to know the person seems to be so important for us especially. Most clients are jumping in to a field they know nothing about and the level of trust has to be alot greater. As Danny said the strategies most people understand but the tactics is where we make all the money. We are trying to translate this trust now into the website without the snake oil value statement pitch.
If you analyze the 3 angles. That is very broad. Every people has there own style or strategy on how to pitch SEO, as you as well, you have your own, which that is one of each people assets.
we are thankful that danny share his strategy. Just it analyze the 3 and you willl get more ideas. :)
The title of this post starts with : How to pitch SEODisney, Facebook, Best Buy and Yahoo! took a cold call 3 minute elevator pitch and signed SEOMoz up? I still dont believe it.
So all the data in here: https://www.seomoz.org/blog/seomozs-venture-capital-process is completely thrown out when you pitch for work? You just throw it away or ignore it?
The fact is that all those clients know SEomoz from a lot of different places like
Its disingenuous to suggest that the 3 things above are all you need to pitch SEO and win.
Seomoz is in a completely different space to 99.99% of SEOs in winning contracts.