Things are slowly getting back to ‘normal’ however way we might interpret that. With COVID-19 still getting in the way of everyday activities, SEO agencies may be struggling to market their business to customers. If you feel that businesses are becoming less interested in SEO services, then it is time to kick into high gear and start marketing your business more to the right people. Today’s blog aims to help SEO companies and smaller agencies get more SEO leads in today’s competitive and challenging landscape. It can be done.

Market SEO Like Never Before

1. Pay Attention to Your Value Proposition

Sales communication is tricky because you can go on and on with how good your SEO company is without genuinely hitting the mark. Whenever you communicate your value proposition, there has to be a specific explanation of why they’re valuable. This is the difference between saying, “SEO is good for business,” and “SEO helps your customers pick the best brand of sneakers in half the time.” See the difference?

Additionally, the value proposition has to be closely tied to solving your customers’ problems. There is no shortcut to this. If you don’t know your customers well enough, that’s going to be a problem.

Whenever you create a powerful value proposition, there are four elements that you must include:

– A clear and powerful headline. The headline should summarize what your value proposition is about. The “why” should be in the headline. Any additional details can be tackled later on.

– The sub-headline. The sub-headline supports the headline and provides just enough detail to pull in the reader even more. Remember, the goal is for the reader to continue reading through the details.

– The bullet points. The bullet points provide insight and detail that complete the offer. The bullet points should offer the features and benefits of the value proposition. Select the most engaging ones – don’t squeeze everything into one segment.

2. Make Your Cold Emails Sharp

Cold emails are known for being rejected or ignored. However, they’re still part of a healthy marketing strategy because they can help generate SEO leads for your business. Instead of being anxious that your cold emails are going to be rejected, look for ways on how to make them better. Your cold emails have to be more refined, and they need to be useful and valuable to potential customers. Here are some ways to accomplish that:

– In the time of COVID-19, people are going to be more stressed than usual. Be sensitive about the situation and give people a sense of community. This should break down the initial resistance to your cold email that you are trying just to turn a profit.

– Revamp the old image of your business. SEO can be a valuable step in re-igniting business growth. With businesses closing left and right, how can you help businesses remain open and profitable in the time of the pandemic?

– Write cold emails with the prospect at the center. Show off how much you know about their needs and how you can solve them. Center the solutions you have and not the branding or the company. The branding will be there no matter what, but you have one shot to impress the recipient.

– Pull back the desire to land a sale immediately. Sales-y letters during the pandemic will not get you where you need to be, especially if it’s a cold email. Slow progress is the name of the game. Don’t expect people will jump at the first opportunity to pay for services.

– Take a good look at your subject line. The subject line is the first thing that people see and is a huge determinant of whether or not the recipient will open the email or not. Use past analytics data to see which subject lines get the highest opening rates. People have to open your email because the subject line is engaging. If people aren’t opening, you need to split test your subject line and determine the best one for future cold emails.

– Before reaching out to any segment of your leads, do proper research. We know that this might be a little challenging, but you need to fully understand the needs of different segments before you can craft a compelling marketing message. This is how things work with marketing – unless you already have a working idea of how they think and respond. But then again, if your cold emails are being ignored, there’s a big chance that things have changed.

– Finally, don’t forget that no matter how good your services are, people won’t bite if they cannot immediately see the benefits. We recommend that you demonstrate the value of your offering. Remember that shifting to a new SEO provider is a form of change, and people naturally resist change. You have to convince them that it’s worth the change and the ‘risk’ of modifying their online business strategy with search engine optimization.

3. Craft Powerful Case Studies

A case study is the fastest way to show social proof and improve your chances of convincing people that you are the real thing. But how can you create the perfect case studies that will wow your audience? Here are some ways to do that:

– Focus on your past customers that are also ideal customers. These are customers that other customers can relate to easily. In short, we want to create case studies about businesses that are presentative of the markets that you want to focus on. Some SEO agencies are generalists in the sense that they can work with different kinds of businesses, regardless of the market. Other SEO agencies are more specific because they specialize in building websites and performing SEO for specific kinds of businesses.

There are three things that you need to accomplish before you can even write a useful case study. One, you have to be 100% comfortable in the industry and market you’re focusing on. Second, you know the specific needs of your customers in that industry. And finally, you have to know the actual steps for creating targeted results.

– A case study doesn’t have to be boring. It shouldn’t be boring. The most significant case studies, no matter how much data is involved, should be interesting, engaging, and relevant to the readers who took the time to download and read it. If you don’t know how to create the proper flow for a case study, follow these steps:

1. Introduce the subject of the case study (the customer) and relate to the readers what kind of business they’re engaged in. This necessarily includes the geographic area/s that the customer serves, and what the business is using as a marketing or business model.

2. Relate to the reader the different goals that your customer had. These are the same goals (coupled with different problems) that pushed your customer to get SEO help in the first place.

3. Enumerate the various needs of your customers and explain how you responded to these needs. Since it’s a case study, you can be as technical as you want with the explanation.

– Next in line is the formatting of the case study. Again, case studies can present complex information without sacrificing readers. Technical information, coupled with the right formatting, is a pleasure to read. Use the same techniques that you use in improving the readability of your online content, such as blog posts and landing pages. Since people will likely be reading your case study on their computers or phones, it makes sense to format it as you would a Web page.

– Don’t forget to include real numbers when writing your case studies. Share statistics and analytics data, and tell a story of how the subject of the case study progressed from point A to point B. For example, it would be interesting to track the progress of a website as it climbed from 200 views per week to 20,000 views per week. This is a vast improvement, one that you can be proud of, mostly if it were your efforts that led to this significant change in traffic. It is easy to say that you doubled or tripled the profitability of a website, but showing the numbers is much better.

– Tackle the specific strategies that you use to arrive at excellent outcomes. This increases the authoritativeness of your case study. If you can discuss at length what you did (even if it’s just in general terms), potential customers would say, “Hey, I’d like them to do that on my website.” There is a massive boost in confidence in your method as an SEO company when the method is clearly outlined. You can choose from all the methods you use. Of course, you’d probably end up with a book instead of a case study if you outline everything you did, but you get the picture. Focus on the methods that will look impressive once translated to your case study.

– Experiment with various formats. Some case studies are focused on the method and statistics, while others take a more relaxed form and include lots of interview material and statements from the customers. You can also strike a balance and include all of these elements for a more balanced read. Why should you include statements from your customers? We want your case study to be relatable, not just accurate, and filled with the right kinds of hard numbers to push your message across to the most number of people.

– And finally, we need to address the learning mode of the potential consumers of your case study. There is visual formatting of the material, and then there’s the possibility of using other formats to communicate the content of the case study. For example, you can use a video or audio podcast, a YouTube video (like a talking head video, or a video with a voice-over and animation), and even a series of infographics.

4. Know What to Say to an SEO Client

There’s a right way and wrong way of communicating with SEO clients. The right impact is to be able to make them understand what SEO is really about. This helps set their expectations about what they are paying for in the first place. The following are essential lines of thought that you can improve upon and integrate with your marketing messages.

– There is no such thing as SEO magic. SEO takes time and constant improvement. It’s like building a house. The approach is different each time, and adjustments have to be made to ensure that your business is on the right track.

– There are different kinds of approaches to SEO, but there are best practices in the industry. The best practices tend to change from year to year, depending on how the search engines evolve. It’s not just about the filters or signals of the search engines. As AI evolves, SEO changes too. Search engines become better with their use of language, and the criteria for relevance and rankings change as well.

– SEO audits must be done to see the actual state of a website. There is on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Both contribute to improving the visibility of a website for search terms. The goal is to fix the issues that are preventing the website from being found by the right customers. The audit is central to the process.

– There is a need for transparency from both sides. The SEO company has to be upfront about what is being done and what’s happening, and the customer has to be communicative about their needs. If changes are made on the website, then you have to know beforehand. There has to be an ongoing dialogue between the SEO company and the customer.

– Don’t tell your customers that SEO is a one time, big time thing. It is an ongoing process.

– Don’t give one-time free audits. The audits have to be exhaustive and professional. It is always better to present an audit as part of a comprehensive SEO revamp.