In this post, we are going to show you how to get more high quality SEO clients without endlessly posting on social media or dancing on TikTok. Let's dive right in. You small. So number one, get smaller. I know it's counterintuitive, but the best thing you can do to grow is to think small. If everyone is your ideal client, then no one is your ideal client and you need to pick a niche and focus on it for at least one year. And one year is an arbitrary number, but it's enough time to get traction in any niche. Now you might be wondering, why should you get small to get big? Well, look at this illustration from essentialism.
These arrows represent your energy and when it's distributed across different niches, ideas and tasks, you're moving a centimeter at a time. But when you refocus and allocate all of your energy, resources and time towards one niche, you'll make 100 times more progress.
Find the niche
Now the question is, why does niching down help you attract more clients? Well, it's simple. You'll get more leads and clients because you can speak directly to your ideal prospect. Instead of creating content about generic SEO, you'll start creating content specifically for your ideal client. And this will stand out in a sea of generic SEO information. More on this in a second. But niching down makes everything easier. Your marketing gets clear, your sales process becomes consistent and streamlined, and your fulfillment process is fluid because most of the campaigns are similar.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, if you're working with any business, you might be working on a SaaS project one day and a local roofer the next. These two types of campaigns require entirely different processes and frames of mind, which means you won't be great at either. But when you're focused, you'll become a master of that niche. And when you master it, you get better SEO results for your clients.
And guess what? When you get awesome results, you get more referrals. And because you're focused on one niche, it becomes easier for these businesses to refer clients to you.
So how do you pick a niche? One of the biggest objections I hear about niching down is that some people think they'll miss out on the opportunities. It's a valid concern. But that brings us to my next point, which is number two, do the math.
Do the math
Listen very carefully. You don't need a massive amount of clients to build a seven figure agency. People overestimate this because most are undercharging for their services. But we'll talk about that in a second. Let's just do some simple math. So we put some niches into a random picker and we ended up with a physical fitness program. In this case, We'd build an agency that focuses on personal trainers.
Now, according to one study, there are over 800,000 personal trainer businesses in the United States. And the top 10% of personal trainers earned at least $80,000 per year. Now based on this data, We would not go into this niche because the ticket value would have to be low, which means you would need to focus on the volume of clients to make it worth it.
But let's say you're going to focus on the top 1% of personal trainers in the United States. That equates to 8000 personal trainers. Now let's assume you'll take on the top 1% personal trainer per city and your lowest retainer size is $2,500 per month. You ready for this? You only need 33 clients to build a seven figure per year agency. And if you add secondary services like design, CRO and Google Ads, you can increase your retainer size to $5,000 per month and handle all of their digital marketing.
Then you only need about 17 clients to build a seven figure per year SEO agency. The point is, think small to get big.
Build a one pager
For example with HubSpot's free landing page builder.
To get up and running fast, create your free account, go to the marketing tab and click on landing pages. Pick a template like schedule consultation or schedule meeting.
You don't need any coding experience, you don't even need to be a developer or anything like that. It's just purely drag and drop. So really any tool like this one or any landing page builder, the key to success with it is that you need to understand some basic levels of copywriting and really most importantly, understand what you're trying to achieve with this landing page. So what you would want to achieve in the context of getting SEO clients is that you would want to build a landing page that helps the prospect know, like and trust you. So those are the three things we're trying to achieve.
A well-designed landing page should encompass the following elements:
- A clear and appealing title along with concise headlines
- A video that comprehensively describes the problem and the solution you offer
- A straightforward booking form
- An additional, small call-to-action section.
And you'll see We are just kind of hitting on three critical points here and always just try to give a good offer, right? And for us, we found that a free SEO diagnosis, a free ranking diagnosis, a free audit, anything is better than just hey, get in touch, right? Because what we're doing is we're incentivizing them, we're giving a reason to get in touch with us versus reaching out to someone else. And this will typically put you ahead of the competitors.
You don't feel like you need to build some massive website, some huge agency site. Those don't convert that well. What converts the best is just a simple landing page with a good headline, good subheadline, good video, and just a simple call to action. If you can do that well, and of course make it very specific to your ideal client, you'll be ahead of 99% of your competition.
Social proof and authority
Build social proof and authority. One of the biggest struggles with starting a niche agency is a lack of proof or results. It's a catch 22. You need clients to showcase results, but you need results to get clients. So how do you overcome this conundrum?
Well, here are our favorite techniques. Build a local lead generation website in the industry you're going after. For example, if we were targeting personal trainers, we'd go after your keyword like personal trainer St. Louis, which has 350 searches per month. If the metro was too competitive, I would go after a smaller surrounding city. Once you've decided, get an exact matched domain like personaltrainerstlowismo.com.
Then open up surfer's surf analyzer and enter your keyword. Get the average word count, which is about 1500. Then open up the audit section and export the NLP keywords. Open chat GPT and use the following prompt and within a few minutes, chat GPT will spit out a solid SEO content brief. Now all you need to do is outsource this writing or have ChatGPT write it for you.
And once it's done, run the copy through Surfer's content editor and make sure it's fully optimized. Now upload the content to your cms. Add some images, videos and trustworthy external links. Publish it and let it live on the homepage.
Go back to Semrush, go to the SERP analysis section and export the results. Exclude the super authority sites and only look at the average referring domains for the local businesses. Once you have that number, all you need to do is narrow the gap and get as many or more high quality backlinks.
For example, the average referring domains needed is about 15. Now keep in mind, you don't need to rank number one to get minimum social proof. As long as you're in the top ten, you can showcase those results. Also, every keyword is proof that you can rank. Take a look at the keyword profile for this competitor. They rank for countless keywords in St. Louis. That means you have many keywords you can add to your portfolio once you're in the top ten. So now that you'll have social proof, it's time for number five, which is create video content.
Create video content
And no, you don't need to be charismatic or awesome on video. But video is the single best way to get a prospect to know, like and trust you. And there are several proven frameworks you can use, but the key is to keep it 100% relevant to your ideal client. Don't create content like how to do SEO or on page SEO checklists.
This is too broad and competitive. Instead, create content like complete on page SEO checklists for personal trainers. Just slap your target market on every topic and your agency will enter a blue ocean.
Now, here are some frameworks for driving leads with video. Number one, the case study method. You can easily do this with the results you've achieved with the previous step. In short, you're going to show your prospect, your exact process that you use to drive SEO results. Yes, the exact process. And don't worry about them trying to do it themselves. By showing them the entire process, you'll prove that you know what you're doing and that you know way more than they do.
And from their perspective, it's way riskier to do it themselves instead of just having you do it for them. So don't be afraid to share everything.
Case study number two, the RIA technique. RIA stands for result in advance, and it's a concept coined by direct response legend Frank Kern. But here's how we use it in the context of SEO. Pick a company that you want to work with, or a random company in the niche that you're going after. Then conduct a free SEO audit and create an SEO strategy for them that you'll share publicly. You can promote it directly to the prospect via outreach, and it can act as marketing collateral to get more relevant leads.
So these are just a few techniques you can use to land more SEO clients. Execute on these and please subscribe for more.