How To Get SEO Clients As A Noob

Here's how to get SEO clients if you're just starting out as a freelance consultant or new marketing company. These six tasks are pretty much risk free to both you and the customer, so you can get some quick successes and testimonials and referrals.

It feels like a chicken-and-egg things, trying to get your first paying customers as a new SEO specialist out there on your own. You could go that route, busting your head to get contract signed, but why not try these risk-free services instead? They're easy to do, add great value for the client and best of all, don't have a chance of making you fail.

Ready? Let's get started.

Website Audit To Snag A New SEO Client

Why not offer to do an audit for a website? If the prospect has Google Analytics and Google Search Console already set up, you won't need to pay for an SEO website audit tool. Or, if the site is really small, you can download Screaming Frog Web Crawler for free and do your audit. It's up to you.

This is risk-free because you're not changing anything on the site - you're discovering issues that keep the pages from getting indexed and ranked, and you're proposing real solutions that will solve the crawler issues you find.

How To Get SEO Clients With Keyword Research

This is one of the most effective ways to get your first SEO customers, but you will need to spend a little money upfront. Pay for one month's subscription for a keyword research tool like WordTracker.

If there's a particular business vertical or industry you want to work in, do some keyword research around some of the basic words and phrases. For example, let's say I want customers who run flight schools. Here are few phrases that look really good, and I would show these to prospects:

• private pilot ground school private pilot ground school
• private pilot training
• cessna 172 poh
• cessna 172 checklist
• flying lessons

Or, let's say I appreciate old car restoration, and I want to help boost search results for a local shop:

• classic car restoration classic car restoration
• muscle car restoration
• car restoration shops
• old car restoration
• antique car restoration

Again, you're not touching the website, so where's the risk? Get the owner excited by the possibilities of showing up high in search results for very focused keyword phrases.

How To Get SEO Clients Using Their Social Media

Suppose a prospect has a social media presence that's really weak. Offer to go into their pages and profiles and optimize them. If it's a B2B client, target their LinkedIn profile and business page. Show them how you can re-write their business and services pages to attract more attention from their target audience.

Use Local Listings To Get SEO Clients

Another no-risk, high-win task you can do is to analyze their local business listings, using Moz and offer to optimize their listings with some relevant keyword phrases. This is probably the easiest win you can get them because you're not touching their site, but you are getting the client links from relevant directories that will drive targeted traffic to their site!

Go to Moz Local, and put in their business name and zip code. Get the results like this:

Clearly, there's room for improvement! You can also show them specific trouble spots with each listing:

As you can see, this is low hanging fruit.

How To Get SEO Clients With An Inbound BackLink Analysis

This last one requires you to most likely invest in a good backlink analysis tool, but it will be worth it. Offer to do a backlink analysis and see if their site has links pointing to it that may be affecting their rankings. Look at the domain to see if it's relevant and the anchor text that's on the site.

Show the prospect just a few of the link issues and offer to do link clean up for them.

How To Get SEO Clients With A Competition Analysis

This last one will cost you money, because you'll need a variety of tools to do this, but again, it's worth it. Offer to do an online competitor analysis. You'll analyze these:

• On-page SEO
• Off-page SEO
• Keyword rankings
• Inbound backlinks
• Social Media

By doing this work, you can show them their SEO strengths and weaknesses compared to their online competition. You can work up a priority SEO action plan for them to consider, and they most likely will hire YOU to do the work for them!

Do you need SEO skills to start your career? Invenio SEO can take you from beginning to advanced and coach you to be successful right out of the gate.

Until next time, keep it safely between the ditches!

All the very best to you,

Nancy McDonald