Ghodke Is it worth spending time on your own business website to get it ranked and get potential Digital Marketing clients? People who are ranking, do you get a lot of inbound inquiries? Do they convert? Or is it better to spend time and money on FB and Google Ads? I have been in affiliate marketing for the last 15 years and am now in process of getting local clients. I can rank my business website but as we know, it will take time. Should I focus more on ads or cold calls/emails? 19 👍🏽19 41 💬🗨📰👈
Alex Controversial opinion – but I frequently get the answer from people "I don't want to commit the resources to rank because that isn't where I get my clients." Or some variation of that from people that try to sell me whitelabel SEO services. 100% of the time I go through their "success" projects or proposals they end up not actually knowing what they are doing. Short answer you don't have to rank, there are other ways to sell, but if you can you should probably at least try. I don't get a large amount of calls from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – but when I do the calls are better. When I run Google ads I just so much junk and so many scams and it turns into a huge waste of time and money. At least when that happens on SEO I'm not annoyed that I paid for the call. Ryan What ever you do do, commit to it fully and don't half ass it, and if you stick with it long enough building out SOP's you'll have success. People make it with one and the other… start with one first, get it up and running. Then focus on the other and take the same full-ass committment to see it through to success. (y)
Ghodke ✍️ » Ryan That's what is happening with me. Every time I try to focus on my business website or client acquisition, my affiliate websites start pulling my attention. Need to focus more.
Noah Lopata 🎓 I get a regular amount of calls and a lot of new clients. It's an easier sell as they already know you can rank. You still have to be able to sell and close but it does generate calls. 🤔👍🏽4 Brian It depends on what type of clients you want and what you are selling. If you want to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for anybody who reaches out to you or you are selling services/pkgs to other SEO users that you say will help them get their clients ranked, you will probably benefit from having a high-ranking site as part of your "proof." But if you are very selective in terms of what niches you want to work in and what type of client you want to work with, you don't need a website… but you do need to have a good outreach strategy and you do need to be able to demonstrate that you understand what your prospect(s) are trying to accomplish and that you are that guy that can help them do it. References help. Demonstrated results help. But a good, simple two-way conversation with your prospect works wonders. They will know in minutes if you know what you are talking about. Good luck.
John » Brian Although we sell software to create and perform most of the processes we perform over a period to rank sites, we find that a zoom call to show the tools, and the processes works really well. We also obviously also show actual results.
Holgate There are exceptions but I've noticed that the SEO companies that rank for their own keywords and get inbound leads, have only done the work to achieve this after they have already become successful and have everything in place, like client's, system's, SOP's, fulfilment automation and an internal marketing team etc which actually gives them time to work on their own website/s.
Noah Lopata 🎓 » Holgate We just set ourselves up as an actual client so we made sure to work on our own site
Keith L Evans 🎓 YOUR REPUTATION IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN YOUR WEBSITE. A prospect is more concerned about what I can do for them rather than what I do for myself. You need trust so work on your reviews and case studies. My first 20 clients were gained with no website. But I could give references to my prospects and say, "call any of them". Your biggest success will come from inside you. And you can build a cool ranking website in your area. Looks great, it ranks, and you get an ego boost. But it will not bring you the leads you want. BONUS: just rank in the map which will take much less effort and generate a better Return of Investment (RoI).
Hong Last week, I closed a $15k web design + $25k per month digital marketing project by ranking in the snack pack. Week before last, closed a $35k web design project + $20k per month digital marketing contract. The deals don't come often, but come regularly through snack pack leads. Snack pack rankings can be a gold mine in my opinion. You should be doing all 3 IMHO My agency does all 3 plus more. (Cold outreach, Ads, Organic SEO
Holgate » Hong If you don't mind me asking, are the snack pack leads from web design Google My Biz (GMB)s or internet marketing/SEO agency GMB's? Hong » Holgate 90% of my snack pack leads come from web design. Most (if not all) small businesses build a website with the goals of turning it into a lead generation or profit machine, so the logical upsell is digital marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) My SEO snack pack rankings are ammunition in closing them into a digital marketing contract after the web design project is done. The initial sole reason I started offering web design is to get the digital marketing contract. Holgate » Hong I need to get into posher, wealthier areas then lol because I have 3 in the map pack for web design and 99% of the leads are complete trash and even the 'decent' 1% one's are a tiny fraction of the job ticket price you have mentioned here. I've always said that if you want local SEO clients then the best way to go if you plan to target inbound leads is with web design GMB's rather than SEO or Internet Marketing so i agree entirely with that and is why I asked the question… … I might test this out in bigger or more affluent areas. Well done on those prices… I'm lucky if I can find $500pm clients lol. I need to up my game massively on pricing. Hong » Holgate I'm not in a wealthy or affluent area at all. I'm in New Orleans. This city is poor. 😂 The lead is the foot in the door, then it's up to you to turn up your sales game and up sell them! Nevertheless, I'm sure it can't hurt to target a richer city as well, which is what I'm in the process of doing too. Targeting much bigger cities right now. Holgate » Hong Yeah right, upsell 30k packages and 25k per month deals to people earning 3k to 7k per month 😆 Because I can guarantee you, that's the demographic that call my inbound GMB's!… … If what you are saying is true, then you just got lucky or maybe it's different in the US because where i am in the UK, corporate or enterprise client's with those kind of budgets defitnley do not just randomly call the nearest GMB … I'm in constant contact with nearly 100 agencies where I am in the UK and subcontract for quite a few of them and I've never heard of the same thing happen over the last decade or so… In fact, the biggest agency I know with probably the best sales team in the UK gave up taking calls to their many web design and internet marketing GMB's because of the trash inbound leads they produce and moved to networking and direct sales instead… If the best sales team in the UK can't upsell, then there's not much chance I can… The only place in the UK that you have the slightest chance of getting the prices you mentioned from a Google My Biz (GMB) is London which would take a while to rank and a large budget but I'm thinking about getting an office in London so that's something I'm looking at in terms of a decent inbound GMB lead generator. Organic Search Engine Result Page (SERP) rankings are also worth doing in that city as well compared to the rest of the country. Keith L Evans 🎓 » Hong 💯!! Can't wait to see you at Mastermind Mansion. Hong » Keith L Evans Yes, can't wait for the event! Very happy to see it's in my neck of the woods, super convenient!
Morgan I know for a fact that there are multinational agencies (talking about huge names) that have 0 leads coming from organic search. They do have tons of visits from referral, social medias, and direct. I've personally worked with agencies I was referred to that had no rankings whatsoever on their site, but did an amazing job. I've also recently seen an interview with an agency owner in London that owns the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) for SEO-related terms and gets a ton of leads from organic. I think it just comes down to exististing pipelines and client acquisition strategy. I would for sure say that spending from 6 months to a year and tens of thousands of dollars to rank an agency website for related terms is probably not the best business decision. That's why most agencies start with ads + cold outreach, start getting clients, then referral clients, and then they have enough clients that they don't care about optimizing their own website anymore. I don't like the narrative "how are you providing SEO services if you can't even rank your own website?". Well, first of all I'm a businessman and Return of Investment (RoI) is what matters most for me. Why would I spend my resources on trying to rank in one of the most competitive niches and get a delayed ROI when I can focus on other channels and get clients flowing within the first month?
Holgate » Morgan Yes, I see both sides of the coin too. Was the guy who gets most of his leads organically in London the owner of Pearl Lemon?… He's a FB friend of mine and he has scaled amazingly well doing it this way so it can work if targeted correctly but he's in the minority from my experience.
Jesper Hey Ghodke, yes it is worth it. But, as you are allready suggesting, be prepared to work a lot for your rankings, since you are competing with fellow SEO users. That being said, I get all my SEO leads from my agency website due to organic rankings. I started out with Ads, and that gave me valuable information on what keywords converted to leads. Those keywords could then be incorporated into the service page content and blogposts. It did take me a couple of years, but now I don't use Ads at all. A problem you will be facing if you are going to use Ads, is of-course the ever increasing click price, that's the main reason I suggest you just start right now working on ranking your own website.
