The easier it is to find your website in the search engines, the more customers, sales, and leads you’ll generate. This is what’s known as search engine optimization (SEO). Selling these services to prospective clients is easy if they know what’s involved. However, when your prospect has no idea what this is, things are bound to get tricky.
How to Effectively Explain how SEO Works
Now is a great time to flex your expertise by explaining SEO’s inner workings while also telling the business how you can help them. By showing them you’re knowledgeable, you’ll gain their trust and be able to easily close the deal.
The best place to start this conversation is by first determining what they know. With this knowledge in mind you’ll be able to simplify your message to the right level and gather up any educational materials you may need. Your goal here is to build on their current knowledge by referring to what they say they already know. This shows that you’re listening and helps keep them engaged by using their language.
How to Explain Things to People with no Knowledge
For these people you must explain how you set up a website so that you can digitally market it in such a way that it’ll show up higher in the search engines (usually Google in specific), in front of their targeted customers. You should also tell them that Google has a continually evolving algorithm that takes dozens of factors into consideration.
Now make things relevant to your customer by providing an example that uses their business. Help them understand how it’s important for them to optimize more than their website and for more than Google. Tell them they should also include their business’ listing in review sites, directories, and business profiles where people are likely to search for them.
You can also help them think of the process as setting up shop online. This is especially helpful when discussing local SEO whereby you must add location identifiers to let the search engines know your business’ relevance when people are searching for your service area.
How to Explain the Nitty Gritty – On-Site vs. Off-Site SEO
Once you help your customers move past a basic knowledge, you must also help them understand why both online and off-site optimization are important. The best way to explain them is like this:
- On-site deals with your own website, especially its technical side (e.g. setting up shop properly, keeping it updated, page speed, creating keyword enhanced content). In this way, you can think of on-site optimization as laying your online foundation for your business.
- Off-site deals with optimizing things online that are away from your website (e.g. getting reviews, getting other sites to link to yours). Here you can think of off-site SEO as ramping up the quality of your online presence. Unfortunately, how effective this depends on human behavior (e.g. are people clicking on your site, sharing and mentioning your content on social media, linking back to your webpages).
Conclusion
Explaining SEO to your clients is challenging at best. When the business owners you’re speaking with have no knowledge at all it’s even more difficult, especially when you’ve been engaged in this process for so long that it seems like second nature to you. Nevertheless, this is important because it’ll help you win over clients and prospects. When you use their language, build off their knowledge, and include relevant analogies and examples you’ll help them improve their understanding here. If you’re a client who’s in the market for these services and looking for someone who can help you understand things better, make sure you contact ISEOU. They’ll take the time to ensure that you understand everything that’s being done and how it’ll help your business’ bottom line. This will make you feel like you’re the authority which is important since this is your business after all.