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Selling SEO – Tips for the First Conversation

February 18, 2010
by Jennifer Grappone

We hear “I don’t know how to sell SEO” frequently from agencies and developers. This post is the first in a series of insights into how to sell SEO.

Our company, Gravity Search Marketing, is a kick-ass boutique SEO firm. We’re very small, we’re very smart, and many people will attest to the fact that we do what we do very well.

Being “boutique” means we don’t have a sales staff – that’s a role I typically fill by myself. We’re not flying completely blind: I’ve observed sales teams in action at other companies, and I’ve even watched Glengarry Glenross, but I’ve never been trained in the art of selling. Nonetheless, you may be surprised to learn that we do pretty well for ourselves when it comes to selling.

I don’t know how the big guys do it (honestly, I don’t – could someone please tell me in the comments?) but I thought it would be helpful to share what seems to work consistently for me. Today I’ll focus on the first conversation with a new prospect.

Plan for at least a half hour of listening before you start talking

My favorite sales conversations start off like therapy sessions. People are calling with a problem they want me to solve, and I need to know what that problem is. This problem cannot be expressed in a hurry, and it often has many facets. Here are some of the open-ended questions I like to ask:

“So, what’s going on with your site?”
“How do you know this is a problem? (i.e., “How do you gauge the performance of your website?”)
“What have you tried before?”
“What is working well right now?”
“What does your team look like?”

Even if it turns out that you don’t land the sale, by really listening, you’ll have added one more “business like this” to your mental database, and that can be helpful in your ongoing selling and consulting work. I find it indescribably satisfying to learn about the cogs and wheels of other peoples’ marketing campaigns. I’m fascinated to hear what their research has told them about their audience segments and their customers’ perceptions and biases. This knowledge adds up, and is quite valuable in informing my consulting work.

Only after you’ve gotten a thorough understanding of your prospect’s needs should you begin to launch into your “About Us” spiel.

Answer the unspoken questions

You might think your job now is to describe your company, your experience, process, and prices. But don’t miss your prospect’s unspoken questions: What it will be like to work with you? Are you honest and trustworthy? Will I understand this confusing subject of SEO any better if you’re the one explaining it to me?

One common unspoken question is, “Will we be able to phase you out as an SEO consultant and do this ourselves eventually?” Many prospects won’t say it directly, but they hope to reach a point of in-house competency when they won’t need you anymore. This is a reasonable goal. Will your SEO capability transfer to in-house staff? Can you develop “cheat sheets” for your client, to keep them optimizing according to plan? Do you provide SEO training? Is there a provision in your service for on-call SEO Q&A? You may find that talking about these services early on will increase your desirability.

You also need to prove beyond a doubt that you know your stuff. I’ll focus on tips for proving your SEO skills in a future post.

Gently Redirect Common SEO Misconceptions

Selling SEO involves listening encouragingly as someone struggles to state their goals in your language. This can be challenging for some prospects, and that’s why many goals come out sounding simplistic, like, “We need to rank #1 for [generic phrase]” or “We need to get [audience X] to find us.” Since you want to have a successful business relationship with this prospect, you must be able to identify unreasonable expectations and gently educate until you can rephrase these goals into something more specific and achievable.

When a prospect is unfamiliar with the basic touchpoints of current SEO best practices, you may need to explain things like:

“Building links” is not a standalone task. Link building these days requires – at a minimum – a serious effort in improving your website’s content offerings.
What you want from your organic ranks may be easier and cheaper to achieve in the short run with paid search.
I value your thoughts on keywords, but with your best interests in mind, we always perform our own objective keyword research.
Even the best social media strategies will not get off the ground without your input and participation.

If you don’t think SEO is the best way for this prospect to spend their money, do not try to sell them SEO

Believe me, I understand it’s difficult to walk away from a budget earmarked for SEO, but sometimes it’s the right thing to do. SEO cannot fix a product that nobody wants, and even the best SEO likely can’t save a business that already has one foot in the grave. Search marketing, by and large, cannot create demand where demand does not exist. And organic SEO may not be the best choice in a competitive space where a prospect doesn’t have unique value to offer. Nobody will be happy in the end if the money going into SEO is wasted because it’s not the right service to fill the need.

If you’d like me to focus on a specific aspect of selling SEO, let me know in the comments, or track me down on Twitter.

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Human Readable, Semantic URLs Will Help Your SEO

February 10, 2010
by Gradiva Couzin

If you’re building a new site or redesigning one, we think you should switch to meaningful, human readable (aka “semantic”) URLs. But don’t do it just because we think you should. Do it because the research backs us up.

If you’re launching a new website, or getting started on a redesign that will require changes to your page URLs, you may be considering the benefits of human-readable, semantic URLs. We are proponents of these URLs, which we think make good common sense. But if you need more than common sense to justify an increased level of effort for implementing human-readable URLs, here’s some hard data to back it up:

Semantic URLs Help Search Engine Ranks

The consensus in the SEO industry is that keywords in page URLs are a factor in Google’s ranking algorithm. In our experience, sitewide semantic URLs gives a modest, across-the-boards ranking lift. Don’t expect to jump from third page to #1; but a lift from #11 to #6 is feasible.
Page URLs are sometimes used as the linking text from other websites; this translates into more keywords in the linking text pointing to your site, which plays a role in the ranking algorithm
Google’s Matt Cutts has confirmed that it is helpful to have keywords in the URL – as long as it’s done in a sensible way. (See http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-keywords-in-the-url-16976)

Semantic URLs Increase Clickthrough Rates

Not only can human-readable, meaningful, keyword-rich URLs improve search rankings, they may increase your clickthrough rates. Here are salient research highlights:

In one eye-tracking study, business professionals viewing a search engine listing with a long URL ended up clicking on the URL immediately after it 2.5 times as often as those viewing a short URL. (1)
In another eye-tracking study, when searchers scan through search engine listings, 13-33% of time is spent looking at URLs. (2)
In yet another eye-tracking study, searchers spend 30% of their time reading the listing title, 43% of the time reading the listing description, and 21% of their time reading the URL. (3)
There was “overwhelming endorsement” when participants where asked the question: “When I’m searching the Web, I often look at the URL of each search result to help me decide if the page will be useful.” (on a 7-point scale, 6.4 was the average). (2)

There are, of course, a few caveats on the effect of semantic URLs on clickthrough rates:

The effect is greater for navigational searches, and lower for informational searches. Navigational searches are people who already know exactly what they are looking for (for example, they might type “flickr.com” into the Google search box), and they are probably most interested in your domain name, not so much the individual filenames.
The effect may be diminished if Google is showing breadcrumbs, rather than a URL, in your site snippets.

We’re pleased that common sense and scientific research are in alignment on semantic URLs. We typically would not recommend changing page URLs for the sole purpose of SEO improvements, but if you’re making changes to your website anyway, we hope you’ll take advantage of this rare SEO “no brainer.”

FOOTNOTES

(1) Marketing Sherpa (2008). Search Marketing Benchmark Guide for 2008 (www.marketingsherpa.com/exs/Search08Excerpt.pdf)

(2) Cutrell, E., & Guan, Z. (2007). Eye tracking in MSN Search: Investigating snippet length, target position and task types (research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=70395)

(3) Granka, L., Joachims, T., & Gay, G. (2004). Eye-tracking analysis of user behavior in WWW search. Proceedings of the 27th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (pp. 478-479). New York: ACM Press. (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/People/tj/publications/granka_etal_04a.pdf)