How to Sell SEO Services to a Prospective Client without quoting too low?

SEO Industry is extremely competitive. At one hand, there are deep-pocketed SEO Agencies who have highly trained salesmen with honed sales pitches and on the other hand, there are home based freelancers shooting millions of unsolicited emails announcing their dirt cheap prices for their SEO Services.

Most of the times, the business owners get confused due to the price disparity. This confusion leads to a nightmarish scenario for the serious SEO companies as clients often object to their proposals with statements like “Why Should I pay twice as much for the same results” or “Why Should I hire you when I am getting the same service in one-fifth of the cost” etc.  These questions can take any form but the nuances of the objection usually have to do with the price.

As a marketer, I often hear this kind of objections on a day to day basis. If you are asked this question, don’t fall into the trap of being defensive and start blabbing about how your services are better than your competitors’ or that your customer support is great, blah blah. Keep in mind that your prospects have already heard these clichés hundreds of times before you.

Instead of begging and blabbing for the project, PROJECT yourself as an expert. Justify your time and the cost of the time and client will get convinced. Let me tell you how.

I am creating a scenario of a customer and a salesman conversation so that you can better connect:

Prospective customer:  I have already received competitive proposals from other vendors who are promising the same results as yours in one-fifth of your proposed cost. Why should I go with you?

My answer: Hey Julian, I am not asking you to choose me over him or anyone as I am not sure about the content of their proposals or their offerings.  [This gives the signal to the client that you are not desperate to pocket their money but you are a man of dignity. In saying this, I do not mean that those who adopt other methodologies have no self-respect but this helps you stand out)

I have a few friendly suggestions for you:  Don’t choose an SEO Company just based on their prices because this can cost you a lot in the long run and ruin your brand and online sales.  

For example, Two similar companies can promise you five backlinks in a month but one can get you penalized and the other can boost your domain authority, link profile and rankings. Not only the number of links matter but their quality matters too but I am sure none of the pitching vendors mentioned the quality but I can assure you the highest quality of links and I am ready to mention in the proposal too.

Now since you have sidelined the prospect’s first concern about your higher prices, it is time to justify your cost which needs some more efforts.

To justify my prices, I make a very simple calculation in front of him. Using Google AdWords, I show him the traffic on the keywords he is targeting and then I ask him about the minimum and maximum cost of his product. For example: if he sells industrial products and the minimum cost of a product is $1000 and the maximum is $20,000 and the total traffic on the keywords he wants to ranks has only 10,000 traffic per month.

I assume that at least 1% of the client coming to his website will convert in actual customers as the conversion rate of visitors coming through Google search is quite high. So I show him the calculation: If he sells to 1% of the visitors, then he can sell between $100,000 to $2,000,000 per month after few months and even he can’t spend $1000 per month then he should forget about the deal.

I have a very high closure ratio thanks to the above technique and hope this works for you too.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the same or if you have any questions, feel free to share them with me in the comments section.