Selling Your SEO Talents to SMBs

 Small to mid-sized businesses are a tricky bunch; more often than not, they have hyper-local geo targets, tiny budgets, and little to no experience with digital marketing. Believe it or not, many SMBs are still devoting much (if not all) of what marketing dollars do exist to – gasp – the Yellow Pages. Most of you probably don’t know what those are, but trust me, they were all the rage with the SMB crowd at one point.

Paid search is often a less complicated sell to smaller businesses (although challenging in its own right). There is a certain tangibility with PPC- “you’ll see your ad on Google if you search for your company name or xzy keywords”- that many SMB owners can latch on to. Additionally, they can boast to their families & loyal customers about seeing these ads almost immediately following launch; since as the PPC analyst, you would provide them some keywords you already knew to show their ads in a top position.

PPC offers essentially the same “instant gratification” that these small business owners have been accustomed to receiving from years of advertising in those Yellow Page books I mentioned (seriously, yes, they do exist; I’m not making that up). SEO, however, really doesn’t. Telling an SMB owner that they need to invest in a digital marketing program that a) will most likely require them to alter their website based on recommendations and b) won’t really begin showing results until at least 3 months in can be hard for this crowd to swallow. Especially with their marketing budgets being what they are.

Some ideas of compiled on reliable methods to sell search engine optimization to small to mid sized businesses:

Use an SMB case study- I know this can be like a “chicken or egg” principal, since you need to sell SEO to an SMB in order to sell SEO to future SMBs, but providing a potential client with a detailed real-life example should help break the ice.
Offer to perform the necessary website work yourself- many of these SMB owners had websites created for them from an IYP reseller or their neighbor’s 15 year old son, and don’t have much technical knowledge. Often, simply providing them with deliverables detailing the work that should be done won’t be enough.

If they are already running a paid search campaign, or plan on starting one concurrently, stress the potential cost-efficiencies that can be gained through SEO.

Avoid technical jargon when not absolutely necessary. Even dropping lines like “your title tags are poorly formed” will most likely cause them to zone out.
When all else fails, just remember that SMBs are concerned with bringing in business (OK, that can be said about all businesses, but hear me out): they may not necessarily care that they aren’t ranking very high on the SERPs, but if you can associate this lack of visibility with their lack of Internet-based leads, they’ll understand.

And if not, you can always hit them over the head with a copy of the Yellow Pages.