2015 – The DEATH of SEO… No.. The Death of SELLING SEO.

Don’t you just love it when there’s all these posts every year, blogs, articles, and forums going ape shit saying that SEO is officially dead? Usually it happens when an algorithm update comes and destroys someones rankings. That’s not what this is about though.

This is about the death of SELLING search engine optimization.

But SEO is SUCH a Great Investment For A Business

Yeah, I think most of us can agree that SEO can help a lot of businesses bring in additional leads. Especially in large cities, but even targeting small cities can bring one heck of an ROI.

A client I built a website for and did SEO was in a small city, ranking #1 but it wasn’t doing much for him, so we ended up ranking him in 20+ cities, bringing a huge influx in leads via the internet.

The problem isn’t the concept of SEO.

The Problem is Perception

SEO is a great service to offer, one of my favorites. In fact, it IS my favorite and I have a slight obsession with it. My thoughts on SEO and your thoughts on SEO may be different than the businesses we’re marketing to though.

There are two very big hurdles that we need to jump through in order to sell this service.

1.) Over half (I would say at least 75%) of business owners have no idea what SEO is. A lot of businesses don’t even have a website so this already is not a good thing for those offering these services. Those that do have a website and don’t know what you’re talking about are prospects that need to be educated before they can ever see the importance and be willing to buy from you.

2.) Many business owners are familiar with companies offering these services, and have dealt with more than a few. They are educated on SEO based on their past experiences with companies that didn’t fulfill their promises. This brings you into a situation where the prospect associates you with something negative based on his or her experience. The whole “we’re different” rebuttal worked on the 2nd or 3rd SEO company they used, it’s not going to work for you.

Many people think SEO is a downright scam whether you’re offering local or national services. It’s not exactly a misconception, it is based on their experience and educating the prospect is going to be of little use at this point. The problem is you already associated yourself with that service and there’s no going back.

The Solution: Differentiate Yourself NOW

I’m not saying to stop selling SEO. I wouldn’t ever say that because I know how valuable it is for businesses and if you know what you’re doing it can be a profitable service to sell. The client value is huge, and it’s always nice having a recurring payment that you can count on every month.

What I’m saying is you have to position yourself differently. You don’t need to be cheaper, you don’t need to be the best, you need to be different.

How can you repackage SEO into a different service?

Well, I did it no too long ago… take a look.

Case Study: No More SEO

In order to test this I needed a decent sample size. I chose my worst sales person to be used in this study. Why? Because he is awful. If he wasn’t commission only I would have fired him long ago, but he makes the dials and gets lucky enough to where he’s been able to live off of commission only. I didn’t want to use someone better, because most people get better with time, and repetition. This guy doesn’t. It’s the fairest way to get a good test out of cold calling.

Price point was the same for both SEO and the internet supremacy package.

Sample size – 5,000 calls offering SEO / 5,000 calls offering our “Internet Supremacy” package

Now the scripts were very similar. Different openings are used in different situations to get to the owner. These scripts are just initial conversation starter with the owner of the company.

Script for SEO

Thank you for your time Josh. This is Ryan and I was just calling to let you know about a special we’re having for SEO. We help a lot of companies in your industry increase their visibility and bring in more leads online. Is this something you’re interested in?

Script for our Internet Supremacy Package

Thank you for your time Josh. This is Ryan and I was just calling to let you know about a special we’re having for our Internet Supremacy package for businesses. We help a lot of companies in your industry increase their visibility and bring in more leads online. Is this something you’re interested in?

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The Results

I was surprised to see such a difference. I expected the internet supremacy package to win but the numbers we’re wider than I thought they would be.

Cold calling for SEO

5,000 calls
41 qualified leads
5 sales

That means my crappy salesman converted a lousy .82% of calls into qualified leads. I’m not actually disappointed by that because he had runs where he was averaging .49% of calls into leads. Average call volume per day in this test was 249.3 calls.

Cold calling for Internet Supremacy

5,000 calls
108 qualified leads
12 sales

Now isn’t that something? His prospect to lead conversion reached 2.16%. That is actually very good. Many cold callers will average 1%… 1 good lead every 100 dials, so this is really surprising especially considering his lack of talent/skill. The average call volume per day was 191.2/calls.

The call volume sticks out to me. The first initial thought was that maybe he was doing some pre call intelligence but he’s not smart enough for that. Perhaps he was focusing more on striking up a conversation?

Looking at it objectively, knowing he wasn’t doing any pre call intelligence, I can assume that the reason for the lower call volume average per day is because he was having more conversations because prospects were more willing to discuss their situation or ask questions about what it is we’re offering.

Another reason the lead conversion rate sky rocketed was maybe because SEO – Search engine optimization is quite sophisticated and a guy stumbling all over his words selling something as complex as SEO, isn’t credible. Maybe Internet Supremacy was better for him to sell because it didn’t require as many objections, people never got calls for it, it’s something new they never heard of before, so he could be an authority on the subject.

This was such an awesome test. Another cool reason why I think the results turned out the way it did is because the internet supremacy package subtly implies we have our own process, that works for everybody whether the search engines play ball or not. Proven processes remove the risk of doing business with you.

Testing, is essential in every business. Data is very important to me, but the thing about data is that it is useless if you don’t try to understand it.

Conclusion

Yes, folks, SEO is dead. We killed it.

Seriously, this is as much about branding, messaging and creating an identity for yourself as it is about SEO and selling. There’s competition out there hammering phones, spamming emails, doing everything you’re not doing.

Now what are you going to do about it?

How can you recreate SEO into your own proprietary process?