Getting SEO clients

I finally graduated from Rutgers University and started my own SEO firm, Mangia Marketing. I have 3 clients currently, all gotten through my personal network of friends and family, but I am looking to expand.

For all of you running successful operations - what works best for getting clients? Craigslist? Door-to-door? Direct mail?

What have you seen success with? Any pointers you can offer at all would be a big help.

I'm in a similar situation to you. Personally, Craigslist has just generated tons of spam from people wanting to 'market' me. They obviously don't know what SEO is!

To grow a startup, marketing must be the first priority.

1) Identify your target market
2) Spend 3+ hours a day effectively connecting with the target market. Marketing is the first priority, SEO work is second.

Most prospects will not understand your service. Find a way to demonstrate your services.
-Find a few demo clients and create an ongoing blog series as you walk through each step of the process with the demo clients.
--Post 1 - Overview of series, business description, and targeted keywords
--Post 2 - On page seo analysis, what was wrong, what was corrected, mistakes disreputable or sloppy SEOs would make.
--Post 3 - Backlink building - how your service works, and examples of terrible backlink building - If you need an example, a local bookkeeping firm has inbound links from very politically charged news articles and from p-rn quality lingerie websites. I doubt the business owner realizes what the backlink service did.
--Post N
--Provide Quarterly updates on the sites and detail Google rankings

If you focus on local businesses, call businesses and promise a report of 25 things wrong with their site if they will meet with you for 5 minutes the next day. Deliver the report in person and offer to leave after five minutes. The owner will either invite you to stay longer or schedule a second meeting.

Build out your website. I would expect a much stronger website from a SEO guru. I want to see your picture and credentials on the about us page.

Great idea! What kinds of things do you generally point out?

I am CPA and QuickBooks consultant and will start using a similar marketing system in the next few months.

The key is to develop a standardized template that you can complete in 30-60 minutes. Focus on the fundamentals, as they will be easier to discuss with the firm owner. Do not develop solutions at this point. Diagnose problems that can lead into future work.

-Home page - Analyze site structure, On page SEO details, keyword usage
-One product or service page - Analyze site structure, On page SEO details, keyword usage.
-Backlink summary on both of prior pages - include details on two competitors
-Google Local Listing analysis
-PPC Analysis - use keyword spy (?) to compare PPC activities with 2 competitors

aignam....cruise over to seomoz & their youmoz...remember seeing a great article on writing that client-getter style email....I think it was earlier in the week too, so it's contemporary, eh!



Jim

Thanks for the replies - there are definitely some great ideas. I love contador's idea to promise a list of 25 problems with their site...great marketing.

Do you guys do any traditional marketing? Door to door, display advertising, newspapers, billboards, etc?