AMA: Client SEO -

How much info do you give clients about the work you are going to do for them (especially relating to the grey hat / black hat stuff).

Do you make them acknowledge the risks, or do avoid discussing any of the details?

SEOMemj said:

I'm a big fan of using every resource at your disposal. I also do some gray hat sales (I'm planning on making a detailed thread about this in the near future)

• Craigslist - Shitty place to look unless you like $50/month gigs. There are at least 3 posts a week for people needing an SEO. For these, I have a copy & paste email I send out. Takes maybe 5 minutes to send 3 proposals. Every once in a while, there will be a decent job that comes out of it.
• Upwork - Less shitty but quality is always going down. Most people who post on Upwork have no idea what SEO is or what it costs. There's also the downside of them getting 25+ bids meaning that unless they know what they're doing they'll hire than $3/hour guy from India who says they'll be rank #1 by morning. Needless to say, this has been great for client acquisition. I get interviewed 90% of the time for clients I can tell, based on their post, know what they're doing. I get hired about 75% from that 90%. From those client's I also run "deals" in which if they're able to refer someone that needs SEO services to me, I'll give them 1 month of free SEO. A lot of agencies also hire on Upwork and they generally pay well and have consistent work.
• Manual outreach - Meetup.com around me has a lot of groups for networking. It's cool to meet aspiring business owners or established business owners. Bring your laptop and be willing to show them how their online presence is, and how you can improve it. I also do some cold emails. There's a local farmers market that happens every Tues and Thurs in which companies that sell food products online (energy bars, chocolate products, etc) attend. It's a great place to find out more about them, drop a business card, and follow up later on.
• Outsource it - Some companies specialize in doing outreach for you or you can hire someone to do it (solo - not a company). I've never done this before but I did sign up for a free test with a BHW provider to see how they do.
• Gray hat sales - Use a FB account to post on a businesses page that you had trouble finding their website on Google, leave a review on their Yelp/G+ page asking if they have a website because you can't find it (use accounts with different names than your own and spread 2-3 of these out over the course of a month). Then, contact them as you about how their search presence isn't great and people are even posting online about it. Ethical? Eh. You draw your own line. If I'm able to get them profitable results then I don't see the harm.
• Social media - as much as I don't like it, I do occasionally get messages about my service. Mostly through LinkedIn (which is the only social page I keep updated). Usually, it's someone trying to hire a full-time in-house SEO in which I politely decline, spend 10 minutes looking at their website to point out issues with their onsite SEO work and then offer my services as a freelancer - either to do work or consult with their marketing/dev team.

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Thanks for the info. I'm in Northern CA. I was in a great situation with some partners but have been forced to start over because it fell apart. (I've been doing SEO, Web Dev, and PPC since 2004.) So, I'm scrambling to get clients now for SEO and web dev. Can't thank you enough for the info.

zacc255 said:

Thanks for sharing your advice with us mate!

What are your tips/advice for someone that just wants to start client SEO? Where to begin getting clients and so on?

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I would suggest starting on a platform like Upwork or Freelancer. You don't need to do manual outreach so you can focus on SEO instead of sales. There's a lot to learn about working with clients, payment, your rate, etc. So this is a great place to start. You can make a name for yourself with reviews as well.

If you want to do client SEO, get used to doing research. Read articles at least once a week. On Friday's I usually go through all the new posts on:
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/
https://searchenginewatch.com/
http://searchengineland.com/
https://www.seroundtable.com/category/seo

I also check BHW at least a few times a day.

The more you know the better. Email marketing, social media, and web development skills help me a lot.

If the opportunity to work with an agency arises, take it. Not only do they do all the client gathering for you, the other SEO's are an amazing learning resource.

davids355 said:

How much info do you give clients about the work you are going to do for them (especially relating to the grey hat / black hat stuff).

Do you make them acknowledge the risks, or do avoid discussing any of the details?

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The number 1 reason, besides my rate, that I lose leads is because I tell them too much. Mostly when I say things like "I can get you listed on [editorial]" and when they ask how I say "I pay the writer etc..." they freak out that it's a paid link. Consumer education is pretty crap for our industry and I wrote a thread about it.

I don't mention the words gray hat or black hat unless they know what they're talking about (which is rare). I call everything white hat, even if it isn't. I haven't ever had a client get a penalty due to my work *knock on wood* as I'm very conservative with black hat tactics. Most things are just a matter of doing them right and you're safe.

When I list of how I help their rankings I just list general stuff you find in an article about how to do SEO targeting towards business owners as they likely read a couple articles and think they know exactly what they're talking about. Here's something pasted in from a proposal I have saved:

To keep this short, here's a list of other skills in brief:
Data analysis
Keyword research
Digital advertising (PPC, display ads, etc)
Citation building
Buyer persona research
Email marketing
Link profile analysis
Bing webmaster tools
Google my Business page(s)
Local SEO
Content marketing
Content writing
and more....

Other ones that I have go into a little too much detail (no bad, just extra noise that takes away from the rest of the proposal). This one is probably almost 2 years old:

Set up GSC
GSC analysis
Set up Bing WM
Set up SumoMe
Social link building
Social bookmarking
Meta data optimization
Title tag optimization
URL cleaning
Niche link building
Review building
Data highlighting
keyword research
Page speed optimization
Header optimization
Anchor text optimization
Submit sitemaps
Advertising (PPC, CPM, Social -if requested)
social optimization
Set up Robots.txt
301 redirects
404 set up

TLDR;
Read some article based on "How to hire an SEO" and "How to rank on the top of Google" (that search term is targetted for people who don't know the term "SEO" so it's not insider knowledge). These articles tell business's what to avoid such as "Don't hire someone that says they buy links" but they fail to say that some links you have to buy. The BBB links cost's $500.

Unless the client knows and specifically wants gray/black hat SEO don't mention it. Articles have scared them into thinking it'll ruin them if they partake in it. At the end of the day, clients just want to see results and they don't press too much on how you got them.

visitorstoleads said:

Thanks for the info. I'm in Northern CA. I was in a great situation with some partners but have been forced to start over because it fell apart. (I've been doing SEO, Web Dev, and PPC since 2004.) So, I'm scrambling to get clients now for SEO and web dev. Can't thank you enough for the info.

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That's rough. Best of luck to you.

I've been getting into niche web sites and internet marketing, i've been doing it for about a month now and reading/working for 14+ hours a day. So far I've made $3 on amazon affiliates. I have one main niche website, with multiple micro niche posts under the same major niche.

I have 0 ranking on google, but I have 4 web 2.0's 30 PA scraped tumblr's per post (like 10 total) backlinking to my website. How come my website isn't showing up on google, even like rank 300?

Thanks!

PS: one other question: Is it okay to have a major niche website with multiple sub niche categories, and then send backlinks from web 2.0's directly to each sub niche post?

twpro said:

I've been getting into niche web sites and internet marketing, i've been doing it for about a month now and reading/working for 14+ hours a day. So far I've made $3 on amazon affiliates. I have one main niche website, with multiple micro niche posts under the same major niche.

I have 0 ranking on google, but I have 4 web 2.0's 30 PA scraped tumblr's per post (like 10 total) backlinking to my website. How come my website isn't showing up on google, even like rank 300?

Thanks!

PS: one other question: Is it okay to have a major niche website with multiple sub niche categories, and then send backlinks from web 2.0's directly to each sub niche post?

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EDIT: I should also post, the keywords I'm targeting are 35-38 difficulty, so not too tough.

twpro said:

I've been getting into niche web sites and internet marketing, i've been doing it for about a month now and reading/working for 14+ hours a day. So far I've made $3 on amazon affiliates. I have one main niche website, with multiple micro niche posts under the same major niche.

I have 0 ranking on google, but I have 4 web 2.0's 30 PA scraped tumblr's per post (like 10 total) backlinking to my website. How come my website isn't showing up on google, even like rank 300?

Thanks!

PS: one other question: Is it okay to have a major niche website with multiple sub niche categories, and then send backlinks from web 2.0's directly to each sub niche post?

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twpro said:

EDIT: I should also post, the keywords I'm targeting are 35-38 difficulty, so not too tough.

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There are hundreds of possible reasons as to why your site won't rank. 4 web 2.0's is pretty much nothing. I threw around 50 on a site and saw no changes. Web 2.0's don't work as well as they used to. Try looking for some domains in the 30's for DA & 30-40 homepage PA. I had a med-comp KW go from nowhere to 9 overnight with 1 EM anchor.

Your sites metrics also matter.

thanks for sharing this with us, very nice info

davids355 said:

How much info do you give clients about the work you are going to do for them (especially relating to the grey hat / black hat stuff).

Do you make them acknowledge the risks, or do avoid discussing any of the details?

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I forgot to mention something in my first reply. If you're being paid any way other than hourly via some sort of time tracker never tell the client how much time you work on their project. My rate, hourly, is between $20-$30/hour so if I'm paid $500/month that's only 16-25 hours per month, 4-5 hours a week. To a client, that's not an attractive number. For $500/month, most clients expect you to be working 20+ hours a week on just their project.

And those numbers aren't always set-in-stone either. Some weeks I may only check GA & rankings. Other weeks I may put in 20 hours. You're paying me $500/month to get at least $500/month worth of results.

Can this make me rich?

greengooboy said:

Can this make me rich?

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Yes but you will need PayPal money generator too which is in the VIP section

greengooboy said:

Can this make me rich?

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Effort in correlates with profit out. If you're already thinking about "getting rich" then you're on a course for failure. Focus on smaller financial goals

• X to pay rent
• X for a new car
• X for my (reasonable) total savings by Y

Thanks for the post, it has been really beneficial and timely now that i'm also doing client SEO with a few partners. I would like to know what softwares do you use to track these processes such as SERP ranking, keyword analysis and maybe even competitor backlink analysis. Or do you use freeware such as Google analytics and webmaster solely.
Do you use Moz, seoserps ahrefs or other tools available? If i was to purchase a tool which would you advise.

It'd be interesting to know about the tools you use both for SEO and managing clients/staff and why you use them.

I will put this in my bookmarks as SEO expert Journey definitely.
I would like to ask you and explain me in short PBN basics in short steps as step1 ,2,3,4, and so on.
And how you are doing interlinking-Ring to Homepage then to Money site or LongTials bonded on every post directly to Money site or other web pages to teh Money site.
Thanks and I expected your full answer in this.
Ive read some srticles about PBN but they just confused me not give me directions.

Jonyeoo said:

Thanks for the post, it has been really beneficial and timely now that i'm also doing client SEO with a few partners. I would like to know what softwares do you use to track these processes such as SERP ranking, keyword analysis and maybe even competitor backlink analysis. Or do you use freeware such as Google analytics and webmaster solely.
Do you use Moz, seoserps ahrefs or other tools available? If i was to purchase a tool which would you advise.

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Oh wow, there's a ton of stuff I use. I'll try to list them all off. I highly recommend all of them depending on what you can afford

• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• Yoast (WP plugin)
• Screaming Frog (Crawler)
• Ahrefs (backlinks)
• Majestic (backlinks)
• Moz OSE
• Microsite Masters (SERP rankings & competitor research)
• Deep crawl (In depth crawler)
• Linkresearchtools (bunch of stuff)
• GSA (tier 2 spamming mostly, not too much to use it for anymore IMO)
• Brackets/Sublime (code editing)
• Bright Local (reports, KW tracking, citations)
• GIMP (Photo editing)
• https://compressor.io/ (smaller file sizes)
  
• Tools.pingdom.com (page speed)
• Webpagetest.org

ChrisX said:

It'd be interesting to know about the tools you use both for SEO and managing clients/staff and why you use them.

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Please see the above. I'll also add in:

• Slack (staff). Simple and easy to integrate 3rd party apps with
• I don't take on too many clients at a time so a simple CRM such as Zoho works for me. Play around with different CRM's. Different strokes for different folks. I've used Asana, Teamwork, pro work flow, and Podio before.

Cashback said:

I will put this in my bookmarks as SEO expert Journey definitely.
I would like to ask you and explain me in short PBN basics in short steps as step1 ,2,3,4, and so on.
And how you are doing interlinking-Ring to Homepage then to Money site or LongTials bonded on every post directly to Money site or other web pages to teh Money site.
Thanks and I expected your full answer in this.
Ive read some srticles about PBN but they just confused me not give me directions.

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Bookmarked?!? Woo, moving up in the world

For PBN's check out this post by T0mmy. Too much detail to go into on a comment, it's worth its own thread. If you have specific questions about PBNs I can answer that for you but a step-by-step guide is a little much.

Silo links. Every page links to the homepage, contact page, and at least 1 main page (such as a product or service). Map out your link structure and make sure all pages are sharing the juice.

Wow. Thanks a lot for the tip on what to do. If would recommend one to do analysis for competition backlinks, profile, serp tracking, keyword analysis and site audits all in one app which would you use. Don't want to spend so much current with the few clients we have right now. Was looking at SEO powersuite but still on the fence whether to buy it or not. Used the free edition and seems to be quite decent but want to hear from long time users.

Since you consider yourself "Grey hat". When you're building links for a clients money site, would you build blackhat links directly to the money site or would you create a web2.0 / new domain in the same niche and point your blackhat links to those?

Clarification:
Client Site <- PBN <- PBN
or
Client Site <- Web2.0 / Buffer Site <- PBN <- PBN

I'm wonder since someone reached out to me and I'm seeing what's the best way. I would pick for the first way for my own sites, but this client wants to see the links first and I don't want to to show them my PBN network. I would rather keep that safe and avoid them doing anything to my domains in there.

Always wondered what approach do people like you take while servicing clients. Clients always like to see results, definite results. When they ask you to promise them something, whether it's traffic or rankings, how do you tackle that?

do you only do client SEO or anything on your own too?

SEOMemj said:

The number 1 reason, besides my rate, that I lose leads is because I tell them too much. Mostly when I say things like "I can get you listed on [editorial]" and when they ask how I say "I pay the writer etc..." they freak out that it's a paid link. Consumer education is pretty crap for our industry and I wrote a thread about it.

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First of all, this is a great thread OP. I expected BS and you reverted my expectations, thanks for doing this.

Yeah, that is exactly what the terrorism put out by search engines is supposed to achieve. Matt Cutts has said explicitly that people who do SEO are like criminals who subvert the legal system for profit. He actually went there. Gaming his search engine results is like a criminal gaming the system. That propaganda is efficient.

Social media and the Internet have in fact indoctrinated a whole generation to be passive, accept everything and obey. SEO customers are no different.

Tell a bunch of idiots to go hunting Pokemons and just the other day I was getting into my car at 7 PM when I saw a bunch of idiots walking around filming everything with their stupid phones and I asked WTF was going on, they said it was Pokemon Go. Idiots become voluntary surveillance cameras just to capture inexistent beings.

With a generation like that what do you expect? Tell them you bought a link and they freak out because they must obey a corporation. That's the world we live in.