The only way to sell local SEO, if you actually want to get traction and maintain traction, is to work on a model of ranking the client first, THEN calling to introduce yourself. You must assume they want to keep the ranking - and you can then explain the charges to 'keep doing the work' to keep them ranked.
Contrary to the above posts - this is not 'offering a guarantee', it's just shifting all the risk over to your side. And, when you take all the risk, you can command a princely fee.
When we were in this game, I would arbitrarily set the fees depending on what I thought made sense based on the volume of new business our service was delivering. If there were 320 searches a month, and I delivered top 3 ranking, and each customer was spending $2k, it's not a far stretch to charge anywhere from $2-$5k/mth for that ranking. Under the conventional "lets try rank you" client model, that would be anywhere from 4-10 clients that you'd need to first find, and then hand hold, and then chase for payment.
My average billing for a top 3 ranking was >$1k a month, and the client would just keep paying in perpetuity because their phone keeps ringing, day in, day out.
Compare that to having to hand hold the nervous-Nellies, and having to re-sell them each month or two to keep the few hundred dollars a month coming in... I know which I'd rather do. I'll take the $1k+ a month from a delighted client, who sends me massive amounts of referral business.
You can imagine those referral conversations... under my model above, they go like this;
"Man... I've been SO busy this month, the phone just hasn't stopped ringing. This guy just ranked our website and said we only need to pay to keep it there - you should really give them a call",
vs the conventional model of SEO sales,
"So these guys say they're doing something... and I'm spending all this money each month, but who knows... I'll give it another month or two and then pull the pin if I don't get something from it. But hey - if you want to call them, go ahead, you might have better luck".
As with any business - it's ONLY about risk management, sales, and service delivery. If you take the risk, you get the reward on the back end, PLUS the reward of having clients flooding in to you, taking care of the sales part. It just doesn't make sense to me to do it any other way.
Of course you won't rank 100% of sites. Who cares - when in fact, your success rate could be as miserably low as 20% and you'd still make an absolute killing, and live a stress-free existence with clients who absolutely love you, and are true ambassadors, rather than 'annoying people who call each month expecting an update'.
A business is nothing more than a vehicle for monetizing value. So if your business is struggling, you must question the value that you offer the world.
