How to get SEO clients?

how does one start up their seo business and find their first client? make a website and rank for seo searches? or other ways? the best way to get cleints is from referrals, but when youre starting out you have 0 clients so far.

Do some free promotion for a few companies to build your client portfolio, partner with web firms, or rank for seo related search terms, or adwords.

Hi, this thread has some info:

Offliners: The Amazing Google Maps Placement Letter That Gets New Clients

although some of the info in the WSO as far as his folders, etc are lame, the guts of it seems to work, as detailed here:

Good Way To Build A $5,000+ A Month Consulting Business

Georges said:

how does one start up their seo business and find their first client? make a website and rank for seo searches? or other ways? the best way to get cleints is from referrals, but when youre starting out you have 0 clients so far.

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Some say you don't need a website, however, I disagree. Building your own site and then ranking it for a particular SEO niche is the way to go. I chose Google Places, built and optimize the site to rank, made videos and got them ranked. Both my website and some videos ended up #1 or 2 for keywords in the Google Places niche.

I read everything on Google Places that I could get my hands on...I mean everything. My site began to get tons of traffic, PR went from 0 to PR4 in 60 days and clients began to call. I also worked my local area by asking friends if they knew anyone who needed help with their local business seo.

When people wanted proof of my "ability and knowledge" my website and rankings spoke for themselves. I now offer website design and SEO services.

I now operate a successful SEO company (It's not huge, but keeps me busy and I make money...this was a godsend for me). of course, it takes work and lots of it. My clients are happy and they pay on time .

I don't make promises to my clients that I know I can't keep or have control over. Several had been burnt before by less than honest SEO companies. I strive everyday to bring each of them results and they appreciate it. Work hard, apply yourself, and you will have clients begging for you to help them.

Hope this helps. Good Luck to you!!!

Word of mouth works surprisingly well. Get into small talk with anybody you can and work in that you do SEO to as many of them as you can. You'd be surprised who's looking for SEO. Get a good looking business card and hand it out each time you bring it up.

Rank in your region for the terms.. SEO, search engine optimization, marketing, etc. Advertise on CraigsList, get a phone number for your business, make a nice looking ad. (You can use images in CL posts, and HTML, so making your ad look good is easy.) There's probably some type of community board on your local news website, get on all of those.

If you live in a big city, then CL can keep you pretty well tied up. When I lived in LA, I couldn't advertise every day.. I could only advertise about 2 days a week or else I'd just be swamped with leads. One thing that I always did with SEO services in the LA area was posted in the barter section, you can convert a lot of those into paying customers by not being interested in their shit for trade.

Also, like said.. Mainly be honest with your clientele. Treat your clients like you'd expected to be treated and that's how you'll get good word of mouth and future projects. Not to mention, that's how you'll KEEP your clients, period.

in addition to what's been said, you could hire someone to cold call businesses.

Can you please let me know how did you achieve PR0 to PR4 ranking in 60days?. usually, SEO companies target to achieve it in 6 months time

I recently went to a meetup event in my city that caters to entrepreneurs, where I made a number of good contacts that I hope will become clients. I think having a site up and running is key so that when you hand people like this your card, they can go home and check it out. You may want to give that a shot.

I am also starting a partnership with a web-designer I know, and will begin offering a commission for any new clients he sends my way...probably 20% of one month's fees; it may not be a huge chunk of change, but I think he'll appreciate a couple hundred bucks here and there, and he's been proactive in wanting to work with me, so I'd like to return the favor. He's already sent one client my way a few months ago, and we've just made a proposal to another huge client who is a 'warm lead', so we'll see how that goes. So...find a designer who doesn't have an SEO guy and offer free services to help their business...then he can say 'I know a guy who helped us out a lot, and I think he would be great for you...here's his email.'