If you build it (rioght) they WILLl come

I have had a really good two days. Let last year I decided to build a website in Houston to promote my website building service. In Houston this market is huge, and the SEO market is even larger, with tons of competition.

I really built my site for my own crediility, and since I flatter myself to believe that I know a little about local SEO, I decided just to see if I could get it to rank.

Amazingly it went sraight to the front page , at the bottom,but still, and has hovered there since.
Needless to say, that low down gets very little traffic.

A few weeks ago I decided to try a SEO services site, so I build a one pager, and linked to it from my website selling to get it indexed.

Yesterday, a gentleman hit my contact form on the build websites page, and requested information, and today he hired me to build a membership site for him.

The best part? He did not bat an eye at the price, I did not have to sell him, the site ad done it for me.

A few minutes ago a lady who does seamstress work contacted me from the SEO site, and decided to take my basic SEO package.

Again, no haggling was required, she did not even mention the price.

My experience has been from the perspective of convincing someone they need a website and SEO, and convincing them that they can afford it, or trying to work in their budget range.

For all of you out there who are offering these services in your area and have not built your own sit to showcase your services, do it today. Don't let the competition scare you, someone will find your site.

Whatever contact you get from your website will be pre-sold on your product and price. This makes the resulting conversations a dream compared to what I have had to do in the past.

I can get used to this.

Sounds like your on a roll, that's awesome. Keep it up

Quick question: Do you have prices on your site?

carlikito said:

Quick question: Do you have prices on your site?

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Yes I do, for basic services.

Good thread

Techxan said:

Yes I do, for basic services.

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I assume a basic package would be something like: rank you for one local KW + get you in places or maps?
Out of curiosity, how much do you charge for that? And do you put them on a monthly plan or one-time service? What separates you from large companies that blast these same local business every day with cold calls?

congratulations man. How much did you made from those two sales?

Not giving my prices here. but my wife's meds are covered for next month.

Xtopzi, I do not offer packages like that, and I am not going into what I do because it is working for me right now and I do not want to mess it up.

I sell them on the idea that they are paying for my knowledge, not my efforts. I do what they need to rank them, and very little more, so that I always have room to improve in case the competition makes a run at me.

My basic package includes onpage optimization for two pages, some citations, and goggle and Yahoo places. I provide all that in the first month of service. Each subsequent month gets two more pages until the whole site is done.

I always try for a monthly plan.

Congratulations, it sounds like it's going really well for you. Keep it up, try to rank for some more keywords and increase the traffic to your website.

My partners and I started this way, offering SEO to local businesses from our website. It worked well but after landing some clients from across the globe, we realized we can offer our services to literally any business anywhere in the world. So long story short, we now run multiple websites in the US, Canada, UK & Australia.

Once your client base grows, try hiring a couple freelancers to handle the workload for you while you manage the business and figure out how to grow it exponentially!

Good luck to you!

So are you upselling them on anything?

Nice one mate

Out of curiosity, since you say you kind of did it on a bit of a whim, did you do a custom design, or just a quick WordPress Theme set up? In short how much of an impact do you think your design/sales copy as opposed to your rank is making?

SEO_Alchemy said:

Nice one mate

Out of curiosity, since you say you kind of did it on a bit of a whim, did you do a custom design, or just a quick WordPress Theme set up? In short how much of an impact do you think your design/sales copy as opposed to your rank is making?

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I used an HTML template and modified it. I will attach a blog, but for now it is just an HTML/CSS site.

I think the design only contributes as it looks fairly professional, and the copy on the page must be answering their questions.

It really too early to delve into that, only one customer so far from each site.

Thanks for the info. I am in the Houston area and noticed that the competition is fierce and haven't even attempted to rank my site (mainly SEO). But after what you said, I think I will give it a go. Just one sale from my efforts would be rewarding. The only diff from me and you is that you probably do SEO manually (more reliable) whereas I just resell.

Congrats with your success and I wish you the best!

If you want to do better locally, go even more niche with your keyword selection. Don't ignore a keyword because it only shows 10-20 searches/month in Google Keyword Tool. Those few folks searching each month are HIGHLY targeted to exactly what you offer.

As an example, all the local SEO folks and companies in the city I live in go after "<city name> SEO". The competition is FIERCE and would take months or years of heavy duty work to even squeak into the Top 10. But keywords like "<city> internet marketing consultant" or "search engine marketing <city>" have a lot less searches, but also a lot less competition.

I'm starting to get back into more local stuff, and am going EXTREMELY niche. Targeting terms that have ~10 searches a month or less. Usually a quick blog post and some simple sharing/link building will help you get ranked and bring in some highly targeted traffic.

Techxan said:

Yes I do, for basic services.

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I have about 4 sites with various offerings just laying around, never done any SEO to them not even on-page lol....too lazy.

They get traffic but I don't think I ever got a single lead out of them. I will add prices and see if that helps.

Maybe people think that the prices are too high and don't bother to call to find out as not to get sold. We'll see, thanks.

Nice thread, i just set up my own local SEO service website yesterday, you give me more confidence. Thank you

Thats awesome man! ... Congratulations.. Wish I could do the same where I come from but the competition is fierce here and it will take me some time to get there.

This is something I rarely see talked about on forums.

It's all cold calling, direct mail etc. etc.

Put the same effort into your own site and rank it and you will get leads.

I hated cold calling and almost begging people to listen to you...your instantly on the back foot.

If they come to you it's a different story.

virtualc08 said:

Thats awesome man! ... Congratulations.. Wish I could do the same where I come from but the competition is fierce here and it will take me some time to get there.

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This is what I am trying to say. The competition in Houston is insane. Seriously I even had a guy ask me why SEO people send him pennies and dice.

But for whatever reason, everybody doing this service is either not a local business (like me) or do not do proper local SEO. (like I do) because they think the competition is to fierce. (like you do)

Looking at the numbers, I should have not been able to do this, but everyone is ranking with links and such, and not taking advantage of local SEO benefits.

I will bet you this, if you get your on-page SEO right, and do the best 30 local citations, you will bounce to the first page in three months or lless. I did it in 4 days.

how do you do local citations?

So you're going off a google local page?

Techxan said:

This is what I am trying to say. The competition in Houston is insane. Seriously I even had a guy ask me why SEO people send him pennies and dice.

But for whatever reason, everybody doing this service is either not a local business (like me) or do not do proper local SEO. (like I do) because they think the competition is to fierce. (like you do)

Looking at the numbers, I should have not been able to do this, but everyone is ranking with links and such, and not taking advantage of local SEO benefits.

I will bet you this, if you get your on-page SEO right, and do the best 30 local citations, you will bounce to the first page in three months or lless. I did it in 4 days.

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