Giving Away the Farm: Proposal Development for New SEO Agencies

Posted by BrianChilds

There’s a huge difference between making money from selling SEO and actually making a living — or making a difference, for that matter. A new marketing agency will quickly discover that surviving on $1,000 contracts is challenging. It takes time to learn the client and their customers, and poorly written contracts can lead to scope creep and dissatisfied clients.

It’s common for agencies to look for ways to streamline operations to assist with scaling their business, but one area you don’t want to streamline is the proposal research process. I actually suggest going in the opposite direction: create proposals that give away the farm.

Details matter, both to you and your prospective client

I know what you’re thinking: Wait a minute! I don’t want to do a bunch of work for free!

I too am really sensitive to the idea that a prospective client may attempt to be exploitative. I think it’s a risk worth taking. Outlining the exact scope of services forces you to do in-depth research on your prospect’s website and business, to describe in detail what you’re going to deliver. Finding tools and processes to scale the research process is great, but don’t skip it. Detailing your findings builds trust, establishes your team as a high-quality service provider, and will likely make you stand out amongst a landscape of standard-language proposals.

Be exceptional. Here’s why I think this is particularly important for the proposal development process.

Avoid scope creep & unrealistic expectations

Just like the entrepreneur that doesn’t want to tell anyone their amazing idea without first obtaining an NDA, new SEO agencies may be inclined to obscure their deliverables in standard proposal language out of fear that their prospect will take their analysis and run. Generic proposal language is sometimes also used to reduce the time and effort involved in getting the contract out the door.

This may result in two unintended outcomes:

1. Lack of specific deliverables can lead to contract scope creep.
2. It can make you lazy and you end up walking into a minefield.

Companies that are willing to invest larger sums of money in SEO tend to have higher expectations, and this cuts both ways. Putting in the work to craft a detailed proposal not only shows that you actually care about their business, but it also helps manage the contract’s inevitable growth when you’re successful.

Misalignment of goals or timelines can sour a relationship quickly. Churn in your contracts is inevitable, but it’s much easier to increase your annual revenue by retaining a client for a few more months than trying to go out and find a replacement. Monetizing your work effectively and setting expectations is an excellent way to make sure the relationship is built on firm ground.

Trust is key

Trust is foundational to SEO: building trustworthy sites, creating valuable and trustworthy content, becoming a trusted resource for your community that’s worth linking to. Google rewards this kind of intent.

Trust is an ethos; as an SEO, you’re a trust champion. You can build trust with a prospect by being transparent and providing overwhelming value in your proposal. Tell your clients exactly what they need to do based on what you discover in your research.

This approach also greases the skids a little when approaching the prospect for the first time. Imagine the difference between a first touch with your prospect when you request a chance to discuss research you’ve compiled, versus a call to simply talk about general SEO value. By developing an approach that feels less like a sales process, you can navigate around the psychological tripwires that make people put up barriers or question your trustworthiness.

This is also referred to as “consultative sales.” Some best practices that business owners typically respond well to are:

• Competitive research. A common question businesses will ask about SEO relates to keywords: What are my competitors ranking for? What keywords have they optimized their homepage for? One thing I like to do is plug the industry leader’s website into Open Site Explorer and show what content is generating the most links. Exporting the Top Pages report from OSE makes for a great leave-behind.
• Top questions people are asking. Research forum questions that relate to the industry or products your prospect sells. When people ask questions on Yahoo Answers or Quora, they’re often doing so because they can’t find a good answer using search. A couple of screenshots can spark a discussion around how your prospective client’s site can add value to those online discussions.

Yes, by creating a more detailed proposal you do run the risk that your target company will walk away with the analysis. But if you suspect that the company is untrustworthy, then I’d advise walking away before even building the analysis in the first place; just try getting paid on time from an untrustworthy company.

Insights can be worth more

By creating a very transparent, “give away the farm”-type document, SEOs empower themselves to have important discussions prior to signing a contract. Things like:

• What are the business goals this company wants to focus on?
• Who are the people they want to attract?
• What products or pages are they focused on?

You’ll have to understand at least this much to set up appropriate targeting, so all the better to document this stuff beforehand. And remember, having these conversations is also an investment in your prospect’s time — and there’s some psychology around getting your target company to invest in you. It’s called “advancement” of the sale. By getting your prospect to agree to a small, clearly defined commitment, it pulls them further down the sales funnel.

In the case of research, you may choose to ask the client for permission to conduct further research and report on it at a specified time in the future. You can use this as an opportunity to anchor a price for what that research would cost, which frames the scope of service prices later on.

By giving away the farm, you’ll start off the relationship as a trusted advisor. And even if you don’t get the job to do the SEO work itself, it’s possible you can develop a retainer where you help your prospect manage digital marketing generally.

Prepping the farm for sale

It goes without saying, but making money from SEO requires having the right tools for the job. If you’re brand-new to the craft, I suggest practicing by auditing a small site. (Try using the site audit template we provide in the site audit bootcamp.) Get comfortable with the tools, imagine what you would prioritize, and maybe even do some free work for a site to test out how long it takes to complete relatively small tasks.

Imagine you were going to approach that website and suggest changes. Ask yourself:

• Who are they selling to?
• What keywords and resources does this target user value?
• What changes would you make that would improve search rank position for those terms?
• What would you do first?
• How long would it take? (In real human time, not starving-artist-who-never-sleeps time.)

Some of the tools that I find most helpful are:

• Moz Pro Campaigns > Custom Reports. This is an easy one. Create a Moz Pro campaign (campaigns are projects that analyze the SEO performance of a website over time) and then select “Custom Reports” in the top-right of the Campaign interface. Select the modules you want to include — site crawl and keyword rankings against potential competitors are good ones — and then offer to send this report to your prospect for free. It’s a lot harder for a customer to turn something off than it is to turn something on. Give away a custom report and then set up time to talk through the results on a weekly basis.

• Builtwith.com. This free service allows you to investigate a number of attributes related to a website, including the marketing software installed. Similar to a WHOIS search, I use this to understand whether the prospect is overloaded with software or if they completely lack any marketing automation. This can be helpful for suggesting tools that will improve their insights immediately. Who better to help them implement those tools or provide a discount than you?
• Keyword Explorer > Lists. Create a list in Keyword Explorer and look for the prevalence of SERP features. This can tell you a lot about what kinds of content are valuable to their potential visitor. Do images show up a lot? What about videos? These could be opportunities for your customer.
• MozBar. Use the Page Analysis tab in MozBar to assess some of the website’s most important pages. Check page load speed in the General Attributes section. Also see if they have enticing titles and descriptions.
• Site crawl. If you don’t have Moz Pro, I recommend downloading Screaming Frog. It can crawl up to 500 pages on a site for free and then allow you to export the results into a .csv file. Look for anything that could be blocking traffic to the site or reducing the chance that pages are getting indexed, such as 4XX series errors or an overly complex robots.txt file. Remedying these can be quick wins that provide a lot of value. If you start a Moz Pro campaign, you can see how these issues are reduced over time.

Want to learn how to add SEO to your existing portfolio of marketing services?

Starting on April 4th, 2017, Moz is offering a 3-day training seminar on How to Add SEO to Your Agency. This class will be every Tuesday for 3 weeks and will cover some of the essentials for successfully bringing SEO into your portfolio.

Sign up for the seminar!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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10 Free Copywriting Resources to Catapult Revenue (Or Your Money Back)

You start with a few formulas, and then you tweak – insert a power word here, take advantage of expanded headlines there. Whatever it’s gonna take to hit chart-topping CTRs.

Results all come down to your ad text at that point. That simple string of characters acts as a catalyst, leaping off the page and into a viewer’s brain to motivate, inspire, scare, or forcibly push them through the formidable couch-bound inertia that keeps people from making any changes at all.

But no one teaches this. There’s no Ad Copywriting 101 in college.

Instead, there are an abundance of free resources online that will teach you everything needed to know to instantly improve your AdWords copy. No formal education or expensive tuition required.

Here are 10 of the best free copywriting resources that you can read right now.

1. Gary Halbert: The Boron Letters

The first resource is also the weirdest.

Gary Halbert was like the OG internet infomarketer in his day. And he’s got a rap sheet to prove it.

His ads were excellent. The products in his ads? Not so much.

One thing leads to another (as they usually do) and he winds up in jail. Apparently, though, prison is an excellent productivity hack (no free Wi-Fi).

While there, Gary decided to make the most of his incarceration by writing to his son. You know, passing down his fatherly wisdom and all that.

And thus, The Boron Letters came to be.

It’s not always PC. But it is entertaining. Vastly interesting lessons that range from life to business to copywriting.

See, here’s the trick with this copywriting thing. Don’t watch what people say. Watch what they do: The storytelling. The sentence structure (or lack thereof). The conversational tone.

It’s all there inside The Boron Letters. You’ll get distracted while reading it. You’ll question what the hell you’re wasting your time doing. But then you’ll get to the good stuff. And it’ll all be worth it.

The Boron Letters also appear alongside Gary’s other, similarly personal letters on direct-response copywriting. Here’s one example. They were originally packaged as part of a high-dollar subscription thing (you know, those infomarketing guru’s gotta hype something).

But now it’s available for free for all to read. (Gotta love internet piracy.)

2. CopyHackers: The Ultimate Guide to No-Pain Copywriting

Many of these resources are going to look like blog posts. (We are shooting for free here, aren’t we?) But in reality they’re so much more.

The Ultimate Guide to No-Pain Copywriting by the always excellent CopyHackers is a perfect example.

Sure. It’s technically a blog post. But it also clocks in at a 59-minute reading time! So it’s one you’ll want to bookmark, favorite, Someday/Maybe, and come back to reference in the future.

Once again, you can also learn by watching (and not just reading).

Look at that first line:

“Because only rookies write from scratch…”

It’s short and bold. But it also introduces the hook from the get-go. “Rookies”. “Write from Scratch”. Formulas. The entire introduction is a lesson unto itself.

The hook is: zen. The promise of a simpler, easier life.

And then the meat goes through almost every single formula, including old-school class ones, for almost every circumstance imaginable.

Take testimonials for instance.

People are installing ad blockers faster than you can blink. Instead, they choose to rely on recommendations from other individuals (9 out of 10 people trust them more than brand-sponsored messages).

Ideally, testimonials should help potential buyers overcome a specific hurdle.

Think about it. They’re the living, breathing version of your buyer persona. People want to learn how those people ran up against challenges just like they face on a daily basis. And they want to know how they were able to overcome those challenges to reassure the money’s a good investment, the time it takes is minimal, or the stress endured is worthwhile.

About halfway down you’ll find the TEASE testimonial formula, with an example from some handsome young man from 2013.

And, of course, there’s also more ad-specific formulas so you can see how a formula like PAS can serve as a framework for your AdWords or Facebook ad copy.

3. KlientBoost: The Landing Page Copywriting Blueprint

Ad copy is only as good as its landing page at the end of the day. Which means even if you come up with a great 10-word hook, you gotta stretch that out a bit for the page itself.

The Landing Page Copywriting Blueprint from KlientBoost can help. There’s a gifographic for starters (yay, no reading!). But more importantly it unveils the subtle nuances of copywriting for online ad campaigns.

For example, what has the largest bearing on your campaign conversions?

Simple: The offer.

The reason is because different offers (with different hooks for different levels of commitment) will appeal to different groups of people.

That’s why pushing your salesy Facebook campaign to ice cold traffic fails miserably. You gotta warm those peeps up first with infographics, interest them with eBooks, and build trust with case studies before going in for the kill.

These considerations also dictate other things. For example, long or short landing page?

Shorter is better for interested parties who just want the facts, while longer is preferable for brand new visitors.

Point is: You can’t copy-and-paste a copywriting formula and use it at random (no matter how good or timeless it might be). You have to exercise some judgment, consider the circumstances and context. Then you write.

4. Jon Morrow: His Posts. All of them.

Confession time. Sometimes I cry.

It’s not pretty. A grown, balding man crying. Cringe-worthy. Embarrassing even.

But you can’t blame me. I dare you to read this or this and not tear up a little bit. Go on. Try it.

Half a decade ago, when I was a slave to the man in-house marketer, I would re-write those two posts to internalize the writing. (Because I had a lot of free time. See: Being an employee.)

Hey. If it was good enough for Ben Franklin, it’s good enough for us.

There’s a lot that goes into this copywriting thing.

There’s storytelling arcs from classic movies (we’ll get to that in a bit). Like the “Reluctant Hero” which pops up across Hollywood every quarter or so. There’s the stylistic elements like sentence fragments or line repetition. The twist turns, “open loops,” and unexpected details that force readers to keep, well, reading.

Oh. And did I mention Jon writes with his voice?

Virtuoso. Seriously. Read them.

5. ConversionXL: Quick Course on Effective Website Copywriting

180 degrees in the opposite direction we have ConversionXL’s dry, technical, in-depth Quick Course on Effective Website Copywriting (I mean that as a compliment).

Their point of view, unsurprisingly given the name, is a focus on copy that converts. That gets people to take action and give you their info or whip out a credit card.

Most of these other resources listed provide tips, tricks, and formulas. All good and helpful. But ConversionXL takes it one step further, presenting a framework or process for actually sitting down (or standing up – sitting is the new smoking apparently) and writing copy.

It kicks off by walking you through how to perform basic research on the customer, product, and competition. This prep work, truthfully, is where the gold lies.

It’s like that old repairman story. Takes them about five minutes to perform a task and bill a couple hundred bucks. The customer is appalled at the total. So the plumber writes out an itemized version, explaining:

• $0.25 cents for wear and tear on the hammer,
• And $75.00 for knowing where to hit the pipe.

See. The writing stuff is hard. No doubt. But you have absolutely no idea what to write in the first place without the research. (Even old Ogilvy knew this!)

Doesn’t matter if we’re talking about writing a long-form landing page, writing a blog post like this, or a measly five words in a headline. You gotta do the work before you do the work.

6. Khan Academy: Pixar in a Box

Pixar has won 210 awards and been nominated 211 times.

Not bad, considering they’ve only released 17 feature films.

That’s, like…a bunch of awards for each film (math was never my strong suit).

Sure, their graphics are good. Bleeding edge and all that. But they don’t win all those awards and break box office revenue and WOW moviegoers with graphics alone.

The secret lies in the heart.

Pixar is, above all else, master storytelling. They know how to draw you in with unforgettable yet relatable characters. How to toy with your emotions so you buy into their world.

And thankfully, the Khan Academy is bringing the story behind their stories to life.

Look: We all talk about storytelling. Seth told us years ago. And yet, no one’s tellin’ any stories.

Go read your own blog posts. Go read your landing pages. Go read your advertisements.

The same old boring, “me-too” exposition that solves zero problems and motivates zero people to read, click, or opt-in.

If someone told you about the important reasons for internet security, you would agree. And then continue to ignore them. But if they started out by first talking about how hackers have stolen over one billion dollars from businesses last year alone and another billion people had their identities stolen, your ears might perk up a little bit.

Great ads need hooks. Drama. Foreshadowing. Conflict. Climaxes and even a dénouement to put everything straight after you purchase.

In other words, the same storytelling fundamentals originally put forth by the Greeks and Romans.

7. Jon Morrow Redux: Headline Hacks

Speaking of hooks, let’s jump back to Jon Morrow. Because his Headline Hacks will give you a handful to get started with (in addition to helpful explanations of why each works).

Here’s what you should do after downloading it.

1. Open up a notebook or Google docs.
2. Begin copying down – word for word – each section, one at a time. (Remember that whole Ben Franklin bit? There’s also some science about learning stuff better when you rewrite it. For what it’s worth.)
3. Now repeat that for the next section, making sure to add a helpful note for how each should be used.
4. So at the end, you should have created a little mini-database that looks something like:

Click image to enlarge

And voila! Literally start by just copying and pasting these. Then reworking. Then adding to it as you get better.

No more limp headlines that sabotage your ad campaign CTR’s or landing page conversions.

8. Claude Hopkins: Scientific Advertising

In 1923, ad man Claude Hopkins published Scientific Advertising, which went on to inspire the likes of David Ogilvy and Gary Halbert (ever heard of ‘em?).

Ogilvy once remarked:

“Nobody should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times. It changed the course of my life.”

In this book that was written before the Great Depression, Hopkins explains his testing philosophy to (a) maximize results while (b) minimizing the damage a bad ad can inflict.

He also introduces new age concepts that we digital marketers like to take credit for, like split testing ad campaigns and using coupons to track ad performance, customer purchases, and power loyalty or database marketing campaigns.

It’s a little dry. Some tactical elements might be outdated. But the principles are the definition of timeless.

You can purchase it on Amazon. OR you can read it online for free and download the PDF version if you’d like.

9. Steven Pressfield: Writing Wednesdays

The excellent Made to Stick (not free) introduces the idea of “successful plots” that firmly implant themselves into people’s brains.

Think of the Challenge Plot (similar to the Reluctant Hero), where Rocky Balboa goes from dock worker to world champ.

Or the Connection Plot that brings people together from different sides of the tracks, like Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio (he’s so dreamy) in Romeo and Juliet (was there a book version, too?).

Point is, many of our favorite works from the past few centuries are well worn ideas that still resonate (yet presented in new, refreshing ways).

Steven Pressfield, author of The Legend of Bagger Vance and The War of Art (among many others), dissects many of these plot styles and other writing insights in his Writing Wednesdays column.

His work also reinforces another recurring theme here: watch what he does, not just what he says.

The writing is crisp and clear. Conversational. And he uses modern day examples as a frame of reference to help make intangible concepts concrete for readers.

10. Rachel Aaron: How I Went from Writing 2000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day

Rachel Aaron writes sciences fiction. Or maybe romance? I’m not entirely sure of the difference.

And her post, How I Went from Writing 2000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day was the kernel for an expanded Amazon version, entitled 2K to 10K.

Here’s the deal.

You know writing’s tough. The idea of writing 2,000 words in a single sitting probably sounds like torture to most.

Instead, Rachel retells her experience in upping that word count to over 10,000 in a single day.

Why is this important? And what on Earth does this have to do with ad campaigns?

Writing is everything.

The top-of-funnel content to bring in new search visitors. The eBook for your Facebook lead gen campaign. The long-form landing page that gets them to convert. The 10-part drip email campaign that nurtures and upsells.

You wanna cut it in today’s marketing world? You’re going to have to do some writing.

Penning that five-word headline and eight-word description for your ad campaign isn’t the end of work for the day. It’s just the beginning.

BONUS: WordStream’s Free White Paper Library

WordStream’s free learning resource PPC University offers a bunch of free guides to help you write better copy for your ads and landing pages.

Here are a few of our favorites:

• Tricks to Get the Click: 10 Tips for Writing Better PPC Text Ads
• Toolkit: Mastering Copywriting for Conversions
• Voice of the Customer: The Secret Weapon for Great Landing Page Copy

Start Reading!

The legendary Ogilvy on Advertising talks about David’s response to someone who works in advertising, yet had not read any books about advertising.

Specifically, he asked:

“Suppose your gallbladder has to be removed this evening. Will you choose a surgeon who has read some books on anatomy and knows where the gallbladder, is or someone who relies on his own intuition?”

Same applies today.

Maybe you didn’t learn ad copywriting in college, but if you look around, there’s an endless amount of free (or extremely inexpensive) resources available that will teach you the ropes.

Grasp the fundamentals, and there’s no reason you’ll have to suffer subpar CTR or conversions anymore.

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Your Daily SEO Fix: Link Building & Ranking Zero

Posted by FeliciaCrawford

Last week, we shared a series of four short videos intended to help you accomplish some easy wins using Moz Pro: Your Daily SEO Fix: The Keyword Research Edition. Week Two (that’s this week!) is focused on link building, identifying opportunities to take over SERP features, and doing that all-important competitive research.

This time around, we’re using a mix of Open Site Explorer, Fresh Web Explorer, and Moz Pro. Open Site Explorer has some free capabilities, so if you’d like to follow along…

Open OSE in a new tab!

If you’re a Moz Pro subscriber, crack open your campaigns and settle in. If you’d like to see what all the fuss is about without committing, you can dip your toes in with a free 30-day trial. And now that that’s out of the way, let’s get started!

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Fix #1: Link building & brand building via unlinked mentions

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“Moz” is an SEO software company, yes, but it’s also Morissey’s nickname and short for “Mozambique.” All three of those things get mentioned around the web a bunch on any given day, but if we want to identify link building opportunities just to our site, it could get confusing quick. Luckily, Jordan’s here to explain how to quickly find unlinked mentions of your site or brand using Open Site Explorer and keep those pesky Smiths references out of your results.

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Fix #2: Prioritizing and organizing your link building efforts

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Link building requires more than just finding opportunities, of course. April shows how you can prioritize your efforts by identifying the most valuable linking opportunities in Open Site Explorer, then dives into how you can cultivate a continuous stream of fresh related content ripe for a link-back with Fresh Web Explorer.

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Fix #3: Ranking in position zero with SERP features in Moz Pro

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If you have keywords that aren’t ranking in the first few results pages, don’t despair — there’s hope yet. There are tons of opportunities to rank above the first organic result with the prevalence of SERP features. In this video, Ellie shows how you can identify keywords that need some love, track SERP feature opportunities for them, filter your keywords to show only those that surface certain SERP features, and more.

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Fix #4: Gleaning insights from your competitors’ backlink profiles

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Remember April from Fix #2? She’s back and ready to show you how to get the skinny on your competitors’ juicy backlink profiles using both your Moz Pro campaign and Open Site Explorer.

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One step beyond

That wraps up our latest week of fixes! We’ve got one last round coming at you next Thursday. As always, if you’re curious and want to follow along, you can try it all out firsthand by taking a free trial of Moz Pro. We also offer several SEO bootcamp courses that can get you started on fundamentals if this whole SEO thing is pretty new to you.

If you’re looking for some more meaty info on these topics, I’ve put together a short list of light reading for you:

• How to Prioritize Your Link Building Efforts & Opportunities – Whiteboard Friday – On par with some of the ideas in this post, Rand outlines how to simplify, streamline, and prioritize the link building process.
• How Long Does Link Building Take to Influence Rankings? – This case study sets a baseline for how long it may take for your link building efforts to bear fruit.
• Ranking #0: SEO for Answers – The inimitable Dr. Pete delves into everything Featured Snippet, from what they are, to why they’re important, to how you can begin earning your own.
• Hunting Down SERP Features to Understand Intent & Drive Traffic – Next Level – Learn all about those mysterious beasts, SERP features, and how you can use your understanding of searcher intent to start winning more of them.

Thanks for reading along, friends, and we’ll see you again for the last installment of the Daily SEO Fix series next week!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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