SEO Client Acquisition

TL;DR Before starting to read, I want to explain the purpose of this post – I want to share some thoughts with my SEO colleagues about the importance of thinking from the user’s perspective and their intent, before planning website structure, topics, keyword research and creating content, with an example. Paying attention to this, we will be able to save time and resources and focus on the really important things.

This morning (actually night 😊), I was doing keyword research for a local business targeting specific types of users. The long-tail keywords I was focusing on at that moment included one very specific: “best” and different variations of the location…

Not sure why, maybe because I was tired and subconsciously wanted to rest and distract myself a little, I did the following search: best seo experts Galway

For those of you who do not know me – I live in Galway, Ireland, which is one of the largest cities in the country, concentrating a diverse number of businesses and definitely one of the most beautiful places.

Anyway, let’s assume that I have some idea how to position my services at the top in some location. As an example, I can give you a range of interesting keywords where for the last 5 years, different websites of mine have been and still are among the first 3 positions:

• SEO Galway
• SEO services Galway
• SEO audits Galway
• SEO agency Galway
• SEO company Galway
• Etc.

For those who do not know, Galway is not only the name of the city but also of the county. The population of Galway city is around 85,000 and of the county around 280,000.

In the beginning, just like the biggest part of our community, I was thinking that ranking for all of this would bring me clients – not saying a lot of clients because even at that moment, I was conscious that the most searched keyword, “SEO Galway,” had around 500 monthly searches globally and 100 from Ireland.

Now, let’s try to think about who is searching for SEO – it should be someone who knows what SEO is, and the reality is that the vast majority of searches are from us – from the SEO specialists 😊.

If you’re a single person orchestra or a small SEO company, what type of clients would you have? The most probable answer is self-employed local service providers, small businesses, or in the best of cases, you may provide white label services.

If I’m not mistaken, over these 5 years of ranking in the top positions for the mentioned type of keywords, I had 4 genuine organic leads. Two converted into clients and one of the others, I forwarded to a friend as they were looking for PPC services, which I do not provide – and they used his marketing service.

The truth is that small clients often have no idea what SEO or other marketing terms and abbreviations mean… If you’re looking for organic SEO leads, the focus should be completely different, more like a long shot – creating topics specific to each different business on the problems they have and how you can solve them, helping them achieve their goals.

How I am achieving my clients – mainly on 3 ways:

• business forums helping to solve a problem for free. Usually target people that have been mocked by the “experts” that do not know something – my success rate converting them into clients is above 90%;
• people are finding me on LinkedIn – not a clue what exactly I have optimized so well on my profile 😊;
• and of course the worth of mouth.

Why would you like to rank for “best SEO expert”? Do you really think that’s the case or is there a very specific type of client looking for that? I don’t know – it could also be an SEO experiment that you can use to show your clients how you can achieve something to be well-positioned. Actually, I was using this approach with some clients, showing how my sites rank for the mentioned above keywords.

I don’t know about the real intent of the colleague spending time creating such pages – it’s possible that in Bangladesh, using “best” as part of a long SEO-related keyword is a valuable target and brings clients.

On the other side, after a good number of years in the SEO field, I have the feeling that finally, Google, after all these helpful, spam and user experience-oriented updates, will make me focus on something else… Why?

Domain with the name of the person, using plural for contact and about, strong EEAT content on “about us” page using lorem approach, content promoting Royal Elementor Addons feature list widget 😊, stock images that accurately represent the team (the single specialist person behind the site).

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