In this guide, we’ll explore how agencies can use SEO to grow their business, increase client retention, and expand services without adding extra staff. You’ll learn practical ways to identify opportunities, pitch SEO effectively, and scale using smart tools.
The Opportunity: Growing Your Agency with SEO
As a small agency, it’s easy to get stuck offering just one or two services. But what if you could grow your business and increase client retention without hiring a new team? The secret is to strategically upsell SEO services to your existing clients.
Upselling SEO is about identifying clients who need more help and providing it to them. For example, if you’re already doing content writing for a client, they’ll likely also need help with technical SEO, link building, and performance tracking. By expanding your service offerings, you not only increase your revenue but also become a more valuable partner to your clients.
How to Identify the Right Clients
You’ll find that more clients need SEO services than you might think. Here are a few signs that a client is a prime candidate for an SEO upsell:
- They have great content but no backlinks: These clients are great candidates for a link-building service. Good content is the first step, but without backlinks, it’s not getting the authority it needs to rank.
- Their rankings have plateaued: If a client has been consistently publishing content but is not seeing any new growth, it’s a sign that their strategy needs to be more holistic. They may need help with internal linking, structured data, or a technical audit.
- They’ve never had a technical SEO audit: Many clients don’t know if they have technical SEO issues. This is a huge opportunity to provide a quick, free audit that shows them what’s holding them back.
- They invest in content but aren’t tracking results: SEO reporting is the easiest first upsell. Clients want to see a return on their investment, but they often don’t know how to interpret the data.
How to Pitch SEO Services
The key to a successful pitch is to show value first. You should not just tell a client that they need SEO; you should show them why.
Offer a Quick Mini-Audit
A mini-audit is a great way to show a client the value of your services without asking for anything in return. For example, if you are doing a content audit, you can tell them that you found a few pages that are ranking on page two of Google and that with a few simple tweaks, they could be on page one.
Frame It as a Solution to a Problem
You should always frame your SEO services as a solution to a problem. For example, if a client is spending a lot of money on paid ads, you can show them how SEO can lower their cost per acquisition over time.
Use Data to Tell a Story
A major mistake that many agencies make is just dumping raw data on a client’s desk. You should use the data to tell a story. For example, instead of saying, “Your rankings for X keyword dropped by 5 spots,” you can say, “Competitors overtook your spot here. We can regain lost ground by improving the page’s relevance and internal linking.”
How to Scale Your Agency’s SEO
An excellent way to scale an agency’s SEO services is by leveraging AI-powered automation platforms like ClickRank. This approach allows you to increase your capacity and manage more clients without needing to hire a full-time team.
ClickRank.ai simplifies and accelerates SEO tasks through automation, which is essential for scaling an agency. Key features that enable this include:
- One-Click Optimization: The platform automates fixes for common issues like missing meta descriptions, duplicate title tags, and missing canonical tags with a single click.
- AI-Driven Content Enhancements: ClickRank uses AI to automatically optimize meta titles, meta descriptions, image alt text, and internal links based on data from Google Search Console.
- Campaigns for Bulk Actions: The Campaigns feature allows you to apply bulk SEO optimizations across multiple pages at once, saving significant time and ensuring consistency for your clients.
- Comprehensive Audits: It detects and fixes technical SEO issues and provides detailed reports on new keywords, top-performing pages, and traffic trends, giving you actionable insights for all your client sites.
ClickRank offers a specific “Agency” plan designed for managing multiple websites, with a capacity of 10 sites and 10 users. This allows you to collaborate with your team and scale your services efficiently.
