After 12+ years in SEO, selling to hundreds of clients – from small businesses to global brands – I’ve learned what works when it comes to landing and retaining SEO clients.
While every client is unique, there are clear strategies that consistently lead to success.
This article tackles my best advice for winning new SEO clients, along with insights from top industry professionals.
Whether you’re just starting out or looking to scale, these proven tactics will help you build a strong client pipeline.
1. Start small
When building your SEO business, you can go after big clients (“whales”) or smaller ones (“rabbits”).
While whales bring higher revenue, they’re harder to land without a proven track record. Rabbits, on the other hand, are easier to sign and provide quick cash flow.
Some of the best places to find small-business clients include:
- Freelance platforms: Upwork, Fiverr, Craigslist, Bark.com, GetCredo.com.
- Local business groups: Chamber of Commerce, marketing meetups.
- Social media and forums: Reddit, X, LinkedIn.
- Personal network: Business owners you know, friends, family.
Starting small builds experience, testimonials, and case studies – helping you land bigger clients over time.
Dig deeper: Ensuring quality in your SEO services: A checklist
2. Do great work
Delivering outstanding results is one of the most effective ways to grow your SEO business.
Clients are seeking strategic partners who inspire confidence, as Luca Tagliaferro explains:
- “Clients want a strategic partner but also a doer. With SEO, there is much uncertainty about what works, so you have to come out very confident in your recommendations.”
This emphasis on strategy is reinforced by Carrie Rose, who built a successful agency quickly:
- “Focus on strategy, not execution. Clients want strategic partners right now, especially with SEO – start by selling an SEO strategy project and you’re already positioning yourself as their long-term agency partner.”
To truly establish a partnership, prioritize client education. Mike Ginley provides valuable guidance:
- “Teach them like they will no longer need you one day. Helps build trust, helps build knowledge. Both will help overall success of the website and partnership.”
This approach builds trust without losing clients.
In practice, when you teach clients thoroughly, they rarely conclude they can handle SEO independently – they continue to value your expertise.
When you deliver work that clients can’t help but mention to peers, referrals follow naturally.
If you lack confidence in achieving results, invest in training through conferences, meetups, podcasts, and other resources to immerse yourself in SEO.
Beyond passive referrals, implement the simple yet powerful strategy of asking.
Many clients don’t think to refer you – not because they’re unwilling, but because they assume you’re busy or have other priorities.
Make it a practice to directly request introductions at least annually.
As Erin Jones notes:
- “Do great work for your existing clients, and they’ll not only stick around, but they’ll sell you to other business owners. There’s no greater sales tool than taking great care of your existing clients and helping them increase their visibility online and revenue as a result.”
Building an agency partner network can transform your business.
The standard arrangement pays referrers 10% on the first year of services, creating bidirectional revenue opportunities.
However, choose these partners carefully, as you’re attaching your reputation to work outside your control.
Some potential partners for SEO agencies include:
- Web design agencies.
- Fractional CMOs.
- Paid media agencies.
- Creative agencies.
- Smaller or larger SEO agencies that don’t serve your ideal clients.
- Technology/tool companies.
Build a target list and reach out to discuss your capabilities.
3. Get listed in SEO agency directory websites
Listing your agency on one of the many agency directory sites can be an easy way to passively generate some lead flow.
While some of these sites are honestly not worth the time, others can be a powerful tool. When listing your agency on these sites, fill out as much detail as possible.
If you can get some of your clients to leave you reviews on these platforms, it can go a very long way toward helping you land new SEO clients.
Some of the sites I have used are:
- Clutch.
- Agency Spotter.
- Digital Agency Network.
- The Manifest.
- UpCity.
- Credo.
- Semrush’s Partner Directory.
- Breef.
4. Conduct Linkedin outreach
Although I haven’t had great success with it myself, LinkedIn outreach can be an effective way to connect with potential SEO clients and is often recommended by others in my position.
Since many of us have experienced spammy outreach, the key is to be authentic, useful, and non-intrusive.
5. Do email outreach
Some of my most meaningful client relationships started with a cold email.
While this approach can be effective, it can also lead to many unproductive meetings.
To make the most of it, have a strong process for quickly qualifying or disqualifying leads to avoid wasting time.
6. Develop unique capabilities and differentiators
In 2024, there were 54,216 digital advertising agencies in the U.S., growing at a 14.5% CAGR since 2019, according to IBIS World.
Globally, 5.22 million people on LinkedIn have SEO in their title or work experience.
Clearly communicating “why you” is key to landing clients.
For instance, my agency leverages technology in client accounts and focuses on organizational and marketing OKRs rather than just SEO metrics.
Build your “Why us” case with business impact in mind.
Tip: Create “industries we serve” pages on your website to highlight how you help specific businesses. Our beauty SEO page has led to valuable clients and conversations.
Dig deeper: How to keep your SEO clients engaged: 8 communication touchpoints
Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.
7. Participate in the community and build thought leadership
Being seen as a thought leader can be a valuable source of new leads.
However, you don’t need to be at the forefront of the industry to establish credibility. I’m not, yet I still generate leads this way.
You should do it, too. There’s always room for more voices.
Engaging on Reddit and other forums can also help build credibility and a reputation for being helpful – qualities potential clients look for.
Many top SEO experts, like Marie Haynes, started by simply answering questions in forums.
Places to engage in thought leadership and community participation include:
- X.
- Reddit.
- Conferences.
- Medium.
- LinkedIn.
- Your agency blog.
- Guest posting on industry blogs.
8. Perfect the pitch
A strong pitch process is essential for winning clients, yet many agencies and contractors miss the mark.
A strong pitch should:
- Establish authority by introducing yourself or your agency.
- Present a clear SEO approach with a roadmap of activities.
- Define your capabilities and the specific work you’ll be doing.
- Set expectations for results, including a timeline for impact (without overpromising exact metrics).
- Outline your SEO implementation plan. Unimplemented optimizations will not drive results. For clients with difficult CMS setups or limited dev resources, use edge SEO tools or JavaScript implementation.
- Showcase your work with case studies that speak to your target audience.
Your pitch process should typically include two or three calls. The first should be a discovery call, focused on gathering information rather than selling.
Caroline Posma offers great advice for this stage:
- “Be genuinely interested in their business and genuinely motivated to help them grow organically. A sales call is about them, not you. Don’t just pitch. Do your best to understand their business, their problems. Already provide value, for example by doing a quick site audit.”
During this call, ask about their broader marketing efforts.
- Do they have dev resources?
- Use a PR agency?
- Invest in paid media?
Understanding these areas can help you make a bigger impact.
The second call is where you present your capabilities and findings, especially if you’ve provided a free audit.
Dig deeper: Mastering SEO account management: The recipe for success
9. Offer a free initial SEO audit
Some SEOs and agency leaders refuse to offer free work, but this can be a missed opportunity – especially for those just starting out.
Clients need to see the value before committing, which is why free audits are so effective.
A mentor once told me, “Make them sick, then make them better.”
Show clients what’s wrong, then clearly explain how you’ll fix it.
SEO expert Tammy Wood supports offering quick wins upfront:
- “Quick wins – immediate gratification prior to charging. Why? Because I’ve obviously looked through the site, and the knowledge may help them – whether hired or not.”
A free audit also demonstrates your expertise in ways a generic capabilities deck cannot.
A well-executed audit in just two hours can highlight your depth of knowledge.
If you can explain findings in a way clients understand, you build trust and set the stage for a strong partnership.
After all, if they don’t buy into necessary changes, showing SEO impact becomes difficult.
Chris Green suggests using audits to teach prospects something new about their market:
- “Teach them something about their market they’re not aware of. Be generous with your time and speak with confidence.”
Even if you don’t offer full audits, you can still be generous with insights. Ryan Huser recommends transparency:
- “Show them how you work. If they have a question about a SERP, query data, or backlinks, I’ll frequently just pull up Ahrefs or another tool on screen share and let them see the process. Don’t worry about giving away the ‘secret sauce.’ They’re trying to hire help for a reason.”
Christina LeVasseur uses an interactive approach by showing clients a SERP and asking them to pick the listing they would click.
It’s no surprise here that most of the time, clients do not pick their own page!
This highlights the importance of the work we do which clients often misunderstand.
Grant Simmons emphasizes leveraging competitive insights:
- “Closing: Highlight where competition is eating their lunch aligned with low-hanging fruit. Give reasonable expectation of expected outcomes.”
- “Retaining: Demonstrate effort and that you met or exceeded outcomes you predicted. Strategically rinse and repeat where opportunities exist.”
Oliver Sissons offers three key tips for presenting audits effectively:
- “Don’t step on toes. They’ve haven’t come to an agency to be put down. Likely they’ve done a lot right, and just need new ideas.”
- “Avoid jargon. No need to know every title/canonical tag you’ll check.”
- “Tie previous results to real business growth (sales, revenue and leads).”
Lastly, tap into the psychological principle of fear of loss, which is often a stronger motivator than the promise of gains.
If a client is engaging in risky SEO practices, highlight the dangers.
As JP Sherman puts it:
- “Fear will keep them in line!”
In a good way, of course!
10. Demonstrate your plan for implementation
Audits and optimizations can transform a business, but without a solid implementation plan, nothing happens.
That’s why we always discuss how we support implementation. It’s a key factor in delivering faster SEO results.
Some clients may grant direct access to their CMS, but others may have custom-built or complex proprietary systems that make even basic changes difficult.
Often, implementation is dependent on a development team or technical marketer with a long backlog, delaying progress for months.
This is where edge SEO tools like SearchPilot, RankSense, and Sloth.cloud can be game-changers.
Not only do they help you win business by offering a practical implementation solution, but they also improve client retention by enabling you to execute changes yourself.
Other tools, such as SEOScout, Ahrefs, and seoClarity, offer similar solutions.
11. Build a business case with forecasting
SEO forecasting is a powerful way to justify investment in SEO.
Martin McGarry emphasizes the importance of setting realistic expectations:
- “Give them an estimate of growth, where you think you can take them if they partner with you and follow your plan and suggestions. You don’t have to make bold claims of number 1 rankings, but at least target some kind of tangible growth in the areas you’re focusing on.”
Dig deeper: How to build lasting relationships with SEO clients
12. Leverage competitive benchmarking
Different stakeholders within a company have different motivators.
C-suite executives and directors are often driven by competitive insights, making competitive benchmarking a valuable tool.
In some audits, we create competitive scorecards that assess competing websites across key SEO factors like technical health, on-page optimization, off-site authority, and performance.
Ways to not get SEO clients
While researching this article, I came across some of the worst advice on landing SEO clients.
Here are two major mistakes to avoid:
Making guarantees
Never make promises you can’t keep.
SEO is unpredictable. Algorithm updates, client implementation delays, and competitor strategies all impact results.
Making bold guarantees damages trust and sets unrealistic expectations, leading to unhappy clients and a damaged reputation.
Getting ‘accredited’
Some sources suggest getting a Google Partners badge to attract SEO clients, but this is misleading.
Google Partners is for PPC, not SEO.
Trying to pass it off as an SEO credential may deceive uninformed clients, but those who understand the industry will see right through it.
If you want to build lasting relationships, avoid misleading tactics.
Time to go get some clients
Winning SEO clients isn’t easy, but the right approach can significantly improve your close rate.
From doing great work and starting small to developing differentiation and partnering with other agencies, these strategies set you up for success.
Now, go land some clients!
Dig deeper: 12 tips for better SEO client meetings
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