Introduction

A few days ago, there was a blog entry by jordan8037310 titled "How Do You Crack Open That Marketing Budget?"  It got me thinking about how we compete with other SEO companies.

Your Price - Competing with the Cheap Guys

This is by far the objection we run into the most.  Most people we encounter are stunned by the cost of our services because there's a lot of sneaky "SEO companies" out there that sell their services for a lot cheaper.  My first reaction is "show me these services."  Every single time, these cheap services have some gimmick or they engage in black hat tactics. 

Recently, I've run across a lot of these companies that hijack local listings and create new ones in Google to get instant traffic.  Google has started to require phone or mail verification but there are still ways around this.  I don't see this as often now but I still do see it. 

Another ploy I see a lot is an SEO company that is really doing PPC.  Our client would get an e-mail stating "Be #1 in Google!", "Guaranteed Placement!", etc, etc.  Most of these people are actually buying Google Adwords. 

The last thing I see is marketing e-mails.  They are usually centered around a marketing phrase.  One recent one we found was "The Power of 5."  Oooh.  It was saying all these spiffy things about increasing conversions, getting more traffic, blah blah blah.  When I contacted them with my potential client, we found out it was basically 5 pages they put on your site... That was pretty ridiculous.

When contacting these cheaper SEO companies, I usually say I'm the CTO or an engineer at my potential client's company so I can ask some really technical questions.  I also ask for a few example sites that they work on and try to understand exactly what they do.

My company does a lot of face to face meetings so that our client understands exactly what we're doing and exactly what the cheap guys are doing.  We get so many referrals this way because our clients really like us.

Competing with Reputable SEO Companies

Our prices are comparable to other reputable SEO firms out there. So we set ourselves apart by having a really happy client base.  For some reason, other SEO firms we've competed with don't have super happy clients or they aren't willing to share their information to potential clients. This is really bad because most potential clients think that they are hiding something or that they don't have any happy clients.

We have a pool of clients around our area that really love our services.  We keep them really happy so they can be our references, and this has helped us out a lot in terms of sales.  We meet with them almost every week, we invite them to our events (like our company parties) and we make them part of our company.

The Pitch

We really don't have a pitch.  We show potential clients some of our current clients' traffic reports, leads reports and keyword placement reports.  We have a lot of happy clients that gave us permission to share all this.  This is why having happy clients is so important to our sales process.  Our happy clients also act as referrals, so it is vital that you build up a client base that you can draw on just for this purpose.

What really sells the client isn't the reports, it's when they talk to one of our happy clients.  Our clients usually go out of their way to help us sell more accounts because we keep them very happy.

The second most important thing is not lead reports, not traffic reports but keyword placement reports.  I always think this is really odd, but they are always wowed when they see our keyword placement reports and each time. I'm always puzzled why but hey, it works.

This is just what's been working for my company.  I would be interested to hear what other people do  to compete with their services.