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How a Good Salesperson Can Teach You to Be a Better SEO Consultant

How a Good Salesperson Can Teach You to Be a Better SEO Consultant

How a Good Salesperson Can Teach You to Be a Better SEO ConsultantI recently had the opportunity to review the work of a fellow SEO company in the form of recommendations they had made for a client’s website. It was a good report, full of information about duplicate page titles, internal Page Rank flow, and other helpful statistics about their site.

Yet, the client left that SEO company, and mainly because of the helpful report that I saw. The problem is that it didn’t help the client make sense of what they were viewing, and without providing that clarity, the client was overwhelmed and under impressed. Yet, any good salesperson could have helped create a more useful document.

Most sales processes involve identifying the features of the product or service and the benefits they provide. For example, the fact that a widget is made of reinforced titanium is a feature, whereas the fact that it will save you money because you will never have to replace it is a benefit. In the sales process, benefits, not features help sell a product.

In consulting, a similar dichotomy exists. The fact that a website has several 404 pages indexed could be valuable information, much like a feature, but without the expertise to process that information, it’s useless. A consultant’s role is to bridge that gap by demonstrating the benefits of fixing the problems they’ve found.

Does a client need to rewrite their title tags? Tell them how it might benefit their rankings and click-through rates.

Dozens of pages of duplicate content? Explain to them why a search engine won’t index those pages and how it’s affecting their users’ experiences.

No matter how expansive the knowledge or how exhaustive the research, the most impressive consultant is the one who can help a client understand the obstacles in between them and more business.

Category SEO
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Jesse Laffen Professional SEO

Jesse Laffen is the Senior Consultant for Slingshot SEO in Indianapolis Indiana.

How a Good Salesperson Can Teach You to Be a Better SEO Consultant

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