How To Get SEO Clients: 8 Strategies Every SEO Business Needs

Let’s guess: you’ve tried filling out project applications, reaching out to business owners, and asking ChatGPT for advice.

Yet, you’re not able to figure out how to get SEO clients. 

The current SEO industry is highly competitive, we get it. With more number of businesses and individuals offering SEO services, landing clients has become harder.

If that’s a problem you’re facing, we’re here to solve it. In this article, we’ll discuss 8 effective strategies to get SEO clients using both inbound and outbound methods. Whether you’re a new SEO strategist or have owned an SEO agency for years, these strategies will help land the clients you want.

Let’s get started.

How To Get SEO Clients: 8 Effective Strategies

Getting SEO clients involves both inbound and outbound strategies. For outbound leads, you can send cold emails, offer free services, and attend networking events. Similarly, you can build a social media presence and rank your own website to get inbound leads. 

Let’s see how each of these strategies can help you get SEO clients:

1. Cold outreach

Cold outreach is the process of reaching out to people outside your network to offer SEO services. In simpler words: you reach out to people who don’t know you or your services. These can be new businesses in your locality, an influencer you’ve followed on LinkedIn or anyone else who might require SEO services.

Now, the process is fairly simple. Gather the contact details of the business you want to reach out to, and craft a message that introduces you and offers a service. However, due to the nature of this strategy, cold outreach messages can quickly become spammy and irritating. 

If you want to avoid that and still send effective cold messages in bulk, here’s a solution: try writing customized outreach emails through AI writing tools like Writesonic. 

Our guide on email writing can help you craft effective emails with ease using Writesonic.

Say you want to send customized emails to 50 leads in a week. With AI writing tools, you can write each email in a few minutes, speeding up your cold outreach process.

Writesonic, for example, has a dedicated template for writing cold emails using simple instructions.

Check out the email we wrote for our imaginary SEO agency using Writesonic. 

This email barely took us a couple of minutes. We could change the target audience and pain points to create multiple versions of the email, customized for different readers.

Manually crafting these emails could easily take hours. You can use the saved time to find better leads or engage with those who are interested in your SEO services.

2. Rank your website

For an SEO business, what’s a better testimonial of services than ranking your own website? If you want to get SEO clients, ranking your website can help you in more ways than one. 

For starters, it helps build trust and credibility of your services in front of potential clients. If you’re skilled enough to rank your website, you can definitely rank theirs, right? You can also use your website to experiment with new SEO strategies and share the results on social media — a way to build proof of concept in the public eye and get SEO clients.

It’ll also help you get organic traffic to your website, promoting your own services. And since you’re an SEO business owner, you must know how valuable organic traffic is. 

One of the best ways to get organic traffic and rank in SERPs is by including a blog on your website. With a blog, you can host SEO-optimized content that helps rank the articles. Plus, creating helpful articles, guides, and whitepapers helps attract traffic and can also be used as content marketing assets.

If you’re skeptical about content marketing due to its time and money commitments, try speeding up the process using Writesonic. With Writesonic’s AI Article Writer 6, you can write full-fledged articles, guides, and comparison posts — complete with SEO optimization.

Here’s an article about AI content quality we wrote using the Article Writer 6:

Notice how the tool structures content and generates well-researched, value-packed articles. The built-in humanizer is another added advantage. You get content that sounds natural and engaging, as opposed to sounding robotic — which is a general issue with other AI content writers.

Since the content is automatically optimized for SEO, it’ll help rank your website and help get SEO clients.

3. Share testimonials and case studies

Today, customers trust online reviews and personal recommendations more than branded content and paid ads. In fact, a 2024 study reveals that 75% of customers trust online reviews when purchasing products or services. 

Testimonials and case studies can help establish that level of trust and credibility, prompting more customers to try out your SEO services. If you want to get SEO clients, try sharing testimonials from previous clients on your social media platforms and website. 

If you’re new and don’t have previous clients, offer a discount or a limited free trial in exchange for reviews. Once you’ve got a few clients, you can create case studies and share the results of your SEO services to build more credibility.

4. Build a social media presence

Love scrolling through social media platforms? The same platforms can help you get SEO clients — if you build your online presence.

Unlike cold outreach, social media doesn’t yield immediate results as it’s an inbound strategy. But, consistently posting valuable content on platforms like LinkedIn and Reddit will get you a good number of inbound leads in the long term — like many SEO influencers are already doing.

Check out these examples

Neil Patel, the founder of Neil Patel Digital, posts reports, trends, and stats around SEO derived from his work experiences. With valuable posts like these, he has amassed over 680,000 followers on LinkedIn alone.

Aleyda Solís, another top SEO leader, has got a following of over 82,000 on LinkedIn by regularly posting about SEO.

Similarly, another social media platform that’s excellent for getting SEO clients is Reddit. Unlike LinkedIn, which is an algorithm-based open feed structure, Reddit is a niche forum-forum based platform where people interested in a specific topic join and post on the particular subreddits. 

However, the process of getting SEO clients on Reddit is similar — share informative posts, engage on others’ posts, and contribute when you can.

Check this post on the subreddit r/seogrowth:

The poster has shared a detailed plan to get SEO clients and scale monthly traffic. By building a presence on Reddit, you can get inbound clients and referrals. But remember, many subreddits ban promotions, so you won’t be able to directly advertise your services.

Want to know how to build a strong social media presence? Check out our article on boosting social media engagement.

If you’re not sure what to post on social media, here’s a quick hack to get you started. Craft social media posts using Socialsonic, an AI social media management tool. 

By giving a topic and choosing the type of post, you can craft engaging social media posts that generate clicks and results within a few minutes. Check out this post we wrote using Socialsonic:

With just the topic, the tool generated three different versions of social media posts which has a human voice, great hooks, and engaging content.

Don’t like engaging on social media? Schedule posts through Socialsonic and the tool will take care of the writing, posting, and the first comments on LinkedIn. You can simply engage with other comments or spend time taking care of other business tasks.

5. Have a Unique Selling Proposition

There are hundreds of businesses offering the same SEO services as you. So, why exactly should customers choose your business? That’s where your unique selling proposition (USP) comes in.

The USP is a unique quality, result, or service that only your business offers. 

Say you can help e-commerce businesses rank on the first page of Google within a month. Or, your SEO services guarantee a certain amount of traffic every week. These are your USPs.

Having a USP will help you bring forward the best of your business while also helping get SEO clients that are aligned with the type of services you offer. You can share your USP through your social media posts,  mention it on your website, or also convey it during cold outreach.

Not sure how to write a USP? Try using Chatsonic to craft one for your business.

6. Share free gated content

Creating gated content is a way of collecting email addresses and other information from potential leads in exchange for valuable content like ebooks, whitepapers, and guides. If clients want to access to these content assets, they need to cross the “gate” by sharing their info. 

As an SEO business, you can create numerous useful guides and resources that potential clients may find valuable. For instance, Backlinko, a well-known SEO brand, creates and shares newsletters directly to their subscribers’ inboxes, collecting their email addresses in the process.

Now, if creating gated content seems like a lot of work, you can speed up the process using AI writing tools like Writesonic. These tools can create whitepapers, SEO guides, and newsletters that you can customize for your own business. 

Once you share them and get the required information from leads, you can identify clients who might be interested in SEO services and reach out to them through email or social media.

7. Offer free SEO analysis

This method is for businesses who’ve managed to get a lead response but are struggling to close a deal. If your lead is interested in SEO services but is skeptical about investing, try offering them a free website SEO audit. 

An SEO audit is an evaluation of how well the lead’s website is optimized for search engines. While a complete SEO audit involves the on-page, off-page, and technical aspects, you can also offer smaller audits that only evaluate content or technical SEO.

Offering a free audit helps you in two ways:

• It gives a glimpse of your working style and quality to the lead.
• The lead gets a clear picture of the problem areas, convincing them to invest in the solution, i.e., your SEO services.

If they’re just starting out or want to improve their website SEO, you can also offer free competitor analysis. In a competitor analysis report, you analyze the search engine optimization strategies of competitor websites and identify gaps in your client’s SEO strategy that are preventing them from outranking other websites.

Read our detailed SEO audit guide to create SEO audit reports your leads will love!

Make sure to specify how you can help solve the SEO problems for a better chance at closing the deal.

8. Partner with other agencies

If you know a digital marketing, content writing, or web development agency, chances are they have clients who also need SEO services. 

Reach out to these agencies and offer a partnership deal with a specific price cut in exchange for client referrals. You can try finding agencies within your network or check out websites like clutch.co for agency directories.

Simplify your SEO client acquisition process with Writesonic

We’ve discussed 8 inbound and outbound strategies on how to get SEO clients. However, the process of getting clients and closing deals involves a lot of effort and is time-consuming.

Writesonic can help simplify the process by assisting in a number of tasks. From writing articles and social media posts to analyzing your content’s SEO, Writesonic can speed-up the above discussed strategies.

Whether you want to send cold emails or check out ice-breakers for networking events, Writesonic’s generative AI capabilities are extremely helpful.

Ready to speed up your SEO client acquisition process? Sign up for Writesonic today!

Niyati Mahale

Niyati Mahale is a Content Writer @Writesonic. She specializes in artificial intelligence and B2B, with a flair for combining effective storytelling and SEO best practices to create impactful content.