SEO – Objection Handling
Limitations
- You likely won’t get any results until about 3 months after launching an SEO campaign. And you probably won’t realize a return on investment until 6+ months.
- Search engines such as Google are continually revising their algorithms so there is nothing permanent about organic search successes. Plan to continually revise SEO strategies.
- You’re competing with companies that likely have bigger budgets…for a limited number of page one spots. Moreover, it’s believed that search engines favor big brands, regardless of quality.
- It’s very difficult to make changes once you’ve started with SEO. If you ranked your homepage for a particular keyword, you can’t — all of a sudden — decide to rank a particular service page for that keyword. In other words, it’s difficult to refine your marketing because of indexing delays.
- There is little certainty in getting results.
Common Objections
Sources: https://moz.com/ugc/top-ten-client-objections-to-your-seo-services
Objection 1
You say you have experience in our industry and are working with some of our potential competitors. How would you deal with having 2 of your clients ranking for the same/similar keyword phrases? Who would get preference in being ranked higher?
- Thanks for noticing that, we can do the same for you. And by the way, it’s not about increased rankings so much as increased traffic and conversions for your business. That’s what I provide for them and that’s what I’ll provide for you.
- As a standard, we don’t usually take on other clients within a vertical market. It’s unfair to the clients, and it ends up creating more work for us. We don’t like extra work.
Objection 2
We’ve seen your portfolio and it’s extensive, but we feel what you’re charging is a lot of money for SEO, especially when you consider we get many (cold) calls from other SEO companies offering SEO at a far lesser rate. Why are your rates that much higher?
- Feel free to go with the cheap cold callers, but keep my number on hand in case you ever reconsider. My experience has been that they provide an inferior serviced based on x, y, z, etc. & you get what you pay for. I’m more expensive because you get more in return.
- If those cold calling SEO companies were as successful as we are, they wouldn’t have to charge less, and they wouldn’t be making those degrading phone calls either. Unfortunately, some SEO companies think they know what they’re doing but don’t have any results to prove success. Be careful if you decide to take that path.
Objection 3
I don’t agree with you SEO type people, you are only taking advantage of companies who want to rank on search engines. I think your business thrives on misinformation and BS. Prove to me it isn’t and I’ll think about taking you on.
- There are companies out there that do just that and it’s unfortunate that you have that opinion of all SEO companies as a result of the snake oil SEO salesmen. Here are three references that have dealt with us after they dealt with the BS SEO companies you speak of.
- If you aren’t sure about the validity of our business, we invite you to come back once your competitors are beating you in the rankings and you are losing business.
Objection 4
We don’t have the budget for your services. Can you do a cutdown version for us to get ranked on Google’s first page and we’ll pay you more as we grow?
- Sure we can scope down, but you get less work & less results for less money. Just, FYI the more you spend with me, the better your ROI. And no, I don’t work less hard when we scope down, we just can accomplish as much as we could with a bigger scope.
- We’re sorry, unfortunately there isn’t a “cutdown” version of SEO. There are some modular one time optimization of your current website that we may be able to do under your budget, but you will most likely have to invest more before Ranking #1.
Objection 5
We’re happy to proceed with the one off SEO service, but we’re not interested in your monthly support. We believe your SEO should put us on the 1st page of search without having to review it every month.
- OK – Here is my one-time project fee, it’s much higher than the first month of a six month contract because I’m going to try and cram a lot into that first month. You see, I won’t be able to take advantage of analytics, and results tracking to determine what’s best for you over the next six months, so I’ll have to try a little bit of everything and hopefully something will work.
- The Internet is dynamic, as more competitors come into the field, they will inevitably pass you up as new standards and developments becom factors in ranking. You are free to find out for yourself and come back at any time for a renenewed package.
Objection 6
Company X has promised us first page rankings for keyword phrase X, but you cannot make that promise. Why?
- It’s not that I can’t make that promise, it’s that I don’t think that’s the best way for you to spend your money. I would rather show you and overall ROI through best practices SEO rather than spend your whole budget chasing a ranking that may or may not produce business for you.
- As an ethical standard, respectable SEO companies within the industry purposefully do not make any promises for performance of an SEO campaign. We do however make estimates based on Eye-tracking reports and statistics within the industry, but as rankings become more competitive, SEO campaigns become more expensive.
Objection 7
A coding monkey can do your job. Tell us whilst you’re here what’s wrong with our website and we’ll get him to fix it so we don’t have to pay you to do the SEO instead.
- OK, you need to code in thousands of high quality inbound links, call me if you need anything else.
- If you are interested in consulting services, we have an in-house SEO education option at X hourly rate.
Objection 8
We think your fees are high. We don’t want to work with you monthly, but once you have worked with us we do not want you working with others in a similar field either. Do you still want to do business?
- See number’s 1 and 4
- We can not comment at this time on future campaigns that we may or may not have with other companies. We do our best to avoid competition between clients, but if another company approaches us after a significant amount of time that your project has completed, it is a likely option.
Objection 9
We don’t think what you do will make us rich and famous, so can you do a little for free so we can see the difference it makes to our business?
- Nope, how did you even get me to take this call?
- No. Do it yourself and let us know when you’ve figured out how much it’s worth.
Objection 10
We don’t require SEO after all, as we have discovered PPC instead and set it up in-house. Can you take a quick look and point us in the right direction? Thanks.
- Alright, if you want to keep spending lots of money for your traffic rather than investing in something that will allow you see traffic with significantly less long-term spend, go for it! We use PPC to figure out what we should do with our SEO campaigns and strongly encourage you to look at this eye chart.
- PPC is great for specific business marketing models. We wish you success in your endeavors and hope that you will reconsider at a later date. We feel, base on industry standards, that SEO is a much cheaper, and more successful option.