How to get new leads coming in when you've hit a rut (SEO company)

My personal experience as a web designer was building 30K+ custom html whale sites and that market started to fizzle. I ended up not beating them and joining them and built Wordpress sites. I now make more than I ever did with the whale sites.

I know the answer before I ask... but why beat your head in one of the hardest markets when you could drop a ring or 2 into less competitive markets, work less get paid less but at the end of the day make more?

SEO is SEO, and you have proven your worth for 15 yrs now in the Legal Niche. a better man than me, that is actually a niche I stay away from for the most part.. to much stress. You need to diversify.. bring on 10 clients for $1000 each a month for $10,000 a month in revenue probably work less ( time ) and make more.. and when you loose a client.. its not such a big deal, and you go out and get another.

If you think of clients as a possible liability.. you have a total of 3 clients and lose one... you are instantly 33%+ in the hole. Lose 2 and you start losing stuff like offices and cars etc. And from the sounds of it, you have been on a good run, but Good things must end, and you need to adapt.

My advice.. Diversify across a few niches, decrease a clients potential liability and loss to your business. Increase client load, decrease client cost, and because you have left the probably hardest SEO Niche on the planet, your overall work load will shrink, and your effect of loss as a business will be minimalized. YOU will probably be less stressed, your clients will be thankful, and you will in the end gain more financially.

My 2 Cents...

Hope that Helps!

Hello George

I'm going to be a bit tougher on you than savidge, I think he sugar coated his answer then dipped it in honey, so not to upset you. You have brought this on yourself, yet you still havn't learned any lesson from it. You say "How can I get out of this loser mindset and get back to managing a lower number of higher-end clients, or generate more leads?". You are wanting to go back to the exact same situation that has caused your loss of income and stress.

So to start, what have you been doing the last 15 years, spending most of your time sitting out in the sun? You don't seem to have had much motivation to build your business, after 15 years you are still a one person business with a few part time freelancers. And so few clients that when you lose 2 of them it effects you to the point of causing financial difficulty and stress.

I'm going to make some comparisons here to hammer some points home. We started our Agency 14 years ago (My Dad, Anna and myself, but Anna and I were only 24 at the time and had no experience at all with any kind of business) We started with a single service, website design, but now we are a full service Agency, have 78 full time employees and over US$21 Million yearly turnover. We grow each year, more services, more employees and more sales. We could lose 100 clients next week and it wouldn't effect us in any way, they would be replaced in a week. We give millions of pounds away each year to charities and causes and we share our success with our staff. Now I'm not saying you should have the same drive and passion as we do, but really, you should have been able to do a bit better then you have when you have been operating longer than we have.

I see simple things that have put you in this position, just common sense things which everyone knows from old sayings: "Don;t put all your eggs in one basket", and "There is safety in numbers." You ignored both of those guidelines, not enough eggs (services) in your basket and no safety in having so few clients. As savidge said, losing just 2 clients could take one third of your income away.

Then other things you say disturb me and flag warning signs:

1. "my website was hacked 2 months ago and I've had literally no leads coming in". Do you know so little about aspects of your business that you can't do backups and restores via Cpanel? If one of our websites, or client websites was hacked, we would have it restored again within 20 minutes. It is beyond my comprehension that you are running an online business but do not have the knowledge to do something as simple as backups and restores.


2. "I've been taking on random outsourced projects for $700/month which I told myself I would never do, but I guess I have to pay the bills somehow."
This really pees me off, it really does. So you feel doing a $700 a month service is beneath you. GET REAL!!! that's likely one of the reasons you are in this mess. We have clients paying us from US$12,000 a month to ones who might start out at only $200 a month, for something like automated social media memes being posted on their Facebook pages. We welcome them like any other client and help them grow their business's, and as they grow, we grow too. You obviously havn't heard of that concept, but it's one reason we make more in a year than you ever could in a lifetime.

But I'll give you an idea to help you, if you actually get off your bum and put it into practice. One of our Business's is an SEO company so we know it is a hard sell, most clients just don't understand the work that goes on in the background, and then it is hard for them to measure results. I agree with savidge that you could go after a larger number of smaller clients, and that would be much safer than your small number of larger clients. But I'm going to tell you another way that I feel is much easier to scale and a lot less work then SEO, but where you can still put some of your skills to work.

So what do your lawyer clients want from your SEO services? Simple, they want more clients, and they think to get more clients they need better rankings. But how many can be on Page 1 even in local search, and if they are on Page 2 they might as well be on Page 100.

So, change your direction and start generating and selling leads, live phone leads, live phone leads of people needing/wanting legal services now, in real time. Leads that you can track and account for, and where your client can see the results of what they are getting for their money.

After you set up lead generating campaigns it is very hands off, it purr's away in the background while you set up more campaigns. Lawyers pay from $100 upwards for a live lead, but you are not limited to law firms, we sell leads to heaps of different business niches.

If you are interested I will tell you more, but I won't waste my time if you are not willing to put more effort into your Business.

Cheers
Lindy

If you are from US, UK etc

Maybe you could setup multiple GMBs and get leads from that. As the most exposure of these GMB are from calls, you could receive a decent amount of calls from some well placed GMB thereby helping you to land a client.

SEO is never a set rate first you need to find out exactly what your client is trying to achieve? Their goals? From their you Analyze the work needed and how long it will take to get the job done. Every client is different with different expectations. High ticket clients are becoming harder to find especially when theirs so much black hat seo willing to do it cheaper. Creating high quality content will help increase website traffic and generate more low and high ticket customers.