5 people making calls 5 days a week 4 weeks a month. you would be happy with bringing in 5 clients a month which translates to $2000. where is the money? I personally have ONE salesperson and they costs me more than that a month. Let alone me making a profit.

You did say you are biz ad and accounting grads?

In a real world scenario ( based on my own personal experience dealing with the service you do ) I MIGHT see a break even point after 6 months with $400 a month I personally do 90 day SEO contracts STARTING at $5000. And even at THAT I am by no means the high end of the scale.

IF you can show that you have GOTTEN results.... and thatyou are more than confident you can PROVIDE results. charge more, will make the accountant happier.

My apologies, 5 sales per salesperson.

This is the second thread I've seen with someone planning on starting a new SEO company, and one thing sticks out to me: Why does everyone want to hire salespeople before they've even gotten any clients themselves? What do you plan on doing while your salespeople are working? And how in the world are you going to train them if you haven't closed any sales yourself? Everybody seems to want to create these "hands-off" SEO businesses where other people do all the work. It doesn't work that way.

Right now OP is just guessing on those numbers. The only way to know what will happen is to just do it (Nike?). If you don't meet your target goals tweak/adjust until your happy with results.

Personally I would target existing web/dev clients: Where do non pro SEO's get their clients?

Madness even hiring outbounders in your case. If you have the seed capital and have SEO skills you should be parking your bus in front of people already searching through search and paid search.

A good web funnel will do all the heavy lifting and weeding out, and then you'll be talking to people who have been filled in on most of the issues and have a strong desire for what you offer.

With the right money and skills to rank or advertise for the right keywords, you could be bringing in thousands of potential buyers to you a month. No need for 5 sales people. It's not 1975

I would think bigger, sell a SEO Package, back it up with Lead Generation, Search and Social Media Marketing. Charge $1,500 - $4,000 per month depending on the size of the client.

That sounds like a long grueling road of cold calls and getting low value clients IMO

Good luck !!!

Again you assume I think at the most basic level, and think he should find 4 or 5 alternative keywords with a trickle of traffic just for the sake of it.



I'm talkng about complete market and vertical research and analysis to find relevant segments, which you call niching and think is a load of crap. With the right software, like Krakken from themezoom, or even wordstream's free suite of tools, he could do that kind of analysis, pinpoint clusters of keywords that would add up to a lot of traffic, and have a good chance of dominating.

This would mean building silo architecture with their software and be ranking for 100's of keywords. Or using Becker's methods of getting lots of keyword variations on a page to get that page ranking for many different variations, at the very least, which is strong point of Becker's methods.

Again, I'm lazy minded in suggesting it and then just assuming others would know about all the silo stuff and how to do it properly.

And yes, people can say silo's are dead and this and that, etc.

But themezoom take a different approach and build sites to dominate a market, even though they are affiliated with OMG. They have a 180 approach of building big structured silo sites going for hundreds, even thousands of keywords at a time, rather than 1 keyword, like Nashville SEO.


If you think market segmentation and positioning is crap, or simply changing titles and tags, then you've never done it properly in the way I'm saying.

Let me just say something on this part in particular. Yes, with Nashville SEO, you could go for that and beat Mike Long if you were prepared to put the money in, since you know his methods. It's all about how much you're willing to spend. And if it's even necessary at all to reach your income goals.

When you go for major keyword terms where there is major competition and companies invested millions, then unless you can do the same, you have to forget about them because you're only going to burn money.

Any even half decent SEO authority would tell you the same and to look for areas where you can win and make a positive ROI.

In an ideal world, yes you'd be able to rank for the most trafficked terms. That's obvious. But not plausible in a lot of cases, particular if your competing against big info or gov sites.

You think people should give up if they can't rank for the main terms? Even though they can still get thousands of target visitors a month by identifying other keywords and having a solid strategy to rank for a lot of them.

We've gotten into an ego argument here, which I hate. ''I'm right''. I don't give a shit about that, I care about what's true.

Your claim that apart from anything to do with the ''location + SEO'' it's not worth it? Because you claim traffic flows falls short?


This is exactly why there is opportunity abound for those willing to properly do the work and find out what's actually there. Because most people think like that. It's not true.

Larry Kim, from Wordstream ranks for hundreds of thousands of keywords he doesn't optimise for. There's a free tool at wordstream.com that lets you group keywords and segment properly, that would allow people to find a good silo structure to target and gain traffic from many different, relevant search terms.

I haven't got the time or inclination to do indepth keyword and market analysis on that market, since I have other areas I'm currently working on in that regard, but I bet that with a bit of expansive thinking beyond random keyword thinking to how clients think, what they are looking for, market research, keyword grouping, siloing, a decent site hitting lots of different keywords and generating over a thousand targeted visitors a month could be set up and ranked for within 90 days or so max, and with traffic and leads coming in well before that. I've seen many examples.

Here's a couple of free guides from Wordstream, one of the top PPC and Search companies in the world for anyone interested on keyword research and commercial intent.

http://www.wordstream.com/download/d...earch-tips.pdf

http://www.wordstream.com/download/d...ial_intent.pdf

I'm confused about something. I don't see any single SEO firm with the results Savage is saying for the Nashville terms so what gives Savage.

Let me say something about my perspective on competition in the serps.

Your only competition is the level of skill the other SEO firms have, that's pretty much IT!

What I mean by positioning and segmenting your customer base so you analyse more accurately what problems you solve and who would be interested, is the process of that would snap you out of the restrictive little box where you identify yourself only as an SEO.

If that is all you are billing yourself as, then yes, it's restrictive in a local sense. But that isn't necessary to do that.

Internet Marketing Services Nashville (without SEO needing to be in there) is just one of many segments outside of the SEO box you could tap into if you're position yourself properly as more than just a SEO specialist.

If you were to offer a complete SEO service geared towards customer's ROI rather than just taking their money like most, you'd have to offer content creation, social media signals, lead capture and autoresponder set as well, so you could create keyword groups with a subset of promising keywords for each of those. Plus many more. Online Marketing. Digital Marketing. Inbound marketing. Content marketing. Lead generation. Increasing sales online, etc. All of those just want to successfully market their business online, and if you could get infront of them with the right offers and relevant solutions you could capture a nice percentage of those segments profitably too.

So many more you wouldn't think of till you ran an indepth keyword and market analysis.

That's what I meant.





I see what you're getting at. You can though make all the pages landing pages and look to capture those leads and get them into your funnel, and then launch you're follow up stuff, for those pages where there are less buyer intent.

Some can just be sales pages, like this one, once you have them ranked for high commercial intent keywords:

Automated Sales |(877)236.9094

He ranks number 2 for the term automated sales funnels.

That's a decent sales/lead capture page. Some might be in the market there and then and be impressed and phone him and become a customer in short order.


Some might take longer.

Some not at all.


But you don't have to create a load of long-tail blog posts or pointless SEO articles for your top keywords. You can still make them transactional like this above page.

As others have said. Your $400 price point is really low - even if you are outsourcing it. Of course this all depends on your industry too but I wouldn't charge anything less than $750 for any SEO search package.

But you should stop thinking about "services" and start thinking about solutions. Business owners want new leads & customers - How are you going to get do that? Yeah, maybe your method is SEO, but that doesn't generate traffic right away right?

I offer search & social packages, with and without paid advertising depending on their budget. I'm charging a substantial amount more- but their phone is ringing this week not 3-6 months down the road. That statement alone is very powerful, and has helped me close more new deals that I can remember.

When i do get pushback on my rates- i simply say:

Even if I charged $20,000 per month but I generate you $100,000, you'd cut me a check every month like clockwork.

Just think, there's so many people competing for table scraps, when there's big money to be made. I've been right where you are years back, and I can honestly say it's easier to sell a $1500/month package than a $400 package. Plus you don't deal with the tire kickers, and clients that never seem to be happy with anything.