You Ask, I Answer: SEO Value Added Service Offerings?

In today's episode, Luca asks, I've been doing SEO for about eight months now and I have a few clients that I service. My question is what avenues or skills related to SEO, like web development, should I invest time in to increase my skill base and what could I potentially do to create more value out of my services? Here's I guess my point of view on this. So how do you do this? Well, there's a couple of different ways.

That's market research, that's having good skills in writing and communication, maybe some design skills, uh, partnering with companies that have those capabilities. And then getting those links and stuff like that, um, and and creating more value is all about building a community. Right? If you can garner a good size mailing list or good size Discord server or uh a good size only fans or whatever the the mechanism that you choose to retain a community, then when it comes to value add for SEO, you will be able to leverage that community much more than somebody who's just you know randomly pitching cold links, right? Uh if you have uh a thousand people on your mailing list and you chat with them, you provide them great value all the time, then from time to time you can probably figure out who on that list does what and say, hey, I've you know just helped a client put up a new free resource on I don't know, uh, fermented coffee.

I'm I'm making that up. Um, and you know the five people on your mailing list who are like avid coffee aficionados, you can reach out to them and say, hey, I got this new thing from a client. You want to check it out and send them the link? And if no one say to them, hey, if you uh if this is of interest to you, you know, would you mind throwing a link to it on your blog? Having a community that most of the time gets value from you, and ever so often you can get value back from means that in terms of the things that generate interest, that generate links, that generate search volume and stuff, um, you have that as a more reliable resource, right?

You don't have to be that one SEO person uh just sending out pitch spam, right? Or running a bot that leaves stupid comments on people's blogs or the the random pitches in you know people's LinkedIn inboxes. Nobody likes those. Um, and very few people respond to them. I mean, enough people respond that um it's obviously a tactic that still works.

But if you don't like the stress of that, if you don't like the high variability of those results, spend some time building up your community. Spend some time diversifying your community. Get people who are B2B, who are B2C, government, military, um, people who are in retail and finance and fashion and accounting. Um that the bigger that audience you have of people that you actually interact with that you care about and that you provide value to, then when it comes time for any given client, you know, they've got something to promote. You've got a resource that you can go to right away and create those links way faster, way faster than a competing SEO agency.

I am astonished at the number of SEO agencies that don't have some kind of community resource on demand. I understand why they don't do it. They don't do it because they're not they're not seeing the value of those communities. They don't understand that that is your insurance policy against search algorithms, but it is a massive blind spot. It is a massive blind spot in the SEO community, and it is something that is easily fixed.

Right? Well, simply fixed. It's simple, not easy. I remember uh a while ago, I was doing some uh link building for a financial services client, and a friend of mine ran a fairly decently sized uh website. And uh we were having dinner one night, um, and I said, I tell you what, I'll pick up the bill if you stick a link on your site for this thing, knowing that it was on target.

It was it wasn't you know just a random pitch. It was, it would have made sense to link to it. My friend was like, sure, I mean, I'll keep it up for a year. Um, and and he did. He put up the link on the site, and you know, we got uh the credit, we got traffic from it actually, because again, it was it was relevant, it was on target.

That kind of relationship building takes time, takes a lot of effort, but it is it is your parachute, right? It is your break glass in case of emergency because getting people's attention otherwise these days is getting harder and harder. This this lovely little device here has a such a profound capability to distract us, to take our attention away, that as marketers, we're having a harder time getting everyone's attention. So if you have that community of people who are already paying attention to you because of the value you bring them, then you can leverage that. So that would be my suggestion for how you can grow the value that your services provide and how you can uh eventually charge more for those services, right?

Because you can say where other agencies can't, hey, I can get you relevant placements, relevant placements for your products and services, assuming the company has something that you'd want to link to. And if they don't, you can also be very selective then with your clients and say, Yeah, I'm sorry, I can't take you as a client because you have a product that sucks and no one's gonna want to link to it. Right. Uh I remember I worked for this one company where uh the product was twice the price and half the quality of the nearest competitor. And we're like, yeah, we're not doing a uh a link building campaign for SEO because the only links we're gonna get are are bad reviews.

So let's let's do something else. And we did, and uh, you know, the the company eventually went out of business because you can't run a successful business when you're twice the price and half the quality of your nearest competitor. But um, but we knew there was no way SEO traditional link building was gonna work because nobody wanted that product. So that's my suggestion. Build that community.

And by the way, whether or not you own your own firm or whether or not that you you work at another another agency, your network, your relationships, your community, that is something that goes with you wherever you go. And it is an essential resource. If you can, if you can build that and and carry it with you from job to job, agency to agency, you will do really well. You'll do much better than your peers. Um having that network on demand is it's gold.

It's literally in sales, it's called the Golden Rolidex. Uh, the person who builds those relationships, they can generate more results faster than someone of equal skill and equal seniority, but without the network. So give that some thought. Good question. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.