#general

Hey @Patrick, First, I'm a freelance writer and strategist, so I'm not your target client, but I have a couple of questions that are relevant to the strategy and business goals. And, I've worked with such founders.

How do you talk about SEO in terms of the bottom line when you talk with these founders? No one wants "SEO," they want the brand awareness and new customers that SEO can bring. So are you targeting other SEOs or people who are aware of SEO but need immediate revenue?

If the latter, how can you demonstrate business results within the "container" of SEO?

Maybe you've got that covered but to your point, your checklist sounds like "stuff" rather than the value of the "stuff." It's hard when you're so close to it. Believe me, I know.

Hey @Jen Phillips April thanks for the feedback. Actually we could lean on that a little more. In general when we do keyword research we have a potential traffic and revenue impact for each keyword and ranking for the keyword set as a whole. So we use the keyword research and conversion data from each site historically to predict future results.

When we work with clients we have a plug into their hubspot generally and that allows us to track back pipeline generated and revenue for SEO. From that we calculate CAC, CAC:LTV and all that good stuff for them as we work together.

Yep. I mean, I don't know how you're positioning it in those initial convos but most of us can lean on spelling out the potential $$$ more. Have you offered this package before?

This is actually part of our usual offering I am thinking of offering this as a stand alone package for 2024 kick-off. Which I have not done before. You're right I could lean on this a little more in the messaging and even visuals.

So you'd offer it as a one-off project delivered over the course of a few weeks? Have you thought about including a periodic check in- maybe quarterly? Could be an upsell. To your original point, these people are swamped and could use expert guidance to help them move the needle.

Yeah thats right. I havent formally thought about the periodic check-in but its what our plans were informally. We could actually add a monthly email check-in just to touch base or quarterly depending on the businesses preference.

I'd think most would find that valuable. It also adds a little accountability piece. Good luck!

FWIW, what you're contemplating here is similar to something my business has delivered in certain situations for a number of years, so you can definitely sell it. To position it, though, I wouldn't break it down into those granular deliverables, which start to sound like "filling with stuff" even though it is valuable, in very specific situations. IME, offerings that get into the weeds of your jargon ("keywords," "brief template," "content plan." etc.) sound like price padding to buyers. I'd keep it simpler and more accurate: "we'll write up to 100 content briefs and all you have to do is have your SME execute them and search engine traffic will start showing up in a few months."

To sell it (unless it's to folks that already trust you), you'll have to overcome some buying objections:
• The marketer and/or writer want to ideate and write thought leadership content, not boring organic content
• The marketer and/or writer become blockers because they have a decent working knowledge of SEO.
• Founder or CMO thinks "there's no reason we can't do this in-house with an ahrefs subscription."
• All parties may not want a forklift deliverable of a years' worth of briefs. What if they decide on a different distribution channel halfway through the year? What if the writer quits? What if marketing gets too busy with something else?

To sort of split the difference on Jen's point, I can tell you that just about everyone that buys this kind of a brief backlog will want your input after one or a few to know if they're doing it right. I'd suggest making a check-in after ~2 months part of the offer (and maybe ones beyond that are an up-sell). That gives them enough time to generate some content for you to review, and even time to see if it's getting indexed and starting to climb the ranks, and it also serves as a commitment device for them to get on top of publishing some of the content from your briefs.

Thanks @Erik Dietrich I appreciate the detailed feedback. A lot to consider here.

Let me clarify though.
What we're providing is the keywords, the plan and the brief template.
We wont brief the topics. That'd be an upsell on a monthly basis for many of the reasons you mentioned.

What we're trying to do with this is give early on companies a roadmap for launching their own SEO and what we find is they generally don't know where to start or what to start on.
So by saying "these are important keywords for you" and "here is the template and how to brief them" we then empower them to go out and get some success solo. The intention here is to be the first reference and help point for those that can't afford us regularly and for those that can and want to solo well they will always do that and that's ok too.

A few rebuttals I would have to your sales objections;
• Great they can and should. We would recommend not ignoring SEO in that mix though. If they click this they are already considering that angle so why not add those boring rankeable articles to eventually gain customers.
• Then they aren't a good client for us. They wouldn't be interested anyway they'd be a better fit for our services on a specific task like competitor analysis/intelligence.
• They can and in most could do that inhouse. Much of it. But you are less efficient and less confident than we are and you'll use 10x the resource to get 0.5 of the result in most cases. Its overall better investment to get it DFY
• We don't do the briefs we would upsell that. We just provide a template for them to follow to make sure the brief includes what it should to have clarity on the output.
Your follow up point makes a lot of sense yeah. I will add that in somewhere. I think Id like to find a way to follow up monthly but with some value rather than in two months but that will take some brainstorming.

I don't have a price point for this yet but I was thinking that all this for approx. $1,000 is a pretty good deal for start ups. Any thoughts on that as a price point?