How SEO Resellers Can Guide Clients Through Budget Planning 

If you’re an SEO reseller, your clients will come to you seeking answers, not just deliverables. 

They probably don’t know that you outsource your SEO, so they’re going to approach you whenever they have questions or concerns about the process. 

Rather than viewing these instances as a hindrance, you should consider them golden opportunities for:

1. Establishing trust with your clients
2. Building their confidence in your abilities 
3. Helping them achieve their goals (to secure their future business) 

In particular, it’s crucial for resellers to understand the SEO budgeting process. 

Since we’re currently in a time of economic uncertainty, your clients will want to know how to maximize their ROI (return on investment) from SEO with smart budgeting practices. 

With strong SEO budgeting knowledge, you’ll know exactly when and where your clients should spend their money. 

That translates to happy clients, repeat business, and more revenue. 

In this guide, we’ll teach you how to guide your clients through each phase of the budgeting process, including how to properly explain SEO ROI, so stay tuned!   

Understand What the Client Actually Wants from Marketing 

Every client will have a different goal they want to achieve from an SEO campaign, and it’s your job to find out what those goals are. 

For instance, do they want to generate more leads or improve their online visibility for industry keywords?

It’s important to know because each goal requires different SEO tactics to achieve. 

If their ultimate goal is to generate more leads, you should focus on creating lead magnets like:

1. Helpful guides and how-to posts (that have calls-to-action at the end) 
2. Free tools that require users to sign up (i.e., leave their email address)  
3. Original research and reports in exchange for contact information 

If they want to boost their online visibility, researching trending keywords and creating optimized content for them is the winning tactic. 

The point?

The better you understand your client’s SEO goals, the easier it will be to match them with the right services. 

Some common SEO goals include:

1. Improving lead generation (helpful content + lead magnets) 
2. Generating more organic traffic (backlinks, keyword research, content creation) 
3. Boosting sales and conversions (BOFU [bottom-of-the-funnel] content, conversion rate optimization) 
4. Improving brand awareness and credibility (digital PR, backlink outreach) 

As you can see, each goal has corresponding SEO techniques associated with it. 

Clarify timeframes and risk tolerance 

Before we go any further, we have to mention the importance of being 100% transparent with SEO clients. 

Promising the moon but only delivering a dim flashlight is NOT how you sell SEO. 

By that, we mean you have to be honest with clients about how long SEO takes to yield results and the risks involved. 

No digital marketing strategy is completely foolproof, so there is some risk involved. It’s entirely possible that the client won’t meet their goals even if the work you do is flawless, so be upfront about that.

Also, don’t promise clients that you can deliver results in just a few weeks. 

Instead, be realistic by letting them know that most SEO campaigns take 6 – 12 months to start delivering results.

At the same time, mention how SEO is a long-term strategy that delivers compounding results after it gets going. 

Don’t forget to bring up that SEO has the lowest cost-per-lead out of any marketing channel. Once you’ve got a library of keyword-optimized content, you’ll begin to generate leads and sales without having to lift a finger. 

Position yourself as a strategic partner, not just a vendor 

The client should know that you’re not a department store that sells them a lamp and then disappears forever. 

Instead, you’re more of a strategic partner than a vendor. 

Instead of a clerk behind a cash register, you’re a guru eager to help your mentor find success in any way that you can.

Should one attempt fail, you’ll be there to catch the client so that they can try again.

This will instill confidence in your clients that you won’t abandon them the second you aren’t seeing the types of results they wanted. 

The SEO Budget Framework You Can Use with Any Client 

Our 3-tier SEO budgeting model is the perfect framework for ANY type of client, regardless of their industry or audience.

As a bonus, it’s extremely simple to break down. 

The 3 tiers are:

1. 1. Essentials. These are the basics that all your clients need to improve their online visibility, like on-page SEO, local SEO, and technical SEO. 

• Accelerators. Once you’ve established a foundation, you can accelerate what’s working through methods like digital PR, backlink outreach, and an advanced content strategy. 

1. Experiments. This tier is exclusively for brands that have found consistent success through their essentials and accelerators. From there, you can start to ‘experiment’ with things like influencer partnerships and paid ads to see what works and what doesn’t. 

Let’s take a closer look at each tier and the kinds of services they entail. 

Starting with the essentials 

Essentials are the SEO services that NO business can go without. 

If digital marketing services were a grocery list, essential services like on-page SEO and technical fixes would be the major food staples (bread, cheese, milk, etc.). 

The essential SEO services are as follows:

On-page SEO (content, keywords, metadata) 

SEO tweaks that occur on the client’s website fall under the umbrella of on-page SEO. This includes things like keyword research, content quality (E-E-A-T), metadata, images, and videos. 

Strong on-page SEO is how you get your client’s content to start ranking on search engines, and it’s the foundation for all SEO campaigns, which is why you can’t go without it. 

Local SEO (if applicable)

If your client’s business has a local presence, you can’t ignore local SEO. It involves tweaking special factors that affect your visibility for local keywords (i.e., keywords that include city and town names). 

Essential local SEO services include Google Business Profile optimization, local citation building, and localized content. 

Technical SEO

You can’t achieve success on Google if your content doesn’t even appear in its index. This is the impetus behind technical SEO. It has to do with identifying and resolving pesky technical issues that can negatively impact your search rankings. 

At the same time, technical SEO is about ensuring a great user experience by tightening site architecture, improving loading speeds, and enhancing your website’s overall performance. 

Revving things up with accelerators 

Once your clients have the basics covered, you can begin accelerating your strategy with tactics that enhance the essentials. 

Our favorite accelerators include:

Digital PR 

Networking with online media is THE best way to generate editorial backlinks that will supercharge your clients’ ranking authority. 

Thus, digital PR makes a fantastic accelerator for SEO campaigns that are starting to gain traction. 

Content strategy 

You also need to get smart with your client’s content. 

Instead of targeting a single keyword per post, try using content clusters instead. This is where you produce several articles that cover a single topic in great detail. 

Clusters are one of the most reliable ways to build topical authority with Google, which paves the way for top-tier rankings. 

Backlink outreach 

Backlinks are how you build trust on Google, and high-quality backlinks will greatly enhance your client’s ranking ability. 

Outreach efforts are made to secure things like guest posts and link insertions, both of which will boost your client’s domain authority. 

Gaining the freedom to experiment 

The last tier consists of experiments. You should only engage in these once your client is seeing steady results from their essentials and accelerators. 

As soon as that happens, you’ll gain a little wiggle room. 

From there, you can invest leftover marketing funds into things like influencer partnerships and paid social media ads. 

The goal here is to discover ways you can improve the client’s online visibility even further, but it takes a solid foundation to reach this point. 

Use CPA and CPL Data to Make a Case for SEO 

We know, we know – your clients are going to want to default to paid ads because of the quick results. 

Regardless, it’s up to you to show them why SEO wins in the long term.  

Just like with the tortoise and the hare, slow and steady wins the race:

As far as cost-per-acquisition and cost-per-lead go, SEO boasts the lowest out of any marketing channel. 

Research by Tarakeet found that businesses can acquire customers for 87.41% less with SEO than other channels like PPC (pay-per-click). 

The best part?

Your CPA will continue to decrease as your SEO efforts bear fruit. 

With an established library of high-quality content and a superb backlink profile, you’re more likely to:

1. Maintain the current top 3 search rankings you have 
2. Begin ranking for new keywords (since Google trusts you) 

While paid ads can catapult you to the top of the search results, each click does NOT guarantee a conversion.

If your client has a poor user experience or poor conversion rate optimization (CRO), it’ll be difficult to score customers from paid clicks. 

Moreover, the second you stop paying for ad space, your visibility completely disappears. 

Compare that to SEO, where you earn your rankings organically. That means your clients will continue to dominate the search results without having to pay! 

How to Recommend SEO Packages Based on Budget 

What types of services should you recommend at each budget level?

Here’s a quick guide you can reference:

Build Loyalty with Transparency and Tools 

Our final tip is to use branded reports, industry tools, and strategy decks to build trust with your clients. 

After all, which would you rather see:

1. A minimalist email covering vague results 
2. An extremely detailed breakdown of your marketing ROI 

The choice is pretty obvious. 

Having things like branded reports and real-world data will establish you as a serious professional and expert. These little touches let your clients know that you’re paying close attention to their SEO campaign, which will put their minds at ease. 

To make things easy for SEO resellers, all our reports are white-labeled by default. 

That means we don’t include any branded images or logos so that you can easily add your own. We’ll equip you with the reports, tools, and resources you need to become an SEO guru in the eyes of your clients!  

Final Thoughts: The Best SEO Resellers Lead with Strategy 

To summarize, becoming an SEO budgeting wizard will set you apart in the crowded SEO reseller market. 

Most SEO resellers don’t provide enough education or customer support for their clients, which is why they don’t find success. 

Resellers who talk the talk are far more likely to retain clients longer and grow revenue faster. 

Our advice?

Educate yourself on everything SEO to give yourself a competitive edge.

Do you want to improve your ability to resell SEO services?

Grab a spot on our calendar to book a white-label focused strategy call today!