6 SEO Agency Upsell Ideas To Increase Client Value

Intro

Adding service upsells is a great way to generate more agency revenue, without the time, effort, and resources involved in attracting new clients.

It can really accelerate agency growth and profitability. So, what are the best ways to do that?

Here’s some ideas for additional services that SEO agencies can consider offering to their existing clientbase.

Naturally some of these ideas may or may not be relevant to you depending on what your current client retainers include. Regardless, hopefully you’ll find some actionable ideas in this post that you can offer to your existing clients, and generate a higher average client value. Let’s jump in!

Content optimization

Content optimization is the process of making sure your content is perfectly SEO-friendly, and nails the search intent. Through the process, you would make sure that:

• All the right keywords are mentioned, at the appropriate frequencies
• All the relevant subtopics are covered and questions are answered
• The content is the appropriate length / word count
• Meta titles & descriptions are optimized for search engines & CTR
• The content has the best possible chance of converting users

Regardless of whether you’re already creating new content for clients, you can add content optimization as a service for existing pages too.

Optimizing existing pages can lead to quicker wins (compared to new content) for your client, plus add a nice boost to your margins along the way.

To do this, you’ll need content optimization software. A tool like SurferSEO (or one of the several SurferSEO alternatives) will help your writing team stay on track, and easily optimize content (even without deep SEO expertise).

Analytics & tracking improvements

You need good data & analytics in order to prove the value of your own work, so why not build it into your service offering?

This could be a one-off project, an ongoing retainer for data analysis, or perhaps a setup fee. The latter is probably the most common. Allocating some extra budget at the start of an SEO engagement to make sure the results are measured adequately makes a lot of sense for all parties.

You can set up Google Tag Manager for implementing click-tracking conversion events, and Data Studio dashboards to visualize data. If you’re working with small businesses, some clients may even need Google Analytics & Search Console setup. These things collectively will help you analyze your performance, figure out the opportunities, and what to do when you see a drop in organic traffic.

Lastly, you’re probably using a rank tracking tool anyway, but if not rank tracking should be a part of your analytics set up. Ranktracker is a straightforward affordable option, with white label reporting.

Link building

Some agencies offer link building, and some don’t. It’s not the easiest service to provide, but if you can build a team & a process for guest posting, outreach, PR & other link building tactics, it becomes viable (and profitable).

If your clients are not currently building backlinks, it’s likely that they simply cannot compete for the most valuable keywords in their niche. The more valuable the keyword, the more backlinks needed to rank (typically).

Adding this service could take your (and your client’s) organic performance to the next level.

Getting started doesn’t need to be complicated either. To start, you’ll need to pick a link building technique. Guest posting is the most common. One of the easiest ways to kickstart your guest posting strategy is to analyze competitor backlinks. If they’ve been guest posting, you’ll quickly find the websites, and you can pitch your own content.

You can set up a specialist outreach tool, but it isn’t necessary. Gmail is perfectly suitable; set up some Gmail templates to speed things up and start crafting personalized pitches. Don’t forget to create a follow-up email template, too. Chances are most of your biggest opportunities will come from the follow-up.

Conversion rate optimization

CRO and SEO can go very well together. There’s no point in driving organic traffic if you can’t convert those users into customers, right?

Working on CRO will improve your organic results, make the client happy, and justify increased fees for your agency as revenue grows.

There’s a misconception in CRO that it requires deep expertise in tools like Google Optimize, coding, VWO and other technical A/B testing methods/tools. While those things are a big advantage, there’s almost always some easy wins to be found.

Firstly, if you’re working with small business clients, there’s a good chance your clients don’t even have enough traffic to get statistically significant results from A/B testing. Secondly, if there’s no full-time marketing team working on the website, some very simple best practices may not have been implemented. Here’s a few very easy ideas to get you started:

• Add social proof and client testimonials to your landing pages
• Add more CTAs to blog posts
• Make sure your CTAs are aligned with search intent
• Make sure your pages are optimized for all devices types
• Rewrite headlines & copy to make them more compelling
• Review your website navigation & footer

Graphic design add-ons

While design could potentially be a part of CRO, there’s scope for an SEO agency to add graphic services too.

If you’re producing blog content for your client, for example, how about adding on a fixed price per featured image? It’ll help to streamline the process, get your content published (and indexed) faster, while boosting your margins a little at the same time.

You could also consider offering design services for infographics & other assets that could be useful for UX & link building.

Additional marketing channels

Lastly, you could diversify entirely and manage other marketing channels. If you open that door, the options are near-endless.

The most obvious channel to move into is PPC; a lot of what you’re learning about driving revenue through organic search will be applicable to paid search too.

Other than that though, you could consider:

• Social media management
• Influencer marketing
• Email marketing
• Website management / development
• Managed affiliate marketing
• Video production & video marketing
• … and so on.

If you’re seriously considering this route, then think about a) what your clients are most likely to need, and b) how your team can deliver those services. There’s a good chance you’ll need to hire & expand the team.