How to make money from SEO without selling SEO services

There are roughly 15,000,000 Internet users in Australia which is just over 70% of our total population. 94.4% of these Internet users use search engines to find and access websites each month, yet research shows 54% of Australian business cannot easily be found in Australia’s major search engine – Google!

These statistics were re-enforced earlier today when I was at a networking breakfast. I spoke with about 25 small – medium sized businesses owners and not one of them were involved with any form of online marketing. None of them had a clue what the mystical acronyms SEO, SEM or PPC meant and terms like Social Media or Web 2.0 was like trying to explain astrophysics to a 3 year old.

So how do you make technophobic business owners see the benefit of SEO?

It’s simple – communicate in a language that they understand. Don’t try and sell them things like link building services or Pay-Per-Click – sell them the one thing that all businesses want more of – LEADS!

Let’s look at a self-employed tradesman for example – the local plumber. He has no interest in a website as he runs small advertisements in the trade section of the local newspaper. He’s the last person who could benefit from SEO, right? WRONG!

We registered a keyword rich domain name and built a small generic plumbing site with some stock photos, a couple of paragraphs about typical plumbing problems and dropped-in some local suburbs and areas that we can service. Added an online inquiry form stating that if you need a plumber – leave your details and we’ll contact you.

A few inbound links later, the site is now ranking quite well and generating a hand-full of leads each month. We then sell these leads back to the plumber. He still doesn’t have a clue about SEO – he just knows that somehow we’re getting him more work than he’s had in years by using this magical thing called the Internet.

If you find an untapped market that is easy to optimise for, yet you cannot find anyone interested in SEO – Simply build-up a site yourself. There will always be those business owners who can’t seem to justify the costs of having a website or employing someone to optimise it – but tell them you have a dozen qualified leads and you’ll have their attention instantly!