Small busi­ness own­ers are be­ing courted, al­most on a daily ba­sis about the lat­est SEO of­fer­ings from com­pa­nies from across the world.

From the spammy email sent on a bulk ba­sis to face-to-face con­sul­ta­tions that take place at net­work­ing meet­ings, en­tre­pre­neurs can’t go any­where with­out hear­ing about SEO.

The prob­lem is, no mat­ter how SEO con­sul­tants sell their ser­vices, every­one strug­gles to an­swer the ques­tion; “When will I see re­sults?”

It’s a ques­tion that makes me, as an SEO con­sul­tant, shud­der. There re­ally is no good way of answering.

Do you quote the short­est time pos­si­ble in or­der to se­cure the con­tract or do you of­fer a more re­al­is­tic time­line with the hope that your po­ten­tial client will ap­pre­ci­ate that good, hon­est, white-hat SEO takes time?

Of course, you could use this ques­tion as an op­por­tu­nity to ed­u­cate them, but then you risk com­ing across as pa­tro­n­is­ing. This ques­tion is why I use PPC to se­cure new SEO clients.

In­stant Results

When I take on a new SEO client, I al­ways turn to PPC, in par­tic­u­lar Google Ad­words be­fore I do any ma­jor SEO work. The rea­son for this is be­cause it of­fers in­stant results.

What does be­ing at the top of Google for cer­tain key­words mean for your clients site? Well with an ef­fec­tively man­aged (but small) Ad­words cam­paign setup, you can show what they could ex­pect in terms of ROI in a re­ally short pe­riod of time.

Of course, they may re­ceive next to no con­ver­sions, but rather than see­ing this as a fail­ure, take the data to your client and ex­plain that the site needs a re­design, or work on con­ver­sion op­ti­mi­sa­tion. Af­ter all, if they have spent a month at the top of Google for their main key­words but seen no con­ver­sions, there would be no point im­ple­ment­ing a wider SEO strat­egy on their site.

Us­able Data

The sec­ond rea­son I use Ad­words be­fore start­ing any off-site SEO work in par­tic­u­lar, is be­cause of the data that I can ex­tract from Ad­words once the ini­tial cam­paign has run its course.

All that key­word data should be seen as gold dust for fu­ture SEO cam­paigns. You’ll have a month’s worth of data de­tail­ing what key­words con­vert best and, whilst it’s not al­ways true, the cheaper the cost per click on Ad­words, it’s of­ten eas­ier to at­tain a higher rank­ing on Google due to less competition.

Guar­an­teed Contracts

If you im­ple­ment an Ad­words cam­paign prop­erly, and the site you’re work­ing on isn’t ter­ri­ble, you should be able to demon­strate a pos­i­tive re­turn on in­vest­ment to your client.

With this data you then just need to ex­plain how an in­vest­ment in SEO along with PPC will pro­duce both in­stant re­sults from the Ad­words cam­paign and a last­ing im­pact in the search en­gines. Of course, this is the time to ex­plain that you would be tar­get­ing more key­words than the few you’ve set up in Ad­words, which will in turn in­crease re­sults further.

PPC be­gan as my an­swer to many awk­ward ques­tions that I re­ceived as an SEO con­sul­tant, but it has since be­come a mas­sive part of the way I work. The data it pro­vides isn’t based on pre­dic­tions or best guesses but cold, hard facts. Facts that new clients can’t ar­gue with.

Ar­ti­cle by Lewis Love

Lewis Love is an SEO con­sul­tant from Derby. He uses PPC cam­paigns to se­cure long-term SEO con­sult­ing con­tracts with small to medium sized businesses.