Many SEO experts ironically find it easier to get work from contacts that they make online even though there are numerous organizations in their own areas that need their services. Selling SEO services to local businesses requires good lead generation tactics and following through with the leads that you have.

Use Your Business Contacts to Generate Leads

Just because you sell SEO services today doesn’t mean you should ignore your past work experience in other industries. These business contacts are great to start building your client list.

Make a list of the companies that you have worked with and contact them to discuss the advantages that your SEO services could offer. Assuming that you left the organization in good standing, you will have a solid reputation that encourages them to use your services instead of someone else.

Use Your Personal Contacts to Generate Leads

You should also use your personal contacts to generate leads.

Many small business owners today recognize that it is important for them to maintain a presence on the Web, but few of them really know how to use their company’s site or that blog they had installed once to generate business.

Contact friends who manage or own small businesses, home businesses, and part time operations that could use your help and tell them you’re focusing on local businesses.

Cold Calling to Generate Local Leads

There are two basic approaches to cold calling. You can either pick up the phone and call local businesses, or you can walk into their stores and ask to speak to someone who makes financial decisions. I’ve found that you almost always get better leads by visiting the business in person.

Most small business owners are busy people, and they don’t have a lot of time to chat on the phone to people that they don’t know.

When you visit in person, though, you show that you are willing to dedicate your personal time to form a mutually beneficial relationship. It is also much easier for busy people to focus on what you say when you are sitting right in front of them.

You can even bring information sheets that they can read when they have free time.  That’s almost the offline equivalent of getting a whitepaper download, with the difference that online, whitepapers are usually requested, rather than thrust on people.

Don’t Quit

Finally, don’t give up on your local business lead generation attempts.

Sometimes months will go by without your hearing a single word from all of the people that you visited and talked to! This is a frustrating experience, but you should remember that it’s the nature of the business.

Some leads will close faster than others, so if you keep plugging away, the faster closes will sustain you in the short term while the long-term leads are simmering.

I’ve known for over a year now that acronyms are absolute garbage when it comes to keywords. Today, I’m going to explain why and demonstrate with a few examples.

It’s a known fact that the more specific the intent of a keyword, the better search marketers can convert the traffic. In non-geek marketing speak, the more your prospects know what they want, the easier it is to close the sale.

That’s because they can explain it to you more precisely, so you can do a better job responding to their needs.

So why are acronyms awful keywords?

With acronyms, your task is doubly difficult.

First, you have the problem that, as with other short-tail keywords, there are plenty of things the searcher might have in mind. Someone looking for “ballet” may be interested in the Bolshoi Ballet Theatre of Moscow, in ballet shoes, in ballet music etc.

Second, one acronym can stand for many things. At least with ballet you can exclude the possibility someone is looking for football boots. But consider this acronym, “CCQ.”

To anyone in the Quebec legal profession, that stands for Civil Code of Quebec.

To anyone with a Mozilla Firefox-Google address bar, (in Quebec, at least) typing in CCQ gets you the Commission de la Construction du Quebec, which means that the Commission is Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” search result.

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s an ad that showed up in my Gmail account where the subject line included the exclamation, “WOW!”

Similarly, I was recently studying for an exam on international law that covered the International Criminal Court, or ICC for short. I saw – and clicked on – this ad:

Makes sense, right? Looks like an ad offering the ability to look through the archive of decisions the ICC has rendered?

Turns out the ad offered exactly what it promised… only the ICC meant the International Chamber of Commerce!

So acronyms are also bad for a third reason, which is that their ambiguity works both to attract useless impressions [which lower your CTR and drive your bids up] as well as to attract useless clicks [which drive your ROI down].

The bottom line is that acronyms, like rats, need to be purged. Your advertising ROI depends on it.