How to use audits to upsell & re-engage with your clients

By now, you’ll know that auditing can help you sell more and retain clients. But audits aren’t just for prospecting – they can help you upsell your services after you’ve completed the project, too!

Audits aren’t just for selling to prospects. They can be used across your pipeline to help you upsell and re-engage with your clients, and we’ve outlined the whole pipeline and how to use audits at each stage.

You may have guessed this one, but in case you’re not already doing so, sharing an audit with a prospect is a great way to engage them with your service offering.

This is because moving prospects through your pipeline can be difficult when you’re trying to sell services that are often intangible and hard to attribute to hard data. However, with an SEO auditing tool, this is where you can grab their attention. Show your clients exactly where they are going wrong, and the solutions you can offer them to improve their scores and performance.

Top tip:

There’s a step before this that most folks miss; cold outreach is bound to yield more when you offer your prospects a  free audit  when you first reach out, as this will offer a hook for your prospects to cling on to.

So a lead has come through to you, but you’re not sure if they’re the right client for you? Use an SEO auditing tool to gauge the state of their site to understand:

For example, you could find yourself a client in your target sector, but spending resources on trying to engage with that client could prove fruitless if their site is running and performing well. Alternatively, a lead that comes through to your inbox could show on an SEO audit report that not only do they need help with their SEO, but you could also help them with their PPC strategy, and so on.

Having an audit to hand will better help you, and your team, establish through the  BANT  method whether your prospect could become a worthwhile lead to chase.

Once you have engaged your prospective client with an audit of their website, why not motivate them to close the sale by comparing them to their competitors? Whether you’re aggregating competitor results or using a tool like Insites, where you can compare your would-be clients with up to 3 competitors, comparing to competitors will let you show them where they’re doing better and how you can help them overtake.

Key point

Most SEO audits don’t include manual checklists. Depending on your tool, either you can include your parameters to measure (i.e. is the branding consistent across the website?) to track items that are a simple yes or no on your auditing tool or your report. Hard figures will strongly back up your manual checks that could include design relevance or whether their site is ‘on brand’.

When you come to close the sale, or come to the end of your pre-contract pipeline, using an SEO audit report to set the benchmark of the improvements you will be delivering will better help you cinch the deal. And more importantly, give your team a QA benchmark to work towards when you are improving the site.

Once you’ve finished improving your client’s site, you can show your clients just how much you’ve achieved. With two score reports to compare (the first when they were a prospect and the second after you’ve completed the work), you can effectively show your customers how and where you have made improvements to their online presence. Looking to re-engage the client? With the latest report, it becomes clear to the customer that you can add further value through additional work. Plus, with competitor analysis, you can show them how they now rank in comparison.

The Insites Team