Portfolios - Achievement History

[ukgimp]

Selling yourself as a SEO can be difficult at times.

Would any of you have any advice as to the sort of things you show/tell to a prospective client.

Would you show printouts of previous SERPS.
Actual client sites, although I would be slightly worries that they could look at the sites and take up on some of your most recent methods.

How do you go about giving thme just enough to get there attention to seed a face to face conflab.

Cheers

[Travoli]

If I were a potential client, I would want to see examples of your results, and I would want to speek to one of your current clients.

If you have any customers that would be willing to give you a reference, maybe for a discount, it could do great things for you.

Lots of SEO firms will give more detail about their work when they are speaking over the phone to a qualified buyer.

[Robert Charlton]

I use a combination of reference letters and serp printouts. I used to use Ixquick printouts, which can be very impressive if you have a lot of top 10 results for a site... but Ixquick doesn't reference Google any more. The meta engine that is beginning to work for this now is ez2www. It is a little clumsy to send a pile of printouts, but to show a history of results I haven't found any other way.

One of the constant difficulties is that you don't want to point just anyone to examples of your optimized sites... and in some cases I have non-disclosure agreements, which make certain references impossible.

I also like to show current results. The volatility of the economy over the past several years has made this a constant game of catch-up. I've had many good results evaporate as business models failed and companies went under. Nothing to do with the rankings or traffic I got for them. Maybe it's got a lot to do with the San Francisco Bay Area these days.