How do you sell search engine optimization?

I'll assume you mean "How do you sell SEO to potential clients?" It depends. Does the client need to be educated about SEO? Clients that need to be educated about SEO don't even know they could benefit from SEO and may not know what SEO does. Educate these clients about SEO, show them proof and positive reviews of your work. Be prepared to provide some numbers i.e., "We were able to increase traffic to their site by 22% in the last 3 months by boosting the position of their blog from #5 on page 3 of google to #3 on page 1."

Use the real, but scary, statistics about the number of websites on the internet that their competing with. Do yourself a favor and figure out who their competing with. Solidify it in their mind that they want to show up where their most popular competitor is; that they could start "stealing" their sales by appearing ahead of them in SERPS.

If they're curious about how you do this and what they're paying for, tell them in generic terms unless they seem quite literate in the lingo. I suggest perfecting an elevator pitch for describing SEO work. Something like, "It's a series of on page and off page techniques used to optimize your website and other internet property to help increase your rankings in SERPS which will help your business gain more customers." Or something like that.

Chances are, if someone is contacting you about SEO services, you don't need to explain too much but you may need to have more KPIs available like backlinks, how much traffic you're getting from keyWords, organic traffic, bounce rate, returning visitors, page load speed, and more.

In a short answer: I start with, "Hi, I'm Jason. I own and operate IM Einstein an internet marketing agency. Did you know that SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate while outbound leads have only a 1.7% close rate? I help businesses grow by increasing their visibility online using research based, whitehat SEO."