Gun to my head, if I needed to get a client in 90 days with zero case studies, here's our playbook:
stop chasing the industries every guru tells you to chase. if "industries that need SEO" already has the niche on a listicle, it's because every agency already ran it dry. the real money is in boomer industries — industrial, commercial, the most unsexy niches you can think of. tristan's rule: ask claude for industries where the average owner is 65+. one guy tested the list cold calling and converted at 3X his residential rate. ticket sizes are 2-3X higher with a third of the competition.
the no-GBP cheat code. got your google business profile clapped for using a PO box or coworking space? build a service area page for every service in every surrounding city. austin agency targets georgetown, round rock, pflugerville — "tax prep pflugerville," "bookkeeping pflugerville," "financial planning pflugerville." scale it to 200-300 pages, link them all internally, and you collect every lead outside the GBP radius. organic SERPs are localized now so you rank for the broad term too.
this also wins AI search. chatgpt weighs relevance as heavily as authority, and nobody's spamming listicles for local queries the way they do for ecom. reverse engineer the long tail — someone types "i have two W-2s, a 1099, and stocks to sell, who helps with that" — and put all of it on your service page. tristan tested it: page goes up, prompt gets pulled, you show up in the answer.
never pitch on the first call. get them on a second call to qualify. how many SEO agencies have they used? above three is a red flag. figure out their ticket size, then send an audit showing exactly how much revenue they're leaving on the table. price local SEO at $1,500/month minimum, up to $3,500-5,000 for lawyers and competitive markets like dallas or houston.
first 90 days is offense and defense at the same time. defense: lay out a week-by-week game plan so they know exactly what they're paying for. offense: fix all the money pages first, then show leading metrics. impressions is the easiest early win — page starts ranking, impressions jump, and you can show "up 300% month over month" by end of month one. months two and three are content and links.
the biggest agency mistake both of us made: taking clients you can't service. jacky took a $10K/month client he didn't have capacity for and it gave the agency a bad rap in their whole industry. tristan's churn killer: stop assuming the client knows SEO. lead every deliverable with "this is a first draft, we need your feedback" instead of dropping a link with no context. that one habit cuts churn by 25%.
bonus: systems are overrated. you can brute force an agency to mid-seven figures with five URLs, some spreadsheets, a phone number, and an AI subscription. tristan fired two people he'd built systems around and hired one killer instead. it's never the systems — it's the people.
second eps with @TristanZheng watch/listen ↓
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