One mistake I made when starting SEO Freelancing was charging an hourly rate that was based on my experience and education. Well, if you're new to SEO Freelancing, no one cares about your education or in-house experience. In Freelancing, they care about results! The best way to show results: show positive engagement on your website and/or freelancing profile on UpWork, Fiverr, Guru, PeoplePerHour, Freelancer, etc... How do you gain positive engagement on your profile/website? Work for free. Yes, you read that right. Offer your services for free, you are new to SEO Freelancing and no one owes you anything. Working for free will force you to provide value for your clients, it will allow your clients to provide feedback about your services, and working for free will make your clients more comfortable when leaving a positive review. This will build up your profile, and when you increase your hourly rate, many of your clients will follow you. Dont worry, you won't work for free for long; maybe a few months, it's different for everyone. Focus on building up your profile and your rate as you see the projects improving. However, as mentioned in the title, be ready to eat a pile of sh*t when you're new! Free work often attracts low-level clients which can be a challenge to manage. These types of challenging clients will also help you build your SEO process and business documents. And believe me, the first time a project goes out of scope, you will be updating these quickly! :) Let projects go out of scope, offer extra help, provide education, grind hard, take on criticism and hold yourself accountable for your SEO strategies by measuring them. This is how I started, it's also how I developed a bulletproof SEO process that I use to train my team. It's a grind, but nothing worth doing is ever easy. Good luck out there people! Derek Kent - SEO Director, iNet Media

"We hold our SEO strategy accountable in using your marketing data." We do this by measuring before and after our SEO improvements. Showing clear improvement in Organic Traffic and Engagement and Organic Keyword Ranking. The organic keywords will have been reviewed with the client - volume and keyword difficulty is visible We build reporting dashboards for all of our clients, big or small. We provide 24/7 access, allowing our clients full transparency in their marketing data and SEO performance. Google Data Studio is a cost-effective place to start if you're operating on a budget.

I made a list of over 1000 websites that I would contact to offer SEO. I wrote personalised messages (as in, not a blanket email to everyone) I used contact forms mostly. Sometimes had to use actual email. I focused heavily on ecomm and more specifically Shopify stores. I cited my nearly 20 years of experience and my own success running a profitable Shopify store. And I genuinely thought I’d get some responses. I’ve gotten nothing. There’s all sorts of reasons this has failed. But the main lesson here is: don’t be naive like me. You may have everything going for you (experience, for example) but that won’t be enough. Your biggest Issue isn’t convincing others. It’s getting them to even open your email to begin with. So that’s my next challenge. Get them to open their emails and not mark me as spam!