How To Make Money With SEO: 8 Best Ways in 2022

There is no doubt that SEO is one of the best high-income skills because search engine traffic is very valuable for all businesses.

So in this guide, I want to share eight ways you can make money from doing SEO.

Let’s get started.

1. SEO For Local Busiensses

The first method is one of my personal favorites for getting started quickly, which is selling SEO for clients.

SEO is one of the best digital marketing services to sell if you want to start a digital marketing agency.

This entirely depends on your ability to be able to sell not only to know SEO. But client SEO is a fantastic starting point for getting up to six figures relatively quickly. Again, if you can sell.

Now client SEO can come in many forms. But it’s essentially just going out there to sell SEO services to businesses. It could be local businesses, B2B businesses, e-commerce, or anything really just any type of business.

Most SEO projects cost between $400/month to $10,000/month depending on the level of service.

And this is great because even on the low end, you’re looking at $1,000 a month for SEO services even for our local business.

Now, if you want to make six figures a year, that is what nine clients paying you $1,000 per month, which is very insignificant.

So it is quite easy to do if you can sell. And of course, if you can actually deliver results to justify charging that amount of money.

But if you can do that, it is relatively simple. I wouldn’t necessarily say easy, it’s relatively simple to go out there and get to $10,000 a month. Because again, it’s on the higher end of a number of clients, 10 clients paying you $1,000 a month on the lower end, it’s two or three clients. It’s very simple if you know how to sell.

I’ve done this, I’ve helped many other people do this. But again, it isn’t for everyone because not everyone enjoys sales. And not everyone wants to communicate or manage clients. It isn’t really fun if you don’t like talking to people.

2. Affiliate SEO

The second strategy, which is very popular in the community is running an affiliate website or authority websites.

And here’s the deal with this. What happens when someone goes online and wants to buy a gaming chair?

Well, some people will go directly and search for the gaming chair they want to buy and they’ll go and buy it. Or maybe they go on Amazon and they directly buy it.

But some people aren’t quite ready to make that purchasing decision yet, they want to research a little bit first. So they’re going to search for something like best gaming chair or gaming chair reviews.

They’ll look through some of this information, and maybe 1 – 3% of them will then click through a link on that page and make a decision there and then to buy a gaming chair.

Now what you’re counting on what you’re monetizing is that 1 – 3%, because you’re using an affiliate link, where a retailer will pay you anywhere from 2 – 10%, possibly more for every sale that you send their way, this is how you make money with affiliate marketing business.

Now if you run the numbers on this, you’re looking at in a region of maybe 15 cents to 30 cents for every visitor to your website. So if we say and even 20 cents per visitor to your website, you’re looking at having 50,000 visitors a month to your website to convert into about $10,000 per month, which is interregional that more than six figures a year.

So that is quite a high target. But if you know SEO that is very achievable. It won’t happen quickly. But you can definitely go out there and do that.

3. SEO Lead Generation

The third way is kind of a spinoff of the traditional client SEO strategy. And that is lead generation.

Rather than having a retainer, or selling your time on an hourly basis, you can also just directly sell leads, i.e. results.

So you can go to a local plumbing company say:

And this allows you to have a little bit more control over the process. Because you own the website, you control everything and they’re simply paying you for every lead you send that way.

And this means that per client, you can make significantly more money and you’re not restricted in the same way where a client can tell you what to do you have to report to them or anything like that. All you have to do is show them the leads that you’ve sent their way.

The massive downside of this in my opinion experience and opinion is that it’s difficult sometimes to justify the leads. And it’s difficult sometimes to work with clients.

For example, if they’re paying you $1,000 a month, and you’re doing SEO, when you’re sending traffic their way if half of the leads are wasted because they’re bad on the phone, they don’t answer the phone anything like that. It’s not really your problem as long as you don’t cancel, and they’re still monetizing some of it. So it’s fine.

But what happens when you’re on a lead generation basis, and you charge them $50 for a phone call and they don’t answer their phone?

Well, in your opinion, why is that your problem?

That is not your fault, they didn’t answer the phone, that is their fault. However, try explaining that to a client and get them to pay $50 for this call, but they didn’t answer or they messed up.

So it gets a little bit complicated there. However, some people swear by this method, I’ve done this personally with great success also.

You can definitely get to six figures a year. Because you run the numbers, if you’re getting paid just $100 per call, you can get paid double this and more in some industries. But $100 per call, that is 1000 calls per year.

If you break that down, it’s basically two more likely free calls per day. It’s not that crazy. If again, you can rank the site, you can bring in traffic and just send it to businesses.

And also there’s also the sales aspect. You still need to be able to go out there and sell to a business to get them to agree to pay for every lead but as an alternative to the client SEO and retainer type model there.

4. Rank and Rent

Now the fourth method is similar to the previous one, but a little bit simpler. And that is called rank and rent.

Rank and Rent SEO is where you own a website that is ranking that is driving traffic and has leads coming for it.

And then rather than selling the leads to the business, we have to qualify the leads inside. Okay, is it 30 seconds to a call that’s qualified? What if you don’t answer and all that complexity there?

You simply say to a business owner:

So they don’t own the website, but they’re renting the website.

Your website has traffic that they’re looking to get in front of. As in its ranking number one for say plumbers in your city or whatever your niche is.

It’s a lot easier to manage is a lot easier to track everything. And you get paid a little bit less money for this, but it’s easier to manage.

And unlike client SEO, where you got to send reports and you have expectations something like that the website is already ranking, already has traffic. It is easier to sell, and it’s easier to manage.

5. SEO Vendor

See there is a lot to SEO. There is:

• Technical SEO
• On-page SEO
• Link building
• Keyword research

And certain cases, unfortunately, penalty recovering things like this.

Well, this is very difficult to know all of this and be good at all of this and manage a team for again, all of this.

So what a lot of SEOs do is outsource certain areas of it.

So maybe they’re very good at technical SEO and on-page SEO but they outsource link building. Well, here’s an example Hoth offers link building services, guest posting, syndication, and more.

Now that is a vendor service, basically where they’re selling SEO services to other SEOs.

And this is a massive market. There are numerous companies out there selling backlinks and millions a year doing this.

So it’s a huge opportunity if you can specialize in one fin, which I suggest, and then you can provide awesome results.

So I think the biggest opportunity here is going to be a link building.

And also because people spend a lot of money on links. If you have a client, you’re gonna buy links for that client, every single month.

So becoming a vendor, whether that’s content, whether that’s links, or anything else is a massive opportunity still if again you know how to deliver and all of this really ties back to can you actually do SEO?

Are you actually good at this stuff? Because if you are people will pay for it just needs to be able to actually deliver.

6. Personal Business

The next way to make money with SEO is to use this for your own business. So let me give you three online business ideas within this.

E-Commerce Store

Number one is e-commerce where you run your own online store. This could be selling products yourself or it could be a drop servicing business.

But as long as you can generate traffic you can make money and that’s what SEO is. It’s going out there and generating traffic frantically from search.

So if you can generate traffic, it is not difficult to make six figures a year. If you just imagine that the average product you’re selling is, say $100. Well, you need to sell 1000 of them a year to have $100,000 in revenue, again, that’s not profit.

Local Business

So you can do e-commerce there. Or you can even have a local business. I’ve seen people do this in our community as well, where they run their own local business.

I’ve seen people have cleaning businesses and all sorts. So you can do this.

If you have your own skill, you can run a local business, and literally, just use SEO as a means of driving traffic rather than paying someone else if you want to.

Information Product

Another great example is information products. So you guys have probably seen information products before because YouTube is just full of ads that people sell, make money online courses. But it actually extends beyond that.

A buddy of mine has a business making around $30,000 a month selling weight loss and health and fitness-related information products. They generate a lot of traffic from SEO because he ranked really well for weight loss related terms, he promoted these products that he created himself.

And then he charged maybe $47per product. That is not a lot of money. But it adds up significantly when the profit margins are 95%. So that’s how he built up his business, he later sold that for pretty decent money.

Again, if you do an affiliate SEO or anything where you own your own website, you can sell your website for in a region of maybe 35 times the monthly profit.

So it’s a great way of making additional money. And then you have cash flows and most new websites and grow quicker.

So the point here is you can create a business website and leverage SEO as a skill, as a traffic source. Rather than simply selling SEO directly you leverage that to build a real genuine business.

7. Teaching SEO

There is a massive market of people that want to learn SEO. This is huge because you can make money from doing this as a job or you can make money from any of the other methods I shared previously.

Aka there’s a lot of money to be made in SEO. Seo is an $80 billion industry possibly greater now.

So if you know SEO to a decent ability, there is a lot of people that are willing to pay money to learn to do this.

There is a huge opportunity for this. And there’s several people popping up that teaching this. As long as you have the skills in place to actually do what you’re teaching, people will pay you to learn how to do it.

Again, I really want to explain here and I have the caveat in here, you need to be good at what you do. So I suggest doing other things first, or even just having a job doing SEO first. But do SEO first actually know what you’re doing.

And if you are really good at this, then there’s a huge opportunity to teach other people.

If you want to get started to learn SEO I highly recommend SemRush Academy.

They offer a completely free SEO courses and exams with certificate!

8. SEO Job

Now the final way I want to share which probably won’t get you six figures to be completely honest, but that is to get a job.

So you can get a job in doing an SEO, this could be for an agency or for some affiliate business.

The average salary for an SEO  is $68,545.

Obviously, there are exceptions, there are people making more than 100 grand a year doing SEO.

However, that doesn’t mean the opportunity isn’t there to grow from that. Because every single thing I mentioned previously was about leveraging your SEO skill to sell to businesses or rank your own sites and make money from that.

All of that means you need to actually know SEO to be able to do that.

So a great starting point for learning SEO is to get a job. The number of people I’ve seen that work in agencies that then went on to run their own agencies or run their own affiliate portfolios is staggering.

Most well-known SEO specialists didn’t just come into this randomly, they work for an agency or something similar before. They learn SEO there. And then they left and did their own thing.

So a great starting point to kind of shortcut that is to go work for an SEO agency, they’re gonna show you exactly how to do things the way they do at least, and they’re gonna pay you for your time.

And then the longer term you could possibly grow in that position if you like that. Or if you want more freedom to do your own thing, launch your own websites on the side.

My Advice

And that is eight ways you can make money from doing SEO. The point is SEO is very easy to make six figures a year from if you have the skills. And that’s all it is. It’s about developing those skills.

This isn’t something that you go into and you immediately start making money. This isn’t some like get rich quick scheme. This is a real business, this is a real industry and you have the skills, you will make the money because organic traffic especially is very valuable.

If you know how to generate this, whether for yourself, whether for clients as long as you know how to generate this traffic, you can make six figures a year, you just need to learn the skills.

Don’t expect this to happen overnight. So put in the time to develop your skills. Put in the time, learn the skills, develop your skills, and then you will get there eventually.