18 Use Cases: How to use SE Ranking to pitch your agency to new clients

Setting the stage for a strong pitch often comes down to knowing what to analyze first and how deep to go. It can be challenging to do it quickly and efficiently without wasting resources. 

This guide is packed with special use cases. It explains how to use SE Ranking’s tools to gather valuable data quickly and use it to back up your SEO pitch and prove your expertise. We’ll go into detail about the tools we recommend starting with. We’ll also cover extra tools worth using if you plan to go the extra mile with high-value prospects and build arguments around why these techniques work. 

Let’s dig in.

Tool bundle for winning every pitch

Competitor Research tool 

Start by getting a clear picture of your prospect’s current performance, including their strengths and weaknesses. The Competitive Research tool can help you with this. Run an analysis to estimate the effort required to improve their ranking and set the stage for discussing your SEO services.

Optimize your pitching process by using these four main checks as the foundation for reviewing your lead’s website.

#1. Learn which pages drive traffic to their websites, which geographical regions the traffic comes from, and how their rankings have changed over the past year.

Learn which pages drive traffic to your prospects’ websites by using the Pages report in the Organic Traffic Research section. It shows the lead’s top-ranking pages (these can be sorted by traffic to identify potential targets). Click on the URL to review a specific page. Alternatively, you can click on the magnifier icon to perform a quick on-page SEO check.

To see where the prospect’s traffic comes from regionally, open the Traffic distribution by country tab under the Organic Traffic Research section. This report shows the site’s traffic dynamics and distribution of traffic between countries and continents according to its traffic volume and keyword count. You can also select up to 5 countries to compare traffic results. This data is useful for understanding the prospect’s target regions.

Use the Ranking Changes tab to get an overview of your prospects’ ranking changes over the past year. It displays keyword rankings that improved, decreased, appeared, or got lost. You can customize the analysis timeframe and see historical data as far back as February 2020. Focus on keywords with diminished rankings and filter them by positions 1 to 20 to see which lost top positions. This shows you where your prospects are losing ground to their competitors.

#2. Discover keywords the site ranks for that trigger AI Overviews (AIOs).

According to our latest research, AI Overviews appear in 18.76% of search results, showing up in roughly one out of every five searches. It’s clear that AI-generated answers are a new reality and you should know how to adapt your SEO strategy to them. That’s why checking your prospect’s presence in AIOs should be a key part of your initial analysis. 

Our Competitive Research tool makes it easy to spot keywords that trigger AI Overviews (AIOs). It gives you a fresh angle for your pitch and shows prospects that you’re thinking ahead about emerging traffic sources. Many competitors likely aren’t taking advantage of these opportunities, so getting the jump on them now is crucial.

To see keywords that do trigger AIOs but don’t cite your prospect’s website, open the Keywords section in the Organic Traffic Research section. Add the SERP features filter, find AI Overviews in the list, and then select Not linking to domain.

Once you have a list of potential queries with AIOs to link to your lead’s website, review each search term and do the following:

#3. Learn who your prospect is competing with to identify promising keyword opportunities.

Nothing gets a prospect’s attention like showing them exactly where their competitors are winning. Having a clear view of your prospect’s position in their niche helps you show them exactly where they’re falling behind and what it will take to catch up.

To find out who your prospect is competing with, go to the Competitors section under the Organic Traffic Research section. It shows you a list of domains ranking for the same keywords as your lead. Analyze those websites on the graph and in the detailed table below.

To find Missing keywords, line up your prospect against a relevant domain by choosing the Compare with your domain option. These keywords are being targeted by your prospect’s competitors but not by them. Use this data in your pitch to pinpoint areas where your prospects are losing organic traffic.

#4. Assess at a glance the number of backlinks they acquired and the growth dynamics over the past year.

Looking at backlink growth trends gives you quick insights into how well your prospect is performing at building authority. Use data from the Competitive Research tool to see if your prospect is actively building links or losing valuable backlinks.

Go to the Backlinks section in the Overview dashboard to review your prospect’s link profile. Select your timeframe and track changes using the backlink curve, which highlights both gained and lost links over time. This data helps you quickly spot potential gaps in their strategy, which is crucial to discuss in your pitch.

Website Audit tool 

Your prospects might not know much about technical issues that may be hurting their search visibility and user experience. It’s up to you to highlight anything that could be preventing their site from performing well. 

One technique is to check their website with SE Ranking’s Website audit tool, which uses 115+ site parameters to assess site health. It also groups all the issues it found into 13 categories (Security, Crawling & Indexing, Sitemaps, Meta tags, Content, Speed and Performance, Links, Redirects, etc.). If your lead has a JS-based website, enable JavaScript Rendering (Client-Side Rendering). This will help you identify issues revolving around dynamic content. 

#1. Check the technical health score of your lead’s website

The technical health score measures your site’s overall technical performance based on its security, redirects, server errors, broken links, content, and more. In the new 2.0 version of the tool, we’ve improved this metric to consider both the severity of detected errors and the number of affected pages. This metric is helpful for showing prospects where they stand and which fixes to prioritize first.

#2. Identify technical issues related to content, sitemaps, redirects, indexing, usability, meta tags, security, and more.  

In the main dashboard, focus on the section highlighting the website’s top issues. These issues are considered the most significant and frequent, with the most critical issues appearing first. This is a good starting point for your pitch.

Pay special attention to critical issues that fall under the Errors category. Website Audit will show page experience issues, broken links and redirects, errors related to content, sitemap and robots.txt files, meta tags, noindex and canonical tags, and more. You can use these data points in your pitch to explain to your prospects how each issue affects their website’s performance and search visibility.

Backlink Checker and Gap Analyzer

Showing prospects how their backlink profile compares to industry leaders shows them where they need to catch up and which links are the most important to get. However, the quality of your backlink analysis depends on the quality of the data you receive. To bring fresher, more comprehensive data to the table, SE Ranking upgraded its backlink database. There are two backlink tools worth looking into for this: Backlink Checker and Backlink Gap Analyzer.

#1: Review the quality of your lead’s backlink profile and compare it to their competitors. 

Choose how deep you want your backlink analysis to be: 

• Examine the backlink profile of your prospects’ entire website. 
• Analyze specific, high interest URLs found during competitive research. 

Reviewing the Domain Trust score helps you assess the quality of your prospect’s backlink profile quickly and increases its chances of ranking high in search results. 

Start by analyzing the lead’s backlink profile for crucial metrics, including its Domain Trust score, total backlinks (including broken and toxic ones), referring domains, and top anchor texts. Next, repeat this flow for each of the lead’s competitors identified during competitive research.

Quick reminder: To understand which competitor backlink profiles to check first, prioritize those with high Domain Trust scores. Sort competitors by Domain Trust in the Competitors tab of the Organic Traffic Research section in the Competitive Research tool.

#2: Show lost backlinks impacting performance.

Check the Lost backlinks subtab in the Backlinks section of the tool to spot link opportunities missed by your prospect. Each backlink comes with essential metrics like Domain and Page Trust scores, link type, toxicity score, and more. This insight helps you identify the most valuable links to reclaim. Focus on lost links from high-authority sites (with high Domain Trust) for quick SEO wins.

#3: Highlight toxic links suspected of holding prospects back.

Review however many toxic backlinks your prospect has in the Overview section of the Backlink Checker. These links can prevent your prospect’s website from getting higher rankings. Focus on links marked as “High toxicity” backlinks, which are suspicious or low-quality links that your prospect would be better off without. To dive deeper, click the number indicating how many links were found for each toxicity level to get details about each toxic link. Then, sort by toxicity to bring the most potentially harmful ones to the top.

#4: Identify competitor links worth pursuing.

Use the Backlink Gap Analyzer to review the backlink profiles of (up to 5) top-ranking competitors. The tool will show all the backlinks that your prospects’ competitors have that they don’t. Review the list of missing backlinks and find the most valuable ones by focusing on backlinks from authoritative and relevant sources. These will be the most valuable backlinks to present to your prospect as you propose a link-building strategy for them.

Tool bundle to strengthen your pitch  

Although you should have finished your core analysis by now, you may have high-potential prospects for whom you want your pitch to be bulletproof. To give them a compelling presentation that fully covers this section’s insights, you need to create a project for your prospect and add the top keywords to track. The system will process the data and the Insights tool will provide key points to act on. It will also calculate your lead’s share of voice.

You should have plenty of room to analyze multiple prospects at this point, especially if you have a Pro or Business team subscription. Pro users get 30 projects and 3 team seats, while Business users enjoy unlimited projects and 5 team seats.

In the meantime, if you need a refresh on project creation (or you’re doing it for the first time), here’s a quick video guide that shows how it’s done. Our tool gathers website data as soon as you create a project and add a website to the platform.

Insights feature

The primary value of SE Ranking’s AI-powered Insights feature comes from its ability to capture all those SEO trends, patterns, and opportunities that need minimal effort to bring quick SEO gains. Normally, you’d need multiple rounds of analysis to spot these opportunities. With our tool, you get useful insights and to-do recommendations automatically. This is perfect for the pitching stage when time matters and you need to prove the value of your services quickly.   

FYI: All insights are grouped into categories. Some of the insights mentioned below will appear immediately for new projects, while others can take 1-3 days to fully appear.  

#1. Highlight keywords with strong traffic potential and moderate competitiveness.

In the Keywords and pages with easy-to-improve positions block, focus heavily on the keywords and pages that your prospects already rank for. Many of these pages will require little push to achieve higher rankings. Sometimes all you need to do is optimize for a few crucial on-page elements. 

The detailed report shows all pages ranking for your selected keywords. It highlights high-potential keywords, their current positions, monthly search volumes, potential traffic, individual search engines, and the location data. To add more justification to your plan to improve the prospect’s pages for certain keywords, run a detailed analysis in the respective tool.

#2. Spot keyword cannibalization issues. 

Find a block with insights on Keyword cannibalization. This will help you spot instances where your prospect’s website has pages that compete against each other for the same keywords. These pages might offer similar content and share the same search intent. This is a common issue that often goes unnoticed despite severely damaging page rankings and confusing both readers and search engines. 

The tool will flag all relevant keywords and the specific pages affected, along with key metrics like Page Trust, average position, traffic forecast, and more.

#3. Present pages with low Content Score (poor-quality content).

Look for the Pages with poor-quality content section to spot the pages your prospect currently ranks for that only need a little push to rank higher. These pages have a Content Score below 60, which is worse than the average value of top-ranking competitors. These pages also fall behind the top 10. Note that our Content Score measures content quality and relevancy by checking content for metrics like keyword usage, headings, paragraphs, images, and more. 

You can jump right into analyzing each underperforming page. You’ll get a quick overview that displays average and maximum competitor scores and quick actions that involve optimizing the primary content elements on the page. These tips help you win extra points and boost your prospect’s rankings.

Once you start working with your prospect’s content and they become your client, you can dive deeper by running a detailed analysis in our Content Editor tool.

My Competitors  

#1. Present share of voice in their market.

Share of voice is the perfect tool for demonstrating your prospect’s brand visibility in their market. SE Ranking’s Share of voice feature uses the keywords you’ve added to the project. It measures the percentage of organic traffic your prospect’s website earns from these keywords compared to competitors. This metric is the key to explaining to your prospects how competitive they currently are in their niche.

Check your prospect’s share of organic traffic in the dedicated Share of Voice section. Start with the summary widget for a quick view of where they stand, then see how they compare against the top 20 ranking domains in their space. This section ranks your prospect’s site based on their total traffic share of your target keywords.

For a deeper look, expand the details in the section, URLs in Top 20, to spot which pages from each domain rank in the top 20, along with their associated keywords, SoV, and expected traffic. Explore Keywords in Top 20 to gain a complete understanding of the terms each domain ranks for, their positions, search volumes, competition, and more. Analyzing these top-ranking URLs and keywords are a great way to get your prospects to see the value in discovering new ways to boost their share of voice.

Create professional pitch decks with Report Builder 

At this point, you should have strong data points around which to build your potential client’s story. You should also be ready to present them in an easy-to-digest format. Summarize the most worthy website audit insights that you gathered and pack them into a compelling, eye-catching deck. 

Maybe you already have your own reporting style, but our Report Builder is also effective at winning clients over. It delivers key findings by pulling data from the main platform modules, and it only takes a few clicks to do it. 

Our reporting tool offers an unlimited number of manual reports, with 12 unique templates to choose from. You can organize the data however you want. Just select the sections you need, present the data in easy-to-read graphs, and style it to match your preferences. 

During the pitching stage, download the report in PDF, HTML, or XLS format and email it to your prospect. Down the road, when your partnership grows, you can use our automated report delivery feature. The number of reports you can deliver, however, depends on your subscription plan (5-50 reports, or unlimited with Agency Pack). Plus, Agency Pack users enjoy benefits like reports white labeling, AI summary generation, and many other useful perks for agencies.

#1. Present insights to your prospect about issues uncovered during competitor research, website audit, backlink analysis, and more. 

All the data you’ve uncovered should serve as your foundation for explaining the technical enhancements and SEO practices you plan to implement. Our Report Builder makes this process more effective and time-efficient. 

Whether you’re starting from a template or creating a custom report, the Report Builder makes extracting competitor analysis insights, technical audit results, backlink profile gaps, and more easy. 

Note that these are only a few of the many possible insights that you can include in your pitch reports. Please feel free to add any additional insights found using the various platform modules we provide.

#2. Create templates using various customization and formatting options and reuse them as needed.  

Having clear, well-designed reports helps your prospects quickly understand the data. Use the full range of customization elements when designing templates and ensure they reflect your reporting style. Add cover pages, table of contents, titles, images, and more. Place each element exactly where you want it, and reuse your template for future reports to maintain a consistent, professional presentation style with every client you work with.

#3. Create White Label reports that reflect your brand identity. 

Note that this feature is only available to Agency Pack users.

Create a White Label report that feels like it’s truly yours and deliver professional, polished reports that build trust with your prospects on the spot. You can even add your logo to the header and cover page, pick your brand colors for the text and background, and tweak the design to match your style. Preview, return to defaults, and fine-tune everything to ensure your report looks polished and on-brand.

#4. Use the tool’s AI-based capabilities to generate quick, professional summaries for your report sections.

Note that this feature is only available to Agency Pack users.

Use AI to quickly create professional, insightful summaries for your report sections. Highlight quick wins, low-hanging fruit opportunities, the potential impact of proposed improvements, and any relevant insights you want to include. Choose the tone of voice for your narrative (negative, positive, or balanced), and set the summary length. You also have full control over changes made to the generated text and can add personal insights.

Why this pitching approach works  

Now let’s talk about why this approach works so well. This section details why we recommend this pitch approach and is backed by our ongoing communications with our agency users. 

Here’s what makes it work:

Make your next pitch your best yet!

Time is precious for both you and your prospects. This guide offers a proven, time-and-cost-effective framework for using SE Ranking’s tools. Now you can analyze sites quickly and efficiently and present your findings in the best possible way. 

Show up prepared, use data to back up your recommendations, highlight opportunities your prospects may not have spotted, and show them exactly how your agency can make a difference. Now go and show your prospects what you’re made of!