Scaling Success: Mastering Agency Growth Through Strategic Moves and Valuable Lessons

Hello Everyone. Today we have with us, Jacob Kettner, Founder and CEO of First Rank, a successful search engine marketing agency from Canada. Jacob, Welcome to the show. Excited to have you.

Thanks for having me on Dawood. I was looking forward to this.

Same here, man. Same here. After your talk in Chiang Mai about how to scale an agency, I thought this was an episode we had to have before we closed for the new year because a lot of our viewers are agency owners or entrepreneurs planning to start their agency or people struggling with scale. This is an important episode to have. But Jacob, before we dive deep into your journey and the things you did to successfully scale, it would be great if you could introduce yourself and the company to our viewers.

Yeah, absolutely. I’m Jacob Kettner. The company is First Rank. We’re probably one of the largest SEO agencies in Canada. We serve primarily the Canadian Market. I’m nine years old. We’ve got about 20 people full-time right now.

You started First Rank right after college. Was it all planned?

No, it wasn’t that.

How did it happen?

Yeah, back in grade 10, I decided that I wanted to learn how to make money online. I Googled make money online and the first result was Warrior Forum. I spent many years dropshipping on eBay and doing a lot of these little black hat tactics for making a few bucks here and there. But I was just doing well enough that I just wanted to keep chasing it. When I graduated, I was like, Hey, I’m going to start a real business now. I had some experience in drop shipping, and I started a drop shipping business. I was selling backyard patio furniture. I was doing just Google ads. I was in grade 10 in 2006. I spent 2006 through 2013 avoiding SEO because It just seemed like a scam to me. I was always looking for paid ads and stuff. I ran the whole store on paid ads and I was break even because the ads were expensive. I started learning about SEO again and decided that it could work. I didn’t have the resources to rank that site. It was a little bit too competitive for what I had available to me.

However, I realized that I could help local businesses easily. If I just share how I got my first client, I wanted to think about the least competitive market that I could think of. I’d heard it was an OMG webinar. I was never part of that group, but it was a webinar. I think Mike-Long mentioned that he was bragging about ranking for eyelash extensions. I was like, What a joke. You’re bragging about your number one rankings for this keyword that you’re competing against a bunch of stay-at-home moms. I was like, What a great idea. I’m going to rank eyelash extensions because it’s going to be super easy. I called outreach to a few stay-at-home moms who did eyelash extensions and offered to work for free, and one of them took me up on it and ranked number one for that. That was my first client.

You’re talking about cold outreach. Right now, I know one of the biggest agencies in Canada, you already have that market and your referrals, your normal inbound must be working fine. But is there still a go-to strategy or a go-to cold strategy for you to get clients apart from whatever is coming inbound?

You know what? We’ve had very poor success with cold outreach. We’ve tried it a lot over the years: email, calling, appointment centers. We’ve tried pretty much every service out there that hits my inbox. In the beginning, I think the reason that I was effective with it was because of the risk reversals that I was willing to put in place. For this first client, my pitch was, Hey, I just graduated from university. I’m trying to get some experience. I’ll work for you for free until you rank. So she took that. Then later on, it wasn’t necessarily free, but it was, if you’re not in the three positions in six months, I’ll work for free until you are. I think as we’ve stepped back from those risk reversals and started using our client successes as our sales pitches, the cold outreach has been a little bit harder because we don’t have quite the same hook that we had before.

But I think that’s part of the phases of an agency maturing. Now, the quality of clients also has increased, and now you don’t need that hook at all. Thank you for saying that. I want to congratulate you for creating a successful agency and scaling an agency right from scratch. You have done it yourself. You have been a true leader, grown the company, and a successful one. But as for you, what are the top three strategic initiatives or decisions that you believe were instrumental in the successful scale of First Rank?

Yeah. I think one of them is tracking everything. This was something that, again, I was raised in the glory days of PBNs. I had a spreadsheet for tracking where all of our links were going from our PBNs. By the way, we don’t use PBNs at all anymore. But I realized a spreadsheet is not enough. I need a database.

Where i can quickly reference like, Hey, are we building a footprint here? Do we have too many links from the same sites to the same clients? That was my initial inspiration for working with databases. Then as we built it, I realized, hey, we can do so much more with this. For every link we’ve built for the last six, or seven years, we track the page that it went to, the page that it came from, and also the ranking page that we’re targeting. So if we were building a link to a supporting piece of content, we’d have where we built it to, but also the end goal of what we were trying to rank with it. We expanded from there and used the same database for our content process and our on-page changes, and it turned out to be a good system for tracking hours and how we deliver things. It didn’t happen overnight, but it was a pivotal change for us having all of that data because, after several years of using it just as a project management system and doing nothing with the data, we decided that we wanted to be a little bit more strategic about pricing and use cost centers and figure out what our costs were on everything.

And having that data was what made that possible. And also just to be able to provide a higher level of transparency to clients and if they say, Hey, what have you done for the last three months? We to be able to break it down by the 15-minute interval as to what’s going to do a campaign. I think a lot of agencies try to avoid that because they’re not putting in that much work. We could argue with value-based pricing, but I like to be able to back up what we’re doing. I think you asked for three. That’s one. The second would be having the insurance pool mindset. We price for about 80% utilization of staff. We always have about 20% extra that we can put into our internal projects or research and development for our clients. So it’s nice having that pool and clients knowing that, yes, they’re going to get their minimum deliverables every single month, but if there’s an update and their site gets hit or their site gets hacked. We just have the extra resources to put in at no extra charge for them and give them that concierge experience.

And I think that’s just helped with client retention, not going back. And you have to be careful not to blend that. That that doesn’t turn into scope creep and them asking for too much. However, having the ability to allocate extra resources to clients without losing money was important. Third, learning about implementing EOS, entrepreneurial operating system traction, it’s basically, I’m your typical visionary in an organization. I’ve got good ideas. I’m building a strategy and seeing how the pieces are going to fit together processes. But once I’ve put together that strategy and process, I need that integrator to make sure that it happens. I think at the beginning, I’d spend a week putting something together and then I’d have a conversation with the staff members who are supposed to implement it, explain my whole vision, and what I want them to do. Then six months later, I’d be like, Hey, guys, we’re still doing this. They’d be like, Oh, no, we stopped doing that because it wasn’t working because of this. I never followed up because I was on to building the next processes and systems. I think putting in that integration and those department heads so that I could build it, give it to somebody, and then make sure that it consistently is happening.

No, absolutely. I think traction worked wonders for us as well. But just curious, did you read the book and then implement it yourself or did you have somebody implement it for you?

I’m part of another organization called EO, Entrepreneurs Organization. As part of that one year, as part of our training, we did a group implementation. It was not a full implementation by any means, but we had an official EOS facilitator and we did four sessions with them that were a few hours each they gave us homework and then we came back in small groups. I was with maybe six other business owners. That’s the extent of it. That was enough for us to take the worksheets and run with it. We never got officially implemented.

I understand. Now, the reason I said this is, in fact, for our viewers, we can put in the link for traction and the details. But I think traction is a very good system for an organization to be organized and scaled properly. We tried doing it ourselves earlier, and then we ended up creating our version of Traction. We would just spend hours and meetings, and we ultimately just changed the whole concept. Then the second time we asked a friend, they had Traction implemented. We asked him to be the facilitator and do it for us, but it has been very amazing for us. Talking about good initiatives, I’m sure there have been many. I’m sure top of your mind, one of the most difficult decisions you had to make, and then it ultimately led to a long-term benefit.

That all of the most difficult decisions that I’ve had to make throughout the business have related to people. It’s they’re typically letting somebody go that I like that’s just not the right fit or having a difficult conversation with somebody. I don’t know that I can boil this down to one, but I know that there have been a couple of instances where I’ve had to fire somebody who was a friend, either a friend before I hired them or became friends working for me. I put it off too long. I let it probably be three months too long and I just knew that it wasn’t going to work, but I just wanted to keep giving them chances and I wanted them to succeed. And in every case, it was such a relief once I did it. And then looking back, I’m like, Why did I not do that sooner? I can’t boil it down to a specific one, but having difficult conversations with people has been the hardest thing that I’ve had to deal with.

Selling SEO is an art. How do you communicate the value proposition to prospective clients?

Yeah, it’s hard. We generate most of our business through SEO or Google ads for SEO keywords. So most of the people coming in know that they want SEO when they come in. We’re not trying to explain the value of SEO to them. They get that SEO is valuable. So that’s helpful. In the beginning, like I said, we did a lot of risk reversals. If I didn’t have tons of case studies client testimonials and proof that we can do what we say, I would go back to risk reversals because it’s the easiest way to sell. It not only helps the buyer feel comfortable buying, but it also shows extreme confidence, right? That I’m confident that I can do what I say I can do. That was near the beginning. Now it’s just we’ll try to find similar clients to the prospect that we’re talking to and share those results on the time-lapse. Because just saying, Hey, this is another client that we work with and they rank number one for this keyword and get X amount of traffic, they don’t have anything to compare that to. They’re like, Okay, that sounds great. I’d like that.

But where were they when they started? Are they like me? And if I can find someone that was like them when they started and say, Hey, look at this. We started with this guy four years ago. He was exactly like you. He had the same baseline that we were working from. This is where we got after a year and it was good results and he was happy. But really, look where we got after two years, three years, four years. I like setting that expectation because it’s scary to tell someone just on a first-time call, How long is it going to take? I feel like this is a thing in the industry. We all want to be like, Yeah, we can do it in six months. Some campaigns just aren’t six-month campaigns. Sometimes if you’ve got competitors that have been spending on SEO for 10 years and doing a good job of it, we’re probably not going to beat them in six months with your brand new website.

But just telling people, Hey, it’s going to take 18-24 months, a turn and they’re going to walk away. But if I can show them through an illustration here’s what we did. Look, within the first six months, we were seeing improvement. But really where things took off for them was at the 18-month mark. I think people being able to say, okay, I’m going to follow that same path has been helpful.

The onboarding process is critical because that’s the entry point and the start of the client experience with an agency. How do you approach setting client expectations during the initial stages? And how does the initial investment phase impact the overall client-agency relationships?

To answer the second question, immensely, most clients that we’ve lost because of some miscommunication or misalignment of expectations. We have in the office, the mantra that we live by do what we say we are going to do. That applies to obviously showing up to work on time and the things internally, It’s those little things, There’s a story in E-Myth Revisited where the guy talks about how he goes into a barber shop and has a good experience they offer him a coffee sit him down, cut his hair, they wash his hair. He comes back and he has a different experience. They don’t offer him a coffee till afterward. They wash his hair before. It’s a different process than what he was expecting. It was still a good experience, but it was different. He comes in a third time and he has a different experience again and he never comes back. Any one of the experiences was okay, but it’s the reason that I get breakfast from McDonald’s. I like the sausage and egg McMuffin because it comes out the same way every single time.

One in 10, they’ll put the egg and the sausage in the wrong place. I’m like, That’s a lot, right? So back to the onboarding, those little expectations. We try to set in the sales process. Here’s what the next steps are going to be. We’re going to get on a kick-off call on your first or second day. We’re going to introduce you to the entire team. You’re going to meet, not the entire team, sorry, but the leadership team that’s going to be managing the campaign. You’re going to meet your account manager, the technical person. We’re going to have some questions for you. We just want to make sure that we do a smooth handoff and that we’re targeting the right stuff. And then you’re probably not going to hear a lot from us for the next week or two, which is normal because we’re working on setting everything up and making sure that we’re targeting the right stuff. And then at about two weeks, we’re going to have a realignment call where we’re going to get back on and we’re going to walk through what we’ve done in those two weeks, how to read the reports, how to use the tools that we set up for you, any further recommendations that we found.

Then after that, we’re going to meet with you once a month for the first three months. We’re going to have a meeting, just review your progress. After that, we’re going to move to quarterly meetings. We’ll do monthly reports, but we don’t need to meet every month because stuff just doesn’t happen that quickly. Then the key part of this is our process, I like the process, but the process itself is useless if we don’t deliver on that exactly. If I say we’re going to meet within the first day or two, if we don’t get that meeting scheduled until day three, we’ve already dropped the ball for that client. It doesn’t matter if we were already working in the background, what the reason was somebody got sick. If I tell them one or two days, it has to be one or two days. It’s just ironing out that process and then making sure that what we tell them happens exactly how we told them it was going to happen. When we do, that instills a ton of confidence. It has nothing to do with how good we are at SEO. It’s that they believe that if the process that we communicate for onboarding is as consistent if they experience it as consistently as we on it, then their assumption is that our processes for getting them the rankings are going to be delivered as consistently as what we promised.

Right. Yeah, I think that’s very important. A lot of people get it wrong when they try to, like you said, do what you say you will do. You try to say things and overcommit things that even you’re not confident will happen in that timeline. I think that’s very important. You guys have a very robust onboarding procedure. Now, one problem, that I have seen a lot of agency owners discuss, is profitability per client. Investing less time per client is as dangerous as investing too much time. Is there a process that you follow to track profitability per client and just to ensure that every client is getting what they deserve, but at the same time that you are tracking your profits per client?

Yeah. We use a super advanced tool for this called Google Sheets. Now, it is somewhat advanced because we’re pulling our pricing data into a sheet, but it’s not that complicated. There’s not that many actual things that we do. The strategy is very important, but actual things. We build links, we do press releases, we build it, we do on-page or technical work, and we write content. We do the same things in the right quantities, and we have pricing for each of those things. The prices might be in hours or in several words or whatever that is, but we put it into the calculator. Every month at our end-of-month meeting, we sit down with the account manager and the technical lead for the project, and we review what happened in the last month, and what the client objectives are, that’s where we exchange information. Then we lay out what the plan is for the next month, and we fill in that calculator with what we want. It tells us if it tells us that we’re over budget, then we say, Okay, maybe we could push 500 words of content to the next month. Or if we’re under, then we say, Okay, let’s increase that.

Then we monitor that in our database software that we also use for project management. So halfway through the month, we’ll have, anytime throughout the month, we have a live report that shows how many of each of these things have gone into a campaign, and then there’s a difference column, so it’ll show us how close we are. So if we’re halfway into the month and one of the clients hasn’t gotten any of the deliverables yet, they’re going to show up with a high number in that difference column, and the account manager or operations manager will notice that and say, Hey, guys, make sure we have a plan for getting this done. And then, as I mentioned, the insurance pool model will have some of our clients in that end-of-month meeting get color-coded as red. And those are the clients that feel like the results aren’t meeting the expectations that we set out. And so the red clients, we were allowed to go over budget within an acceptable threshold.

When should an agency outsource and what parts should be outsourced?

It’s interesting. I’ve been through so many sides of this. So when I started, I was doing what I think a lot of people do when they start. It was me doing all the strategy. I started hiring remote employees in the Philippines. And then I realized that I had grown too fast. We doubled the size of our agency and I just didn’t have the people. I panicked and I said, Oh, my gosh, I can’t do this. I fired everyone and I outsourced the whole thing. Not outsourced, but white-labeled basically. Worked with another agency, and said, You’re going to provide services for me. I’ll do sales and client management. I had a great summer that summer because I didn’t work very hard and I made a bunch of money. But I think coming from the agency side, I was used to this model where I’d overdeliver for clients that were underperforming. This agency that I was way willing to didn’t have the same mentality. They wanted to make money on all the clients, which makes sense. I felt uncomfortable that I had clients who weren’t getting as good results as I wanted them to, and I couldn’t directly control them.

I went back and ended up firing that agency, but now I had a bunch of clients and no fulfillment team or process for fulfilling it. I hired an operations manager. That wasn’t her title, she was an assistant, basically, but she turned into an operations manager. That was the best hire that I ever made. I was doing 80% of the work well, And we started using vendors again. But instead of outsourcing the whole thing, I’d buy links from one person and content from somebody else. I had vendor relationships. I wanted to give her the things that I didn’t know how to do. I thought I’m getting all this stuff, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing, and you do the stuff that I don’t know how to do. I got some very good advice that was, No, Jacob, that’s the wrong approach. It was Michael Myles who gave me this advice. He said You need to give her all of the things that you’re good at doing because it’s easy for you to train her on them. You have processes, and then you have to figure out the things that you don’t know how to do.

She started outsourcing to She started doing what I did, which was managing the campaigns and making sure that we bought all of the right things from the right vendors at the right times. And then I started doing more in-depth strategy. And the more important thing that I did is that I had time to go around and replace them with internal people. I hired writers. I did interviews. I found good writers. Hired writers stopped buying content. Her job stayed the same. She was still buying, and ordering content. She just ordered it from our internal team. And it’s funny because, to this day, we outsourced very little. We outsourced citations and that’s about it. We still, in the office, referred to getting content as ordering content. It’s been this big problem that an account manager will say it on a client call because we say it in the office and they’ll be like, We ordered the content. They’re like, Oh, are you outsourcing this? We’re like, We ordered it from our writer that sits beside me, but that language never left. Okay, so to answer the question, I’d say outsourcing is almost imperative when you’re starting because there’s no way that I could have built

There’s so much in SEO. It’s not like we do We have a lawn care business. You hire people that can cut lawns and it’s great. But in SEO, you need developers, writers, and outreach people. There’s no way that you can build an SEO agency without outsourcing at the beginning. As you get more established, what I choose to outsource is things that we can’t do internally as efficiently. But for it to meet outsourcing criteria, someone else has to be able to provide a higher quality output at a better price. So we did citations internally. They were costing us $9 a citation. I found a vendor. I can get citations for two dollars a citation and the quality is the same. But I guess the other criterion is that they had to be somewhat flexible because I need everything in my management system. They had to be flexible enough to work with us. I know you get into that. You do a lot of white label and vendor. You are the vendor for a lot of agencies. We had that conversation about how you get integrated into their systems. I think that’s such a smart play because the last thing an agency wants to do is go have two management systems, one for the vendor and the internal, right?

Thank you so much for explaining that so well, because I’m sure a lot of agencies when they’re scaling, have this problem. Should we outsource? Should we not outsource? And what to outsource? So thank you so much for that. Seo landscape has evolved so much. Like you said, you were there in the PBN days, and we have seen that, we have seen everything crash, and so much has changed since then. Now the AI thing happening. Sitting at the end of 2023, as an SEO agency owner, what are the key shifts or things that SEO agencies should prepare themselves for?

Good question. Honestly, I think SEO is probably more straightforward today than it ever has been. I’m not saying Black Hat doesn’t work. I have some friends who do very successful Black Hat SEO, but there’s less and less and it seems to get picked up quicker and quicker. Our strategies haven’t changed that much over the years. We build out topically relevant content silos that satisfy search queries, do intelligent internal linking, and get mentions and links on authoritative and relevant sites. None of that’s changed. Even from the PBN days, we were doing the same thing. We were just faking it. The question is what happens? From my perspective, If I had to make predictions about AI, it’s that Google has to devalue high-quality content. It’s been such a pillar for so long, and it’s become easy to create on mass. They have to move to engagement signals, which they’ve been trying to do already for a long time. How are we going to get good engagement? Is by writing high-quality content that relates to the search query. I don’t think that the content itself, just building out, what are people calling it now?

Programmatic SEO or building out thousands or millions of pages of content. I don’t know if that’s going to last. But as far as we specialize in local SEO and for a local client, having their service pages with the right content on them and supporting content that answers user queries. I don’t think people are going to go to AI for local search as much as they will for other things. It’s good at answering questions, but if you’re looking for a dentist, you probably still want a directory experience, right?

Yes. What about link building has evolved so much. I love doing links and I have seen link-building change and always trying new strategies. But from your experience, what worked in 2023 and what do you see working in 2024?

Yeah, on the local side, I think from a cost-to-value perspective, citations are some of the best links that we build. Not just for local rankings, but not just for Maps rankings, but for Organic as well. Because basically, somebody said a while back, I forget who it was, they said, Good Off Page is good on the page, off the page. If you can have a link in a well-optimized article that is relevant, it’s helpful. A citation is exactly that because nine times out of 10, you get the location, you get the address, and sometimes the category, the business category in the H1, and the title tag. I have a page of this page that has a link to the site. Anyway, we’ve had massive success, especially even aggregating that. If we have 10 locations across Canada and we build 100 citations for each location, we do still do outreach, guest posting, link insertions, we do press releases, but they’re expensive. Sometimes they move the needle and sometimes they don’t. With 100% consistency, building 100 citations for a local client always moves the needle.

Right. Jacob, favorite client story?

You know what? I was thinking about a negative one, but I got to give you a positive one.

Yeah, sure. Why end 2023 on a negative client story?

Say again?

I said, Why end 2023 with a negative story?

Exactly. I met one of my first clients actually at a BNI meeting years ago. He was an electrician and he was a small business. It was him a partner and two apprentices. I got started doing their SEO and got really good results. They started growing and I think they have 70 electricians today. Not all from SEO, some of that’s commercial and industrial stuff, but we helped for sure. We became good friends. I ended up going to his wedding. The 2016, he tells me that he wants to start a solar company. I said, Oh, cool. I’m interested in solar. That’s a space that I’m passionate about. I said, Well, there’s not a huge demand for solar here. We live in a province in Canada where we have super inexpensive hydroelectric power. Not a huge sell to replace clean energy with other clean energy. I said, Let’s partner up on this. I’ll build the website, we’ll rank it, and then as the industry evolves, we’ll get more business. The business will go. Set up the partnership, and started the business. Two weeks later, some rebates and incentives came out and business ended up blowing up. That business is just over double the size by revenue of my first rank, the SEO agency now.

That was just really cool. It didn’t happen just because he was a client, it happened because of building a relationship. I always remember that. It’s not that I’m just farming opportunities, but it’s like,I try to be Friends with my clients.

Oh, that makes sense. I think that always works. You can’t fake it. It has to come within your new nature. It has to be who you are. I think relationships always help long term. Jacob, I know we are less on time. I also have to play a rapid-fire round with you. But before that, what advice would you give to agency owners who are currently in the growth phase?

Yeah, I guess it would depend on size. It’s a people game. I think that was something that I didn’t realize. I was in grade 10 when I decided to make money online. I wanted to not talk to people, just work behind a computer. Every industry is a people industry, including SEO. In the beginning, it was developing those people skills because I was the salesperson. I was out farming business and getting clients. Then it turned into managing, making good hires, managing people, keeping employee retention, and keeping people happy. Now we have one more layer where I have managers and I’m helping coach them on how to manage people, which is crazy because I never even thought that I’d be doing that. I think it’s not directly related to bringing in new sales for scaling, but to scale effectively, the better your people skills are. Read books. It didn’t come naturally to me. How to Win Friends and Influence People is an amazing book on that topic, and there are many others. That would be my number one advice is to sharpen those people skills.

Thank you for that, man. In the end, before I let you go, I play a quick rapid-fire round of three to five questions. Are you ready?

Okay, ready.

How long does it take you to get ready?

In the morning? Yeah. Thirty-five minutes from out of bed to in the car.

That’s an exact calculation. Can you time it?

Yeah, that’s pretty accurate.

Texting or talking?

Talking.

Favorite ice cream flavor?

Mint-chocolate chip.

Last Google search?

Orthopedic Surgeon New York.

If a movie was made on you, what genre would it be?

Space Western.

Thank you so much, man. It was so fun talking to you. I wish you all the best. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year, and we’ll be in touch.

Thank you. Yeah, you as well. Appreciate you having me on.