Scaling an SEO Business: How to Transform Challenges into Opportunities for Growth

Hey, hi everyone. Welcome to your show, E-Coffee with Experts. This is your host, Ranmay here. And today we have Ross, who is the Chief Executive Officer at Search Marketing Pros with us. Hey, Ross, how’s it going?

Going great. How about yourself?

All good. I can’t really complain. Ross, before we move any forward, let’s get to know the human behind the mic. Why don’t you talk us through your journey, how we’re growing up, and how did you land up in the digital marketing SEO space, and also about your agency, Search Marketing Pros. What do you guys specialize in, what are your core competencies, and we take it off from there.

Yeah, sounds good. All right, how far back do you want to go? Are we talking about childhood? Or are we talking the start of the actual professional?

We can go to your school, no We got time.

Okay. Search marketing pros agency has started, probably new, as far back as 12 years old. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. Started a lawn care business, made flyers using, and this is how technology as well took the new tools at the time in whatever year that was, 1996, 1998, made flyers, threw that out, and got a bunch of calls and built an entire business where people were very surprised to hear a 12-year-old answer the phone when they thought it was a legitimate lawn care business. Flash forward, and I worked for a number of larger corporations, mainly in the Memphis area, and did the… I’m going to be honest, with the pandemic, one of the stereotypical things now of leaving your business to start your own business and actually contracting back to them. So worked for a number of the bigger companies here in Memphis, FedEx to Autozone. I worked at a great agency here as well called Wunderman, which is an international part of the WPP Network. And then on to Service Ma ster, which is a house of services brands, and then specifically with Terminex before leaving and contracting directly back to Terminex and doing the old consultants thing where you go right back to your old company.

So in the ashes of that consultant land that I was in, I wanted to build an actual agency. So how do we scale and build the people and the processes in place to build something that’s bigger than yourself? So that’s the long-winded way that we got to search marketing pros. So taking what we found in the home services industry that was the most important for inbound lead generation, which was a mix of SEO, PPC, and paid social, combine that all into what we call campaign-based marketing, making sure each of those channels work together to get to a lead and then overall to revenue and to sales.

Lovely. Thank you. Thank you for detailing that out for us. Search marketing pros, when you started, agency life is not easy, but especially when you’re starting out, there are a lot of challenges there. Can you walk us through how the initial days were when you started Search marketing pros, getting those first clients, You’ve been building a team? What were the challenges and how did you overcome them?

The first challenge I had was I was lying to myself. I started a different business, and I said I was an agency, but really, I was a consultant. From that end, it dawned on me of I was thinking like an agency, but really, I was just consulting, which is fine. It’s just you have to play… If you’re going to be a consultant, you have to play by consultant roles. If you’re going to be an agency, you have to play by agency roles. We like to break them or bend them a little bit to try to overcome our competition. But at the same time, there’s still rules to the game. That was my first challenge was saying I was something when I wasn’t. That’s why officially made the Search Marketing Pros brand to be consistent with the agency world. One of our main obstacles we had to overcome at the time was just the name itself. The first name that I chose, people did not understand necessarily what we did. Classic case of, I’m in marketing and I’m not listening to what a marketer would say. So as soon as we renamed it Search Marketing Pros, people at least had an idea That’s almost exactly what we did.

So that was one of our biggest challenges and first lessons that we learned on a larger scale. And then just with gaming clients and clientele, the number one thing, as happens all the time, as you start off and word of mouth is great, and then after word of mouth, that friendly little support blanket or whatever you want to call it, you have to go out and actually do good inbound marketing as well as outbound as well to get a awareness out there. That’s right.

As the CEO and founder, what has been the most rewarding experiences thus far at such marketing goals?

The most rewarding experience for us is truly to see people’s business grow. We deal with larger corporations, enterprises that are doing 100 million plus or 60 million plus. It’s great when we raise their revenue, their bottom line, their leads, that’s great. But some of the things that give us the most joy are when we take the more localized business and really grow them, because what we are trying to do is take the tools of the enterprise and bring it to Main Street is what we say. When you can take someone who’s doing $5 million in revenue and as quickly as we can take them the $7 million, that’s a big deal for them. You get to see the joy on the owner’s face, too, is their business is not only gaining revenue, but then value itself. So that’s what we like to do.

Lovely. And you have been an SEO for quite some time now, right? So what is the biggest shift you have witnessed in how search engine scroll and rank websites?

Yes, they have been in it since about 2013. So it’s crazy to say that at this point, right? Where it seems like it’s still new. It can’t be 11 years into something and still say it’s new. We saw so many monumental shifts. I remember working with one of the partners where one of the updates dropped, I believe it was Panda. And you hear about other companies where Half of their organic traffic dropped in one day, laying people off. So riding the wave through all of those tides and all the shifts that Google getting to dominance, even at that time, they were pretty close in 2013, but really getting to that 95% of search volume to now the challenge is that, what are people going to be searching on going forward? We believe most of it will still be around Google, but we know and Historically, the things tend to fracture and break down. As people start to use other items as search engines, mainly younger people, you’re 18 to 24, many of my students still use Google, But about half of the time, they may also use social media as well. So trying to be adaptable as we learn from the innovator’s dilemma every single time, and how do we change, and how to search change, and how do we change with it?

Absolutely.

And search agents are getting smarter at understanding user intent. So how can businesses ensure that their technical SEO strategies align with this shift?

I would say that from the technical SEO side, you’ll see that it matters less for a smaller website in a company than it does a larger one. It will matter more there. The main thing that I’ll see, and I remember, and I stole this from somebody else. I stole it from Bruce Clay, who taught SEO, but the idea is just that the site one-to-one, the site with the least amount of imperfections, will win. But the fact is, every single site that we go into we’re going to find some imperfections. I think on the technical SEO side, still aligning that the most with user experience is the one where we’ve seen the best results when it comes to overall search rankings, one to one. So just the classic, can you make your website faster? Is it easy to use, easy to find, and easy to understand? And then that’s a mix of the technical Amnion page and off page, et cetera. But using those in in coordination with the technical. That’s really what we hope that people focus on and provide.

Absolutely. Then talking about content here. Balancing content for different search intents can be really challenging changing, Ross, right? How do you strategically prioritize and allocate resources within your agency to create effective content for various user goals?

We try to break it down to the point of where we, assuming that it’s a new client, that we would take on, create some persona based off the data itself. But then the best thing that we found, too, is after that, try speaking to the actual customers to make sure data is only going to bring you so far. So you have to do some user-moderated studies just to try to understand what are the actual lever point? What’s the lever that will get somebody to purchase or what are they truly interested in? And then on top of that, what are the unseen things that they may may or may not be searching at that time, or it’s just so small, it’ll go into a purchase decision. Everything from how does an icon look to the total reviews that people have to the color scheme, all these things outside of that. How do we bring and what is the tone and voice that people are looking for? Bringing that back into the actual content, how it’s displayed, we found that to be the most important next step of not just to look at the data, but you do actually have to talk to people to understand them and try to tailor everything back to them.

Then, Ross, I also came across your LinkedIn post, where you emphasize the importance of evolution orientation in business. Why don’t you talk us through it, through some more light in terms of what are your thoughts on it?

Thank you for doing that research. Now I’m scared because it’s something that I’m a little bit obsessed with, and I’m still working on it as a concept, which goes into the evolution part. But I am obsessed with the idea of evolution in business and evolving as a person, as a business, and as a whole organization itself. So that means at the individual level, are we able, am I Why, Ross, am I able to get better? Personally and professionally, is the business, our processes, are the people that we work with, the tools that we use, are those able to get better? And then the organization, so values, what we try to accomplish for our customers, can that evolve as well? So people that, I think we see it all the time, where even Google just found out they were sitting on parts of their AI and being able to offer some things in their search engine. And the innovator’s dilemma, it comes for everybody, every single gener. Any new company that you see right now, in 20 years, innovator’s dilemma will come for one of them as well. So we’re trying to understand is historically, that happens to everybody, how can we focus on evolving and not worrying about making mistakes, but worrying about finding what is the truth and what is the best for us personally as a business and then as an organization as well.

Absolutely. And talking about AI, you touched upon a very important and interesting point there. So what is the best use of AI that you are doing right now at your agency that excites you?

Yeah, I would say that the easiest thing is to state that we still do all, as an example, paid search copywriting, paid social copywriting. We’ll always start with a core and a concept, but as you were able to test out, and we like to run multiple A and B tests. It fits into our idea of trying to evolve constantly is you have to test that out. You can have gut intuition, but until it hits the street, the people’s ears, their eyes, you don’t actually know. So one way that we’ve used it is purely just to pumping out A and B tests to validate and make sure that either our concept is good or is there any way we can reword something, make it better? Is there any way we can visually adjust something? And then was that good or bad? And trust me, we have definitely had our failures along the way with those items as well, but that’s helped us learn and improve along the way as well, too.

Absolutely. It is all about experimentation with AI at all times, right? You cannot be 100% success with all your trials there. Because we also do a lot of experimenting. We created a module for AI link building recently with our platform rank. Well, again, I can understand things working and not working at times with AI. That’s there. Finally, Ross, for our listeners, you have been a successful entrepreneur. For our listeners who are starting out the careers, trying to make it big in the digital marketing SEO space, or trying to start their own agency or their own gig, what is that piece of advice you’d want to give to them?

I can’t give you any advice other than my pure experience. All I would say is what I told myself, which was at the time before I left to start my own agency, was when I came to the true realization that I could get my job again. So if anybody… That’s the best advice I can give for anybody that’s looking to start an agency or looking to leave, is that at the end of the day, the biggest thing that helped me to jump off the ledge was the concept of, I may not be able to get this exact job at this exact company again, but I can get this type of job in SEO or digital Marketing Manager. I could easily get that again. That helped me take the leap realizing that because a lot of times I think we hold on to this concept of the sunk cost of I’ve already put time in, and if I leave, what if it gets worse? It is that it could get worse, but at the same time, you can get right back to where you’re at in six months, a year, if it wouldn’t work out. So why not take the lead?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Can’t agree more with you. Guida Ross, thank you so much for taking out time amidst your situation right now being a new dad. So thank you so much, once again, for taking your time to do this with us. Really appreciate it, man.

Appreciate the time. Thank you, Ranmay.