Expert Strategies for Building and Leading Successful SEO Agency

Hey, hi everyone. Welcome to your show E-coffee with the Experts. This is your host, Ranmay here. Today we have Spencer Padway, who is the founder and CEO at Search Nurture with us. Hey, Spencer.

Hey, Ranmay. Thank you for having me.

Great. Spencer, before you move forward, let’s get to know the human behind the mic. Talk us through your journey so far. How did you start or find Search Nurture? What have been the challenges? How is it going now? What do you guys specialize in? And we take it from there.

Yeah, absolutely. Gosh. It’s been 15 years since I started in the industry. Founded my old agency, Brandfish, in 2009. That was acquired by another agency, SailPoint, where I was able to run a big team there and learn a lot. That launched off the running Search Nurture. It’s been a journey. Agency life is always interesting. It’s ups and it’s downs, but it’s always exciting. I’m excited about where we are today. I think our positioning is great. We’re focusing on e-commerce marketing, specifically with retailers. It’s an exciting space. I think one of the things that keeps me going in marketing all the time is that it’s constant innovation. Things are always changing. That was very true of SEO a long time ago. It’s very true of ads and SEO right now, particularly in this retail space, because there are new retailers adding advertising every day, new features, and new networks. A big part of the fun for me where we are right now is, okay, how do we explore this new space that nobody is the true expert in and become that true expert? How do we innovate and stay on these features that are coming out every couple of weeks, every month Really exciting right now?

Lovely. To kick things off, could you share a defining moment in your early career that ignited your passion for digital marketing?

Yeah, I think the earliest moment. I graduated a mile back, and it happened to be during a financial collapse or the financial collapse of recent times. I graduated with a degree in finance. It was an unfortunate time for finding a job. I went out and I started doing small business IT. I was good with computers, and the bar was lower back then, I suppose. As I was doing this, my father came to me and said, Look, I’m going to hire this thing called an SEO Agency. You’re playing this game where you battle against Google. I think you’d like it. You knew I liked video games. I like strategy. I went to Mazcon back in 2009, and it was just exciting. All these people were talking about this brand new thing called SEO. Very few people were doing it back then. The sales pitch wasn’t like, Why we’re the best agency? It’s, Why do you need SEO? The business didn’t even understand at that point. It was just really exciting. I started going into these businesses for the first time in my life in my solo career, going in there solving these problems when I was 20, or 21 at the time.

That was it. It was just so exciting to be able to go in there and be innovative and learn this thing no one else knew. Yeah, change things all the time and solve problems. I think that was the defining moment. It’s still what I’ve been doing since then, just always finding the new problem to solve.

Lovely. Give us your first client story. How did you crack your first deal?

Yeah, that’s a great question. I don’t know if this is my proper first client, but it was the first client I got excited about. I had gone to a company called Baby Center long ago, and they were interviewing agencies and all these other people. I’m not even sure how I got introduced to them. I believe it was a friend who was like, Hey, these guys need SEO. Maybe you should talk to them. I went in there, and I’ll never forget, that they talked to a bunch of agencies that gave the high-level pitch. I went in there with a 17-page printed-out audit that I handed to all of them, walked them through for 45 minutes, and at the end of it, they were just like, This is insane. No one’s come even close to this level of dedication. You’ve already done the first three months of work. You’re hired. It was so exciting for me because it was the first client that wasn’t a referral or a family member or anything like that. It was just a client that I’d gone out there. At that point, the pay was amazing. I was like, This is shocking.

It was super exciting. It was a great big site. I’ll never forget about four, five, maybe six months into the contract, their traffic went from about 2 million a month to 5 million a month. They were just shocked. I was even shocked. I was like, I have no idea what’s going to go on as well, but I’m really happy with this. It was a really exciting first client experience.

Lovely. Coming back to Search Nurture, what inspired you to go find Search Nurture? With So many digital agencies now in the market, what sets you guys apart from all the digital marketing agencies out there?

Yeah, it’s interesting. I’ve been working for two different agencies, Brandfish, and then sellpoints to acquire brand fish for quite a while. I took some time off after sellpoints, and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I interviewed for jobs. I looked at all these different things, and at the end of the day, I just had to ask myself, Is this what I want? Do I want to be working for other people? Do I want to be doing this or do I want to go back to the agency life? What drew me back to the agency life is that I have a very specific set of values and principles. When you run your own company, one of the things that’s great is it reflects that. You’re hiring people that reflect You get to tell people like, This is how we act with integrity. We’re going to collaborate. We’re going to innovate. Being able to foster that culture and innovation is important to me. Being able to do it my way, I developed that way because I enjoy that. I think a lot of what makes us stand That part is we’re super innovative.

We give very much white glove service. Our clients love not just that we’re giving them great results, but that they’re building a relationship with their account manager. Their account manager is going to know their brand. They’re going to know, Okay, here’s this new thing that just came out. It’s going to apply I think it’s hard to get when you’re with a bigger agency, you’re with a 300 to 600-person agency. It’s just a lot more impersonal. Of course, that’s what happens with scale. Being able to stay on that cutting edge in a very specific location and being able to truly know and care for our clients is part of what makes the job fun for me and part of what makes us stand apart.

Lovely. Talking about clients, how have you gotten in a situation where you had to deny a client or say no to a client, right? So if you can help us understand more about why, if at all you have done that, why would you have said no? And just give us the story there.

Yeah, absolutely. There’s I was that we’ve said no. I think it comes down to a few different things. When we’re looking for a client, especially if we’re looking for a smaller client, we’re looking for someone willing and ready to grow. Are you willing to invest in this? Do you have a supply chain? That’s a factor, too. We’ve had some fun clients but they come to us, we advertise for two or three months, and then they run out of product, and then we pause for two or three months, and then they come back for two or three months. We’re super happy that we’re selling out their products. At the same time, operationally, it’s challenging to have to turn on and off very rapidly. That’s one. It’s that commitment to working with us and commitment to growth. We’re looking for those long-term partnerships where we can learn and grow and push people beyond. If people are just looking for a quick fix, sometimes we can do a project, but we’re not always looking for that. The other thing is culture fit. We have run into clients that can be hard on our account managers or rude.

That’s something that, surprisingly, it’s really important to us. We want to make sure that our team is happy that they’re thriving. If one person is making the account manager unhappy, then they’re going to perform worse on the rest of their job. They’re going to be less happy. They’re going to perform worse on their other clients. We look at the halo effect of the culture of our company is not just us. It’s not just internal. It’s every decision we make and every person that we bring into Search Nurture, even if they’re a partner and not directly integrated with us.

We also have Being internal in our company, if your account managers are happy, and we just joke around with it, yeah. If your account managers are happy, the accounts are happy, right? Yes. It’s quite crucial from all aspects, the folks who are handling the battle on the ground, interacting with clients, understanding, making the accounts grow, and making things happen. They need to be happy in terms of all aspects, interactions, the communication that they’re having with the client, internal, external, all the ways. So only Then they can make the account grow.

Yeah. No, I agree. If somebody’s unhappy, even if they like the work if they’re unhappy with some interactions, they’re going to become less engaged over time, they’re going to become less dedicated. I think that there is a lot of joy in work, especially when you do something hard, you succeed, you get that feeling like, Yes, I’m good at this. I did it. This is great. Or as you feel your clients grow and you like your clients, I just did something, even though they’re paying me, I just did something great for this person. That makes me feel good And so keeping that positive energy, it’s a cycle, right? It’s a spiral. And you can either spiral up or spiral down. And so I want to keep that spiral going up.

Lovely, lovely. As a founder, I think this speaks volumes about the culture that you would have at Search Nurture. Lovely. Great. Coming to a brand fish part, Pensa, the brand fish rapid growth from a solo operation to a thriving agency is remarkable, right? So can you please walk us through some key decisions or strategies? I know you would have had many during your tenure, but what you would have implemented to achieve that level of scalability in those early days? Because as we all know, running an agency is not an easy task to keep the lights on. Initially, again, has its challenges. But give us some key decisions or strategies that made it work.

Yeah, absolutely. That’s such a good question. I remember when I started brand efficient, I tell the story sometimes. I graduated college, I wasn’t going into finance, and my dad told me I was SEO. I just in my head, I was like, You know what? Starting a business is easy. I can do this. Anyone can do this. I just had this wonderful level of courage in the every day of this will be nothing. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do this. Of course, I started it. Turned out it was way harder than I thought, but I was good at SEO, and I think that was one big thing. I learned so much so fast while we were doing that. I was doing our accounting on QuickBooks. I was hiring people. One of the big things that I learned, I think probably more than anything, is that the people that you hire are crucial. In the beginning, I hired some friends, and they were great, but they may not have been interested in SEO. I don’t know if this is for me, and that was fine. But over time, I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is you have to find good people, and not just good at SEO, but are they going to be good team members?

Are they excited to learn? Are they willing to go in there and get their hands dirty, and become innovative? Are they excited about this? All of that is so, so important. Going back to that culture, you have that exciting culture. Everyone starts sharing articles, then more people share articles, more people talk, and you have better brainstorming and better swap meetings. Getting that momentum going and making sure that everyone that you hire is not just talented, but also fully bought in, not just to the company, but to the industry, all of that is important. If I had to choose one single thing, I think that’s probably the biggest takeaway is finding that and matching people to what they’re best at. Make sure that you’re doing the job that you find exciting or fun or that you’re passionate about, where if you put them in the wrong role, they may be amazing and they’re still going to end up not liking it.

Absolutely. Hiding Adding the right set of people, adding the right people, and the right team is so crucial to any business’s success. There’s a team that makes or breaks it. And then, extending on that, the acquisition of brand fish by sell points was, again, a significant milestone for you, right? So what were some of the key learnings you took away from that experience, both in terms of business growth and navigating acquisitions? Because that is, again, a different ball game altogether.

Yeah, absolutely. Man, what did I learn? So acquisition-wise, I think there was a lot of learning. On the one hand, going to Sellpoints was amazing. I got to manage a much larger team, but we also had a full sales team and a marketing team. I got some first-hand experience. Brandfish, I had never worked in an agency environment at all. I was just making it up as I went along and it seemed to work. And Sellpoints was, okay, I get to learn from somebody that’s done this. We have 75 people. There’s a lot of scale. I’m learning how to teach managers and all these different things. I learned a lot of really good I think, tangible skills in that acquisition. On the other hand, I learned that the grass isn’t always necessarily greener either. Sometimes I look back and I’m like, If I had kept running Brandfish, it would now be a 15-year-old agency. I wonder how big or how much it could have grown if it was continuous instead of three separate agencies over time. There are pros and cons to everything. I always like to say there are no solutions in life. There are only trade-offs.

I think that’s one of them. What did I trade-off by doing that versus not? But the acquisition process was really interesting. I didn’t know how to evaluate a company I didn’t know how to guarantee anything. If I was ever to do that again, I think there’s a lot of knowledge like, Okay, let’s make sure this deal is rock solid or just not do it at all because I like running agencies. That’s what I came back to anyway. I could have just been doing the same thing the whole time. But yeah, it was really interesting. I learned a lot by switching to a larger company for a while.

Or could have evaluated it more than you would have done at that point, right?

Yeah, probably.

Yeah. Great. Coming to project FBA, which is close to your heart, and exemplifies your dedication to industry knowledge, which we are doing today as well. What motivates you to mentor others and contribute to the development of the digital marketing community at large?

Yeah, absolutely. It’s so many different factors. I think the first one is when I think back about Brandfish. Again, I was swimming in the dark, and I was lucky. My sister was a recruiter. When I was like, How do I hire people? How do I even do payroll? You’re talking about a 21-year-old starting a company. I was like, I don’t know how these things work. Knowing that I had a good talent and there was a lot I didn’t know, I remember that feeling. Sometimes I think back, Man if I had a business mentor back then or somebody to help me, that would have put me ahead. I know how valuable that can be when you have a great business idea, but you don’t necessarily know how to run a business, or how to file the paperwork. I have a lot of people who still come to me today and say, What form of corporations did I start? How do these taxes work? That stuff. I think that’s exciting. It’s really rewarding, too. In particular, I get excited about marketing. That’s why I like doing this. That’s why I like talking about it. I always get excited about whatever new is coming out.

I think I said this a little earlier, but retail right now is one of these things where every call, every week, new things are happening. I think with retail advertising, it started with Amazon. All the other retailers added sponsored products. Then they added sponsored brands and displays. Now they’re adding off-site marketing. Home Depot, you can run Pinterest and Meta to your Home Depot Instacar,t or all of these. Now, to the next level, all of these retailers are taking the first-party data. Let’s say that you want to sell on your website and you have a product that Home Depot people would like, Home Depot customers would like. You can then take Home Depot data or Instacart data plug that back into Google or Facebook and run that to your site to drive this customer. The level of complexity and interest and ability to innovate and be cutting-edge is super exciting for me. It’s more fun when I’m sharing it. It’s more fun when I’m saying, Okay, this is what you could be doing. This is the next step in the industry. You might think they’ve ruined your competitive advantage, but things are changing so fast.

It doesn’t matter. Someone else will figure it out. They might not have figured it out yet. It takes a lot of joy just to be able to take those things, share them as much as possible, and then go to find the next thing to share. I find that process exciting. It’s nice to me when people can go to Search Nurture or Project FBA and go in there and have that sense of community and be able to find the articles that are going to solve their problems for them or teach them something new. It’s a lot of the reward of doing this work.

Lovely. Talking about sharing and mentoring, your brand on LinkedIn is quite strong. We were speaking about it in the green room. How has investing in personal branding impacted your career and business endeavors? What advice would you give to our audiences, entrepreneurs, and professionals who are listening to you today about looking to build their brand? How does it benefit out of it?

Yeah, absolutely. I enjoy it. I think there are a few factors to building your brand. My first one is just doing it. Everyone I talk to, it’s hard, it takes time. It’s 100% true. There are a million reasons not to. But once you start doing it, it builds up over time. I know when I started doing this, I was like, I don’t know if this is worth it. Is anyone even watching these things? More recently, I’ve gone to conferences, and people I’ve never met before have come up and been like, Oh, I saw your stuff. It’s great. I’ve seen you here, I’ve seen you there. It’s cool to me. Even I saw my old Amazon rep, my first ever Amazon rep at a conference recently. He was like, Oh, I Why are you selling yourself on LinkedIn? I’ve been meaning to reach out. It’s social media at its best, in my opinion, which is when you’re doing things, it’s useful, it’s helpful, you’re connecting with people, and I love doing that. I think the flip side of that is it can be hard to come up with, A, passion constantly, and B, new content.

What are you going to talk about all the time? You have to figure out what you want that brand to be, what you want to be talking about, and what excites you. If you’ve seen my videos on LinkedIn, they’re fairly tactical. I love to talk about specific things. Okay, here’s how we’re going to move data to this retailer, or here’s how you approach this challenge or this problem. But those are the things I like doing. I like to research that. I like to figure that out. For me, I like to talk. Being able to do a LinkedIn video is great for me because I’m not a huge writer. But if you sit me down and ask me a question or if I have a new idea, I’m super happy to talk about that. I think the results of that are just more awareness and more opportunity. When I go to a brand now and I say, Hey, let’s do a webinar or co-marketing, they’re much more willing because they go, Oh, you have an audience. You’re bringing value, too. You’re not just trying to take our audience. I think it opens a lot of doors in a great way.

You just need to know, What is your business goal at the end of the day? Why are you doing all of this? How can you truly help people in that process?

You’re talking about conferences, cutting your teeth in the early days of Moscon, and SEO suggests a deep understanding of the industry’s evolution. How have you seen digital media and SEO transformed over all these years? What are some of the emerging trends you find impacting businesses the most today?

Yeah, absolutely. I think the first thing I’ll say, which is exactly an internet question, is that if you can go to conferences, I find a few things more valuable. People are willing to tell you everything in person. They’re always inspiring. I leave them being refreshed. I want to do this and that. I learned so much there. There are a million marketing conferences. Whether or not you’re in marketing, I love going to conferences. I love seeing people in person and getting to talk and getting to learn things. But yeah, that first Mazga on an It’s a great example. It was very transformative for me. The industry has changed so much since then. I remember at that one, it was like, Okay, here’s how SEO works. If you looked at what we talked about then, it was mind-blowing at the time, and it would be extraordinarily Nearly basic today. But that’s how the industry is involved. This was pre-Panguin, pre-Panda. That was a huge update. 2012 came, and all of a sudden they changed. It was no more changing the game altogether. No more scalable content. I feel like that’s happening again, 12 years later, that was 2012, those came out.

Now there’s the unhelpful content update. There are a lot of sites that are having huge shakeups right now. It’s a big piece because of AI. Google doesn’t want us to scale content. They want subject matter experts. They want first-person articles. They want actual people writing to actual people.

Writing the content.

Exactly. They have their AI. They can write unlimited AI content on their own. That’s not useful for them. They want people to create new new helpful things unhelpful content updates. It’s really interesting to see Particularly right now, I think this is going to be the biggest shift in the last 12 years in SEO and marketing because we’re introducing that AI. After all, Google SGE, their AI search engine is going to come out soon. That’s going to change the results. The 12 Blue Links, has changed a lot over time, but it’s been relatively the same since the inception of Google. This could completely change the way you interact with Google. There’s so much going on right now that’s exciting, both in, okay, there’s new ways of data when you’re looking at retailers, there’s a new way to target, there’s ways to do all these things, and the face of content marketing is going to completely change in the next few years. One thing that I like doing is things that you can do with AI, but AI is not there yet. Ai is not going to make a great video, not necessarily, at least.

Right now, focus on those mediums. We can still connect humans to humans in the best possible way. But it’s going to be an interesting couple of years to see the industry is just always evolving so fast.

After 11, yeah, it does give you a head start for sure, but it is still not there in terms of producing that final product, which is going to be consumed by humans to make that decision making in their hearts and minds to buy a product or use a service. When you said about human starting content. I’m 200% with you there.

The big challenge of AI is that currently, it can’t come up with its ideas. The AI that we have right now, can read everything on the internet and then it can compile it and regurgitate it, but it’s not going to come up with a net new idea in terms of writing. It’s just going to take everything else and then basic inclusion off of that. That’s where humans are still super valuable. That’s where being a subject matter expert, having a unique opinion, What’s the value that you bring when you’re writing an article. It’s for a long time, people cranked out just articles to write articles. I think that version of SEO is pretty much God. You have to put in time, effort, and innovation, and be a thought leader to make this worth reading.

Absolutely. Ai is something that we can go on for as long as we want. Spencer, going back, what is that one piece of advice you wish you would have known when you were first starting in digital marketing I think?

Yeah. I’m a particularly stubborn person. I’m very driven, I’m very ambitious. I mentioned this earlier, I’ve always liked to do things my way. I go, Okay, I like this way for a reason. Let’s figure out how to do it that way It feels right to me. I think the biggest piece of advice, if I could go back, would be to find a mentor. If I’ve learned anything over my career, it’s that when I talk to people, everyone, maybe not everyone, most everyone is really happy to share their knowledge, is happy to help them, really happy to teach you them. I took the lone wolf route of, I’m going to invent all of this. I’m going to do it all my way. I’m going to do it differently. There were a lot of things that I could have learned very quickly if I had just asked people and just been willing to say, Hey, I’m learning about this. Can you teach me this? Especially when I was younger, getting a little bit rid of that extra level of pride or ego of saying, No, I’m going to do everything, and just allowing more people to help because people love to help, and everything goes faster that way.

It’s one of the principles of search and nurture. We have quite a few, but one of them is you don’t always need to reinvent the wheels. Sometimes the wheel is there. You can just learn, and you don’t have to put the effort in to make your wheel every time.

I’m glad you mentioned that, right? A lot of founders, don’t share this. Trust me, when you said this, a lot of us have gone through this vicious circle of doing it all on our own, initially, till the time we figured out that delegating or being more collaborative and looking around for solutions. When you already have it, you don’t have to create one of your own. We all learned it the hard way around.

Yeah, absolutely. It goes back to hiring, too. We have a factor when we hire people that we call the Robin Hood factor, which is there’s an anecdote from Robin Hood that he wouldn’t let anyone join his band of merry men unless they could beat him in a fight. The way that we apply that is what skill does this person have that we don’t currently have? What are they bringing to the table that they can do better than I can? Pretty much everybody has some factor. It’s a good perspective to look at for that exact reason. Oh, I want to add this service, or I want to be able to do this thing, or I have all these ideas, but I can’t learn to code right now or do data analysis. Let’s find someone who can do this and expand the horizons and collaboration in the company.

Great. Lovely, Spencer. It has been a brilliant conversation. But before I let you go, let’s play a quick rapid-fire. I hope you’re game for it.

All right, let’s go.

All right. Your last Google search.

My last Google search. Let me see. I think it’s open right here. Yeah, sure. I’m looking at Google Retail Media Solutions. They just released a retail media ecosystem with Search Ads 360, so I was looking that up.

All right. Your last vacation?

My last vacation? It was half a vacation, but I just went to New York for the shoppable event to visit some clients, and then hung out with some friends in Florida over the weekend. It was just got back Monday night.

All right. Talking about hanging out, where do we find Spencer on a Friday evening after work?

Oh, that’s a good question. More often than not, I will either be listening to live music or playing live music. When I’m not working, I’m usually either doing some sport or some music. Those are my two favorite hobbies by far.

Lovely. Favorite sport then?

Rugby, hands down. I played for 12 years actively, and I still play two-hand touch rugby, but I am too old to tackle at this age.

All right. That can help you in terms of tackling clients as well. Yes.

I haven’t used that tackling yet.

All right. The last one will not grill you any further. Spencer, your celebrity crush.

My celebrity crush. Oh, man, I don’t know if I have a celebrity crush. I think you got me on this one.

Okay, we’ll change the question. What did you do with your first paycheck, Spencer? First paycheck of your life.

Oh, my first paycheck. What did I do with it? Let’s see. I think I was in maybe high school at the time. I’m pretty confident I bought some either video games or magic cards. Those were where I would have spent that.

All right. Love it. Guides, Ben, sir. Thank you so much for taking out time to do this with us. Appreciate it. For our audiences, if they want to reach out to you, how do they do that?

Yeah, absolutely. Feel free to connect me on LinkedIn, Spencer Padway, or reach out to hello@searchnature or hello@projectfba. If you ever need any help with an agency managing your advertising, or you just want to learn and join a community about retail, that’s what Search Nature and Project FBA are here for.

Great. Thank you so much, Spencer. It has been a great conversation. I’m sure our audiences would have loved the insights that you have shared. So thanks.

Absolutely. Thank you as well.