In this video, Chad and I discuss some of the advantages and challenges for an SEO agency, particularly in regards to scalability, high prices, and keeping customers. SEO is a great product for every agency, but for some who find it daunting, where do you start and why would you consider Semify? In this video we discuss how to be successful a scalable seo agency.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Hello, and welcome to our agency SEO video. I'm Chad Hill and I have Adam Stetzer here with me today.

Good afternoon Chad. We're exploring seo for agencies. I want to talk a little bit about some of the high points, and some of the challenges for an seo agency, or maybe add on to some of their other agency products, particularly when it gets into scalability, and high price, and sell this and deliver it, and you keep your customers. SEO is a great product I think for every agency.

But I think for those groups that haven't been heavily invested in SEO in the past, may find it a little daunting. So where should they start and why would they consider HubShot's agency SEO outsourcing program?

Yeah that's a great question. And this is one that we've discussed many times. The first one I think starts with specialized knowledge. The fact that we are running over 800 SEO campaigns, we're able to get a sense of what's effective what's not effective.

And I think all too often when agencies do come to us looking for agency SEO programs, the type of SEO they're doing is necessary but not sufficient. What we often see is they're only doing on-site SEO. And we know from the history of running lots and lots of accounts here, that that's an important part and it's critically important. But it's not sufficient to really improve rankings. So that's the first place to start.

Right I was just quoted recently in an article about this very issue, about how agencies transition to pursuing off site agency SEO. And this is when you get into content marketing, content syndication. And of course we have had five years to specialize our content engineering staff to service that, which is, I think, a very challenging think for a lot of agencies coming more from the traditional side. So you're right. That's a strong selling point.

And then the next one I think comes out of that because we are operating across lots of accounts. We're able to achieve economies of scale. So most companies wouldn't be able to justify having a full time editor to make sure that the content that's being written starts off on the right foot with well documented research and then co citation links. And then as we go through and write the content, that it gets edited. So those are some of the things that you get when you're operating at scale. Is that you can have dedicated resources where otherwise a smaller agency that's just getting into their own agency SEO program wouldn't be able to do that.

They might have been doing this in house for themselves. But I guess it's a whole different ball of wax when you're doing it at a very large scale. As you said, having the research team in place and well trained, having an editor, having an audit process, having a reliability process, to make sure when you get to this real high level of output that it takes to rank on competitive SEO terms you're doing it the right way with quality.

I think that sort of dovetails into the next point, which is all about the technology. Because again we're operating at scale, we've been able to invest time and effort in building out a technology platform that both provides tracking and benchmarking to prove out the ROI of the programs, but also keeps our team organized. And I think a lot of agencies that are looking to outsource agency seo are basically, typically faced with the same thing that we faced five years ago. Which is, once you get past five or ten accounts, just managing all of the activities that need to go on becomes daunting. So without an investment in technology it's very difficult to do it, and to do it much be on five or ten accounts.

Right, and that investment to build your own platform is significant. And the thing I love about our agency SEO software is exactly what you said. It merges the best of the reporting and analytics side with some of the leading workflow management tools. It puts it all in one place. It also helps you do a fair amount of client management, expectation setting, showing your value through reports and emails alerts. And of course we're adding features to it all the time, which again would be very expensive to do on your own.