How to Start an SEO Marketing Agency

How to Start an SEO Marketing Agency

To many people operating a website, search engine optimization (SEO) is like a foreign language. You might hear people talking about spiders crawling, “Local Pack”, SERP, backlinks, and even 5XX status codes.  You know there are things you must do to make people find your website, but you don’t know what or how. 

On the other hand, some people thrive on SEO. They understand the differences between PageRank and RankBrain and can discover relevant long-tail keywords in seconds. They might, however, wonder whether they can build an income from their accumulated SEO knowledge.

If you’re knowledgeable about SEO you have probably set up and operated at least one website, probably more. You might even have already found work in an SEO business helping others. Eventually, however, you might well have the urge to spread out and start an SEO marketing agency yourself. This will allow you to work with your clients’ websites, to help them generate organic traffic to their sites, appearing near the top of relevant organic searches.

If you’re new to SEO but enjoy it and have dreams about specializing in the work, start from Step One of our guide. If you’re already an experienced SEO specialist, possibly already with an existing marketing agency you want to expand, feel free to jump into our guide at a later stage. 

1. Learn and Develop Your SEO Skills

It is possible to set up and operate a successful SEO marketing agency without understanding any SEO, but only if you already have business management skills and sufficient capital to employ SEO experts, standing back from the agency’s day-to-day activities. Many existing marketing agencies, whose directors and senior management specialize in other marketing types, have managed to expand into SEO because they employed the right talent. However, anybody not in a position to pay for a team of specialists to undertake their SEO work will first need to learn and hone SEO skills, so that they have something to offer potential clients. 

You need to build credibility as an SEO agency, meaning that you have to be able to do what you promise potential clients. Nobody’s going to contract some unknown agency that can’t even get its own website to appear on the first page of Google for a relevant search. You don’t want your clients coming back to you complaining that their websites remain invisible on Google and that they are receiving a penalty from the search engine for improper behavior.

If you don’t already have a solid understanding of SEO, many places on the internet can help you, including free courses like the SEMrush Academy. We have also created a Local SEO Guide for Maximizing Local Visibility. Keep up with the latest trends in SEO and follow SEO influencers on social media.

2. Build Your Own Website Using Impeccable SEO

You need to be able to provide evidence of your SEO skills. The best way to do this in your early days is to build a website that follows sound SEO principles, ranking highly for relevant SEO terms – at least for long-tail keywords in the regions where you intend to operate. Sure, you can’t expect to hold the #1 ranking in Google for “SEO Marketing Agency” for quite some time, if ever, but you should be able to make the front page of Google for a local region-related search, e.g. “SEO marketing agency in Dallas, Texas” for example, depending on the level of competition you face. 

If you’re a beginner, it may take a while for you to succeed with this – it takes time to establish a website and for Google’s crawlers to recognize that you’re serious. That’s why we have this step earlier in the process before you set up your business and advertise for customers. 

In the meantime, you can create your site, using all your SEO skills and knowledge, particularly with regards to technical SEO. Keep a close eye on your site’s analytics and don’t be afraid to experiment to learn which SEO practices work best for you.

If you haven’t yet decided on your agency name and haven’t had a chance to purchase a suitable domain name for your agency, you should still create a website that you can use to practice your SEO skills. For example, you could create a blog. This could be about any subject you feel comfortable writing about (perhaps even make it an affiliate site), but if you make it a topic that would interest your future SEO marketing clients you could ultimately merge it into your SEO agency site.

3. Decide on Your Specialties

Many larger SEO agencies will offer the full gamut of SEO services – indeed you will find many large-scale digital marketing agencies that include SEO services alongside other marketing services like Affiliate Marketing, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, PPC Marketing, Social Media Marketing, and more. Full-service digital marketing agencies often include SEO in their offerings too.

However, if you are setting up a stand-alone SEO marketing agency, particularly if you’re small, either by yourself or with just a few staff, it may be best to narrow down your niche and specialize.  You will find many agencies offer a general SEO service, including the parts of SEO you may not particularly enjoy. If you specialize in your preferred niches, you have more of a chance to become and be seen as an expert in this. 

For example, a general SEO agency will offer services relating to keyword research, on-page optimization, content creation, link building, technical SEO, and local SEO. They are likely to have an average level of knowledge of each of these facts. However, you could pick an area, and learn everything there is to find about it. For example, one of the harder parts of SEO for many people is link-building. If you enjoy this and can put together a good system to create links, you may find that you can attract far better-paying clients as a link-building agency rather than a more general SEO marketing agency. Brian Dean, of Backlinko, chose to do so and is now an internationally recognized SEO expert.

Alternatively, you could choose to specialize differently, perhaps offering (all) SEO services for a particular industry, or on a particular social network. You will find specialist SEO marketing agencies that market themselves as offering eCommerce SEO, B2B SEO, franchise SEO, Shopify SEO, mobile app SEO, WordPress SEO, Facebook SEO, TikTok SEO, and YouTube SEO. 

4. Craft a Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Whether you specialize or remain a generalist, you will still need some way to stand out from the competition. So, you will need to establish your Unique Selling Proposition (USP), i.e. how will you stand out from all the other SEO marketing agencies? This is particularly important for a new agency, as you haven’t yet had a chance to build a client base. Determining a specialty may help with this.

Try to imagine your potential client. What are their pain points (relating to SEO)? Try and build your USP around this. This can be particularly useful if you’ve chosen to specialize in one industry. For example, you might look at the problems eCommerce sites face in making their online shops visible. How can you help improve things for them?

If you have some unique technology, process, or approach, make sure to highlight that in your USP. How does this make contracting you better for potential clients?

If you’re a new agency you don’t yet have any record of customer service. In that case, you could look at how you could improve the level of customer service offered by existing SEO marketing agencies.

5. Create a Business Plan

As with any other type of business, you should prepare a business plan before you start your SEO marketing agency. If you can’t put together a business plan showing your agency could be viable, it could be better if you used your time and other resources elsewhere.

You will find many books and online resources helping you create a business plan (the Influencer Marketing Hub even has one for an eCommerce business), but one of the most relevant is Upmetrics’ template for a Digital Marketing Agency Business Plan. 

We won’t go into full details of creating your plan in this post, but the key sections you should include are:

• Executive Summary (Introduction, Mission Statement, Vision Statement, Keys to Success, Objectives, Financial highlights) – this should be an overview of your planned agency where you highlight your Unique Selling Proposition (USP).

• Business Summary (Company ownership, Startup summary) – a simple description of how you intend to set your agency up (and who the owners will be). You could also include a brief overview of your key management roles in this section. Include in this section who you believe your target market and potential customers to be.

• Products and Services – what services do you intend to offer the public? Include your intended specialties here.

• SWOT Analysis (perceived Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) - set defined milestones and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure your progress.

• Market Analysis (Market trends, Target market, Competitive advantage) – take a bigger look at your industry here. How will your agency fit into the marketplace? Who do you perceive as being your main competitors? Why do you believe that there will be a customer base for your agency?

• Strategy (Pricing strategy, Publicity, and advertising strategy) – how do you intend to set your prices? What marketing methods do you intend to use?

• Management Plan (Personnel plan) – who will be the key leaders of your agency (if you know yet) and what roles will they hold?

• Financial Plan (Important assumptions, Break-even analysis, Projected Profit and Loss, Projected Cash Flow, Projected Balance Sheet, Business ratios)

Remember that everything in a business plan is forward-looking, so you should be able to estimate things even when you lack concrete data. Ideally, you should update your business plan regularly, preferably every time you have better information, so that it becomes more realistic over time.

6. Set up Your SEO Marketing Agency

Assuming that your Business Plan indicates that you can set up a viable SEO marketing agency, and you have all the necessary resources to do so, you can now go through the process of actually doing so. 

Some of the activities you can do at this point include:

• Depending on where you are located, you may face some legal requirements for setting up and registering a business. You should have researched this as part of creating your Business Plan. Now’s the time to do whatever your region requires. This may include setting up a company (if you intend to use that legal structure), registering for tax, and obtaining any licenses or permits you may need. In addition, some regions will require you to take out insurance of various types. If you don’t already know your local requirements do a quick Google search. For example, New York State has a webpage called Start a Business in New York State, and even an NYS Business Wizard that can help you determine your requirements.

• Create your brand identity – make sure that this reflects your mission and values. You might even start this process before you come up with your agency’s name. Your brand identity should include your logo, colors, fonts, and even copywriting style. 

• If you haven’t already done so, select your agency name.

• Create your online identity. You will need a website, email accounts, and social accounts. You will want your website (either the existing one you set up earlier or a new one with a better domain name) to reflect your new brand identity. Bring your SEO skills to the fore when creating your agency’s online identity, as they will be a showcase for your business and skills. Make sure you use professional email addresses, not generic Gmail or Hotmail addresses. Even small agencies can easily do this, as you usually get free email addresses when you sign up for a website URL. 

7. Hire the Right People

Even if you start your SEO marketing agency as a sole trader, with you being a Jack-of-all-trades, doing all the necessary work yourself, you may find yourself needing to employ staff before long. Hiring good staff is essential. You need to be sure that any employees are capable, preferably experienced, and knowledgeable about SEO. 

Keep in mind the services you have decided to specialize in and prioritize applicants with skills in these areas. Content writers, link builders, and analysts should be priorities depending on the scale in which you intend to operate. This will depend on the budget you’ve allocated. 

If you can’t afford permanent employees at the beginning, consider working with freelancers and contractors to do the work you haven’t time to do yourself. This includes non-SEO areas like accounts and project management.

8. Market Your SEO Agency to Gain Clients

Ideally, you will have included a variety of marketing methods in your Business Plan, but you may have to start small until you have sufficient clients to pay for better methods. Depending on your scale (i.e. whether you are starting your agency from scratch or whether you are a larger agency expanding into offering SEO services) you might even start by offering your services on freelancing websites like Upwork or Credo. These can be challenging, however, because they often have businesses expecting to pay unrealistic prices for SEO services. Once you’ve built a name on one of these sites, though, you may be able to market yourself in a better way.

As an SEO marketer you probably already understand the benefits of content marketing and social media marketing. Progress can be slow, but you can gradually make a name for yourself by using these means. If you prefer video, you may consider setting up channels on YouTube (long-form video) or TikTok (short-form video). However, make sure that your content is where your preferred customers spend their time. There is little value in creating a TikTok account if you’re specializing in serving an industry where most of the decision-makers likely to buy your services are aged over 40. 

Having a blog makes it easier to engage in email marketing, too. Gradually build an email list of potential customers by offering them valuable content in exchange for their email addresses. If you consider other businesses to be the target market for your SEO services (and in most cases, they will be) our Ultimate Guide to Effective B2B Email Writing includes templates you can use to increase your list size. It also suggests how you can send “cold call” emails, which you may have to do in your early days before you have a regular customer base and email list. Just be careful when you send unsolicited emails that you obey the rules to ensure that you don’t get blacklisted by your email service provider.

Once you have a few customers, bringing in enough income to cover your main costs (or you have greater starting resources because you’re simply expanding on an existing business), you will be able to increase your marketing efforts. For example, you could engage in PPC marketing, buying Google Ads for important keywords (like “SEO services in [YOUR CITY}”).

Eventually, you will (hopefully) have some satisfied customers and be able to ask them for referrals, testimonials, and online reviews. You can add the best ones in a prominent position on your website. 

9. Close Deals with Your Prospects

Once you’ve found leads and had a few inquiries, you (or your Sales team if you’re large enough) need to work on closing deals with them. You will usually do this by sending them a proposal. 

Ways to improve the likelihood of converting your leads into customers include:

• Personalizing your proposal – by all means, use a template for your proposals, but make sure you use language that makes them sound personal. Make sure to refer to a potential client by name, and be prepared to tweak your proposal to match their circumstances

• Ensure your proposal looks professional. Use the branding you created earlier, and make sure that you spend time proofreading it, ensuring it has no spelling or grammar errors

• Be as precise as possible in your proposal and avoid general claims and hyperbole. If you can, cite relevant statistics

• Outline the services you propose to offer and the process you intend to use

• Set any expectations regarding your work. Emphasize that SEO is long-term and that you can’t provide instant results overnight. 

• If you’re large enough to have a team of SEO specialists, introduce the account manager who will be working with the potential client

• Imply urgency, for example, place a time limit on the price you are quoting.

If you don’t hear back in a reasonable timeframe from a lead after sending them a proposal, follow up. Often businesspeople are busy and simply don’t reply to a proposal because they get distracted by something else. If you send a reminder, it may focus their attention back on your offer.

10. Build a Network

You will want to build up the visibility of your SEO marketing agency over time, both online and in the physical world. Ideally, you will want to be recognized by both your peers and others as a thought leader. 

Offline, you can do this by participating in industry conferences and workshops relating to SEO and digital marketing. If you provide services locally, you might want to join a local business organization, for example, the local branch of BNI or the Chamber of Commerce. You can attend functions, and meet up with other businesspeople, including potential clients. This can be particularly valuable if your agency has chosen to focus on a specific industry, as it gives you ready access to local decision-makers in your preferred niche. 

Likewise, spend time connecting with professionals in the SEO and digital marketing niche online – in Facebook and LinkedIn groups, relevant forums, and even X (Twitter). 

It may be worth cultivating relationships with those in complementary niches, such as web designers, content marketers, and graphic designers. In turn, they may choose to recommend you to their clients.

11. Create a Portfolio of Case Studies

Alongside networking, you should be building a portfolio of your work as an SEO agency. Have you noticed how all of the big agencies (and most of the smaller ones, too) include case studies and testimonials on their sites, highlighting their past successes? Obviously, you can’t include this when you start your agency, but you should start adding them once you have satisfied customers. 

There are ways you can obtain case studies and testimonials right at the start, however. You can do some work for free before you officially start your business. Pitch your free services to a few select prospects, and hopefully, they will write testimonials for you once they can see the results of your work. They may even opt to become foundation clients for your agency once you’re officially open for business. You could also write a case study showing the success of the website you created earlier in this process.

12. Scale Your SEO Marketing Agency

No matter how big your SEO agency is when you create it, you will probably hope to expand and scale it over time. This is just as relevant for a new division of an existing marketing agency, as it is to a one-person agency set up by a former freelancer. 

It will take time to build your agency, however. Be particularly careful that you don’t hire more permanent staff than you have income to pay for. It is better to subcontract additional work to contractors for a while to determine whether an increase in demand is likely to be long-term. Paying employees tends to be “lumpy”, as you will often have to pay them a set amount each week, regardless of the work you have coming in. Depending on your location, you will have to meet various employment law requirements, and budget for things like sick pay and holiday pay. Your Cash Flow Statement will be more important than your Profit and Loss Statement here – you need to ensure that you have sufficient free cash available each month to pay additional wages and other employment bills.

Not every business wants to scale their business. You might get to the point where you are happy with the number of clients your agency has and have no wish to scale your business any further. But if you do want to expand and can demonstrate that you have sufficient cash flow to do so, you may need to productize your services. This means that you create standard offerings, with clear step-by-step processes that your team will carry out for clients. 

While most agencies don’t offer such clear-cut packages on their website, SEO agency, Submit Shop makes it obvious what services its clients are paying for.

NOTE: This is a screenshot from SubmitShop’s pricing page (although I had to shrink it greatly to fit it all onto the screen).

13. Continue to Update Your SEO Knowledge

In Stage 1 of this process, we stressed how vital it is for most people wanting to set up an SEO agency to learn and become proficient at SEO. However, SEO is constantly changing. Techniques that could get web pages near the top of an organic search ten years ago are almost irrelevant nowadays. Therefore, you need to continue to update and hone your SEO knowledge as long as you operate your agency.

Wrapping Things Up

In this post, we’ve shown how to start an SEO marketing agency, and then expand it once you’ve tasted success. It may seem daunting, but there is a clear demand for people with strong SEO skills. As any SEO specialist will know, SEO is a slow process – nobody is going to reach the top positions of the Google search results overnight unless they engage in PPC marketing and can outbid the competition. Even then, many searchers go straight to the top organic search positions, bypassing paid search results. Likewise, setting up and building your SEO marketing agency is likely to be a long process as you build your reputation and make a name for yourself.

Perhaps the most important piece of advice is to avoid making promises of impossible results. No matter how good your SEO knowledge and skills are, you can’t promise your clients guaranteed instant results, and will only damage your reputation by doing so.