Last month I talked about 7 lessons I learned from running an SEO agency. One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that you can command clients to pay you 6 and even 7 figures a year if your agency has brand recognition.
Brand recognition also gets you more inbound inquires from companies who need SEO, which will help your revenue become more stable.
If you are ready to take your agency to the next level, here’s how you can build a big brand:
Start a blog
Not only can a blog help build your brand, it can also drive thousands of extra visitors to your website each month. Before you start a SEO blog, you need to know 1 important fact… it needs to be on the same domain as your agency website.
Early on I made the mistake of calling my SEO blog “Pronet Advertising”, when my SEO agency was in fact called “ACS”. The blog was hosted at pronetadvertising.com while the agency site was hosted at acsseo.com. Once the blog became popular people didn’t know whether we were called ACS or Pronet Advertising… even though on the blog it clearly stated that it was owned by ACS.
Once you have a blog up and running, there are a few things that you have to do if you want it to become popular. These days there are hundreds of SEO blogs and if you aren’t unique, there is no point in starting one.
Write detailed blog posts – if you write how to type of posts you’ll typically gain more traction than if you just blog about SEO news.
Use stats – blog posts that contain facts and percentages also tend to do better. If you look at the SEOmoz blog, you’ll notice that posts like this are popular because they contain stats.
Dumb things down – SEO is a complicated topic, so if you can dumb down your blog posts you’re better off than if you only use technical jargon. At the end of the day the person who is most likely to hire and pay you won’t understand this jargon, if they did they’d just optimize their own site. By using images and even whiteboards, you’ll be able to dumb down your blog posts, yet still keep them somewhat technical.
If you blog on a weekly basis and push out good content every week, you’ll start to get more traffic and see an increase in brand recognition in the SEO space.
Become a guest author
Blogging on your own site isn’t enough. You need to start blogging on other blogs. By becoming a guest author on popular SEO and marketing blogs you’ll brand yourself as an SEO expert, which will also help your agency.
In addition to blogging on marketing blogs you also want to
Excellent blog! Do you have any helpful hints for aspiring writers? I’m planning to start my own website soon but I’m a little lost on everything. Would you suggest starting with a free platform like WordPress or go for a paid option? There are so many options out there that I’m totally overwhelmed .. Any suggestions? Thanks a lot!