Building an SEO Business Agency Model 2023

Want to start your own SEO agency so you can work from home? Building an SEO business Agency, like I’ll be showing you, is really in my opinion, If I could pick one business model, for someone who’s new to the business or trying to make money online, this is the SEO business model that I would recommend because it actually is sustainable and it actually can produce large amounts of income.

This is unlike doing affiliate marketing or even trying to make money through ads, where you need such a high volume to make any money that even makes it worthwhile.

This is much different because you get one client, like I showed you, paying you, even a thousand dollars per month. Imagine getting five clients paying you just a thousand dollars a month, that’s $5,000 a month. How much difference would that make in your life to be able to make an additional $5,000 per month?

I know for me, my goal was just to make $3,000 per month and of course, now, make much more than that. But still, my goal was just to make $3,000. Cause I thought that would absolutely change my life. And the truth is, making, and hitting $3,000 per month, had a huge impact on my life. But now where I’m at, it’s really made an even bigger impact, to be honest.

Bonus: Read more about Best WordPress SEO Tips and Practices for Beginners 2024

4 Huge Benefits Of Client SEO In SEO Business Agency

Here for you the Huge Benefits Of Client SEO In an SEO Business Agency First of all you can work from home and your Passive income is possible, Financial security matters and the money you make is directly proportional to the amount of value you add to the marketplace.

1. You can work from home

The first thing here is you can work from home. So if you see, the interest for people to work at home is absolutely huge. I mean, looking at this result here, 425,000 jobs for work at home, okay?

But most of these jobs are pretty terrible. And a lot of these jobs are ones that I actually tried in the beginning, before I built my SEO business model. And a couple of those are like doing paid surveys, or writing essays, you know, for college students, which I’m not super proud of, or even selling my college books to try to make money as well. So I tried a lot of these things.

I even did data entry as well. I tried all these different remote work from home jobs. And I’m telling you, you will make absolutely pennies compared to what you will make actually building a real business, building a real SEO business agency.

2. Passive income is possible

The next thing is passive income is actually possible. And so a lot of people don’t think this. When they think of agency work or they think of client work, oh man, it’s gonna be so hard, and I’m gonna have to work 12 to 16 hours a day. That is only true if you don’t know what you’re doing you don’t have systems in place and you don’t know how to build a team.

All of those things I’ll be talking about. And that is the way that you can make this passive. The truth is, I don’t spend a whole lot of time doing SEO, actually doing it. I’m the architect of our system. I’m the one that’s at operating at a high level, instead of actually operating in the weeds.

And so of course, in the beginning, you’re gonna be working a little bit harder ’cause you’re building up these systems and all that stuff.
But the end goal is to have the systems and have people operating within those systems, so that you can scale and ultimately, not have to work as hard, and your agency starts to generate passive income for you.

3. Financial security

The next thing is financial security. And so, you know, Warren Buffet says, that the best investment you can make is an investment in yourself. And the more you learn, the more you’ll earn. And I absolutely agree with this, because I’ve experienced this myself. The truth is though, financial security isn’t just about money. Yes, money is a big piece, but it’s also about your skills.

And so I learned this concept when I first got started. Fortunately, I learned it very early. And it’s, if you understand how to get a business more customers, you will never be broken. And so this is actually a concept from Dan Kennedy and it has stuck with me to this day. And once I learned this, it made me realize that understanding how to do SEO, which is ranking on the first page of Google, ultimately allows businesses to get more customers.

That if I understood that skill and I could do that repeatedly, I would be more valuable, because I knew how to get more customers. And it’s absolutely true because now I’m so confident that I don’t have to worry about finances or anything of that nature, because I have a skill that’s extremely valuable and in demand in the marketplace, and I want the same for you.

Also, if you want to make more money, you need to become more valuable. This is another quote that stuck with me for a very long time, and I didn’t realize this while I was still in school, but as I started to learn, I discovered this, I realized, okay, well if I wanna make more income, then I need to become more valuable and to become more valuable, I need to have more skills.

And so one skill that’ll make you much more valuable is obviously this ability to drive more customers using SEO.

4. The money you make is directly proportional to the amount of value you add to the marketplace

And lastly, the amount of money you make is directly proportional to the amount of value you add to the marketplace, okay?
So if you’re not making a ton of money, then it’s probably because you’re not adding a ton of value to the marketplace.

So to put it in perspective, someone at McDonald’s, who is just working as a cashier, yes, they have an important job at McDonald’s. They have an important job for our economy. But as far as how much value they’re adding to the marketplace, it’s not super big, right? They can be replaced and the new person could do that job. So the amount of value that’s actually being added to the marketplace isn’t huge. Now, compare that to someone like Jeff Bezos.

His ability to build businesses, his ability to create products and add value, is absolutely huge, and therefore he gets compensated for that ability. So this is to show you the difference in the value that can be added and this is very important. And the way we add more value is, once again, we become more valuable.

And lastly, the other big part of building an SEO business that makes it so incredibly valuable, is that you can achieve financial freedom and don’t let the media fool you, okay? There is actual data proving that 80% of America’s millionaires are first-generation rich. They weren’t given money to ultimately become wealthy. They built it themselves.

So don’t let the media fool you. Don’t believe this concept that all rich people are bad, because if you believe that, you’re definitely going to have some problems making money yourself.

But the truth is, building an SEO business, I truly believe is the best way to achieve financial freedom. And it’s not necessarily, you know, to become a billionaire, we’re not trying to do that, but to have the freedom to never have to worry about your bills again, that was my initial goal.

I wanted to never have to worry about my bills again because I grew up with a single mother, who was constantly stressing out about her bills. And it created a lot of turmoil in our household. And for me, that was my biggest motivation. I just wanted to never have to worry about bills again.

So honestly, within the first couple of years of running my SEO business, I completely eradicated all my debt. I had over $40,000 in student loan and car debt, completely crushed that, and haven’t been in debt since. And as you can see here, my net worth has been climbing and climbing every single year at a faster and faster rate. As I mentioned earlier, over time, as you do this more, you’re gonna become more valuable, which means your earning ability will become much higher. So those are all the benefits of doing client SEO.

3 Ways to Build an SEO Business Agency Model

Now let’s talk about the system I’m gonna be showing you here. This system is called The Lean Agency System. And so this is a system that I’ve been teaching now for a while. The reason why it’s called The Lean Agency System is that it’s not about building an agency where you have, you know, 400 people working for you.

Now, if that’s something you definitely want to do, there’s nothing wrong with that. If you wanna scale to that level, please do. But the truth is, you don’t need to have many people to deliver incredible value.

You need really good systems and the right people who can work within those systems. And the truth is, you don’t also need the most expensive individuals to achieve that goal. Because with what I’m going to teach you, we are gonna become systems dependent. That’s gonna be the foundation of our business, is to be systems dependent, not necessarily people dependent.

Now we need people to work within those systems, we need people who are self-motivated and we’ll be talking about that. But let me show you the three different parts of what this system looks like.

1. Start

So very simple, you know, before you can even get into the systemized portion of this, this system here, you have to actually start. And so anyone who is making below $20,000 per month is in this phase, which means they need to be 100% focused on client acquisition. So once you start acquiring clients, then we can move into the next process, where you can start to systemize and break out of that plateau and bring it to the next level.

So the systemized portion is 100% based upon building an SEO machine so that you can produce predictable first-page rankings for all of your clients, every single time. So if you’re worried about, oh man, like are we actually gonna be able to drive results?

If you have those doubts, it’s because you don’t have a good system in place. So this next part is absolutely critical. Then the last part, once we’ve got our nice pool of clients, we’ve systemized our processes. Now next phase is to bring people in, who can operate within these systems and ultimately communicate with the clients and drive results for you. So then now you’re operating as a CEO and not so much as an SEO.

So with no pun intended, let’s start with the start phase here. So there are three parts to the start phase. First is attack, the next is attract, and the final part is close.

So the attack is about, you’re gonna be going out there and finding clients. Attract is we’re going to actually be bringing clients to us. We’re gonna be putting content out so that they can actually find us and get in touch with us. This is the best lead generation type. And then lastly, once we get those leads, we need a process for turning those leads into actual clients.

So that’s what the close process is all about. Once again, you don’t need to be good at sales, you just need to follow the same process over and over and refine that over time. The best method for the attack phase is to simply use Upwork, okay? There are many other methods that I teach, but this one I would say for most people is the absolute best option because you can go into Upwork without any experience and you can start to apply for jobs starting today.

Right now you can start applying for jobs, there is no delay. So if you’re new to this, I highly recommend immediately going on Upwork, creating your profile, working hard on your profile, and making it good. But the truth is, profiles are actually not super important, how deep it is. What’s really important is the quality of the proposals that you put in, and ultimately not just that, having a consistent cadence for applying for jobs.

So if you wanna get more clients through SEO, then you should make a commitment to send proposals at least once per day, okay?
So once you’ve done one per day for 30 days, I recommend going up to two per day, and then eventually three per day, okay?

But we want to develop very, very achievable goals, but ultimately scale that up over time, so then we can build up this pool of clients. Now, Upwork is just the beginning, because the goal of getting clients on Upwork is to build your portfolio, which then you can leverage that portfolio to get even more clients. But in the beginning, the number one priority that you need to have is you need to build your portfolio because that’s gonna make everything else easier over the next months or years. So absolutely the priority and Upwork is really the best place to begin.

2. Attract

Next, you need to focus on attracting clients. So once you build out a nice pool of clients, you have some good recurring revenue coming in, and you’re starting to get pretty confident in your SEO processes, What you need to do, is you need to start attracting new clients. So I’m gonna walk you through a few different pieces.

So what you’re looking at here is blog content from the gotchseo.com blog. As per Nathan Gotch, he said:

“You know, this particular blog post, I published the first version of this maybe in 2015. This blog post alone has driven me, an ungodly amount of leads, okay? For many different things. For my agency, for my training, for consulting, you know, whatever it is, this one blog post has done so much for my business.”

It’s insane. And so this is the type of stuff that you can do, is you can create this informational piece of content at the top of the funnel to really educate people and attract people into your world. So blogging is really one that has stood the test of time, but you have to really be able to do it the right way. But this is just a really good example of, you know, you wanna focus on the top of the funnel.

So the blog is the first. Next is YouTube. A lot of people fear video, and I’m telling you that’s a huge mistake. The video has absolutely been one of the biggest things for growing my business by far. It’s not even close.

So when most people get in touch with our agency or they apply to join our training program, Readmorr.com, almost all of them come from YouTube. I mean, it’s very common that they’ll say, you know, where did you find us?

They say YouTube. And so the truth is, I used to be horrific on video. So you can even go and look at my old videos, look at the ones when I first started, I was so embarrassingly bad at video. And the truth is, I just stuck with it. I just kept going and I kept producing. And now I feel much more confident on video.

I have a lot more to improve, but I just cannot stress how important it is to get comfortable on video. You don’t need to be Gary Vaynerchuk, you don’t need to have a ton of charisma. You just have to put in the work and ultimately, produce content consistently. The next thing is trying to get interviewed. So once you have some good traction, you’ve got some client results, and then you can jump on some interviews to start to leverage other people’s audiences.

So here’s an example of me being interviewed. Nathan Gotch said:

“I’m tapping into Jaryd’s audience to bring them into my world, right?”

So with these other two methods, we’re hoping in the case of the blog, we’re gonna attract traffic from Google, organic traffic from Google, which then can convert into leads. With this, we’re hoping to attract organic traffic from YouTube, which once again, we can send to our site. And in this, we’re trying to, you know, we’re trying to attract his audience over to my world.

So then ultimately I can convert them there as well. So there are many different ways to attract leads, but these are just a couple that you can rely on.

A blog article from the dynamic website dynamicsalessolutions.co.uk said:

“SEO helps generate more qualified leads by improving the visibility of a website, so that it’s easier for potential customers to find it. By optimising keywords and content related to specific topics, businesses can attract people who are interested in their services or products.”

3. Systemization

Number 3rd is, that once you’ve gone through the start phase and you’ve got a nice pool of clients, you’ve got some good lead generation coming in, Now we need to talk about systemizing. So systemization is absolutely key, and this is why most people get stuck in that 10 to $20,000 per month mark because it’s not super difficult to get to those numbers once you use the methods I just showed you.

But it’s very difficult to get past there. And the reason is almost, I’d say 99% of the time, it’s because of a lack of systems. So I’m gonna show you what good SEO systems look like right now. So there are seven parts of a successful SEO system.

The first is the actual system itself, okay? That’s the broad terminology. So in this case, SEO as a whole, is one system, but it’s actually one system within a broader system, which you could say is search marketing. And then you can go even further out and say, it’s actually a system within digital marketing.

And then you go even further and say, that digital marketing is a system within marketing. And then we know we keep going further and further out. But in the case of this example, SEO is the system, okay?

Next process. So within a system, you have many different parts. So in the case of SEO, we have keyword research, we have done audits, we have link building, we have on-page SEO, and the list goes on and on. So we have all these different processes. The reason why keyword research is a process is because within keyword research we have procedures.

So procedures, the actual step-by-step checklist that you need to follow help integrate, and ultimately it’s the building block of a process. So within keyword research, we might have, you know, find existing keywords, find low-hanging fruits, find clustering opportunities. These are all procedures and very specific to, you know, this overall process.

And then to support these three different things, we have templates, we have reference docs, and we have demonstrations. You need to actually create a video to show people how to actually do that task, and then we have tools. So these are the seven parts of a successful SEO system or even just systems in general.

And so this is really, really important to understand. Now let me walk you through what this kind of looks like. So first is, as I mentioned, the system. So what you’re looking at here is the exact template that we use to manage our system within our agency.
And also, this is the exact system we teach inside Readmorr.com as well. But if you look at this

You can see that on each of these tabs, you know, we have the start, we have the keyword research, and then over here we have the SEO content audit, and it goes on and on. Now, as I mentioned, this is the system, this whole thing and all these tabs, this massive thing is the system. Then within here, we have keyword research, okay?

So we have, this keyword research as a process. And then within the process, we have each of these individual procedures, okay? So keep walking through this. You’ll see we have the processes, and then we have the procedures which go into here.

So this is a singular procedure just to show how to find clustering opportunities. So clustering opportunities are keywords that are ranking from positions 50 to 100. And so this shows you the step-by-step checklist on how to actually find those, right? And so really a system is really just a combination of a bunch of processes and a bunch of procedures. But on top of that, you also need the templates.

So that’s how we have a keyword research template. We have an SEO content audit template. We have all these templates to be able to organize all of the actions that we need to take. Very, very important. And then also we have demonstrations. So we want to demonstrate how to actually do these tasks.

So if you’re trying to grow your team, they need to see over the shoulder how you actually do it. And this makes a huge difference. I can’t stress this enough. You can show them the check by, you know, the step-by-step checklist on the procedure, but if they don’t actually see you going through it yourself, it’s much harder. So you need to have this demonstration part as well.

And then lastly, also reference docs. The reference docs are to support this larger system and all the different procedures as well.
So you need all these pieces working together to really build an effective system that allows you to move into this next phase of the process, which is the scale part.

4. Scale

Now scaling is definitely a more advanced topic. So definitely if you’re kind of new to this, this will seem maybe a little more foreign. I wouldn’t be too concerned about it because honestly, if you just mastered the start portion and you get the systemized portion in place, this part actually isn’t that difficult. You just have to learn some new skills. The first one is you need to adopt a CEO mindset, okay?

And so when you’re an SEO, you’re a specialist, you do one thing really, really well. But to grow, you have to stop just being an SEO. You have to become the leader and you have to lead your team to success. And you have to let your team do the important work. You have to trust your team to be able to do that.

Move from an SEO to a CEO in your agency.

Now, here is how you can move from an SEO to a CEO in your SEO agency. 5 steps to follow while moving from an SEO to a CEO in your agency.

1. Never do the same task twice.

Never do the same task twice this is absolutely critical. If you see over time, you’re starting to see, okay, I’m doing keyword research every single time, you need to catch yourself. You need to catch yourself doing the same task, because then that’s an indication that you need to build a system and then delegate that work to someone else, so you don’t have to do it again.

2. Prioritize who over how

And so once you have the systems in place, we need to find people to work within those systems. And sometimes, depending on what you’re dealing with, so in the case that you’re trying to grow your own agency and maybe you want to do Facebook ads to drive leads, does it make sense for you to try to learn it yourself?

Or does it make sense to go and find someone who’s already successful at Facebook ads and learn from them? That’s absolutely way smarter. And I’ve done this countless times in my business, where I needed to fix something in my business that wasn’t working super well.

So I just found someone who’s already achieved the goal that I wanted to achieve, and then I just told them to show me how to do it. And once I know how to do it, then I can systemize it and once again, delegate it, right? But you need to see the light, you need to see that framework of how to actually take care of, and the best thing to do is find someone who’s already achieved the goal.

3. Eliminate all fear of delegation

The next thing is you need to eliminate all fear of delegation. This is the biggest thing that I hear all the time from agency owners who are stuck, is they’re just like, man, well I’m so good at SEO, I just don’t trust that someone else can do it as well as me. And they won’t, they won’t do it as well as you if you don’t have systems in place.

But if you have the systems in place, which the truth is a system is, all it is, is just taking what’s in your mind that already exists, all that experience, all that work that you’ve already done, and putting it in a format that someone can follow, okay? So instead of them, instead of hoping that people will just read your mind and you’ll help them become experts through osmosis, that’s not gonna happen.

You need to get the stuff that’s out of your mind, put it on paper, and put it in a digestible format so that your team members can follow your thought process, and follow those steps that really are in your mind. And now they can go through it many times. And ultimately that helps them learn. That helps them become more skilled. And ultimately that makes your life actually easier.

4. See people as an investment

Also, you have to see people as an investment. People are not an expense. That’s a huge mistake for beginners. They think that getting people on their team, they look at it as an expense, a big mistake. And the truth is, if you view it that way, you’re actually gonna have a hard time even selling SEO services.

Because when you’re selling SEO services, you always have to talk about how SEO services are an investment in their business. So you need to view your team and building your team as an investment in your own business, very important.

5. And lastly, lead by example.

You have to constantly be leading by example. And it’s so key because everyone who’s in your organization, everyone who’s in your SEO business, they’re watching you. If you’re not leading by example, then they’re going to follow you, whether it’s good or bad. So try to lead by example.

Why you should invest in SEO team building.

Now let’s talk about why you should invest in SEO team building. Building a team in SEO is important to make a successful SEO Business Agency. You need to work with people, focus on building more systems, and you need to be focused on the growth of your SEO agency.

1. The time leverage.

So when you have people working with you, they’re taking care of a lot of those tasks that you used to do, which means you have freed up time. And when you free up time, you can focus on what’s actually gonna help move the business forward.

2. Focus

You can focus on building more systems, which then allows you to scale even faster. You can focus on finding new talent to bring onto your team. You can focus on business development and getting more clients. That time is so critical because we cannot get more time, we can only invest and ultimately get our time back, because, at the end of the day, that clock doesn’t stop ticking, right? The clock is always ticking. So we need to be looking for ways to really leverage our time.

The way to do that is through building systems and bringing great people onto your team and they will help you. Those two things will help you free up your time, which then allows you ultimately to focus on the things that really matter in the business.

3. Growth

And not things that are actually not going to result in more growth, okay? So as the CEO of an SEO business or CEO of any business, you need to be focused on growth and the future and the direction and the leadership of this organization. So that’s what this allows you to do, When you start to build a team, it makes a huge difference.

3 Deadly sins of building an SEO team

Now, let’s talk about the three deadly sins of building an SEO team while working on an SEO Business Agency:

1. Thinking you need to hire a guru for $70,000 per year.

This is a huge, huge mistake. So there are a lot of businesses that do really well. They get up to 10, $20,000 per month and they think, okay, well I’m the only SEO here, so I’m just gonna go and hire another SEO to bring on my team. Here I will suggest you see my other post about how to avoid common SEO mistakes that beginners make.

Big mistake. Because what you’re doing is you’re creating a culture of having to find the next guru to bring onto your team. And that’s not what you want to do. You want to build a culture where you are systems-dependent. So you’ve built these systems and you need to bring people into these systems and train them up on those systems.

And so instead of relying on a particular individual, you’re reliant on the system. So when something isn’t going super well and you’re not getting client results, you don’t look at someone and say, Hey Joe Smith, why aren’t you getting results? You say, Oh wait, it’s not Joe’s fault, it’s the system’s fault and we need to fix the system.

We need to refine that system and see why we’re not getting the result. But you always go back to the system. You never go back to the individual. Now of course, there are bad hires, right? It happens, that’s not a big deal, but most of the time, it’s usually a problem with the systems, not necessarily a problem with the people.

Also, on top of that, in the beginning, you don’t need to hire the most skilled individual to come and work with you. You can work with virtual assistants, and you can bring entry-level people on, who don’t have a ton of experience with SEO, but they’re willing learners, and they’re willing to learn your system. So don’t think that you need to go and hire someone for 70 to 100,000 dollars per year in the beginning. That’s actually a huge misstep.

2. Thinking one person should handle multiple roles

That’s not a great idea. You should have specific responsibilities based on situations. So in the case of SEO, you have people who can kind of be, the overall strategist on the SEO campaign. You can have a virtual assistant who’s gonna do all the data entry and managing of the data. You can have someone who just creates SEO-driven content.

And you should also have someone who’s just doing the really technical work like development, all that stuff that you’ll see within an SEO campaign.

A recent artarticle from entrepreneur

“Of course, hiring an in-house team can be costly, which is why many business owners choose to source their online marketing to agencies.”

Don’t try to get someone to do all these roles, because as you know, a jack of all trades is a master of none. We want people who specialize in these specific roles, and we have one person who’s the overall manager of all these operations.

3. Thinking, the person should figure it out.

And this just goes right back to the systems that we talked about. If this is your mentality that Joe Schmo should go and just figure it out, that is not leadership. That’s not leadership. Leadership is setting your team up for success. The way we set them up for success is to have systems in place that make their job easier and ultimately a system in place where we can go and tweak it and optimize it and improve it, okay?

Just imagine, for example, if Toyota or any of these car manufacturers, if they just relied on some person, just to figure out their systems, or just figure out how to make cars. That wouldn’t work super well. So they need to have systems, they have everything in place to be able to create the same vehicle every time, almost with a tiny margin of error. So don’t do that. We need to really focus on building systems. So those are the three deadly sins of building an SEO team.

You may also like:
How to Do SEO from Scratch in 2024: Advance SBS guide
2024 Best Google EEAT Seo Checklists: Authors Without Expertise

FAQs