Table of Contents
This week we were joined by Ruan Marinho, a digital marketing agency owner specializing in the local SEO space. Make sure to join our Facebook Group to catch future broadcasts live.
Timestamps:
- 04:30 Tell us about yourself?
- 06:47 How have you managed to grow so quickly?
- 08:43 What should agencies be focusing on right now?
- 12:33 When you sell, do you offer one package that includes both SEO and AdWords?
- 17:07 How were you able to get enough leads to support your business model?
- 20:56 How do you handle link-building for your local clients?
- 26:09 Is there anything with Duda that you dislike and have any of your clients switched from WordPress to Duda?
- 31:29 What are good topics to target a more advanced type of client base?
- 37:37 What are the most important automation templates you use in your agency?
04:30 Tell us about yourself…
I’ve been doing SEO and website design for about three years. The company that we run is called Develomark, and we’ve been around for about three years. Right now, we have a hundred clients and about 15 full-time employees. Develomark focuses on local service-based businesses. We sell them a campaign where we redevelop their website, run their Google Ads and we report to them the leads that we get on a month to month basis.
06:47 How have you managed to grow so quickly?
I think education is by far the most important thing. I try to get as much education as possible. I’m taking in so much information and then I’m applying the knowledge as much as possible in the real world.
08:43 What should agencies be focusing on right now?
That’s a really good question because there’s so much that you can focus on, but ultimately the best thing that you really need to focus on in terms of service is a website design and SEO. The reason for the website design is because you can control the customer’s experience with your SEO service and Google Ads service. Our company doesn’t take on any customers, unless they’re okay with us, redeveloping, redesigning, and moving over their website to our management. And if you haven’t heard of a website platform called Duda, it’s what we’re using right now.
When we get a new project, a customer fills out a survey, we pick a template and we edit it, the site’s made and we can optimize the title tags, the meta descriptions, all of the SEO stuff on the backend of the website. Ultimately the customers feel as if they’re getting the website, the SEO and the Google Ads from us, all under one account. And they like it because it causes retention.
12:33 When you sell, do you offer one package that includes both SEO and AdWords?
We have two types of customers. One is one time only, they just want a website. Two, we call it a campaign. So when we sell the customer, we don’t call it a website sale. We call it an activation. So, we charge $2,500 upfront for a website with 30 content-rich pages. We’re not going to make a lot of money on the upfront. But we’re going to put the person into a year contract, and then we’re going to charge a little retainer, a lot of money in Adwords.
The combination of the SEO, beautiful website design and PPC — the phone is going crazy. The customer is extremely happy. They have the chat going, the phone calls coming in. They have the form submissions coming in all day and they’re getting notified of it because of the way we set up in CallRail.
17:07 How were you able to get enough leads to support your business model?
Right now, our only challenge of growth is lead generation. We’re getting a lot of leads, which is good, but that’s what we need right now — to grow qualified leads of customers that we want to work with. We’re getting quite a bit and we’re closing about nine accounts a month, which is good. Before I had this structure, we weren’t closing much because something was missing.
We would get access to their website, we would do their SEO, they’re going to get leads, and then they would always cancel, but keep their website company. And that’s why I made that mental shift of taking over the website too.
20:56 How do you handle link-building for your local clients?
We don’t do much link-building for most customers because when we sell SEO, we’re targeting their organic location. For a lot of businesses, their organic location is wherever they have a physical address location. For example, it wouldn’t be Miami, it would be Bay Harbor, Florida instead. Generally, that doesn’t require us to do any link building, the proper page optimization works fine.
In terms of link building, in our campaigns, we’re basically promised the directory cleanup, so we use a tool like Yext that keeps the customer on the Yext platform and keeps the data consistent. If the customer breaks our contract, or if the customer leaves, obviously we cancel that Yext account because they’re not paying us for monthly service anymore.
26:09 Is there anything with Duda that you dislike and have any of your clients switched from WordPress to Duda?
Naturally, the number one thing we ask when they work with us is do they own their website? Is it WordPress, is it Wix? What platform is it? Some people are skeptical about coming onto our platform because they’ve never heard of Duda. At that point, we’re just educating the client. We don’t own it. We host it and we manage it. But at the end of the day, we can export it to your account if you were to cancel.
One of the things that I really dislike about Duda is that it’s not responsive.
31:29 What are good topics to target a more advanced type of client base?
The advanced type of client base understands the value of what you’re doing. Josh Nelson said that some companies aren’t ready and you shouldn’t waste your energy and time trying to get them and convince them. Usually, the advanced people know what they’re talking about, they know what they want, and they’re not going to waste their own time talking to you.
As long as your ideas are good enough, they’re going to hire you if they think that you’re smarter than them. They’re trying to save time. If you want to get the more advanced types of clients, you’ve got to have a more advanced mindset of how to do the SEO creatively. So look at a creative way and approach to do SEO and start making content or start telling people about your creative way of doing it.
37:37 What are the most important automation templates you use in your agency?
Our agency is templated and I think it’s important because the more time that you can save and get the same result is obviously the more that you can scale. We automate a few different things. We use the same page and we’re just duplication over and over again, changing the text only. The person that’s coming to your website gets the idea that this is a custom website.
Duda has really helped us with automation and making things really scalable by selling the same thing every time. We have an issue with most agencies with reporting and we need to cut down that time we spend on reporting. We’re actually creating an analytics platform called Splashdash. It is going to allow you to CRM all your customer’s data and put all of the most important information and integrations inside of the tool.
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