How To Build A Digital Marketing Agency (Part One)
How To Build and SEO Agency (Part One) So you heard about the digital marketing agency model and like what you heard? To clarify, yes, you can make a lot of money each month by providing high quality SEO services to small and medium sized businesses. But, there is some prep work that needs to be done. In this article I am going to give you the basics of starting a digital marketing agency. First, how do I know how to do this? Simple. I was the owner of a 7 figure marketing agency that I sold in 2022. I am going to give you the information you need to build, marketing, and deliver to clients. Everything you need will be here.
Building The Website
There are many ways to build a website. You can hire a firm to do it, go to Upwork and outsource, or build your own with a website builder. I made the choice to use the latter. Its quick, easy, and cost effective. I was able to get our website up in a day and then build it out each week until it was exactly what I wanted. Here is a list of website building aids. Depending on what you want to do for a website, these links will be helpful to you.
Wordpress Websites:
I love wordpress and it makes it easy to get a site live with their themes. But first, you need to get a domain name and host the site. I have used Namecheap for over a decade and love it. Affordable pricing. Bulk domain look-up tool makes it easy to search for a bunch of domains in one quick action. Their hosting is also affordable and has a very protection. So now you have your domain and hosting for the domain. What about an actual site? That is where ThemeForest comes into play. https://themeforest.net/. You can go to this website and search “Digital marketing agency” and see a boatload of themes that can be purchased for around $60. You take these themes and upload them into wordpress and it gives you a baseline from which to work.
Website Builders:
I love website builders. They make life very easy when you need a quick website. My personal favorite is this site. Yet, you can also try wix.com or Squarespace.com. All them work great.
Content
So you have the website template done, have the domain name….now its time for content. Content is king when it comes to ranking in Google so spend some time here. You want to write copy for the following pages:
SEO
Local SEO
PPC
Display
Content
Website Development
Video Production
You can use a writing service like this or this. What I found helpful is to use one of these services then take that content and make it my own, with my own voice. It will save you a lot of time.
Phone Numbers
You need a phone number on your website along with additional phone numbers for:
1-Google My Business
2 - Business Cards
3 - Facebook
4 - IG
5 - TikTok
6 - Affiliate Partners
Rather than spending a a lot with the phone companies to get many numbers, you can use callrail.com. What makes call rail so great is two fold. 1 - You can buy phone numbers in any area code, including 800, for cheap and then forward them to your cell phone. So you can have phone numbers for all your personal marketing and client marketing. 2 - Included in their cost is number swap. This is very important for your clients and you. What this does is changes the phone number on the we website, based on how the user got there. So, you can use this information to help better understand which marketing platforms are providing leads and which are not. Very valuable information and the installation is super easy.
SEO
Obviously, as a digital marketing firm, your SEO has to be perfect. When I ran the agency we ranked number 1 for all our major keywords. It provided me with a great closing statement with prospects. “Well, you can choose whoever you like, obviously, but, I would choose the SEO firm that was able to do it for their own website. If they can’t do it for themselves, how can they do it for you?” Worked like a charm. So, here is the secret for the business website and clients. OUTSOURCE THIS STUFF! In the beginning, building a team of SEO and link building pros will cost to much. As this effort is to make money for yourself and then scale, here is how you do it.
Step One of SEO: On-Page
If you don’t know SEO, there are two sides to it. One is on-page and the other is off-page. On-page SEO is the words, code, images, etc that are on the page. These aspects of the site are called the “Meta Details”. This includes Title Tags, H tags, Meta description. If you don’t understand this yet, don’t worry, you will. In the meantime, hire a service to help you with it. Getting the right keywords is very important so here are the companies we use.
1 - thehoth.com - The Hoth offers a TON of high end SEO services, but to start, check out their on-page SEO services and blog services.
2 - Web20 - These guys are amazing and affordable. They offer agency discounts up to 25% as you grow with them.
They offer both on-page and on-page SEO along with national and local SEO packages. Very affordable and the results are always there. You can also use either of these companies for Keyword Research if you are not sure what to do. Again, web20 for fully managed SEO is my recommendation based on price and results.
Off-Page SEO
This is considered 70% of the ranking algo. This is getting websites to link to your website as an authority on the topic of the page. The more votes, from bigger sites, the better the rankings. So how do you do this? Simple….you outsource the hell out of it.
1 - Get a Press Release written and published.
This site will get you on over 200 new sites including the big ones. Its a great way to get some attention to your website quickly (10 days)
2 - Build out Basic Links To the Site
These links are foundational. You only do this once and its super cheap. Here is the link - https://legiit.com/MissingLink/stacked-web-20-links
3 - Backlinks
The hard part here is that you have so many options to choose from when it comes to outsourcing this. I have used this service on a monthly basis and was happy. You can also use this The Hoth guest post service. This service reaches out to blogs and websites asking them if they would like content. The Hoth then writes the content and places it on the 3rd party website with a link back to you. I also found, surprisingly enough, some great link building services HERE. I will say, you need to be careful. Anything less than $300 is probably not high quality. Just keep that in mind. \
4 - Promoting Your Business
You need to get leads for your business. So, here is how you do that.
Social Media
If you are new to marketing, or simply don’t have the time, like everything else, hire someone. We have used THIS COMPANY for ourselves and our clients. They do a great job. You want to set up a lead generation social campaign. Give something away for free like a link audit or an entire website audit. You can use https://fatjoe.com/seo-revenue-calculator/ for a “results estimate” for SEO services to help people understand the long term value of SEO.
Paid Search
This is Google Adwords. You can learn this from Google, they have free classes that you can take to learn how to do it. Or you can…yes…you guessed it, outsource it. This company, once again, does a great job of managing and delivering results for you and your clients.
That is step one for setting up an agency. Next, I will show you have to build out proposals, set pricing, how to gain sales skills, and how to deliver on your SEO contracts with little to no effort.