Podcast With Lawrence Hitches

How Did Studio Hawk Scale from $0 to $13M? 🚀

Show Notes

How did Studio Hawk grow from a part-time startup to a $13M SEO powerhouse? 🚀 In this exclusive episode, we uncover the strategies, challenges, and lessons behind scaling Australia's largest specialist SEO agency. Join me as I sit down with Lawrence Hitches, Studio Hawk's General Manager, to explore what it takes to achieve phenomenal growth in the ever-evolving SEO industry.

Discover how to rank your website number one, build a high-performance team, and drive more organic traffic with proven SEO strategies. From mastering client retention to overcoming the biggest scaling challenges, this video is packed with actionable insights for agency owners, SEO professionals, and anyone looking to improve their search engine rankings.

Looking to scale your agency or improve your SEO services? Watch now to learn step-by-step how to achieve a #1 ranking and future-proof your business. Don’t miss out—subscribe and stay ahead in the competitive world of SEO!

Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction

00:41 - How did you become general manager of a $13 million SEO agency?

02:48 - What was the initial revenue and biggest challenges in scaling?

07:53 - What key strategies fueled your agency's rapid growth?

10:23 - How did you expand your service offerings effectively?

11:40 - What new services did you implement for success?

13:00 - How do you structure services to ensure profitability?

15:09 - Client retention vs acquisition: which is more important?

20:04 - How to hire the right talent for your agency?

24:33 - What are the best strategies to scale your agency?

27:25 - How to maintain quality and consistency during growth?

30:00 - White label SEO vs in-house team: what's the difference?

31:43 - How do you find the best SEO minds in the industry?

35:39 - What distinguishes an average SEO from a great one?

38:01 - How to keep talented employees motivated and engaged?

44:08 - How do you keep your team updated on SEO trends?

45:45 - What skills are crucial for today's SEO professionals?

47:28 - What are the differences between Australian and US SEO?

50:14 - How will the role of SEO agencies evolve in the next 5 years?

54:54 - Rapid Fire Questions

57:01 - What final advice do you have for SEOs and agencies?

57:30 - How can viewers connect with Lawrence?

Transcript

Introduction

0:00 welcome to the agency insider show i am your host Navnit Koshell and today we have a very special guest joining us

0:06 Lauren Hitches the general manager of Studio Hawk Australia's largest specialist SU agency lawrence has been

0:13 instrumental in growing Studio Hawk from a startup to a $13 million agency yeah

0:19 you heard it correct $13 million agency he's here to share his insights on agency growth SEO talent recruitment and

0:26 the future of SEO agencies hi

0:33 Lawrence welcome to the show great thanks it's a great introduction thanks for having me you're welcome uh

How did you become general manager of a $13 million SEO agency?

0:41 Lawrence let's straight get into of course I mentioned zero to 13 million twice so let's get into that first now

0:49 uh how did you go from being a part-time employee to the general manager of a $13 million SEO agency

0:56 yeah well now I'm class my man back uh about seven years now so initially when I got the job I was hired as a entry-

1:03 level we call them junior SEO specialist and yeah funnily enough I was working 3 days a week um so not much time um to to

1:12 learn during that time but you know the the days were very long you know the

1:17 hard the work was very hard at that point and I think slowly I scaled up and went 4 days a week and 5 days a week but

1:23 then eventually I was uh full-time and that was at a stage where we had you

1:29 know about 100 clients and we just landed one of our first big ones a national retail here in Australia and

1:36 things started exploding people were very interested in what we were doing because uh at the time well SEO providers weren't you know in terms of

1:43 the standards that we have today uh they were very primitive there was a lot of black hat stuff going on we called cowboys back in the day and now um you

1:52 know from that point things really started growing we started taking on new clients more complex campaigns so I was

1:58 sort of forced to scale up in SEO very very quickly which is funny because it's the first agency job I truly had but had

2:05 to you know get on the tools learn learn to communicate with clients learn how to do sales learn how to do SEO all at the

2:11 same time so it was a very condensed almost university of information about

2:16 working in digital but also SEO and you know throughout that time we started scaling up and then one day the founder

2:22 Harry approached me and said hey do you want to be general manager and this was very out of the blue and at the time I just sort of said yeah why not that

2:29 sounds really cool let's do it and at that point I think we're about 30 people and yeah it was it's a big learning

2:35 curve to step into that but Harry really trusted me to um to to grow

2:40 fundamentally mentally learn on the job and uh he trusted me to to really guide the agency into the next stage of growth

What was the initial revenue and biggest challenges in scaling?

2:48 okay and uh uh of course now you have played a huge role in studios hog growth from a

2:55 small team to a multi-millionaire SEO powerhouse so can you walk us through that journey and uh what was the revenue

3:02 when you joined and of course now we know and what were some of the biggest challenges in scaling an SEO agency

3:10 well I see it as we went through a few phases i like to call them I always describe them as the valleys of death in

3:16 business uh it's a quite a common thing where when you hit certain points of of growth uh things start really

3:22 challenging you so from that 0 to a million dollars mark and that's where I I really joined the agency it was you

3:27 know reflecting back it was quite easy i know that's sort of funny to say like business isn't easy but at the time we

3:33 had a really good product offering we're quite unique in the market we're building a lot of good connections through networking and just

3:39 doing a good job which got us to a million but then beyond that point everything got 10 times harder uh we had

3:45 to hire people we had to scale up our processes we had to learn how to do better quality work so that drive from a

3:53 million to 10 million which is that annex valley a lot of businesses failed during that point now we didn't come out

3:59 of that that phase very perfectly but uh we learned a lot of things along the way one of the things that really helped us

4:05 is just focusing on what we do really well which is SEO uh we could have added on paid ads we could have added on all

4:12 different types of services web development at that time but we chose to stick what we're really good at and I think our clients really appreciated

4:18 that they worked with a specialist agency and then you know we hit really bad points in the agency where after

4:25 COVID we grew massively as well there was a big growth spurt so not only did we stack on a bunch of clients we also

4:30 stacked on a bunch of people but beyond that point we didn't know how to use that workforce and also deal with that

4:36 client base so it was great initially we're growing really fast but there's I always see in business as a

4:41 consolidation point so that around that $5 million mark we realize oh we haven't focused on ourselves internally we've

4:47 been very external focused but internally things are a little bit messy uh throughout that time we we focus a

4:53 lot more on one just our team like how are we going to make our team really good at their roles when we first

4:59 started people were just doing a whole mismatch of different things around the business so myself I was doing sales we're doing client work jumping over

5:05 here jumping over there doing HR sometimes but during that process people were just very stretched very thin they

5:12 were trying to do SEO work but they had a bunch of other priorities so we started segmenting and siloing out a lot of those responsibilities so people

5:19 would just focus on one or two things max but it was very hard to do that at the time because you're very used to

5:24 working on a bunch of things in the agency and working on the business but we realized that you know people just

5:30 need to focus on what they're really good at so we allocated people who are great at sales to do sales people are

5:35 really good at SEO to do really good SEO and then we restructured our agency around people retain and then people uh

5:42 look at growing the business at the same time and if the two work together really well everyone wins uh so on the

5:48 retention front as well we realized that we were getting a lot of clients on board but we weren't showing the wins

5:53 enough we weren't reporting very well we're doing manual reporting uh there was a lot of just gaps in our agency

5:59 where things were taking way too much time and it's funny this is all pre you know prei phenomenon where people can

6:05 increase the efficiency of their business using you know great tools and great automations this is before that

6:10 stuff existed so we're doing quite manual things we only really addressed that a couple years ago but uh you know

6:16 realized the first 90 days of the the client experience was very important to important to the client so we focus a

6:22 lot on that and building out a really great 90-day experience for our clients and on the sales front as well uh just

6:29 getting a couple people to focus on what they do really well in pitching the clients and uh you know doing the great

6:35 audits that would get them on board and the ideas the road maps that would facilitate a great campaign so we did

6:41 just a lot of sectioning and surgically removing a lot of the people doing different things around the business and

6:47 just getting them channelneled to the right thing uh that would make them succeed it was quite an uncomfortable

6:52 period i think a lot of people you know uh parts of the business that they like doing they weren't able to do anymore so

6:58 they felt you know this isn't for me and that was totally fine uh during that phase but uh out of it we we boosted up

7:06 and hit you know 10 million about two years ago and now we're forging ahead in

7:11 that 10 to20 million phase of the business now which is uh quite exciting

7:16 but it's presenting new challenges that's the third phase of the business which is now we've got a global

7:22 operation we've got a bigger team but more diverse services as well so we're learning to work together as different

7:28 departments in different regions across the globe too so that's the next learning curve we're experiencing how

7:33 many people you have right now currently on your team uh we

7:38 are in Australia we're looking about 60 in UK we're about 20 so I think we're

7:45 100 all up if I was to count everyone currently but it changes all the time so it's very hard to pinpoint a number

7:52 right now that's impressive now what were of some of the key strategies that contributed to your rapid growth i mean

What key strategies fueled your agency's rapid growth?

7:59 I know you mentioned some but were there some other strategies as well well funnily enough it's investing in

8:05 our own marketing a couple years ago was a pretty important thing so we were one of our clients basically who you know

8:11 thought ah we could get away with not marketing our business much but we focused a lot of it in the last couple years and made those investments it you

8:18 know it was more expensive to do but actually facilitated a lot of growth long term so even doing things like our

8:24 own SEO our own Google ads our own you know content marketing plays uh investing in trade shows and different

8:30 opportunities doing a lot of branding work as well in the last couple years has really helped us so it's funny you

8:36 know as a marketing agency not focusing on yourself because you're just so focused on doing it for the clients you

8:41 put that on the wayside right all of us um you get so stuck with you're trying to do a great experience for clients

8:48 that you just don't take care of yourself so doing that despite the investment at you know at the time

8:53 initially was was quite big um it helped stabilize a lot of the growth we're experiencing we were experiencing at the

9:00 time like a lot of waves where business was really great and then it was stagnating for times now we've gotten to

9:05 a point where you know it's very predictable because our marketing funnel was quite tight um so you know that was

9:11 one thing also you know initially we had a really great uh in growth structure around um getting on new business yeah

9:18 on the inverse of that so we had people focusing on bringing in new business but we um we did that for a period of time

9:24 but we realized most of the gains is actually helping clients um do great SEO they will stay around for a long time so

9:31 we created a KPI system around our team which said you know the longer that you retain clients and the more of them that

9:37 are really happy the more you can buy into that reward which changed a lot of behaviors in the team where they sort

9:42 sort of said okay if I you know bring on new business that's great but if I retain my clients long term I'm going to

9:47 build great relationships the campaign is going to get easier because of the success and I actually get bought into

9:53 that system and I can progress through a KPI system that rewards me for basically retaining those clients long term sounds

10:00 very simple and like a no-brainer but at the time we didn't realize where the gap was after implementing that it's

10:06 funnally funnily enough you know you see the behaviors change over time that even from someone like myself at the time I

10:12 thought you know this it's a lot of hard work to retain clients but seeing the effects of that come through the numbers

10:18 and how it can grow based on just purely retention has been pretty incredible

How did you expand your service offerings effectively?

10:23 now uh as agencies grow they often need to expand their service offerings so a

10:30 have you expanded your offerings or they are still just SEO

10:36 so I always see it as the umbrella of SEO has gotten a lot wider or the tent

10:41 of SEO has gotten a lot wider so it used to be just you know technical fixes links uh content as well we introduced

10:48 content as more of a service a couple years back then we you know introduced more things like development later down the line but now we're looking at things

10:55 like digital PR we're looking at things you know in terms of more experimental marketing CRO that are expanding out

11:01 becoming almost subservices of SEO and how we look at organic is very different

11:06 these days you know we're trying to optimize for LLMs now and that's what people are really focused on um I don't

11:12 think everyone's truly cracked the code because the the rate of change is so so fast that you know next thing you know

11:18 there's a deep seat coming out or next thing you know Claude comes out with a new update and it changes everything over again so focusing on you know how

11:26 we can develop SEO as a better offering and you keeping it quite standard in terms of we can fundamentally fix your

11:32 website but these great little opportunities alongside of that that we can introduce as sub services to what

11:38 we're doing is what we're focused on right now no so how do you decide which new

What new services did you implement for success?

11:43 services to add and how do you implement them effectively as an agency when you grow up is is it something you can throw

11:50 more light on yeah so in terms of integrating new services into the agency you know

11:58 we've flirted with like different ideas of doing it and we've tried testing it out tried learning ourselves how to do

12:04 things but the best thing I've seen work is actually hiring someone who's done it before that's the most efficient way of

12:10 starting any new thing is hiring someone who's got the right attitude the right skill set they don't even really have to

12:16 have the perfect skill set for it but they have to have a really good attitude and some more long-term thinking so you

12:22 know when you hire people with not a lot of experience it's all about what's next but uh when you hire someone with a lot

12:28 of experience it's like I've done that part and I can foresee what's going to happen next behind some of these services so hiring people great people

12:34 into the business that have done things before really supercharges that process but besides experimenting with different

12:40 tactics and strategies to try and build it yourself I've always found that the most cost effective thing to do longterm

12:46 but the hard part is actually finding that person initially is while it's great on the long-term effect the

12:53 short-term effect you have to put as much time into finding that person as you do developing that

12:58 service okay and uh so the next obvious question is how do you structure your

How do you structure services to ensure profitability?

13:04 service offering to stay profitable is it just because everybody else doing should an agency add or how do some how

13:10 do an agency go about structuring them to stay profitable

13:16 comes down to really two things and it sounds very basic but it's the pricing structure and also how much things cost

13:22 and those two things are getting pulled constantly as soon as revenue starts increasing your costs start naturally

13:27 rising up with that as well and having to stabilize that is is a battle the only thing you really do at that point

13:33 is increase your prices but you might cut your conversions at the same time now everyone I've talked to is like well

13:38 there's no definitive you should do this at this point it's all about what you can control uh so looking into your

13:44 client base and going where are the time bleeds happening around your client base uh and also looking outward and saying

13:50 what what what people can tolerate in terms of a pricing structure as well now it's interesting in Australia because uh

13:59 SEO industry is a lot more primitive than compared to the globe basically in

14:04 US UK and all around the world they're a lot more developed and a lot more used to the pricing packages that you might

14:09 see um as part of SEO campaigns in Australia we really have to fight for those types of campaigns it's gotten

14:14 better over time but just working really efficiently and now in you know an age

14:20 where people can just build their own tools for instance people can find ways to do things a lot quicker which is

14:26 really great and then also the the the method of actually delivering those results can come through hey you can set

14:32 a spreadsheet you can set a report reporting up all the great wins but if the clients don't feel that from you as

14:37 well and just building a really good relationship I think that's where you can really leverage efficiencies in the

14:43 type of campaigns you run where people trust you to do things they ask less questions and less questions means

14:48 there's less time spent on calls there's time less time spent on calls there's less time spent you know doing things in

14:55 terms of hours behind a campaign that aren't really that efficient the more you can get an SEO specialist to just

15:00 work on the website and optimize it the better the less you have to talk about it hopefully um the more profitable the

15:07 campaign will be right now now uh you mentioned you worked on uh retention in

Client retention vs acquisition: which is more important?

15:12 90 days uh first 90 days of clients now what's your approach to client

15:17 retentions versus acquisition so in terms of client retention I see

15:24 that as a result of whatever your product is having a really good process

15:29 now it's quite unique in our agency where we have a a model where our SEO specialists are the account managers so

15:37 one thing we realized as part of that onboarding experience or the client retention experience overall for our

15:42 agency is the better we train our people to do SEO the better they retain the clients long term but to train people

15:48 better you need a lot of focus to do that initially when I started doing SEO alongside Harry and Anthony who's the GM

15:55 of the UK it was quite easy because I was sitting next to someone who's quite experienced I can ask them basically any

16:00 question but as you get bigger in terms of an agency that experience sort of

16:05 dwindles and if you have less experienced people training less experienced people it creates this cascading effect so you really have to

16:12 So we really put a focus around learning development as an exercise for client retention so instead of just finding

16:17 ways and saying to clients you know you know stay with us longer it's like well if you create a great specialist behind

16:23 that work the client will want to stay longer so we've invested a lot of time into just training people fundamentally

16:30 and this is where I think in a lot of businesses not just agency people go training isn't something you know it takes away time from doing billable

16:37 hours or do billable work but the systemic uh impact of that compounds

16:42 over time where if you train if you focus on training and what we do is when we have a new person on board they spend

16:48 six weeks just learning SEO from the ground up that's a lot of time spent not doing actual work but it's focusing on

16:55 being really skilled up and equipped and being tested and being challenged and

17:00 doing role play and you know just finding ways of uh making them learn everything about SEO they would need to

17:07 know to get a baseline and develop the skills from that point we were just throwing people into to SEO quite

17:13 quickly and a lot of people naturally picked it up but we realized that people have different learning styles and if

17:19 different people were teaching them it was creating inconsistencies in their training so we you know allocate a lot

17:25 of time to that first six weeks which required a person to come in and train them for six weeks so we got one of our

17:30 team leaders who was really good at training and said you're now going to onboard every single person that comes into the agency it's a lot of expense to

17:38 do that but we've seen the long-term impacts of that be quite successful where you know our client retention is

17:44 down in terms of it's 12% better year on year ever since we started doing that

17:50 and all it took was really f focusing on one one person focused on one role and one KPI to make the specialists that

17:58 came into our agency really really strong so when they're released into the world and working on campaigns they have

18:03 all the tools they need to retain that campaign okay so same goes for the account uh

18:09 accounts uh strategy guys or accounts uh guys you hire for clients

18:15 yeah everyone so if we you know have anyone join the the agency um they're

18:20 skilled up in our processes and the way we want to do things and learn SEO from the beginning so even down to the

18:25 fundamentals of how search engine actually works we want to teach that in so that that knowledge is all inbuilt so when the time comes to it and a client

18:32 asks them they don't have to reference a book they've got yeah they've got the the the natural their brains are like

18:38 sponges initially so they've developed that information they can answer that question really quickly and you can you'd be surprised what you can do in

18:44 six weeks of training so our six weeks of training means that they basically have the the skill set of someone maybe

18:50 being in one year of SEO because all we do is just teach them SEO for six weeks it's kind of incredible

18:57 so do you do you also teach them client communications or just the SEO for six weeks yeah client communications

19:04 everything so role playing like you know we jump on a you know jump in a room and say you know I'm a client talk to me as

19:10 if you know you're the first uh person that's ever talked to me about SEO and it's going to manage my campaign what

19:16 would you say in those situations and people get nervous i think I remember a time where um I got tested on the same

19:23 thing when I initially when I was uh starting working in SEO as well and yeah it was it was I was shaking i was

19:30 nervous i couldn't express myself properly but you do that a few times you

19:35 build a really good muscle for it and you know by the time you hit four years or something yeah you you don't sweat in

19:42 those conversations anymore it just comes out naturally because you've just done it so much so it's like going to

19:47 the gym you just go in the gym every day learning about SEO talking about it then overall you you can suddenly just lift

19:53 all these weights without breaking a sweat uh it's the same thing when when we talk about client communications or

19:59 just SEO fundamentally right now uh of course uh scaling SEO

How to hire the right talent for your agency?

20:06 services means hiring right talent so you told us how you onboard for six weeks now what do you look for when

20:12 bringing in an SEO experts what I look for uh looking for attitude

20:18 is is has always worked really well for us but again I think in interview processes people are always going to

20:24 show the best version of themselves they're always going to tell you what you want to hear they're always going to say the right things you know what's

20:31 your long-term vision ask to work for this company that's great and maybe people mean that maybe people don't at

20:36 the same time but I found a way you know in processing out the interview steps

20:42 where you can glean out any issues with that someone might have or disalignment to your culture or the the right

20:47 attitude as well uh that really helps and being quite brutal about it hiring is not easy i always say compared to

20:54 sales is a lot harder because you're dealing with humans with in the sales process the the final thing is someone

20:59 to open up their wallet pull out their credit card and pay for your services when you hire someone you have to pay

21:05 them a wage and also make sure you take care of them fundamentally and they take care of you and it's a very human

21:11 relationship based thing at least with a client that isn't happy with your service they can just cancel it and you can give them a refund when you deal

21:17 with all the pe the people stuff you know either goes really well and they become a really great specialist or a

21:23 great fundamental part of your team but if it goes really badly they might leave your organization both people have a bad

21:29 taste in your mouth so yeah like I found really processing out the the interview

21:35 steps and being quite strict about it it's very easy to jump into interviews and be nice to people i've definitely

21:41 done that before as well and been easy on people but I think the harder you are on people in interview process and the

21:47 more they uh find themselves challenged by it and they don't seem that they don't feel like it's too easy that they

21:53 actually earn the job it finds the right people naturally so we've got three steps initially we just do a screen say

21:59 you know hey how you doing are you a real person can you talk on the phone second step is a more formal interview

22:05 where we actually challenge them on their their SEO skills so we'll ask them what EAT is we'll ask them what you know

22:10 a canonical is and if they can't answer those questions they may not hit the mark what we need for an SEO specialist

22:15 and the third part is some sort of audit or test i find that works really well i've seen people say I don't want to do

22:21 an audit to get a job but if you don't want to do that to get a job right well it's going to be part of the job anyway

22:27 so you might as well give it a crack and you'd be surprised you know people with 10 years experience really struggle with doing an audit um especially doing it

22:35 live in front of someone or presenting it and someone with one year's experience can do 10 times better just because they have the right attitude

22:41 around it and they don't have to get everything right we're not looking for the perfect audit there is no perfect audit of a website but as long as we get

22:48 the good sentiment behind what they're trying to achieve and they we see the passion coming through uh that that

22:53 really you know shows who's the right candidate for us you know reference checks are really great process as well

22:59 references usually tell you what you want to hear about the candidate too so you have to dig really deep and ask them

23:04 hard questions too so the harder and more complex questions you ask of the interview process the more you know they

23:11 don't even have to answer the interviews that correctly the interview questions that correctly but how they handle it is

23:16 more of what we're observing do they get frustrated do they get mad do they get sad do they get nervous i don't mind

23:22 nerves at interviews as well i think being nervous actually shows that you care about how you're perceived by the

23:28 other person which is a fun if you if you're I was nervous in my job interview i'm sure you've been in some interviews where you've been nervous too i think

23:34 it's a very human thing so as long as I can still communicate and get it out you know that that's really important to me

23:40 but yeah this just really honing in on the interview process has worked really well and I think it falls by the wayside

23:47 because you want to interview someone and just hire someone really quickly that's great but you know the results of that can be quite damaging if you don't

23:53 pick the right person so really taking your time with it so I spent last year doing a lot of recruitment it took a a

23:59 lot of my time but I'm glad I did it and then we had eventually hired a recruiter in house to do a recruitment from then

24:05 on so they could really hone in on that craft and be really great at it and give the interview process a lot of love what

24:11 I found is I was jumping between different things but to be really great at a recruitment and find the right people it's it's a day-to-day job i I

24:18 don't wish it upon anyone to to have to you know um you know do 10 million

24:23 things and then have to find the right person on top of everything else um that's really tough so having a good

24:30 concerted focus towards it will pay off long term okay now now speaking of

What are the best strategies to scale your agency?

24:35 growth many agencies struggle with scaling what advice would you give to agency owners looking to scale their

24:41 operations looking to scale their operations well when it comes to what I

24:48 always ask what the goal is when people have come to us for you know just looking for advice you know they've got

24:54 an agency that's you know smaller maybe it's one person maybe it's five people i

24:59 always come back to the question of like what are you scaling for are you looking to be the biggest baddest agency known

25:04 to man or you just trying to get to this point like what's in it for you long term when you talk about scaling an

25:11 agency especially depending on what your processes are if it's very people dependent it's like I've just talked

25:16 about you need to have a rock solid recruitment process to find those right people that are going to build it with you uh very early on if you have the

25:24 right culture and when we talk about culture it can be quite a quite a fluffy term it's just to me it's like the attitude the you know the vibe so to

25:31 speak of the people working in your business if they're not keen to put themselves to through a lot of pain

25:38 initially for the sake of growing and yeah they'll get renumerated and they'll they'll uh you know level up in their

25:44 career by doing it but if they're will willing to rock up stay a little bit later to scale that particular thing

25:50 that project that that agency that works quite well um if you're looking to just sit back and not go hard that's totally

25:57 fine too but we talk about scaling and also you see the pure investment of it as well things can come really easy

26:04 sales can come quite easily as well if you've got the right product offering and you you're really good at talking to

26:10 people and convincing them to spend money and a lot of people are great at doing that but uh you know after that

26:16 comes the investment like if you want to hit 100 million there's no way you can do it without spending a bit of money so

26:22 I've seen a lot of the fallacy behind um some of the agencies I I've talked to is like yeah they they do want to get you

26:28 know more revenue in but they're not willing to commit to that um that investment behind their marketing budget

26:34 even marketing agencies are hesitant to invest in their own marketing which is ironic and then um and then just trust

26:40 like you're going to have to find good people around you to scale your business with you i've seen a lot of founders try

26:45 and do it themselves and if they do it themselves they'll only hit a cap point they'll hit a point where they literally

26:50 cannot breathe and the agency is wholly dependent on them existing which is uh I

26:57 think if people are fine with that and they just want to keep it small that's that's awesome but if people want to go and be a big agency like ours you have

27:04 to find great people around you and they won't be perfect you know they will have their flaws and weaknesses but you can

27:10 only strengthen those and invest time to strengthening those at the same time um and yeah I I think just having a great

27:17 culture fundamentally drives that scaling attitude uh and having more people on board with that journey long

27:23 term will will assist that that goal now uh interesting now how do you maintain

How to maintain quality and consistency during growth?

27:29 quality and consistency as you scale having a really great CRM so the part

27:36 that I haven't talked about in a little bit more tactical is we didn't have a CRM like before 2 years ago so we had no

27:41 idea one where our leads were coming from which is funny and uh two uh you

27:47 know what was happening in the client base NPS scores and things like that so we're very strong on HubSpot um you know

27:53 that was a great CRM for us to introduce a great CRM M all over the place if you can afford a great one if you can if you

27:59 don't have the budget to do you know that um you know an extensive enterprise account that's fine there's you know Joe

28:05 High Level there's there's Zoho there's Pipe Drive there's great CRM involved and that that

28:11 way you can actually just monitor every single contact coming through your business whether they be a client a person a referral partner any type of

28:18 person that interacts with your business are categorized and they're somewhere that someone can look at and find um you

28:25 know very easily and know what the communications are going on between uh that client and uh yourself so you know

28:32 having a really great rock solid central database of that information we were lacking that before and we were all over

28:38 the place but integrating something like that really brought everything together and made it easier easier for us to find

28:43 information and the quicker we're doing that more efficient we got and fundamentally the the happier people

28:48 were with with the experience they had from us as well so and in terms of the uh managing

28:54 clients after post sales you said you also uh some project management tool also you implemented

29:02 yeah so we use a mix of things uh one we just use a very standard spreadsheet i think spreadsheets are really great um

29:08 they're quite flexible everyone knows how to use them for more complex campaigns we use something like Monday or notion to uh delegate out and manage

29:16 the campaign hubspot for you know meeting calls and notes and you know uh quick bites information bites about the

29:23 campaign that we're working on uh and then you know we use tools like Seamrush and Href to audit the campaigns at the

29:29 same time so we've got all the information linked up as well and uh it's quite easy to access that information for our team and uh on the

29:37 client base you just having everything fundamentally draw down to like a spreadsheet something a link they can click and find the information they

29:43 really need easily gives a lot of comfort and then of course we have like monthly reporting that comes out and monthly calls or looms that we send

29:50 quite actively to just keep things moving on campaigns because things change constantly and if we're tracking them really really well uh we we don't

29:58 have many problems on our client base right now uh many agencies struggle with

White label SEO vs in-house team: what's the difference?

30:04 this scaling SEO services now some prefer white label SEO instead of building an in-house team what's your

30:10 take on outsourcing SEO for growth for agencies um I I think it just depends on what

30:17 your goals are um outsourcing you know SEO can be a great idea the quality control you know it's a it's a more um

30:25 you know based on what you're trying to achieve and if you're outsourcing and you've got a good purpose behind that

30:31 and reasoning and you're trusting a really great provider it can work really really well where I see it falters

30:37 sometimes is just the communications so just setting up some really great communication guidelines on who's who's

30:42 doing what as simple as that may sound can minimize a lot of issues that come come off that as well um if you want to

30:49 build an in-house team again it's just going to be more expensive and I would just pick my battles you know you can

30:54 outsource great things externally that you're not great at and just focus on one thing that you're really good at and

31:00 make that the the premier part of your service and secondary services um you can outsource or you know bolt on an

31:07 outsource service uh to that as well um I don't judge as long as the quality of work coming out of it is fundamentally

31:13 good you know wherever it comes from I think uh you know people need to be a bit more blind to that that you can

31:20 great get great quality of work from anywhere in the world at this point um

31:25 so as long as it gets results you know no one should really complain u but

31:31 often the the problem of that is how it's communicated as well so um just keeping that very tight uh and

31:37 actionable and um setting deadlines and meeting those deadlines you can work quite well okay now let's talk a bit

How do you find the best SEO minds in the industry?

31:45 about uh the talent and recruitment for an SEO of course and how to find the best minds now SEO is a part science and

31:52 of course a part art uh finding great SEO talent is always been tough so

31:58 what's your approach to building a high performance team i understand one is six with coding but besides that

32:06 so besides that so I'll start from the beginning what we do a lot of and how I was hired is just hiring people with no

32:12 experience at all they're a great base pallet to work off because they have no preconception of SEO they have no idea

32:19 which means that anything you teach them will be really great and that's how I learned a particular style of SEO on the

32:25 more you know two to year uh two year to threeyear front you will find people that have learned SEO in a particular

32:31 style which may meet the style or any sort of skill that may meet the style of your agency or business but may not

32:39 completely align they do things a little bit differently or your processes may conflict with things that they previously learned which can be a little

32:45 bit hard to unwire finding those people is actually quite difficult because really great people in a in an industry

32:51 are quite happy with their jobs so they're not looking very actively so on that front uh utilizing recruiters can

32:58 work quite well and recruiters are specialized in uh just finding great talent whether you outsource that to a

33:03 different agency or hire internally or do a contract basis that can work quite well um and then also looking globally

33:09 too so something that we've expanded out in the last couple years is not looking in Australia because Australia's talent

33:15 for SEO pool is quite limited we're you know what 30 million people compared to

33:21 the rest of the world which is you know 7 billion we're a very small segment so

33:26 if you cluster that down there's probably only a couple thousand SEO specialists in Australia and there's

33:32 hundreds of agencies so they're going to be quite limited so we've expanded our scope we work uh we've got a UK office

33:38 we've got a US office now um you know we're looking in all all places we we're

33:43 trying to recruit from different regions around the world and actually bring them over to Australia uh which is great and

33:48 something we've done is a lot of relocation from the UK over to Australia or hiring people in the UK to service to

33:54 Australia the US is a newer market for us and they're big they've got a lot of people um we're doing our junior

34:00 strategy there on the more higher end of people um again it's more scaled up version of the the more mid-tier person

34:07 that you're looking for so doing heavy recruitment over a long period of time if you want to find great people that

34:13 have 10 years experience you're probably going to have to look for a good 6 months to to find those people and build a bit more of a relationship so at that

34:19 point I think people are quite settled in what they want in their career they've done the hard yards uh they want

34:25 a very nuanced type of role and something that fits their uh style of

34:30 work which you have to be quite flexible about but um you can find great people just through I think going to

34:35 conferences LinkedIn following great people actively talking to people in the community um seeing who's available

34:42 maybe they work as a consultant externally from your business maybe they they're hired in at a really great salary maybe you move them from a

34:48 different country but you want to find great people it's it's the cost investment to doing that the time to do

34:54 that um and just allocating a a person to do that or a set set a strategy to

35:01 find those people and tweaking and finding awkward angles to work with and maybe they don't fit perfectly in your

35:07 business but they can provide value so even the role that you might be looking for you may have to morph eventually and

35:12 say you know actually we're looking for something like this and I think this person could do this segment of it maybe we should get just get them involved in

35:18 doing that portion of the role and covering up those gaps because if you don't do that you're just going to slow down your business growth If you're

35:24 waiting for the perfect high to come along you're probably going to miss the boat on a bunch of different things so at least getting something in motion at

35:31 the end of the day that you're confident in and you've got a a good fallback plan if it doesn't work you know in terms of recruitment that's that's what it's all

35:37 about now uh what separates an average SEO

What distinguishes an average SEO from a great one?

35:42 from a great SEO expert expert according to you

35:47 i think it's just being able to break down a very complex situation like HR

35:53 langs or eat or you know canonicalization or duplicate content in

35:58 a way that anyone can understand because in SEO we we're living in this echo chamber of understanding these issues

36:04 and these nuances people outside this room people outside the industry will not have any comprehension or care about

36:11 what a conicle is so being able to you know describe that really simply to another person whether it be a marketing

36:18 manager or your grandma or someone just random on the street and get them you

36:24 know to understand it really clearly and completely and even just leave a smile on their face i think that's what

36:29 separates the the average maybe just good people to the great ones and then bring them on to that journey as well

36:35 because SEO always sits in this weird I I always describe it as the the cousin that you barely see you know but they

36:42 rock up at the uh they they come to the the family event and everyone loves them or maybe they question like what's that

36:48 person doing and you know what do they do with their lives and when you actually describe and describe to people

36:54 what you do with a lot of passion that's where great SEOs really thrive and linking it back to the business goals i

37:00 think when you start learning SEO it can be all about we got to technically fix up the website we've got to do this we

37:07 got to do that but then you don't tie that to what the business is trying to achieve if the business wants more you

37:13 know a wider keyword base or it's trying to target a particular vertical that technical audit probably doesn't matter

37:19 it's more about how do we reverse engineer our uh competitors on the serves to rank as equally as them which

37:25 may not even involve doing anything technical or maybe building out a really great content cluster so I think uh by

37:31 doing that um by uh really reverse engineering and actually describing to

37:37 clients hey how this is how you beat XY Z competitor because fundamentally

37:42 business owners want to and business operators want to beat their competitors so if you bring them along to that journey and tell them hey I'm going to

37:48 do this because it's going to be a great result not just I just did a technical audit here it is you're you're telling

37:54 the story behind what you're trying to achieve and people really buy into that journey too

How to keep talented employees motivated and engaged?

38:01 right now uh once you hire great talents how do you keep them motivated and

38:06 engaged yeah this is a good one because once you build out a really great process of

38:12 hiring someone then they have to you have to make sure they stick around yes and I think as I've gotten older uh I've

38:20 realized that people's life priorities may change you know you may have the perfect business in the world and you

38:26 know you great get good cultural engagement you get good feedback scores everyone loves it but then people leave

38:32 and I think that's an okay part of it so even expecting a little bit of you know people's life priorities changing and

38:38 they decide you know I don't want to do SEO anymore maybe I want to do something else and just being okay with that I think helps quite well and it shows

38:44 people that you know if you put in a really good time in a business as a career and you do the right things and

38:49 you get the results in and you uh have the had the right attitude and you start cultural acumen that uh that's a really

38:57 healthy thing and eventually people will leave so I think you can never have 100% retention especially when you reach a

39:02 certain size but the ways you can actually tackle and retain people for longer um you know come down to like you

39:09 know finding out what they want to achieve in their life and then you know reverse engineering basically you know

39:14 how they can get there um through your business couple ways we're doing it is just providing a clear career pathway i

39:22 think for agencies it's quite difficult to do that because it's really contingent on the growth of their next

39:27 client so what we've done actually really gified and and laid out

39:33 a progression structure where people start as a junior SEO specialist and they rank up to an SEO specialist and

39:38 they rank up to a senior SEO specialist and then a team leader and then an enterprise manager and then maybe they

39:43 become a department role so that's a good fouryear journey that someone can jump in on uh and we've had great people

39:49 do that over time but now we've gotten very literal with that and say hey you can do that too you just have to hit off

39:54 you know you just have to hit these steps along the journey and I think as as people have more predictability

40:02 behind their career progression they're a lot more settled and they don't ask those questions so even just writing it

40:07 down and sending it to them and showing them visually this is the pathway you can create you know taking inspiration

40:12 from a lot of big businesses you know your Microsofts and Apples they have very very complex career progression

40:18 pathways because they're big you can take that to a very small scale even if you're a five person agency you can put

40:24 something down on paper and say "Hey you just joined this team we're five people but when we get to 10 people you might

40:29 be looking at a leadership role." And people get excited about that now the key is if people are excited about doing

40:36 something in the future you have to find a way to follow through on that so if you say to someone hey we want to build you to be a leader you got to back that

40:42 up you can't just get lost in the day-to-day got to give them the training and the focus to do that your job is to

40:48 grow the agency but uh in the background you need to be building up their leadership skills because you don't want

40:53 to get there and then they don't have the skills to do that so not only do you have to set the pathway forward for them

40:58 you have to find the development in that because you can give them the pathway but if you don't give them at least some milestones to hit complete this uh you

41:04 know learning course on leadership complete this training on SEO complete this training on account management

41:10 people like learning people buy courses all the time and kind of never complete them i've been known to do that but but

41:18 you know people like that progression so we even build something like Hawk Academy which is our learning platform

41:23 uh that takes all distills all the information that we've ever learned about SEO into one platform that people

41:28 can complete too so we say hey do cork academy before you start and people like that little progression point even

41:34 before they start in the agency as well um and then yeah I think beyond that you

41:40 know when you reach a certain point in your career you're looking for different things like flexibility is a big one uh

41:45 I think flexibility is quite tough is a broad word it can mean a lot of things to different people some people just

41:51 want you know to to start a little bit later in the day and some people want more days at home some people want to go

41:57 traveling i think when you get to a point where someone's been around for three or four years and they've proven

42:02 themselves and they're a great operator uh you can provide that flexibility and it can be quite tailored

42:08 to what they want which is different for everyone some people have you know kids some people have um you know they want

42:14 to go traveling so you know if it's more important for someone to uh be at home at 3:30 to spend time with their kid and

42:21 another younger person wants to go to to you know the Bahamas for 2 weeks and

42:26 work from there you're not going to offer that to the person with the kid that's it's going to be a little bit redundant so tailoring those pathways

42:33 and finding unique and it doesn't always have to be salary based it can be something as simple as hey you want to

42:38 go to a conference we're going to pay for that that's people find that like a nice way of progressing in their career

42:44 and they feel good about that uh and then the final part is just recognition so you can recognize people in different

42:49 ways people have different uh feelings towards it some people like it in private some people like it quite

42:54 publicly uh being you know asking people hey how do you want to be recognized for the great work that you do do you want a

43:00 big shout out in front of the team or do you want a like small nice note left in your desk i think for me people saying

43:07 you know a great job is all I need but for some other people they you know they like the feeling of receiving an award

43:13 so catering those and tailoring those to every different type of personality there's no oneizefits-all there's a

43:18 framework that you can use like a progression pathway or structured on boarding or you know uh learningmies

43:24 that you can put in the system but eventually you need to tailor that to the particular person that's why having

43:30 great HR involved in your business is a great thing fundamentally I think HR is

43:36 perceived as being something evil when it should be more about how do we get the team really engaged uh in from a

43:42 from the time that they start to the time that they finish how can they just get a great experience overall not

43:48 driven by like crazy policies or you know you know bad things is driven by how do we make things a little bit

43:54 better every day how do we find like just unique opportunities to get a team engaged how do we create great events

44:00 that people want to come to um and the strategy to get people involved and and stay longterm is all built by that

How do you keep your team updated on SEO trends?

44:08 now SEO landscape of course as we know is constantly changing and very fast how do you ensure your team stays up to date

44:15 with the latest trends and algorithms yeah I think um just actively talking

44:21 about it every day because we specialize you know the chat is always popping off with new things that are happening in

44:26 the business and then having that learning and development role behind the agency as well helps so they can find

44:32 all the unique things distill it down to something actually practical so I think there's a lot of noise out there as well

44:37 there's a lot of people saying "Hey this is the next big thing but you don't know if it's true or not." And you have to wait a couple weeks for it to to

44:43 actually filter out so having someone really focused on that every day and bringing all the insights from the

44:48 industry in can work quite well um and yeah like you know things like conferences work well because they get

44:54 people engaged and get people thinking a little bit outside the box too and um making a concerted focus to go to those

45:01 conferences and say hey you know what did we actually learn from this conference it may be something it may be nothing but actually you know putting

45:07 down into words and presenting back to the team what they found and then um I'm always open to new tools so I think if

45:12 someone comes to me with a new SEO tool every single day that they want to test out I'm quite open with that and saying

45:18 "Look if you want to use it we'll get a free trial i'll pay for the first month if you don't use it for if you don't use

45:23 it after that it's probably not useful." So just allowing your team to experiment and having budget behind that um gets

45:30 them to to open their minds a little bit and explore different areas you can get quite stuck doing the same things in SEO

45:35 but if you're constantly challenging yourself with new new tools new opportunities new little quirky ways of

45:40 doing things um the journey basically never ends okay and

What skills are crucial for today's SEO professionals?

45:47 uh so in your experience what skills are uh most crucial for SEO professionals

45:53 today beyond just technical knowledge i think beyond just technical knowledge

45:59 there's a big push in you know understanding how LLMs work in your everyday life a lot of people just not

46:05 using them at all not even using your basic chatbt um there's a lot of people that are you know hesitant to do that

46:12 content writers and things like that they you know a little bit hesitant and that's fine but eventually you're just going to lack the the skill set I think

46:19 you need for not just 2025 but 2030 and 20 35 as well um and getting really good

46:26 at automations you know just learning the skills of using a make or n um now

46:33 can really help your skill set learning how to write scripts really leaning on uh these tools

46:40 these AI tools to to to skill set um yourself to to be able to build your you

46:46 know skills for any career that you might do in the future let's say SEO does die eventually it may do uh so yeah

46:53 having at least a wider range of skills really help um and then eventually uh you know being very open-minded i think

47:00 what can happen sometimes is people have been in the industry for a long time and they say no this is the way to do things when the great SEOs are out there

47:06 experimenting and proving if something's true or false or not so having no ego about it ego about it and just going you

47:13 know I'm just going to test this out if it doesn't work that's totally fine uh and just allowing people the space to

47:18 experiment and just find stupid things to do and implement them and if they work they work if they don't you know no

47:24 one gets hurt in the process right now uh in one of your talks you

What are the differences between Australian and US SEO?

47:29 talked about the difference between SEO in Australia and the US how do you think global I mean first of all what are the

47:36 differences as per you and then how do you think global SEO strategies will evolve in the future

47:44 so the differences between Australia US and even just like the rest of the world is just the scale australia scale is

47:51 quite small compared you know I've talked to people in the US and doing you know hundreds of thousands of dollars for SEO you've got people uh in big

47:59 brands you know equivalent of a Walmart in Australia has probably just started building their SEO team when the the

48:05 Walmart in the US they've got a team of probably 10 people doing SEO every single day uh which is enormous compared

48:12 to us so I think the scale and the the the propensity to actually invest in in

48:19 u experimental activities behind SEO is is different in Australia and the you

48:26 know the the the usual like leaning on Google ads and things like that is quite prevalent here as well um people are a

48:33 lot more hesitant to try something new but as interesting is the the SERs in

48:38 Australia at least I find are a lot uh uh less competitive overall um because

48:44 no one's really investing the sheer amounts that you might in the US too so there's still a lot of scope to grow um

48:50 and you might find that as well things that happen in the in in the US in terms of search results don't happen in

48:57 Australia so we're a little bit behind uh you know AI overviews work sometimes but I know it's been in the US for a

49:03 while our SERs look fairly different um compared to the US so you know even the

49:09 competitive landscape we're a little bit behind the times but I think that this allows us to play a little bit of catchup so um in terms of like global

49:17 SEO overall I think Google's going to care a little bit less about the technical

49:22 nuances behind it I've always questioned whether HF1s actually work long term

49:28 because I've seen great brands i think I don't think I've ever seen a brand um especially a household name or global

49:34 name really nail the international SEO to the degree that which Google asks in their documentation i think it's just

49:40 more hints than anything so building out those brands in this particular regions if you're launching into one you're

49:46 probably going to have to put some heat behind it um but you won't have to exactly nail the technical in sometimes

49:51 you just have to nail the actual presence within that industry and make sure you you know you're localizing the content not just be not just from a you

49:58 know changing the the the Australian English to the US English but actually building a fair amount of presence on

50:05 even social media channels in those particular regions getting people to search your brand in those regions I

50:10 think is way more important from a global SEO perspective all right and uh uh looking at how do

How will the role of SEO agencies evolve in the next 5 years?

50:19 you see the role of SEO agencies evolving in the next 5 years i mean with AI and everything

50:26 it's it's weird because uh we had this debate uh in the team where someone asked is SEO a viable industry in the

50:33 next 10 years and to really break down that question you'd only make a really good guesstimation or an educated guess

50:41 right when even looking at Google trends SEO agencies increased in trend wise over the last couple years so I think

50:47 it's it's popular to be an SEO agency now because we're probably the only people really at the forefront of understanding how connected we are to

50:54 you things like large language models we're probably the most forefront people using them every day because it you know

51:00 directly impacting the share of traffic from Google if it directs impacts the direct share traffic of Google of course

51:07 we're going to be re So we're very adjacent to the that industry so we're kind of perfectly placed that if Google

51:12 died tomorrow people would start searching on something else and we'd probably be very positioned to do that

51:19 when it comes to agencies you're probably going to have a lot more niche down agencies i've seen these trends in the US where someone's just focused on

51:25 pest control or law firms um it may go a few layers deeper than that like

51:30 regionwise uh but this will be quite valuable i've seen that trend in Australia for the first time like

51:35 someone who's just focused on legal firms in Australia uh which is pretty pretty surprising to me because um there

51:43 you know it's not a as big of an industry as the US but it's still cool to see that trend that trend follow

51:48 through to that this particular region um so I think SEO agencies may not call

51:54 themselves SEO agencies in the next 10 years or five years i don't know particularly but there's some sort of

52:00 optimization that we can do definitely uh and there's going to be people required to do it because you know you

52:06 can't automate uh a really great strategy you can kind of get the baselines of it but you still need

52:11 someone to do it um and you need people to be creative i always see AI as was created at a good standard of doing

52:16 great work at a base average level of a normal person around the world but if

52:22 everyone's at that level if the standard's now here how does anyone get here i don't think I don't think AI can

52:29 capture the true human experience of doing something unique and weird it can give you some good ideas but you know

52:35 the human brain is pretty powerful so it should win out most of the time seo is probably going to get a lot more creative so you might see agencies have

52:42 to invest more time into designing content or coming up with quirky ideas or doing things like digital PR which is

52:48 not as traditional and as boring as fixing title tags it's it's quite a

52:54 nuanced thing and a creative angle to take on SEO but uh if you're trying to optimize for a search engine or an LLM

53:02 you got to stand out so doing things that stand out and you know people on Instagram and Facebook and social media

53:08 and Tik Tok do this really well we may have to adopt some of those practices and think a bit more uniquely not just

53:14 create a blog about what is a law firm but you know do something really special

53:20 behind it do a press release do a content strategy do video content to to actually rank in those search results

53:27 okay now as more businesses bring SEO in-house how can agencies continue to provide value and remain uh relevant

53:37 i think when someone's inhouse they they have to they're shouldering a

53:43 lot so they'll always need support from that front when someone's in house uh they've got to handle the stakeholders

53:50 of multiple different channels and they've got to defend themselves against algorithm updates so they'll always need

53:57 someone to lean on and if you're the only person talking about SEO in particular business you're kind of stuck

54:03 you're kind of not not in a good position if your CMO or CEO really understands what you're trying to do

54:08 that's great but having an agency as a backup um backup provider to do a lot of

54:14 the leg work that you can't do by yourself to soundboard ideas that's always going to be valuable uh in any

54:21 role so I think agencies are pretty well placed to support those people internally and you know I always look at

54:28 the difference between in-house and agency an agency you got a lot of variety you're deal you're dealing with a lot of different challenges on

54:33 different scales in-house if something goes really wrong on the SEO front on a big website and you're the only person

54:39 that can fix it and resolve it that's a lot to burn so um having at least a

54:44 backup there is really nice and agencies can always provide that backup and if you have a good relationship between

54:49 those two providers uh you can do some pretty awesome things right with this we came to the last

Rapid Fire Questions

54:56 section of our um podcast which is uh rapid fire questions so I'm going to ask

55:02 you round and you're going to answer whatever comes first in your mind so let

55:07 me know once you are ready okay the the one SEO tool you can't live without

55:14 i would go SEO testing but SEO gets as well is also very good so I'm going to

55:20 give you two there uh biggest SEO a mistake agencies make

55:29 not investing in their people long term okay ai generated content good bad or

55:35 inevitable i'll go I'll go good but I'll just keep it at that okay if you had to

55:41 rank content links or technical SEO what comes first i'd go content first yeah okay a brand

55:50 that's crushing in SEO right now i always like to think of uh Skiims so

55:56 Kim Kardashian's body shape brand i I gave a presentation i talked about how she's

56:03 overtaken Spanx in terms of uh the keywords that they used to used to rank for in two years it's an incredible SEO

56:09 case study and I would like to meet King Kardashian to understand what she what she planned out there or it just

56:15 happened by luck okay and an underrated as you hack no

56:21 one talks about i think uh I'm going to steal this one from someone I think Steve Tooff they

56:27 talked about how they would just take a competitor put in the site command and

56:32 look for the keyword that you know you're trying to rank for and basically whatever content they created to rank you first is probably content that you

56:38 need to correct i thought it was just a really good practical tip to use okay and the best piece of SEO advice

56:46 you have ever received um well it's funny because I always feel like I give about advice these days but

56:52 um I think it just sounded like it's the marathon not the sprint you know you could be waiting two years for results

56:57 basically it's just the game okay okay and Lawrence this has been an incredible

What final advice do you have for SEOs and agencies?

57:04 conversation of course tons of insights for SEO professionals agencies owners as well before we wrap up is there any

57:11 final advice you'd like to share with our listeners who are looking to grow their agencies or improve their SEO

57:16 services yeah in terms of improving your services it's all built by the people uh you can

57:22 automate probably you know a lot of it these days um but it's always built off really great ideas from people so take

57:29 care of your people and they'll take care of you all right that's a good advice and where can people connect with

How can viewers connect with Lawrence?

57:35 you and learn more about your work um just LinkedIn i think uh LinkedIn you know is a really great place for for

57:41 everyone to communicate especially about SEO there's pretty strong and healthy and active community so Lawrence Hitches

57:48 on LinkedIn follow me love to chat is it all good uh it's it just hanged i can't

57:55 hear hello can you hear me yeah yeah okay okay uh thank you so much for

58:02 insights Lawrence and to our listeners if you find value in this episode please don't forget to subscribe to the Agency

58:08 Insider Show and if you are looking for top-notch white label SEO services to complement your agency offerings be sure

58:13 to check out Page Traffic until next time this is Navnit Koshell signing off and Lawrence thanks again for coming on

58:19 the Agency Insider Show hope to have you back soon this way