Building an SEO Agency – 6 Lessons I’ve Learned

Being an entrepreneur can seem like a dream job, and many times it truly is. Not a dream job in the sense it may appear, but rather the opportunity to work with your dream. If you are an aspiring entrepreneur, or if today you are dreaming of starting your own business, I have a few lessons I’ve learned along the way to share.

To begin with, I want to be clear that I don’t see myself as particularly successful. We haven’t yet come as far as I’d like, and I certainly don’t have all the answers on how to do it. For me, that’s no reason not to share. We’ve learned quite a lot along the way, and I’m certain it can be of use. The hope is that you’ll find value in our lessons, even if it’s often the case that everyone has opinions on how to run a company.

This text is about how we’ve thought when building our agency—we work with search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Whether the knowledge can be applied outside the SEO industry, I can’t swear to, but I believe many of the lessons are universal.

We rise and fall with the quality of our service

Early on, we decided that the quality of our delivery would be the decisive factor for our success. If we deliver a better service, we will grow the way we want. That might sound obvious, but in the agency world, it isn’t always the main driver. As an agency, you’re always caught in a dilemma: you need to bill, but you also want to put more time into each billed krona.

Our ambition has always been to deliver truly high quality, better than our competitors. For us, this also means we can’t grow faster than we can train specialists to keep up.

Of course, you can choose another path—there are many other good USPs for an SEO agency: being the cheapest, being the closest, and so on.

Every extra hour you spend in recruitment saves a hundred hours of trouble

Recruiting is incredibly difficult, and no matter who you are, you’ll make mistakes—far more often than you’d like. We’ve worked hard to reduce that error rate by taking a structured approach with more science and less gut feeling. We also steer clear of horoscope-like methods of evaluating applicants (whether it’s color systems, four-letter codes, or other arbitrary ways of sorting the unsortable).

We put a lot of time and energy into looking past the biases our own prejudices might trick us into. The main reason is that we want the best candidate—regardless of background, gender, or anything else. That it’s fair from an equality perspective is, of course, good, but for us that’s secondary.

We’ve concluded that our growth depends so much on recruitment that it has to be a core function for us. We need to be skilled at it ourselves rather than outsourcing it. By becoming better at recruiting, we’ve improved the agency’s work significantly. It speeds up growth, eases the pressure on managers, and makes employees feel better at work. Spend serious time getting good at this.

Sometimes things need to go slowly

One of the hardest lessons for me personally has been learning patience. Just like in SEO, sometimes development has to go slowly. For me, that’s a nightmare—going slow is my life’s biggest fear.

But some things simply need time to grow, regardless of how we feel. Often, it’s about people. It can take time to change habits or work in new ways, even when the will is there. I live in a world of constant change, and that’s how I like it—I only feel good when things are moving forward. But not everyone has the same outlook on life and work, and you have to accept that, even as an ambitious business leader.

Here, the challenge is finding balance. That’s how I’ve approached it—learning when to push forward and when to slow down. Maybe that comes with experience?

Choose your bedfellows carefully

Just like recruiting, choosing partners and clients is complex. Yes, I said choosing clients. Not all clients are good clients, and not all partners are good partners. The wrong clients can drag a company into a downward spiral. A client you can have open and honest communication with is worth almost anything, while one you can’t trust can cause problems for a long time.

Keep your promises—every time

In sales, it’s easy to overpromise. Our motto is to never, under any circumstances, do that. It’s not worth ruining your reputation for a client who will end up dissatisfied and terminate the contract as soon as possible. Of course, not every project goes perfectly, and you have to manage that. If you’ve chosen your clients carefully, they’re usually on the same side, working toward the same goals and accepting that, especially in SEO, not every detail can be controlled.

If employees start overpromising and underdelivering, you must handle it firmly. Making it clear that such behavior isn’t accepted—even if it brings money in—is extremely important to us.

Sure, you can build organizations without that principle—we’ve seen it up close—but I firmly believe you can’t build truly great, long-term companies with short-term methods.

Listen to the right advisors

As I mentioned earlier, I believe everyone in society thinks they know how you should run your business. People who’ve never held a leadership role, never worked in a private company, and so on. I find it incredibly hard to tell who actually has good advice and who doesn’t. The only benchmark I can give is this: has the person themselves built a profitable company? If not, maybe their advice isn’t fully thought through.

That means you should think twice before even taking my advice here. These are the things that have worked for us—or so I believe. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re right for you.