The secrets behind our agency's results

Three years ago, I decided to stop working for other people.

 At the time, I was working for an SEO agency that was poorly structured and wasn't paying me enough.

They were falsifying my reports — which is super unethical — and to make things worse they wouldn’t send the client reports even if the clients asked for them. 

I quit that job only 8 months in, and began freelancing with a partner, only to find out he was skimming profits off of me and on top of that, not holding up his end of the deliverables. 

Fast forward to September of 2022, I was boarding a flight to the Canary Islands, planning to solo travel for a few months. I was leaving my old life behind — friends, family, and unethical business partners. 

I spent the next 8 hours on that flight writing out a detailed business plan for my agency on the Notes app on my iPhone — the modern equivalent to writing your business plan on a napkin — and the guiding principles of the agency were this: 1) deliver insane results and 2) it needed to be built on a foundation of trust & great relationships.

As soon as I landed, I put my head down and started working 12-14 hours per day to make it happen.

It’s been 15 months since I got the idea and 13 months since bringing the first brand onboard, and we’ve been crushing it for them & all of our other brands! 

But this email is not a walk down memory lane. Instead, I’m going to share with you exactly what’s gone into our operations, deliverables, and structure over the last 15 months. 

This is going to be broken down into three sections:

• The tech stack

• The team

• The daily operations

The tech stack: 

• Semrush – Semrush is our most used and primary SEO tool for keyword research, competitor analysis, link prospecting, and rank tracking. 

• Slack – This is the only communication platform we use at our agency. For every brand that we work with we create an internal and external channel. The internal channel is where our team communicates about new links, new content, and project updates. The external channels include myself & the brand’s team. I regularly update them when new content or backlinks go live, send them ranking updates, and share monthly KPI reports. 

• ClickUp – This is our current PM tool where we manage content production, though we’re in the process of migrating to Airtable.

• Others – We also use a lot of other tools like OpenAI, Make, and AgencyAnalytics to run the business but I won’t describe every use in detail.

The team: 

• Kai – I create the strategy for every single brand we work with, handle inbound marketing, take sales calls, and onboard new brands. I’m also involved in several of the deliverables, like money page optimization, internal linking structure, and backlink campaign setup. 
  

• Head of Content  – I recently hired a Head of Content to oversee our entire blog content strategy. She’s a beast, previously heading up SEO content at Masterclass and another eCom brand.
  

• VAs – Our lean team of VAs handles most of our link building, everything from guest posting to niche edits to reactive & proactive PR
  

• Make – We’re revamping our operations infrastructure with the help of a killer operations agency, and they’re using a platform called Make to help streamline many of our processes. It’s currently doing the work of 3 people, so I consider them an employee at this point. 

The daily operations: 

• Content – We optimize all of the money pages within the first 30-60 days of a new brand coming on board, then focus primarily on blog content & new money pages as we identify them. We publish 4-5 blogs per month, a sustainable cadence that enables us to 1) produce only the highest-quality content that aligns with each brand’s voice and 2) flies under Google’s mass publishing radar.
  

• Link Building – Our team of VAs run our link-building campaigns 24/7, so we’re building links pretty much every day
  

• Technical – Very little technical SEO work occurs after the first 4-5 days of starting a new relationship. It’s the least important bucket of eCommerce SEO and has very little impact compared to content and links. We monitor GSC for indexing & technical issues and address those as needed, of course.

I witnessed first-hand how poorly many SEOs operated, and I knew exactly what not to do. I basically had an upside-down map. 

From the time I scribbled out a business plan on my Notes app to now, every single aspect of our agency has 100x’d.

The guiding principles of insane results and trust & transparency have not changed whatsoever.

I’ve spent an insane amount of time testing, iterating, and improving on seemingly insignificant aspects of our process, with the sole focus of delivering better results and making things easier for the brands we work with. 

Don’t believe me?

Watch this video:

Until next time,

Kai Cromwell.