How to Scale an SEO Agency to +100K a Month with Ryan Stewart

Ryan Stewart owns WEBRIS, an SEO agency in Miami. When this was recorded in 2017 he had about eight years of client-facing SEO behind him, the last two running his own shop after contracting for a big agency on accounts like Best Buy and Target. The episode is from the show’s Inbound Agency Journey days, hosted by Andrew Dymski and Gray MacKenzie, and covers the gap Ryan saw in the market, how his training grew out of process docs, his assembly-line team, and why he pulled WEBRIS back to SEO only.

The gap between local shops and big agencies

Asked what pushed him out on his own, Ryan started with temperament and ended with a market.

I didn’t work well for people, number one. That was my biggest thing, was that I was a contractor for the big agency and I didn’t like the way they did things, to be completely honest… I realized that there was a huge gap, especially for SEO, between your small local agency and these big agencies who work with corporate clients, and the market for SEO is really that $2,000 to $6,000 retainer that everyone needs these days, especially e-commerce websites.

(Listen at 1:08)

He built a personal brand on the side through guest posts and sites like Moz until the inbound leads justified a pay cut from contracting. Two things he kept from big-agency life: carrying a weekly client call when there’s little new to report, and technical SEO depth, which smaller shops raised on content and link building often lack.

The training product came out of processes written for offshore help

Selling training wasn’t the original plan. Ryan’s content pulls over a million views a year, mostly from agency owners and other marketers, and the number of clients that produced was tiny by comparison. That audience, he decided, needed process more than knowledge, and the process already existed.

When you’re first getting started as a consultant, I was doing everything myself, but you quickly realized that you can’t scale without people, and when you’re still getting started you can’t afford local people, they’re just too expensive. So I had to look offshore, and if you want to manage people offshore, you absolutely have to give them the most detailed processes possible, otherwise it’s just never going to get done. So I started building it for them and then I started just publishing it on the blog and people were just going crazy for it. So I cleaned it up and I turned it into a training.

(Listen at 6:36)

He said the training had done about $400,000 in sales in a year and a half and was still selling. The plan was a full ladder: free tools and cheap WordPress plugins at the bottom, training around $1,000 in the middle, agency services from $3,000 up.

An assembly line instead of an org chart

Asked whether he builds processes off an org chart, Ryan said no.

We’re more of an assembly line, where it’s not levels and tiers so much as a straight line. So the people that we have locally, they’re more managers and they’re more kind of like all around marketing strategists that understand the process end to end, but we use quite a bit of freelancers and offshore to cut our costs, and those people are trained to do one thing and one thing only. Like we have someone who only does GTM, we have someone who only does Google Analytics… So basically instead of hiring more people underneath people, it’s hiring people more horizontally.

(Listen at 7:45)

Because every client gets the same process, work is batched up front and dripped out: the content calendar and link strategy are built early and delivered over the following months. The plan is mapped step by step for 12 months, and the client sees it, with live tracking of the tasks in progress.

Why WEBRIS dropped Facebook ads and went deeper on SEO

Ryan had tried widening the service mix with a full-time local hire for Facebook ads, and found the team overloaded and under-delivering at the same time.

I had one person here locally, but she maxed out at two accounts for ads, and I found that people were only willing to pay a certain amount for that Facebook management, and the margin on it was terrible. So we were going to have to build an offshore team under her… instead of doing all this, let’s just take it all back and look at just our SEO and build a much deeper SEO service as opposed to a much wider marketing service.

(Listen at 11:46)

His warning to agencies that bolt on services: if the new work isn’t good, you kill the original relationship too. His e-commerce clients want specialists anyway, and hire a marketing manager to manage several agencies, which is what he saw inside Target and Best Buy.

Google Sheets is the whole operating system

The host asked about the tool stack for a team spread across time zones.

Everything we do is run through Google Drive. We don’t use Dropbox. We don’t use Asana. We build everything custom in Google Sheets… People don’t realize how powerful Google Sheets are. It’s really incredible, because you can connect APIs to them and basically you can hack together software in a day… Basically we don’t use the tools. We just use their APIs.

(Listen at 15:16)

A Google Sheets developer on the team built the onboarding.

When we onboard a client, all you do is hit a little drop down menu up top. You add their information and it automatically creates a Google Drive folder for them. It creates all their templates in Google Sheets… It automatically creates a project plan for them. It automatically generates an email in Gmail.

(Listen at 16:31)

The custom tools double as a sales pitch against big agencies in RFPs: the same proprietary tooling, customized to what the client cares about, at a fraction of the cost.