The Tiger of SaaS: SEO and Growth Strategies for Agencies with Jeremiah Smith
Key Takeaways
- SimpleTiger stumbled into SEO when a web design client asked to get the new site into Google. Within six months of starting the agency, Jeremiah had cut everything else.
- The SaaS niche came from pattern matching across clients: which ones they liked, which paid well, which spoke the same language. Saying no to everyone else made sales like shooting fish in a barrel.
- Marketing breaks sales, sales breaks operations. Jeremiah was the bottleneck in the middle until he hired a salesperson and handed him a fixed system with no power to customize projects.
- Instead of three or four blog posts a month, SimpleTiger built one huge SaaS SEO Guide. It hit number one for almost all target keywords and now brings in most of their leads.
- SimpleTiger self-implemented EOS and went about six months with no client fires. Every year Jeremiah and his brother Sean hire a coach for their single biggest weakness.
- Jeremiah is careful about adding paid search: burn a client there and SimpleTiger loses the SEO work and its reputation with it.
Jeremiah Smith is the president and CEO of SimpleTiger, an SEO agency that has been at it for about 15 years and now works only with SaaS companies. Gray MacKenzie hosted, catching up with an old friend. They covered how SimpleTiger found its niche, how Jeremiah got out of sales, the pillar content that changed their lead flow, working with his brother Sean, and EOS.
Six months in, SimpleTiger dropped everything but SEO
The agency started as a do-anything shop: web design, logos, business cards, whatever anyone would pay for.
“I kind of stumbled across SEO on accident when one of my clients needed help with SEO. I built them a website, and they were like, that’s great, let’s get them in Google now. And I was like, how do you get a site on Google?”
Within about six months he’d cut everything else. The SaaS focus came later, after Sean joined and they started seeing patterns across clients.
“We liked working with these clients. We didn’t like working with all those clients. These clients made good money. Those clients were annoying. So we kind of figured out that SaaS businesses were the clients that we enjoyed working with. We spoke the same language.”
“After saying no to everybody else, any time we get on a call with a SaaS company: we only work with companies like yours, and we only help with the thing that you came here to get help with. It just made it like shooting fish in a barrel in regards to the sales process.”
Early SaaS clients came through white-labeling for other agencies, which is also why many of the best logos can’t go on the site: for every one they show, two or three similar ones sit under NDA.
Marketing breaks sales, sales breaks operations
Gray asked about the turning points in building a sales system. Jeremiah said he could have saved five or six years. He’d been doing founder-led sales with no outbound training, and it wasn’t repeatable. Two things changed it. The first was investing in SimpleTiger’s own SEO, which he recommends to any agency: at least do the one thing you’re good at for yourself. The second was a line from a consultant.
“They said that marketing breaks sales, breaks operations, and that’s how it should work. And that just came like a light bulb to me. I was like, oh, yeah, marketing is breaking me. And then I’m constantly breaking operations because I’m the sales guy.”
So he hired a salesperson and, this time, handed him a system that removed customization. With a 20-client roster they’d had 20 distinct projects (Jeremiah credited ZenPilot with helping straighten that out).
“After I hired the sales rep, I was able to say, here’s how we do what we do. That’s it. He has no control over modifying projects or contracts… We started closing deals consistently that all looked the same, and operationally things really improved. Everyone came in with proper expectations. Profitability started improving.”
One huge guide instead of four blog posts a month
Gray asked about the long-form pillar content on SimpleTiger’s site, which was about two years old. Before that the blog was fluff, and Jeremiah took a lesson from Brian Dean at Backlinko: publish less, make each piece required reading, and rank for it.
“I built ourselves a piece of pillar content, which is the SaaS SEO Guide… I wanted to build something that was so large, so comprehensive, so competitive, that anyone else would have a difficult time competing with it… So that when we put it out there, we would just dominate. And that’s exactly what happened.”
After publishing it and building a few links, it jumped to number one for almost all their target keywords, and lead flow followed. The program now is big guides (an SEO ROI guide from Sean, a SaaS content strategy guide from Caitlin, their head of content), and they bring in most of the agency’s leads, with readers already sold on how SimpleTiger works.
Two brothers: the visionary and the filter
Gray asked what it’s like working with his brother. The clashes are about perspective, Jeremiah said, not rivalry.
“I’m the anxious, dreaming visionary who’s constantly coming up with new ideas… which if that just runs amok, it will destroy a company. And he tends to be a lot more practical and slow moving and steady and consistent and thorough, which means that he shoots down a lot of my great ideas.”
EOS, and a new coach every year
SimpleTiger switched to EOS at the start of the previous year, self-implemented, running on Ninety.
“They loved the weekly touch point. And then we started putting out fires, and then after a while, fires stopped happening as much… And now we’ve gone like pretty much six months with nothing but rave reviews from clients.”
“Every single year, Sean and I analyze our number one weakness or area that’s really holding us back. And then we hire a consultant or a coach in that area to fix that or help us fix that, and we run that until that’s no longer the issue for us.”
About 60% of what consultants tell them gets implemented, and that 60% has been well worth it. His closing advice: take the one thing your agency does really well and put it into a large piece of pillar content. “You’ll be surprised how it can sprout legs and walk around the web.”