Scaling Up: How To Expand Your SEO Services To New Markets via @sejournal, @jasonhennessey

Many SEO agency owners have a vision of growing their business, building a model that drives recurring revenue without having to sacrifice their time, energy, or sanity.

Unfortunately, many agency owners get stuck in a plateau. They hit a ceiling on how many clients they can manage, yet don’t have the cash flow to hire a team. What’s an ambitious agency owner to do?

In this guide, I’m sharing my growth strategies as a 10+ year SEO agency owner – from how to expand to new markets to how to implement a sustainable, scalable agency model.

A CEO’s Secret To Scalable SEO

How did a hopelessly distracted C student grow a 100-person global SEO agency?

Well, it wasn’t through “growth hacks”, offshoring, or selling courses.

It was through a passion for the craft: 30,000+ hours obsessing over the algorithm, speaking to clients, testing strategies, and doing the work.

There is no shortcut.

But there is a mindset.

It’s a mindset that’s attentive to the needs of real business owners. One that’s future-forward, recognizing the unique challenges business owners face today. And a mindset that’s creative in crafting an SEO service that helps business owners overcome these challenges.

This starts with understanding the market, finding the gaps, and bringing something unique to the table.

Here’s how to do that.

1. Trim The Fat

Very often, we agency owners get stuck in a rut of managing a high volume of low-paying clients. This burns out our resources and makes it very difficult to scale.

If you can’t take on more, higher-paying contracts, you have very little room to grow. That’s when it’s time to “trim the fat”, so to speak.

First, identify the clients that are causing the biggest headaches for the least amount of contract value.

  • How much time is being put into managing those clients?
  • Are the time, energy, and resources worth the measly revenue for your business?

Next, identify your best clients – not just in terms of money, but the client-agency relationship.

  • What are the characteristics that make working with them enjoyable?
  • Are these types of accounts profitable?
  • If so, what is the margin?

The tough news is that you will likely need to let some of the difficult clients go. But this is just to make space for more enjoyable, lucrative projects. Doing so also opens up breathing room for you to get more creative with your service offerings.

2. Remove The Operational Bottlenecks

Besides time-consuming clients, there are likely other factors that are hindering your agency’s growth. This could be the lack of team resources to take on new projects, a lack of skills to reach that next caliber of service, or a lack of time on your part to bring it all together.

This is the time to take a good, hard look at your agency structure, resources, and processes.

Here are a few common issues that can lead to inefficiency (and, ultimately, stagnation) in your business:

  • Lack of scalable systems to facilitate a seamless client intake to service to retention model.
  • Poorly defined roles for your team members, leading to confusion and churn.
  • Reliance on manual processes, slowing down the speed of service and creating bottlenecks in fulfillment.
  • Insufficient team training, leading to poor service quality.

Identifying the bottlenecks is the first step in fixing them. Trust me, this isn’t just about good housekeeping; if your agency works like a well-oiled machine, it’s better positioned to expand to new markets and take on more clients.

3. Assess The Financial Health Of Your Agency

Now it’s time to get your financial house in order. The last thing you want to do is start selling SEO to new markets without first establishing a profitable, sustainable revenue growth model.

If available, look at your agency’s past 2+ years’ Profit and Loss statements.

  • How much revenue is your agency generating year after year?
  • What are your expenses?
  • Are you charging enough to offset the costs of personnel, software, your salary, etc.?

Analyze your financial reports to look for inefficiencies.

  • Is there a history of overspending?
  • Underearning?
  • Inconsistent cash flow?

This activity isn’t meant to deter you from expanding to new markets; rather, it’s a practice of taking a look at your business financials and making data-informed decisions.

I highly recommend having a health cash reserve to help you manage unexpected costs and/or potential setbacks as you expand to new markets. Change can come with some unpredictability, so the more you can give yourself a cushion, the better.

4. Identify High-Growth Markets

By this point let’s assume your agency is financially sound, you have the space to take on new clients (because you have trimmed the fat), and have put systems in place to facilitate growth. How do you identify the hot new markets for expansion?

One way is to “stay in the know” by monitoring industry trends and news. Outlets like our very own Search Engine Journal are great at covering emerging markets, technologies, SEO applications, and more.

Another source of market research is Google Trends, where you can spot a rise in search volumes and emerging keywords. For example, at the time of writing this article, there was a significant uptick in topics related to law and government.

I also recommend reading industry reports and surveys to see what’s new in the market. For instance, Forbes often covers ‘emerging markets’ by location, demographics, and industries.

Look for opportunities that indicate increasing and sustained growth. For example, the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been on the upswing for quite some time, while others (like all the craze about Instagram Threads) fizzle out.

5. Look For The Gaps

Look for opportunities in which your competitors have yet to capitalise on a new market or growth trend. If you’re able to beat them to the punch, you’ll be better positioned to win the lion’s share of the market.

There are a few ways to do this. For one, you can be the first to launch a service offering to a new/emerging market. However, another way to “fill the gap” is to offer a different take on an existing service/model.

For example, say there’s been an increase in demand for SEO services by tree removal service providers as a result of local storms (this has really happened).

In the midst of other marketing agencies pushing generic SEO packages, perhaps you offer a “storm-response” -focused digital strategy, including rapid content updates and pay-per-click ads emphasizing emergency services.

This really requires you to think outside the box (remember, Mindset) to figure out 1) what the market needs, 2) whether you can be first to fill the gap, and 3) what makes you different from other SEO providers.

6. Restructure Your SEO Offering

Scaling up your SEO agency requires adaptability. Stagnation is a real agency killer. To maintain an upward trajectory, you need to make some changes to your SEO service offerings.

For example, AI has been a hot topic for quite some time. While many agencies claim to leverage AI to streamline the content creation process, your claim to fame could be that you don’t use AI, and instead offer a customized content model to provide additional value to businesses.

Or perhaps instead of offering soup-to-nuts SEO services, you realize Content is the most profitable, so you niche down to focus on content strategy and blogging.

Restructuring your services doesn’t necessarily need to mean changing what you offer, though. It could mean changing how you offer it.

Like if you typically provide customized SEO strategies (that change month to month), perhaps you find it more economical to offer out-of-the-box SEO plans that include the main components most businesses need to see traffic growth.

In my own SEO agency, Hennessey Digital, I noticed where some of our services were “good to have” but not “need to have”, or even services clients never ended up subscribing to.

We focused on the services that provided the best results for clients. And we are constantly adapting to the times, incorporating new technologies and strategies.

7. Build A Scalable Team

The truth is, it’s very difficult to grow your SEO agency with a team of one. At some point, you will need to bring on support, not only to manage the growing client load but also to offset gaps in your own skillsets.

A great entrepreneur can recognize their constraints and see the strengths in others. New team members contribute new ideas, new ways of doing things, and new processes to help economize your business.

They may also have insight into the new markets you are looking to expand to. For example, if your agency has historically worked with home services providers, and now you’re looking to expand to law firms, hiring a Marketing Manager with experience in the legal industry could be a huge benefit.

Start by identifying the top 3 challenges your business is currently facing — and how hiring a skilled team member could offset these challenges. If the cost of hiring is easily offset by the new revenue brought in, it’s a done deal!

Maybe you can’t hire someone full-time right away. That’s okay! Consider outsourcing to start and then scale up incrementally as your business grows.

Scale Your SEO Agency With Confidence

Scaling up an SEO agency comes with its challenges, from resource limitations to difficult clients to financial constraints.

But most of these can be mitigated by proper planning, trimming the fat in your business, and shifting your mindset from solopreneur to CEO.

It’s what’s allowed me to grow my SEO business from a solo practice to a global agency. And while that didn’t happen overnight, it was made easier once I was able to identify the gaps in my own skill set and find great people to inject creativity into my business.

Every agency owner is capable of scaling up — just look for those gaps and bring a fresh take to the market!

More resources: 


Featured Image: fizkes/Shutterstock

Wix Shares How To Optimize Enterprise Marketing via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Search Engine Journal spoke with Paula Ximena Mejia, VP of Enterprise Marketing at Wix, about building high-performing enterprise marketing teams. She shared actionable strategies to achieve marketing goals and identify what holds a team back.

The discussion focused on multiple topics, including:

  • Telltale signs of misaligned goals and inefficiencies
  • How to overcome resource constraints
  • Stakeholder engagement to improve collaboration
  • Tech audits
  • Best way to use of AI in a marketing team

Reasons For Inefficiencies In Marketing Teams

Emailing with Paula about enterprise marketing she made it clear that marketing inefficiencies arise from losing focus of the overall goal. What she describes can happen almost silently and affect the productivity and success of marketing teams without hardly noticing what’s going on.

Paula shared:

“Marketing teams frequently encounter inefficiencies because they lose track of the goal. There’s a reason why certain activities are designed and executed but throughout that process, the end goal can be lost. It’s important to eliminate siloed information, bottlenecks in workflows, and challenges in managing limited resources to keep eyes on the prize and end goal.”

How To Address Misaligned Goals

Misaligned goals is something that affects marketing teams of all sizes. Over a career spanning over 20 years this is something I’ve seen quite a bit as a consultant for B2B enterprise corporations all the way to smaller offices. It’s easy to be consumed by the process and mistake them for goals.

I asked Paula what a company can do to avoid misaligned goals and one of things she touched on is pursuing trends that don’t align with broader priorities. She also mentioned “cross-functional collaboration” which is about getting employees that specialize in different areas to work together successfully on the same project.

She shared:

“Misaligned goals often emerge from unclear communication or when teams pursue trends that don’t align with broader organizational priorities. To avoid this, managers and team leads should focus on defining clear, measurable objectives that tie directly to business outcomes. It’s the project manager or team leads’ important role to make sure they understand senior leadership goals and establish processes for regular goal alignment by reviewing initiatives across teams and ensuring everyone is on the same page.

Cross-functional collaboration is key. Engaging stakeholders early in strategy discussions can unify the team’s direction.

Finally, leverage data analytics to measure progress and refine strategies, ensuring that efforts are always aligned with business goals.”

Telltale Signs Of Inefficiencies And Misaligned Goals

Are collaborative inefficiencies and misaligned goals problems that an organization is typically unaware of? Paula shared the warning signs to watch for.

“Many organizations remain unaware of inefficiencies or misalignments until they manifest as missed deadlines or underperforming campaigns. It’s not uncommon for management to lose touch with some of the more day-to-day challenges so it’s important for them to be in constant communication with their teams about some of the below:

  • Keeping project timelines
  • Number of rounds of revisions which is commonly due to unclear communication
  • And inconsistent messaging across campaigns.

Additionally, if teams are experiencing burnout or higher-than-average turnover, it’s a clear indication that resource constraints or inefficient processes need to be addressed.”

Overcoming Resource Restraints

Resource constraints are a common challenge, there is only so much a team can handle, right? I asked her if there is a framework or steps for helping a team get up and over those challenges.

Paula advised:

“Overcoming resource constraints begins with evaluating your team’s current bandwidth, skills, and tools to identify gaps. From there, it’s important to prioritize high-impact projects and delay or eliminate lower-priority tasks to free up resources.

Structuring your team effectively is another step. Cross-functional teams provide agility, while specialists offer expertise in niche areas, so choose a structure that aligns with your goals.

Outsourcing can also be a practical solution, allowing you to tap into external expertise without overburdening your team. Conducting a tech audit is essential to ensure your tools are optimized and integrated, eliminating redundancies and automating repetitive tasks.

Lastly, continuously reviewing and refining team processes helps maintain adaptability and efficiency as market conditions evolve.”

That last part about a tech audit is an interesting bit of advice. Sometimes there’s a better tool that can make life easier for a marketing team.

Where Does AI Fit Into Enterprise Marketing?

Speaking of tools that marketing teams can use, I next asked her how AI fits into a high functioning marketing team. She said that AI use is often a siloed task.

Paula shared:

“Marketing teams are still navigating how to leverage AI to its fullest potential. We use it all the time for specific tasks but it’s often a siloed task.

The main thing I’m looking forward to this year is seeing AI tools that enable better cross collaboration across marketing teams. It’s important to approach AI as a tool that can help, and not use it to replace the human touch and creativity. The key is to strike a balance—use AI to enhance your processes while maintaining critical human judgment.

As a marketer we’re still the ones in the driver’s seat and we have the responsibility to ensure that AI is being used correctly – and delivering quality.”

I had recently listened to a podcast she participated in where she talked about AI silos, so I asked her to elaborate on how that affects marketing and for her advice on improving collaboration with teams that are using AI.

She answered:

“AI silos occur when individual teams or employees adopt AI tools independently without collaboration or integration. This leads to fragmented processes, duplicated efforts, and inconsistent outputs, all of which undermine marketing efficiency. The impact can prevent teams from leveraging shared insights and can create disjointed campaigns.

To address this, organizations can centralize their AI strategy by appointing a project owner to oversee its implementation. Standardizing tools and processes ensures consistency, while cross-team training helps employees understand how to use AI collaboratively.

Establishing regular check-ins to share insights and results can further strengthen teamwork and ensure that AI is driving value across the organization.”

Advice For Building A High-Functioning Marketing Team

Misaligned goals happen when teams prioritize trends or their own narrow objectives that may not align with the overall priorities of the project.

Engaging stakeholders at the start of a project to establish shared objectives is key to keeping the entire team working together toward the same goal. Analytics can help track performance, help identify marketing gaps and identify where to refine a strategy to make it work better.

Tech audits is a brilliant suggestion because it can improve the ability to reach objectives and milestones. Careful implementation of AI is important to ensure that the team is using it collaboratively instead of in silos.

There’s a lot more to unpack in that interview, it may be useful to read it twice.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Golden Sikorka

18 Essential Accessibility Changes To Drive Increased Website Growth via @sejournal, @skynet_lv

This post was sponsored by “Skynet Technologies USA LLC”.

Did you know that 1 billion people have not reached you or your customers’ websites yet.

1 billion potential customers are waiting for businesses to step up and do what’s right.

Find out if your website is accessible to 1 billion people >>>

Accessibility isn’t just a compliance checkbox anymore – it’s a growth strategy.

The demand for scalable, innovative accessibility solutions has skyrocketed.

And your competition is already making these improvements.

For agencies, this means an unprecedented opportunity to meet clients’ needs while driving revenue.

Learn how you can generate additional revenue and boost your clients’ SERP ranking by gaining access to:

Ready to get started?

How Accessibility Improvements Can Increase Growth

The digital economy thrives on inclusion.

There is a large market of individuals who are not included in modern website usability.

With over a billion people globally living with disabilities, accessible digital experiences open doors to untapped markets.

Do Websites Need To Be Accessible?

The short answer is yes.

How Does An Accessible Website Drive Traffic?

Traffic comes from people who have needs. Of course, everyone has needs, including people with disabilities.

Accessible websites and tools cater to all users, expanding reach to a diverse and often overlooked customer base.

Global Potential & Unlocking New Audiences

From a global perspective, the global community of people with disabilities is a market estimated to hold a staggering $13 trillion in spending power.

By removing barriers and ensuring inclusive digital experiences, you can tap into this 1 billion-person market and drive substantial economic growth.

Digital accessibility helps to increase employment opportunities, education options, and simple access to various banking and financial services for everybody.

Boosts User Experience & Engagement 

Accessibility improvements run parallel with SEO improvements.

In fact, they often enhance overall website performance, which leads to:

  • Better user experience.
  • Higher rankings.
  • Increased traffic.
  • Higher conversion rates.

Ensures Your Websites Are Compliant

Increasing lawsuits against businesses that fail to comply with accessibility regulations have imposed pressure on them to implement accessibility in their digital assets.

Compliance with ADA, WCAG 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, Section 508, Australian DDA, European EAA EN 301 549, UK Equality Act (EA), Indian RPD Act, Israeli Standard 5568, California Unruh, Ontario AODA, Canada ACA, German BITV, Brazilian Inclusion Law (LBI 13.146/2015), Spain UNE 139803:2012, France RGAA standards, JIS X 8341 (Japan), Italian Stanca Act, Switzerland DDA, Austrian Web Accessibility Act (WZG) guidelines aren’t optional. Accessibility solution partnerships ensure to stay ahead of potential lawsuits while fostering goodwill.

6 Steps To Boost Your Growth With Accessibility

  1. To drive growth, your agency should prioritize digital accessibility by following WCAG standards, regularly testing with tools like AXE, WAVE, or Skynet Technologies Website Accessibility Checker, and addressing accessibility gaps. Build accessible design frameworks with high-contrast colors, scalable text, and clear navigation.
  2. Integrate assistive technologies such as keyboard navigation, screen reader compatibility, and video accessibility. Focus on responsive design, accessible forms, and inclusive content strategies like descriptive link text, simplified language, and alternative formats.
  3. Providing accessibility training and creating inclusive marketing materials will further support compliance and growth.
  4. To ensure the website thrives, prioritize mobile-first design for responsiveness across all devices, adhere to WCAG accessibility standards, and incorporate keyboard-friendly navigation and alt text for media.
  5. Optimize page speed and core web vitals while using an intuitive interface with clear navigation and effective call-to-action buttons, and use SEO-friendly content with proper keyword optimization and schema markups to boost visibility.
  6. Ensure security with SSL certificates, clear cookie consent banners, and compliance with privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA. Finally, implement analytics and conversion tracking tools to gather insights and drive long-term growth.

We know this is a lot.

If this sounds good to you, let us help you get set up.

How Can Digital Accessibility Partnerships Supercharge Your Clients’ SEO?

Partnering for digital accessibility isn’t just about inclusivity — it’s a game-changer for SEO, too!

Accessible websites are built with cleaner code, smarter structures, and user-friendly features like alt text and clear headings that search engines love.

Plus, faster load times, mobile-friendly designs, and seamless navigation keep users engaged, reducing bounce rates and boosting rankings. When you focus on making a site accessible to everyone, you’re not just widening your audience—you’re signaling to search engines that the website is high-quality and relevant. It’s a win-win for accessibility and SEO!

12 Essential Factors To Consider For Successful Accessibility Partnerships

  1. Expertise: Look for a provider with a proven track record in digital accessibility, including knowledge of relevant global website accessibility standards and best practices.
  2. Experience: Consider their experience working with similar industries or organizations.
  3. Tools and technologies: Evaluate their use of automated and manual testing tools to identify and remediate accessibility issues.
  4. Price Flexibility: Explore pricing models that align with both the budget and project requirements. Whether for a single site or multiple sites, the service should be compatible and scalable to meet the needs.
  5. Platform Compatibility: Ensure seamless accessibility integration across various platforms, providing a consistent and accessible experience for all users, regardless of the website environment.
  6. Multi-language support: Enhance user experience with global language support, making websites more inclusive and accessible to a global audience.
  7. Regular check-ins: Schedule regular meetings to discuss project progress, address any issues, and make necessary adjustments.
  8. Clear communication channels: Establish clear communication channels (for example: email, and project management tools) to facilitate efficient collaboration.
  9. Transparent reporting: Request detailed reports on the progress of accessibility testing, remediation efforts, and overall project status.
  10. KPIs to measure success: Review the partner’s historical data, especially those similar projects in terms of scale, complexity, and industry.
  11. Evaluate technical expertise: Assess their proficiency in using various accessibility testing tools and ability to integrate different APIs.
  12. Long-term partnership strategy: Compare previous data with the current one for improvement and optimization process. It is crucial for a long-term partnership that there is a specific interval of review and improvements.

    Scaling Accessibility With Smart Partnerships

    All in One Accessibility®: Simplicity meets efficiency!

    The All in One Accessibility® is an AI-powered accessibility tool that helps organizations to enhance their website accessibility level for ADA, WCAG 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, Section 508, Australian DDA, European EAA EN 301 549, UK Equality Act (EA), Indian RPD Act, Israeli Standard 5568, California Unruh, Ontario AODA, Canada ACA, German BITV, Brazilian Inclusion Law (LBI 13.146/2015), Spain UNE 139803:2012, France RGAA standards, JIS X 8341 (Japan), Italian Stanca Act, Switzerland DDA, Austrian Web Accessibility Act (WZG), and more.

    It is available with features like sign language LIBRAS (Brazilian Portuguese Only) integration, 140+ multilingual support, screen reader, voice navigation, smart language auto-detection and voice customization, talk & type, Google and Adobe Analytics tracking, along with premium add-ons including white label and custom branding, VPAT/ACR reports, manual accessibility audit and remediation, PDF remediation, and many more.

    • Quick Setup: Install the widget to any site with ease—no advanced coding required.
    • Feature-Rich Design: From text resizing and color contrast adjustments to screen reader support, it’s packed with tools that elevate the user experience.
    • Revenue Opportunities: Agencies can resell the solution to clients, adding a high-value service to their offerings while earning attractive commissions through the affiliate program.
    • Reduced development costs: Minimizes the financial impact of accessibility remediation by implementing best practices and quick tools.

    Agency Partnership: Scaling accessibility with ease!

    • Extended Service Offerings: The All in One Accessibility® Agency Partnership allows agencies to offer a powerful accessibility widget – quick accessibility solution into their services, enabling them that are in high demand.
    • White Label: As an agency partner, you can offer All in One Accessibility® under their own brand name.
    • Centralized Management: It simplifies oversight by consolidating accessibility data and reporting, allowing enterprises to manage multiple websites seamlessly.
    • Attractive Revenue Streams: Agencies can resell the widget to clients, earning significant revenue through competitive pricing structures and repeat business opportunities.
    • Boost Client Retention: By addressing accessibility needs proactively, agencies build stronger relationships with clients, fostering long-term loyalty and recurring contracts.
    • Increase Market Reach: Partnering with All in One Accessibility® positions agencies as leaders in inclusivity, attracting businesses looking for reliable accessibility solutions.
    • NO Investment, High Return: With no setup costs, scalable features, and up to 30% commission, the partnership enables agencies to maximize profitability with their clients.

    Affiliate Partnership: A revenue opportunity for everyone!

    The All in One Accessibility® Affiliate Partnership program is for content creators, marketers, accessibility advocates, web professionals, 501 (c) organizations (non-profit), and law firms.

    • Revenue Growth through Referrals: The All in One Accessibility® affiliate partnership allows affiliates to earn competitive commissions by promoting a high-demand accessibility solution, turning referrals into consistent revenue.
    • Expanding Market Reach: Affiliates can tap into a diverse audience of businesses seeking ADA and WCAG compliance, scaling both revenue and the adoption of accessibility solutions.
    • Fostering Accessibility Awareness: By promoting the All in One Accessibility® widget, affiliates play a pivotal role in driving inclusivity, helping more websites become accessible to users with disabilities.
    • Leveraging Trusted Branding: Affiliates benefit from partnering with a reliable and recognized quick accessibility improvement tool, boosting their credibility and marketing impact.
    • Scaling with Zero Investment: With user-friendly promotional resources and a seamless onboarding process, affiliates can maximize returns without any costs.

    Use Accessibility As A Growth Engine

    Endeavoring for strategic partnerships with accessibility solution providers is a win-win for agencies aiming to meet the diverse needs of their clients. These partnerships not only enhance the accessibility of digital assets but also create opportunities for growth, and loyalty, top search engine rankings, boost revenue, improve compliance with legal standards, and make you to contribute into digital accessibility world.

    With Skynet Technologies USA LLC, Transform accessibility from a challenge into a revenue-driving partnership. Let inclusivity power the success.

    Ready to get started? Embarking on a digital accessibility journey is simpler than you think! Take the first step by evaluating the website’s current WCAG compliance with a manual accessibility audit.

    For more information, Reach out hello@skynettechnologies.com.


    Image Credits

    Featured Image: Image by Skynet Technologies. Used with permission.

    10 Hosting Trends Agencies Should Watch In 2025

    This post was sponsored by Bluehost. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

    Which hosting service is best for agencies?

    How do I uncover what will be best for my clients in 2025?

    What features should my hosting service have in 2025?

    Hosting has evolved well beyond keeping websites online.

    Hosting providers must align their services to meet clients’ technological needs and keep up with constantly changing technological advances.

    Today, quality hosting companies must focus on speed, security, and scalability. Staying ahead of hosting trends is critical to maintaining competitive offerings, optimizing workflows, and meeting client demands.

    So, what should you watch for in 2025?

    The next 12 months promise significant shifts in hosting technologies, with advancements in AI, automation, security, and sustainability leading the way.

    Understanding and leveraging these trends enables agencies and professionals to provide better client experiences, streamline operations, and reduce the negative effects of future industry changes.

    Trend 1: Enhanced AI & Automation Implemented In Hosting

    AI and automation are already transforming hosting, making it smarter and more efficient for service providers, agencies, brands, and end-point customers alike.

    Hosting providers now leverage AI to optimize server performance, predict maintenance needs, and even supplement customer support with AI-driven features like chatbots.

    As a result, automating routine tasks such as backups, updates, and resource scaling reduces downtime and the need for manual intervention. These innovations are game-changing for those managing multiple client sites and will become increasingly important in 2025.

    It only makes sense.

    Automated systems free up valuable time, allowing you more time to focus on strategic growth instead of tedious maintenance tasks. AI-powered insights can also identify performance bottlenecks, enabling you to address issues before they impact your website or those of your clients.

    Agencies that adopt these technologies this year will not only deliver exceptional service but also be able to position themselves as forward-thinking.

    Bluehost embraces automation with features like automated backups, one-click updates, and a centralized dashboard for easy site management. These tools streamline workflows, enabling agencies and professionals to manage multiple sites with minimal effort while ensuring optimal performance.

    Trend 2: Multi-Cloud & Hybrid Cloud Solutions Are Now Essential

    In 2025, as businesses demand more flexibility and reliability from their online infrastructure, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud solutions will become essential in the hosting world.

    These approaches offer the best of both worlds:

    • The ability to leverage multiple cloud providers for redundancy and performance.
    • The option to combine public and private cloud environments for greater control and customization.

    For agencies managing diverse client needs, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies provide the scalability and adaptability required to meet modern demands. Multi-cloud solutions allow agencies to distribute their clients’ workloads across multiple cloud providers, ensuring that no single point of failure disrupts their operations.

    This feature is particularly valuable for agencies with high-traffic websites, where downtime or slow performance can have a significant impact on revenue and user experience. Hybrid cloud solutions, on the other hand, let agencies blend the scalability of public clouds with the security and control of private cloud environments.

    This service is ideal for clients with sensitive data or compliance requirements, such as ecommerce or healthcare businesses.

    Bluehost Cloud provides scalable infrastructure and tools that enable agencies to customize hosting solutions to fit their clients’ unique requirements. Our cloud hosting solution’s elastic architecture ensures that websites can handle sudden traffic spikes without compromising speed or reliability.

    Additionally, our intuitive management dashboard allows agencies to easily monitor and allocate resources across their client portfolio, making it simple to implement tailored solutions for varying workloads.

    By adopting multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies, agencies can offer their clients enhanced performance, improved redundancy, and greater control over their hosting environments.

    With our scalable solutions and robust toolset, agencies can confidently deliver hosting that grows with their clients’ businesses while maintaining consistent quality and reliability. This flexibility not only meets today’s hosting demands but also helps position your agency for long-term success in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.

    Trend 3: Edge Computing & CDNs Replace AMP For Improving Website Speed

    As online audiences grow, the demand for faster, more responsive websites has never been higher. Edge computing and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are at the forefront of this evolution, enabling websites to reduce latency significantly. For agencies managing clients with diverse and international audiences, these technologies are crucial for improving user experience and ensuring website performance remains competitive.

    Edge computing brings data processing closer to the end user by leveraging servers located at the “edge” of a network, reducing the time it takes for information to travel.

    Combined with CDNs that cache website content on servers worldwide, these technologies ensure faster load times, smoother navigation, and better performance metrics.

    These features are especially beneficial for media-heavy or high-traffic websites, where even a slight delay can impact engagement and conversions.

    Bluehost integrates with leading CDN solutions to deliver content quickly and efficiently to users across the globe. By leveraging a CDN, Bluehost ensures that websites load faster regardless of a visitor’s location, enhancing user experience and SEO performance.

    This integration simplifies the optimization of site speed for agencies with multiple clients. By adopting edge computing and CDN technology, you can help your clients achieve faster load times, improved site stability, and higher customer satisfaction.

    Bluehost’s seamless CDN integration enables you to deliver a hosting solution that meets the expectations of a modern, global audience while building trust and loyalty with your clients.

    Trend 4: Core Web Vitals & SEO Hosting Features Make Or Break Websites

    Core Web Vitals play an important role in today’s SEO, as Google is increasingly emphasizing website performance and user experience in its ranking algorithms. Today, loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability impact a site’s ability to rank well in search results and keep visitors engaged.

    That means optimizing Core Web Vitals isn’t just an SEO task for agencies managing client websites. Fast load times and responsive design are critical parts of delivering a high-quality digital experience. For example, metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which measures how quickly a page’s main content loads, depend heavily on hosting infrastructure.

    Agencies need hosting solutions optimized for these metrics to ensure their clients’ sites stay competitive in the SERPs.

    Bluehost offers a WordPress-optimized hosting environment with features specifically designed to improve load times and server response speeds. From advanced caching technology to robust server architecture, Bluehost ensures that sites meet Core Web Vitals standards with ease.

    Additionally, our hosting solutions include tools for monitoring site performance, allowing agencies to proactively address any issues that could impact rankings or user experience.

    By prioritizing Core Web Vitals and leveraging SEO-focused hosting features, agencies can enhance their clients’ visibility, engagement, and overall online success. With Bluehost’s optimized hosting solutions, you’ll have the tools and infrastructure needed to deliver fast, stable, and high-performing websites that delight users and search engines.

    Trend 5: Sustainable Hosting Practices Help Reduce Energy Consumption

    Sustainability is no longer just a buzzword. It’s a key consideration for businesses and agencies alike. As 2025 progresses, more clients will prioritize environmentally conscious practices, and hosting providers will step up to offer greener solutions, such as energy-efficient data centers and carbon offset programs.

    Migrating to a sustainable hosting provider not only supports client values but also demonstrates a commitment to responsible business practices, which will resonate more with consumers in 2025 than ever before.

    Efficient hosting practices reduce energy consumption and create a more sustainable digital ecosystem. It will also allow you to help clients meet their environmental goals without compromising on performance.

    These benefits are especially valuable for clients with higher energy and performance demands, such as those in ecommerce, media-heavy, or high-traffic industries.

    Bluehost has long been recognized as a trusted hosting provider that operates with efficiency in mind.

    Our robust, energy-efficient infrastructure already aligns with the sustainability goals of environmentally conscious clients.

    In addition, our long-standing reputation, proven history with WordPress, and demonstrable reliability enhance your clients’ sustainability objectives, ensuring they can operate responsibly and confidently.

    By choosing sustainable hosting practices and partners like Bluehost, you can contribute to a greener digital future while reinforcing your clients’ environmental commitments and strengthening client relationships by aligning with their values.

    Trend 6: Security Must Be A Core Offering

    Security is a non-negotiable priority for any website. Cyber threats like data breaches, malware, and DDoS attacks are on the rise, and the consequences of a breach, including lost revenue, damaged reputations, and potential legal issues, can devastate clients. As a result, offering secure hosting solutions with proactive security measures is essential to safeguarding clients’ businesses and building trust.

    These key features include SSL certificates, which protect sensitive data while boosting SEO rankings and user trust, and regular malware scans to prevent vulnerabilities.

    They should also include automated backups that enable quick restoration in the event of a crash or attack and provide comprehensive protection and peace of mind. Essential security features are standard in Bluehost hosting plans, including SSL certificates, daily automated backups, and proactive malware scanning.

    These built-in tools eliminate the need for additional solutions, added complexity, or costs. For agencies, our security features reduce risks for your clients and provide peace of mind.

    By choosing a hosting provider like Bluehost, you can prioritize client security, reinforce client trust, and minimize emergencies, allowing you to avoid spending time and resources addressing threats or repairing damage.

    In short, by partnering with Bluehost, security becomes a core part of your agency’s value proposition.

    Trend 7: Hosting Optimized For AI & Machine Learning Is Key To High Visibility On SERPs

    As artificial intelligence and machine learning become increasingly integrated with websites and applications in 2025, hosting providers must keep pace with the increasing demands these technologies place on infrastructure.

    AI-driven tools like chatbots, recommendation engines, and predictive analytics require significant computational power and seamless data processing.

    AI and machine learning applications often involve handling large datasets, running resource-intensive algorithms, and maintaining real-time responsiveness. Hosting optimized for these needs ensures that websites can perform reliably under heavy workloads, reducing latency and downtime and delivering consistent performance.

    If you plan to be successful, you’ll also require scalable scalable hosting solutions. These solutions allow resources to expand dynamically with demand, accommodate growth, and handle traffic surges.

    Bluehost’s scalable hosting is built to support advanced tools and applications, making it an ideal choice for agencies working on AI-driven projects. Our robust infrastructure delivers consistent performance, and flexibility allows you to scale easily as your client’s needs evolve. By leveraging Bluehost, agencies can confidently deliver AI-integrated websites that meet modern performance demands.

    Trend 8: Managed Hosting Helps You Focus More On Profits

    In 2025, websites will become increasingly complex. Businesses will require higher performance and reliability, and everyone will be looking to operate as lean and efficiently as possible. These trends mean managed hosting will become the go-to solution for agencies and their clients.

    Managed hosting shifts time-intensive technical maintenance away from agencies and business owners by including features such as automatic updates, performance monitoring, and enhanced security. In short, managed hosting enables you to simplify workflows, save time, and deliver consistent quality to your clients.

    These hosting services are particularly valuable for WordPress websites, where regular updates, plugin compatibility checks, and security enhancements occur frequently but are essential to maintaining optimal performance.

    Managed hosting also typically includes tools like staging environments, which allow agencies to test changes and updates without risking disruptions to live sites and ensure you can deliver a seamless experience to clients.

    Bluehost offers managed WordPress hosting that includes automatic updates, staging environments, and 24/7 expert support. These features allow you to handle technical details efficiently while focusing on delivering results for your clients without added stress or time.

    Trend 9: The Shift Toward Decentralized Hosting Boosts Your Brand’s Longevity

    In 2025, expect to see decentralized hosting gain attention as a futuristic approach to web hosting. Like Bitcoin and similar advancements, the technology leverages blockchain technology and peer-to-peer networks to create hosting environments that prioritize privacy, resilience, and independence from centralized control.

    While this model appears to provide exciting new opportunities, it’s still in the early stages. It faces challenges in scalability, user-friendliness, and widespread adoption, which agencies can’t typically rely on for client sites.

    Decentralized hosting may become a viable option for specific use cases, such as privacy-focused projects or highly distributed systems. However, centralized hosting providers still offer the best balance of reliability, scalability, and accessibility for most businesses and agencies today.

    For these reasons, agencies managing client websites will continue to focus on proven, reliable hosting solutions that deliver consistent performance and robust support.

    So, while decentralized hosting may gain traction this year, Bluehost will continue to provide a trustworthy hosting environment designed to meet the needs of modern websites. With a strong emphasis on reliability, scalability, and user-friendly management tools, we offer a proven solution agencies can depend on to deliver exceptional client results.

    Trend 10: Scalable Hosting For High-Growth Websites Is Key For Growth

    As businesses grow, their websites will experience increasing traffic and resource demands. High-growth websites, such as e-commerce platforms, content-heavy blogs, or viral marketing campaigns, require hosting solutions that can scale instantly. And scalable hosting is critical to delivering consistent user experiences and avoiding downtime during peak periods.

    Scalable hosting like Bluehost ensures your clients’ websites can easily adjust resources like bandwidth, storage, and processing power to meet fluctuating demands. Our scalable hosting solutions are designed for high-growth websites. Our unmetered bandwidth and infrastructure were built to handle traffic surges, ensuring websites remain fast and accessible.

    These features make us the ideal choice for agencies looking to future-proof their clients’ hosting needs.

    As the digital landscape continues to evolve in 2025, keeping up with the latest trends in hosting is essential for agencies to provide top-tier service, drive client satisfaction, and maintain a competitive edge. From AI and automation to scalability and security, the future of hosting demands flexible, efficient solutions tailored to modern needs.

    By understanding and leveraging these trends, you can position your agency as a trusted partner and deliver exceptional results to your clients, whether by adopting managed hosting or integrating CDNs.

    Bluehost hosting will meet today’s demands while helping to prepare agencies like yours for tomorrow. With features like 100% uptime guaranteed through our Service Level Agreement (SLA), 24/7 priority support, and built-in tools like SSL certificates, automated backups, and advanced caching, Bluehost offers a robust and reliable hosting environment.

    Additionally, Bluehost Cloud makes switching easy and cost-effective with $0 migration costs and credit for remaining contracts, giving you the flexibility to transition seamlessly without the high cost.

    Take your agency’s hosting strategy to the next level with Bluehost. Discover how our comprehensive hosting solutions can support your growth, enhance client satisfaction, and keep your business ahead of the curve.


    Image Credits

    Featured Image: Image by Bluehost. Used with permission.

    Wix Rolling Out AI-Powered Site Planning & Visualization Tool via @sejournal, @martinibuster

    Wix announced it is rolling out an AI-based tool that simplifies the site planning and visualization step, dramatically compressing the time from planning to site rollout.  The  new tool enables agencies and enterprise users to create a visual map and wireframe website representation for planning new websites, simplifying one of the most fundamental tasks of creating a high performing website.

    Wix

    Wix is a cloud-based website builder for small to medium size businesses to enterprise level companies that handles all of the back-end technology necessary for creating a professional online web presence with a state of the art website performance and search optimization features. It offers complete customization, marketing and integrations with Google business features that small businesses, agencies and advanced users require.

    Site Planning And Visualization

    One of the first steps for creating a high performance website that is user friendly, easy to navigate and search optimized is planning the site structure. This is important for every website but especially important for large websites with thousands of products or topics. A taxonomical topic structure that makes it easy for users to locate what they’re looking for begins with creating a visual representation of major category sections with hierarchical nodes that represent subcategories and all of the associated web pages.

    Wix’s new tool is an AI-powered tool that can create the visualization after users input the project details. The visual representation allows agencies and designers to view what the site structure will look like and make decisions ahead of time. The visual representation can then be exported to share with clients and stakeholders. The AI can even pre-insert content suggestions. The resulting visual representation can be fully customized and edited. A task that ordinarily can take weeks to months is compressed to days.

    Wix explains how it works:

    “Agencies and web professionals can input project details, including business type, site description, goals, target audience, and tone of voice. After filling in the information, a tailored sitemap structure is created detailing pages and sections.

    If preferred, bespoke wireframes can be generated to kick off the creation process. Both the tailor-made visual sitemap and wireframes are created with pages, sections and relevant business applications.”

    The tool’s built-in collaboration functions can reflect changes made to the sitemap in real-time, speeding up the process of getting project buy-in and moving forward.

    Read Wix’s announcement:

    Visual Sitemap And Wireframe Generator: Site planning, accelerated

    Featured Image by Shutterstock/Graphic farm

    AI & Automation for SEO: Scale Efforts and Drive Revenue [Live Webinar] via @sejournal, @lorenbaker

    Are you ready to leverage AI to transform your digital marketing approach and drive unparalleled results?

    AI is no longer an option. It’s essential to stay competitive in today’s fast-paced digital world.

    The question isn’t if, but how quickly and efficiently you can integrate AI into your SEO strategy and marketing operations.

    Join us for an insightful webinar, AI & Automation for SEO: Scale Efforts and Drive Revenue, where Manick Bhan will guide you through how to automate your SEO strategies and implementation, saving you time, resources, and money while maximizing results for your clients or business.

    Why You Should Attend

    AI is reshaping how digital marketers approach SEO. In this webinar, you’ll learn practical strategies for integrating automation into your workflows and discover real-world examples of agencies leveraging AI to produce massive results for their clients.

    In This Webinar, We’ll Show You

    • How to automate your SEO process: Learn the steps to turn your business or agency into an AI-powered marketing machine.
    • Real-world case studies: Explore success stories from agencies that have harnessed AI-driven SEO strategies to achieve impressive outcomes.
    • Scaling your operations: Get insights into how automation helps you scale your business and drive more revenue.

    Meet Manick Bhan

    Leading this session is Manick Bhan, Founder of Search Atlas and SEO automation expert, who will equip you with the tools and knowledge to enhance your services, improve campaign performance, and scale your marketing efforts.

    Exclusive Live Demo of Search Atlas!

    Don’t miss our exclusive breakout session after the main presentation!

    We’ll offer a live-only demonstration on how to harness the power of Search Atlas, giving you a real-time walkthrough on AI-driven SEO automation.

    Who Should Attend?

    This webinar is ideal for:

    • Digital marketers aiming to integrate AI into their SEO strategies
    • SEO professionals looking to streamline operations and improve performance
    • Agency owners interested in scaling operations and delivering high-value results

    Live Q&A Session

    Following the presentation, there will be a live Q&A session where you can ask your questions and get expert advice on implementing SEO automation in your workflows.

    Don’t Miss Out!

    AI-powered SEO is the future, and the future is now. Reserve your spot today to learn how to supercharge your business using the latest in AI and automation.

    Can’t attend the live session? No worries—sign up anyway and we’ll send you a recording of the main presentation.

    Get ready to elevate your SEO with AI. Register today!

    Preparing For The Feedless Future With Google Merchant Center Next via @sejournal, @gilgildner

    For some years now (ever since Google Merchant Center was introduced in 2010), ecommerce advertisers have been working with product feeds.

    It’s historically been a complex and often fragile process, but thanks to the introduction of Google Merchant Center Next, we have some new tools at our fingertips.

    Here’s a look at how things are changing with Next.

    The History Of Google Merchant Center

    Back in the very beginning, we remember having to download CSV files from the website with all product information, and embarking on a long process of cleaning up and formatting the data so that it could be manually uploaded into Google Merchant Center (GMC).

    In the early days, before policies became more strict, you could even use Merchant Center to advertise anything from repair services to round-the-world gap year vacations!

    But in time, GMC became far more sophisticated (and also more restricted). Along with increased restrictions came the ease of use. Uploading data became much easier and more stable.

    Eventually, plugins and connectors began doing most of the job for you, then platforms like Shopify got native integrations, and now with the advent of Google Merchant Center Next, you almost don’t need feeds at all!

    Common Complaints About GMC

    For most of the past 14 years of Merchant Center history, you’ve likely heard a few bits of common wisdom repeated ad nauseam:

    Optimize your shopping feeds inside of GMC! Keep your Google categories accurately assigned inside of GMC! Add your metadata inside of GMC! Fill out all the boxes in GMC!

    The world is slowly changing, and now, with GMC Next, you don’t have to make these changes within the GMC interface.

    The changes need to happen on the website. While feeds won’t totally go away overnight (and neither will the need to optimize products), Google Merchant Center Next is ushering in a new feed-less era.

    Announced at Google Marketing Live 2023, Merchant Center Next actually hasn’t taken hold as rapidly as expected. Even over a year after its announcement, most but not all of our client accounts have shifted over.

    GMC Next started rolling out for new users first, but Google has stated the full rollout should be completed sometime in 2024. Whether this is the actual date is yet to be seen.

    What Is Google Merchant Center Next?

    The core differentiator with Merchant Center Next is the simplification of website verification and the automatic population of product feeds from your website. This means that Google will scrape product information, pricing, imagery, and more directly from your site.

    Additionally, it has integrated a new feature called Product Studio that allows you to use AI to update or change your product images and offers more comprehensive performance insights.

    Screenshot from Google Merchant Center NextScreenshot from Google Merchant Center Next, August 2024

    Many marketers had a negative gut reaction to the announcement of Next, but our entire team at Discosloth was actually pretty excited about this development.

    Feed management (and especially the involvement of any third-party integrations, connectors, and tools) has always been a bit clunky, so the removal of any friction is a welcome feature.

    While you can still use Shopify to upload your product data, many people have found it to be more difficult with some products not being uploaded properly. As it turns out, feeds have technically gone away, but in a way, they have actually just been renamed to Data Sources.

    Screenshot from Google Merchant Center NextScreenshot from Google Merchant Center Next, August 2024

    It appears that product feeds, as we know them, might be going away.

    This doesn’t mean that product data management will become obsolete; rather, it indicates a shift in how this data is handled within the Merchant Center Next ecosystem.

    The Mindset Change

    I ultimately think that removing feeds is a fantastic approach because it shifts the mindset of marketers. Rather than focusing on incremental metadata optimization on hidden feeds, it will instead encourage advertisers to update & improve the actual listings on the actual site.

    Rather than just making sure endless attributes are filled out in the backend, it means that the actual website and associated metadata will need to be correctly optimized. This eliminates double work and conflicting data.

    When the website itself is the primary focus, it has positive effects on performance for all channels, like organic or social – not just paid.

    While many paid marketers have been focused only on optimizing products and images within the Merchant Center, without paying any attention to the website listings, now may be the time to change that approach.

    Thanks to this, the website owners may start seeing a better overall conversion rate for the entire website, across all channels.

    This is a great step in the right direction. Contrary to what many naysayers think about the onset of AI and generative automation, I’m a fan of taking away the grunt work from marketing and handing it all to the robots.

    A more automated approach to feed management will undoubtedly grant us a lot more bandwidth to make actual strategy and content decisions on the products themselves.

    While we’ve been seeing more comprehensive data on product performance appearing in Google Merchant Center over the last few years, now may be the time to dig a little bit deeper.

    While GA4 has widely become useless for advanced data analysis, the new GMC Next allows us to see website traffic for both paid and organic traffic from product listings, review competition and visibility, and get better data on the best-selling products and new trends.

    Perhaps the feature I like the most: comparing the prices of your stock-keeping units (SKUs) vs. competitors. This is the kind of data that has been classically underused.

    Instead of a misguided focus on inserting our favorite keywords into descriptions, we can finally focus on the quality and competitiveness of your products.

    Screenshot from Google Merchant Center Next, August 2024

    Taking Merchant Center Beyond Optimization

    Performance Max and Demand Gen campaign types have given us some new tools and strategies to use in ecommerce advertising, but it’s become harder to see granular data on where your ads are appearing, detailed performance metrics, and perhaps most notably, which keyword terms & specific audiences these campaigns are appearing for.

    Many advertisers are afraid that Google Merchant Center Next may be on a similar path of removing even more granular data and making it even harder for advertisers to be specific in our ad targeting.

    But so far, most of the early complaints people had when Next was introduced have already been fixed. We got access back to supplemental feeds, we can now make bulk changes (even though it’s not as easy as it used to be) and we can once again appeal any incorrectly disapproved products.

    Of course SKUs and product feeds need to be optimized, but this shouldn’t be anything out of the ordinary.

    Optimizing this should be an assumed baseline for any ecommerce storefront.

    Merchant Center Next, as we’ve found, is most effectively used for tactics far beyond what the old Merchant Center offered. Some of the most important tactics we now use include things like getting insights on specific SKUs to make sure you always hold in inventory, and diving deep into competitive visibility and pricing in order to massively increase sales.

    More resources: 


    Featured Image: N Universe/Shutterstock

    Survey Shows Where SEOs Get Their Clients via @sejournal, @martinibuster

    Aleyda Solis recently published the results of her SEOFOMO survey that revealed actionable facts about where SEOs are getting their clients, what kinds of clients they’re getting and how they’re promoting themselves to get more clients.

    Aleyda Solis (LinkedIn) is a popular digital marketer specializing in International SEO. She publishes the SEOFOMO + MarketingFOMO Newsletters, is well known for promoting best practices in SEO and speaking at search conferences around the world.

    This survey, conducted with a self-selected group of 337 respondents, offers a view of how SEO businesses get more business, who their clients are and what they do for them in 2024. The data offers valuable insights for digital marketers who want to grow their businesses.

    For example, most of the respondents indicated that their area of specialization is Technical SEO. That makes sense because fixing website issues that make it easy for search engines to crawl, index and understand content is at the hear of what it means to optimize a site for search engines.

    This is the kind of work SEOs specialize in:

    • 64% Technical SEO
    • 60% Content Focused SEO
    • 54% SEO Generalist
    • 51% SEO Management
    • 14% Link Builder
    • 8% Other

    Only 14% of respondents answered that they build links for clients. That doesn’t mean that link building is not a priority but rather it may reflect that link building continues to be a difficult area to specialize in because of its complexity.

    Who Answered The Survey

    Aleyda’s survey consists of a sample of 337 respondents who self-identify as SEO specialists.

    44% of respondents are Full-Time Agency SEO consultant
    32 % are freelance and independent SEO consultants
    24% are part-time SEO consultants
    6% identified simply as Other

    Data About SEO Clients

    The results of the survey indicated that most of the respondents work with small and medium sized clients, with 49% working with sites less than 100K URLs and 33% working with client sites containing between 100k to 1 million URLs.

    Local search SEO is perhaps the largest segment of small to medium businesses. This market, once challenging to scale with quality service at a reasonable price, has evolved. Today, agencies can partner with platforms like Wix or Duda, which both offer a high-performance website building platform that integrate marketing and SEO tools and also streamline client management and billing. These new technologies enables SEO agencies of any size to more easily scale, allowing them to focus on marketing and SEO rather than the underlying platform technology.

    SEOs who self-identified as working with larger clients represented a total of 18% of the respondents. I’ve worked with large multinational B2B companies and there’s good money in it but it’s also can be frustratingly limited to how much influence you can have with the SEO. You just have to take your wins where you can get them and accept that you’ll never get your wish list fulfilled.

    This Is Where SEOs Get Their Business

    There is a great diversity in where SEOs get their business, which perhaps reflects individual priorities and strengths. Not everyone has the time to be a social media influencer nor the ability to get up and speak in front of audiences at industry events, right?

    Referrals

    The most highly cited source of clients is referrals from other companies and clients, accounting for 77% of responses. Putting in the hard work to cultivate happy clients and to promote an SEO business pays off in referrals.

    Ranking In Search Results

    SEOs who focus on ranking for phrases that brings them more clients was the second largest reported source of new clients. This approach makes sense for SEOs who have a geographic reach or who focus on a single vertical like personal injury. Combining a vertical (like personal injury or HVAC) with a geographic market could be easier to rank than trying to rank for the general term, especially given that Google tends to personalize general search queries.

    Social Media

    Participating in social media was reported by many respondents as a source of SEO clients, with 26% indicating that social media is a source of new clients and referrals.

    That totally makes sense. I’ve seen SEOs with little experience come out of nowhere and get SEO business by extensive social media posting and participation in conversations as well as starting conversations. There’s a strong validating component that comes with cultivating a large social media following so it makes sense that social media is an important channel for obtaining referrals.

    Something I see in the most successful SEOs who promote with social media is that they don’t tend to post on controversial topics like politics but do tend to get behind popular causes. Social media is a lot of work but the SEOFOMO survey validates social media as an important channel to focus on for building a client base.

    Events

    Twenty five percent of respondents cited Events as a channel for cultivating clients. Speaking at events can be a good way to get clients or at least to build a good reputation that leads to client referrals.

    Speaking at events can be tricky because you have to have something interesting to say but it can’t be too complicated because you’re going to lose or bore the audience. I’ve been speaking at events since around 2004 and have seen others freeze in fear, spontaneously utter crazy things or bore the audience with a monotone speaking style (which is why I sometimes choose to speak first!).

    Here are the top sources of SEO client business:

    • Client Or Company Referrals 77%
    • SEO 39%
    • Social Media 26%
    • Industry Events 25%
    • Blog Posts, Studies, Research
    • Other 15%
    • Cold Outreach 14%
    • 9% Paid Outreach

    Getting Clients Requires Proactive Work

    Despite that so many SEOs reported receiving client and company referrals, reaching that point requires putting in the time to cultivate happy clients, marketing their business in person and online, and demonstrating thought leadership. Everyone has their superpower, some are great speakers, some are great thinkers. Some SEOs find happiness making videos and while others are more comfortable sharing on podcasts. Whatever your superpower is, get out there to discover it then be the best at what you excel at.

    Read the results of the survey here:

    The SEOFOMO State of SEO Consulting – Survey 2024 Results

    Featured Image by Shutterstock/Khosro

    10 Creative Ways To Motivate Your Marketing Team via @sejournal, @jasonhennessey

    Everyone loves a good pizza party, but there are many more fun and creative ways to motivate your marketing team!

    Motivation is about creating an environment where people can do their best work, offering incentives that meet real needs, and building a healthy team culture.

    Giving incentives for hard work can significantly increase company loyalty, prevent burnout, and keep the creative juices flowing.

    It’s not only about rewarding performance. Your team should feel supported and that they have the trust and appreciation of their peers and managers.

    In this list, we share some unique ways to motivate your marketing team while promoting a positive company culture and continued performance.

    1. Convenient Rewards Programs

    Gift cards, vouchers, and other flexible perks can address the needs of employees by letting them choose how and when they use the rewards. These can be merit-based, but making them permanent perks for all team members can help increase retention.

    Many companies offer business-focused rewards programs to make implementation easier on your end.

    Uber for Business is a great example of a program that allows businesses to offer perks to employees, such as ride and meal vouchers.

    Regularly improving an employee’s day or making their commute a little easier is a great way to show that you care about their wellbeing as well as their performance.

    2. Remote Flexibility

    Since the boom of remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic, working from home (or from a cozy coffee shop) is now easier than ever.

    If your company still requires your marketing team to come into the office, it might be worth considering a more flexible work model.

    Remote or hybrid work allows employees to enjoy greater flexibility in their schedules, which reduces commuting time and lets them structure their day in a way that suits their needs.

    Not only does this promote better work-life balance, it can also lead to improved employee retention and productivity.

    3. “Weekly Wins”

    Allow your marketing team to share their wins and gain encouragement from other team members.

    Daily stand-up meetings are often all housekeeping and business; this is a missed opportunity to showcase the amazing things your team is working on.

    Dedicate a time each week to share “weekly wins” – or any other catchy name to match.

    Announcing accomplishments can boost morale while encouraging all the marketers on your team to participate, identify their wins, and strive for success.

    4. Mentorship Hour

    Most employees identify longevity and upward mobility as essential factors when deciding to stay with a company.

    Unfortunately, many managers create an environment of stagnation by not providing mentorship, training, or opportunities for growth. Implementing a mentorship program could be a great way to keep your team motivated and feeling supported.

    Whether that’s pairing some of your senior team members with junior marketers to hone their skills, or allocating a portion of your training budget to coaching or learning platforms, continued education in the workplace shows your team that you are willing to invest in career development and skills.

    5. Local Activities & Events

    Team Happy Hour is always a favorite, but it can also feel overdone.

    Why not mix it up with some more creative activities? Some great ideas include mini golf, escape rooms, sporting events, hiking, wilderness retreats, and concerts, to name a few.

    Now, not every type of event will be everyone’s cup of tea. Attendance should be optional.

    However, getting creative with your team events can help you build rapport and nurture relationships between team members. You could always survey your marketing team to field ideas about cool things to do in your area.

    6. Friendly Competition

    Turn mundane tasks into a friendly competition by creating games, charts, or leaderboards tracking success. These don’t have to be highly structured; in fact, the more fun, the better!

    For example, marketing team members can place a sticker every time they post a video that goes viral.

    Or, create funny bingo cards with various milestones that your team can check off – and then win a prize.

    7. Lunch-And-Learn

    Even the junior team members have something to share, and a “lunch and learn” allows them to share knowledge.

    Team members can volunteer to share a unique learning from the week, a tutorial on something they’ve accomplished, or a think-piece on something they find super cool to the group.

    This allows team members to share their insights and learn from their colleagues.

    8. Office Aesthetics

    If your marketing team works from a company office, then you’ll want to make sure their workspace is as inviting as possible.

    Office aesthetics do matter – from incorporating elements like artwork and plants, to comfortable furniture and community spaces.

    A comfortable yet focused space both helps to promote productivity and collaboration between team members. Yes, ping-pong tables are still a thing.

    9. Workshops (Without The Work)

    Give your marketing team time off from the daily grind by bringing in guest speakers or hosting a workshop.

    This can be a time for your team to hear fresh insights, learn new techniques, and explore industry trends.

    It can also be inspirational to hear from marketing leaders on what works well and the lessons they’ve learned.

    10. Join The Club

    Give your team a piece of the company culture by offering participation in the brand’s podcast, YouTube channel, or blog.

    These channels can allow team members to share their own insights, grow their professional brand, and build trust in the company.

    Your team likely brings a treasure trove of experience to share with your audience. Giving your team these platforms can be a great motivator and vote of confidence in their skills.

    A Little Support Goes A Long Way

    Many business owners forget how important it is to provide continued support and incentives for their marketing teams.

    Your team wants to feel that you respect their work, energy, and contributions to the company. There are many effective and creative ways to show your marketing team you care.

    From career growth opportunities to remote flexibility to customizable perks, every business should incorporate some incentive program to encourage team retention and promote well-being.

    Not only do happy marketers do better work, but they are more likely to stick around for the long run. This can pay off for your company for years to come.

    More resources: 


    Featured Image: Lucky Business/Shutterstock

    How Agencies Can Have Successful Client Partnerships [Part 2] via @sejournal, @coreydmorris

    Let me start by saying that I know you’re successful and probably wonder what you can learn from me as an agency owner, leader, or staffer.

    I will humbly admit that I can and do continue to learn from you; I have some great relationships with other agency owners and always learn something when I’m in the room with them – even if it sometimes feels more like a therapy session than one where we solve all of our problems.

    The agency business is hard.

    Whether we’re talking about advertising, digital, PR, or other niches and specializations, we’re in a hard industry. We care deeply about people – our own and those who are our clients – as well as the missions and causes that factor into the reasons we’re in our current gigs.

    This article is my companion and “part 2” in this series. The first was about how brands can have successful relationships with agencies. In this one, I’m taking the other side.

    I’m here today to share the 8 things I’ve learned over my nearly 20 years in agencies – mostly from the mistakes I have made – so if there’s anything you haven’t experienced, you don’t have to go through it yourself.

    1. Know What You Want Or Need

    This seems blunt, and I apologize if so. But it probably should be.

    If you don’t fully push clients to share their goals or help define what success looks like for your partnership and their investment in an agency (or any resources), you’ll risk wasted dollars and time (for both sides) in getting to their ROI goals and risk churn or attrition of the client relationship.

    For some clients, it is a process to figure out what they want and many agencies (including mine) have a robust planning and strategy process to help get to the definition and strategy mapping stage.

    However, if you don’t work to elicit objectives and truths for their ROI math and measures that show if something is profitable or not, they might not be ready to go down the path of evaluating an agency partnership and, unfortunately, may sign on with you, but not last long.

    2. Be Clear On Communication

    I often emphasize to prospects and clients that I want them to be bold and honest and to share with us the details of when and how they want to be communicated with.

    That is definitely not a one-way street.

    Whether you have highly defined communication processes and cadences or typically adapt them to the client, I want to encourage you to be clear early in the relationship about what works best for your agency.

    Be open to sharing how you like to communicate. That could be through email, Slack, text, phone calls, scheduled meetings, tickets, or messages in a project management system. Whatever it is, when it is, and what the response times they can expect, you are definitely best served in sharing about your communication parameters.

    We never want clients guessing or our staff being caught up in out-of-cycle, off-hour messages or misaligned response windows.

    Despite the constant change in subject matter (that we have to contend with), algorithms, and attribution, one of the biggest reasons prospects and clients still reach out to me is that they weren’t getting the communication they expected from their previous agency.

    I know this is a two-way problem, and in many cases, the agency would probably acknowledge communication was an issue, too – or wish that they knew, as it is something that is, in many cases, easy to correct compared to the other challenges we face in meeting performance goals in an ever-changing marketplace.

    3. Remember The Scope

    My companion article mentions scope, and I want to make sure it isn’t lost or forgotten on the agency side as well. I’m as guilty as anyone of wanting to add value (aka over-service) to clients to show them love in the relationship.

    Despite the goodwill built and the potential for growing lifetime value with a client, we have to make sure that our teams understand the scope.

    If you have tailored scope documents to different clients, then maybe your team is really dedicated to scope management. However, regardless of what your scope management looks like, if you aren’t tracking utilization, efficiency, and profitability in your agency – down to the client level – then you’re likely operating without all of the information you need.

    It is really easy for an owner, salesperson, or anyone to get a scope approved in a contract, SOW, MSA, or other document and then for the team to take over and not look back at it.

    Be diligent about what is in scope and what is out of scope, and have dedicated processes to monitor and implement the proper change orders and management techniques to stay on budget in a professional manner.

    4. Be Invested

    This is a weird one. We all say that we are invested and excited about any client who comes through our doors and chooses to work with us—and that we choose to work with. However, I have seen a lot of strange things in my career.

    Again, no judgment here, and I can’t say that my team has been fully engaged or invested in every single relationship. Naturally, there are clients and brands in some less-than-sexy industries.

    There are clients who are not the easiest to connect with on a personal level. There are clients who are not themselves invested in the work. Or, there are clients who are not pleasant to interact with, and for any number of reasons, you can’t fire them at this moment.

    In any situation, it shows when we aren’t invested in the client. Maybe they were the first to show it, or maybe we were. They could be quiet quitting on us.

    Whatever it is, we need to show our commitment to not just the day-to-day but to being the idea-bringing, problem-solving, solution-seeking, and proactive communicating member of their team that we can be. We must show our commitment and do all that we can to be fully invested in the relationship.

    5. Share Your Expectations

    Understanding and managing client expectations is important in the agency/client relationship. It has been talked about forever and will continue to be.

    Expectations, however, are a two-way street. We want to know what our clients expect and to help shape those expectations to be realistic based on the scope, our expertise, or the scale of the services we’re offering.

    However, what if we also stated what we expect of our clients? I’m not saying it is a perfect process, as the party who is paying the bill typically wants to feel catered to and have their expectations met.

    At the same time, as I think back on some of my team’s biggest challenges, they often stem from some type of asset, approval, deliverable, or step that a client hasn’t followed through on or done in a timely manner.

    Did we do our best to clearly state our expectations on what we expected from the client? Did they know the consequences of not delivering?

    Whether it is a balanced, mutual client agreement, a manifesto, bill of rights, or some other expectation-setting tool or document, I believe that agencies (including mine) should do a better job of stating our expectations while also trying to understand, manage, and set those of the client.

    6. Be Patient, Yet Expect Accountability

    This one is hard – sometimes really hard.

    Accountability can be intimidating and something that is hard for agencies to accept as we typically, by default, don’t have control of client branding decisions, sales teams, ultimate marketing approvals, product roadmaps, or financial performance.

    Yes, we often can get transparent ROI math, access to CRM, and possibly a seat at the marketing table.

    The difficulty of accountability is that when we don’t have full control, we often can’t be fully accountable for results and actions. In relationships with little digital agency accountability, it is easy to stay on the search or marketing side of the table. That means doing what we can from the outside or a couple of levels deep.

    We can report marketing metrics and KPIs and collaborate, but ultimately, it is up to the client to judge the effort’s ROI and connect all the dots.

    On the other hand, to get to the depth we need in order to fully prove our ROI, we might not agree with or like the decisions being made and still have to settle for a certain level of accountability that isn’t totally fair to us.

    In any situation, we must find a balance between being patient as we navigate getting as deep as possible with our clients versus pushing too hard or being walled off from information.

    7. Provide A Clear Escalation Path

    Most people in the business world are respectful and professional and want to maintain a positive reputation.

    This leads to cordial relationships and often great camaraderie between people on the client and agency sides of the relationship.

    However, if the day-to-day person on the agency side is close to the work or close to the client contact, chances are that the client contact may not feel super comfortable providing negative feedback.

    Feedback is a great tool in general, as getting it early and often in a relationship allows for minor adjustments to strategy, communication, or other factors in the relationship. However, if someone doesn’t know where to give objective feedback or doesn’t feel they can do it without hurting feelings or being confrontational, then that is a problem.

    I mentioned quiet quitting earlier.

    I have observed a lot of quiet quitting of clients in agency relationships over the past couple of years. While I don’t know that having an escalation path is the biggest factor, I can definitely recommend making it clear and comfortable for the client to know how to give direct feedback, anonymous feedback, and feedback to others in the chain of command in a way that will be handled professionally so they aren’t shy about giving it.

    8. Celebrate

    This is possibly the most overlooked aspect of any agency relationship. It might be easy to keep the client at arms distance or even to assume they are celebrating their own wins separate from yours.

    Assuming they have real wins in their company that have any attribution to or opportunity to bring in your agency for, then encourage it!

    Good agencies care about their clients and their success. Companies who see that success and feel like their agency is a partner, not a vendor, should naturally want to celebrate together.

    If you have a partnership that isn’t at arms length, please share your successes with the client and push them to share data and reasons to celebrate with you as well.

    With how many years I’ve been doing this, I know our type. I know that we’re agency people who know how to properly party and celebrate things and love to hear about wins and share them.

    Chances are, if we are good at sharing wins and cultivating a culture for our clients to share wins with us, we’ll be able to properly party with our clients and be one team instead of two in the relationship.

    It might not seem like a big deal, but believe me – in the post-COVID era and in a decade with a lot of burnout, we need to celebrate wins more than ever.

    Have Honest, Clear, and Difficult Conversations Earlier

    While some of what I talked about might feel like tough love, please know that I will be the first to say that I’m not perfect, nor is my team.

    Everything I have shared is what I believe in and is also something I want to be accountable for.

    Whether it is setting expectations, making sure the fit with the client is right for both sides, being open to honest feedback, managing scope, or any number of other things that you can do to enhance the client experience and have smooth client relationships, I want to challenge you to test these things out and see how they improve retention, performance, and efficiency in your agency.

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