Scaling A Small Agency
-
I have reached a placed where I now have several clients and we're charged closer to the $2k/month mark for our SEO services. We normally partner with the client's inhouse copywriter or content person so that's a piece we don't have to take on in house...however we do provide content strategy for their person to execute.
I'm now at a place where I want to scale and offer link building but quality link building services. I do it all myself and I really can't keep up with the time management and amount of labor that goes into quality link building. We're not looking to outsource or pay $10/hr for link building as I know we won't get the quality and impact our client's want.
Can anyone speak to hiring people for SEO/Link building purposes for a small SEO agency? Right now it's myself and 2 interns, but even the interns don't fully know SEO. Just trying to figure out how best to proceed with scaling and how much to pay a part timer we bring in house. Also....how on earth do you all manage link building projects for multiple clients. I hope the $2K I'm charging is a fair rate...I feel like I should be charging more.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
At scale way to check content in google?
Is there any tools people know about where I can verify that Google is seeing all of our content at scale. I know I can take snippets and plug them into Google to see if we are showing up, but this is very time consuming and want to know across a bulk of pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Large-Scale Penguin Cleanup - How to prioritize?
We are conducting a large-scale Penguin cleanup / link cleaning exercise across 50+ properties that have been on the market mostly all for 10+ years. There is a lot of link data to sift through and we are wondering how we should prioritize the effort. So far we have been collecting backlink data for all properties from AHref, GWT, SeoMajestic and OSE and consolidated the data using home-grown tools. As a next step we are obviously going through the link cleaning process. We are interested in getting feedback on how we are planning to prioritize the link removal work. Put in other words we want to vet if the community agrees with what we consider are the most harmful type of links for penguin. Priority 1: Clean up site-wide links with money-words; if possible keep a single-page link Priority 2: Clean up or rename all money keyword links for money keywords in the top 10 anchor link name distribution Priority 3: Clean up no-brand sitewide links; if possible keep a single-page link Priority 4: Clean up low-quality links (other niche or no link juice) Priority 5: Clean up multiple links from same IP C class Does this sound like a sound approach? Would you prioritize this list differently? Thank you for any feedback /T
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomypro1 -
Large scale change of incoming anchor text/alt tag image links
I provide SEO services in-house and for clients for a ecommerce and web design company. For every client site we create or host we provide a image link on the bottom linking back to our company website. I started researching competitors that offer same services for our industry that have top Google rankings for all the terms we are targeting and i just realized they rank that well because their image/anchor text link they place on client sites is alt tagged for that specific keyword. We have not been optimizing or utilizing this easy keyword backlink method. I am now wanting to go to all of our clients sites and change our backlinks to target the keyword we are optimizing for but my concern is will that number of incoming anchor text/image alt tag links cause us to get penalized from google for either over optimization or them seeing 100's of backlinks keyword specific just change overnight. What is the best way to go about this change in a safe way to avoid or risk penalty from Google? 99% of all of our client backlinks are in the footer so they show up on every single page and they are all images. Would it have a different affect if i add a alt tag to those images so that we get the oncoming link juice of that specific keyword? One of my concerns is over optimization, since some of our clients have 1000's of pages on their website. so that is 1000's of incoming exact match keyword links. I feel like the danger is low for being penalized but i would rather be safe then sorry and get additional feedback. Thanks, Stephen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VITALBGS0 -
I have a general site for my insurance agency. Should I create niche sites too?
I work with several insurance agencies and I get this questions several times each month. Most agencies offer personal and business insurance and in a certain geographic location. I recommend creating a quality general agency site but would they have more success creating other nice sites as well? For example, a niche site about home insurance and one about auto insurance. What would your recommendation be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lagunaitech1 -
What is the best: one big site or several small ones?
Sometimes I've felt that my choice was incorrect. I know taht with a big amount of content on the same subject a bigger one is better: it’s easier to maintain, and a big number of pages is good for Google ranking, but when you have many small sites, each one focusing on a totally different subject, you can crosslink them and this will improve your rankings. Furthermore, many small sites allow you to focus in specific niches and help you rank better for different keywords. So, what is the best choice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sergio_redondo0 -
Website design agency - Penguin update could effect us?
Hi Guys, Just wanted to pick your brains here - I have a client who I have just taken on who is a small website design agency, all their clients they have built websites for over the years have the anchor text; 'website design' Will the website be effected by the new Penguin update due to the face they have thousands of links on clients websites they have built all witht he same anchor text? One idea I thought about is to build links into different pages of the website on future client websites? Any help or guidance would be much appreciated ! thank you Thanks Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GAZ090 -
A challenge! What off-page strategies would you employ first when ranking a brand new small business website?
I'd love to hear what you guys do. I think the game has changed now in the era of Penguin. Gone are the days where you can build a few quick links and suddenly your new site is ranking fairly well. Obviously, the first steps are to get the on page SEO right - titles, good keyword use, etc. Eventually, the goal may be to build some content that will attract natural links. But, we all know that is going to take time. So, here's the scenario: You've got a new client with a website in a fairly non-competitive niche, say, a piano mover in Seattle. The site is indexed, with no external backlinks. You're happy with the current on page SEO. The site is currently ranking on page 3 for "Seattle Piano Mover". What would you do next?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
Small buisiness multiple cities
Say i have a website for a small business...but that business is expanding into neighboring areas. I still want to have it SEO optimized for keywords in the neighboring towns but I do not want to have to redo the whole website. Is there a way to do this without having google penalyze me for having duplicate content? I mean i know i can create a landing page www.mysite/newtown but whos to say the reader wont click the logo and go to the home page and gets navigated to www.mysite.com and get confused because its not the same info or its talking about the original town the business started. I hope this makes sense...thanks for the help! I see that craigslist uses the city.craigslist.com so im wondering if this is the answer??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dcstover10