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Starting Your SEO Business | Dan Kurtz
Published March 3, 2023 · 151 views on YouTube
Key takeaways
- Pick one core service (link building, content, social, or PPC) and master it inside and out before offering anything else to clients.
- When a client asks for a new service, offer it first as a beta test rather than immediately building it into your core offering.
- Learn any process manually before automating it, so you can hand off the automated piece to a team member without losing the underlying skill if a tool or vendor disappears.
- Only automate or delegate work you'd be willing to do yourself for eight hours a day, so the workflow stays something your team can actually execute well.
- Build toward a repeatable production line, client sends information, the process runs, a consistent quality product comes out, so results stay predictable across every client.
How do you start an SEO business from scratch?
Dan Kurtz says the core value proposition of any SEO business is essentially omnipresence, showing up everywhere a potential audience already gathers. Rather than trying to do everything at once, he recommends figuring out where you want to spend your time first, since time is the scarcest resource for a business owner juggling multiple client needs.
What’s the difference between SEO and platforms like Facebook?
Kurtz argues that traditional SEO, going to other websites, interacting, and leaving a link back to your own site, is the same underlying mechanic as building a business inside Facebook through value posts, live videos, and groups. If you’re building a following inside Facebook’s search and discovery system, you’re technically still doing SEO, just inside a different platform’s engine rather than Google’s.
How should a new SEO business owner choose what to offer?
- Pick one core competency, link building, content, social media, or PPC, rather than trying to offer everything at once.
- Learn that core process manually and master it before expanding.
- When a client asks for a different service, treat it as a beta test rather than committing to it as a core offering right away.
- For services like PPC, learn from an established expert first (Kurtz points to Perry Marshall for Google AdWords) before building out that capability.
- Once you’re getting results in that new area, add it as another “value stack” on top of your existing services, the way Kurtz expanded from link building into other SEO disciplines over time.
Why learn a process manually before automating it?
Kurtz’s own path started with link building in competitive niches like online casinos and PokerStars around 2012–2013, when few automation tools existed, forcing him to learn how to scale and optimize by hand. He recommends manual mastery first because if a tool you rely on gets bought out, a subscription price spikes, or a vendor goes out of business, you still know how to deliver the service without it. Automation, in his model, exists so the manual, repetitive portion of the work can be handed to a team member to manage and monitor, not so the underlying skill disappears from the business.
What does a mature, automated SEO business look like?
Kurtz describes the end state as a production line: a client’s payment and information come in, the automated and human-supervised steps run, and a consistent-quality product comes out the other side. He frames this as combining digital automation and AI content tools with clear internal processes so results are repeatable across clients, regardless of which market a business owner decides to serve.
Full video transcript
So you’ve been doing this for a long time, and I guess in your case you’ve just been replacing pieces, not replacing but automating them, so you can get more hands-off. If somebody was starting from scratch, not that we want to create a whole bunch of competitors here, well, there’s two sides of this question. One is, with the core value prop, is it just that omnipresence, as much of that as you can do, that’s the core value prop, or if you’re starting, is that mainly it, just as much as you can?
So for the most part, SEO, or at least how it traditionally used to be done years ago, because I’ve been messing with marketing in general since before Google officially went public, so it’s been a while, back then it was the same thing. We didn’t have search engines at that point, you had Lycos, you had Dogpile, a bunch of old-school things, but the main way you got traffic was going to other people’s websites, interacting on those websites, and then leaving a link for somebody to follow what you do and come back to your site. That’s still pretty much how the internet works. Some people will go ahead and build their entire business on Facebook, doing value posts, value ads, going live, having a group, and that’s one way to do it, but you’re doing the same thing, Facebook has a ball of traffic and you’re chunking out your piece. Same thing that pretty much any book you’ve ever read comes down to, a lot of the Seth Godin books, The Purple Cow, building your tribe, all those things, you’re doing all of that on other platforms, and that’s really what SEO was. So in effect, if you’re just focusing on Facebook, you’re still technically doing SEO, you’re just doing it inside a Facebook search engine, not inside of Google itself.
But getting started with all of this, the easiest thing, more or less, is to figure out where you want to spend your time, because there’s a lot of stuff you can do in the market. You could go ahead and be just a link provider, you could be just a content team, you could be just somebody who specializes in social. Pick something that you like, learn that core product process, whatever it is, master it inside and out. Then if a client asks you for something else, offer that to them as a beta test and then go that way. Let’s say somebody’s doing social and they want to start doing PPC, figure out how to do PPC. I always refer people to Perry Marshall, he’s a whiz when it comes to Google AdWords and that sort of stuff, look at his trainings first, and then go ahead and start building out a platform for that and start getting results for your clients. Now you have another value stack that you can add on to what you’re doing, and that’s what I’ve done over time.
For me, I started doing it through link building. I originally got started years and years ago in a couple different spaces, mainly the black hat ones, PokerStars was my first foray into doing SEO back in the day, and a lot of the online casino stuff was extremely competitive, so you had to learn how to scale, optimize, and basically automate everything. This was like 2012, 2013 at the time when I was doing this, so there were a lot of tools that just didn’t exist yet, especially AI for a lot of that stuff, so you kind of had to learn and build your parachute while you were going. But I pick one core competency within SEO or marketing or understanding the agency model, understand how to do it manually, then go ahead and automate the process. The reason I tell people to do that first is because, the same thing with your website and your email list, if one product gets bought out and the monthly subscription goes sky-high for each client you have on board, or something happens and they’re no longer in business, you still know how to do that process manually. We only use the automation so that on our team I can hand off the AI portion or the automated portion of that to somebody else to manage that machine. I don’t want my team having to sit there and think about it and do the groundwork, because one of my core values with the team I work with is if I’m not willing to sit there and do it myself for eight hours a day, I’m not going to hand it off to somebody else to do for eight hours a day, because as somebody who’s the owning managing partner of the company, if I don’t want to do it, I’m not going to hand it to somebody else to do it, because they’re not going to want to do it either.
So if you could figure out how to automate and scale those boring pieces and make it so that their workflow is much easier, more spot-checking and just making sure it goes, then it’s a lot easier. We’re in an age now, especially with all of the digital automations, the AI tools, the content writing, all of it, where we are now able to essentially build a Ford assembly line, a production line, where this goes in, client payment comes in, they send us the information needed, and out the other side there’s a consistent quality product, because we have all of those donation processes and steps in place, so you get consistent, repeatable results for your clients, whatever market you decide to go into.