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xFor this episode of E-Coffee with Experts, Ranmay Rath interviewed Ben Sisson, Founder & Managing Director of Targeted SEO, located in Southampton, England. Ben shares his professional journey from a graphic designer to an SEO expert, detailing the evolution of his agency which he started after a decade-long stint at Garmin. He discusses the critical role of partnerships, particularly how working with his wife has contributed to their success, and provides insights into the challenges and strategies that have shaped their rapid growth in the competitive SEO industry. Tune in now!
SEO isn’t a set forget solution. You need to be investing in an SEO strategy for 12, 24 months, and longer for the life of your website.
Ben Sisson
Founder & Managing Director of Targeted SEO
Hey, hi everyone. Welcome to your show, E-Coffee with Experts. This is your host, Ranmay here. Today we have Ben, who is the founder and managing director of Targeted SEO. Hey, Ben, how are you?
Yeah, well, thank you. How are you doing?
All good, Ben. Ben, before we move forward, let’s get to know the human behind the mic. Why don’t you talk us through your journey so far? And how did you start targeted SEO? How is it going? And we take it from there.
Yeah, sure. Of course. Yes, Ben at Targeted SEO. We founded the agency in 2017. But before that, I had quite a long and very successful career working for a range of different businesses. I started my career as a graphic designer and then progressed into web design. And then I was lucky enough to work for a company called Garmin, and they’re an American GPS company. I was there for about 10 years. I was working on the global website, working with the team in America, and learned a lot about marketing and online marketing. And eventually, that got to a point where I was a digital manager and I started to play around with SEO in my spare time and started building my website and learning the power of what you can achieve with SEO. That led me to create the company. We started to get our clients and it’s rapidly really grown over the last four or five years. A bit of a journey. So we got something like 60, 70 clients now. So, yeah, it’s been an interesting journey, but it’s been great so far.
Lovely. And what were some of the game-changing decisions or strategies that fueled the expansion of your ambitious SEO agency? As you mentioned, in 60-70, clients in a span of six, to seven years is quite a rapid growth.
Yeah, it’s been pretty rapid. I think the way that we approach SEO is because I had them in web design, we were able to design and build great-looking websites, but then also apply successful SEO to those websites. I think that’s helped us maybe stand out a bit more. I was also very fortunate because my partner in crime, actually my wife, Emma, came from a content and advertising background, and she’d also worked with some bigger companies. She was at Carnival UK, a big cruise company. She was an advertising manager there, and With her skills in creating content and my web design skills, the two just combined well together. We just so happen to partner up. I’m not sure everyone can work with their wife or partner. For us, It’s been a bit of a success. But I think because we do two different roles, she’s very much content, whereas I’m more on-page SEO, maybe a bit off-site as well. The design side of things, that’s why it’s worked so Lovely.
Setting up an agency and making that successful are two different ball games altogether, right? In the early days of targeted SEO, what were some of the biggest hurdles that you would have faced establishing your agency? We understand how difficult is it in those early days to keep the lights on. What were those initial challenges and how did you overcome them?
I think the initial challenge is making companies and businesses realize the power of SEO. I I think as an industry it has grown massively and there is a lot more trust in the industry now. But I think several years ago, maybe it wasn’t still… People were still learning to trust SEO in the process and having the patience to stick with it as well. As we know, you need to be investing in an SEO strategy for 12, 24 months, and longer for the life of your website, really, and trying to show and highlight the benefits. After six months, okay, things are moving, but you’re not going to see that massive increase in traffic over such a short period. It is a long-term marketing strategy. I think once you show what you’re doing and you can dive into search console and other software, Semrush, Ahrefs, whatever you’re using, and start to show that actually of content you published three or four months ago is now starting to get impressions and clicks and it is working, that’s when companies will go, Actually, yeah, I can see how this is going to compound over time and start to grow.
I think early days, it was about that trust. We didn’t have much of a reputation being a new agency. We didn’t have many case studies, we didn’t have many Google reviews. But I think It’s all about building that up. It takes time. You have to get those case studies in there. You have to get testimonials from people. I think once you start doing that, people start to notice you a bit more and trust what you do.
Lovely. What are some of the common pitfalls or challenges that SEO agencies face while scaling their operations? Ben, as you mentioned, yours is a journey where you started, the initial days were difficult. Everyone would be facing, and now you have skilled up, right? What do you think are some of the common pitfalls or challenges that agencies face? In your case, how would you have navigated those challenges?
I think you can invest a lot of money in the wrong things sometimes. We’ve been very lucky that we’ve hired well. We’ve got a great team of skilled people. I think sometimes you can be in danger of spending or investing your money in the wrong areas. When I was first starting I was diving into the world of affiliate marketing and trying to focus on that side of things, and I did spend a lot of money on sites that just failed. It didn’t take off for various reasons. I’ve been hit by Google updates. I’ve had an affiliate website, basically, via a Google update. I think Until you’ve done that and you’ve tested what’s possible, that’s how you can learn. And it’s even more important when you’re working on client websites because they’re investing their marketing budgets with you. And you’ve got to make sure that you’re doing everything right. You’re not doing anything dodgy and doing any dodgy off-site SEO. You’ve got to try and be very transparent in what you’re doing and try and do it the way Google wants you to do it. And we conform to them. But Yeah, I think that’s one of the things.
Talking about off-site SEO, Ben, what are some of the good link-building strategies for you? And what do you prefer, guest posts versus niche edits? What is your take on that?
I think guest posting, and niche edits, still work. Like all this talk of EEAT and everything like that. I mean, if you’re still getting decent links on decent websites that have got traffic, they’re in good neighborhoods, they’ve got organic traffic, they’re ranking for things that that type of site should be ranking for. If you start to look at these sites and they’ve got every topic under the sun, it’s quite clear that they’re just solely there for a minute, D.R., domain authority, whatever it is. You just need to make sure that the sites you’re getting content produced on and links back to your client websites are trustworthy. Ultimately, you want to be able to show those sites to your clients and go, Great, look, we got some decent links here for you. That’s where the transparency can come in a bit more. Niche edits, it depends. I think they can work. Again, if it looks forced in the content, then, yeah. Again, you’re not going to want to show that to a client. Yeah, it depends. But we love saying that, don’t we, in the industry, it depends.
You have witnessed the SEO landscape change, not only from your agency days but before that as well since you have been in the industry for quite some time now. What is one most significant shift, if I were to put it that way, that you have observed in how search agents approach website ranking and content evaluation?
That’s a great question. A significant shift. With all these Google updates, there’s always going to be something that your site might get hit by something. If you’re focusing on building a great user experience, a great website that’s got great content on it, then you should stand the test of time. Okay, an update might come along, and you might lose a bit of traffic. But diving into that site, is the content as good as it should be as it can be? Have you got decent links from decent websites related to your industry? Things like that. It’s not always rocket science. I think, yeah, SEO is getting harder. It’s getting more competitive. The best time to start SEO was several years ago, but we are where we are. I think if you’re sticking to those core values when you approach it, then you should be building a website that stands the test of time and is an asset to your company.
Absolutely. Ben, in your case, you have seamlessly combined your design background with SEO expertise. What advice would you give to businesses trying or aiming to strike the right balance between the aesthetic appeal side of things and search engine optimization on their website?
Yeah, of course. There’s always a good balance between having a nicely designed website that is esthetically pleasing, that’s well-branded, and having good on-page SEO, good technical SEO, making sure that you’ve got the correct markup of content, internal linking, whatever that is. So many times I’ve seen websites that just try too hard. They’ve got things moving all over the place, and they’re really thin. They’ve got 100 words of content on a page, and they’re looking at it going, Why aren’t I ranking for my key service here or product or what it is? It’s just because you’ve got a terrible user experience, but the website is all over the place. Maybe you’ve given Google mixed messages. It’s like, really think about it.
Can you share some tactics metrics, Ben, that you have used to effectively market your agency and attract new clients? Because as an agency, while you’re established it’s easy, I would not say easy, but you have a word around in the market. But when you’re starting, when you’re decently new, what are those strategies? And one agency owner listening to us today, can you apply to attract new clients?
There are the obvious ones if you’re in a city or location, then try and rank for the keywords related to that city. That’s always one of the obvious ones when we started targeted SEO, we did rank number one for SEO Agency Southampton, SEO Consultant Southampton, and those related search terms. And that did generate our first leads. These days, we’re not so bothered about being number one for it because sometimes you do get a mixed bag in terms of inquiries. But that’s a really good starting point. Then start to go after industries. Type of industries that you want to work in. We’ve done quite well with accountants and mortgage brokers. If you build great websites and great content and do some great SEO in those industries, then that can start to generate a name for yourself. You can start getting more referrals and get to know those industries as well. For us personally, we’ve attended in the U. S. Some big accounting shows. We’ve exhibited a couple, and that starts to get you known in the industry. Yes, they’re quite expensive to go to these events. You do start to get contacts and you start to network.
That’s probably the best way to get started.
Lovely. Ben, what is your favorite client story?
Favorite client story? Well, we got quite a few. I think just talking about accountants and mortgage brokers, we’ve done quite well. We’re working with several accountants. For us, that has been great. It’s worked well for us. I think when you start to tap into some of those industries, it can grow your agents. I think we’re a client story as any individual one. Quite a few to pick from. We’ve recently done quite well in renewable energy and tapping into that market a bit more, like solar panels and air source heat pumps. I think for us, it’s when you see you’ve been working on a website for maybe a year and a half, two years, and you start to see that growth. The clients themselves, they’re really busy and they didn’t see the reward. We can’t handle the inquiries. We’ve had clients say, Can you turn it off? Can you turn off SEO now? We’ve got too much. No, it doesn’t work like that. I’m pretty proud of some of the results that we’ve got for our clients. A lot of our clients have been with us for four or five years now.
How? I end up becoming friends with them and we have that relationship.
Absolutely. Then it is really difficult to say no to a client, but have you ever done that? If yes, I’m sure you would have, but What is the back story? Why did you say no to that client?
Yeah, not every business or every client is the right fit for you. It can come down to a cultural fit or do you warm to that particular person? Do you think you can be able to to work with them? Sometimes it might be that you can’t see a relationship happening with that particular client. Maybe it could be as simple as you don’t like them. But also you can look at their website and think what they’re trying to do isn’t quite right, doesn’t fit in with how we work. You’ve got to be confident to just say, No, I’m sorry, it’s not going to work for us. But I’d always try and suggest another area or another agency or another advertising method that they could go after. It isn’t always possible with some industries or some clients.
Yeah, I can completely relate to that.
Yeah, it’s on a case-by-case basis. That’s how we approach it. SEO isn’t a set-for-get solution. If you can’t just pay your monthly retainer and just go, I’m doing SEO, and just leave them to it. Some agencies might work like that. But for us, we want to have regular comms with you. We want to what business, and service you want to focus on next, or if is there something happening in your industry that we need to be creating cocreated. Or you get to know that client and their business is really important. I think that’s where you get the most success.
Yeah, getting more involved in the entire process. We Going beyond your contractual obligations, just getting put faults to the website. I remember one of our clients talking about how they picked up the phone for the lead gen that they were doing and analyzed the entire back-end operation and how the clients answered when they were picking up the phone. Because while you can, as an agency, do a whole lot of SEO, PPC, whatever, the end objective is to get the phones ringing, but what is happening after the phones are ringing, right? So the back-end business ops is also critical while you are getting that put forth to the business. So it is getting involved as much as you can, while you’ll have a lot of clients, but to get invested in that particular client’s business, to understand what they’re doing, how they’re doing, and then take it from there.
Yeah, definitely. And that’s actually why we’re hiring at the moment. We’re about to take on a new client account manager Because for us, we have an SEO account manager who does a lot of obviously looking at the overall strategies and communicating with clients and reporting and that type of thing. But we also want a client manager to come in to nurture that relationship a lot more. It makes the client feel valued. They get a lot more visibility in what’s happening. For us, it’s really important to understand, in terms of what you were just saying, what happens once that traffic comes into the website, how it converts, what happens What’s the process, and anything like that. I think that is where you can start to stand out as an agency. If you’re doing these little extra things, we’re not just doing SEA, but we’re really trying to be integral to your business, and we’re here to support your business growth. Yeah, it will help.
Absolutely. Ben, talking about you, an SEO agency, what excites you most about the future of SEO?
There’s been a lot of talk about AI and how that is used. We’ve seen case studies where people are building really powerful websites using AI, but on the flip side of that, being hit with updates and things as well. I think it’s constantly evolving. SEO is always always changing. I think it’s always going to be around people who will always need a great website. I think seeing how AI is going to be integrated into, obviously, the search results in a lot more and how that’s going to impact websites that we look after and manage and start to deal with that. I think anyone coming into the industry, it’s a brilliant industry to be involved in. You can learn a lot. That’s one of the things as well is all the different industries that we work across, from pest control to mortgage brokers and You end up picking up all this stuff that I’m an expert in bed bugs now, how to get rid of rats. It’s like, how do we not know all this stuff because some of our client websites are in those industries? But yeah, great in a quiz.
Great. Ben, finally, what is that piece of advice you’d want to give to our listeners today, especially young folks who are trying to make a mark in the digital marketing space, trying to get into this space, or let’s say, people who are already there in this space and trying to be entrepreneurs, trying to start their agency?
Advice? I think you’ve got to start somewhere. If it’s building your website or testing, that’s a great way to get into it. Just start building your websites and just see what you can create That’s a great learning exercise as well. If you could then monetize those websites, if they start getting enough traffic, that is Zoic ads on them or Amazon, you’re not going to earn loads of money on the commission unless you get lots of traffic. But it’s a good starting point. I think that affiliate marketing and content marketing a good areas to start in. Then maybe get some retained clients because you only need three or four clients on monthly retainers. If you’re just a single person and you’re outsourcing some of that as well, then happy days. It’s a great starting point. But just build relationships, build your network, get a bit of trust out there, maybe set up a business profile on Google, get a few reviews, and get some case studies in there. That’s how we started. Several years later, we’re quite successful. Even if I do say so myself.
Lovely. Lovely, Ben. Before I let you go, I want to play a quick rapid-fire with you. I hope you’re game for it.
Yeah, sure. Go on then.
All right. Your last Google search.
My last Google search was you, actually, this morning.
All right. Okay. Your last vacation.
On my last vacation, I went to Jordan.
Okay. Your favorite spot?
Purple, of course. I’m a Southampton fan for my sins, and we got thrashed last night by Lester. So yeah, not a good subject at the moment.
Not for us as well, being a maniated fan. Okay, what did you do with your first paycheck, Ben? First paycheck of your life?
Oh, first paycheck? That was a long time ago. Yeah. No idea. I don’t know. Probably bought some beer.
All right. Good. I will not grill you any further, Ben. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this with us. Appreciate it. And for our guests, if they want to reach out to you, how do they do that?
Yeah, just come to our website, targetedseo.ca. Uk, fill out a contact form on LinkedIn as well. So feel free to DM me and get in touch.
Perfect. Thank you, Ben. A pleasure. Cheers, man.
You’re welcome. Thanks very much. Thanks for having me.
