How I Would Build A $1 Million Per Year SEO Agency

Hey there everybody. It's Matt here and this is going to be a video on what I would do if I wanted to build a one million dollar per year SEO agency. Now I have never built a one million dollar per year SEO agency to be quite honest, but I have built three agencies to that revenue level or above. And the process is all the same. Whether it's an SEO or a Facebook or an Amazon or a CRO agency, you still need to go with the same amount of steps with the offers, the bottom of the funnel, the middle of the funnel, the top of sales. So I hope this is going to be helpful and let's get right into it. So if you don't know who I am and you never watched one of my videos before, my name is Matthew Larson and I'm the founder of 1000x leads and 10k per month agency. I work with about 315 agencies on a monthly basis and make daily YouTube videos and newsletters about growing agencies. So that's all about me. If you've never watched one of my videos before, in this video I'm just going to go over what I would do and there's more than one way to do it. This is just what I would do with no like BS or gatekeeping. Whatever your plan is, just take what you think is good from this and discard the rest. I'm not saying that you should follow this plan exactly if it doesn't work for you. So the whole video is going to be going over the 1000x leads funnel where we have our top of funnel at the top, our middle of funnel, lead magnets and email flows, our bottom of funnel conversion mechanisms, and then our offers and SAL process down here. So this is the most effective funnel for any type of agency and it's going to work for any type of agency or B2B business. So it's very good that that's where we start with in the video we're going to see that we start from the bottom up because we can't really start at the top in that way. We have to build the offers and then the bottom of the funnel and then the middle of the funnel and then the top of the funnel and then sales. And we do that because trying to create the top of funnel first would be like trying to put the roof on the house first when it's being constructed. Just not possible. You need the foundation, you need the floors, then the walls, then the frame and then you can finally put the roof on. But a lot of people will start at the top. But it's not really possible if we want to do it correctly. So let's get into it. If we go Back to the 1000x leads funnel here we have a few different offers. We have the one time service, the recurring service, the we need referral fees, we need a course, we need a program, and we need digital products and affiliate links. So these are seven unique revenue streams that can really, really help. Like any kind of agency where most people just have their recurring service. Adding these will lead to, you know, two to three times the amount of revenue. And that's hard to believe for a lot of people, but it's true. But more importantly, in terms of revenue, like also profit, because things like digital products, things like affiliate links, things like courses, programs, referral fees, these are all going to be 100% profit margin or very close to it, let's call it 95 after payment processing and maybe some software. But it's very, very important that we have all of them. So the first thing we're going to go over is what I would do for the recurring service. And I would probably have three different options for my recurring service or three different tiers. I would not recommend doing this for a lot of different agenc, but for SEO I think it is very, very important. So we're going to call it the low tier package. If I was actually making this agency, I would probably call it like the silver package and then the gold package and the diamond package to make it sound like low tier package is kind of like a shit thing to call it, but whatever. So this would be 500 to 1500amonth. And these are kind of, kind of things I would do. I would just optimize five pages per month, probably can be automated. I would check for broken links, you know, update the site, map, one blog post, all that kind of stuff. I'm not really going to go into the very specific stuff here, but like this is just the kind of stuff that I would be doing. So if you have an SEO agency, you probably know this stuff. So it's just not super necessary for me to repeat every single part. But the most, you know, in general, the more they pay, the more stuff they're going to get. And we have something for small businesses, some for medium sized businesses and some for big businesses. So it's very, very, you know, simple. But I think the three packages or three tiers here is very important for SEO or so you're just going to be excluding so many people from being a customer because a lot of you Know, just let's say gym or a restaurant or something like that, doesn't really need $5000 a month for SEO, but they would do 500 to 1500 and the operations are the same, you're just giving them less. So that's a key thing that I think is important to highlight here. Like the operations for all of these tiers are the exact same. It's just more of a quantity type thing. Very important to note for my intro offer. I found it quite difficult to make a good intro offer for an SEO agency and I think that is just because it's played out at this point. Not played out, but just been around for decades. There's nothing new really about it. It's just a matter of, you know, doing it. So I think that a one time SEO optimization, especially for people who are just starting with SEO and kind of weight getting their, you know, dipping their toe in the water type thing where I'd have a full website audit, do some keyword research, get, get the odd page optimization, make sure they're local SEO if applicable, if they're a local business is right, and then do a follow up consultation for $2,500. I think this is going to be a very good intro offer, as good as I could think of for an SEO intro offer. You could also sell backlinks as an intro offer, but I don't know. I don't think that's better either. For my referral fees, I would form referral relationships with other businesses who sell to the same type of customer as I do, but not the same service. So people who have like web agencies or creative agencies or email marketing agencies or you know, Google Ad agencies, we could do PR agencies, Facebook ad agencies. Anyone who sells to my customer but doesn't sell SEO is someone who I'd try to partner with. And that way for every customer I get who might need something else, I could send them their way and collect a fee and just increase my profit, increase my lifetime value type thing. For my course I'd probably make a course that is around $997 and is good value. So what I would do is have training video or training videos for every step that I determined. So stuff like intro to SEO, keyword research and strategy, on page, SEO, technical, SEO link building, content creation, mobile and local, everything you can kind of think of that you know, someone might need to know about SEO. I divided it into parts and I would just have a bunch of training videos or video, if it only needs one, on how to do each part but it'd probably be like 3, 5, 10 videos for each. And you put good effort into this course. It's not like you're a scammer who's trying to sell courses. Like, it is your reputation and your agency's reputation with this course. So the best way that I think to do it would be to repurpose and package up your internal training a lot nicer and then sell that as the course. And then you could also use it to train your own employees. So if you make it really good and you put a lot of effort into it, you can double this as employee training. And then I would have a bunch of different templates and swipe files and assets for every step. So you might have keyword research templates, you might have, you know, competitor analysis templates. Just like whether those are, you know, like PDFs or spreadsheets or, you know, whatever. Just templates to make it easier for them. Because it's one thing to give them the theory, but we also want to make it easier for them. That's like the hallmark of a great course, has templates and frameworks and stuff like that. For my program, I'd probably have a three month done with you program where they do it themselves and I'm going to provide feedback. I probably charge around 6k for that. There'd be 4 parts to that. I would have a custom SEO plan in Trello, kind of like we do with a thousand X leads, where you just have a bunch of steps that you have to take. And I'll be very standardized and they follow along. I'd have a weekly Q and A call if anybody has any questions. I would have ongoing feedback in Slack. So they're going to get the plan. They're going to be on calls if they have questions. And then they'll also have a Slack channel. And then I would use an SEO tool. I don't know which one I would use. There's a few options to generate monthly reports on their site. So I would just have my assistant put in their Slack or put in their site and we get a report and we could kind of use this to show that they are actually making progress. And I could put that in the Slack or the Trello maybe if they decide to duplicate this into their own Trello board. So for the affiliate links, I would promote one tool and there's multiple tools for everything. And you don't have to promote these tools like there are others, but I would promote one tool for all of the major use cases in SEO. So if someone download my lead magnet and want to do it themselves, I could have these affiliate links in there as well as my email flows and still build some mrr. So I'd use hrefs for the overall tool. I would use Surfer SEO for the content piece, I would use Screaming Frog for the technical SEO and site auditing and I would use Answer the Public for content idea generations. If you don't know what any of these are like, you can google them yourself and see what they do. But these are just pretty good tools that I've used in the past for SEO on not necessarily an SEO agency but what for my own purposes elsewhere for my paid product I wouldn't really want it to be a hundred dollars or less and not require any manual fulfillment. For me this is very, very important because you can sell a lot of these sometimes and you don't want to Like a hundred dollars or less is something that's expensive enough to be meaningful. But you could still like impulse buy it, you know what I mean? So $500, not really an impulse buy where you see it in an ad and buy it, but 97 or something like that is. So I might use, you know, Woorank or SEO Optimizer and I'd scan their website for SEOs and I would use API calls and you know, zapier and a little bit of make.com to do this and you'd have to figure that out. But what I do is I just have to do their website URL, you know, hook that up with automations to run the audit and then deliver to their email and it would be branded if you paid for the actual plan. So it'd be pretty good. Could charge 97 for that. And then on top of that I would have free bonuses of the audit checklist, swipe file, keyword research template, kind of the same bonuses that you got in the course I would have just a few of them just to make it seem that much more valuable. And when you're doing a paid product, if it's $97, you want the perceived value of all of the bonuses to be $97 on their own too because then they it's super easy to justify. Like if any of these things are good, it's going to be worth 97 dol. And I think these bonuses and the types of them are very good for that. So I think that would be a great offer. So that is basically what we've done for the offers. We have seven different ones and having all these offers is very important just to Address and monetize every level of the target market. Because if you just have your main service that's like 1% of people can realistically buy that. And you know, leaving 99% of people on the table is not a serious business strategy in my opinion. So let's get to the bottom of the funnel and let me open, you know, a different thing here with the funnel map just so we can see. Let's not open that one because I was drawing on it. But one sec here. There we go. This one should be good. So realistically we have done the offers part. Let's draw it properly here. So we're going to go the purple here. Like we have done that. Let's put a check mark there. And now we're going to try to do this part. The conversion mechanisms. So let's get into that. The first conversion mechanism that I would be doing is a newsletter. And a newsletter is one of the best tools to convert leads who are already on your list, who already know about you into customers. It's just a very nice, intimate, you know, directly from your brain to theirs way of marketing. So I would write a newsletter every single Monday, Wednesday and Friday and each would have three main sections and I would just stick to this format because it's very repeatable. You can just duplicate your last newsletter and change out the info and you could, as you get good at this, you can make these in like 15 minutes. So the first would be an actionable SEO tip that they can implement within 24 hours. The second would be a short example of what I would do for a situation. So I might have, you know, I might come across a website who has, you know, it's a local business. But their on page SEO, their H1s, H2H3s, their titles, their meta descriptions are all screwed up. So I would do an example of how I would fix that. And then the third would be a longer form section about something important to do with SEO. Probably like a long form. Long, like a long form step by step guide type thing to be honest, because SEO like in some situations you can just write day by day and just tons of stuff about whatever your topic is. But with SEO, like a step by step guide instead of something totally theore theoretical might be better. The next is I'm going to have an appointment setter who emails, texts and phones all of my qualified leads based on their responses to the opt in forms. So I would pay this appointment setter 5% commission on any sales plus a small base salary and what I would do is have them focus on the intro offer. And if they can't sell the intro offer, I would have them focus on signing people up for my main conversion mechanisms. So the next one here is the retargeting ads. And I would be running retargeting ads on different ad platforms to try to get in front of people who have been to my website. This would be a small budget because I likely won't have enough visitors to scale probably like 5, 10, 15, $25 a day. I would do YouTube retargeting ads to people who've watched my YouTube videos before as well as people who've been to my website. I would use Google Display Network retargeting ads to people who've been on my website. And the same with Facebook and maybe Twitter to be honest, let's actually put Twitter on there. I wasn't going to, but let's do that. Even though the targeting is not great. People who follow me might do LinkedIn too, but we're not going to put that there. So that is the newsletter, the appointment setting here. So that leaves a few different options for our main conversion mechanism. We have our webinar, a live workshop, a community or a unique mechanism here. So I chose for this one to be a pre recorded webinar and it would kind of go over the same stuff from the course from earlier, the exact same topics. You know, I'm not going to read them again here, but you can see them on the screen. And I would use this because I think it's really good way to do it. Something very specific to a niche. Like let's say I was, I do SEO for jujitsu gyms or something. You know, how to drive traffic to your jiu jitsu gym. Using SEO would be a great webinar and I would use it, make it very specific to my niche to show that I know what I'm talking about and then educate people on just what's possible. Because especially if you're doing SEO for local businesses, local businesses aren't going to be as sophisticated as hardcore E commerce or direct response marketing companies or even like better run SaaS. They need to be educated on this stuff even if it's been around for decades. And I think a webinar would be something that would be very, very good for this purpose. Much more so than a live workshop or a community. You could use a community though. I don't know. We're just going to use a webinar because I think that's the best option not to Say the other options are bad, but let's just go with the best option here because that's what's important. In my CRM, when I have people coming through my newsletter, when I have people coming through my webinar and my content, I would really, in my appointment setter, I would try to tag them and get their especially what their revenue is. So I have people tagged in my CRM, 0 to 10k per month, 10 to 25k per month, 25 to 100k per month and 100k plus. And I would try to do this with the tags because I would sell the different packages to those different revenue levels. Like if they're under 10k per month in revenue, I probably say that even the low package is not gonna be good for them. Like probably not gonna do it. So where are we here? But if we have the 10 to 25k per month, that'd probably be like the low package. 25 to 100k would be the middle and 100k plus would be the top. And I think that'd be a very easy and clean way to do it. Not too hard to collect their revenue in exchange for them signing up for your webinar or something like that. So I think that would be very, very strong for what I'm trying to do. So this would be the middle of the funnel and that or the bottom of funnel. And we've just kind of taken care of that. So the next is going to be the middle of the funnel, which usually makes up of the lead magnets, the thank you page and the email flows. So let's get into that next. So what you really want to do for lead magnets is make full length trainings on every single subcategory or part that has to do with your service. So spoiler alert that these are going to be the same topics as we did for the course and the webinar because these are the right topics. So I'd have a lead magnet, full size lead magnet on every single one of these different topics. So if we go into my lead magnets for a thousand x leads, you know, the cold emails, the paid ads, the lead magnets, the offers, those are different parts of a thousand x leads and I have different lead magnets for each. It's the same thing here. So these would be really full length, not half ass at all. Take your time making these. Like you really need to impress the target audience with them. And that's the most important part. So when you're making these lead magnets, we want to make sure they pass a bunch of different rules. So even though lead magnets are free, would you honestly say that you would pay $50 for this? And if the answer is no, it's not good enough. And hopefully you have some friends that are honest with you and you can ask them too. But if you wouldn't pay $50 to have that information and that lead magnet, it's not good enough. It's a very easy rule to go through. You don't need to go more than $50 because it's free. But if you wouldn't pay 50 bucks for your lead magnet, then it's not a good lead magnet. It's not going to impress anyone. Like these lead magnets people would pay $50 for the next one is the actionable rule. So is there a quick win or series of quick wins that are very clearly laid out that they can implement within 24 hours? Because when they take your advice and they put it into action, they are going to see that it works and trust you way more. Very important. And then the readable rule. So is there one idea and one image per slide? So you'll see here there's one idea and one image per slide. I just kind of repeated that. But it is makes it so much more readable and consumable. It doesn't matter how valuable or actionable your lead magnet is if no one is consuming it. And this is the number one way to make lead magnets or anything a lot better. The next thing I would do is the email flows. So those are going to be right here. And I'd have two different types of email flows. And both would trigger when they. When people get my lead magnets. So if they downloaded a lead magnet, they would automatically be added to these. So the first would be the four hour email flow. So that would be the lead magnet delivery. After one hour. I would go what we do or what problems we solve after the second hour. Why we need to solve these problems now and why we need to solve these problems now is a lot different than why we need to solve them. Because if we don't put that sense of urgency and frame it that way, it's going to be a lot less effective and a lot less painful for them. And the next one is how we solve the problems. So this would be all done in the first three hours. We call it the three hour email flow. Really? But I call it the four hour. So once immediately, then after one hour, then after two hours and then three. The next one I would do would be a 30 day email flow with one email per day and each of them would basically answer an FAQ or objection that has to do with SEO. So think of these as FAQ emails, but also objection emails. So like an objection, how do I measure the ROI from SEO? I'd have a full email about that and you know, what is the difference between local SEO and national SEO in terms of strategy? And an objection like are these backlinks going to be terrible? Or how does this impact my site load speed? Or you know, if I have to make everything SEO optimized, does it make it less readable for my website? All of these kind of different things. So if we keep going, you can pause the video and get some of these FAQs if you want. And I'm gonna link this video in the description anyway or link this document. So let's go to the thank you page. So on my thank you page, which if you've ever opted into a lead magnet or a form before and you redirected to a page, that's the thank you page. So what I would have is a VSL about my offer book, a call button and then some case studies. Very simple. But that's what you need to do next is the top of funnel. So we kind of went over this kind of stuff here. Now we have to go over the very top. And the top of the funnel is called the top of the funnel because this whole process is shaped like a funnel where you're going funneling people to the sales call with less people at every single step as they drop off. So the first thing that we would do here is paid ads. So I would have a bunch of different types of paid ads and a bunch of different offers. On Facebook I would have lead magnet ads which are trying to promote my lead magnets. I would have intro offer ads and digital product ads and I'd have different offers because on Facebook it's kind of the most mass market out of all of them and different things apply to different people and each of these offers makes the other one more effective. So if someone has downloaded your lead magnet ads and sees your digital product ads and they liked your lead magnet, it was valuable. $50 rule, much more likely to buy your digital products. Buy your digital products, more likely to sign up for your intro offer. And I do the same thing on YouTube and the same thing on Google. Search for this for my written content. I would use the same categories again from the course, from the webinar, from the lead magnets. And I would do the same Kind of thing I did with my email flow, but on a much larger scale where I'd have all of the different categories and my entire content strategy would be to brainstorm FAQs about them and then answer them on LinkedIn, on Instagram and Twitter. What I would do is use Hype Fury, which is just a posting tool, and it would cross post on all of these things. So I don't have to do that myself or I don't have to make the content over and over again. So I just included three FAQs here for each. But what I would do is I try to start with like 50 FAQs and then narrow it down to about 20. If I have 20 FAQs for 10 different categories, that's 200 FAQs. And as I work my way through this and answer all these in content, I can just start over. Basically no one's going to remember at that point. And even if they do, repetition is very important. So these are just some example FAQs. The next is video content. And video content, especially longer form YouTube videos like the one you're watching, is just one of the most important parts of the overall funnel. So we have YouTube up here and we kind of have YouTube down here where it's so good because it builds a lot of trust by showing your face, letting them hear your voice, and just separates you from where you're not an anonymous Internet scammer anymore. You're actually a real person and a real agency owner who knows what they're talking about. So for my YouTube videos, I would keep it to three main styles. So I'd have a tutorial style, how to do X, Y and Z, how to build backlinks. An example style, how I would make an SEO strategy for Joe's local gym. And then quick wins and mistakes to avoid. So top X things to achieve Y, top five things to fix your on page SEO, something like that. And I would just keep cycling through these formats. There's tons of different topics that you can do and you probably never run out. And it makes it easy to wrap your head around in terms of creating them and all of that kind of stuff. For TikTok and reels and YouTube shorts, I'd make one short form video per day. And to think of these topics, what I would do is sort my written content by engagement because I'm posting five times per day here and if people like it in written content, it's probably worth making a video about. So I'd sort it by number of likes and highest Engagement probably means the most interesting. And that's what I would do for that. And that's how I would never run out of those ideas. For my outreach campaign, we have mostly cold email is what we're going to focus on. But it'd be the same strategy with cold DMs and prospecting too. I'd have two different campaigns and I'd try to see which one is the best. I'd have my intro offer campaign and then that $97 digital product automatic audit campaign. And for the list I do basically people from the United States, CMO, COO, CEO and founder job titles. I do a 3 to 25 employee just because I feel like less than 3 might not have money or even be a real business. And then more than 25 probably would have their own SEO team in house or definitely have an SEO agency already. And for this I would do. If they're using WordPress would be my criteria. And you can just sort by companies using WordPress in technology. So very easy to find. And my script would be centered around a loom that shows my face, lets them hear my voice and explains it a bit more in depth. So when you're doing cold email, you gotta keep it simple. Like you really got to keep it to, in my opinion, 75 words or less. You see all of these people with a crazy word count and just like they're writing a book. So if you do it like this, more so and let me pull my screen over, that's 50 words, 263 characters, you're gonna have a much better example or a much better success rate here. And then sending over a quick video is a lot less commitment for them than you want to get on a call with me. And then in the video you can explain it more in depth. So you get the best of both worlds. A short, low commitment, cold email, and then a big follow up in the loom or the video that shows your face, lets them hear your voice and sends them all the details. Very, very good. For partnerships, I would put as much emphasis on trying to create these as I put on getting clients. Because when you get one client, you get one client. But if you get a really good partner, they can send you 20 or 50 or 100 clients or even more. So the referral and white label partnerships are basically going to be the same for this. It's just a matter of if they want to white label or refer to you. And I have Facebook ad agencies, Google Ad agencies, email agencies, web agencies, creative agencies. You could have way more than that. But those are the ones that I put my focus on. For media partnerships I would try to be featured in blogs or newsletters or podcasts or YouTube channels or speaking at events or guest posting in like communities for business owners type things. And for my joint venture partnerships I would partner with website agencies and do their SEO for them when they're doing it in exchange for a fee. Or I'd partner with PR companies for search result optimization. So those are the two joint ventures that I think I would put most of my focus on. So that is going to be the top of funnel completed. So we've got the offers, we've got the conversion mechanisms, we've got the middle of the funnel and then we got the top of the funnel and the last part is to do with sales. So in my pre call flow I would make sure it does a few things. I would send them three reminders via email and SMS 24 hours before, four hours before and one hour before just to avoid no shows on the form. I would try to get some good qualifying information and or disqualifying information. And if I pull up my own calendly as like a proof of concept here on my form, you know I have all this stuff, you know with a thousand x leads if you're doing less than 10k it's probably not going to be a good fit. Costs 4k for a year. How familiar? Where are you booking from? And that's just good information to have for your call. And then when they fill out this form they're going to re be redirected to the sales presentation where they can take a look at it. So they're going to be 100% familiar with it. The next is going to be a pre call video which they're going to get on the thank you page and in the sales presentation and in the email flows. It's just going to be talking about who I am, what problems I solve, why we need to solve them. We should probably put now in there how we solve them and then some examples and case studies. I probably make this 3 minutes, 5 minutes but maximum 10 minutes. And then in my sales presentation I would make it so I could share it within seven to 10 minutes on a 30 minute call. That would give me a lot of time to do the rest. But these are the main questions that I would be answering in my presentation. So what are we trying to do? How is this usually done and what are the limits of that? Why is our approach new or different and why will it be successful especially if they've tried it before and failed, you know, who cares if we're successful? Like what difference will it make? What are the risks, how much will it cost, how long will it take? And what are the, you know, checks for success? How are we going to measure success here? When I'm doing the sales call, I break it down into three parts. The information gathering part, the screen share presentation part from right here and then the objection, handling and close. So the first part would be five or so minutes. Why are we here today? Why do we want to even do SEO? Or what problem are we having? Like I don't have enough leads would be a problem. SEO would be the solution. Why is not having enough leads a problem? Why now? Not why didn't you do this a year ago or something? Or why aren't you just do this six months from now? And then why not do something else? Like why would you be doing this with me as opposed to doing it yourself or something? These might sound like interesting questions and obvious questions, but getting them to admit it to themselves out loud, the answers to these questions makes it undeniable in their mind. When you go for the close, like why is that a problem? Because my I'm going to go out of business if they admit that out loud. Psychologically it's going to be a lot better for you. Not going to go over the screen share presentation again, but the objection handling and close. So right after I'm done my screen share presentation, usually what I'm going to ask is like, what do you think about this on a scale of 1 to 10? Like 1? Not for you, 10. I want to get started right now. And they're going to tell you and it's always going to be honest when you frame it this way. And then you say, they say six. Okay, how can we get that six to like an eight and then, or how do we get that eight to a ten? And then what we want to do is revisit their answers from the first part. Hopefully you can remember or take some notes here. And then ask them what are some things they don't like or unsure about. And they're gonna ask, if you really ask them like this, they're gonna tell you. And then at the end we wanna tell them exactly, step by step, painstaking clarity, how to get started. Most people aren't going to buy right off the sales call. It's just a fact of life, regardless of what sales trainers are gonna say. So you need to follow up. So I would be creating 24 follow up templates, so I can follow up twice per week for 12 weeks. In each of them, I would include, like, documents, videos, case studies, examples, templates, free tips. So it's at least valuable. It's obvious we're trying to sell them, but it's least valuable as well. And that is going to be the end of what we're doing. That's the sales process down here. So we've got the top of the funnel, we've got the middle of the funnel, we got the bottom of the funnel, we got the offers, and then we got the sales. And that's really how I would build this million dollar SEO agency. So if this video was helpful, thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one.