How To Build An SEO Agency Portfolio In 2026

Benefit-Focused: Learn how to build an SEO agency portfolio that wins clients. Step-by-step guide with real examples, templates, and pro tips.

In this Show, we delve into the essential steps for building a compelling SEO agency portfolio that catches clients’ attention. Learn how to showcase your skills, demonstrate successful case studies, and leverage analytics to justify your strategies. By the end, you’ll be equipped to create a standout portfolio that effectively communicates your expertise. Ready to elevate your agency’s presence

With Special Guest David G Quaid From Primary Position

https://davidquaidseo.com

https://primaryposition.com

@DavidGQuaid

This Week’s Sponsors

Jetpack: LifterLMS

Ninja Forms: Rollback Pro

LifterLMS: LifterLMS

Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro

The Show’s Main Transcript

[00:00:22.180] – Jonathan Denwood

Welcome back, folks, to the WP-Tonic show. This is episode 2022. That’s right, folks, 1022 episodes of this show. We’ve got a returning friend, um, it should be a great show. We’ve got David G. Quaid with us, and he’s showing up for that in Google, and he’s really— he’s not got it totally right, but he’s a lot happier. He’s, uh, He’s returning, and he is the GOAT when it comes to SEO. And in this show, we’re gonna be talking about building an SEO portfolio. Now, if you’re an agency, and I know we’ve got a lot of agency, um, owners that listen to this show, and you are looking to go into SEO, promote it a bit more, or buy or work with a freelancer or SEO agency, and you want to build out an SEO portfolio. Um, David’s got a lot of knowledge in this area. So David, would you like to quickly introduce yourself to the listeners and viewers?

[00:01:35.950] -David G Quaid

I would. I think I’ve just been upstaged by a very special guest on Kurt’s lap. Uh, Kurt, who have we— who’s joining us?

[00:01:43.980] – Kurt von Ahnen

This is Lacey. She’ll be joining the show today.

[00:01:46.850] -David G Quaid

Oh, well, welcome, Lacey. It’s a privilege to be on the show with you. What a gorgeous, gorgeous pooch. So for those of you who don’t know, I’ve had an SEO agency and, before that, a PPC agency and a web design agency, which was interesting because I’m colorblind. And I actually do a lot of work with agencies. So I’ve worked a lot of my career as a— because I’m more of a boutique agency, which really just means smaller, just means really a one-man show. I work with many other agencies, so I’ve gained valuable insights into how they operate and build portfolios and client relationships. And I think that especially for a lot of newbies, starting an agency and building up from scratch from the outside can be a little awkward. So hopefully I can simplify that. And so it’s not just for SEO; the same principles apply to design, web development, paid search, and social media. Content is content marketing, the whole lot.

[00:02:48.810] – Jonathan Denwood

Should be a great show. And I’ve got my great co-host Kurt with his partner. Kurt, would you, if you’re listening to this, Kurt’s got a pooch on his lap. But Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself?

[00:03:04.210] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah. Kurt von Ahnen, own an agency called Mañana No Más. We do a lot of great work with the team over at WP-Tonic as well, and I apparently pet-sit for the neighbor next door, and I wanted to keep this thing in eyesight. So, um, I’m excited to do the show today, Jonathan.

[00:03:21.460] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, should be a great show. Like I say, David’s got a lot of knowledge to share. Before we go into the meat and potatoes, we’ve got a break for some of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:03:36.860] – Kurt von Ahnen

WP-Tonic is sponsored by Jetpack. Managing WordPress sites shouldn’t mean stitching together a pile of disconnected plugins. Jetpack brings security, performance, publishing, growth, and AI tools together in one WordPress-native toolkit. Use what you need: Backup, Scan, Boost, Social, VideoPress, Stats, and more. All with modernized dashboards built into WP Admin. For your site or your client’s sites, see what Jetpack can do. Jetpack.com. WP-Tonic is sponsored by Ninja Forms, and let’s talk about one of their powerful tools, conditional logic. Conditional logic is the clearest example. Every rule for the entire form lives in a single panel instead of being buried field by field. On client work, build speed and low maintenance are part of your margin. A form that is fast to configure and that a client can run afterward without coming back means less friction during build and less support load after the handoff. Ninja Forms, powerful and genuinely easy to work with without being dumbed down. To learn more, go to ninjaforms.com.

[00:04:55.990] – Jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back, folks. Really want to shout out for Jetpack, um, Ninja Forms, some of our new major sponsors. Their support is so welcome. Um, to maybe get some special offers from the sponsors plus a curated list of, uh, services and best plugins for the freelancer, the power user, or the small agency owner, you can get all these goodies by going over to wp-tonic.com/deals. wp-tonic.com/deals. Deals. That’s where you find all the goodies, folks. What more could you ask for, my beloved tribe? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get on that page. So let’s go straight into it, Dave. Um, so is there a kind of couple key things that you think a kind of web design development agency needs to understand about maybe bringing in SEO services, and what’s the best way to promote that? Or, when we were talking before our break, you said this could apply to web design or development, depending on the experience. So I’m gonna throw it over to you and see where you think we should start this conversation, David.

[00:06:15.810] -David G Quaid

So I think basically every agency either fits into one of three categories, right? You’re either a cost-effective solution. So for example, if you’re selling bandwidth for developers, right, so it’s traditionally offshore, nearshore, midshore, onshore, you’re either bringing developers who you have a currency gain over, right? So, for example, the US dollar to the South African rand means you can hire someone at a local salary in South Africa, but the salary cost in the US is maybe 50-25%, right? So you’ve got a cost advantage, or you’re someone who’s very specialist in a particular niche, right? So you have a lot of experience with, say, WordPress, or a lot of experience in, say, cybersecurity or fintech, or one of the regulated industries, which also includes fintech, but also healthcare, things like that. So if you’ve got a lot of, you know, niche-specific industry and regulation knowledge, that saves companies a lot of time, and those are your unique selling points. So you need to be on top of those. Or you’re coming because you’re just a fantastic marketer and it’s— your work speaks for itself. That’s very rare. And that’s a very difficult but enviable spot to be in.

[00:07:33.030] -David G Quaid

And it requires a lot of effort, right? A lot of the agencies that have experts that do the speaking circuit, they’re so busy keeping their reputation that they do— they don’t often get to do a lot of the work, right? And that becomes a challenge for agencies. And I feel like that would always be a challenge for me: if I started scaling too big to support the team’s pipeline, I would be doing less and less of the work. And I feel in my position, a lot of people buy me for me. And so that’s why I’ve kept it small. You also have to remember that just because you’re a good designer doesn’t mean you’re a good businessperson. I’m a good self-employed person because I’m not a great employee, as I’ve proven before. And, like a lot of people in my place, I like working on projects. It keeps me interested and occupied. It means I can test different things. So you have to be honest with yourself about why you’re setting up an agency and why you’re in business. And can you deliver the things, right?

[00:08:26.860] -David G Quaid

So even as an artist or creative, as long as you can learn to execute, you can still run an agency. But I think a lot of people think that one, demand just flows in automatically, and they don’t realize how much, especially full house agencies, right? So a company with 50 people, how much effort they’re putting into lead generation, sales, and that’s also why they have those big ticket fees, right? So an agency out in New York, if you’re a freelancer from the Midwest or from Europe or Eastern Europe, and you see some of the fees that an agency in Manhattan is delivering, you might balk at like, wow, they’re charging $25,000, $35,000. And you’re like, wow, that’s, that’s a scam. You have to understand the input costs that go into that, right? There is a sales guy, there is a— that you keep motivated, there’s marketing, there’s finance, there’s payroll, there’s legal counsel, there’s pay— there’s just so much involved. And so you can come in, for example, and undercut that, but you then have to deliver the same service, and that’s pretty difficult. So I think understanding competition, understanding go-to-market, and realizing that you need a number of pipelines set up to go.

[00:09:39.660] -David G Quaid

So streams of pipelines would be, for example, if you’ve experienced working with other agencies, and you provide an acute skill that they don’t need all the time. So for example, you’ve done a lot of work with, say, FDA 21 CFR Part 11, right, which encompasses a large amount of pharmaceutical manufacturing. And that also means that a lot of the marketing speak and the way you market and how you market is controlled and regulated, so you can’t just go and promise whatever you want. You could then become an expert consultant and charge a pretty reasonably high rate to a lot of other agencies. And then you could sell your time at a 50% discount until you build up. And, um, that way you foster demand for yourself, right? And so that’s a really good way to build pipeline. You can do the same thing as an SEO, being an SEO expert, being a web designer, being a paid search expert. A lot of agencies will typically have a very strong mid-level base with a lot of sort of junior teams learning how to do things. And that’s where people go to learn their trade. And so often they buy in very, very experienced, knowledgeable talent, people that have 10 years experience working at a director or higher level that can help guide them, that can act as a really good name on the board, on the sort of like delivery board and in the— help them with their PowerPoints and so on and deliver solutions to clients.

[00:11:09.110] -David G Quaid

If you’re building an agency from scratch and you’re sort of like wondering where do you start, there are quite a lot of sort of avenues like cold calling outreach, which I’m not a big fan of. I think that that’s becoming increasingly spammy. That’s a numbers game. That’s about just hitting tens and tens of thousands of people. I think that showcasing your knowledge, being on, on podcasts like this is also really good. And I think then LinkedIn is probably a very swamp place where I think far too many creators go to sell their wares. Speaking of places not to go, I also think that places like Upwork and Fiverr are really, really terrible places, especially if you’re trying to move up the value chain. These are places where Um, people that are using, say, currency gain or exchange rate gains, um, can essentially 5x their revenue and still undercut you. And so it’s a, it’s a difficult place to go. Also, promising something as complicated as an SEO strategy or a paid search strategy or a marketing strategy for $5, $10, $20 seems to be the wrong type of client to go after in my book.

[00:12:22.990] -David G Quaid

And so if you, before you What I’m really getting at is just if you’re, if you’re in that position that you’re just about to jump and set up your own agency, you need more than one stream. So if you’re doing it because your current employer or current agency is promising to keep you busy with work, that’s awesome. And that’s a great time to set up, but you need to have eyes on another stream. And so you want to start to build a pyramid. Right, of A clients, B clients, and C clients. So an A client is someone who’s almost giving you a salary, right? It’s like 75% of a full-time salary, for example. And you need to have at least 3 leads of those per year to survive 5 years. Then you need— then you have your B list and your C list. The problem with C-level clients is that these are going to be the— let’s say if your annual retainer markup is between $500 and $3,000, they’re going to be the $500s. If your, sorry, monthly mark— monthly retainer is going to be $2,000 a month to $10,000, Level C is going to be the $2,000s.

[00:13:30.680] -David G Quaid

The problem with Level C is that it’s easier to win, but it’s also a lot of heavyweight. There’s a lot of meetings you have to subscribe to. There’s a lot of metrics you have to remember. There’s a lot of people’s names you have to remember. There’s a lot of work you have to do in between.. And so if you have the wrong proportion of ATCs, you effectively will start to screw up, and that’s damaging to your reputation. There’s also a number of ways to build your reputation that I think people don’t understand. One is, you can also be the most helpful person in the room. The other is, you can also be the most contrarian person in the room. A strategist that used to work for me was very much of the opinion that, you should start an argument with everyone and that’s how you get eyes on you. I don’t know how you guys feel about that.

[00:14:20.560] – Jonathan Denwood

Kurt, you’ve a lot of experience. I don’t know about that. You’ve opened— I kind of put a layout. I normally do, folks. I normally lay out about 6 questions, but David, um, I’m going to leave it to Kurt. I don’t know if you want to go to the next question or you— we’ll just have an open discussion, Kurt, because David’s opened so many things here, hasn’t he? So I’m just gonna get your response to this, Kurt, and see where you want to go with it.

[00:14:48.810] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, one of the first things that really crossed my mind as David was speaking was, um, he touched on this, and it’s, and it’s ironically one of the things that’s been on my platter lately. And that is, you have an agency and you’re looking to scale, you’re looking to grow, maybe you want to add teammates. But then, to your point, David, you were stressing like you want to do the work that you want to do. And so I have actually caught myself doing a lot of the work on a couple of projects and then chastising myself saying, you know, you should be delegating this, you shouldn’t be doing this. But then when I look at it, that’s the work I want to do. Like, I enjoy doing it. I’m just going to do it. And, you know, newsflash, I get to keep the margin, right? I’m not giving the money to somebody else. But then that gets in the way of that scaling, of that getting the next client, of that. So it’s almost like you’re fictitiously shrinking your ability to grow because you’re doing the stuff that you, that you want to do. There’s a real obstacle there.

[00:15:51.050] – Kurt von Ahnen

It’s a seesaw that seems to be working against itself.

[00:15:55.710] -David G Quaid

You’re so right. And that’s why I think it’s important to know who you are. And, you know, you can, you can take a personality test. There are lots of personality tests online that help you discover, are you very project-oriented. So, Curt, you’re absolutely right. If you are a team manager and you’re able to manage clients and bring clients in, and then you find yourself doing the work, that’s problematic to scale because you can’t, you know, the more you jump in, you start losing, you know, it’s okay on day one, right? But then you start losing line of sight on pipeline, on client management. And so that’s what I was saying, or what I should have said is for me, that’s my preferred mode, right? Me outsourcing to someone else doesn’t always make sense. If I should, I’ll outsource graphic design and things like that because I’m colorblind, right? It’s just a, it’s a no-brainer. But I think if you’re, you’re right, if you are actually someone who can bring in pipeline and manage clients, then you need to control, you need to do the opposite of what I said, right? You need to make sure you’re managing the people you have and getting the most out of them.

[00:17:01.010] -David G Quaid

Right. And I think that’s, that’s where it can get confusing for people. So if you, if you are a really talented designer and people just say, wow, we would pay you $50,000 just for your design talent, then you’ve got to make sure you’re the person doing the delivery. Obviously you can subcontract to people instead of hiring who can help build the WordPress sites, and then that way you’re not having them on monthly payroll. You’re having— you’re connecting their charge to a fee. So if their costs go up, you can potentially increase their cost. So that’s another thing I think that freelancers in particular don’t think about is scope creep, cost inflation, you know. So if you do a deal with someone to deliver a website for $50,000, they say, look, we’ve got to come back and charge another $50,000. Have you built that into the terms and conditions, for example? So it’s quite a lot of different things to think about, and you need to know are you able to manage that exposure and that risk? And are you comfortable with it? Or do you just want to do what you do and repeat that for lots and lots of people?

[00:18:05.290] -David G Quaid

Then maybe you can trade and say, look, I’ll give your agency a preferred rate and I will deliver the $50K design for $25K and you guys get 50% of the margin and it’s a pretty good deal for everybody. And by offsetting that, You’re essentially giving yourself a long-term projection, but you’re also selling under somebody else’s name. So you’ve got to decide about that. I think a lot of people can get a little bit precious about their brand name before they have a brand name. And I often raise my eyebrows. I’m not a big proponent of work for free, but when I was setting up Primary Position again in the US, one of the things I did is I just started finding people who needed help with SEO. And I just said, look, that’s a relatively small problem, or that’s a problem I can fix for you over 6 months. And I’ve got my old employer have given me a 6-month contract, and I found this other company, and they just want to pay me $500 an hour to sit in meetings and help make sure that their strategy is on time. And so that gave me a lot of spare time to build a network.

[00:19:10.310] -David G Quaid

We, you know, it was the middle of COVID or COVID had just started, Um, I’m not proposing that sort of freelancers and writers and designers go out and do free work for big corporations. That’s not what I’m proposing. However, it’s always been a super effective, um, way for me to find other people. So if I solve a problem for one company that is maybe short of money, but they’ve got other clients— I, I get a lot of my clients from either people I’ve worked with that move to a new company and I stay with the old company, or they can say to one of their clients or one of their business associates or networks, this guy came in and in 3 months we achieved more than we did with the last 3 agencies over the last 5 years. And that’s when you start to get a brand. And so I still think that’s a good strategy. I don’t know about what you guys think about that.

[00:19:59.820] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, I’ve actually caught myself doing some similar things lately. Just recently, a guy came and cut down the tree in our yard that was dead. And, uh, you think, well, that’s not a big deal, right? Well, what’s also not a big deal is he did a wonderful job but didn’t have a website. And I thought, well, I own an agency, let’s just build him a website. So I sat down, knocked out a website for someone that cuts down trees and people that want to make appointments to get their trees cut down. And then I showed it to him and I said, I already reserved your URL, you already have your website. This is it. Here’s the deal. As a tip, I’m gonna host it and run it for you for the next year. When that year’s up, the website’s yours. You can do whatever you want. You can turn it off, you can move it, you can migrate it, or you can keep it with us and we’ll host it and maintain it for you for our normal hosting fee, right? And it’s like, boom, customer for life. Like, I know he’s not going to leave.

[00:20:48.660] – Kurt von Ahnen

Um, sometimes, some— sometimes the schedule opens up like that and you’re able to do something incredibly nice, and— but it still creates business in the end. And every tree he cuts down in the neighborhood is a possible referral for us. Yeah, which is the way that I looked at that. Now, you did mention the A, B, and C level clients, and I don’t want that to escape the show. That that was some genius-level conversation there. What would you really top down was the difficulty combined with the lack of margin that, that a heavy load of C-level clients can bring. And, and I think what’s ironic is I’ve noticed in, in my 18 years of running an agency, the A-level clients seem to have higher margins and less friction at the same time. It’s like you do the work. And so people will ask me, why do you put so much work into these podcasts and these shows and the branding that you do? And it’s like, because we’re trying to attract enterprise-level e-learning clients, because we know that when we get those projects, if we manage them correctly, there’s like no friction and the margins are great.

[00:21:56.070] -David G Quaid

100%. You look at, for example, you meet a founder at a networking event of a SaaS startup and He’s paying himself in ramen noodles every night. And you come in and you say, look, I’ve got a great strategy. And they’re like, I love the strategy. And then you realize that part of the strategy means video production, editing, landing pages, paid search campaigns. Someone has to pay for that. An enterprise will come along and insist on having the best video team. So that’s not a problem you have to worry about. They’ll make sure the content is the best. They’ll make sure that their paid search campaign is managed and that they have enough money to outbid their competitors. Whereas, you know, a SaaS co-founder that you can have a 3-year relationship with, you’re suddenly having to growth hack all of the things the co-founder hasn’t thought about, right? And that’s more work for your $2,000, $3,000 a month retainer suddenly, right? That you’re stacking on top. And I speak about retainers and there’s obviously two models. There’s an hourly charge, which, you know, that means the more work you get, the better, obviously. I would say a large amount of the SEO industry has settled on a retainer model because obviously one of the reasons I pick a retainer model is I might decide that some months there’s 30 things to do and some months there’s 10 things to do.

[00:23:14.370] -David G Quaid

We can’t in, in the month that we need to do 30 things, we can’t just lop off 20. And because the client says, I’m not paying for extra hours. If they don’t get done, the strategy falls over.. And so I don’t want to be in that predicament. And so an old, uh, one, one of my, uh, VPs from Dell who continued to be a friend of mine after I left, uh, told me, showed me the retainer model and that how it’s burstable. And if it, if it bursts for too long, your rate goes up. And if it comes back down again, you, you reduce it again. Um, otherwise the hourly rate, it can sound very attractive at the start, but then it becomes very expensive and you become a line item if, if somebody from finance has to look over your account, right? Uh, what do you, what do you go on a retainer model or an hourly model for the most part, Curt? What do you see?

[00:24:01.130] – Kurt von Ahnen

We do projects and we do the retainer model. So, um, like the original build of a website, build, design, launch, that’ll typically fall within the project scope. So we’ll say we’re gonna take care of all of, all of the actionables in this project. We’re gonna take care of that for $37,000, whatever that is. Um, we work on a prepaid model at our agency. We don’t do billing, we don’t chase accounts receivable or any of that. If you have budget, if, if you have budget, we’re your people. Um, and then for ongoing stuff, like, like for ongoing, uh, maintenance, content creation, um, we offer an item called student support. So we do a lot of e-learning sites and we provide the support to the students, um, ticketed support. So resetting passwords and certificates and stuff like that. Um, that’s all done based on retainer, like they’re gonna pay us $1,800 a month and we’ll monitor that ticketed support channel, whatever. But we have a, a menu list of items we offer our clients off of that menu. And then that constructs the, whatever that retainer fee would be for the month.

[00:25:06.520] -David G Quaid

So that’s great because that gives you a, a sort of 6-month, 10-month, 12-month window of saying, if I don’t make any other sales, I, I’ve got these retainer contracts that are coming in. So while you want to chase those 8 clients, they’re going to drop maybe once a quarter or once a month. But also the sales cycle is longer, right? There’s potentially more procurement to go through, more document signing, the setting up a first call even with somebody at a, in a V position at a big company could take a month just to get on their calendar with their team, right? So that’s where you need to balance the, that sort of like tightrope. And then you also have to leave money for what if that, you know, I work with a lot of startups, and if I do a good job, they get acquired, and guess who doesn’t need me, right? And so, you know, you’ve got to build that in. So, if you, at least if you have a retainer model, and you have eyes on how many people you can network with a month, you can sit down with your accountant or bookkeeper, and then say, well, here’s my monthly running for 12 months.

[00:26:11.590] -David G Quaid

And you kind of have to do this from a diligence point of view, right? Like, can I pay all my bills at the end of the month before I pay myself, right? And then you start to realize, actually, 2,000 a month isn’t a whole lot of money, right? I’ve got it, you’ve got to pay for professional insurance, you’ve got to pay for other things, banking facilities, credit card, credit facilities, things like that. And you obviously want to try to avoid credit facilities as much as possible, right? Because they’re, they build up over time. So what are the ways that you look at sort of landing those A and B clients, for example? What are your main strategies for that?

[00:26:49.550] – Jonathan Denwood

I think, I think, I think we need to go for our mid-break and then when we come back, Kirk can answer that question. Um, I’ve got some questions as well. So we’re going to go for our mid-break folks. Hopefully you got some value from our discussion. I think it’s been fab. Like I say, we will be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:27:08.990] – Kurt von Ahnen

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[00:28:20.830] -David G Quaid

Enjoy the rest of your show.

[00:28:23.410] – Jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back, folks. We’ve had a discussion about SEO, getting clients, building your agency. Been a great discussion with our friend of the show, David. Um, but before we go into the second half, if you want to support the show, why don’t you— and you’re listening on your mobile device— why don’t you just leave us a review on Apple or Spotify? It’s really easy. If you’re listening on their app, you can leave a review instantaneously, and it really does help the show. So, um, I just wanted to intervene. Um, I think a lot of small agency owners, you know, they’re competent with WordPress or they’re, they’re competent with learning management systems, and then they want, um, they want to expand their agency and they’re looking to hire either a normally a freelancer, in the SEO area. Um, you got any insight how, you know, how they find that person? Because I was listening, um, to the Agency Growth Podcast. Um, Jake, I think you’ve done a couple of podcast, um, joint interviews with Jake. He’s a great guy.

[00:29:53.300] -David G Quaid

Yeah, really is a good guy.

[00:29:55.030] – Jonathan Denwood

And they’ve got a lawn care, um, I— that the area that they specialize is getting clients that have lawn care businesses.

[00:30:06.110] -David G Quaid

Yeah.

[00:30:06.360] – Jonathan Denwood

And they have a package, um, they productize to some level their offerings. Um, but if your agency and kind of built it in WordPress, but you’re looking to hire somebody who to do the SEO. You got insight about some of the things, how they judge they’re hiring the right person?

[00:30:33.430] -David G Quaid

I do. So something I, that I think about a lot and I talked to Jake a lot. One of the things I think it’s very important for, for business owners is to have a good network. You need advisors, you need people who understand you. You can’t lean on your family and friends. Your family and friends are there for downtime. They’re there to support you when you need it, but you can’t lean on them all the time for the day-to-day running of a business. And a lot of agency owners find themselves in a similar pattern that it’s very difficult to talk about the ins and outs of work. Like, I don’t have a pension. Should someone remind me I need to start a pension? Things like that that help you succeed in life. I think it’s important that you have agency members. Jake is also the moderator of our agency on Reddit. And he also has a Discord channel for the, for the subreddit that I recommend anyone who’s thinking about this joins because networking with other agencies is important, right? Like you can find out what their real challenges are. Agencies are constantly looking at talent and how to buy that talent.

[00:31:35.210] -David G Quaid

So it’s a really great place for freelancers. On the flip side, where you’re getting to, Jonathan, is how do you assess someone in SEO? And I think that part of One of the big problems with SEO is the sort of the black box issue, right? Is that we, we pretend that we think that we don’t know how it works, yet we know exactly how it works because we’ve been reverse engineering it for 28 years. And you can’t tell me that reverse engineering doesn’t work because that’s exactly why we have the IBM BIOS chip. It was re— it was reverse engineered by BIOS chip engineers in Taiwan and in America by getting engineers to send data in and measure the data back out. And if they hadn’t done that, IBM would have had a monopoly on the PC, or we may not have been using PCs today. So the challenge within SEO, I think, is that there’s a number of ideologies and a number of tribal factions. And I’m not trying to further divide the industry. I’m just— I think I have a bird’s eye view and a unique position to look at the SEO industry.

[00:32:35.060] -David G Quaid

And there are people that definitely want to push a strategy or ideology as the main way to do SEO. And the problem is that every website and every marketing strategy has its own unique DNA, right? They have their own brand. Some are well-known brands and some aren’t. So you can’t do with a well-known brand what you can do with an unknown brand. It just doesn’t work that way. Right. At the same time, if a brand has a lot of budget and spending a lot of money on advertising, it’s going to require a different strategy. So if you’re, if you think that SEO becomes a checklist and you can sit down and interview someone and say, okay, you know what a slug is, you know what keyword research is, you know what a SERP report is, that, that’s going to, that implies far too much trust, right? I think that you need to look at a more holistic area within SEO. And say, well, do you understand authority? A lot of people that work within the SEO industry, for example, content writers, right? If you’re very— if you take very highly paid content writers, they tend to be hired by the richest companies, right?

[00:33:41.580] -David G Quaid

So your Cisco, Microsoft, Nike, whatever, right? They can afford to pay $2,500 per blog post. They also happen to have buckets and buckets of authority. People link to them every single day. They have multiple units. They acquire, they grow through acquisition. They’re getting backlinks without even thinking about it. Their web team, their, the way their web team thinks about SEO is almost purely on a maintenance and, uh, control and security model, right? They’re not thinking about growth hacking. They’re not thinking about acquiring links. And so you get these different mentalities and they, they’re fine if you go from Cisco to Citrix, but they suddenly don’t work if you now go to a startup that wants to take on Cisco, right? Um, because now you have to acquire, uh, authority and guess what? It doesn’t come free. I think some of the worst myths, and, and I think Google is guilty of this to a large degree, is just write good content and they’ll come. Go to any SERP tool, go to any Search Console, go to Bing Webmaster Tools and look at how many pages rank for a topic and tell me that your content is good enough to jump over 10 million pages because I would love to see that happen.

[00:34:54.220] -David G Quaid

It just doesn’t happen. Unfortunately, there’s far too much user validation, which we call authority, and Google used to call authority, and they don’t anymore. I think Google have, over the last 26 years, walked this tightrope where they first of all pretended that SEO didn’t exist when they were building the ads team. Then they kind of pretended it existed. Then they built Bing— sorry, Google Webmaster Tools. Then they stopped pretending. Then they gave us Matt Cutts, who gave us tremendous insights into the engineering that is Google. And they’ve actually, unfortunately, I think, removed a lot of his videos and know-how, which is actually still on his blog. And I think it’s as applicable today as it was 10, 12, 14 years ago. And I think that Google had such a big issue in 2012 with people buying backlinks that they sort of have dampened down authority so much. And when I go to any of the subreddits or I look at LinkedIn or I looked at X, people say, well, I’ve written the best content and I’ve built the best websites and I’ve written— I’ve done everything right. But I’m not getting any traffic. It’s because this idea that backlinks have become so taboo that they’ve disappeared.

[00:36:00.030] -David G Quaid

But if you look at the people that are outperformers in SEO, like Jackie Chow, Charles Floate, all of these affiliate companies, companies that have set up non-brands and been acquired by brands because they’ve delivered so much pipeline. These are people whose focus and mentality is how do I get in front of people? And disrupt their view, and I’m not doing it in a way that’s respectful of a brand, or I don’t care, I’m going to find the people that I can solve their problem for, and I’m going to get there for the cheapest, most scalable, most repeatable way. Those guys buy backlinks, unfortunately, because Google, I don’t think, is doing enough of a job to clamp down on it, right? And so if you’re hiring for SEO and the person starts to tick boxes like they understand branding and content and or they bought into a particular ideology, you have to know that by not understanding what they’re missing is going to be what’s actually going to let you down down the road. And it’s very difficult to, to do that. And I empathize with people. So I think that having a network and having someone who can say, hey, I’m in a similar area, like a SaaS company or a local services company, or, um, We’re the best website hosting for communities and WordPress sites, right?

[00:37:18.550] -David G Quaid

This person was able to identify what we couldn’t see and solve the problems that we had. That’s the person you need. And I think you, you, you, you can’t just rely on an interview. There’s also this bizarre thing, and I see this a lot with, again, with SEOs who’ve done very technical SEO at large websites, right? So you’re really big sites. Like job boards, marketplaces, and where technical SEO is vital because it’s all about scale. You can’t do this on an individual process. You have to build code that empowers itself, that they think that if you just build a good product, you know, magic happens and it doesn’t. Nobody’s out there trying to reward you, right? And any, anyone who’s self-employed will tell you that, right? So they often are the first to say, you know, ranking for SEO doesn’t help, you know, Of course it does. I spent the last 2 years building in public and building on X. That’s how we’ve gotten to know each other. I’ve literally said, I’m starting out while I build a business that turns over more than $50,000 a month. I will also show that I have the time to outrank the biggest agencies in New York.

[00:38:29.270] -David G Quaid

And some of those agencies are 500 people, half a billion in revenue, and I’ll outrank them with my tiny little, back then, 25-page website, which is now 200 pages. And Charles Flood actually— and this was for me, it was a personal award to celebrate, he actually sent out an X that if you look at my SEO traffic in Ahrefs, it’s now worth $140,000 a month. And I did that by just writing 3 to 4 blog posts a week. And I rank for cybersecurity, SEO, legal SEO, and someone will come on to me on X and go like, oh, that’s easy to rank for. Try rank for legal SEO in New York City. Well, I do. I’m in the AIO. And you can do that. And I think that’s a great way to show that you conceptually and holistically under— understand SEO and not just a part of it, right? Technical SEO is very important because if your pages can’t be— can’t load, Google can’t index them. It’s not going to send people to it. I— one of the things I struggle with is I want to support people who do technical SEO, but it’s not the be-all and end-all of SEO.

[00:39:38.160] -David G Quaid

You can’t just compartmentalize it. If you take a website with 100 pages with no authority, break the 100 pages and put them back together and add more schema and add more page titles and add more inlinks, you still have a site with no authority that’s just not gonna rank, right?

[00:39:55.890] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, but I think, I think the thing, before I throw it over to Kurt, I think the thing, and I struggle with this, is this term authority. It seems very, um, nebulous, you know. What— but we probably— we— I’m not going to go there because we probably can do a whole episode just on that term and what it is, right? But it does seem very nebulous out there, you know. How do you really build that? Because It’s a chicken and the egg. If you’ve got no, you’ve got no site authority and you know, they index your pages, but they don’t show them. And it, and because of AI and, um, AI overviews, this, this is, this is, it’s been put on steroids. Um, you’re publishing content and it’s not being. Index not shown or not indexed at all. How can you build authority? You know, so it seems a bit of a chicken and egg. Can you quickly answer that and then I’ll throw it over to Kirk?

[00:41:14.470] -David G Quaid

I think for any founder, whether you’re founding a SaaS company or founding an SEO or PPC agency, going to market on your own is scary and lonely and a terrible way to do things, right? And I think networking is so important. When I was younger, I helped run Limerick Open Coffee. None of my clients were in Limerick. Limerick is too small a city to support, uh, big companies. All my clients were in Dublin, London, and the US. Uh, but I went in and I helped local bricks turn into bricks and clicks, right? And they were— they had friends who worked at big companies who then they could say, I don’t just— I’m not just a friend of David, but David’s solved this problem for me. If he can do it for me, he can do it for you. Right. And that’s the power of referral. That’s why networking is so important. The second thing is, and I see this on X and Reddit every single day, well, I don’t know anyone who’s got a website that can link to me. And you’ll see 50 people on the same thread saying the same thing, yet they’re all building a web.

[00:42:09.040] -David G Quaid

They all have a website because they’re all SaaS co-founders, right? The three of us have websites. There’s nothing stopping any of us from starting with an easy-to-use keyword building on top of it, linking to a similar website, a similar page on each other’s website and building it up. The too many companies look at sort of like building profiles for each other, right? So you build a profile on, on Kurt’s site, I build a profile on your page, you do the same on mine. That doesn’t help because the only people are going to find that are people looking for your brand. So that’s, that’s a chicken and egg situation if ever, right? But let’s just say, take the lawn care companies, right? Or the higher education colleges and so on. They all have feeder schools. If you’re doing lawn care, it stands to reason that your clients will eventually need a plumber, an electrician, someone to clean drains, someone to clean cars, someone to wash driveways, right? That’s not necessarily a service you can take on. But maybe you could get a 10% referral cut. And if you are servicing grade A clients who want and demand perfection, you’re going to be expected to recommend someone who’s going to deliver the same service as you.

[00:43:24.650] -David G Quaid

It’s fair to get a 10% cutback, but it’s also fair to build a webpage that links to their site and their site. And a lot of people get caught up in that and say, well, we’re a plumber and they’re an electrician. We’re not related. And I don’t think they realize that that kind of human evolutionary categorization is not a problem that Google engineering can solve without a large human team, which is not something they do. They’re highly automated so that they can make tons of money to repay the investors they have, plus spend it on the other 3,000 brands that they’ve killed, right? And I gave an example on X earlier. When I was at Kemp and we were already an established company and Microsoft and Google launched— they were launching their cloud marketplaces. And we were competing with them, right? Because we’re a load balancing company and Microsoft have at least 12 products in their lineup that are load balancers, reverse proxies, gateways, whatever you want to call it. But they saw us as a massive way to bring our enterprise clients into their cloud. And so they gave us $25,000 a month to blow on LinkedIn.

[00:44:25.640] -David G Quaid

They flew in 5 of their senior VP marketers, one who just left Intel, which is never heard of.. And we camped out for 3 days in Times Square because at the time we were up in Rockefeller Center. And they wrote blog posts, we wrote tweets that they tweeted out, we were on TechNet. We didn’t— it sounds great. Oh, that’s easy. You got a link from Microsoft, you’re set. We got links from TechNet. That doesn’t mean that the link is endowed with like all of Microsoft’s authority. The page has to rank in Google as well. That’s one of the observations I’ve made. It’s not factual. It’s not verified by Google, but I’ll stand over it till I die. What we did is we looked at the keywords that they could rank for that we couldn’t rank for, like Microsoft Load Balancer. And so we crafted titles like, here’s an alternative load balancer for Microsoft products in the cloud. And that ranked for everything to do with Microsoft Cloud. And they, we, they wrote the article and published on TechNet. And they linked to us and we got so much visibility. And even today that would be called geo because we’re getting mentioned on Microsoft, they’re linking to us.

[00:45:33.270] -David G Quaid

Any company can do that.

[00:45:35.200] – Jonathan Denwood

So just to recap before I throw it over to Kurt, because we’ve got about 10 more minutes before, um, is that links? No, all the other— pardon?

[00:45:48.440] -David G Quaid

So basically It’s the links. Authority is a word because backlinks have become taboo. Links in SEO and in web are the pylons that carry current from supplier to user. So if you’ve got a homepage and you’re getting 100 clicks a day, and that links to your About Us and your products page and your services page, the links carry that authority from your homepage to those pages. If you’re stupid enough as 99% of websites out there still are, to call your products page products, you’re not going to get found for products. So call it something else, like dive straight into what you do. But your links from your site and from other pages that rank in Google send authority, which is just a number for a particular topic. So if you want to rank for WordPress, that’s a topic. So the page that you get a link from has a score, you get a score. The more links you get, the higher your score. That’s all it is.

[00:46:42.200] – Jonathan Denwood

Thanks for that. Over to you, Kurt.

[00:46:45.030] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, again, you know, so much to try and dissect and come away from. As you were talking about SEO and then kind of that like referral or piggyback, piggybacking kind of, kind of thing, I immediately thought, wow, I wish I was as good at SEO as I am at LinkedIn. Like, I’m kind of a LinkedIn expert. And when we looked at— when I look at my LinkedIn Analytics, it’s the posts where I tag someone else. Like, say someone else is looking for a job and I go, hey, so-and-so’s a first circle, you know, uh, connection of mine. If you’re looking for X, Y, and Z, reach out to this person. Those get huge interaction, huge, uh, everything, everything worked great. Um, if, if I recommend one of the WP-Tonic shows that I was on, they get more views than if I promote something that’s my own site. And so when I talk to people about how to use LinkedIn, I’m like, you, you have to network with other people. You, you have to bring in other people’s circles, other people’s things. And I remember way back when, when, when, when we were a fledgling agency, we would do social media promotion for our startup clients.

[00:47:57.010] – Kurt von Ahnen

And it was so easy to like create the website, create the Facebook fan page, because they were called fan pages back then. The Twitter account, and it’s seemingly like within 10 days they’ve got 10,000 followers. Like, you— because you would just link all your other accounts, you would, you would cross-post from all these different things, and it would just kind of magically start to come together pretty quickly. But that doesn’t work like that anymore, and you’re kind of describing why that doesn’t work like that anymore. And then comes the confusion I think a lot of agencies and customers find, and that’s like what you’re saying makes sense, but executing it is so hard. I consider myself a writer and a communicator, and I like writing blog posts, but I’m going to be honest with you, David. If, if someone comes to me and says, I want you to write content for me, but these are the keywords and this is the schema and this is the layout and this is the— it’s not fun to write that anymore.

[00:48:51.070] -David G Quaid

Right.

[00:48:51.410] – Kurt von Ahnen

And then I think that’s why you see people like me maybe leaning on AI more, but then we know that AI is probably not the best content either. And so there’s like a struggle like this when people say, oh, I write the best content and I have the best ideas and I have the best. That’s great, but it doesn’t index it. Not index, that’s the wrong word. Probably it doesn’t have alignment with what the SEO requirements are. And I think that’s where people are getting so disconnected because the SEO requirements don’t align well with your creative writing.

[00:49:24.710] -David G Quaid

Right. That’s great—you brought up so many good points. So I, one of my favorite shows, I know Jonathan loves Edward Sturm as well. And I used the same strategy on Reddit as I do on YouTube. And that is, I will, because I suck at LinkedIn. But I took up Edward’s challenge. And I think I got to like 10,000 engagements a week, and then up to, I think, at one stage, I got to like a quarter of a million in 90 days. But on Reddit, I could get to 1.5 million in a month. And I watch people make the most basic mistakes that are clear as day. They go in, brand their response, and tell them how they can help. People going to Reddit are DIYers; they’re trying to solve the problem themselves. If you’re the most helpful person in the room, you will stand out head and shoulders clear of the rest. You could go in under an unbranded account and get business because people will say, I, this guy can see what I can’t see. I need them. If 10,000 people view that, and 99,999 of them go and do it themselves, great.

[00:50:41.320] -David G Quaid

You’ve got 9,999 fans. All you need is one person with a $100 million-a-month business. He says, if I don’t get this guy for $1,000 an hour, I’m out of business, right? And that’s where it comes from. So many people go in and go like, DM me. And it’s like, InterestingApple527. No one’s going to DM you, InterestingApple527, right? They don’t know who you are, right? I actually write under a pseudonym, and it gets more Google searches than my own name. And I don’t care because I’m actually genuinely there to help. And so, when I got offered my first podcast, I said I was going to give people at least 10 things they can do if they know nothing else about SEO, or even if they do, that no one else has told them, and I’m going to give it for free. And that’s always been my motto, uh, because one, I think it shows that I know so much that I never run out of ideas, and hopefully I don’t. But two, hopefully it says that no matter who’s got a problem, I’m there to solve it, right? And if you, if you pay it forward that way, if you’re going to go into community like LinkedIn or Reddit, I think far too many people go in with the, with the invoice, right?

[00:51:53.920] -David G Quaid

And I’m like, do you, do you go to your neighbor’s barbecue party with an invoice in your hand? You know, you don’t, right? That’s not the way to act. And I see so many fledgling agencies and freelancers make these rookie mistakes because these communities are designed to protect people. You go in with linking to your website, you’re going to get banned, and you get permabanned. Game over, right?

[00:52:15.490] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah. Yeah. It’s so interesting because as you’re discussing that, I think about all the LinkedIn spam and people go, how are you successful at LinkedIn? I’ve been using LinkedIn, I can’t get anywhere. And I’m like, because you connect with somebody and then you send them 6 paragraphs about how great your business or service is and how you’re going to get them 5 more vetted clients in a month. That’s not what I do. I just sent them a message that says, “Hey, you seem interesting.” You want to have a quick icebreaker conversation or not? And most people are curious and go, sure.

[00:52:45.170] -David G Quaid

Mm-hmm.

[00:52:45.890] – Jonathan Denwood

Mm-hmm.

[00:52:46.660] -David G Quaid

Oh, I noticed this on your webpage. Here’s how you can fix it. Right? I get like 100 backlink sellers connecting to me, and I think I have it on my LinkedIn profile. I think I have it everywhere. I’ve never bought a backlink in my life. Adding me and then expecting me to go see what you do. That’s not marketing, right? That’s, that’s spam, right? And I think you’ve, you really got to think about the other person, right? And what you’re bringing to the table and why you’re there. I think a lot of social media marketing is just pumping content into a deluge, right? It’s just, it’s just, and Sites like LinkedIn are smart. Like LinkedIn at one point was getting a billion clicks a month from Google. They’re not going to promote your content just because you want clients for free. It’s not how it works, right? No.

[00:53:39.650] – Kurt von Ahnen

I want to ask you something, and I’m sure Jonathan will ask if you have an extra 10 minutes after I have to leave. You mentioned Reddit, so I’m going to bring Reddit up again. Like you, you’ve mentioned Reddit. Other SEO experts have mentioned Reddit. Reddit. Seems to have some kind of deal with Google, where they’re at the top of search results all the time. But for an average Joe like me who signs in to Reddit and takes a look around, it’s confusing. What is the— what’s, what’s, what’s the architecture to even start or do something positive in that space?

[00:54:13.620] -David G Quaid

Don’t even think about doing business on Reddit until you’ve actually been able to use Reddit to make a friend. So if you’re interested in barbecue, your favorite is Memphis, right? What’s your favorite barbecue, Curt?

[00:54:26.870] – Kurt von Ahnen

I run a smoker at my house at least once a week. Brisket, pork, we make our own bacon, man, we have at it.

[00:54:35.540] -David G Quaid

Then I would start with the communities around smoking, whether it’s about the recipes, about smoking itself, or about the equipment, right? And until you get to a point where one of your posts becomes the most upvoted post in the community, you are not ready to enter a business forum, um, because you’ll get slaughtered, uh, because the people who are good at it are acutely aware of it. I, I have no doubt that there are billions of dollars, uh, trading hands in the background in Reddit, um, and so one of the things, if you’re a specialist an expert, and you can go to a subreddit and take someone’s problem, articulate the solution, and at the same time, articulate to the fourth wall, right, the, the enterprise reader who might be lurking, right, and say, if you don’t solve the problem, here’s the outcome. That’s what gets eyes on you. And if you do that without worrying about how to brand this and sell it, you’re set. If you go in and genuinely help people and, you know, people start— you know, you’re doing well on Reddit when people post, I’m so happy that Kurt helped me with this, or you, Kurt, did this for me, or Kurt showed me how to do this.

[00:55:52.100] -David G Quaid

I love nothing more than when I get these absolute random strangers saying on X, I follow you on Reddit, I figured out who you are. I met this wonderful person who has pretty much set up his own website and is now earning an income from home doing what he loves. And for an SEO and someone who’s self-employed and has ADHD to read that someone was reading what you did, and it helped them become self-employed, create, and take control of their own income. I can’t think of a better day.

[00:56:20.430] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, I think that’s a good place to stop. So have you got 10 minutes to stay on or do you have to go?

[00:56:27.610] -David G Quaid

I have literally a client coming to visit me, but I’m going to text them and say I need 10 minutes.

[00:56:32.240] – Jonathan Denwood

Oh yeah, do that. Um, so Kurt, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you, what you’re up to?

[00:56:39.200] – Kurt von Ahnen

I just gave up the ghost that I’m on LinkedIn. I’m easy to find there. I’m the only Kurt Von Ahn in there. Uh, our agency’s name is Mañana No Más, or you can reach out to me through the WP-Tonic site.

[00:56:50.520] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. And David, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you?

[00:56:56.750] -David G Quaid

Um, so now you can find me as David G. Quaid on Google, um, or you can find me on X, or you can just come to your favorite, um, podcast show here on WP-Tonic is probably the best place to find me.

[00:57:06.950] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, thanks for that, David. Um, I’m going to be in the bonus content. We’re going to be discussing, um, a topic that David brought up about, uh, an apocalypse coming with Google. He thinks they’re going to tighten up a lot. I just want to see if he’s got any additional thoughts on that. So you can watch the bonus content on the WP-Tonic YouTube channel. Um, but we’re going to close the podcast part of the show, and next week we have another great guest. We’ll see you soon, folks.

[00:57:40.960] -David G Quaid

Bye. Hey, thanks for listening. We really do appreciate it. Why not visit the Mastermind Facebook group? And also, to keep up with the latest news, click wp-tonic.com/newsletter. We’ll see you next time.

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