Summary
- Don't try to serve everyone; focus on a specific niche to create predictable client relationships and scalable processes.
- Trying to be everything to everyone can result in inconsistent results and client churn, as each client requires a unique strategy.
- Specializing in a niche simplifies marketing and attracts more qualified leads, making you the go-to expert in that industry.
- A specialized agency is more likely to receive automatic referrals within the same industry, increasing inbound leads without extra marketing effort.
- Niche specialization makes sales easier as you face fewer objections and clients typically come pre-sold on your expertise.
- By focusing on one niche, you can streamline and repeat processes, leading to faster client results and higher profitability.
- Specialists can charge more than generalists, as they are seen as more valuable and authoritative in their field.
- Building an agency around a specialized niche increases its enterprise value and potential appeal to buyers.
- Use a niche database and assessment template to carefully select a profitable and enjoyable niche for your SEO agency.
- It's important to consider both objective metrics (like market demand) and subjective metrics (like personal interest and industry knowledge) when choosing a niche.
Video
How To Take Action
I would suggest starting by choosing a specific niche for your small business instead of trying to serve everyone. This means focusing on one group of clients who need similar services. Doing this makes your marketing simpler and helps you become a go-to expert in that niche. For example, if you are an SEO specialist, you might choose to focus on a particular industry like law firms or dental offices, which makes your job easier and more profitable.
A good way of doing this is by creating a list of potential niches you are interested in and then narrowing it down by considering both market demand and your personal interest in the industry. Tools like a niche database can help you identify which niches have high demand and are enjoyable for you to work with over time.
You can also streamline your operations by developing processes and templates that are repeatable for clients within your niche. This way, you spend less time customizing your work for each client, which means you can deliver faster results. When you specialize, you also gain the ability to charge more because you are considered an expert.
Lastly, focus on building something that can run without you. Specializing helps create systems that allow others to work independently, which means your business can grow even when you're not directly involved. By prioritizing these steps, your small business or entrepreneurial venture becomes more profitable and sustainable.
Quotes by Author
"Saying yes to anyone who will pay is the fastest way to stall your growth"
"Once I stopped being a generalist and owned a specific niche, everything got easier"
"Specialization makes marketing work for you instead of chasing leads, you attract them"
"When you specialize, sales gets easier because you're already The Authority"
"When fulfillment is systemized, you are no longer the bottleneck"
Full Transcript
most SEO agencies struggle to scale not because they lack skill but because they try to serve everyone and I made this same exact mistake and it kept my business stuck but once I fixed it everything changed more predictable clients higher profit and an actual scalable business so if you're stuck in the cycle of working too much for too little I'll show you how to break free of this let's get right into it so the biggest mistake I see SEO agencies making and the mistake that kept me stuck is trying to be everything to everyone saying yes to anyone who will pay is the fastest way to stall your growth now why is that well it's because every client needs a different strategy a local HVAC company an e-commerce store a SAS business they all require custom SEO plans so instead of having a streamlined system you're constantly starting from scratch and that leads to inconsistent results constant pricing struggles and worst of all client churn and since you're spread so thi you can't create a repeatable process which means you're constantly chasing new business just to stay afloat and because your services are all over the place your marketing is too you blend in with every other SEO agency and the only way to compete is on price and that's why so many agencies struggle to charge premium rates I see it all the time and I've lived through it myself back in 2018 my business was making $60,000 per month but behind the scenes it was a mess yes I was constantly working taking on every type of client local businesses SAS e-commerce lawyers you name it every project required a different strategy and I was drowning in custom work with no scalable process it wasn't sustainable and I was stretch thin constantly putting out fires and even though I had a business on paper it felt more like a NeverEnding job so then I hit a breaking point I realized I wasn't building a real company I was just selling my time and if I wanted to grow I needed to simplify and specialize so I niched down instead of chasing every client I focused on SEO agencies the exact people I understood best and that decision didn't just change my business it shaped everything I've built since got SEO Academy is built for SEO agencies so they can get predictable repeatable SEO results the SEO entrepreneur is a stepbystep guide for growing an SEO business from scratch and rankability well it's designed specifically for agencies to scale content driven SEO so once I stopped being a generalist and owned a specific Niche everything got easier better marketing better clients and a system that actually works so if you're stuck in the same cycle I'll show you how to fix it but first I want to give a quick shout out to today's sponsor search intelligence so you're already starting to see why niching down is really important for growing an SEO agency but one of the other things you can do to really scale your business is to actually Outsource some of the work to experts so then you don't actually have to build all of the systems to ultimately get some of the deliverables you're going to need in an SEO campaign so one of the deliverables one of the most important ones that you will need to do to deliver incredible SEO results is to get high powerered backlinks backlinks from websites that are actually trustworthy not the sketchy links that you can get on forums we're talking about links that can actually stand the test of time and we'll never get you penalize and most importantly will actually deliver results for your clients and so one of the services that I highly recommend is digital. PR and they are not going to get you a massive amount of links okay they're not going to get you a ton of links but what they're going to do is they're going to get you the absolute best links so this now at this point is a a game of quality over quantity and this is exactly what they're going to do you can see they're going get you very strong links that are actually going to move the needle so just go to digital. PR to learn more so here's why you should Niche down ASAP number one niching down makes marketing 10 times easier so one of the biggest advantages of niching down is that marketing becomes effortless when you're a generalist SEO agency your messaging is Broad and generic you might create content like SEO checklist how to get more traffic to your website or Best Link building strategies so what's the problem with this well these topics attract everyone but convert no one but when you specialize your marketing becomes laser focused on a specific audience and now you can create content like SEO checklist for Cosmetic Dentists how personal injury law firms can get more clients with SEO or Best Link building strategies for e-commerce stores so instead of competing with every SEO Agency on Google you dominate one Niche and become the go-to expert in that industry and as a result you get more qualified leads a general SEO checklist attracts random business owners who may not even need your services but an SEO checklist for dentists attracts dentists actively looking for SEO Solutions you'll also get higher conversion rates when prospects see that you specialize in their industry they imediately trust you more than a generalist agency and it also helps with ad targeting instead of running broad expensive Facebook or Google ads you can hyper Target Industries like Dental marketing or Law Firm SEO reducing ad costs and increasing Roi so here's the bottom line specialization makes marketing work for you instead of chasing leads you attract them instead of competing on price you compete on expertise instead of struggling to stand out you become the number one agency in your Niche which brings me to reason number two niching down makes referrals happen automatically so when you specialize in one industry referrals become automatic because people in the same industry talk to each other think about it if you help a cosmetic dentist get amazing SEO results who do you think they'll refer you to other dentists so if you work with personal injury law firms your happy clients will introduce you to more law firms now compare that to a generalist agency if you work with a dentist an e-commerce store and a SAS company none of them will refer you to their Network because they don't know who your ideal client actually is but when you own a niche your clients become your best salespeople your name spreads in their industry and soon you're getting inbound leads without spending a dime on marketing that's not all though because niching down also makes sales effortless when you're a generalist SEO agency sales is an uphill battle every sales call feels like you're convincing prospects why SEO is valuable why your agency is different and why they should trust you over the thousands of SEO providers out there but when you specialize sales gets easier now why is this well number one you're already The Authority so when a law firm is looking for SEO and they find the number one SEO Agency for law firms they don't need convincing they already know you understand their industry number two fewer objections so generalist agencies get hit with do you have any experience in this industry or have you worked with businesses like ours before a niche SEO agency never gets these questions because every case study and testimonial is from their industry number three higher close rates so specialized agencies charge more and close faster because the client sees less risk in hiring an expert verse a generalist number four clients come to you already pre-sold so when you become the goto SEO Agency for an industry prospects seek you out instead of you chasing them instead of why should we hire you as the question the conversation shifts to how soon can we get started so now you know that marketing and sales is easier when you specialize but it should come as no surprise that niching down makes SEO fulfillment easier and more scalable so one of the biggest hidden cost of being a generalist SEO agency is the constant learning curve every time you sign a new client in a different industry you have to research their Market figure out what keywords matter to them and learn their customer behavior and then you also have to understand their competition and that takes a ton of time which kills scalability but when you Niche down fulfillment becomes streamlined and repeatable because you're working with the same type of business over over and over and this allows you to number one develop proven processes so instead of starting from scratch you create templates and systems that work every time if you only serve law firms you already know the best keywords for law firms what type of content ranks and how to structure their local SEO strategy number two your team becomes more efficient your writers strategists and Link Builders don't have to relearn a new industry with every client that means faster execution better results and lower operational costs number three you deliver better SEO results so since you already know what works in your Niche you can refine your strategy over time making your agency's SEO more powerful and predictable clients get better rankings faster which means higher retention and more referrals number four scaling becomes possible so when fulfillment is systemized you are no longer the bottleneck you can train a team to execute the same strategy for every client allowing you to step out of operations and focus on growth if you're constantly relearning new Industries building custom SEO strategies and adjusting to different client needs your agency will always feel chaotic and unscalable but when you focus on one Niche fulfillment becomes faster smoother and more profitable which brings me to my favorite reason to Niche down which is niching down equals more profitability and this is why Specialists charge more so one of the biggest fears SEO agency owners have about niching down is losing out on potential clients but the reality is Specialists always charge more than generalists think about it if you needed a root canal would you go to a general dentist or a specialist like an endodontist the dentist might charge $150 for regular filling but an endodontist can charge over $1,200 for the same procedure because they specialize it's not just true in dentistry it happens in every industry a freelance SEO might offer services for $500 a month while an SEO consultant who specializes in law firms can charge $10,000 a month so why is this well it's simple Specialists are more valuable when you Niche down your SEO agency you move from being a generalist competing on price to an authority who commands premium rates clients will pay more because they see you as the go-to expert for their specific industry and the final reason why you should down is because niching down increases Enterprise Value most agency owners focus on monthly Revenue but what really matters long term is Enterprise Value which is the value of your business as an asset when I ran got SEO I made a critical mistake I worked with everyone and the business was built around my personal brand and that made scaling difficult but more importantly it made the business hard to sell and to step away from if your SEO agency is built on you it's not a real business it's a high-paying job and that's a major problem when it comes to long-term value compare this to an SEO agency that specializes in one Niche and operates without the owner's involvement that agency is more systemized because they serve one Niche and they have a repeatable process that can run without them it's more predictable because recurring revenue is consistent because they work with the same types of of clients and it's more valuable to potential buyers because investors and buyers don't want a personal brand dependent business they want a system that can scale just think about it if someone was looking to acquire an SEO agency would they rather buy a generalist agency that works with every type of client and relies on the founder for sales and fulfillment or a specialist agency that dominates one industry has proven systems and can run without the owner they'll always pick the second if you want to build a real asset not just another service business niching down is the key so now let's break down exactly how to choose the best Niche for your SEO agency so at this point we need to figure out how to actually pick a niche that you want to go into so I've got a few things for you number one I have this Niche database okay so this is a list of niches that I pulled from all of the Google business profile categor so you could certainly go and do this yourself and find all of these categories and scrape them but there's about there's over 4,000 and I've already done it for you so you know this is that's up to you but um I have built I have built this for you and these are pulled directly from Google okay so these are legitimate businesses different types of businesses uh that that you could potentially service okay on the second tab here are all of the search volume associated with keywords uh that are Niche specific so you can see like SEO for lawyers has a lot of search volume okay it's one of the most popular but you there's also a ton down here that we can go and look for like we have uh SEO for roofing okay only 140 searches a month don't view that as a bad thing because if you were to rank for this it would be extremely valuable hence why bus other agencies are willing to pay $30 per click just to show up for this keyw okay so I have all of these for you here this is not there might be more but there's a significant amount uh I've gathered for you here and then these are actually really high value Industries so when you look at these industries businesses are willing to pay sometimes as high as $500 per click now lawyers are typically the highest but you're going to see there's all kinds of different Industries here that are super high value so this is just to get your wheels spinning okay but this is just the first part all right so you're going to pick a few niches that you think are interesting I'd say probably about 10 I would settle on about 10 that you're interested in and then just using your gut I would go ahead and just break that that down into five so five niches that you're really interested in okay and then from there you're going to use this template okay so this template is because I've gotten this question so many times which is which Niche should I go into I decided to invest a significant amount of time into this template okay this template will solve this problem and will answer this question for you and it'll be basically Beyond A Reasonable Doubt which Niche you should probably go into and then it's just a matter of you actually making that decision but if you look at some of the elements here we've got market demand so I'll go ahead and zoom in so you can see this market demand which is the search demand for services for that one specific Niche okay so if we take dentist you can see here that it got a 10 out of 10 there because there's a super high demand for dentists okay in in search volume okay another one is search demand for SEO Services H like how often are dentists looking for SEO or digital marketing help this very high very very high uh and then Google ads are are is that particular business invest already investing in Google ads and the answer is yes dentists already make significant investments in Google ads and you can go in sem rush to see all this okay and then we keep going down the different metrics here and you just go through and you're going to score all these and the the end outcome here is that you're going to see which is a good Niche and which one is not a good one okay and so the first three categories here are all really you know uh objective metrics okay they're not based on your opinion they're super objective the second the final category here are subjective metrics so do you have results in this industry that you can leverage do you uh already have some industry knowledge uh and are you passionate about this could you see yourself working doing SEO for balloon artists for seven years uh that's something you need to be thinking about so uh but the point is is that there's always workarounds for these two like even for results for example you could technically leverage results from another industry uh and and even though they're not hyp specific they're still results so there's workarounds for this in the meantime if you're not quite there um and if you don't have any results then you could certainly just work for a lower ticket price to build the portfolio Okay so there's always workarounds to to fix some of these more subjective elements the industry knowledge is easy because you can just go into chat GPT and you can understand an industry very very quickly okay very quickly and then passion that's highly debatable I mean how passionate do you need to be about these topics I don't I don't think it's wildly important personally I think you become passionate when you start to make a lot of money so I think that's really what matters okay so that this is the criteria now here's the good news you don't have to figure this all out on your own uh it's actually quite nice because I also built out this sop so this sop is going to show you how to go through each of these individual criteria uh you know very very specifically okay um and it's it's no joke so this is not designed for someone that's just wants to Tinker around Tinker around or uh isn't taking this whole you know niching down thing seriously this is for people who are serious about about niching down and building a serious SEO agency um and there's also some other elements in here like all I have all the data in here in this tab so I've already basically done a lot of the heavy lifting for you uh and then also the ROI projection uh tab here as well which is really important which is ultimately you estimating what the ROI is going to be uh for the business itself and how much you could potentially make okay now this is something that most agencies don't even think about but this is really important because I'll just give you a small little example okay so if you take a uh we'll go with the funny example of balloon artist h Houston there's only 190 searches a month okay so what we're going to do is we're going to take 30% CTR which is let's assume that's like really really great results okay we're going to get 30% of the clicks organically for this keyword and other variants maybe so then that's going to send us about 57 organic search visitors to the client's website all right then let's assume a 2.35 conversion uh percent conversion rate which is the just average across all Industries they would get one conversion per month from this keyword assuming a 20% close rate which is pretty average uh they would not get really any clients because the map just doesn't work out okay but let's just assume you know their LTV is $600 um and the business value is about $116 or $160 so what we end up here is with an SEO investment of $30 so that's how much you could charge of this particular company is about 30 bucks okay now this is not an exact science because it doesn't combine all search volume of all variations but just to give you an idea of what this looks like um and the and the way we can come to this conclusion that $30 is based on this column here which is the ROI column so if you when you're trying to figure out your SEO pricing what you want to aim for is a 3: one return on investment so that means for every dollar that a client invests you're going to give them $3 back okay so based on that ratio you that's like bare minimum I would recommend going way higher than that though so you want the ROI to be significant if you're just kind of like you know skirting by uh and it's you know barely any Roi it's just going to be harder to retain that client okay so the higher that Gap is the better you're going to have as far as retention so you can see here like uh the opposite side of the spectrum like fire prote section Houston you'll see that the ROI is uh 29 to1 so for every dollar they put in SEO they get $29 back okay so that's a significant investment but this is assuming at a $55,000 per month retainer okay so there could be you know you could obviously make adjustments on this um but this is just basically looking at how much the business value versus the SEO investment okay so this is how much it actually helps how much money the business will gener rate from the SEO uh in the long term okay and so this is very very important and like I said we want this Gap to be as big as possible and this is why sometimes I see people who will enter a very good Niche but then they price you know completely out of control and they that the ROI gets squeezed for the client we want that Roi to be significant because then the client would never want to cancel so you can always make your pricing based on that and that's why for you know for this one to work for balloon artists you have to charge 30 bucks a month so if you want to be you know the number one go-to SEO expert for for balloon artists you're going to have to get every single balloon artist possibly on the planet to make any significant amount of money okay so I don't recommend that that's not a good idea I would just go after a good industry so you don't have to uh you know work your face off for pennies uh that's not what we're going for here we're trying to find really high value Industries where we can find this beautiful ratio for Roi so so anyway I'll explain all this in the SOP and now you're probably wondering how do you get access to all this well good news so this is the exact blueprint you can use to start an SEO business from scratch and this is not just like one of those books that someone just like generated with AI no this is like a legitimate book that we spent well over a year developing uh and it's it has you can go and look at the reviews there's tons of reviews about it uh and it has a a lot of happy people who have gone through this book and in fact I don't even show most of the reviews most of the time people just email me and tell me how much it's changed their agency changed their life uh and I'm not exaggerating so this is everything that I've learned over the last decade in this book so if you want to build an SEO agency that actually breaks that $20,000 per month barrier uh I actually call that like the the valley of death for most agencies cuz most agencies never get past $20,000 per month this book will help you get there okay so now the good news is not only are you going to get access to the book you're going to get a digital version of this book so you'll get instant access you can start reading it right away uh but I'm also giving you the bonuses which ties back to the niche selection okay so the first bonus you're going to get is you're going to get access to this this sheet here with with all the niches that you can pick from you're going to get access to this template where you can actually you know use data to select a niche and this sop okay so this is all included in this first bonus then you're also going to get access to my my approved SEO tools that I you know all my favorite SEO tools that I use uh as a business uh you're also going to get access to my SEO sales funnel blueprint okay showing you actually how to build a legitimate funnel so you can actually close more deals okay uh you're going to get access to my SEO proposal template this is just uh the template I've been using to get 50% close rate so it works very very well and I've had hundreds of people test this template aside from me and they also get incredible close rates in fact sometimes I see people uh using the template it's always funny to see that but um but it but the funny thing is I know they're getting good results and that's what matters to me okay uh I'm also going to give you access to three private coaching calls this is directly from goach Academy people pay a significant amount of money to get access to these coaching calls but you're actually going to get three of them for free it's about three hours of free coaching um and so you can see the total value here is 5,800 dollars and the investment is only a whopping $9.99 okay that's it so basically 10 bucks uh you know some people spend more on Netflix uh every single month and this is something that can literally change your business and change your life for $10 so to me it's just a no-brainer if you're not willing to make this investment then you know I would just say you know uh hopefully you can figure it out on your own uh good luck but I'm just telling you this is like this will help you get ahead of everyone else uh and I still remember when I made an investment in myself and this is when I was just starting out with my agency this is in 2011 when I made an investment in a program and it was $37 so it was even more than this and trust me that program was brutal it was really really bad but there was something in that program that changed my life forever okay and so in that program they told me to start a blog okay and I ended up starting a blog and that was the single decision that changed my life forever uh all from just a whopping $37 and so don't don't undervalue investing in yourself it is really really important and just to put in perspective I invest in myself all the time always invested I spend thousands and thousands of dollars on books and training and all kinds of things to to it elevate myself to the next level um and so you you have to make these Investments and at the end of the day it's your choice okay but I'm telling you if you make this investment in yourself it's a very tiny tiny investment uh you you are making an investment in your future okay now just if you're not sure take a look at the testimonials do your Google research go to Amazon and look at their reviews like whatever you want to do okay there's there's no no rush for you to sign up for this you know limited copies uh of a digital version of this book there's Unlimited okay so I'm not going to put that pressure on you uh but go and look at the reviews seriously I I want you to uh because I'm I'm very happy about the success of this book so and then on top of if you're not sure worst case scenario let's say you hate the book um I'll literally just give you your money back and you can keep all the bonuses I know once you get access to these bonuses I can stop you from having them so once you get access you know that's it you got access so if you want to be like that if you want you want to just you know basically get everything for free that's all cool too um but the you know my my Sinister element of this is that I know even if you were to do that you actually would get results so um which is really what I'm just trying to do here okay trying to get results I'm not making any money from this but this is more just to weed out the people who are serious and the people who are not so make this investment if you're serious about growing your SEO agency um I don't know how long I'm going to keep this offer in place if if you've been following me for a while sometimes I keep offers up for a short amount of time and I shut them down so you never know what I'm going to do I'm pretty unpredictable uh but for now it is up so take advantage of it get access to the book so I'll have a link below this video where you can get access to your copy and all the bonuses and thanks for watching
