Strategy
Hiring an SEO agency after getting burned: the 30-day test
Find which of 4 patterns burned you, then hire the next SEO agency on a 30-day strategy month you own.
Skip the algorithm chasing. Talk to customers, answer their questions, and earn attention.
I’ve been doing this over 15 years — for big brands like Tiffany’s and for startups and scale ups like HomeLight and Kickoff. Don’t make it harder than it already is.
Listen, if you’re new to this:
Avoid:
- chasing broad high search volume keywords.
- reverse engineering Google’s algorithm.
- publishing thousands of pages with ChatGPT.
- getting lost in the weeds on things like sitemaps, page load speeds, schema markup, and other high effort low impact technical site changes.
Instead:
- talk to your customers and figure out what troubles them.
- do keyword research around those topics to see how they search for answers.
- create genuinely helpful resources for them.
- tell other sites about what you’re making and get them to link to your stuff.
- get your reporting right so you can see how your work ties to revenue.
Keep it simple:
1. Talk to your people.
2. Create outstanding stuff they ACTUALLY want.
3. Tell other people about it and get links.
4. Measure and learn what works.
5. Rinse & repeat.
Focus on this for the first year, at least.
Build from there.
Led content and SEO at HomeLight from Series A to a $1B valuation.
I've worked in SEO for 16 years, and I've always measured it in revenue. I was employee #27 at HomeLight, where I led content and SEO and grew the team to about 30 people as the company went from Series A to a $1B valuation. Before that, I ran enterprise SEO programs at BrightEdge and Catalyst. In 2023 I started Narrative Bent to do the same work for proptech, fintech, and B2B companies with long sales cycles.
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Find which of 4 patterns burned you, then hire the next SEO agency on a 30-day strategy month you own.
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