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 $1 million per year SEO agency now I have never built a $1 million 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 C 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 the funnel and 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 Larsson and I the founder of a THX leads and 10K per month agency I work with about 35 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 sales 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 1,000x leads funnel here we have a few different offers we have

the onetime 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 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

know 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 agents 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 then the Diamond package to make it sound like low tier package is kind of like a thing to call it but whatever so this will be 500 to 1500 a month and these are going 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 you're just going to be excluding so many people from being a customer because a lot of just let's say a gym or a restaurant or something like that doesn't really need $5,000 a month for SEO but they would do 500 to150 00 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 onetime SEO optimization especially for people who are just starting with SEO and kind of wait 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 the odd page optimization you know make sure their local SEO if applicable if they're a local business is right and then do a follow-up consultation for $2500 $1 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 tried 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 onpage 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 probably be like three five 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 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 framew works and stuff like that for my program I'd probably have a 3mon done withy program where they do it

themselves and I'm going to provide feedback I probably charge around 6K for that there'd be four parts to that i' would have a custom SEO plan in Trello kind of like we do with 1,000x leads where you just have a bunch of steps that you have to take and all be very standardized and they follow along I'd have a weekly Q&A call if anybody has any questions I would have ongoing feedback in slack so they're going to get the plan plan they're going to be on calls if they have questions and then they 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 just have my assistant put in their SL 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 I would promote one tool for all of the major use cases in SEO so if someone downloaded 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 Mr 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 $100 or less and not require any manual fulfillment for me this is very very important CU you can sell a lot of these sometimes and you don't want to like a $100 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 is not really an Impulse buy where you see it on an ad and buy it but 97 or something like that is so I might use you know woo rank 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' 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 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 finnal 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 because it's very repeatable you could 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 they're

on page SEO they H1s H2 h3s they're 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 stepbystep guide type thing to be honest because SEO like in some situations you can just write day by day but and just tons of stuff about whatever your topic is but with SEO like step by step guide instead of something totally theor 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 set 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 five 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 or targeting 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 jiujitsu 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 SAS 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 would T 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 going to be good for them like probably not going to do it so where are we here but if we have the 10 to 25k per month that' 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 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 fulllength 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 THX leads you know the cold emails the paid ads the lead magnets the offers those are different parts of a THX leads and I have different lead magnets for each it's the same thing here so these would be really fulllength 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 cuz 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 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 4our 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 probably the three-hour email flow really but I call it the 4 Hour so one's immediately then after 1 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 is FAQ emails but also objection emails so like some 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 going to 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 vssl 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 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 cuz 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 the 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 a three FAQs here for each but what I would do is I'd 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 back legings 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 onpage 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 Tik Tok and reals 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' 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 coo and founder job titles I do a 3 to 25 employee count just because I feel like less than three 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 Word press in

technology so very easy to find and my script to 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 got to 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 to 263 characters you're

going to have a much better example or a much better success rate here and then it's 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 followup in the um 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 ation 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 preall flow I would make sure it does a few things I would send them three reminders via email and SMS 24 hours before 4 hours before and 1 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 1,000x leads if you're doing less than 10K it's probably not going to be a good fit cost 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'd 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 7 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 like why are we here today why do we want to even do SEO or what problem are having like I don't have enough leads would be a problem SEO would be the solution you know 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 make 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 en Clos 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 one 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 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 10 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 going to ask if you really ask them like this they're going to tell you and then at the end we want to tell them exactly stepbystep painstaking Clarity how to get started most

people aren't going to buy right off the sales call that's just a fact of life regardless of what sales trainers are going to 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 and 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 dooll SEO agency so if this video was helpful thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one