How it all began…

My marketing career really started when I joined a small manufacturing business with a job description of just 3 words: “sales, sales, sales”.

I had been in sales roles before previously, but quickly noticed something very different on joining this business.

In previous companies the sales had been driven by telemarketing, mailshots, eshots, and the like.

Here, however, there seemed to be a daily stream of enquiries from the website, between 3 and 10 per day.

These leads were mostly low quality, and not related to some of the higher value and higher profit items we sold, but still, it got my interest.

“What if”, I thought, “we could get the same number of leads coming in each day, but for our other high-value services that were worth 10 or 20x the value.”

Early steps…

I enquired, and was told that this stream of enquiries was because the company was paying for a service called ‘SEO’ – something I had heard of but never really looked into.

I checked, and sure enough, our website ranked in the top 3 for the 3 search terms that the SEO company was targeting, but the search terms targeted were not the ones that would make much difference to my sales, so I contacted the SEO company and asked them to add 3 further search terms related to the high value products that I wanted to sell.

The SEO company doubled our monthly fee for adding in the 3 extra search terms, then proceeded to do nothing – several months down the line and our rankings for the added search terms were still far from page 1 of Google, and there were no new enquiries that I was desperately waiting for.

It was at this point that I started to study, at least 1 hour a day, and experiment with SEO and CRO techniques on our website, becoming a self-taught in-house digital marketing expert.

The results…

A few changes later, and within weeks, the website was starting to rank on page 1 for around 20 new terms that I had added to our focus list, and the enquiries started to flow in.

The results were dramatic – the business I had joined went from slow decline, to growth of 22% the very next year, with no decline in gross profit either because the lines we were promoting through SEO were the higher-profit lines.

The people enquiring had already educated themselves about our services on the website, and had made their decision that this company looked like the right one for them, and my job was then to not mess-up the sale, and simply provide them with what they had already decided they wanted.

Sales continued to grow, averaging 12% growth each year over the next 3 years, against a backdrop of a shrinking market size in our industry.

I then decided to branch out and offer my digital marketing services to other businesses, and One SEO was born.