{"id":7179,"date":"2022-09-05T05:57:38","date_gmt":"2022-09-05T05:57:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/seobuddy.com\/blog\/?p=7179"},"modified":"2022-09-05T06:00:24","modified_gmt":"2022-09-05T06:00:24","slug":"my-seo-journey-contentellect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seobuddy.com\/blog\/my-seo-journey-contentellect\/","title":{"rendered":"My SEO Journey [Pro Edition]: Mark Whitman from contentellect.com \u2013 Productizing SEO services from $250k in annual revenue to $1 million within 12 months"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My SEO Journey [PRO Edition] is a series where professionals in the SEO Industry, Digital Marketing, or Web Design share their honest SEO Journey filled with failure, success, and most importantly, proven results.<\/em>\u00a0Episode #95 features Mark Whitman from Contentellect.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Mark<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Hi! My name is Mark and I\u2019m the co-founder of Contentellect<\/a>, a content writing and link building service for agencies and SEO teams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Contentellect<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Contentellect started life in 2018 as a specialist content writing service<\/a> for SaaS companies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My co-founder ran the company for the first three years where we organically grew to $250k in annual revenue. In 2021 he was looking to do other things and I decided to buy him out and scale the operation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s how we\u2019ve grown from $250k to just under $1 million in annual revenues, in just over 12 months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Contentellect<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

How have you managed to scale so fast?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

If I had to distil our success down to two words, it would be systemize<\/strong> and productize. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The demand for content and links is enormous, but to scale a content writing and link building service without compromising on quality is hard. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The industry is also highly competitive with countless agencies, freelancers, and marketplaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We knew that to stand out and scale, we would have to systemize everything we do and productize every output we deliver. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is easier said than done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the systemize front, we set out to define every process in our company and build streamlined Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for them. At Contentellect this starts with our slick systems to recruit and train great writers and ends with the seamless customer journey from purchase to delivery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every process in our company has been defined, streamlined, and optimized for a great output and customer experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the output end we\u2019ve stayed laser-focused on productizing our service. For each service we have clearly defined packages and outputs, and we don\u2019t change these to specific client needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Contentellect<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

We also don\u2019t sell results. In SEO a client is only interested in one thing: ranking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a result, and it is ultimately what SEO agencies sell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Contentellect, we sell outputs. In our case, quality content and powerful links. These are the building blocks of a successful SEO campaign, but we don\u2019t go to market promising results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This means our service is perfect for agencies who need a reliable white-label partner, or companies with reasonably sophisticated SEO and marketing teams that need the manpower to produce content and links at scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How have you won new business?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

After we had a super systemized and productized service set up, the selling bit has been quite easy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I mentioned, the demand for good quality content and links is huge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our go-to-market strategy has been to focus on where our audience hangs out and letting them know we exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, we\u2019ve won a lot of business from being active in Facebook groups that are focused on online business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019ve also won lots of business from LinkedIn, and believe it or not, cold email outreach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because most clients have a great experience with us, they usually come back for more or sign-up to one of our recurring monthly subscriptions. This means we get a lot of repeat business and referral business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Have you done any SEO on your own site?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Ironically, we did no SEO or content marketing for our brand in the first three years. We literally had a 5-page website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This changed last year when we decided we would eat our own dog food.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s an argument that it\u2019s a waste of time for an SEO agency to do SEO on their own agency website, as the space is just so competitive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But equally, it\u2019s hard to demonstrate your SEO chops if your site has a domain rating of 0, has almost no referring domains and gets no organic traffic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"contentellect.com<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Also, what better way to demonstrate the quality of our content than by publishing to our own website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our SEO efforts on our own site have been pretty good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 12 months, we\u2019ve increased our referring domains from 69 to 286, our domain rating from 17 to 32, and importantly our organic traffic from near zero to over 4000 visits a month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"contentellect.com<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

And the best part is this traffic is high intent, so we\u2019re getting decent conversions from our inbound efforts.<\/p>\n\n\n

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There\u2019s more\u2026<\/div>\r\n

Now it\u2019s time to discover the other 102 steps that will get more organic traffic flowing to your website. Get the SEO Checklist here.<\/a><\/p>\n

Want to get a sneak peek of what it looks like?<\/strong>
\nEnter your email and get a free demo version of the SEO Checklist.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\r\n

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