Why New Agencies Should Break the Vertical Niching Rule

Speaker A: Today we're tackling a counterintuitive growth idea for SEO agencies. Instead of drilling ever deeper into one vertical, what if you became the undisputed expert in one core service and applied it everywhere? To show us how it works, we've invited Johnny Nastor from Digital Commerce Partners to share his journey from broad content SEO to a hyper focused D2C offering. Let's get started. Welcome to the Agency Growth series, the podcast dedicated to setting up, running and

Speaker B: scaling your SEO agency. Hi Johnny, and welcome to the podcast.

Speaker C: Hey, thanks so much for having me.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a pleasure. The first question I want to ask before we begin to dive into this topic is what do we mean by niching down vertically, horizontally? And why is this such an important concept for SEO agencies?

Speaker C: Good question. Um, so niching down is what people tell you to do right when you're starting a business, especially a service based business. Um, and people even say like, go as far down as you can because then you can talk to your ICP

Speaker D: or your ideal customer profile.

Speaker C: That typically means you'll see lots of SEO agencies say like going for lawyers or even like it could be just for criminal lawyers or just for like accident insurance lawyers. And it could be lawyers only targeting local businesses or something. So just like keep going down. Some people do just landscaping businesses and so it's really just finding that and then going down as far as you can into it and basically replicating what you've done for this one company and

Speaker D: do it all around your country or the world, um, in any way, um,

Speaker C: horizontally is to me it's still niching, but it's, it's around the service or the capability of, of my team. So basically I, I came out of a partnership like Digital Commerce Partners came out of a partnership with Copyblogger Media. We were their SEO team and then they proposed this idea because they had a huge audience in the content marketing space. So we created the agency and then we hyper focused around content focused SEO and to the like, to the point where, I mean we're still doing that. So like we don't do backlinks. We didn't get into very really technical SEO. It was like if you need somebody with content focused SEO, which to me is mostly on page, really good copywriting integrated into your pages, internal linking, then

Speaker D: we're the people for you.

Speaker C: You can be a law firm, you could be a course creator, you could be an E commerce company. Either way, it doesn't matter. Our service is what we do and then we just go industries only Covering this space. We're not, we're not like we do all SEO or we're an all service digital marketing agency. We're not. We only do one specific thing, but

Speaker D: we do it across rather than down.

Speaker B: And was not niching down always the initial strategy? How did that actually come about? Because the way the industry talks about it is that niching down vertically is the standard. How did you actually come about figuring out you had to focus on content focused SEO as opposed to focusing on an industry?

Speaker C: Selfishly, I wanted to stay. I get bored easy. So I was like, if I have to work with the exact same kind of company over and over and over again, I'm just going to be bored. Um, but I really like getting better at what we do and then like taking what we do in one market and then implementing it in another market and then another market, another market. So it's just kind of worked for us in that way. Looking back, it seems very clear, right, like that's how we did it. But it was kind of just sort of the way, um, it sort of evolved because again of that audience we had to initially kickstart DCP from. So we had like hundreds of thousands of people on email lists and stuff like that. So we just, we got to start and those were content marketers or people really into content marketing. And so they typically weren't even asking for like backlinks and stuff like that. That came later. And we just stayed away from that. We're just like, we don't do that. We don't do that. We would get partners who would, who like, we can like recommend people who do these other things, the technical stuff, but we just do this and then we just tried to get as good as we could at that and then just sort of evolved from there. And it also just allowed us. There was some markets we tried and stuff and it was just, it didn't like jive with our team or like the way it worked and it just wasn't as successful. And so. But then we'd see success in another like in like the music industry. And then it's like, whoa, okay. So you know this guitar teacher, we're killing it for him and he's killing it with his courses. So it's like, then we got like a bass teaching company and we got like. And we just sort of like went around some markets like that. And so that kind of worked for us. And so it was kind of. It would niche down in little spots of it, but still trying to go to the next market.

Speaker D: To find ones that worked.

Speaker C: Then we stumbled across e Commerce and D2C and then our skill set at that point really, really seemed to lend itself well to it.

Speaker D: And then we've started to niche down now at that point. But this is like three years into it or four.

Speaker B: You initially started with this horizontal niching down using content focused SEO. And then it seems like you did find your sweet spot vertically speaking with direct to consumer E Commerce. How did you manage to get to that conclusion that that was the industry you wanted to primarily focus on? What was the journey like there?

Speaker C: So we got one client, they've been with us for just over three years now. They were a DTC client. They were also really big fans of Copyblogger and so they hired us. Um, we hadn't had an E commerce client before, um, and just our work just lent itself super well to it. And then last year, yeah, the start of last year, so 2024, we had got a couple more D2C clients throughout that year. And then at the start of last year I made the conscious decision that we needed to go way deeper into

Speaker D: DTC and to E Commerce.

Speaker C: It was like working super well for us. We were really successful for our clients. And I also saw on the horizon AI coming and now it makes perfect sense again looking back. But as of then this year, like we were seeing the top of the funnel just like being it's gone, like it doesn't exist. And the companies we were working with before this, it was all top of funnel stuff. Like it was just huge traffic. And then we could get some people down to buy from them. But then it was like I was seeing sort of this and I was like, people still, once AI comes, I mean they still, if they want to buy a dress or if they want to buy a rotor or if they want to, they, they'll find it somewhere else. Maybe, maybe they'll do the research for it some other way, which we can help our clients be found that way, but they still need to physically buy that. But since we were in like course creators and stuff like that, I was like, oh, that's a tough market. And it was just getting hard to like it was getting hard to be able to charge the amount of money we needed to charge of what we wanted to. And then also to get our clients

Speaker D: to see like ROI on it, which is absolutely important if they're going to stay with us.

Speaker C: So the, the DTC just sort of came out of that and then we just kind of went all into it and then we Got a few just really amazing clients, and they were just super happy. They're like, how do we do more of this?

Speaker D: And it just worked.

Speaker B: Sounds like you found your sweet spot. Uh, A.I. yeah. Definitely something we'll come back to. What I'm curious about is when you talk about acquiring clients across different verticals is how do you build domain expertise to serve clients in different industries? And do you collaborate with external partners? How do you come up with the material, the case studies, to convince customers from different industries that you're the right partner?

Speaker C: That's a good question. So the way we. The way we have always been able to work in different markets is everybody on our team is like, in house

Speaker D: except for our writers, which was way

Speaker C: more important five years ago than it is now, obviously, but because again, we came from Copyblogger. Copyblogger had certified content marketers. They had about 1200 people they had certified under the system of Copyblogger. And so we had access to this massive database. All. They all had different expertise. So we would bring in a new client, we would interview them and like, understand exactly what it is. And then we would go hand pick writers from that group and then work

Speaker D: with our SEOs and content team, but we would use their expertise.

Speaker C: So that another problem I saw with other agencies that I didn't want to do, which was you have a couple in house writers and they have to just fit into whatever client comes along, which again, works if you're vertically niching because you're writing about law every single time or landscaping or whatever it happens to be. But with irons, we weren't. We would literally, we were going in the wackiest markets, but doing the same things, which to me made sense, but

Speaker D: we needed different expertise for that.

Speaker C: And honestly, the way I sold it and still sell it to this day, because people always ask, it's like, well, have you worked with another client like ours? And it's like I said, no. And that's good because I couldn't have this conversation with you who have. Because we don't ever work in competing markets. Because, not that I want to toot my own horn, but I'm only competing with myself. Then I put everything we can into getting my client to rank number one for every important keyword and phrase for them. Now, whether I work for them or not, that's still there. I can't just now move in and I'm just going to be competing with my own content that I've already created. So it just doesn't work. So Again, I have to keep going horizontally in that sense. And people tend to they like that. I mean, if as long as I can like say, like, well, we worked with the client here, here and here doing, and here's why it is like similar to your project. And I think what we did here will work with you here. It's like, oh, that makes sense. Almost to the point where I feel like they like it better than just like, well, we only work with all of your competitors. Because then it just. It. To me, I feel like that would be a hard sell. People do it all the time. But to me it was easier to

Speaker D: sell without the competition involved and me just being able to say I'm my own competition. People kind of were like, oh, that's actually quite interesting.

Speaker C: Um, so we still get asked like, oh, have you ever worked with a company our size or have you worked with those kinds of things? I do get those questions, but at

Speaker D: this point we've worked with some of the largest companies that there are and

Speaker C: some of the smallest companies, like one person teams.

Speaker D: So everything in between seems to work for us.

Speaker B: Whenever you're confronted with a potential industry that you're completely not used to, do you have to do a lot of research prior to the pitch or prior to that first contact with the customer? How do you go about doing that?

Speaker C: We do have like a fairly simple process that somebody on my M SEO team runs and pulls data together for me about the company, but for, for beforehand, because we've worked with certain types of companies but they're in completely different markets so many times that I kind of have a pretty good idea. Like there's say like 10 things or fewer that are the biggest like leverage points for E Comm and I can kind of just look at and be like, okay. And then in the proposal it's like, hey, these are the three first ones. Here's two after that I think we'll probably be going after. We haven't dove into your site, we don't know all the data, but my expertise tells me these are the things and they're usually fairly accurate in that sense. Then we do have a pretty in depth process. We call it our business integration process, which is from day one we run some interviews with different parts of their team and ours and we build out like writer guidelines and documentation on their icp, who they're selling to, what they're selling, what their marketing stack looks like, and then everybody who's creating content or working on SEO, whether they're in house or writers afterwards, have to read and understand these documents before starting. And that just sort of evolved over time. That's just sort of a way we've found to really get into the weeds and really fully understand what the business is and also really what. What are their goals for us? Because at the beginning we did sort of misalign with goals at times. And it was like, we really need clarity on this.

Speaker D: And so that business integration process helps us with that.

Speaker C: And it's just been one of those

Speaker D: ever evolving, iterative sort of processes that

Speaker C: has grown and contracted and expanded and

Speaker D: sort of changed over time.

Speaker B: Based on your process you talked about, I'm interested in knowing a bit more about how you onboard new clients across different industries without having to start from scratch each time, which I guess can be a lot of effort involved in that process you talked about. How do you optimize that? How do you make it scalable?

Speaker C: Um, so we haven't worried a lot about scalability. Like we have to the point where we've got to, but we really, we don't take on a ton of clients. Our clients right now are staying with us on average for just over 19 months. And so it's like, we like, we don't even take on a new client every single month.

Speaker D: It's just not what we do.

Speaker C: My process now, a lot of it is turning it away. And we have some like, partners at other agencies because most people just aren't

Speaker D: the right fit for us.

Speaker C: And I'm totally fine with telling them that and then guiding them to where I think these guys are perfect for you, but you're just not the right fit. But for the onboarding we just have a really clear sort of like, we know we have to do some like, technical, like pulling data. We call it our page mapping audit is like the very first thing, day one of a project. While, like, while we're talking to the clients and having our business integration, we're like, we do a full like screaming frog crawl and pull everything in and we start just looking at the site as a whole and then categorizing things out, also looking for. Which we've found more than once, like, uh, oh, you have an entire duplicate of your site as a staging. That's still indexable, those kinds of things. And there's like, oh, we forgot that was two years ago. Those kind of things get found. Then it's like, okay, well let's get

Speaker D: rid of that obviously.

Speaker C: And then from there it's. We have. Our processes are all documented and we use a tool called Slab, which is like our knowledge base for SOPs. And then we have some like, just

Speaker D: like decision trees on like what we

Speaker C: find in the page mapping audit. And do they go to like content audit, or do they go to like content strategy?

Speaker D: Or do we.

Speaker C: Do we have a website health audit, which is kind of our technical audit, depending on what's found at the beginning,

Speaker D: which steps do we go to?

Speaker C: And really we're trying to, we're trying to get to the work. As much as I understand we have to do the audits and all that things, nobody ever buys an audit.

Speaker D: Nobody wants the audit. Right.

Speaker C: They want results. And so it's our goal to get. But we have to make sure we make the right moves and people understand that. So with these decisions, we try and just make the fastest decisions without missing stuff and get them to where we think, okay, we can take action on these collection pages. Now, these are what need to happen or else we're missing these 10 collections that are. And you've told us, like, we're going after these 40 keywords, 10 of them. We don't have any content for.

Speaker D: We need these pages immediately, that kind of stuff.

Speaker C: So again, because even in the proposal, I've kind of just looked at their site quickly and we've dealt with so many E commerce sites that it's kind of like, ah, uh, you're missing this, you're missing this. We need to fix these. Your PDP's are just a mess. So we can kind of prioritize it

Speaker D: from there and then take them to it.

Speaker C: So it's just, it's some decision trees based around probably the 10 processes possibilities, which ones are best. All of them would get done if a client stays with us for long enough, but it's a matter of prioritizing those. And then also with E commerce, unlike, uh, a course creator where you kind of can just run out of content. Like, we've created all 100 pieces of content. And what else? It's like there's just constant influx of new products and stuff always coming out, new launches.

Speaker D: So there's kind of always new stuff to keep us, I guess, required and helpful to the clients.

Speaker B: All right, that's very clear. You talked about rejecting or refusing to work with some customers. I'm, um, curious to know a bit more about what is your qualification criteria? How much does the vertical play a role in that? I hear a lot during the last two podcasts about choosing the right customers to work with, and it seems to be a recurring theme. And you would think that for an SEO Agency, especially in its initial phases, they'd be taking on any customer. But it seems like the smart ones actually reject some of the customers and spend most of their efforts on those that they deem to be of high quality. How do you actually do that and what is the process for dcp?

Speaker C: So we've taken on, um, clients that we shouldn't have taken on before, which has become really obvious almost immediately after. There's been two clients that we've actually sort of parted ways with in the first week because we just realized, which is. It is a problem with the horizontal.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker C: Because we're working in different markets and it's kind of. But it wasn't even the market per se. It was kind of just a really bad mismatch of teams and it was

Speaker D: just like, this is not going to work.

Speaker C: So it's like, let's just all agree that none of this happened. Everybody gets their money back, everyone's happy, let's go. Um, and so we have gotten a bit better at that, like sort of figuring that out. Lots of it's just through the communication, like even via email leading up to stuff. Like certain things are just, it's a little bit off putting to us.

Speaker D: And so we just, we'll just say, okay, it's not going to work out.

Speaker C: I was actually on a sales call yesterday with a, uh, local Toronto company actually. And they're in the information space. Great company. They really, really just need SEO, content, strategy, focus. And they, they do like trainings, they have courses, they do speaking. And I had to say to them, I was like, like three years ago, four years ago, for sure, you guys were our ideal client. And I said, but you're just absolutely not anymore. And it's not just because. Well, it is a lot because their budget, they just said at the beginning they couldn't afford our minimum. But. And I was like, well, I mean, sometimes we can make things work. But it was, it was just like, honestly, I just, I feel terrible. But like every strategy I know for you I know won't work. I know we shouldn't be going after the top of funnel right now. We would. I don't know where your bottom of funnel is because you don't have clear sort of like with a service business or again with products. Like, we have a client that sells like women's fashion.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker C: It's like, I mean, I know when dresses or bathrobes are. And those things are bottom of funnel. I know where they are.

Speaker D: It's easy.

Speaker C: But with courses and this like, sort of speaking and different. It's hard. And I was just like, is. It's intriguing to me to want to find that out and to work with you for that, to be able to like, figure out, because I know there's a wedding, but you don't have the budget to pay me for the next six months to experiment with this kind of stuff. And you shouldn't. You need action now. And there's probably people out there who

Speaker D: have figured it out already, so you

Speaker C: really should be going with them. And they seem to really appreciate the candidness of it. Um, one of the people actually ends up ended up living just in my neighborhood too. So I was like, oh, maybe we'll

Speaker D: see each other at a coffee shop or something.

Speaker C: But it was just like straight up. It's. We, we do charge, I think, like, we charge a fair bit per month and our clients demand. Well, I demand of us to get them so that they're profitable within three months and they're making money back from us every single month and then significantly,

Speaker D: exponentially more than that.

Speaker C: And if I can't see that in your project, I really can't take you on confidently and feel good about myself because I know it's going to be

Speaker D: a mess and you're just not going to be happy.

Speaker C: And it's, it's why our clients stay

Speaker D: with us for on average 19 months.

Speaker C: Because as long as they're getting that

Speaker D: ROI, they're going to stay. There's no reason for people to go, but if it can't do it, I can't do it.

Speaker C: Still, obviously, if people come and they're like, oh, we're just looking for like a bunch of backlinks for these pages, blah, blah, blah. I get these emails quite often and stuff, and I'll just like refer them off to other people. Like, that's. We're not even getting on a call because we just don't do backlinks. It's not what we do. Um, do you do pr? Do you do this? No, we don't. We literally do, which is content focused SEO. But then the clients that do find us and when we get on that call, they're just like, I just got to tell you, I went through so many different, like, SEO agencies and stuff. And like, I love your content focused approach. And it's like, it just speaks to certain people. It doesn't speak to most people. Again, we don't need tons of clients, right? If we have like between 15 and 20 clients, we're more than happy. It's Just where we want to be. But again, clients that are paying us

Speaker D: well every single month and you're amounting

Speaker B: to, I think I remember correctly, over a million in revenue. You with those clients, right?

Speaker C: Yes, yes, significantly at this point.

Speaker D: But yeah, we hit that. Just, I think we were about 14 or 15 months into the business.

Speaker B: Um, congratulations. Yeah, so you don't need that many customers to be able to reach those, those milestones. So choose the customers carefully, basically. Is that uh, exactly this.

Speaker C: Exactly. And I know it's like one of those boring sentiments that people say like charge more, but really just charge more if you can or when you can because you really do start working with a different caliber of clients. It's, it's so much easier. Our clients who pay us $20,000 a month are so much easier than clients they used to pay us $2,000 a month.

Speaker B: I hear that a lot.

Speaker C: It's crazy. I hear that a lot. Uh, I know. And that's why I don't even want to say it because somebody listening who hasn't made that transition yet is like, oh, I hear that all the time. It's like, I know. And it's hard to explain, but it's just a different type of company. And so we just like if you just started a Shopify site and you have it all set up and it looks nice and you just want traffic, I get those emails a lot too. Here's some agencies for starting out E commerce. You're just not the right fit for us. Like, we're just clients who come to us. They've got sites that are 10, 15, 20, 25 years old. The business has been around and they just never really focused on SEO. They figured out everything El. They've built an amazing business, got an amazing amount of like customers, but they just, they're like, it's finally time to do SEO.

Speaker D: And it's like, okay, we can probably work with this really well. So yeah.

Speaker B: Do you price differently across different verticals? And how do you price projects when you can't? Point to deep industry experience in that particular industry.

Speaker C: Our, our base price now is $7,500

Speaker D: a month for just four projects.

Speaker C: And we start now. We, we used to do only six month contracts and now we've gone down to three month contracts. I found that as we made the transition to D2C, six months was hard for budgeting. They really think quarterly and so if we could get into their quarterly planning and do three months, it's like, it's

Speaker D: like a no brainer for them.

Speaker C: But the six months was harder to get approvals on. Even if you raise the price and go to three months, they're like, yeah, let's do it. Let's try this out. And then it's our goal. We typically aren't nearly as profitable as, like, we're way less profitable, almost not profitable in the first three months as we are in, say, like, nine months

Speaker D: down or 12 months. And then we can start gaining back our profitability. But we track that over the life of the client.

Speaker C: And so, again, the deep expertise is just. It doesn't have to be the same market. You have to be able to make the connection their business to other successes you've had with businesses and why you think you can bring that in. And then they'll be like, that makes perfect sense. Like, especially, like, using, like, an analogy of, like, tying another market to this one. It's just. People just get it. It makes sense, right? They typically. I don't think they want you mentioning that you worked for their biggest competitor. They just. They just don't want. They'd probably be like, well, I don't really want. They know everything about them now. They're gonna know everything about us. They probably still have contact with them. It's probably weird. But if they know that, like, we sell women's dresses, then you guys killed it in, like, men's suits. And then, um, you know what I mean? It's like, that's a very easy thing for them to, like, make sense. It's also a very easy thing for us to, um, be able to, like. Like, we worked in custom T shirts and stuff. It's like, if you get into apparel and then you just think, like, okay, so what are the other types of apparel? Like, running shoes and stuff?

Speaker D: Like, I really want, like, Nike to be, like, a client or something.

Speaker C: If they're listening. Um, but it's. It. To me, it's like, because I know what we've done in that market that is almost the exact same. It's a different ICP and stuff. But you're still. It's so interchangeable to me. I can sell that, and I can, like, confidently tell them what we can do, and they can understand it. Maybe that's easier if I'm only talking to lawyers. And I could tell them, for 100 other lawyers I've done this. That. I mean, that obviously works too. It's not that one's better than the other. This is just the way I went. And to me, it's a very natural, easy. Again, it's Just an easy way for you to toot your own horn and just be like, I just don't want to work with competitors because I'll just be competing with myself and I want to be number one. I'm hyper competitive and my clients need to be number one for everything. If I have two of you, who wins, it's like, I wouldn't take on an SEO agency if they want to even pay us because it's like, well, I'm not going to compete with myself for like these keywords. It's just not something I'm going to do. I just, I want to win and I don't want to share that spot with someone else.

Speaker B: So I imagine a lot, actually, I'm thinking about it a lot of very niche, vertically niche type of SEO agencies sometimes must work for each other's competitors and sometimes must be helping competitors bid on keywords that they helped rank for another competitor. That must happen, right? You have to, uh, that's a tricky situation.

Speaker C: Just landscaping companies. One country, like you've got to cover the main cities and then the suburbs at some point I would think, especially because lots of those are like lower price point retainers and so just like a thousand clients. Right. Rather than we have a few clients who can just pay us better. Um, or pay us more.

Speaker D: I shouldn't say better.

Speaker C: No, none of these models are better or worse. I don't think it's just Susan and

Speaker D: I don't think you have to go down, that's all.

Speaker B: Ever lost out on the deal because you didn't have specialized experience or uh, expertise in the specific field that they operate in.

Speaker C: So not expertise in a field that they operate in. But I've lost a ton. I mean, probably in that sense, I shouldn't say no, but like, I was never told that specifically, but I've lost a lot of deals that could be just perfect clients for us. But they really, really were hyper focused on backlinks.

Speaker D: Has to be a huge part of the strategy and they're just not a part of my strategy. They're not going to be a part of my strategy.

Speaker C: I'll tell you the reasons why I don't think they need to be and why I think it's actually just you're missing the right content, solving the right intent in the right places for the right customer. That's it. You're missing those things. It doesn't matter how many backlinks you get. If you don't have the right products or the right collections in the right place, targeting the Right. People. It doesn't matter. Um, that works for a lot of people. That doesn't work for some people because they're often talking to a bunch of agencies. Right. And sometimes it works really well. And I get told you're the only agency who has said that you don't think backlinks are a problem. And I really like that. But then I've heard other people, everybody else thinks this, and we kind of

Speaker D: want to go with the consensus, not with the one goofball who just seems

Speaker C: to disagree with that. Um, so it's just. But again, to me, that's probably a mismatch in our teams anyways then, because they had to get that and it makes sense or they don't and whether fit or not. So we've definitely lost out. Uh, but I think a big part of horizontal niching is really deciding what you don't do more than what you do do and try and repel people and things that need that from you. And that allows you to get this space in here, that if you need an agency to do this and you're not talking about all this other stuff, these. This is probably the people. Right. Like, to me, that's all niching is, is if a certain context or company with a certain context or project comes up and there's people out there who would be immediately like, DCP are the ones for that.

Speaker D: That's what you need.

Speaker C: Right. If they mention backlinks or they mentioned PR or they mentioned rebuilding the site or redesign work, then DCP wouldn't come up. But if it's not, then that's the right project for us. To me, you've niched well, whether horizontally or vertically, if you can fit into

Speaker D: somewhere in that for people, at least

Speaker C: in some people's head, obviously you don't

Speaker D: have to be top of mind for

Speaker C: everyone, but if somebody could immediately think

Speaker D: of you, then I think you've done it successfully.

Speaker B: And do you see many SEO agencies spreading themselves too thin across horizontally, and you think that's to their disadvantage? And would you say just generally, based on your experience, scaling your SEO agency horizontal niching down is something that more agencies should do, especially, let's say, agencies that are just starting off and trying to find their footing.

Speaker C: Yeah, if I had to do it again, I would do it the same way. I don't think trying to do more

Speaker D: things is the way to grow. Right.

Speaker C: Like, people have asked us for design work or whatever, development work.

Speaker D: It's just.

Speaker C: It's just not what we do. And you look at Some like. I mean, there's web effects and stuff, right? Like, but they're like a massive industry agency, but they do everything and it works for them now. But starting out, it's like you need. You just, you do. And I've never liked the thing where people are like, well, what are you the best at the world? That's like, oh, I'm probably not the

Speaker D: best in the world at anything, really, but I'm really.

Speaker C: I think I'm quite good at this. So it's like, if I can just do that, right? But if somebody asks me for this and the reason I think why. And I know it was a reason with me, why. We tend to. It's like, you know, revenue's hard this month, right? And like, somebody comes to you, a lead finally comes in, and they just. They want something slightly different, like, oh, we could offer that and figure it out. But it really detracts you from that. To me, the way I found to mitigate that personally was make sure you have some agencies or people or other people around you that you have a deal set up where you'll get 10% or whatever it happens to be. Because then you feel so. Because you're. Then you're actually like, almost want to do that with ones that aren't a good fit because you start seeing some good 10% of the retainer coming back for literally just handing off an email. And it's kind of like, whoa. And it's like, I'm only making 35% doing all of the work. It's kind of like, whoa, this is actually pretty impressive. And to me, that makes it easier because, you know, some revenue is going to still come from that. So you're not just letting it. Because it's hard to let it go when you don't have the revenue, right? And you're just struggling to grow. And you think, well, maybe these people would be an ideal client. And then it's. And then it just detracts you because you'd never become a really, like, an expert in a place where you can go horizontal because you're constantly just, like, going in these weird places trying to

Speaker D: do whatever anybody asks you.

Speaker C: And so to me, that's the way I found to do it was just find those partners you could offshoot to so that you're still getting revenue, but you're staying focused. And then they also know that, like, it's like, oh, man, if you really just need good content. And it's like, even if they're like, oh, these guys would be Good. They'll want to reciprocate and do it. You can pay them their commission. But it does work out. The more you can kind of be offloading leads and people. Honestly I've had people come back months later and even thank me for the recommendation, like the client themselves because it's. People do appreciate it if they can trust you and like you're just sending them to somebody who's truly a good fit. It's like, yeah, I know agencies. I think these guys are a really good fit for you. And those kind of things can come back to you. You don't know where that person's going to end up working and maybe they do need you, they're going to come back to you again. So I would say horizontal and find

Speaker D: your places to offshoot if you need.

Speaker B: If we had to recap some best practices for an agency that wanted to say do the same thing as you're doing. So content focused SEO, some best practices I hear from this conversation is outsource writing to freelancers who can then be specialized in the different niches that you want to focus in. And maybe the second one is partner with other SEO agencies that specialize in a different type of service so that you can then refer clients to them and create this kind of mutual agreement between the two. And they'll send you over some leads as well when they can't do that specific thing that they're asking them to do. What would be some other practical advice to add to this list?

Speaker C: The other one and maybe the most important for our growth was and I don't know if, I don't know, I can't tell you if it's horror. This horizontal and vertical gets confusing at times and muddled. But like. So we had that acoustic guitar academy came and it was just really successful then. And I love music. If I could show you over here,

Speaker D: I've got my drums set up and

Speaker C: things and I was okay, so like some of our. And so we have some other musicians on the team. I was like there's something about our SEO with this music. So that's when Scott's Bay like we went to then non competing because like somebody teaching guitar and somebody teaching bass guitar are not competing. They might even have overlap of some people but they're not in competition at all. So it's kind of like we could identify. I absolutely want that. And then you can go on LinkedIn, try and find connections or just do really manual slow outreach to people showing what you've done and they'll understand it too, like, oh, wow, they probably, or, uh, maybe have heard of this because they're an adjacent market. But. And so I don't know if that's horizontal. I think that's somewhat going vertical within, like the music, but, like, only doing what we do. And so to me, because then one client finds you, now you can get two even and double your revenue from there and expertise, or even three as you're, like, looking for the next market

Speaker D: to do what you do.

Speaker C: So I would really think of, like, as much as horizontal can be in any market. Don't always think, like, what's some random market I could work in? Let those find you and then look around those. I mean, it was even with, like, the cma, um, helping people become accountants. It was like we started looking in, like, cpa and then there's like, all these, like, MCAT ones, and there's this whole industry of people training and teaching people and helping them pass, like, exams and stuff. It was like, whoa, we could get into this whole space. It's like, to me, that's an interesting way to go. And it can allow you to grow because you can use that to now double or triple in that market space without thinking we have to take over this entire market.

Speaker D: Don't worry about that.

Speaker C: If you just get another client, you've doubled your size and your revenue from just that alone and go to the next one. So to me, it would really be. Look at it. And I know people get really stuck on, like, outreach and doing as much. It's like, you don't have to do lots of it. If you have a specific example and you're talking to specific people that are very intertwined in that, just do that.

Speaker D: Find one, go to the next one, find another.

Speaker B: Now, I'd like to take the final part of this conversation to talk about the elephant in the room. AI. Do you think that domain expertise is going to become more valuable or less valuable in an AI world?

Speaker C: More valuable. Um, okay.

Speaker B: Does that make niching harder?

Speaker C: Again, it gets muddy with, like, the D2C, uh, horizontal.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker C: Because I see them as all different markets and industries. But to me, they're.

Speaker D: They're just.

Speaker C: There's things we can do and like, like the expansion of, like, collection expansion, we call it, is like, the biggest thing we do for our clients, which is we land on the client and they're like, what do you guys sell? What's your biggest thing? We sell women's pajamas. Okay, where's the women's pajama collection? Well, we don't we have it, it's called this, it's called something that we use internally. It's like, oh, uh, but you. That's what you want and those kind of things. That to me is like a domain experience of like, we, we can tell you exactly. You tell us the top, like the biggest head terms. I'll tell you why you're missing the things and how we're going to fix that and it's going to happen quick and you're going to get the results fast. And to me, that's like an expertise

Speaker D: that's horizontal and can be used across all of these different things.

Speaker C: And also, again, I think the more, even if, like in the AI world, if you want to be like shown

Speaker D: in ChatGPT and stuff, I think the

Speaker C: more you're known for a very specific area, which to me can be horizontal or the vertical doesn't matter. It goes back to that. Like, when can somebody be like, oh, DCP is the right for that. If you can do that with what you're doing, then the AI world is

Speaker D: also going to do that same thing for you.

Speaker C: Right. And will that change? Like, obviously what I do for clients today, um, and the big sort of levers I have to pull will probably be different in six months and 12 months because of AI, but it's still, I bring that original domain experience of the D2C world that I can. Then it gets translated into here and people are just like, humans are not nearly as fast as AI is like. Like, we can't forget everything we knew and that expert we knew six months ago for this, if that's the closest thing to this, that you're still that expert, does that make sense? You know what I mean? Like, because even though it's evolution, I mean revolutionarily changing almost daily, us as humans are still like, oh, I can still only remember so much from so long ago. And so it carries through in that sense, but it also needs to make sense. There's people I see popping up. It's like, you weren't talking about anything like this now. All you're just apparently an AI SEO agency now. That's all you are. It's like, uh, to me it's like, well, that's kind of a leap. But to me, that's not showing domain expertise.

Speaker D: That's just showing bandwagon and trying to. Trying to capitalize on something very different.

Speaker C: I think, I think it's really about

Speaker D: like, what can you be known for?

Speaker C: And that's. You have to define that yourself before

Speaker D: any other tool will ever define it. Um, for you, um, or with you in the way you want.

Speaker B: Yeah, I fully agree with that. And I see many agencies jumping on this bandwagon. It's pretty crazy. I mean, we're kind of complicit in that. We have the AI Visibility Rank Tracker, which is kind of geared towards that, but that's been super insightful. That's actually the end of my question, so I think we'll end it here. And I wanted to thank you for joining us on this episode of the Agency Growth series. It was super interesting. I've learned a lot of super interesting case for dcp. And I'm sure that our listeners will find a lot of value in what you've said. If they want to go visit you. I think it's Digital commerce dot com. Great domain, by the way.

Speaker C: Just thank you so much for having me. I look forward to seeing what you and you guys, your team tackled with AI and SEO as it continues along, but it's fun. Thanks so much.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I look forward to having you on one of our next episodes in the future.