Partner Highlights: The Intersection of SEO and the Human Experience

Tonic Talks to SEO and Marketing Partner, Intergrowth

Tonic’s Emily Kucers sits down with Pat Ahern, CEO and Co-Founder of Intergrowth, to discuss the different avenues businesses take to strategically grow their profits with the use of SEO marketing. And, of course, how SEO connects back to making an impact. What sets Intergrowth, a SEO-centric content marketing agency focused on scaling high-growth businesses, apart from their competitors is their willingness to dig deep for their clients, and to never forget what is central to all partnerships, even professional ones — the human experience.

Emily Kucera:

Before getting to the bones of the conversation, how would you describe the umbrella expertise of Intergrowth?

Pat Ahern:

I would describe Intergrowth as an SEO centric content and marketing agency that helps the underdogs of the industry overtake the industry leaders. Seven years ago myself and my then business partner were working at another agency together — I would describe us as young and very ambitious 20-somethings that were convinced we knew how to run an agency better than the legacy players.

So we set our passions free and wanted to make a unique agency structure — We went out to build, largely off of the principle of hiring the best people across the world and really embracing the freelance economy.

As of two years ago we gave up our official office space. We are now in 23 US states and nine countries across the team.

Emily Kucera:

Wow, that’s amazing.

Pat Ahern:

It’s been really fun. When you get people that come from different places that have different backgrounds, it encourages better collaboration. As long as people are open-minded, in my experience, it leads us to come up with some really phenomenal ideas, to help clients grow.

Emily Kucera:

And with your world-wide team, what main services do you focus on?

Pat Ahern:

We really focus on two services. The first is content marketing services, which I describe as figuring out the types of themes that your customers are looking for online, writing in-depth, education centric resources with clients, and helping publishing them. When people go online to search for this type of information, our clients get to show up first on search engines like Google, they get to control the conversation, they get to be the ones that win the customer over their competitor. A core feature of our services is the SEO side of things, which really ensures that we’re doing everything possible to create a great user experience and to make it really easy for tech to read our client websites, and most importantly, have search engines and lead generations recognize our clients as a trusted source of information. This is the Growth Catalyst service, designed for teams that maybe don’t quite have an in-house marketing team.

Our second service, I’d call our Growth Consultation service, is much more of an advisory role, where we’ll work with the client and their existing team of SEO’s content, marketers, maybe contribute to their content, but much more focused on helping them from a strategic side of things and coming in with an outsider’s perspective. This allows their business to grow much more effectively with the people that they already have on their team.

Emily Kucera:

I love the duality of services you offer and meeting clients where they are. Even just with your quick definition, it’s evident you’re leading with empathy across both your own internal teams and your actual clients.

The strategic niche you offer your clients is such a wonderful service. I think so many people in our industry understand what needs to be done for a product or service, but they don’t necessarily take the time to actually look at the road map, step by step, and really have that user experience centric mindset. I think people are realizing how truly important that is to the success of a product — Knowing what to do in this iteration, and what comes next.

...Figuring out what type of content to put out and what format to put it in creates the depth of audience...

Pat Ahern

Pat Ahern:

Definitely! I’m glad you brought that up, Emily, because that’s one of the things we’ve really admired about you all. Your team is so focused on not just figuring out contractually how to solve this complex technological need for your client, but looking at their business holistically and saying “What is it that you need from us to reach where you’re hoping to be in five years?” There are a lot of content agencies out there that get what needs to be done, done, and that’s it. We really pride ourselves on sharing that outsider’s perspective, playing devil’s advocate, and coming in as a strategic partner. Sometimes you need to say, “Hey, you’re really focusing your resources on this email marketing campaign. Based on the data, it doesn’t seem like you’re seeing the right ROI. Let’s audit this deeper. Let’s figure out how we can improve results or let’s figure out how we can shift your efforts towards more profitable areas.”

Emily Kucera:

I love that conversation. I think having that transparency with clients can of course sometimes be hard, but in the long run is always the best solution. We’ve both probably had some rough and colorful conversations, ha!

Pat Ahern:

Oh definitely. We have this phrase internally, “Nobody likes to hear that their baby’s ugly.” To our clients, these projects are their everything, and at the end of the day they are really good people who are doing everything in their power to succeed. But, having those hard conversations is a big part of our job. It’s saying, ”This is getting you 80% of the way there. Let’s figure out how we can get the last 20%.”

Emily Kucera:

I think that is where the consultation mindset comes into play. Truly being there to help. At what point in a Greenfield project should companies start to discuss SEO content, marketing and strategy? Is it after the product and audience is established? Or would you say to hit the ground running?

Pat Ahern:

SEO is definitely a long-term investment and we tell clients this, time and time again, to have realistic expectations and understand growth takes a little time. Often results are pretty minimal for the first four to six months. Month seven through nine is when we start seeing exponential growth. From there, if we work with a client for seven months to a year, they’re gonna get 90% of their growth on average from those first 12 months span. Tech can be very industry agnostic. SEO just takes time to organically grow and have technology recognize the audience growth and engagement.

For example, let’s say you raise your seed round. Best thing that you can do is when you’re in the early stages of building up your business, start investing in SEO upfront, within a budget that isn’t going to totally handicap your entire marketing spend. This is laying the foundation.

Ideally, especially for those who need to meet growth expectations, you should have your SEO take up at most 40% of your total marketing budget. And in most cases, you’re gonna see far better results in the short term if you invest that other 60% into more broad PPC ads, so think Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, Google ads. A lot of pros and cons with each of those channels, but very high level bang for your buck. I would say, you’ll typically pay a bit of a premium but you’ll get immediate results once you turn that advertising channel on.

With that said, SEO is always going to lead to a better long-term investment. Utilizing the PPC ads is a good idea so that they can meet their initial growth goals and then as they see the results from SEO coming into play that’s when we’ll push them to scale back their budget that they’re investing into PPC channels in order to scale up SEO and really start growing. Once the leads come in and SEO is working like a machine, you can really up the investment and see ROI skyrocket.

Emily Kucera:

I think it’s the epitome of the crux of having a greenfield project – thinking you have the next best thing which is great, and it could be correct, but if no one knows about it, it’s not necessarily going to go anywhere or grow your business. Visibility is integral in a company’s success, but budgeting and looking at the long term roadmap is equally important.

Is there one success story or client that has stayed with you?

Pat Ahern:

There are so, so many. We started working with, let’s say Paul for anonymity, in 2017. At the time they were an insurance firm. Historically, they had gotten most of their business from buying email lists and doing email marketing. Unfortunately, their email was blacklisted at some point and it just really derailed their business efforts. They were referred to us from a current client which we always love to see. When we began our partnership, they were getting a dozen or so website leads per month, probably a thousand people coming to their website per month at large. So we spent the next three years really building and implementing a growth strategy. This was more so that Growth Catalyst Service where they had one marketer on their team who was phenomenal at what she did. But just had limited marketing resources, in terms of in-house people.

So we spent the next years helping to turn them into the industry leader. Big part of that started out by mapping out the value of different services, mapping out the difference between profitable services and those that build an audience that can lead to upsells down the road. So we mapped out two core services there and put all of our efforts into writing long form education centric content about those services and then getting other websites to link back to it. While adding in what I call all the behind the scenes, technical SEO. Fast forward three years, the team is now getting a hundred or more website leads per month, about an 800% growth in lead flow from the first mobile centric campaign. An additional 3 years later and we grew their organic traffic by 3,000%. So they went from getting a thousand people to their site every month to getting thirty thousand people to their site just from organic searches. Now with their success they run a non-profit behind the scenes that they give 10% of their profits too. So cool to see the lifecycle of a company expand and do good with your help.

...This is getting you 80% of the way there. Let’s figure out how we can get the last 20%.

Pat Ahern

Emily Kucera:

I love the alignment of what content works best for what company. Your goals and industry can heavily dictate what content marketing works for you! It is keeping the target audience center of mind and converting them to loyal engagers.

Pat Ahern:

Absolutely — Figuring out what type of content to put out and what format to put it in creates the depth of audience, and very much varies from one industry to the next. CNN doesn’t need to write a 2000 word blog article. Often they need to write one paragraph updates consistently to gain the trust of their audience. On the other hand, business that maybe is in an industry that doesn’t change as drastically day to day, might be way better off writing one article a month instead, focusing on creating one really in-depth guide about a specific subject matter. So it’s a lot of fun getting the golden rule of different industries and audiences.

Emily Kucera:

I love that. Now don’t divulge all of your secrets, but specifically how long is your onboarding process to lead to these success stories? What is it like to discover the core services that would help a client?

Pat Ahern:

I’d say 2/3 of clients that we work with take a two to three month process from the time the discovery call to jumping in for a service delegation.

We normally start with a discovery month, where we really get to know their goals and business practices and ask customized follow-up questions. From there we’ll do product demos. Let’s say if it’s a SaaS business, we understand their needs, we share how we will help, and then we dive into the strategy. We start by analyzing their biggest competitors. Not just how much traffic are they getting, but where is that traffic coming from? What blog articles on their site or what service pages are driving the most visibility for them? How many websites are linking back to these? How many of those are really high authority publications versus maybe low quality sites, that aren’t necessarily driving the most value for a client?

Similarly, we will dive into how Google perceives your website. We can earn you more trust very quickly and then we’re going to shift the focus towards other areas that will help you to grow much more exponentially.

Pat Ahern:

What topics are working really well for competitors, how can we create a better version. Are we able to interview industry leaders and inject a couple quotes that we can put into the article. Another part of mapping out our client needs to legitimize the website’s organization to validate Google’s standards. If your business has different service buckets, we need to make it really easy for search engines to understand the route it takes to gather information. From there we ultimately audit their website to see if it coincides with our standards of a healthy roadmap and priority opportunities for improvement.

Emily Kucera:

I think that goes back to the first question — What makes your agency unique. This perspective of really getting to know a client before making commitments or setting contractual obligations is not an industry norm. Society’s immediate gratification can give fame to some other agencies that might not be the best for the role. The, “We can do this in 4 months!” mentality that doesn’t give realistic expectations. But I think, after you have had a few of those calls or maybe have had a few of those partners and the agencies didn’t necessarily deliver the results promised, or not at the caliber expected, it is when you realize you want this fruitful partnership that really looks at the strategic road map. This approach promises success.

Pat Ahern:

It’s very good to make sure that you have just a firm understanding of the business before you put things in motion. It’s one of my strengths and weaknesses, but I really like playing devil’s advocate. It’s super annoying for friends and my wife, ha! A lot of the time, we may have someone who reaches out to us that wants to invest in SEO, having heard great things about us, they immediately want to start. One of my favorite things to do in those scenarios is to pump the brakes and say, “Hey, let’s figure out where you’re investing now. Let’s figure out what your goals are. Let’s make sure that SEO is the right investment for you.”

Because, for us as a business, I’m always thinking long-term. It’s great if we can close a new client but I care way more about building a great long-term relationship with someone. Sometimes there are growth goals that need to be met, and people assume SEO is how to make them happen. That can work when you have time, but from the getgo maybe we recommend they start by putting half towards SEO and the other towards influencer marketing to track short-term ROI. Investors will be happy, and you’ll be happy with a plan to grow your business.

Sometimes professionals are shocked when you don’t just immediately sign the dotted line. But we are here to truly help our clients. So it’s a lot of fun having those conversations, I believe the most genuine relationships come from saying, “Hey, we’re not going to sign on right away. Let’s make sure we are the right team for you.” Often, those are the clients I find that really stay around the longest.

Emily Kucera:

It’s almost the, “business speed dating process.” That entire process comes back to once again being rooted in honesty. I think that’s so huge and again, not necessarily the industry norm, but shared between Intergrowth and Tonic.

Pat Ahern:

Definitely.

Emily Kucera:

At Tonic, we love to get to the root of impact. For us specifically we use our profits, people, and professional strengths to help those in our local communities and the work at large. How specifically would Intergrowth define their “impact”?

Pat Ahern:

I love this question. And I will say, the more that I’ve worked with you and the team, the more envious I’ve been about how much you’ve built that into your company culture from conception. When I think of impact, I always think back to something a mentor shared with me, “Solely focus on being the best person and version of yourself and you’ll succeed; whether that be the best father, best friend, best colleague you can be.” For Intergrowth, we focus on being the best partner that we can be to our clients, making sure that we are always making life better for those clients, ensuring that everything that they are paying us for is well worth their money.

From a behind the scenes of a company perspective, making sure that we’re paying our team fairly and making sure that we’re setting up a really good work-life balance. Making sure we’re not exploiting anyone on the team, especially given that we have people from across the world and there are a lot of places where income levels are a lot lower or higher. How can we, as Intergrowth, make our team’s lives the best they can be.

Emily Kucera:

I love that — Even business, when it gets down to it, is all about our people.