Master SEO Like a Pro: Insights from seoplus+ Co-Founder Brock Murray

You have two funnels, right? You have your sales funnel. We also have your employee funnel. And it's you can sell all day, but if you don't have anyone to deliver on the work. That's going to be a challenge and growing to the point you want to get. So it's always been sell first, get the business, then you get to a point where, okay, we need some more help to deliver on this work. Then it's you have to have that funnel for employees, right? How do we attract the right employees? People who want to be here long term, people who are going to deliver great work for their clients.

All right, welcome to Hack to the Future with Kyle Roof. I am. Today we have Brock Murray, who is the co founder of seoplus+.

Thanks Kyle. I'm pumped to be here.

I'm pumped to have you actually. I there are times when I've got I've had people on and I really haven't had personal questions on this one. I feel like I've got a couple that I'm, I want to guide because I want the answer. I'm interested.

Yeah. I think for me it was really just knowing that was the direction I wanted to take. And being ready for that journey. So I think, being able to focus on that company, on that mission to really take it to the next level. I think sometimes it's a challenge where you have a lot going on. You might have, some people, they have a full time gig or a part time gig, and they're trying to do it on the side to grow. And that's fine. That's one way of doing it, even to get to the point where you're able to dive in full time. But I think being able to dive in full time and be able to focus. on the business. And for me, like I've had a lot of friends who are agency owners where they've, they built out, let's say they want to build an affiliate site or they want to, do another side job on the thing. I've always been like in my time, almost 13 years now, fully focused on the business. And for me, that has really allowed us to, grow to the point we are. Cause I think if I'd been focusing my efforts, maybe in other areas, it might've been a little bit more challenging to get to this point.

That makes sense. A lot of people do talk about like income stream. diversification, in the sense of like maybe running those affiliate sites. So maybe you've got, maybe those sites might be like a, I would give them almost like a lottery, like a scratchy lotto. Like you might hit, you might not, but it could pay off. But I can tell you from my own experience actually in having an agency and selling that agency and then working on another, my software, as soon as the agency was gone, I was able to double the revenue in one year because of that focus. I think from being able to. Yeah. It's a laser focus in what does scaling actually mean in terms of adding employees? Like when you're scaling, are you actually scaling, do you think like the manpower that you have, your support team or is there something else that kind of is more of the heart of what actual scaling is?

Yeah. I think there's two pieces to that. I think. For us and as being like a kind of customer service first agency, I think it's you have two funnels, right? You have your sales funnel. We also have your employee funnel. It's like you can sell all day. But if you don't have anyone to deliver on the work, that's going to be a challenge and growing to the point you want to get. So it's always been sell first, get the business, then you get to a point where, okay, we need some more help to deliver on this work. Then it's you have to have that funnel for employees, right? How do we attract the right employees, people who want to be here long term, people who are going to deliver great work for their clients. So really just having two solid funnels and always being able to have new business coming in, but also having new talent coming in and growing that talent as well. I think that's really important. So for us it's really been about striking that balance.

Another accolade that you've received is like one of the best places to work. In Ottawa, I believe I think it was it this year 2024 or 2023.

Exactly.

Yeah. I'm sure that doesn't hurt when trying to attract talent. How do you set that up? Or like, how do you create? A place that could get on a list like that.

Yeah, definitely. I think it goes back to company culture. And, back in, I think it was about 2016 or 2017. It was when we were about, I think we were about 10 or 12 people at the time. And we went through a tough period where we had three people quit in one month. And we were a relatively small agency. And for me, that really hit home and really forced me to look in the mirror and see Why would anybody not want to be here? Why would they want to quit? Why would they want to leave? Like you, you almost take it personally at that size, right? Cause you're still young, not mature and business and things like that. But really focused, allowed us to focus on what we need to do to have people who want to work here, who want to be here. So we ended up working with a business coach and we focused in on, What is basically the vision for the company, the mission for the company and our values. And it actually took us about a year to go through that process to determine what is the vision for the company? Where do we want to go, right? And then the mission is like, how are we going to get there? And the values are like, what are the things we need to see from team members? How, how are we aligned? And really those things came from, Myself and my partner, Eddie, what are our kind of core values and how do we want to deploy them within the organization? And then from there, like once we had determined what those are, then it was actually like living them out. So for example, when we were having scrums with the team or team meetings, we were actually going through and talking about those doing awards with those things to incentivize those behaviors, right? So really it all starts with those, that foundation. Of the vision, the mission, and the values, and then living them out, and then really the culture will develop itself one way or the other, whether you're intentional with it, or whether it just happens naturally so the more intentional you are with it, the more you can form what that is, and for us, it's really been, it's been, we're 13 years in now, probably six or seven hard years of like actually forming that culture, and you really start to see it have an impact on the team, on the clients, on the work, at this point.

I'm confident that approximately zero agencies, when they open on day one, have like a mission statement or a core value statement, or like anything like that. But then on the other hand, I don't think they know what it would be. It might almost be counterproductive to try to write a mission statement on day one, because you really don't know what you're Identity is you need to form that almost as you go. But then maybe once you are at a place that you can do that's a tipping point perhaps of Now you can grow.

That's a really good point because yeah day one, there's no way we know We would have known what those are right? How to run a business? That's it, but I think you will know You'll know really quickly that you need it.

That's good. That's good. If somebody's looking at particular KPIs for scaling, for growth, are there any that kind of stand out to you as I would watch these numbers, or I'd look at this, or this, or that?

Yeah, for us, sales is a really important aspect of business, and really, we've always had good growth over the years, typically anywhere from 20 to 30 percent growth. Last year was a little bit more challenging, I think, in the economy for marketing agencies. I think, at least, I don't know, Canada and the US, there were a lot of businesses cutting back and things like that which obviously hurt new business growth and things like that. So I think we were up about 10 percent last year, which was on the low end for us, but I think when you zoomed out, it was actually still a very solid year. So in terms of KPIs, for us, We know we have certain targets we want to get on a monthly basis in terms of new monthly recurring revenue in terms of project revenue. And to get to that point, we need a certain number of leads. We need a certain number of conversations, right? And a certain number of opportunities and leads. So for us, it's about how can we be intentional with, the work we're doing on the marketing side, which is going to lead to opportunities, which is going to lead to sales, which is going to lead to work. So really we have very specific metrics that we set in terms of targets. In terms of, for example, we obviously we're a marketing agency, so we can do multi channel approach where there's, we do some outbound, we do, obviously the referrals and things like that. We do SEO, we do paid ads, we have events, things like that. So obviously a mix of different sources, but we know when we ramp up those events, for example, and we ramp up our, paid ad campaign, we know that's going to, bring us more leads, going to bring us more sales. So I think it's really knowing your numbers in terms of how many conversations do I need to have. Which is going to lead to how many deals I'm going to have. I think really always looking at that almost every day. No, you can feel when you know, it's going to be a little bit slow next month because I haven't been enough conversations this month.

A hundred percent. That was something my business partner got very detailed on with us. And that was really what we were able to scale was like, we need this number of phone calls. Like we need this number of like warm leads is actually better. I think what we looked at. Not just numbers, but this is qualified as a warm lead. We need this many here, which leads us to this many proposals, which leads us to this many clients for the month, so that we can outpace any churn that we might have.

Oh, absolutely. Because that's the thing, the churn rate as well, right? Because even if your churn rate, let's say it's, 10%, like 90 percent retention. Going down to even like 80 percent can have a significant impact on your growth, right? So like we had a point last year in, in about a three month window where we churned about a million dollars of recurring revenue, which was that hurt. Like it stops the heart for a second. It hurts. Cause even this year, that revenue would have grown and you would have been even further along. But for us, I think that really forced us to sit down and think about, okay what's going on. I know there's always outside factors, but. I never want to try to blame outside factors of use as an excuse. It's what can we control and what can we do internally to mitigate that. So obviously there's been a lot of things we've done, but there's, focused obviously on customer service, impact, results, value for money, even going to those clients where they might be on a 5, 000 monthly contract and things are going fine but even challenging them like what could you do with that budget that would have a bigger impact than what you're on right now right and that's difficult I think for an agency to go in and it's almost like sometimes you might even be churning yourself be like hey you know what maybe spend a little bit less here and focus I think that's challenging and I think that takes a lot of like maturity as an agency owner but I think that's important for the long term growth of the agency and I think your clients will appreciate that as well.

I totally agree. Totally agree. One of your areas of expertise is in digital assets, in particular in valuation of digital assets and then also how they impact M& A scenarios. I guess as a first question, let's take a step back and what is a typical, digital asset that that you would, something that you'd be working with or something that you regularly see?

Yeah. So typically it would be something like a website, a social media channel that might have a lot of followers, say a Tik Tok page or an Instagram page. It could be even like a mailing list for e commerce type of thing. It could be an app. So there's even like a Google ads account, any of these things are, they're not in the conventional way viewed as an asset. If you go talk to a CFO, they're not going to agree that it's an asset. But we've found over the years that. There is value in some of these things and I find in M& A that a lot of, organizations aren't necessarily seeing the full value of some of these things and aren't maximizing it. So how it came about for us is that back in probably 2020. we had a few clients that were either acquired or had been acquiring businesses. And typically they would come to us later on, basically during the integration phase. So post merger where the acquisition had been done. And, for example, one was like, okay, we just acquired this business, go see what you can do. Like, how can we, they have this website, how do we fold it in, and you're gonna, you're forced to come up with this kind of integration plan on the fly. And one of them was, which was pretty wild is they one of our larger clients, they acquired their biggest competitor. So basically they, they came to us to like, Hey we've acquired it, but they actually didn't get ownership of the domain because they had purchased it. Basically the Canadian operations of a company, but it was owned by a us organization, but they kept the domain. So basically they came to us like, Hey, we got, we have basically all the storefronts. So they said we have all the storefronts, so basically, and I guess the U. S. company, we were like, okay, go do these redirects. We do all the redirects to our, to, to their domain. But I guess they botched the redirects and they didn't really care. They weren't very responsive. Like it was just very poor kind of We didn't really work too well together, right? They weren't willing to implement their redirects properly. So all of a sudden sales are declining in these new franchises. The owners of franchises are freaking out, right? They're not, their sales are down. So we're like, what can we do without them, doing the redirects properly? And there were, yeah, there was no, uh, there was no fire under their feet to actually get it done. So basically what we ended up doing is going, we had to literally go to, because each was a kind of individual location, basically go update all the citations like manually and basically everything we could do just to like to mitigate it to try to get like some of that traffic back. Eventually they did do the rigs, but it was after like three months of like back and forth, so we saw firsthand, The damage that can happen when proper planning is not done in a merger and acquisition. And I've got many other examples. So basically what we came up with is like, how could we help business owners understand the value of those assets so that if they are going to go through an M& A process, that first of all, they can capture the value of those assets. And secondary, where the acquirer, can actually see the value and actually build out a plan to integrate those. I think that's how we came across it. And it's been a really interesting journey with that is, for example, I've gone to M& A clubs, I'm presenting on this and I'm sure someone like, who is this guy? Like some marketer talking, telling us how to do our job, but it's a very interesting niche where I think there is a lot of values. If someone has, half a million dollar organic traffic, Be able to tell them like, Hey, if you can spend another 100 grand this year and, bump that up to 800, 000 worth of traffic, you're going to see significantly increase your return on sale. So that's the focus areas for us.

I was talking with Nick Eubanks, who's the head of acquisition for SEM rush now. And something he's talking about with these types of assets is it's an opportunity to decouple them from revenue so that you're not doing like a typical. So if it or net profit valuation, but you're looking at what it can generate in terms of other things such as traffic that can generate leads, for example, would you say that's a fair understanding of what these things can be, that they're not your typical asset that is completely tied to revenue and then would do a net profit type valuation, but it can have much higher levels of valuation outside of that based on what what they

It's exactly it, right? Because, for example, I did meet with a CFO and he was trying to tell me, he's this is not an asset, and I'm like let me let's take a step back. He's typically that's already considered in the profit loss statement, let's say as part of EBITDA, like you're saying. So I challenged it a bit and I was like, Hey let me give you an example. If we're looking at last year's profits for the company and you look at all the line items. Let's say they brought in 1, 000, 000 and they netted out 200, 000. And let's say the majority of that trap or that those sales are coming from organic search, right? They have a really good SEO strategy, they're bringing in business. Let's just say they got hit by a Google penalty, because they were doing some spammy practices or whatever. All of a sudden now their traffic is tanked, right? And they're not going to see that same growth next year. Obviously, that's going to hurt the valuation. At the same time, let's say they invested a ton into SEO and they actually increased their organics and they're actually going to have much higher sales next year. That's got to be considered somewhere without just looking at the, the financials. So I think that's an important aspect.

Would you say it's something that you were saying earlier about helping people understand maybe what they have, in terms of those assets, is that something you would tell people maybe? Even like an agency, you should focus on these things to be able to present that you have these particular assets that make your company more valuable. And would you consider a strategy to acquire those types of assets as an agency to make yourself more valuable?

Yeah. So for us, we've been more focused on specifically on the digital asset valuation is really just trying to give them a value on what we think it's worth basically. So just really a report to see our I guess our angle from that is what can we do to maximize that? So if we know. This social media page is worth this much. This website's worth this much. How can we help you with a strategy to increase that if your plan is to exit in 12, 24 months? So for us, it's less about acquiring those assets, more about helping them maximize the value. But we longterm, like we want to work with acquirers, like that's our goal. So we see that as a funnel to the acquirers basically, because usually like we've had lots of clients who have been acquired. Usually they'll give you at least a meeting. All right. They'll give you an opportunity to chat. And I think we've had really good success with those acquirers and be able to maximize return and a lot of them are multi location and things like that, which is our target. So that's been us for, it's almost like a, it's a funnel to kind of those acquirers basically.

Would you say, you mentioned that you have been on stage speaking about this and at first maybe people are like, who is this guy? But have you found that once you've been on stage a few times, then you are the guy? There's a, there becomes this shift of you went from who is this to this is the one, this is the guy because you've been on stage and it almost turns into the sort of elite. funnel because of that?

Yeah, I think we're getting there. My first presentation was this summer. We first came up with the idea in the spring, but to like really formalize it and, I created a website and basically productized it. And I'm just trying to spread that message, right? I think for me, it's like the more people I talk to who give me some feedback, I think that allows me to hone in on What the angle is and how we can maximize the value. So I think and just get right getting the message out there continue banging at home. So I don't know if we're there yet in terms of the guy, but I'm hopeful that, the more conversations we have with different people because everyone's got a different angle. I've talked to. Business valuators. I've talked to M& A for people who are like for legacy businesses that are like retiring and things like that. I've talked to, yeah, CFOs, bookkeepers, bankers, right? Insurance people. So it's like everyone has their own angle and their own perspective. So I think it's been really interesting to aggregate that and just continue moving forward.

Very cool. All right. Now we're going to play a little game. I like to call Do you agree with this statement? I will give you a statement and you will tell us if you agree or disagree. Do you understand the rules of the game?

Yeah, do I have to expand or is it straight on?

A key to success is to be a jerk to everyone and ignore your community entirely. Would you agree or disagree with that statement?

Disagree.

I think I know that you are very involved and invested in your community in particular Big Brothers and Big Sisters, is that correct? Tell me what that has meant to you and maybe how, maybe personally, how does that, what does that meant to you?

Yeah, absolutely. Like for me at this point, I'm getting, not getting any younger, I've been in the industry, been been doing SEO and had the agency for about 13 years now, but I've been in web for 20 plus years, and It's been a grind like it's not easy to grow a company and you know it's you never able to turn off right and that's a challenge But something that really helps me get through is giving back I think I've reached a point in my career where I'm able to take a little bit of time And also have the resources to be able to give back in different ways. So last year, I really you know You Obviously you're always thinking about things and what's, what's the future and just stopped and zoomed out a little bit. And for me, a really big focus for last year was giving back in different ways with time. Financially and also even just like with our own team's time of being able to help these organizations with their, Google ad grant campaigns and things like that. A big focus in giving back did a lot of different events, a lot of different support. And for me, that's just I think that's really important that, if you're able to in any way. You know give back to these organizations and Big Brothers Big Sisters is a local organization they basically provide kind of youth mentorship. So for people who you know for children who might not have, a parent at home or maybe they just, want someone else that they can talk to help, the future challenges in school and things like that. So just a great local organization and we try to support them in different ways. There's been, a few different campaigns we've done with them throughout the year and they actually awarded us with the Start Something Big Award for our work with them. We helped them basically maximize their Google Ad Grant. And we did that in kind it's just a great organization and we're helping a few other organizations as well right now. And I think for me, it just feels good to be able to give back and and help the community. So it's really important work for sure.

Fantastic. One last question for you. I was reading something that you posted on LinkedIn and you talked about that this past year in retrospect was a grind. And I think you also mentioned here in this little chat that we've had that there was a downturn in, in, in the industry kind of overall and how that has affected agencies. As you look forward to 2025, are you seeing, there might be another kind of grind here or do you see that things might be looking a little bit better?

I think it's looking good. I'm super hyped. Like right now, I honestly, the past six months, I don't know what happened in June. I don't know if it's been like a rate cut started lowering in Canada or what, but people finally started signing deals before it was like you were waiting a month before you heard back and stuff. And I don't know what's happening now. We have people reaching out and a week later they're signing. So it's been a very strong past six months and I'm hopeful that's going to carry through. I think, the past year has been interesting, obviously, with a lot of the newsworthy stuff around Gen AI, around all these Google updates, right? Helpful content updates and things like that. I think there's just a lot of, people are just trying to find their footing, I think, in marketing right now and in SEO. I think even SEO as an industry, I think is. A lot of people have asked everyone says SEO dead, but I think it's truly people are like actually what is the future for SEO? Even to the point where we've questioned do we rebrand, right? Is this going to be something that's core to our to our organization long term? Is this something that's going to stick around? What is that going to look like? But I think for us it's really focusing in on what are the areas that are having a lot of impact for clients. For us, it's around, for example, digital PR has. taken off, right? Like we've been doing it since 2016, but we've really seen growth there. And it's really for us having an impact on those campaigns. Obviously, paid ad campaigns with Google ads and and meta are continuing to grow significantly. I think that department for us has probably doubled in the past two years and clients are continuing to see a return on ad spend. So I think it's really just leaning into those things, those areas that, you're seeing a lot of success. So I'm excited for the year. I think it's going to be a great year. I think it's going to be a great year for business. So yeah, much better than the grind of last year, hopefully.

Fantastic. Brock, thanks so much for being on. I really appreciate it. If people want to get in touch with you, how can they do that?

Yeah, definitely hit me up on on LinkedIn. Brock Murray, would would love to connect.

Fantastic. And thanks everyone for listening to Hack to the Future. And thank you, Brock. And we'll talk to you all next time. Thanks so much.

Thanks Kyle.