Simon Dalley is a marketer with two decades of experience. He’s headed up the marketing functions at a number of leading brands in the UK. He set up SEO agency GrowTraffic as his side hustle and is currently diversifying into software and property.
What is GrowTraffic all about?
GrowTraffic is a digital marketing agency. I always say it does what it says on the tin: we grow traffic to websites.
GrowTraffic started out as my side hustle. I was working in marketing management roles but I wanted to create a business that would enable me to have an income once I’d finished my time working in corporate marketing.
Whilst I’ve always been a generalist marketer, I had a passion for all things search marketing – i.e. helping websites get found more in search engines – and especially SEO (search engine optimisation).
I set up GrowTraffic as a freelance SEO consultancy, with the idea that it could one day grow into more of an SEO agency. But mainly I started out with the intention of having an income should everything go wrong, like it had done a year or two earlier when I was made redundant.
The project went live only a matter of days before my son was born, something which was definitely a motivating factor.
How do you plan to grow your business?
Our plans for 2020 were put on hold slightly and over the course of the last year. It’s kind of felt like survival is the new success, but we got there. We came into 2021 with a different kind of client base, a much wiser team, a better understanding of our audience and a renewed focus to implement the plans and achieve the goals we’d set ourselves at the start of 2020. I think we’ll get there.
During the pandemic we found ourselves having to change up the way we do things. We placed a renewed focus on old products and found new routes to market. We created new packages and explored new ways to communicate. I am confident the things we’ve learned during the COVID-19 Crisis will go a long way to helping to facilitate growth in the coming years.
Our big plans for this year are about diversification in the form of two new businesses that are interconnected with but separate from GrowTraffic.
The first is for the purchase of an old church building – called Christ Church in Bacup, Lancashire – to convert into a digital centre with offices for GrowTraffic and other digital businesses. I’ve been working on the project for a while now and it’s been slowed down by the impact of COVID-19 but we’re in the final stages of the acquisition now, something that hinges on the decision of the planning team at the local council.
Whilst I see this being an important element of what will make GrowTraffic different in the future and provide a base to be involved with more digital work, I see this as being the first rung on the property ladder for the group and something that will provide a model for how we can carry out similar projects in the future.
On the flip side, it’s very dependent on planning rules, restrictions and local politics and there is every chance this might not come off this time.
The other big project we’re working on is a software solution. The MVP is orientated towards helping us manage our growing number of clients better, however, our roadmap is all about creating a new solution that will be front-facing and used by customers who have never heard of GrowTraffic.
I think the software is in many ways the most exciting project I’m working on at the moment because it has the possibility to scale in an exponential manner, which is something the agency business model is less well aligned to do.
What were the top three mistakes you made starting your business, and what did you learn from them?
I’ve made so many mistakes over the years. I don’t really know where to start.
I think the obvious mistake I made was not committing to the business when it was the right time. I set GrowTraffic up in my spare time and there were several times over the years where the business was covering my salary multiple times over and I still felt I needed to work in corporate marketing to support the business. I realise it was an excuse. I wish I’d bit the bullet early on and committed to the business earlier because I now know I’d have made it work.
Another mistake I made, which is related to the above point, is I was doing too much for the business for free. I spent a long time not allocating my contribution to the business and not putting my expenses in because I wanted to give the business the best opportunity to prosper without being a burden to it. What I’ve come to realise is it’s a false economy. All business owners are going to workday and night, but it’s important you are able to understand what your contribution has been. Without it, you have no idea what the real costs of running the business are.
If I were to do it all over again, I would log everything better and I think that would have helped us define what needed to be achieved sooner and probably given me a goal of what I wanted to achieve before finally joining the business in a full-time capacity.
I was naive when we formed the company as well. The business had been running for several years but always as my sole proprietorship. We decided to bring Hannah into the business and formalise Rachel’s standing; we set up the limited company, but we didn’t do enough work beforehand to set out who did what, who owned what, what was and wasn’t transferred to the company etc and I didn’t do enough to communicate what I wanted out of the business and what my vision for it was.
It still causes problems now and I have no doubt there will be issues that arise out of it in the future.
Having had a partner in the business in the past and having had people come and go, I kind of viewed this phase of the business in the same way. I thought I’ll give them a go and if it doesn’t work out – like it hasn’t before – I’ll just pick it back up and sort it out like I always had done. Of course, what I didn’t question is what would happen if it did work out, which thus far it has done.
I gave away more than I was ever comfortable with in order to incentivise others to build the business. I didn’t properly articulate what I wanted out of it. And if I’m honest, I probably didn’t do that because I thought it would be disincentivising.
Had we laid it all bare in the beginning, I think it would have prevented some of the disagreements and misunderstandings. As a marketer, I understand the importance of perception of a business and I understood the value of employee branding, but I didn’t realise the importance of the perception of a business at the board level.
If I could do it all again, I’d get that right from the beginning.
Tell us a little bit about your marketing process, what has been the most successful form of marketing for you?
Relatively quickly after GrowTraffic first started out we held the top spots in Google for keywords like freelance SEO consultant and this was great, it provided loads of enquiries for us. But after a few years of juggling a national clientbase with clients that regularly came and went, whilst also being low paying clients, we decided to focus more on local clients.
Networking locally then became the focus of how we attracted new customers and all the directors are heavily involved in different networking groups. We also made sure we were integrated with some of the most important community and social operations. We’re also lucky that we’re based in two locations as this gives us two bites of the cherry.
Local networking has provided us with some really great clients. But it wasn’t enough and they were by and large smaller clients with lower spends. It’s ironic that as an SEO agency we put less emphasis on SEO for some time, but that’s what was working for us at the time. But we knew in order to really grow the business beyond our existing networks we’d need to focus on attracting clients from further afield.
We do this in a number of ways. We’ve got a small and targeted pay per click spend, we use online lead aggregators and we tender for work. We’ve also put a lot of emphasis in our rankings, creating a lot of inbound content and the website organically generates leads almost day in, day out.
On top of that we’ve got a good database, which we are able to tap into with special offers that we deliver through our email newsletters. These are generally best when we’re dealing with something that has to be updated on a website due to changes to regulations or changes being implemented by Google.
You’ll see us on social media, where we put several posts out a day on the major channels, which are more targeted to our actual audience rather than the target market. Plus, over the last year we’ve developed a weekly Facebook Live session that has helped us to not only work with some leading experts in their fields, but also to demonstrate our expertise. These Lives are more targeted to our target market than the general activity we do. It’s early days and it’s hard to tell the effectiveness of the Live casts, however, they do appear to be having a positive impact.
First and foremost our primary source of leads is still networking and there’s definitely a difference between the quality of leads we get through people who already know about us, in terms of length of contract and the businesses who get in touch with us online.
Like most marketing agencies, we are probably less well joined up in our own marketing activities than we are in the strategies and campaigns we put together for our clients, but we’re improving all the time and it’s having good results.
What online tools and resources you’re currently using in your company?
We use a range of software packages to manage the business. Without these we wouldn’t have been able to grow to where we are today. Here are some that I view as important:
Asana – this is probably one of the most important tools we have and one that I’m least engaged with. Asana is task management software that enables us to distribute work amongst our employees, contractors and freelancers. I say the one I am least engaged with because I am not hugely concerned with the day to day delivery of tasks for clients.
SERanking – as an SEO agency it’s important for us to use SEO software and the one we use is SERanking. There are lots of pieces of analysis software out there but we have been using this for years and it suits our way of working. It’s the only piece of software that we pay for on a monthly basis that I don’t begrudge paying for at all. I’m sure there are similar pieces of off the shelf software that can be found in every industry and it’s important to know what to spend on and what not to spend on.
Bark.com – this is a web-based services marketplace, whilst it doesn’t drive a great deal of customers, it has been an important part of our acquisition strategy over the last year or so and it was especially beneficial during the first Coronavirus lockdown when our approach of being local first was less useful.
Google Docs – we use Google Sheets to effectively communicate in real time with our customers. They are able to login at any time to see what’s going on with their projects. This is one way we’ve been able to operate without implementing the outright account management structure that you’d find in most marketing agencies.
There are loads of other tools we use. Occasionally I question whether we should be paying for so much software, but generally I come back to the conclusion that most of it is more than just nice to have.
The book I’d recommend is Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World by Rand Fishkin. Fishkin has been at the forefront of SEO for as long as I can remember, having been the CEO of SEOMoz. Naturally therefore I feel an affinity with him but the experiences he documents in his book really resonate with me.
Lost and Founder sees Fishkin discuss his journey from a web design agency to one of the world’s leading SEO software companies. Along the way he discusses the mistakes he made and the problems he faced both from a business perspective but also emotionally and mentally when it came to growing his business and dealing with other interested parties.
Whilst we’ve never had to bring in VCs to help GrowTraffic grow, a lot of what he discusses and talks about feeling I can relate to and I would suggest the book tells a cautionary tale for anyone who wants to grow their business.
Related Interview: Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz: The Era of Earning Links Is Here
If you had the chance to start your career over again what would you do differently?
I didn’t really want to have a career in marketing in the first place. I joined a marketing agency as a temporary thing after I’d graduated from university. After about six months of fruitlessly applying for jobs in my chosen field, someone at the agency took me to one side and suggested I try to make a career out of marketing.
I needed all those early years working in a small agency to be able to do what I do now because it made me more versatile and more rounded. It was hard going though. I had limited understanding about marketing and yet I was front and centre in the agency dealing with big clients including international brands.
I had virtually no organisational skills either and made loads of mistakes. But there was no one else to solve the problems and generally only salespeople to learn from, so I often found quite complex projects falling on my lap that I just needed to muggle my way through.
I took some courses in marketing over time and learnt a lot but I still felt like an imposter in marketing situations. That was until I joined larger marketing teams and found most people in them had similar entry stories to me. Of course this has changed now with university degrees becoming more vocational but now I have the experience and qualifications to boot. So I suppose I wish I could tell myself not to worry so much about not having formal qualifications in marketing.
I also wish I hadn’t hung around if a role wasn’t right. There have been a few times in my career where I’ve not been happy in a role and I’ve waited until the right opportunity has come along. But I now know I should have just left and found a new job because there would have been minimal disruption to my life and I would be able to focus on finding a new role.
I definitely wish I’d started up on my own sooner. Every time I was promoted or got a better job it became more difficult to commit to my own business because of the extra money that I felt had to be found.
It’s not that I particularly regret anything I’ve done or not done in my career. Both myself and GrowTraffic are where we are today because of those choices. Had I done some of the things I suggest I wish I had done, I expect things would have turned out differently and there’s a big chance they would have turned out for the worse.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new business, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
It would depend on the type of business I was setting up I’d expect, but I think I’d put $1,000 into a membership for a decent networking group and acquire some leads of a good lead aggregator.
I can build a website, I can pull together a brand and a logo to get us started. Other founders might want to or have to spend some of it on that. My suggestion is not to spend too much on a logo or a website or business cards to begin with, you can always come back to that. I’d suggest getting some clients in first and making sure your business can do what it’s supposed to do profitably.
Whilst spending that first $1,000 on things that will immediately help get the business off the ground I’d then be spending my time working on more long term projects. I’d start by creating the kind of content that will not only help my website to rank but answer the questions my customers are asking. I’d create the kind of content that will inspire. I’d be working on getting a social media following up and running.
Of course, all that depends on the business in question. And there are lots of businesses that just can’t get off the ground without spending well in excess of $1000 to start.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
To get your startup off the ground you’re going to have to work night and day. It’s not going to be easy but the longer you wait to try the longer it will take to succeed. There will never be a right time to begin a business, very rarely will the stars align, you just have to commit to it.
That’s not easy. I say that as someone who started a business and then got other people to build it to the point where it was stable enough for me to join. Although the plan worked, hindsight tells me that probably wasn’t the best way to go about it.
And if you do commit then you need to work hard. You need to be connecting with and contacting people, find people who will help you do the things you can’t do and see if you can help them do the things they can’t do.
Create content that your customers will find beneficial and get it up onto a website, even if that website isn’t perfect. Put things out of social media as much as you reasonably can until you work out what works, then do more of that. But remember your audience for a long time won’t be your target market, so create for your audience as well as your target market.
Don’t give up or lose hope. It just takes time.
How can we get in touch with you?
You can find both myself and GrowTraffic on all the social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram but probably the easiest thing to do is to head over to my page on GrowTraffic.
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