After a decade of doing SEO in Tucson, Tucson SEO Pros is still a two-person company.
Why haven't we grown?
We never really wanted to.
There's an assumption in business that you're supposed to scale. Get more clients. Hire employees. Move into a nice office. Outsource tons of work. Hire account managers to manage the clients and managers to manage the account managers. Eventually, become a full-time salesperson or operations person instead of doing the thing you started the company to do.
Line must always go up!
There's nothing inherently wrong with building a company that way. It's how you turn a small business into a much larger one.
It just isn't what we wanted to build.
We're a Boutique SEO Agency, and We're Fine With That
We've been called a boutique agency before. We take it as a badge of honor.
We office from our homes. When we meet with clients, we generally meet them somewhere around Tucson. We don't have a beautiful office with an impressive conference room and a massive Star Wars collection.
What we do have is very little distance between our clients and the people actually doing their work. When you call us, you're talking to an owner. When something needs to be changed on your website, one of us is probably making the change. When we recommend an SEO strategy, we're also the people responsible for implementing it. There isn't much of a chain of command when the entire chain consists of two people.
You Lose Something When You Scale
Scaling creates efficiencies. It also creates distance.
At a sufficiently large agency, the person who sells you SEO may not be the person who develops your strategy. The person developing the strategy may not write the content. The person writing the content may not know how to make changes to your website. And the person making those changes may know very little about your business beyond what's written on a work order.
That requires processes, tickets, meetings, project management systems and layers of communication. Those things exist for a reason. Once an organization gets big enough, they're necessary.
We'd rather not need them.
We know our clients. We know their websites. We remember why a page exists, what we've already tried, what worked, what didn't and what we're planning to do next.
That kind of familiarity is difficult to manufacture with a project management system.
The Owners Actually Do the Work
Owner-operated can mean a lot of things.
For us, it means the owners still do SEO and build websites themselves.
We research searches. We write and edit content. We build pages. We work on technical SEO. We troubleshoot websites. We deal with redirects, structured data, internal linking, Google Business Profiles and all the other things that come with trying to improve a company's visibility online.
We also work on our own stuff.
The Tucson SEO Pros website you're reading right now wasn't handed to another company to build for us. We custom built it ourselves, as my long crazy stylesheet can attest to.
The website, the content and the SEO strategy are our own work.
We think that matters.
Ownership Changes Your Relationship With the Work
A lot of employees care about doing good work, but they don't care as much as the owner does.
But ownership creates a different relationship with the result. Our names are on the company. If something we produce isn't good enough, that's our reputation. If a client is unhappy, there isn't another department to blame. If something goes wrong, it's our problem to solve.And if something isn't quite right at the end of the day, it's remarkably difficult to forget about it just because the clock says 5:00.
Nobody has more invested in the quality of the work than the people whose names and livelihoods are attached to it.
Small Isn't a Stage We're Trying to Grow Out Of
After more than a decade doing SEO in Tucson, we're still two people.
That's not because Tucson SEO Pros hasn't figured out how to grow. It's because we've never believed bigger automatically means better. There are excellent large agencies. There are terrible small ones. The number of people on payroll doesn't tell you whether an SEO company is any good.
It does tell you something about how that company operates.
Our version is pretty simple.
You hire Tucson SEO Pros. You talk to the owners. The owners do the work.
And after all these years, we still like it that way.