3 Lessons I Have Learned by Growing PureSeo.com
Pure SEO was started in 2009 with a $200 budget and a little bit of know how. This year we have 75 staff across 4 countries and are recognised as the largest Kiwi owned and operated SEO agency in New Zealand who (using our tag line) “Do Digital the Right Way”.
It has not been as easy journey… there has been death, tragedy, cancer, miscarriages, unethical business partners and more. However, despite this the company has emerged better, stronger and more customer and staff centric than it has ever been.
Over the last 12 years, these strategies have been critical to our growth and success:
Website – our first website at Pure SEO was created by me (I am inept when it comes to design). It looked like a child had cobbled it together! After one year, I invested in a new website whereby I engaged a designer to design it and a developer to build it. This exercise cost me $10k which was a fortune for me at the time. Our first enquiry from that website was Singapore Airlines!
Lesson Number 1.
Invest in your website to ensure it reflects the business or even better, the business you want to become. The website is your shopfront, this is where your customers will likely engage with you for the first time. If you are not proud of your website, it may be time to revisit it.
Pure SEO has become the largest player in its niche in New Zealand and this is no accident. There have been deliberate small (and some large) steps every day we have taken to grow the business. Sometimes they have been internally focussed (culture, people, systems) and others they have been externally focussed; branded cars, billboards, writing for magazines, speaking events, lecturing and partnering.
Lesson Number 2.
Do something every day towards your growth goals. If you want to become the dominant market player, you need to think of ways to do things differently, Zig when everyone else is Zagging. Our competitors were putting out generic e-books with little value (and promoting them hard). We went the other way and created a book of real value to small businesses, we then had it published and promoted by the most prestigious publisher in the world; Penguin Random House.
A mistake we made when I started Pure SEO was to have a myopic view of where the business could go. I bought the NZ domain name and solely focussed on our local market.
Lesson Number 3.
Thinking locally put us at a disadvantage from day one. If I could go back to the 24th October 2009, I would convince my younger self to buy the .com and have a global mindset from the outset.
We bought the .com a year or two ago and integrated our Australian domain and started to successfully target other countries (specifically China). The results have been phenomenal.
The one thing that is for certain is that we will never stop with continued momentum, we are currently re-imagining our internal systems and processes to allow us to double in size again. We have also recently formed a channel partnership with NZME to accelerate growth in that way and are embarking on a sustained fresh, new, marketing approach.
Two things that remain constant on our journey is that we will always treat the customer the way we would want to be treated ourselves, and we will continue to be the best and most technically experienced search engine optimisation and Google Ads company in New Zealand. There will be no compromise.