IAM1350 – CEO Builds an SEO Agency that is Fully Transparent to Clients

Richard started Pure SEO shortly after arriving in New Zealand from the UK in 2009. His vision was to create an ethical SEO and digital marketing agency that is fully transparent with its clients and ‘does digital the right way'. Fast forward 12 years and Pure SEO is one of the most recognized digital marketing agencies in New Zealand. With nearly 100 staff made of digital subject matter experts, Pure SEO is also one of the most awarded digital agencies in the country. Hear from Richard's experience and the rollercoaster-like journey of getting there. Richard is also the author of the book How To Get To The Top of Google Search.

• CEO Story: Richard and his wife moved from the UK to New Zealand. Found a gap in the market which is the SEO. With no friends and being an introvert was their challenge but made their way through it. What they saw in the UK, applied in New Zealand. Found a good fit for them and for their clients, no wonder they are flourishing and have expanded in Australia and other countries.
• Business Service: SEO – Search Engine Optimisation and Digital Marketing Services.
• Secret Sauce: You treat people how you wanna be treated yourself.
• CEO Hack: Ability to delegate. Understanding your strengths and letting people do what they are good at. Having the right tools, processes, and systems for your people.
• CEO Nugget: Continuous improvement. A business keeps on evolving. Make decisions quickly. Learn to have a courageous conversation.
• CEO Defined: Allowing other people around you to thrive. Giving direction and making sure the culture is there to serve other people.

Website: pureseo.com

LinkedIn: @pureseo

Book: how-to-get-to-the-top-of-google-search

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Transcription

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00:17 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs' repeatable failures? Interview. If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:45 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Richard Conway of Pure SEO. Richard, super excited to have you on the show.

00:54 – Richard Conway

Hey, excited to be here. Thanks for having me, Gresham.

00:56 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, absolutely excited. Always great to hear people who are doing really phenomenal things. And Richard started Pure SEO shortly after arriving in New Zealand from the UK in 2009. His vision was to create an ethical SEO and digital marketing agency that is fully transparent with his clients. It does digital the right way. Fast forward 12 years and Pure SEO is one of the most recognized digital marketing agencies in New Zealand.

With nearly a hundred staff made of digital subject matter experts, Pure SEO is one of the most awarded digital agencies in the country. Hear from Richard's experience in the roller coaster-like journey of getting there. Richard is also the author of the book, How to Get to the Top of Google Search. Richard, excited again to have you on the show, my friend. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:42 – Richard Conway

Yeah, absolutely.

01:43 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Well, let's make it happen then. Cheers. Cheers indeed. So to kind of kick everything off, I know I touched on it a little bit when I read your bio, but I wanted to rewind the clock back to, you know, 2009, maybe a little bit sooner of what led you to get started with all the awesome things you've been working on.

01:58 – Richard Conway

Cool, well, in 2009, me and my wife, both British, decided we wanted to move countries and live in New Zealand. So I had a really good job in England, moved to New Zealand, and no.1 wanted to give me a job because I had no Kiwi experience. So I thought, yeah, let's make my own job. I threw around a few different ideas and landed upon pure SEO because I thought there was a gap in the market. But neither myself nor my wife knew anybody, not a soul in New Zealand. So it was quite intense at the beginning. And being a sort of introvert, it had to really kind of go against the natural grade, but it's been good.

02:34 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. So you said you saw the gap in the market. So it sounds like you had been kind of looking to see what opportunity might be a good fit for you, but it sounds like a good fit for the market as well.

02:45 – Richard Conway

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, back in the day, there were a couple of companies who were doing things, taking shortcuts, and then there were 1 or 2 companies that were good. And I saw what was going on in England, and I kind of transferred that to New Zealand. And yes, it's grown from just me, and now we'd be the largest search agency in New Zealand.

03:05 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I absolutely love that. And so, you know, in your past, had you had a lot of, you know, an entrepreneurial experience that decided that you wanted to start something or anything in the past, or was that something that just kind of came to you at that time there?

03:16 – Richard Conway

I've always wanted to do something entrepreneurial. My first job out of university was as a venture analyst for a venture capital company. And I've worked for a number of entrepreneurs over the years. And generally, the best bosses I've had have been the entrepreneurial ones, the ones that kind of give you free rein and that you do things.

03:35 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that's awesome. So it kind of gave you sounds like planted those seeds for, you know, everything that you started in that phrase, you know, I love that phrase, because so many times when we think about our products and services, we forget about fulfilling a gap and creating something that's not being done. We think it's always just cool to start X, Y, and Z. But when you've been able to kind of create something that actually does serve a need and as you've been able to do so well, do it in such an ethical way, then it really creates an amazing impact, I imagine, for you and your team and also the people that you're serving as well.

04:04 – Richard Conway

Yeah, it's been good. It's surreal looking around. I remember when I started, I was sitting on the corner of somebody's desk and now I walk into a building and there's people running around everywhere and, you know, I'm responsible for their wages. It's quite a quite surreal thing.

04:18 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. To see those thoughts and ideas kind of come to fruition. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more and hear a little bit more on how you're serving your clients with Pure SEO. Could you take us through a little bit more on what that looks like and how you serve the clients you work with?

04:31 – Richard Conway

Cool. Maybe I'll go back. So when we started, I was not a detailed person necessarily, but I did everything. And over time, realized that a lot of what we do is on spreadsheets and things like that. So What decided to do with the business is bring in someone who couldn't afford the time and is really good with the operational side of things and help us build software and systems, which allow us to scale in a transparent manner because we've got to about 50 clients, and everything was in my head.

And then mistakes started to happen you know copying and pasting from Google Analytics and human error. So we built a reporting platform, which we got rid of about a year ago because of Data Studio. We also built a back-end system to allow us to protect our IP, but also to grow the business in a systematic, transparent manner.

05:22 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I absolutely love that. And I think so the operations person in every team, so undervalued, just be able to kind of keep everything, you know, in line and in the right places. But I love you talking about kind of the behind-the-scenes, again, you see the success, you see the building, everything that you all have been able to do, but you don't see the behind-the-scenes. You don't see the balls that were dropped probably potentially around that way and how you decided to make those decisions so that you could continue to grow and scale, and make the impact that you've been able to do.

05:52 – Richard Conway

Yeah. I mean, there's, there's been loads of difficult things kind of behind the scenes and a lot of people don't actually see, see that. And I think Often the difference between success and failure is when you get those days, you don't wanna get out of bed, everything's like, yeah, not good, but you decide, I'm gonna get up, I'm gonna face it, I've got staff relying on me, I've got family at home, and you just keep going and it's that momentum and those little things every single day. If you keep that momentum, it makes big things and nothing big happens overnight and there is no overnight success. It is work and it is continual improvement.

06:28 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. They have, Like you said, letting the magic happen at its best. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more and hear a little bit more on how you're working with your clients, and how you're serving them. And also what you feel kind of is what I like to call your secret sauce thing. You feel kind of sets you personally apart or the organization apart and makes it unique.

06:48 – Richard Conway

Cool, so there are a few things. So the things that set us apart are we have an ethos through the business that you treat people the way you want to be treated yourself. Like you know if it's the right thing or wrong thing And if it doesn't feel like it's the right thing, simply don't do it. And we have a saying that if you do something and it was on the front page of the national paper and you wouldn't be comfortable about that, then just don't do it, simple as that. But in respect of client relationships, We like to work with clients in the long term. We don't want to work with clients who want immediate results. So we work on a month-by-month basis.

So it's all kind of a recurring revenue and a lot of it's SEO, a lot of it's analytics, a lot of it's Google ads, and so on and so forth. But we're a performance agency. And so with the SEM, so with the paid search, it's about the outcomes of the clients. The SEO takes obviously a lot longer to have an effect. And so what we do is we look holistically in the content, creating links through media or things like that. And so a lot of what we do from an SEO perspective is really good marketing. As you mentioned earlier, I wrote the book that was through basically cold calling Penguin Random House asking if they want to publish a book about SEO, and through the various dialogue they published a book about SEO.

And I think a lot of what we do for ourselves and for our clients is you look for doing things slightly different. You know, everyone was doing eBooks. And if you're the same as everyone else, how do you stand out? And so we're always looking to push the boundaries. We're looking at voice search. We're looking at Web 3.0. So we're always looking at what's going to be next in order that we can stay ahead of the curve. And as I mentioned earlier, we've got a guy who's head of product, a massively talented individual.

And all his job is to iteratively improve our product and our offering to our clients and he's just literally just redone our audit document. I saw it yesterday, looks epic, you know, and having people that are deep, deep specialists that they love this stuff. So, you know, they wanna spend their days learning more and more and more. And then you give them the ability to learn more and then shape your product. Yeah, but we're lucky to be able to afford to have a head of product. We couldn't in the early days.

09:19 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely, I love that. And really the words that kind of stood out to me, you said it a little bit earlier, was that culture piece. And I love that ethos piece. Awesome, awesome, awesome. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

09:37 – Richard Conway

I think the most important thing as a CEO, which I don't teach at university and things like that, is the ability to delegate and the ability to see in others and find what you're really not good at and find others who love that stuff and then just allow them to flourish. And I think that's probably one of the things that's made the business the most successful is really understanding what your strengths are and focusing on those strengths. Keep an eye on everything, but don't micromanage. Let people express themselves and do what they're good at. And as a CEO, it's often, you're the front person. You do, You get up at gigs, you speak, you create the brand, you create the jazz hands, for want of a better term. But you need those other people.

You need the systems people so that when you bring stuff in, it actually gets done properly. The other learning was we had a few years where we were bringing salespeople and they just weren't working and we were wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars on bad salespeople. Also, I thought it turned out it wasn't the salespeople that was the problem. It was the tools and systems we were giving them. I brought in a new sales manager and he put in all the tools and systems and this many calls to a meeting, this many meetings to a close, and so on. And if they're falling down at a part of that stage, sit down with them, look through what they're not doing right, and fix it.

And it just taught me that you can have the best people in the world, but if they haven't got the right systems and processes, or if you're not giving them the tools to succeed, it's gonna be very hard for them to succeed. And so finding those tools, systems, processes, repeatable things, because none of it's rocket science. And there are people that have succeeded in what you do all over the world. And so the answers are out there and it's finding the people who can deliver that in a way that works in your business. Again, a lot around the people.

11:43 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I love both of those hacks. And I think it's so important that you talked about the jazz hands, the CEO is often the person that is, you know, doing that. But in order to be able to do that, you have to make sure your hands are free. And I think by delegating and making sure you're delegating to the right people, you can have the jazz hands that are actually free to be able to do everything you need to do and to play into your strength.

12:02 – Richard Conway

And that's an important thing to realize, never be totally dependent on any person, even if they seem really good. A business is an evolving thing, and hopefully, you keep improving iteratively, like the whole Kaiser and the Japanese methodology of continuous improvement. So it was interesting to learn that, you know, I thought, oh no, what are we gonna do? You know, he's the best SEO in the whole business. But ultimately we found someone better and now we keep lifting that bar and that's what helps the clients get better results and the business keeps growing.

12:41 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. I love that. And do you consider that to be what I like to call kind of a CEO nugget, which is a little bit more word of wisdom or a piece of advice? But I usually say it might be something you would tell your favorite client or your younger business self. Do you think it's that constant improvement? Do you think that's something that you would really look into to be your nugget?

13:01 – Richard Conway

Yeah, the other one really is to make decisions quickly, especially around getting rid of people. So we've had, I'm a non-confrontational person and in the early days we'd have people and get the odd person who they might be really talented but they're not a cultural fit. And ultimately, I remember back in the day, it took me far too long to get rid of someone. And that impacts how people perceive you as a leader, but it also impacts everything in the business.

And when I got rid of this person, you could tangibly feel it in the office, you could feel the kind of relief across the board. And so I've learned over the years, that you're going to have to do it at some point. So just get it done and move on as uncomfortable as it is. And you learn to have, I think they call it courageous conversations. You learn to have those earlier. And if I went back, I would certainly have those conversations and deal with those things much quicker than I did at the beginning.

14:00 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely appreciate that. And I want to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So Richard, what does being a CEO mean to you?

14:11 – Richard Conway

What being a CEO means to me is allowing other people around me to thrive. I'm there to give some direction and make sure the culture, but I'm really there to serve the other people around me and make sure that they're able to be their best selves within the organization and achieve what they need to achieve. Because without them, I'm just a guy with an idea.

14:38 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, absolutely. I love that. And being able to kind of have the opportunity to bring those ideas to fruition is absolutely huge. And I love that service piece because, you know, the servant leadership, I think a lot of times we think of our products and services and services our clients, but we also have to serve the people on our team and be of support to them and help them to succeed in such a phenomenal way. So truly appreciate that definition. And of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I want us to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best people could get a hold of you, and find out about all the awesome things you and your team are working on.

15:15 – Richard Conway

Cool. Well, we're based down in New Zealand, and we've got the business in New Zealand, Australia. We've got an office in the Philippines. I'm in Sri Lanka. Really pure SEO.com. We do, that's what it says on the tin really, search engine optimization, analytics, SCM, happy to work with anyone around the globe and enjoy it. And, you know, work with good people, doing good things, making a difference.

15:45 – Gresham Harkless

Cheers, indeed. And we often forget about how impactful it is and the things that we can do, but I always say the name of the game is about being found. So I love that you're helping people out and getting their brand names and everything to be found online. But I also love that reminder of how not only do we serve the clients that we work with, but we also serve the clients and people that are on our teams and around us. So love everything you're doing. Appreciate your time. Of course, Richard, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:12 – Richard Conway

Hey, you too. Appreciate your time, Grijim and everyone listening. Thank you.

16:16 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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