Agency Spotlight Q&A

AGENCY SPOTLIGHT: KANSAS CITY WEB DESIGN

We love a good success story. Especially when it involves an agency that combined hard work, vast expertise and robust SEO tactics to build their company from the ground up. So when the opportunity came to interview Phil Singleton, owner of Kansas City Web Design, we jumped at the chance to pick his brain on how he built his successful agency catering to small businesses.

KANSAS CITY WEB DESIGN with PHIL SINGLETONUpCity: How did Kansas City Web Design get started?

Phil: After working in Taipei, Taiwan for 4 years handling Internet marketing and search engine optimization in the software industry, I started my own spin-off venture capital start-up that I then sold in 2004. Shortly after that my wife and I moved back to the US and settled in Kansas City where I have family roots.

During that first year back, I bought a sports car for fun and had it detailed from a local auto shop. At that time, the owner had no retail business and was mostly doing car prep and auto details for dealerships and making pennies on the dollar. I told him with a website and some SEO to boost rankings on Google he could go from making $25/car to $250/car.

I did my first local business website for free and that little Kansas City auto detailing website started it all. Now here I am today with a full service web design and Internet marketing company that has served hundreds of small businesses.

UpCity: Wow! That’s very impressive that this started from a car detailing website. How quickly were you able to expand your business into what it is today?

Phil: When my wife and I moved back to the country to start a family it was really important to me to have a job where I could be with my twin sons whenever I wanted. So I started Kansas City Web Design as a lifestyle business.

For over a decade, we had such strong organic rankings through our SEO initiatives that I unfortunately had to turn away more business than I would have liked to. This year, however, my kids will be in school full-time and we have invested accordingly to grow the business. We have 3 full time developers, a project manager and a business development director to help manage our constant flow of inbound leads, and we will be hiring even more in 2015.

AGENCY SPOTLIGHT: KANSAS CITY WEB DESIGN

KANSAS CITY WEB DESIGN with PHIL SINGLETONUpCity: It sounds like your own SEO strategy has played a very important part in starting and growing your agency. What types of services does your agency specialize in for your clients?

Phil: In 2014, most of our business came in the form of rescue and recovery work — either from companies that lost their ranking from a Penguin, Panda or one of the other updates, or because the previously hired developer could not complete the project to specs.

We specialize in true SEO-friendly website development and most of our customers choose us based on our track record for SEO services, PPC and/or custom WordPress development.

We market and sell Internet marketing and search engine optimization services under the brand Kansas City SEO®. UpCity: As we all know, SEO is constantly changing. Where do you see the main focus going in terms of SEO?

Phil: In the 15 years or so since I have been working in and around SEO, I think Google’s Penguin and Panda algorithms have been macro-level game changers. For years the SEO industry was driven almost exclusively by link-building, and much of that was being fulfilled offshore. With these two evolving algorithms, Google has essentially shut down all forms of volume-based link building and brought all SEO back onshore.

For the last two years we have focused almost exclusively on content-driven SEO. While there are still some back-room off-page SEO tactics that still work, Google is always going to close those loopholes. It’s so much safer and professionally fulfilling to focus on content that nat-urally attracts high quality links, while also spurring engagement and genuine social signals. Since content-driven SEO is the only way forward (in our opinion) we made the strategic decision last year to focus heavily on marketing to support a well-rounded, full-service agency solution.

UpCity: You recently became a Duct Tape Marketing Certified Consultant. Can you tell us more about that?

Phil: As we are focusing on becoming better at marketing in general, the decision was easy to become a Duct Tape Marketing Certified Consultant.

What I love about Duct Tape Marketing is that the system is based on taking a scientific approach to identifying a company’s ideal

customer, then building an inbound marketing system that draws the best customers into your organization. This is exactly how we’ve done SEO for years — reverse engineering websites based on search behavior. Yet, Duct Tape Marketing takes that same kind of ideal customer approach and builds an entire marketing system around it.

UpCity: Do you see this strategy influencing the evolution of your company in the next 5 years?

Phil: Yes we do. In terms of going forward, we plan to work much more closely with our customers to understand their entire marketing strategy, and build a web-centric system that draws and converts as many ideal customers as possible.

In fact, I am co-writing a book with four other Duct Tape Marketing Consultants titled: The Small Business Owner’s Guide To Local Lead Generation. This book, due for release in early summer, will be a big part in how we market our family of products and services this year.

AGENCY SPOTLIGHT: KANSAS CITY WEB DESIGN

KANSAS CITY WEB DESIGN with PHIL SINGLETONUpCity: Without revealing your secret sauce...what’s been effective for you in terms of growth/success? What advice would you share for an agency just starting out? Phil: There is no real secret here. 70%+ of our new business is coming mainly from our own organic visibility, which we supplement with some PPC. The rest of our business comes from referrals.

This year, we will be launching a series of SEO training workshops for business owners. If I could turn back the clock, I would probably start with more marketing via workshops and seminars for business owners.

One other tip relates to inbound marketing: it is harder and harder to rank a single website for related business services. For example, for KCWebDesigner.com, we focus on searches related to web development, web design, WordPress and Magento web design. Since those are already very competitive core search terms in Kansas City, we broke off the search engine optimization content into a separate niche site: KCSEOPro.com. We then took this a step further when we became Duct Tape Marketing certified and created a third site for small business marketing, business coaching and consulting terms at KCMarketingAgency.com.

You can see the strategy. It would be near impossible to rank well for all these services under one site, so we split them out and powered them with their own content specific SEO. If I were just starting out again, I would have implemented this strategy at the very beginning.

UpCity: There are many moving pieces when building out your account team and the processes involved to keep projects in line with customer expectations while still being profitable. Can you share any insight on what makes your team click or what hurdles you’ve overcome to perfect this core element of the business? Phil: This has been a real struggle over the years. The key differentiator for my business has been our ability to achieve and maintain high organic ranking for our clients. I have been able to build a team and delegate most of this process, from design and project management to the development and support of SEO friendly-websites. Yet, the one area that I have not been able to delegate has been SEO strategy and implementation. I am the SEO talent at my agency and this is the special sauce that makes us different.

So, I was very excited to partner with UpCity because the SEO account management platform is exactly what I need to be able to build and customize my own process (via multiple process templates). That means I can grow my team this year by hiring an SEO account specialist that can complete a large percentage of the setup and maintenance tasks, while still enabling me to manage and execute that last 25% of the SEO tactics that really make the difference.

UpCity: We are so glad Kansas City Web Design has found the value in our product and it has helped them expand their business into the successful agency we know today. This is why we do what we do! A special thanks to Phil Singleton for his time and thoughtful responses to our questions.

70%organic visibility

30%referrals

Sourceof New

Business

About Phil SingletonPhil Singleton is the owner of Kansas City Web Design®, a web development firm specializing in SEO-friendly WordPress websites and custom website applications, and Kansas City SEO®, a full-service Internet marketing services company that provides organic search engine optimization and other online marketing services. Contact Phil on his Google+ page or LinkedIn page.

About UpCityUpCity is a local inbound marketing platform built for agencies looking to acquire, scale, and drive results for their local business customers profitably. We accomplish this by combining our proprietary SEO/inbound marketing platform with a full range of sales and SEO service offerings. UpCity makes it seamless for agency partners to increase efficiencies by managing and delivering customized tasks, generating robust on-demand reports, and providing full SEO services to help our partners generate new revenue. Our passion for the industry and dedication to building long-lasting relationships with agency partners is the foundation of our business. It’s what inspires us to continue to raise the bar in the industry.

For more information, please visit us at www.upcity.com or email salesteam@upcity.com.

AGENCY SPOTLIGHT: KANSAS CITY WEB DESIGN

KANSAS CITY WEB DESIGN with PHIL SINGLETON