Ep.15: How Nile Frater Scales Web Traffic for Customers with a $10k SEO Service

Transcript

This episode is brought to you by Equilibria, Inc. Equilibria provides training to assist fast-growing companies in documenting and improving their key processes for maximum operational performance. Visit EQBsystems.com to stop the chaos of fast growth and start flowing today! EQBsystems.com.

Welcome to Scale Tales – the business storytelling podcast where entrepreneurs, executives and experts share firsthand accounts of those magical moments when they achieved something bigger than even they could have imagined.

I’m Alicia Butler Pierre, host and producer of Scale Tales and we’re about to hear the story of someone who, just from the name of his company, let’s you know that he’s all about fast growth for maximum reach. He does this using a non-traditional form of Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

This is Ep. 15: How Nile Frater Scales Web Traffic for Customers with a $10k SEO Service

I’m Nile Frater. I am the founder of Masse SEO. I’m currently based in Andorra, and this is my scale tale.

Now, Masse SEO began in theory on the 7th of July, 2023, but the journey to get there actually started long before that. I originally had a bit of a background in technology, and I ran a website called No Code.Tech, which was a educational hub of information for anybody working with no code tools, Zapier, Airtable.

And what was interesting about that website is it primarily scaled using SEO. I wasn’t an SEO expert when I began that website, but I kind of quickly picked it up and it became the main way that this website grew. And so I sold that website in 2022. It was acquired by a startup who wanted to turn it into a media arm to help them acquire clients. And I worked at that startup for around about 18 months. And at some point along the way, I decided I wanted to start a new business, replace my income, and be able to be selfsufficient as soon as possible.

Given that my website, No Code.Tech, had grown with SEO, I decided to launch an SEO agency. I started out with an initial two ideas.

The first idea was, if you think about most service businesses, what they will typically do is begin maybe charging clients 1,000/month or 2,000/month or 3,000/month. And then after a few clients and a few successes, they might raise their prices to 5k or 6k a month. I decided that I wanted to kind of skip that entirely. I decided that I was going to begin the company charging $10,000 per month.

And so my thought process became less of How much should I charge for SEO? And instead, How can I make my SEO services so valuable, that people will be lining up to spend $10,000 on it? Now, unsurprisingly, on day one, people were certainly not lining up to spend $10,000 on it. I started out with this idea that we would do a form of SEO called Programmatic SEO. So you take a database of information and you turn that into hundreds or thousands of pages.

And that’s very different from traditional SEO where you would just create lots of articles, you know, the type of thing that people, I think, commonly associate with SEO. By, let’s say around October, I started trying to do my first sales calls for this idea. And long story short, it turned out to be a very difficult project to sell. It turned out that doing SEO in this way, where you turn up with this database and you kind of program and design a page, it was a hard sell.

It was especially a hard sell to my target market, which was primarily funded startups and the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, etcetera bcause their point of view was always,

“Well, we already have engineers, why would we pay you to do an engineering thing?”

And so this was a little bit of a tricky kind of objection to overcome. Fast forward to December 2022, I engaged with a client in the robotics space, a pretty well-known company now and I started talking to them about doing this Programmatic SEO and it wasn’t quite a fit. And so nothing else happened at that point. I continued just doing more sales calls, so on and so forth. Fast forward until May, early July of 2023.

This is where Masse SEO starts to become a real company.

Around the same time, something else happened…

The robotics client got back in touch with me and they said,

“Hey, it looks like AI is a big thing that’s happening. And instead of doing this kind of programmatic database content, what if we looked at different robotics forums every month and we looked at all the questions that people were asking and we scraped all of that data and we used AI to write 1000 articles every month about robotics answering robotics questions?”

And I said, “No! I think that would be a terrible idea.” The reason it would be a terrible idea is because you would essentially just be spamming Google with really low-quality AI content.

And so I fought it for a couple of weeks and I went back to them and I said, “Hey, I have this idea. What if we wrote 30 articles per month that we use AI to begin the articles, but we use humans to edit them, to research them, to turn that into a real piece of content and a real finished piece?” And the robotics company agreed that they would like to do that. And so that was very much the birth of Masse SEO. We became a company where we do very high-volume SEO campaigns, but using traditional SEO techniques.

So not low-quality AI content, you know, not these super long, 5,000, 10,000-word articles, but actually just repeatable, good quality, high volume content. And so that’s what Masse was. We started publishing content for this client in July. And at this point I was still working for my previous company so it was very much doing this on the side. And it was very much one of those things where I signed up the client and I thought, Great, I’ve done it. I feel a sense of relief because I finally managed to sign up my first client after seven plus months of trying to do it.

While breathing that sigh of relief, the reality of what Nile promised his robotics customer also struck him.

I felt a sense of dread, a sense of, Oh wait, I’ve just committed to doing 30 articles per month! I have a full-time job. I’ve never done this before. How am I going to do this? I started doing it in evenings and weekends. I probably worked every single evening, every single weekend of the summer of 2023. It was really slow at first. We made some mistakes along the way. For example, we onboarded the client in July, but we never really published our first articles until the end of July. In the first couple of weeks, that’s okay.

By kind of week four, when we’re starting to publish client content, the client’s kind of chasing and asking like,

Hey, where is this content? It’s been three weeks now. I don’t really know you, I don’t really trust you yet.”

And so that was a real problem. But we published our first pieces of content in late July and in August it was very, very quiet. And then in the first week of September we put 10 keywords on page one of Google for the client.

At that point we probably published about just under 60 articles. But we had keywords landing on page one of Google on week one. By week two we put 20 keywords. By week three, we put 30. And you know, that is a trend that’s continued for that client since. But this was the first point in September 2023 when I realized, Well, I’ve got something that works. I’ve got something that can scale and I’ve got something that can scale my client’s traffic.

About one week later, just as Nile hit his stride with this new service offering, something else happened – a financial setback that turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

I was laid off from the company that I was working at. They went through a massive layoff and there was a potential option to stay. But with those kind of wins in September, I felt like this is an opportunity. So, I left that company. And by the following October, I had my second client. By November, I had my third client. By December, I had my fourth client.

When I left the company I was employed at, I immediately went out to my network and I tried to figure out, okay, when I had NoCode.Tech, I had several clients there where we were able to work with them and grow them via the website. So my first protocol was, let’s go out and sign those people up and see if I can kind of work with them. And that brought the first couple of extra clients. But the big thing that moved the needle is the whole time that we’d been working with this robotics client, every week we would post an update on our channel and show them where everything was going. And one of their
investors, a very, very well-known guy in the Valley was paying attention and in December he made his first referral.

And it was a crazy feeling because, most of the time I would do a sales call and at the time it was just me and I’d hired one writer, which I’ll talk about in a second. But there was a real effort for every sale. Every sale was difficult because we had some results, but not very many yet. We’re not a super established company and we had not dealt with a lot of the objections to this new version of Masse SEO that we were selling.

This new version of Masse SEO that they were selling is one that, although it leverages AI for faster results, is still somewhat of a long game in terms of consistently generating traffic to a website to ultimately convert visitors into customers.

As I say, we started to see that scale up in September and that was a really exciting thing. And then I think as we got to around about November, we started to see the first sales coming in and that was particularly exciting because, as you can imagine being a robotics company, they’re not selling products at $100 or $200, they’re selling things that are 20, 30, 50, $100, 100,000 dollars at a time.

So at the time we were making a bit of progress there and that sort of just scaled up. If I fast forward to now, SEO brought them, I think, the largest motors company in America. I’m not going to say the name. NASA is a client of theirs. All sorts of these companies initially found this company by essentially googling, finding robotics content and then leading to our client.

And these are the results that Nile wanted. He’s confident that part of his success in generating these results is that, unlike traditional SEO agencies, Masse SEO puts the responsibility of SEO decisions onto themselves and not on their clients. Decisions like…

“Hey, do you want to write this piece of content?” How long do you want to make that article? But I think the thing that was most difficult, as you’re spending all this money and these agencies are reporting on the traffic growth, not on the conversion growth. And so that was always a focus from us from day one. How do we focus in conversions?

But, since then, we learned a lot from how we did it with that client, and it’s been a focus for all our clients going forward. It’s something that we’re really proud of. We always get SEO growth for our clients, and we’re always able to bring sales for our clients. Obviously, some clients are going to be bigger than others, but I think that being able to do that was a real reason that we were able to attract investor referrals and start to grow there towards the end of late 2023.

Those referrals led Masse SEO from $0 to $1.5M USD within a year.

You know, looking back on the clients that we have, I would say 70, maybe even as high as 80% of those are referrals. And that was quite a shock. You know, I always felt like the way to acquire clients was going to be go out, do cold email, knock on doors, and just really kind of put in the work on the sales side. As it turns out, I think investors, they’re looking across a portfolio of companies.

And whether it’s SEO, website design, any kind of service, I think they’re always looking for an agency that’s dependable and gets results that they can refer. That initial investor referred us to, probably in the space of three months, five different clients. So that was an overnight jump for us. We went from one month where we had three clients to the next month, we had eight. That was a huge leap. And that was where our majority of our growth happened in the space of one month. And then that investor referred us to other investors and it became a real multiplication effect there where one investor speaks to another.

That multiplication effect came as a result of each investor having, as Nile mentioned earlier, a portfolio of companies. When they find a solution provider they like for one company, then they can naturally refer or recommend that provider to the other companies in their portfolio. So, how exactly does Masse SEO work? How do they use AI to write a large number of original articles each month for their clients? Coming up after the break, Nile will answer those questions and give us even more insights into their back-office operations.

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Before the break, Nile Frater, the founder and CEO of Masse SEO, described the remarkable journey his company went on to achieve scale in record time. His secret? Well, part of it is charging a premium price for their service. Another part is his target market of investors who are not shy about making referrals. And then there’s the obvious part – you have to actually provide a quality service. Here’s Nile…

We do two things that I think matter. The obvious one is we get results and we focus hard on getting results. The other thing that we do is be a part of our clients’ teams. So we’re always helping them with random issues that come up that may be to do with SEO or may not.

Last night we had a client where someone broke their website. They didn’t know how to fix it. I knew how to fix that. So I just jumped in and said, “Hey, let me take care of this.” So we do weekly reporting, sometimes more frequently than that, on what’s happening for clients.

We don’t do like an end of month call, we don’t do one big presentation. Every single week, we’re telling our clients, ”Here’s the keywords we’ve got, here’s the sales that we’ve got, here are some of the issues that we’re seeing.”

Nile says their clients appreciate this level of transparency and frequent communications because there can be periods where they don’t think SEO is working.

But that kind of communication and showing them that, “Hey, we’re really thinking about this. This is keeping us up at night and here’s what we’re doing about it.” I think that’s really helped us get a good reputation and kind of be someone that people trust to refer to their friends, you know.

I couldn’t help but wonder, how long does it take to start seeing results?

If you speak to the average person about SEO, they have always felt that it’s going to take eight or nine months to see traction and results.

And my belief is that not really about the time. If you think about the majority of agencies or recommended SEO strategies that you might see out there, most people say you should try and publish one article a week. Some of them will say two articles a week. A lot of agents do six articles per month, but very few do as many as eight per month. And so if you stretch that out to, let’s say over a 10 month period.

You may write 40 articles or you might write as many as 80 articles. We publish a minimum of 20 articles per month for all of our clients. And so in that same 10 month period, we publish more like 200 articles. As a result, SEO just happens much faster because it’s not really about time.

Yes, there’s a couple of weeks where you wait for Google to identify your content and crawl your website and bring it online and move it up. There is timescales there. But really SEO progress is a function of how much effort you put in. And by effort, I mean content, I mean links. I mean, all these things that go into SEO. So to answer the question, how long does it take for clients to see results? Typically, our answer is four months. And this is what we tell clients. We say, in the first month, you’re not going to see anything happen, but what you are going to see is that we’ve put together a strategy.

When you think about the types of people who are going to read these articles, they line up with who you think your customers are. And by the end of that month, we’re going to have written content that you’re happy with, that you’re happy to put your name against, that you feel puts your brand in a positive place. People are going to trust us, they’re going to see it’s credible. Then what we see is by the end of month two, you’re probably not going to see much either. You know, you’re just going to see that, we’ve not only taken that quality, but we’ve done it 20 times minimum.

Things start to get interesting when you get into month three. We tell clients you’re going to start to see some of these articles ranking for keywords, and those keywords are going to be on, you know, page two of Google or lower. And as you know yourself, you’re basically invisible at that point, but things are happening under the hood.

Things are happening so much that by the end of the third month…

You’re going to start to see one or two keywords move on to page one. And this is where people start to get excited. You know, this is where they can Google it and see themselves. And then as we come into month four, we will see that the first two or three keywords are hitting like position one, position two, position three. And they might not be big keywords, you know, they’re not going to be the most revenue generating keywords.

But what we’re typically going to see is they rank therefore they bring traffic. And once you’ve had a couple of weeks of traffic, you can see is that traffic going to convert. And so the majority of our clients get their first return on investment typically by the end of month four. And so maybe it takes another couple of months before that starts to be enough return to completely cover our costs. But at that point, clients are usually excited.

They can see the keyword rankings moving every week. They can see how those keywords rankings can translate into traffic. And most importantly, you can see how that traffic transforms into conversions. And so it’s not about time, it’s about output. We never guarantee it’s going to happen in four months. You don’t know what’s going to happen in SEO, but the reason that we see it happen with essentially every client is because we are doing a fixed output and we know what happens when you’ve had article 20, article 30, article 40, so on and so forth.

Getting clients to pay $10k USD a month for at least four months before getting a return on that investment requires serious faith on their part. Aside from being transparent about what’s under the hood, as Nile described it, I asked about the leadership of that robotics customer. It turns out the CEO of that company was on a mission to be number one and was willing to take risks to get there.

When you look back, it’s like, Wow, why did they do that? They want to be number one. The same way that if you think about health, you think WebMD, they want to be WebMD for robotics. My co-founder Jack and I always remember the CEO was kind of asking us questions like,

“What do you do? How long have you known Nile? How long have you been involved in this?

It was very, very skeptical questions where I think he was trying to figure out if we were free recons in a trench coat or if we were a real company. And, you know, and I think the truth was we were somewhere in between. We knew what we were doing, but we were definitely exaggerating the size of our company. Not point out that we’re essentially just freelancers at that point.

And so, the first couple of weeks were a little bit hairy because I think it was very much, Okay, they’ve given us $10,000. Nothing’s really happened for the first couple of weeks because we’re doing our research and we’re kind of learning how to write articles in the style that they need. I think once we published articles, it was definitely a bit of relief.

I do have a lot of SEO knowledge. So it was backed in something. But just this particular technique with AI I hadn’t necessarily really done before. And so I think we got lucky in a lot of senses that that client had so much patience for us to get rolling, you know.

Once that got rolling, that meant investing in the AI technology required to produce articles for their clients at scale. This also meant building a team that included writers. Nile soon found out that, although he had experience managing 62 people when he worked at a bank, building a team for his own company is…different.

That’s definitely been the hardest part because it’s such a different industry from anything like banking. So, at the minute we are 16 people. At the start of this year, I think we were three, maybe four, the majority of our employees they’re contractors, but they’re full time. And we have a couple of people who do things here and there.

And then there’s AI. In case you’re wondering how it factors into the work the writers at Masse SEO do…

Well, the little secret is our writers write around two articles per day. And that is incredibly difficult normally. But the two things that make that possible are, number one, yes, we use AI to some extent. So, you know, the way we describe it on the website, and that is true, is we use it as a writer’s block. And what I mean by that is, if I ask you tomorrow to go write an article about computer monitors, for example, you know what a computer monitor is.

But what you might not know off the top of your head is what are the default sizes that they come in and what are the different types of screens? And if people are buying monitors, what do they really care about? All of that is not useful information. It’s not useful for a human to go and research that because it’s really obvious information. So AI helps us skip that. AI helps us say, “Okay, well, if we write about this topic, here are the things that you need to know.” And then our writers can go and figure out some of the more involved points.

That produces a really, really good result, and the results we get for clients show that. But it means that our writers can write at a really high capacity. And because they write so much, you know, in a month they’re writing 20 articles about a specific topic. They get to learn it really, really quickly. So a lot of our writers start out and they’re really worried about how am I going to hit this volume, you know, how do I use the AI, et cetera.

By month three or four, they’re asking for a third client. They want to take on 60 articles per month or three articles per day, because they can get through it really easily.

Now that we know how Nile scaled his team, Masse SEO’s revenue, and his client’s website traffic, I asked if he had advice to share with us about working past what may seem like an endless cycle of rejections. He suggests two things. First, it starts with the type of client you choose to work with.

We only work with clients who are funded startups, typically at seed stage, but we want to work with series A clients because we have a lot of confidence that we can do what we do because we know that we’ve got a little bit of a runway.

You can’t really try us out for a month, you’re not going to get anywhere. You have to work with us for at least three months to kind of get any proof that you’ve got traction here. So, you know, that gives us confidence because we’re working with these funded startups who we know and can do that and can have that patience. I think, number two, we only sell a really specific thing.

We got a lot of clients who say,.

“Oh, I don’t think I need 20 articles. Can I do 10 articles?”

The answer is “No! Because I don’t know if that’s going to work. I think it probably would work. I think it would work a little bit slower, but I don’t know.” What I know is every time I take on a client and I do 20 articles per month, it works. And so that gives me a lot of confidence.

However, I didn’t have that confidence before our first client. And the advice I would give here is, and the way that I would think about it is, we promised a lot upfront for that client. You know, we said we’ll do 30 articles per month, so on and so forth. And that turned out to be probably a little bit too many. That’s why we do 20 now. But because we’re charging such a high amount of money, we knew that we could immediately just go and pay the best people.

And so, there’s a real question there of like, if you charge someone $500 a month, you can’t give them a good service because you can’t afford other people. You can’t afford to give it your full attention. But if you charge a high amount of money, you can. And so to some extent, the amount of money you charge directly translates into the type of results that you can get.

But you know, ultimately it took a long time. It took at least seven months of persistence and trying to sell that and reconfigure a new offer and being really responsive to kind of what I was hearing in terms of objections. But I think the key thing is you can be a better service provider if you charge more money. Ultimately, I love that.

And I love that too! Here’s a recap of some lessons learned from Nile’s experience in trial and error for refining his service to achieve scale:

1. Reputation, Referrals, Results. Build a strong network around your reputation for quality work. This leads to referrals and repeat business from your customers and ultimately to win-win results for you and your clients.

2. If content marketing is a part of your company’s strategy, then consider using AI as an assistant to cure your writer’s block and speed up the time it takes to write an original article.

3. SEO, like most marketing, takes time. The search engine algorithms have to learn the nature of your articles and those who are likely interested in that content. Then you can eventually hit your targeted prospective customers.

4. Value-based pricing is a way to offer your clients a premium experience without the hassle that comes with charging competitively low or hourly rates.

5. Risk vs. reward. Charging premium prices can be a high-stakes endeavor for both you and your customers. However, if the desired results are achieved, then the reward can be equally handsome for both you and your customers.

A special thank you to Nile Frater for sharing his scale tale with us. You can learn more about his company and SEO from his company’s website as well as other resources we’ve curated.

This information is available in this episode’s show notes at ScaleTalesPodcast.com. Again, that’s ScaleTalesPodcast.com

Thank you for listening! If you learned something valuable from this episode, please leave us a five-star rating and review wherever you’re listening.

I’m Alicia Butler Pierre and I produced and narrated this episode. Additional voiceover by Clarence Levy III. Audio editing by Olanrewaju Adeyemo. Music production and original score by Sabor! Music Enterprises. Video editing by Gladiola Films. Show notes by Erika Ve Revilla.

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