Chris Dreyer on Why Your Agency Needs to Start With One Niche at a Time | Ep #193
Are you worried that defining a niche will limit your agency’s potential? Don’t be. Check out one agency’s story about how they grew past 7 figures in a very specific horizontal and vertical niche. Think: if you got paid on performance alone, what’s the ONE THING you do best to get you paid the most?
In this episode, we’ll cover:
Why your agency needs a vertical or horizontal niche, or both.
When and how to expand your niche.
How to get bigger clients and retainers.
Why Choose a Vertical and Horizontal Niche?
Chris is a school teacher by trade and was doing some SEO on the side. After a couple years of side jobs helping small businesses with SEO he quit teaching. He says it was an easy decision to choose a specific vertical niche because he knew he already had success stories, would build authority quicker, and stand out from the competition. To Chris, it seemed like an easy and logical decision.
Focusing on a horizontal was a more difficult decision. Chris says they are awesome at SEO and their happy clients would requests other services, like social media, PPC, email marketing, etc. He says they were “OK” at these types of projects and were profitable. However they made the difficult decision to focus only on their core service of SEO - and it paid off! Zeroing in on a horizontal makes you super searchable, and your ideal clients can find you right when they need you.
[clickToTweet tweet="When you make the decision to be the best at one thing, other decisions become easier to make." quote="When you make the decision to be the best at one thing, other decisions become easier to make."]
When and How to Expand Your Agency’s Niche
It was their goal to provide the best SEO for law practices - staying true to the goal was key. It wasn’t easy though. Naturally, law firms have relationships with a lot of medical providers. So, Chris’s agency’s satisfied law clients would often refer physicians to them. As tempting as it was, he often turned down those projects because he was so committed to the original goal in his vertical niche.
In fact, it wasn’t until just recently that Chris’s agency, formerly AttorneyRankings.io, rebranded to Rankings.io in order to draw a broader client base. The rebrand comes after 3.5 years of establishing their vertical niche. They’ve found a lot of their strategies easily transferred from legal to medical practices. However, 90% of their business still comes from attorneys.
How to Get Bigger Clients and Retainers
Not to pat myself on the back… but I’m gonna :) Chris said he attributes a lot of their success to implementing my Foot in the Door strategy. That’s when they saw conversion rates explode! Once they started offering a $995 SEO audit, it became so much easier for clients to commit to bigger projects.
The Foot in the Door allows Rankings.io to showcase their knowledge and educate their clients based on research and fact. It also allows the agency to qualify their prospects by working on a smaller project before signing on for a higher value, long term project. It serves as a vetting process and helps avoid potential headaches. (Translation: weed out the bad prospects before they become bad clients!)
From One Agency Owner to Another
Chris is a big fan of educating yourself and always trying to improve. His best advice to any agency owner no matter what stage they’re in, is to take action. Learning means nothing if you don’t put it into action.
Need Guidance and Support to Grow Your Agency Faster?
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How Can You Improve Further?
Do you still have more questions to improve your business? I can help.
It doesn’t matter if you have been an agency owner for a while now or have just taken the leap and started a new agency, I have covered topics from the struggles you may face within your agency to leveraging YouTube in your marketing for your agency marketing strategy.
Learn more about me or you can check out all my tips, tricks, and everything you need to know in my blogs. I have covered a wide variety of topics as well as answering your questions and more from my Ask Swenk series.
Are videos more your thing? Don’t worry! You can check out my Ask Swenk series and more of my videos on my YouTube channel for advice from myself and other agency experts.
