The path to mastering SEO strategy was uphill and arduous for Frank Sanchez, founder and CEO of ELK. He knew where he wanted to go but was not always sure how to get there. Although the journey wasn’t straightforward, it eventually enabled him to position ELK as the leading and fastest-growing enterprise SEO Agency in the United States.
Frank Sanchez learns how not to run a digital marketing agency
Elk’s co-founders, Frank Sanchez and Craig Harrison, connected through a mutual client in 2013. The pair hit it off immediately and decided to join forces. From that day forward, they collaborated on website projects. Sanchez handled sales, and Harrison took on development.
They solidified the partnership by founding Obscura Media Group. Shortly after launching Obscura, Sanchez and Harrison landed Able Services, their first enterprise account.
Despite moments of celebration, constant responsibility and stress took their toll. Website projects are notorious for setting a grueling pace and yielding inconsistent cash flow. The founders put their heads together and came up with a plan to avoid total burnout. Their idea was to join a larger agency, learn the ins and outs of digital marketing, and find out what they needed to know to make their job easier.
Sanchez and Harrison embedded themselves within a large agency for over a year but never found the answers to their questions. “Working at the big shop allowed us to see behind the curtain,” recalls Sanchez. “But instead of learning the secrets of digital marketing, we only saw how these companies frustrate clients with long-term contracts, overcomplicated billing, and a culture of apathy. After 18 months, we came away with a Ph.D. in how not to run an agency.
Frank Sanchez builds a new model for digital marketing
Sanchez and Harrison walked away from their comfortable salaries and equity offers to take another swing at entrepreneurship. This time, their mission was to build a more customer-centric agency. They resolved that combining content writing and technical website development with sound SEO strategy was the key.
“We took a hard look at our business model as a paid media growth agency,” Sanchez remembers. “Inspiration struck when we asked ourselves one simple question: ‘What would happen to ELK Marketing if Facebook no longer existed?’ As we examined our team’s talent and began building a group of experts around search engine optimization and marketing, we realized that paid performance e-commerce agencies and brands had forgotten the basics of SEO.”
Frank Sanchez refocuses ELK on the basics of SEO
Sanchez likes to look at internet search engines as the world’s purest example of democratized supply and demand economics. Internet searches are the foundation and backbone of today’s consumer-driven e-commerce economy.
“There are approximately 8.5 billion searches on Google every single day and 99,000 searches every second,” says Sanchez. “Those searches convert questions into solutions with a single click, and those millions of clicks provide indexed websites with a stream of highly convertible traffic. The trick is that search engines don’t divvy up the traffic evenly.”
To gain a consistent flow of traffic, websites have to be among the top results. According to Backlinko, only 0.78% of people searching on Google ever make it to the second page, and research from Sistrix reveals that the top three search results win 55.2% of the traffic.
“Getting your website on that first page isn’t a mystery, it’s mostly science,” says Sanchez. “The key is great SEO. When you understand the method behind global keyword search volumes and their corresponding keyword difficulties, you can target the keywords that are most likely to move your website to page one. Utilizing our Growth SEO™ philosophy, we balance which keywords are obtainable in the short term, what we can accomplish in 12 months, and combine that with the keywords that have had a historic track record of success through paid search ads.”.
Sanchez and Harrison guided ELK to apply SEO tactics to websites for a wide array of brands, taking those websites to the first page of search engine results. Where clients previously brought customers in through paid Google Ads, they can now rely on an annuity of inbound search traffic instead of just acquiring potential customers through expensive paid variable cost media spends.
While the path to build a new model for digital marketing was not at all what Sanchez anticipated, he does not regret the journey. Today, he accomplishes his mission to prioritize customer service by providing clients with a dedicated strategist, demystifyingdemistifying the SEO process, easy-to-understand billing, transparent reporting, accountability in contracts, and a proven track record of results.
“We do what we say we’re going to do,” he remarks. “We want to be a trusted advisor to every brand we work with, and we’re proud to have a strong year-over-year retention rate with clients. Our culture and our people come first, and every client can feel that.”
