what's up guys julian goldie here and in this video i'm going to go over how you can build a
team for your seo agency now you might think you don't need to watch a video like this
after all you may feel as though there isn't much to learn here and that hiring team members is all
just pretty simple stuff but i'm here to tell you that this kind of thing can actually be
seriously complicated i mean if you make a wrong decision when it comes to hiring you might mess
your whole team up and hire the wrong person too this can then lead to problems with clients and
before you know it you might end up losing money due to problems with your new hire if that happens
you might end up with a poorly performing agency and you might then be ready to call it quits
on seo and seo youtube videos and then it's just game over you'll then miss out on the joys of seo
and i'll lose views of my videos and it'll just be a bad situation all round luckily for you this
video is going to go over some tips that i found to be very useful when it comes to hiring people
for a marketing agency i just want to say that most of these tips work really well for both
contractors and full-time employees for example in section number five i actually cover specific tips
that will help you weed out bad contractors and employees and this one tip is super important as
it might just protect you from hiring someone that will tank your agency completely either way make
sure you watch until the end so that you can learn everything you need to know about hiring the right
person for your team let's get started so how much can you budget one of the first things you need to
think about is how much you can afford to spend on your new hires this is super important to consider
as it's going to impact a lot of the other things we'll cover in this video now i just want to say
that i can't really give you an ideal budget here as the answer can be quite specific to your agency
and it's a financial standing because of this you might need to review your accounts to figure out
how much you can actually put towards building a team now it's time to figure out what do you
need help with now once you know what you can afford you then need to think about what you need
help with this is key because if you don't figure this sort of stuff out you won't be able to write
a good job description that actually helps you attract the right kinds of individuals something
we'll touch on later plus later on we're also going to cover certain hiring platforms such as
upwork and on these platforms you can search for specific kinds of people right and certain kinds
of skills too and this feature is extremely helpful because it makes it easy for you
to find someone that will be a great fit for your role of course if you don't figure out what you
want ahead of time you can't really make use of this feature and that could then make it difficult
for you to find good high quality candidates on a platform like this does experience matter so if
you're hiring someone for a technical role it's often a good idea to hire individuals that have
relevant technical experience for instance if you run a link building agency you might need
to hire someone that actually understands and has experience with building backlinks
if you focus on hiring someone with relevant skills you won't have to spend a ton of time
training them of course you'll still need to give new team members some training and this is
something we're going to touch on later on but on the whole things will just be a whole lot easier
if you hire someone who's got proven tried tested experience and a good background plus if someone
has relevant experience it's just going to make your life easier when it comes to managing that
person after all they might have some knowledge from previous jobs that improves your current
processes and helps your business grow this might then mean that you can achieve better results for
you and your clients in a shorter amount of time saving yourself a lot of stress and for
even less money now if you want to take things to the next level you might want to consider
hiring a person that is experienced that's super specific to your agency so for example imagine you
have a link building agency and you offer harrow link building if that's the case you might only
want to hire someone that's actually built these kinds of backlinks in the past of course your
ability to do all of this is going to depend on how much you can afford to spend after all if
you hire a specialist typically they charge more and demand higher salaries right i mean if you're
on a bit of a budget you might just have to hire seo generalists and you might then need to train
them up so they can understand how to get results with a specific tactic and if you're on a really
strict budget you might need to settle on hiring individuals that have little to no experience
with seo and this could be a nightmare when it comes to onboarding and training because these
people have zero seo experience and this training period might take longer when compared to someone
that has general seo experience anyhow if you're hiring someone for a admin role then you don't
have to worry so much about whether that person has experience or not or you know they could just
have general digital marketing experience not seo experience you should still make sure they have
relevant experience when it comes to the kinds of tasks you're going to be asking them to do so that
might include basic things like having experience with google drive or slack or microsoft word
though it could also include slightly complicated things like understanding how zapier works by the
way i just want to say if you get the chance please take a moment to like and subscribe
to our youtube channel if you like our videos it will help us get more visibility on youtube plus
if you become a subscriber it's going to be a whole lot easier for me to become the number
one youtuber in the seo space and that's my dream right so please don't crush my dreams
now where should you hire people for your agency so once you have a rough sense of what your budget
is and who you need to hire you then need to go and do the fun stuff which is actually recruiting
that person now there are loads of websites that can help you with this and they generally
fall into two categories right so there's websites that help you hire full-time employees and there's
sites that help you hire contractors if you're looking to hire full-time employees you might want
to use a site like indeed or linkedin jobs if you want your job posting to reach as many individuals
as possible you should consider using a job posting service or even a recruiter because these
services can be a bit costly but they'll help you save you time attract the right candidate and to
be fair that's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars sometimes if you get the right candidate
now if you want to hire contractors or freelancers perhaps the best option is to use a site like
upwork.com of course that's not the only freelance platform out there and there's loads of them out
there but at the same time most freelancers are using up work in fact i've even used this
platform to land clients before on a side note if you'd like to learn more about my journey without
work you can check out this video how i made one hundred thousand dollars on that work with seo
link building anyway because so many freelancers use this site it might be your best bet if you're
trying to find someone that's both affordable and also good at what they do i mean it'd be hard not
to find the right personal website with so many users at the same time you're only going to be
recruiting the top one percent right so maybe a hundred people apply for your job you only
recruit one person because it's difficult to find the right talent right now you should also filter
for certain skills years of experience familiarity with specific tools and time zone requirements if
your job description doesn't explicitly describe what you want as well as what you don't want you
might end up attracting the wrong kinds of people and if that happens you will then have to waste
time sorting through candidates that would never have been a good fit for your position now if
you need some help when it comes to writing job descriptions you might want to look at existing
job descriptions already on these platforms and if you do this you get a sense of what separates
a good job description from a bad one and you can then create your own template based on what you've
learned so here's an example of a fairly basic description on upwork and this is pretty broad
so if you create something like this you could get tons of applications and then it's going to take
a lot of time to sort through all the people that apply it plus good candidates might not
even apply in the first place and that's because the job description doesn't really provide any
specific details when it comes to the scope of the work that's involved as a result good candidates
could be wary of putting themselves forward for a role like this on the other hand this job ad
is a little bit more specific it's detailed and because of this there's a good chance it will
attract someone that can actually deliver the kinds of results this person is after now let's
talk about interviewing people so once you start to get applications you then need to think about
conducting interviews lots of business owners tend to have their own way of doing things when
it comes to running interviews and you may already have a sense of how you're going to approach this
however if you're a bit clueless or you lack experience here and you're feeling a little
bit nervous here's a few key points you want to keep in mind right so basically you just want to
use the interviews to figure out how competent a certain person is and also what sort of cultural
fit they are right so it's easy to lie on a cv or a freelance profile right because of this you need
to verify that person has actually told the truth about the things they're claiming plus you need to
filter for red flags right the best way to verify someone's claims it's just by asking them to talk
about one of their previous seo contracts or even getting in touch with one of their own bosses and
asking for a reference if you speak to their own boss and you get an externally validated reference
then you know that candidate has experience and they've done a good job previously so
therefore they're likely to be a good fit for your business too also if they can describe
you know campaigns i've worked on previously whether it's about seo or marketing there's a good
chance of telling the truth right now if you're going to hire someone with no seo experience
you may be able to ask these sort of questions luckily though there isn't a big problem as you
can use the interview to figure out how good a certain person is as well right so after all
the main thing you're trying to work out here is whether the person is teachable or coachable right
so if they can give you good examples based on how they learned processes and best practices in other
jobs or even just for their own projects then there's a good chance they might be able to follow
your sops without running into any major issues something we're going to touch on later plus if
you really want to verify someone is teachable then potentially you can give them a test task
or a sample task before the interview and if they do a good job they probably won't have too
many issues when you ask them to follow your srps and instructions next up you could consider trial
periods as well so if you're nervous about hiring the wrong person for your agency remember that you
can make the use of trial periods so if you bring a new person on your team you can just try things
out for a certain period of time and test how they are working with you and your team then based on
how things go you can decide if you're going to keep working with them or if it's sadly better
to let them go so for example if you're going to work with a seo contractor you might just try them
out for a couple of campaigns and then determine how long those campaigns will take to test trial
period either way you want to give the person a good chance to showcase their talents and you also
want to give them enough opportunities to act upon feedback and if you're too harsh during the trial
period you might end up letting go someone who's actually really an amazing hire after receiving a
little bit of training coaching and advice now do you have sops all agencies tend to have their own
specific way of doing things and i'd be willing to bet that your agency is no exception here for
example you might have certain preferences when it comes to sending outreach emails
or even identifying prospects for link building campaigns whatever your preferences are you should
try to formalize everything and every process by creating sops now this stands for standard
operating procedure and it's basically a document that details all the things that need to be done
when completing a certain task if you'd like to see some generic sops you can go
to templatelab.com as they have a huge library of srps that you can check out and this will give you
a rough sense of how you should approach things and the way you should structure this kind of
document now one thing i would recommend when it comes to sops is actually delegating them to your
team right don't write out all the sop yourself because if you do that then you don't really give
your team the freedom to find the smartest way to do things plus they won't really stick to sop that
they haven't written themselves so instead when you hire someone new give them the responsibility
of not just doing the process but also documenting it into an srp that's easy to follow and regularly
updated and this is one of the main reasons we've been able to consistently build high dr links for
some of our clients because without good sops i don't think we would have been able to take
this website from zero to a hundred and forty five thousand businesses per month using harrow links
it's all about the process and after all it was the smps that allowed me to scale this process
so that i could build enough backlinks to deliver this result now creating detailed srps might sound
like a lot of work and you might not be ready to do this but if you're hiring generalists
or people that don't have much experience with seo it's really important that you keep things
efficient because when they're building out your sops and they're writing them themselves then they
can quickly see step by step how they should do things and what needs to be done make sure you
review your sops regularly so that you can improve upon them too a lot of the time you can identify
areas for improvement by reviewing the feedback you have to give your team members
and if different team members are making the same mistakes there's a chance that something's
missing the sop or is not quite easy enough to follow and if you notice something like this
you need to highlight this issue to your team asap so that they don't keep making the same mistakes
now if you guys have any good advice when it comes to creating or optimizing saps let me know in the
comment section i'd love to learn from you too now let's talk about building a team through
outsourcing so something you could also do is build a team by outsourcing services too now
you could technically argue this doesn't count as building a team but this approach does help
you achieve all the benefits of having a team and without having to deal with all the stress that
comes with hiring and managing people so how do you approach outsourcing and white labeling well
if you do things this way you basically need to identify a need within your agency you then
need to find someone that offers white labeling services based on your needs and this isn't that
hard to do as there are tons of companies out there that offer white labeling services for
pretty much every single seo task you can think about so you'll find that there are content
services right there are white label link building services white label technical seo services
and just basically everything you can think of when it comes to seo by the way if you're
interested we actually have a white labeling service for agency owners that want to outsource
link building so if you're intrigued by this go to juliangoldi.com to book a free consultation
with us and during the call we'll go over how everything works when it comes to link building
and white labeling it so that's pretty much the end of this video hopefully everything we've
covered here should help you build a solid team for your agency and if you've got any questions
feel free to leave a comment below and i'll do my best to answer your queries so thanks for watching
and please remember to like and subscribe if you like our videos it will help us reach more people
and if you become a subscriber you'll get to hear me talk about seo and if we're being honest that's
amazing right i mean come on on seo videos the best thing about youtube and that's a fact this
right here is my favorite thing ever in the history of forever i think about this every day
i think about this all night long i stay awake not sleeping because i'm thinking about this
so
you