“If you can learn SEO, management is easy to learn.” 🧠
At the Chiang Mai SEO Conference, I sat down with Mads Singers, an SEO turned management coach who helps SEO business owners build effective teams. 🎙️
📊 In this episode, we unpacked:
- 📉 From $20K a month to under $200
- 🧑🏫 Why SEOs struggle with management
- 💸 Why agencies scale into zero profit
- 🎯 Content, links and the 1% trap
- 🧩 Picking a niche and hiring SEOs
🎥 Watch the full episode:
📉 From $20K a Month to Under $200
Mads got serious about SEO in 2007 while working a corporate job at IBM. He built affiliate sites with Filipino writers adding about 6,000 words a day, and at one point made around $20K-plus a month. 📉
Then Penguin and Panda rolled in, and income dropped to under $200. “I started hating SEO a little bit.” He went back to his day job in management, and around 2012-13 started coaching people. For another SEO comeback story, read Kripesh Adwani’s story. 🔗
🧑🏫 Why SEOs Struggle With Management
Most SEOs aren’t great with people, which made the niche a natural fit. He trains people through his course or in person with owners and managers, including at Matt Diggity’s company. 🧑🏫
His core is a management framework: what you do every week and every month. People hate management because they never spent time learning it. Like SEO, it’s a scary monster until you build the skills, and then it becomes fun. For more on building a team, read Navneet Kaushal’s agency lessons. 🔗
💸 Why Agencies Scale Into Zero Profit
Most agencies fail because they don’t charge enough and don’t sell results. Don’t ring prospects offering rankings, links and content. Sell the outcome they want. 💸
One SEO with a few clients works. But scale on the same prices with a bigger management structure, and profits vanish. He worked with agencies doing $300K, $500K and $700K in revenue with literally zero profit, telling themselves they were reinvesting to grow. For an agency that got this right, read Alexander Ljubinkovic’s interview. 🔗
🎯 Content, Links and the 1% Trap
Most SEOs spend 80% of their time analyzing and 20% doing, while hunting for the magic 1%. “That’s the wrong freaking mindset.” SEO is about two things, content and links, which are 90% of it. Master both and you can ignore tiny tweaks like a single citation or social signals. 🎯
On anchor text, he looks at what the top results do. Often, good keyword research, great content and decent links rank well. In very competitive niches like casino, everything is possible: “The question is what does it take.” Usually, a big budget. For a link-building view, read Charles Floate on parasite SEO. 🔗
🧩 Picking a Niche and Hiring SEOs
Newbies: don’t pick a hard niche. In SEO, only the top three to five spots make money, so choose one where your skills can get you there. Even $100 to $1,000 gives you the courage to keep going. Better still, work for someone who knows what they’re doing, even for free for a while, or start an agency where clients bring budgets. 🧩
For hiring, he follows a clear framework based on behavior. Great SEOs are detail-oriented, good with numbers and spreadsheets, and often introverted, so they don’t interview well. And the people who sell themselves best are often not great SEOs. So test candidates rather than relying on the interview.
📝 Key Takeaways From the Mads Singers Interview
- 🧑🏫 Management is a learnable skill
- 💸 Charge enough before you scale
- 🎯 Focus on content and links, not the 1%
- 🧩 Start in a niche where you can reach the top five
- 🧪 Test SEO candidates, don’t just interview them
❓ FAQs About Mads Singers
Who is Mads Singers?
An SEO turned management coach who trains SEO business owners to manage and build effective teams.
Why do SEO agencies end up with no profit?
They keep charging the same while scaling their teams and management, so costs eat the profit.
What should SEO newbies focus on?
Pick a niche where you can reach the top three to five, focus on content and links, and learn from someone experienced.
🎙️ More Inside A Hustler’s Brain Interviews You’ll Love
- How To Grow A 7-Figure SEO Agency That Runs Itself by Rafid Nassir 🚀
- The Secret to SEO Agency Success in the LLM SEO / AI SEO World ft. Adam Chronister
- How Pranav Jha Built a $30k/Month SEO Agency from Scratch
- Chris Tzitzis On Selling His 7-Figure Agency, Life Regrets, and Missing His Mom 👇
Is your SEO business growing revenue but not profit? Tell me in the comments. 💬
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Jitendra Vaswani is a well-known expert in SEO and AI-driven digital marketing. He has spoken at international events and founded Digiexe, a digital marketing agency, and AffiliateBooster, WordPress plugin designed specifically for affiliate marketers. With over 10 years of experience, Jitendra has helped many businesses succeed online. His bestselling book, Inside A Hustler’s Brain: In Pursuit of Financial Freedom, with over 20,000 copies sold globally, underscores his influence and commitment to empowering digital marketers.