The SEO Agency Rollercoaster with Ryan Shelley of SMA Marketing

Ryan:

But we’re in a world of zero-click search. Doesn’t mean people aren’t clicking, but there’s a lot more zero-click search. There’s much more-complex buyer journeys and user journeys.

Andrew:

Welcome to the SEO Agency Rollercoaster Podcast, your go-to show for candid conversations with agency leaders that supercharge the ambitions of up-and-coming SEO entrepreneurs. We break down the strategies, stumbles, and success stories you need to start, grow, and scale a thriving SEO agency—consider this your roadmap to real-world agency wins.

My name’s Andrew Zarudnyi, and I’m a content marketer at SE Ranking, and I’m joined by my co-host and fellow SE Ranking Success Team member, Maksym Blyzniuk.

Today we’re honored to welcome Ryan Shelley, founder and CEO of SMA Marketing. Ryan’s built a powerhouse inbound and SEO shop infused with his faith-driven values and technical expertise. We’ll dive into his entrepreneurial beginnings, how he’s leveraging human-first marketing today, and what bold experiments he’s planning for the future.

If you’re ready for an inside look at building an agency that’s as value-led as it is growth-driven, fasten your seatbelt—it’s going to be an enlightening ride.

Maksym:

Thanks so much, Andrew! Thanks so much, Ryan, for joining us! So I think let’s just get the ball rolling.

So, first things first, could you tell us a bit more about your entrepreneurial beginnings—like, how did that idea come to you; how did a side gig turn into an actual business; how it all started?

Ryan:

Yeah, I mean, it was really by accident; it wasn’t something that I planned out. I was actually working at a church and needed some extra income. I had a background in—like, my undergrad was in—communications, so at the time I was actually doing video work, mostly video and video editing. And these were the early days of online video, so I launched in 2008, which was a great time to start an entrepreneurial adventure when the economy was as terrible as it was in the United States.

But, you know, I got some video work, but it really wasn’t sustaining me, and I had a friend’s dad who had a website and was like, “I see you have a website. I don’t need video, but can you build me a website?” So I said, “Sure.” At the time, too, I was also a musician, and I was traveling and playing around as a singer-songwriter, and he saw that I was booking gigs all over the US through sites like MySpace, and he said, “Hey, can you do that but with my law firm? Could you find a way to market my law firm locally?” He basically paid for me to figure out how to do this stuff.

You know, so I kind of put a retainer together—it wasn’t very high—but just started playing around and testing things. And this is back—2008, 2009—when SEO meta keywords still mattered, right? This is back when you could rank overnight with just some simple optimizations. It was pretty cool to see what happened. As I built some case studies, I had some more local businesses and just kind of started rolling with it there and had this little side gig that was working for me.

In 2015 I made some major shifts in my own life, things I just needed to do differently, and I decided to take the agency on full-time. You know, I’m not really a nine-to-five guy—that’s just not the way I work; I don’t function well in that—so I wanted a little more independence. I went head-first into it and started trying to find new clients, you know, and building and really taking my own marketing seriously and the things that I’d applied to other small businesses, and it took a while.

You know, a lot of people think—you see all these videos today—it’s like, “In three months we’ll increase your MRR by one hundred thousand dollars.” Okay, maybe, but the reality is for most of us that’s not what happens, and there’s a lot of grind. I was creating a ton of content and just getting in front of people and pitching and doing all the things you do when you’re small and you’re a solo shop, and finally, after about twelve months, I started to build some momentum.

Because between 2009 and 2015 search had already changed massively, multiple times—you know, we’re talking tons of massive updates in the algorithms—so my strategy had to change. And once I got that first deal, the ball just kind of kept rolling, and building partnerships and relationships with my vendors even. I ended up building a good relationship with one of my vendors who was helping me with some ad stuff; he ended up going to a large company in Europe and was like, “Hey, you should actually check out this guy—he’s doing stuff that other people aren’t doing,” and I ended up getting contracted by them. That company got bought out, all those people went to other big companies, and now, you know, we started to build a footprint in Tel Aviv, in Europe, and then that kind of went over to the US even more, too.

So I had my local business in the United States; I started growing in the Near East and in Europe, and then that went back into the SaaS companies here in the States as well. So it was kind of serendipitous—opening the doors as they came, building relationships with people, not just hoping that my content marketing would do everything, which was really important, but building friendships and offering help and support. I think those were some of the keys early on, ’cause I didn’t really know what I was doing.

Maksym:

Cool, cool. Frankly speaking, from the way I hear it, everything started quite easily for you, but I don’t believe that was the case. So were there any specific hurdles that you still remember—kind of an impediment that was stopping you from actually growing, and something that you actually had to overcome?

Ryan:

Yeah! I mean, I think there are a number of things. The first one—as so many people, we probably see this with clients as well—is people stop before they really get over the hurdle. And content marketing, laying a foundation for my brand, laying a foundation for how I thought about search and how I thought about marketing and getting that content out there—it was hard to keep doing it when I felt like nobody was reading it, when I felt like nobody was engaging with it the way I thought that it should be engaged with.

There are plenty of times through that journey where I was like, I’m just going to stop; nobody cares, nobody’s reading it. But the back of my mind was like, no, you’ve got to keep pushing through.

So there was that hurdle just with the day-to-day stuff. And then, you know, man, so many hurdles. I mean, even just looking at revenue—like, how do you build a contract? How do you build a retainer so that it works? I mean, there were multiple retainers that, when I did the math on it after I quoted and they accepted, I was like, I just sold my hours for less than five dollars an hour.

Like, what am I doing? I didn’t think about the actual time and effort and the impact, the ROI that I’m bringing in this business, and I’m hurting myself; I’m not valuing myself highly enough. And those things—learning how to price—again, I’m still learning how to price. I think that’s something we’re always shifting and looking at, but realizing those huge mistakes where I’m like, man, I’m working myself to the bone and I’m not getting the value that I’m producing.

And those are hard; they’re not just hard financially, they’re hard emotionally, because then you feel like, man, what am I doing? Why did I make this mistake?

So there are lots of those little things constantly: the content’s not working, my emails aren’t doing what I want them to do, moving into new markets and trying to understand that business now—you know, there’s a difference between marketing locally and internationally or nationally—and how do we position that, or then multilingual, right?

Every time I would take on a new project, I was pushed to try to find or learn something new. And then, you know, SEO and marketing—it’s so multifaceted; it’s not just content. There’s so much of the technical there. I came from a more creative background originally, but I was very interested in the technical side. Learning how to see the technical aspects of search as actually a creative aspect was one of the ways that helped me slowly overcome imposter syndrome—you know, going from knowing how to shoot and edit video to now I need to understand HTML, CSS; working in WordPress, I need to do PHP; now I’m starting to do more technical stuff, so I’ve got to learn JSON-LD, and I need to learn SQL; and then to what I’m doing today where I’m learning Python and building my own LLMs and training LLMs and really getting into those types of things.

So there have been multiple hurdles, multiple walls along the way. I think persistence is a key in entrepreneurship and not allowing your failures to just crush you emotionally. Allow yourself to feel—I’ve been bummed out plenty of times.

I would say a huge factor was investing in personal coaching and business coaching—to have other people speak into you, not assume that I have all the answers and not assume that I have to go find all the answers. I just need to find somebody who has the answers and let them coach me, and I need to be humble enough to be called out. I make mistakes and learn from that.

Andrew:

You mentioned that you had a big client, and I just wanted to specify—maybe you can tell us the name of that client. The idea is, were you waiting for a big client, or was the first client the big client? You considered the first client to be the big client that sort of let you know that you’re in the right place—okay, this is a moment that made you feel like, okay, this is going to work for me. And how did that transform when you got the first official client—let’s call it whatever we want—like the one that you realized was the real deal?

How did that impact your agency’s trajectory going forward?

Ryan:

I mean, I think the big one—it wasn’t this massive company; it was actually a local business, so to speak, but that works in multi-locations across my state in Florida. I was able to present something that I knew would—one, work for them to drive business, and two, be financially beneficial for me. Once they said yes, it was just a confidence builder. You know, I didn’t come into the discovery calls with, “Please hire me, please just hire me, I really need this.” I came in like, no, I have a solution that I know works, and I know you’re really going to benefit from it. Yes, you have to pay me, but we’re both going to—this is a win-win. We’re a partnership.

And that’s a big thing: I don’t ever want to position myself as a vendor. Vendors are easy to fire, right? If I’m a vendor, I’m expendable when things happen, when things change. But if I’m a partner, I’m a part of your team, and I walk alongside you, and I’m providing that value—that creates long-term success.

I’ve been with this client since 2010; they’re still with us today. I have a number of those clients, and it’s the partnership side of things, especially in the marketing space where contracts come and go. We have plenty of those that are the one-year and they’re out, and they want to change because somebody else has something new and flashy. But the confidence that came along with that and believing, oh, I can actually do this, I can actually grow this business. And then, about a year, year and a half later, I started hiring people because I just kept winning and winning and winning, which was really cool.

Andrew:

I want to talk about the evolution of your vision for SMA Marketing. So what was the initial vision like on day one, and maybe you can just take us through the milestones that let you know, okay, I’m going to expand the team or whatever—just the aspects that sort of let you know that you can expand to the Near East, like you said, just go beyond the state. So could you just walk us through the milestones, the vision that you had yourself for your agency?

Ryan:

Yeah, I’d say early on it wasn’t so much of a vision as it was just trying to figure out what the next right move was. So in 2015 we started doing more of the whole inbound-strategy-type work. We were offering a lot of different services to cover a lot of different needs. What I realized in that, though, is while I can do it, I actually don’t like a lot of this stuff, and because I don’t like it, I’m not that good at it—because I don’t want to be good at it.

I don’t care about social media marketing—I don’t care. It’s okay if you do; I just don’t. That’s not a passion of mine, and that’s not something that I’ve seen—at least in the industries we work in—that’s not as big of a pull.

What I realized people were really coming to me for is not even as much so my SEO stuff we did, but more of the consulting and the outside-of-the-box thinking, the consulting side of things, and then how to build strategies to implement that, and I really liked that.

And so, in order to find a team, I knew there were certain things we had to do, right? Content is obviously extremely important. Some of the technical work is very, very important. Even content amplification through other channels is important. I found the things I didn’t like that I knew we needed to provide, and that’s where I found people to help me. And the first person I got was a general VA. I read a book—what was it called?—Virtual Freedom—and my goal, I never wanted to have a building. My agency has been virtual, and I had to say before, it was cool.

So that was an interesting conversion too, because once the COVID stuff and all that happened, we were actually able to help a lot of clients who were going virtual for the first time because we’d been a virtual agency for five, six years up to this point. So we’d already been doing this for so long. We had a lot of ways to help them there as well. I kind of ebb and flow, right? We expanded our services, realized that not all of these made sense in all the areas, and we kind of contracted to what we were really good at, passionate about.

And then—I know it now because I’ve done a lot of business coaching and training with my team—I was able to hire people that were really strong in areas that I wasn’t strong in. So instead of me trying to—the entrepreneur, right? You hear this: find your weaknesses and make them stronger. I don’t always think that’s the case. I looked at my weaknesses and go, I’m not good at that, I’m not even programmed to think that way. If I try really, really hard and get better, I will be mediocre at this. So why don’t I just find somebody that’s really awesome at it and put them in there?

And why don’t I do the things that I’m really good at and just get better at those? So I’m like a pro in that, and they’re a pro in that instead of us being mediocre in these areas we’re not good at. And so as we contracted our services, we found companies that really fit with us—you know, like government defense. I’m in an area of Florida where it’s high government tech—Harris, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, SpaceX. I’m just south of where they launch the rockets at Cape Canaveral, so we see rockets go up all the time in my front yard.

So I was like, okay, I know a lot about this industry and a lot of people in this industry; these are the services they need. I looked at the SaaS companies—these are the services they need. I looked at some of the local businesses, and I started just to go, what actually is working for them in these services that we kind of just have natural alignment with? And we started building around there.

Again, as we expanded—my first general VA, she’s now our COO. She actually had a master’s degree in HR, and she was a stay-at-home mom looking for some more hours and work, and now she’s helping run the agency. We hired another VA—she’s now our content manager—and then as our SEO stuff got a lot and I couldn’t handle it anymore, I hired a technical SEO specialist, and now we have an SEO manager. She’s also kind of working as our CMO right now as well. So we’ve intentionally stayed small because we want to be nimble. I’m not really looking to be this mega agency; I want to be really strategic in what we do and how we focus.

So as we’ve worked through these milestones—I don’t remember all the years ’cause I’m getting old—but our logo is a hummingbird, and there’s a lot of reasons why. One, it’s kind of like a throwback to when Google rebuilt the algorithm. And a hummingbird is this very tiny animal—it’s quick, it’s nimble, it’s agile; it can make very strategic movements when it needs to accomplish a very specific task.

And that’s the way I see our agency. We’re not going to be able to give you every service that an agency has. But if you need search, content, and you want to show up within LLMs and leverage the changes that are happening in search in a very strategic way, and you want to experiment and you want to try new things, that’s what we do, and we do it really, really well.

That kind of evolved over time, and as we’ve gotten more clear about who we are, we’ve been able to just be more comfortable in that. When a client says, “Do you do social media calendars?”—no, we don’t, but I know people who do, and I can send you to them, but that’s not us. But if you want this, we’re the best at that.

Maksym:

I really love the idea of leveraging the strengths that you have instead of trying to be an all-in-one solution as many agencies do. In terms of the strengths that your agency has—you specialize in SEO, content, and inbound marketing—could you walk us through a bit more how exactly you work with clients, especially in terms of inbound marketing, and what you believe makes you stand out among other agencies?

Ryan:

So, we are much heavier on the SEO side, because SEO doesn’t just include search engines today. It’s not just ranking in search—it really does touch every channel. Every inbound channel is wrapped up now in search because search is everywhere.

When a client comes to us, we’re typically looking at how we can actually reach their goals, not how we can improve their rank, right? So much in SEO has been—and it still is—“Where are we ranking? How do we improve our ranks?”

Well, we’re in a world of zero-click search. Doesn’t mean people aren’t clicking, but there’s a lot more zero-click search. There’s a much more-complex buyer journey and user journey. So building your brand in a way that the search engines, the large language models, these other applications can surface you when a query is made across the world, and then moving a prospect from seeing your brand into that business to create a business opportunity is really what we do with our clients.

We try to build strategies not just to generate traffic and visibility but revenue. How do we help impact your revenue? How do we partner with you to get the right people in front of you?

This could look different for every business we work with. We don’t have a cookie-cutter, cut-and-paste strategy where, for this much, you get two blogs, fourteen this, and that. We don’t do that. We look at the business and start with, what are you trying to achieve overall with your market?

Okay, now where do search, inbound, and these digital channels play a role in that? How can we build a strategy to make sure these digital channels are actually working toward your end goal? Some of the things that set us apart: strong technical background. We are very versed in structured data, Schema.org, ontology, creating knowledge graphs and linked open data points to help assist in contextual understanding of your text within computer systems.

Computers don’t understand text—they understand numbers. We can get real nerdy here if we want, but I’m not going to. By giving them this additional information, we can create higher levels of context and understanding with the end goal that when a user makes a query and Google understands who that user is—or the LLM does—they’re going to surface the content there.

A lot of people are data-driven, but what does that mean? It’s kind of a buzzword today. I’ve spent years investing in my own studies to better understand data, and we’re finally at a place where big data is useful if it’s known how to be used because of large language models.

We build customized reporting; we track end-to-end path analysis from entry all the way to conversion points through all their different channels; then we run analysis on that to help them optimize not what they think a user wants but what users are actually doing on their website, which is really helpful. Then we use that feedback loop to say, “Hey, you’re missing content here; there’s a gap between this concept and this concept, and there’s probably a disconnect for the user.”

So we’re constantly experimenting, but we’re using data analysis, technical SEO, and intent-based, human-centered content. That doesn’t mean we don’t leverage AI. Generative AI is extremely helpful as a tool, but it has to be used in the right way, with a human in the loop.

Building the right structure, having a human touch, and helping our clients leverage these large language tools in ways that are effective instead of creating spam—that’s what sets us apart.

Maksym:

You’ve said you’re not trying to be a vendor; you’re actually trying to be a partner, and I think that speaks to the way you approach running your business and your personal values. You often describe yourself as a faith-driven entrepreneur. Could you tell us a bit more about how exactly your personal values and faith influence the way you work with people and how it affects the service that you provide?

Ryan:

I’m constantly looking to grow in my education. Right now I’m doing a generative AI specialization at Purdue; I’ve taken stuff at MIT. At the same time, I’m about a year away from finishing a master’s in theology from Westminster in Pennsylvania.

As a Christian, one basic value is that all humans are valuable—every single person has value inherently because they are created in the image of God.

So if I come into a relationship with that mindset, I’m automatically going to have more compassion, empathy, and desire to see the best in others, as opposed to seeing it as a transaction. I don’t see my clients or my staff as clients or staff; I see them as people who are in my life that I genuinely care about, even outside the business relationship.

Most of the clients—yes, we have business conversations, but I also have other conversations: “How is your family? How are you doing? How can we support you even outside of that?” Allowing my own foundations, my faith, to be my core ethos as I’m making decisions.

Even when it comes to revenue or let’s say somebody’s having a bad month—something happens in their family—we take that into account when it comes to payment. “Take a break; you need to pause. Let’s pause. Family is more important.”

Let’s say they’re doing something for their kid’s baseball team—do they need a sponsor? Can we sponsor their baseball team? How do we look for ways to add value into their lives? Not because I want their money—revenue is great, but money is a tool. How can I invest in their lives and see the value that person has, whether they agree with me on faith or not?

If I start from the point that they are valuable because of who they’re created after, I’m going to treat them differently. To me, that’s a business I’m proud to run. I can go to sleep at night and not feel like I made a bad decision because, at the end of the day, I genuinely care about all the people we work with and I want to do what’s best for them as well as my team.

That even comes to my team. If a client doesn’t share our values or treats my team poorly, I’ll say, “You’ve breached this value. We’re not moving forward,” because I value my team and I’m going to protect them.

We also work with Kiva, an organization providing interest-free microloans to small businesses worldwide. Giving five dollars to a small business in Uganda is a massive impact compared to spending it on a coffee. My mindset is: why not invest in others?

That’s what the human experience is about. I’m very involved in generative AI—I love it, but it all needs to be grounded in morals and ethics. At the other end of that screen is a human being—it’s not an analytic, not a number, not a session. They need something. How are we serving that person?

It starts with seeing the value in the individual. If that’s the foundational point, I’m going to treat people differently and do things for reasons other than just revenue.

Andrew:

We’re going to do a quick outro here and say this is a wrap for this edition of the SEO Agency Rollercoaster Podcast. A huge thank-you to Ryan Shelley of SMA Marketing for sharing his story, insights, and the lessons that have fueled his growth from a one-man startup to a thriving agency.

This podcast is powered by SE Ranking, the SEO toolset that helps agencies scale smarter and achieve lasting success. If you’re serious about building up your agency, SE Ranking is here to help you make your mark online.

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