Marcus Richards
We are The SEO Works, certified Digital Growth Experts. As an award-winning provider of digital marketing and websites to leading brands, we’ve worked for more than a decade with one key goal in mind – to get businesses more customers online.
Our mission is to measure, understand, and maximise our client’s online potential. Digital is now essential for ANY business and as a team of digital natives at the top of our game, we help our clients grow online.
This focus on providing a real return on investment is the foundation of our agency, and it’s what motivates us. But this focus on ROI has also caught the attention of awards panels, earning us prestigious accolades… like being named SEO Agency of the Year three times!
Tell us about yourself?
I’ve always worked in digital in some form or other, although I kind of stumbled into this work. I had always liked computers as a kid, and at university I was also drawn to the more practical elements of media creation via computers, which is how I got my first job as a web designer.
From there I learned about user journeys and designing sales/ecommerce flows, as well as measuring their impact and optimising them. This then broadened out into marketing and not just optimising the user journey on-site but thinking about how to get people to the site in the first place.
From there I worked at a marketing agency and developed my strategic and people leadership skills, before moving to running a digital health business for several years.
When the opportunity came to lead The SEO Works, I knew it was the perfect place to use my knowledge and experience in helping clients get the most out of digital.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
No challenge is insurmountable if you keep things in perspective. With the right communication, focus and effort, so much is achievable.
What problem does your business solve?
Our purpose is to help our clients grow online. To do that, we really need to get under the hood of our clients and learn about their business.
The more we know about their values, their business model, and their future ambitions, the more we can design a strategy to help them grow.
When it works, our teams are effectively an extension of their team. Although the principles and tools of online marketing are there for all, no client strategy is the same.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
We started over 14 years ago when online marketing was very much still in its infancy. However we saw the headwinds of change, with attention moving more and more to digital channels.
Our founder found success in a previous business using search as his main channel, and we wanted to offer this to other businesses. We’ve come a long way from then, and now a tipping point has very much occurred – people use digital for everything!
What is your magic sauce?
We are very commercially focussed and work at the “business end” of marketing, something some agencies shy away from.
Rather than vanity metrics and fluffy campaigns that might look great but don’t generate any results, we focus on ROI (return on investment). Digital is the most effective channel for measurement and we like to use our experience in data to demonstrate our impact.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
We want to continue our growth and become the UK leader for marketing services in a digital-first world.
Our customers will trust us implicity to help them grow their business, and happily recommend us because of our service, accreditations and results.
We’ll continue to invest in our team so that they are the most talented digital practitioners across the UK.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
At our rate of growth, recruitment has been our biggest challenge. As digital is still an emerging industry there are still not enough skilled people there to satisfy demand in the market.
We have developed a world class internal training programme which helps keep our team bang up to date with changes.
Our recruitment strategy is “always on” and we have worked a lot on our employer proposition to try and attract the right people with the same shared values to our team.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We are always interested in speaking with other businesses and startups who feel they are not getting enough from digital, and want to invest in a quality outcome. Just reach out to us via https://www.seoworks.co.uk/contact-us/
