Agency Success Interview with Shannon Pizano

Last Updated: May 6, 2021

Acency Success Interview with Shannon Pizano

Interview Transcript

“All right. Welcome to our Agency Success Interview. We’re joined today by our agency owner, Shannon Pizano of Pizano Website Design, formerly the founder of Arizona Deals. That was a print marketing and a web marketing company. You since rebranding to Pizano Website Design. Shannon, thanks for joining me today. I’ve known you for a couple of years now. We’ve talked a few times, but thank you so much for doing the agency success interview. And, really what we want to do, is we want to inspire new and developing agency owners that are just getting ready or just did take that leap into entrepreneurship and started their own marketing agency, or web design agency. Right? So, anybody watching, we’re going to ask Shannon some questions about how he started. He’s willing to share a little bit of the struggles he had as a new entrepreneur and the successes that he’s had as well in this journey. So, Shannon, awesome talking to you again. Thank you for joining me. What do you think? What a journey? Right?”

“Yeah. It’s been a journey. It has been three years since I just went full time with this thing and completely just doing this full time and it has been a journey.”

For three years, can you tell us a little bit about your SEO background?

Yeah. So, about three years ago, I started getting the web design. I heard about SEO just a little bit but I realized that designing websites was just one part of the equation of having a successful online presence. There was the process of driving traffic to a website, ranking for keywords and all that stuff. That's how SEO kind of like introduced to me. Obviously, had a little background in web design, but SEO was a complete unknown thing to me. But, I went to the University of YouTube and I just absorbed as much information as I could about SEO. Then, I invested into a lot of great courses and started joining some Facebook groups to learn more about SEO. And, it was just getting out there and started doing it. I got my first client, it was a garage door repair technician. He was ranked 12 th on Google Maps. The things I learned online and just taking action, some trial and error for sure. I was able to rank my client in the city for a couple of keywords in the three pack. That was like super awesome. It's such an awesome feeling to like manipulate Google and having that power to like help local businesses get in the three pack. Three years ago, no background, but I just stuck my head down and went into it man. It was a mixture of studying and learning from other top SEOs and just taking action. Because, you can learn all the stuff you can, but without actually going out there and just doing it. It just requires action. That is my background.

I agree with that. As a way of learning, I think doing it couple of times you’re understanding how it will actually takes to rank is do it yourself. Absolutely, I love that learning by doing, right? Did you build him a website as well then, that initial client?

Yeah. I've built him a website. It was my first official website and my first official SEO client. It was a $300 website and I did a local SEO for $300 a month. I was so happy because I got my first client, and I was just learning out as I was going. It was a low budget to him, low-risk, he knew I was just starting out and gave me a chance. I was able to create them a website through WordPress. I started learning about on-page SEO, some of the ranking factors as far as page speed and the technical stuff for on-page. So, it was a great first client and a great learning experience that catapulted me to knowing what it takes to rank a site. Both, the website and organic, and for local as well. Yeah. It was pretty cool.

That's powerful. Isn't it? That's very powerful. Getting that first client is such a really cool feeling. It's hard to explain until you do it and you're like, “Wow”. It doesn't matter what the contract amount is, right? It's that first digital marketing client for your agency. It's like, “Wow, I really have something good here.” Right? It is very cool. Thank you for sharing that story with me. You've been growing your agency for three years now. What are some of the things that you're doing to position yourself now that you're in your fourth year? What are some of the things that you're doing to position yourself a part from some of the other competitors out there, right? Now, that know you got three years of experience under you, right? Can you maybe tell us what are some of those other things that you've started doing in your agency?

One of the things my clients actually love is… Unfortunately, this isn't going to be a forever thing, but I meet with my clients face to face. Unfortunately, all of my clients are in Arizona. The furthest one is about like 45 minutes to an hour away, so it does not sound too bad. But, they love the transparency of I coming down in the first week of every month when they pay their SEO bill, and I show up to their companies with their deliverables. We will get to the web 20 stuff here in a little bit, I am sure. I have a lot of reporting. I spend time answering my client's questions. showing them, or I bring my laptop, and I will show them their local SEO rankings, their keyword rankings, a little bit of competitor analysis, and Google analytics stuff. Showing like how many website visitors they're having this month compared to last month, the page views, all that stuff. They love it and they love that transparency because every single one of my clients I've worked with… This is nothing bad because I don't understand there's a lot of big agencies, and unfortunately they just don't have the time to do this. But, a lot of the clients I'm working with right now, before they hired me, they hired a large SEO agency and they were left in the dark for a lot of deliverables. A lot of them didn't even get monthly reporting. They just paid a bill every month. What I'm doing is not like groundbreaking, but I take the initiative to spend time with my clients and building that relationship and trust, and showing the work I have been doing every month. Even if there's not a whole lot of growth, or a whole lot of traffic and a whole lot of like website visits, they still appreciate the fact that I'm coming down and I'm showing what I'm doing for them every month and answering all their questions.

And some of my clients too, we'll go away at lunch after, or we'll go to the casino or something. It's pretty cool.

Awesome. That is such a great unique selling proposition too, because so many marketing companies and agencies, you're absolutely right, they don't have that personal touch. Especially, that you serve that local area and you can go visit them in person. That's really good for client retention at that, right? You develop real relationships with them. I can just imagine how strong that is for the long-term, keeping your clients with you, right. The stickiness factor, so really cool. I agree with you, agencies tend not to do enough reporting for their clients. I think the more reporting that you can give them, talk, like you said, you show them everything that you can data wise. And at the end of the day, you're just showing the value of what you're doing for their business.

If they're moving upward, it takes a little while to see results from SEO, obviously right? But, just showing them the data and going down to having that personal touch is really powerful. That is a big unique selling proposition for you. Very cool. How are you going to scale that? Have you thought about that, you are going to keep it local, or have a local assistant that's going to go service your clients then?

Yeah, absolutely. I am already in the works with that right now. I'm just hiring an assistant, but as much as I can being available for my clients. Because, right now I have about 10 SEO clients that I'm working with a month. Even though I am an agency, I'm still putting in the time to meet with everyone. The first week of the month I'm extremely busy, absolutely that's just the next step. I know this interview is more targeting people just starting out. A tip I can give to people is, if they're a local business meet up with them and take them out to lunch, or meet up at their office, or meet at Starbucks or something. Just to show them that you're doing your job and you're showing deliverables. I want to touch up on something too, that you mentioned earlier, about like how you work with a client that's just starting out with no online presence. It is absolutely crucial to be super transparent with them, set the expectations with them, but also just being there for them in the first three, four or five to six months. We're generating them while we're doing their SEO. So, in the long run, I am definitely going to hire assistants. Zoom calls are another thing too. I do a couple of zoom calls as well if a client can't meet. But definitely that's the next step as far as scaling goes is hiring someone.

Awesome. I like that, I agree. For anybody watching, if you have the ability like Shannon said, if you can meet personally with clients and develop personal relationships with them, that's really powerful. One thing that we're going to start doing at our agency, just to throw it out there, is when you do get to that point where you need that local assistant to go out and start meeting with clients. Don't just pop up with them. Bring that assistant on that initial sales call to get the assistant involved as early in the process as possible. So, it doesn't feel like you're handing them off. Another agency owner I talked with the other day, actually said they put a system in place like that where they started having an assistant. They said, “I think my client felt like we started handing them off.” They made the assistant be involved from early on the sales process, so there is no handoff. That assistant was like a part of that process the whole time. They knew that assistant was going to, maybe handle the monthly reporting or whatever once they were in the campaign. Maybe, that's just a little tip out there that I got too. I'm going to implement mine… I want to avoid the handoff too. Right? Very cool. I also liked guiding them over that first initial four to six month part. That's the hardest. You got to keep them engaged, especially organic. The value of organic can take months and months to develop. Even local now, in more competitive areas you need that time to show results. Whatever you can do the more touch points, the more deliverables you show them, the more time that you put into communicating developing relationships. Maybe, might make it easier to get over that initial point they start seeing the value? Right. That's a very good tip.

Yeah, thank you.

Awesome. Do you specialize in a niche, Shannon?

When I first started, I did it. I wouldn't even say to extent I still don't. This answer is related to this question, but I'm positioning myself to work with clients like somewhat established; that have region already set in place, or they're just getting clients through raw reputation and referrals. Because, I like working with clients now, or any kind of niche that has the money to invest in, understands expectations about SEO. When I first started, I talked about SEO, I explain it to my clients, but it was a learning experience. It's just that a lot of businesses need SEO, but sometimes some clients just need immediate lead gen flip. And, they might not have the resources on the money to invest in the SEO and some type of lead gen.

It's probably best to invest into a lead generation source for now, and come back and see me for SEO. It's not necessarily a niche, but it's more of a clientele that I'm vetting before I take someone on. I can't believe I'm saying this, because in the past I would take on anyone, but now I'm picky on who I want to bring on. I have turned on plenty of potential SEO clients because, again I still research on their business niche and their competition. I asked certain questions about the finances to invest in SEO because it is a long-term game. As far as like a specific niche goes, like a business niche, not really. But, I do love working with plumbers, roofers, and that kind of stuff because I love making those kinds of websites. But, my clientele is very diverse and I think that's also pretty cool too because I'm learning more about these different niches. In case I come across another niche in the future that's related to one of my other clients, then I have some understanding or insights I want to take to rank. Or, if I see someone online in your Facebook group, your local SEO group, I can chime in and give some advice because I'm working with this niche and stuff. I don't have a specific business niche, but I have like a certain kind of clientele I look forward to work with.

Okay. Very cool. I like that. You're picky in the clientele you choose because you understand that, right? If that client really needs that short term burst, they're not ideal for an SEO company, right?

Right.

They're not ideal for that because they need that in month one or month two. A lot of times SEO just takes a little bit longer to generate the value for them. That's very smart. That segues us into the next question then, what does your agency offer? We talked about websites, we talked about SEO… You used to do print marketing too, do you still do that? Can you tell us what your product mix looks like?

Yeah, absolutely. Right now, I'm just doing web design, WordPress web design, local SEO and organic SEO, and some Facebook management. I will manage Facebook pages, I will post for the clients, and all that other stuff. But, I'm learning really quick too as I grow, hire more people and experts in this field. I know some of my clients really appreciate that I bunker down on one or two niche like specific services in my agency. Because, I'm just like much more comfortable, but more professional in those two. I would say that the print marketing thing when I first started, it generated me a lot of money and it was fun to do. But, it just required a lot of work and I have done those mailers. I'm sure you saw them on my Facebook page. I have done those mailers four or five times. I have done door hanger flyers, it just requires like a lot of work even when I outsource it. I'm trying to just stay focused on what I excel at and the value I can give to my clients so that they are choosing the right type of service for what their company needs. But, there is nothing wrong with offering different services, but for now it is just mainly website design and SEO.

Awesome, very cool. Thank you. This next question is a little bit of a weird. What is the one thing, whatever it is, that you learned in the last month? Do you have anything?

What I have learned in the last month?

Yeah. Any position your agency has?

I am trying to be a Google partner. I am actually speaking to someone right now, he's actually in the local SEO group. He's a Google partner as well. I'm trying to be a Google partner because I think having that on my website will show more confidence to my potential clients. It shows the people that I have the time to really study the craft of SEO and all that stuff. I would just say that learning how to become a Google partner, as far as like anything else outside of that, I would just have to say that making sure I can keep up with the demand. Because again, it has been so busy. I get a lot of inquiries, a lot of like people wanting websites. Surprisingly, a lot of my work comes through referrals. I share my work on my Facebook page and I have a lot of my friends are business owners and need to share stuff. I get phone calls and I get inquiries and stuff. So, it's just more so time management now. Another thing about my agency is when I say that is going to be due, it gets done no matter what it takes. I want to keep that reputation, especially if I'm branding my name. There's a lot of high expectations and stuff. It was more learning about time management and being more focused on the clients I can take on, and fulfill their work, and making sure they have the proper budgets. And, learning how to become a Google partner.

Very cool. Awesome. It is a constant journey. Once you learn something new you start learning the next thing. Right? It's awesome.

I'm always learning man. It never stops.

Absolutely. What advice for anybody watching that is starting an agency? If you had a piece of advice that you could share with them after your experiences and doing this for three years now, you have had a lot of experience. What can you share?

Not to get all like philosophical and everything, but if you have like a burning desire to step out to start your own agency or become a web designer, freelancer, or start working on SEO. You have to ask yourself, you have got one life to live and you cannot live your life in fear and you just have to just go out there. If you feel strongly about something, stepping out to be an entrepreneur, or starting a web design agency, or SEO agency. I hate to sound cliché, but just like go out there and do it. I landed my first client for $300 for a website. If you just humble yourself and look at it as a portfolio piece in a learning experience and just know that once you complete your first project, then you can start charging a little bit more and work your way up.

You just have to stop over thinking about like; I want to charge all this much money for a website, or I want to charge this money this much money for an SEO, you don't have any clients. You just got to get out there, man. There is a ton of like free resources online, especially YouTube. There is literally step-by-step tutorials on how to make a website, or like how to do local SEO. Obviously, you get more value when you pay for courses and everything. But, there is really nothing holding you back other than yourself, then stepping out and start doing these kinds of things. You really only have one life to live. If you are working a mundane job and you are just not happy with it. I was working for the US post office as a rural carrier. I was working seven days a week, I was insane in a 12 hour day. Even though I was making decent money, I was, “Is this all that life has to offer?” All my family members are entrepreneurs. That led a spark in me too. Any kind of advice to people want to step out, just come to a conclusion with yourself that you want to do this. Just step out. I couldn't even send an email bro four or five years ago. I had trouble with Gmail and now I am an SEO Wiz. I can design really beautiful websites. If I can do it, anyone can do it. You got to believe in yourself, apply yourself, and just step out and do it

Take action. It starts with the first step, right? It starts with the first client, the first step, the first site you build, you have to get. If you haven't taken that first step, maybe that's probably the biggest thing you need to do. That would be your advice. Take that first step, no matter how hard it seems, if you really want to do it take that first step. I love it. I agree too. Okay. Next one. Obviously, you use WEB20 Ranker Fulfillment. Since you started using Web 20 for your clients SEO, what have you been able to focus on with any of the time that we help you save there?

That's such a loaded question, but I will try to keep it short. Just the fulfillment and it's so awesome to find a company that I can fully trust with my clients, local SEO. It frees up so much of my time so I can focus on actually growing the agency. When I first started doing SEO, I started working on it and getting good at it. I realized I can't scale this way. I can't take on like these clients on my own. I need to hire, either freelancers or a legit company like a white label company that can handle my clients local SEO fulfillment. I have just got to say my time has just been to focus on acquiring new clients or just like, or working with my current clients by putting more value. It's such an awesome feeling to find a company like yours where I can completely outsource it and get monthly reporting. You do so much in your GMB acceleration services. I have ordered a lot of your services. It is so awesome to have the luxury of like traveling, or hanging out with friends, or doing the things I like to do in my free time. A lot of free time and a peace of mind.

That's awesome. I bet, right. If you had to sit there and build all their citations, socials and everything that is needed to build the foundation for a good ranking brand. That probably would cut out of the time that you have to go and coordinate with your clients that first week of every month and have the time to gather all the reports and really take the time to invest back in building that client relationship. So awesome. I am glad to hear that. That is how we are helping you save some time there. This goes right along with the last question, why did you originally decide to outsource your SEO fulfillment? I know some agencies decide to outsource, some try to fulfill internally, some use one-off vendors like Upwork people. Why did you decide to try the whole outsource route?

I want to be really honest overhead. Hiring someone in-house hourly to do citations and link-building and all that stuff. I got to pay him by the hour and if I do the numbers for all the clients, it's more expensive. I'm in a business and I want to like save on the hire costs and everything. I don't want to sacrifice quality for my clients and won't be able to deliver and everything. Being really honest, it's just cutting costs, but like not in a negative way. Why would I want to hire someone like an SEO at $100 an hour to work like 20 hours a week or whatever when I can just hire you guys. You have very flexible payment options, affordable, and offer a lot of value. If anyone complains they are expensive, they are not expensive, trust me. They're far from it. It's just one of those things where cutting up the overhead, basically.

Okay. Smart. Very cool. That kind of answered the next question too. So, we'll just skip to the next one. I want to talk to you about what's your agency goals for the next 12 months and the long term, three years or so? Can you tell me a little about what your goals are?

One of my goals is basically just to scale my agency to as far as what I'm making now. Obviously, I want to make more money and everything. I want to be able still provide the same type of value and services I'm doing now, but on a much bigger scale. I'm growing right now with all like the clients coming in. It's one of those things where I'm not going backwards in my business, I'm moving forward. This is new territory for me too, so I am asking around, doing my research, you know, and being as responsible as I can to scale the agency.

I see myself, in the next year double the SEO clients. I want to go from like 10 to 20, or more really good SEO clients. In the next three years, I might be a full blown agency. All roads point to that, as far as I just keep on being faithful to my clients and delivering value. The way things are going right now, definitely looks like it's going to be a full-blown agency. That's like one of my goals too.

Okay, awesome. I love that. The power of stating your goals sometimes can be powerful too. What can we do, at WEB20 Ranker to help you achieve those goals? Do you have any? This is kind of the feedback loop here so I want to any type of ideas or suggestions. If you don't have anything, great. But, if you do have anything that we could help to make those goals a little bit more achievable and attainable, let me hear them. I definitely want to have this feedback from the agencies that use our services and have goals that they're trying to attain themselves. How can we help, help you get your goals?

Right. This might be a little bit specific, but I do have a question about your services. I get a lot of websites that, I am either hosting on my cloud servers or they are really WordPress friendly. But, one of the things that I tend to do is outsource page speed optimization for websites and slapped me on the wrist. I looked at your website and I didn't see anything like that. I think you're rolling something out because I did read something too in the group. I would just outsource to either a freelancer or go to a Fivver sometimes, but it wasn't really a full-blown optimization. I have used a WordPress, WP rocket and other plugins to increase my clients page speed. That's the biggest challenge I have right now, since I'm working with WordPress and I use Elementor a lot. Elementor is that page builder and it makes a lot of the websites loaded with extra code. I was just curious if you guys were rolling out anything as far as like page speed optimizations for websites. That's one thing I would in a heartbeat outsource to you guys, as an additional service because it is SEO related.

It is more needed now than at any point in the past. Obviously, site speed has always been a little bit of factor more so than recently than in the past. Now with Core Web Vitals coming out where it really is a big factor and mobile first, right? So, your sites need to be quick on mobile. That is very specific. We should have really good news for you, probably end of this month, beginning of April. That is our goal for our site speed optimization service. We have, it in closed beta right now. We are putting it through the tests, making sure the team's ready to tackle everything. We have SUP's and it's not just thrown in a plugin. We are going to do things like reducing redirects, database optimization, optimizing file clusters, HT access optimization, obviously HTML, JavaScript, CSS, image, compression, and browser caching. We will do lazy loading for chat widgets, manual image optimization. We are going to actually do real image optimization, not just throw in a plug in that does it and minify scripts. We have it all documented. Whenever we launch something, we want it to be very thorough. I think our sup's… I have used some of the other services out there for some of my sites. With the changes with web core vitals and stuff, I just said, “I think we can build an optimization service that's going to be on par with the best out there.” My goal is always to build something a little bit better than what's out there, so the best that I can do is that's what we are going to try to launch. My goal in a couple of weeks is at least for having an open beta. I might not have a product, but I will have open beta where we'll be able to take some beta testers. If you have some site Shannon, we'll definitely get you into that.

Great.

Absolutely. I agree more important now than ever. Even in a couple months, it is going to be super important once Web Core Vitals. They say it's coming to become a ranking factor. I could see that it's already in place sometimes, or they just made site speed so much more important than it was, but it's definitely more important now. Absolutely. So, very cool. That was a very specific way. Hopefully, we can live up to that expectation, right?

Absolutely, yeah.

Help you be the source for that. We'll try hard and it's going to come really soon. We're pushing really hard to get that live. We have some kinks to work out because in my opinion, the page speed is only as good as hosting your own.

Absolutely 100%.

We actually had to put into place, what do we do for people that are still on like… I don't want to put names out there, but any of those big shared hosting accounts where it just takes forever for your server to load or your pages. If you're on really crappy hosting, we're actually going to have a hosting solution in place, a managed hosting solution. That's what took a little bit longer to get set up. We were setting up with WCHMS and all that stuff to manage the hosting. But, the page speed is we have that dialed in and we're really close to it.

Nice.

Shannon, thanks for joining us on the Agency Success Interview. Hopefully, any small agencies or new agencies out there watching this can get so much inspiration from Shannon's story that he shared with us. Some of the tips and advice you shared, I think are invaluable for agency owners of all sizes, actually. Let's remind everybody watching it's, Pizano website design, formerly Arizona Deals, right?

Yeap.

We're going to put the replay up. We're going to have a nice agency feature section over at local client takeover. We'll have a link there to Shannon's site and your Facebook page as well. I think your site's being rebuilt right now, but we'll have links all there. Go check out, Shannon's agency. Check out his website builds, follow his Facebook page. When he posts his new websites there… Anybody watching you need a new website, I saw his stuff he's building. They looked beautiful by the way.

Thanks.

Absolutely. Thank you for joining us Shannon. I really do appreciate it. Do you have any final words for anybody?

Yeah, I have two. One for you and your agency and one for the people watching. Get
what you can out of this interview. If you’re on the fence before, hopefully, we answer some

that you might had. Just to show you, I was delivering mail three and a half years ago. Now, I
have my own digital marketing agency and it’s awesome. There’s a lot of resources out there. I
suggest that you get a basic knowledge or a foundation on SEO before you start outsourcing, so
you know what you’re looking for and talking about. But other than that, just take action
everything will fall into place. The team at Web 20, I can’t thank you enough. I had my
first, client with you guys. It was called Diminished Out of Value Services. It was a car insurance
company and I outsource to you guys back in 2018. It has just been nothing but good reporting
and good deliverables. You guys got my clients in the three pack for competitive keywords and
I’m extremely happy in you and your team are phenomenal. Your support is great and just
keep up the good work because, you definitely offer a lot of value. I would say you’re the best
white label company for SEO services on line right now.

Thank you, Shannon. That is very humbling. We will try hard to live up to that expectation. I try to instill that in the team as well. That sense that anything that we do, we want to help the businesses that we're working on. That's our goal. We come to work to try to rank businesses, to try to do our best job for everybody that we can. Very humbling for you to say that, we'll try to live up to that expectation for you, and try to exceed it for you as well. But, thank you Shannon, for sharing your time with us, sharing your experiences. They are valuable. Anybody going through these types of experiences, they prepare you for what's coming and they give you the inspiration to take action too. Very great interview, Shannon. Thank you so much.

Thank you.