Today we have selected Arthur Choi to take his interview. He is representing the Digital Muscle SEO agency.
First of all, how are you and your team doing in these COVID-19 times?
Well, thank you for having me on this interview. In short, we’re doing well, although the entire year of 2020 and the first half of 2021 proved to be quite challenging in the sense that we’ve seen clients pause their SEO with us, but at the same time, we managed to pick up new bits of business particularly in the essential services niche.
Tell us about you, your career, how you founded or joined this company?
So following a stint working for one of the UK’s largest growing SEO companies at the time (circa 2010), I decided to venture out on my own with the expertise and skillsets that I managed to pick up as a result of this fine employment. I wanted to offer my clients a realistic approach to their SEO and genuinely cultivate and grow their business. I always felt clients were at their happiest when certain outcomes and objectives had been met, and that’s how I came to opening up Digital muscle in early 2011.
What has Digital Muscle done to innovate and remain competitive?
We do study our competitors and other SEO agencies to see what their service offerings are constantly. We realize that every facet of SEO is competitive in our industry, be it pricing, targets, what we optimize, and what we don’t optimize for… all these things play a huge role in making a client decide whether to engage with us or not.
For the past 1.5 years, we’ve been offering discounts on monthly payments for COVID-affected clients (both new and old), which has resulted in many signups to our campaigns.
How has the Coronavirus pandemic affected your business, and how are you coping?
So this stems off from the first question, and the answer is we’re doing well, and we’ve been able to pick up more clients from the essential services niche, such as automotive and freight, and e-commerce. As a result of this, we were able to work consistently with no limitations. We hope that going into 2022, our past clients will come back to us to resume their SEO.
Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?
We certainly did. When COVID first came around, we had to let go of three of our staff, which wasn’t easy. Doing virtual meetings and consultations proved to be quite a hassle initially as we were used to doing face-to-face all the years prior and leading up to COVID in 2019. We felt that online consultations proved quite challenging in expressing and getting the right message across to clients, which might have affected our conversion levels.
But we’re certainly glad that restrictions are being eased right across the country, and we’ve already been able to resume our face-to-face consultations as of this month (November 2021).
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?
We use a simple CRM to plan all our business events, including consultations at specific times of the day.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
Your final thoughts
I can think of only a few major SEO agencies in Australia, but their service offerings are far different from ours. Digital Muscle has reached that level whereby we are comfortable with what we do and deliver the results every month. We’ve been working with our current existing clients for the past 10 years now, and there’s a reason why they haven’t switched to another SEO… My final thoughts? It’s to be true to every one of our clients and set realistic expectations from the get-go.
- Spokesperson: Arthur Choi
- Company: Digital Muscle SEO agency
- Website link: https://www.digital-muscle.com.au
