Hello WebCEO readers! We want to acquaint you with Martin Suttill, CEO at Data-Driven Agency 54 Solutions. 

SEO agency case studies are critical for any marketing employee to learn from in the 21st century.  Meet Martin Suttill from 54 Solutions!

Let’s get it started! 


GETTING WISE TO 54 SOLUTIONS

Allen MacCannell: Hello Martin. We’re happy that you have agreed to take part in our project.

Martin Suttill: Hi Allen. Thanks for having me. It’s always a pleasure to share experiences and learn how other experts work, study some techniques and, maybe, innovate them and apply. This is good training!

A: You’re definitely right. Inspiring examples should never be missed. Let’s start with the basics: how long have you been working as an SEO agency and in the SEO niche specifically?

M: We have been in the SEO game for over 5 years. 

Regarding our company… We aren’t just an SEO agency; we are a Data-Driven Agency. We are primarily focused on web development and are experts in building SEO friendly sites that convert. We build sites and measure their performance over time to see how we can help them improve their conversions. 

A: What sides of the business workflow do you usually work on? 

M: This means that we need to look at the whole picture: Development, Analytics and Marketing. SEO is obviously a big part of that. If you can’t be found on Google, how are you going to make a sale? 

A: As I see, your target client area has extended over the years. Now you work globally, right?
M: Exactly. Our client base now spans the globe from Europe to the US and from South America to Australia.

A: Your company has an interesting name: 54 Solutions. Could you decipher it please?

M: That’s a common question we get from our customers on a regular basis. +54 is the dialing code in Argentina, where we started operating. And Solutions stand for digital solutions we offer to our customers.


GETTING INTO THE COMPANY’S EXPERIENCE WITH WEBCEO

A: Do you remember your first steps in the niche? Specifically, your “tool experience”: did you start with a few tools for different purposes or with an all-in-one SEO platform?

M: We started with a variety of tools, from Google Webmasters, to Moz, Ahrefs and Majestic. Now we just use WebCEO and sometimes Ahrefs. We chose WebCEO because it’s a great all in one tool, which includes Moz and Majestic ranking factors.

A: And when was the first time you started using WebCEO? 

M: We first started using WebCEO in June 2018

A: Two years are quite enough time to see if a platform suits your business and way of operating. How does WebCEO help you with your work?

M: It helps us to get a quick overview of the problems a client might be experiencing. We use the site audit tool to quickly find major and minor problems. It helps us gain insights into why our competitors are ranking higher than our client sites, and then see how we can improve and outperform them. 

A: Speed is indeed important. The quicker you draw an optimization plan, the better the actual optimization goes. However, often enough one conquers issues that are not a one-click deal and require several steps to be solved. What quickly fixed issues do you find using the WebCEO platform? 

M: We have solved many problems with the software:

1. Technical issues on client sites;

2. Broken links;

3. Toxic links.

These damage user experience, ergo, rankings will go down as well. With WebCEO, we have found a solution to find, fix and track for more of them. After a while,  we know what side of our client’s website needs the most protection. 

A: What is your favorite tool/feature in WebCEO? 

M: Our favorite feature is the white label client dashboard, so clients can log in and see how their site health is, plus how their site is climbing the rankings depending on the keywords. 

Top 3 tools:

1. Site Health

2. Backlink Health

3. Keyword Research

A: When one chooses a specific SEO platform, we expect it to give us some advantages in contrast to some other on the list: better efficiency, a broader set of tools, exclusive features, price and great scan speed. Is there anything special in WebCEO that helps your SEO team save time and costs and be more effective?

M: WebCEO helps us save time & money by being able to automate reporting and repetitive tasks. This helps us concentrate on other important things to optimize and implement, thus the work is more efficient. 

A: Which WebCEO tool really helped your agency grow?

M: The leads tool is quite useful to capture new clients, so I guess that tool.

A: What do you find unique about WebCEO?

M: Great customer service. The team always responds quite quickly to any requests.

Great customer service. The team always responds quite quickly to any requests.


GOING INTO THE UPS AND DOWNS AND HELPFUL PROFESSIONAL ADVICE

A: As you have said, your company covers not only the SEO side of a website but also Development, Analytics and Marketing. These require a lot of time and tasks to complete before succeeding. Which SEO tasks eat up most of your team’s time?

M: Deep technical audits and site fixes usually are the most time-consuming.

A: You work with SEO reports and send them to your customers a lot. Could you please tell us more about it?

Indeed, we do send out reports to clients, every month we send them a PDF report to show the progress made on their sites or any problems that we may have noticed that need to be fixed. As mentioned previously we also give clients access to a dashboard which really gives them an interactive experience. 

A: With so many clients, how do you keep an eye on their profiles?

We use project management software to make sure we are in control. 

A: Having so much work, have you ever missed deadlines? And can you give our readers some advice on how to keep things on time?

We rarely miss deadlines, and if we are going to miss a deadline, then we give the client plenty of warning to manage expectations.

As to advice: it’s important to have a clear understanding of the site and the task at hand before committing to deadlines. You need to see if you are going to implement the changes required to a site or if your client has an IT department that will implement the changes. We find that with large companies that have their own development teams, they are usually the bottleneck as they often have other priorities. 

A: Are there some SEO hacks for gaining high rankings and driving traffic to a website that you can share?

Look at your competitor backlink profile for a specific URL that they are ranking for, then try and get the same or better backlinks. Improve your content and try and use the correct schema markup or rich snippets. This should get you a better ranking than your competitor.

A: What SEO tools are a must for you/for any SEO specialist?

M: The Google Marketing Platform is one of the main tools, so here we use Google Search Console, Google Analytics and Google Ads, we use these a lot for research and site health etc. Of course now with WebCEO, we can see all of this inside the one platform, but we still rely on the other tools if we need to dig deeper into certain insights. 

A: Now give our readers a professional tip, please: how often do you recommend SEO & technical audits? 

M: We usually scan once or twice a month, any more than that you don’t see any real change where you can take actions that will make a difference.

A: Tell us about your most recent success, please.

Recently we have 2 great success stories:

1. We had a large site transfer from one domain to another, where we used WebCEO to help us control the transfer and also assure that the client remained in the top spot in Google UK for their keywords.

2. In Peru, we helped a large retailer (Promart) position their eCommerce site for a select range of keywords and got 90% of 200 keywords to rank in the top 3 spots in Google Peru. This has helped them increase their organic reach and conversions by at least 30% in the last 12 months.

A: Our humble congratulations for such great results! However, success inevitably goes hand by hand with hardships. What challenges did your Digital Agency face?

M: Our biggest challenge as a Digital Agency has been getting clients to understand the need for good original content and to focus their marketing efforts on specific niches. Once they understand that, the rest is simple as they soon start seeing results.

A: And one last question: what is your agency like now compared to how it was when you started?

M: Well, when we started we were 2 people, we are now a team of 6.

A: Thank you for contributing your time to this interview!


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