SEOblog Interview: Denver SEO Expert Michael Borgelt from 51Blocks

We’re excited to have interviewed Denver SEO Expert Michael Borgelt, from 51Blocks, for the next installment of our Featured SEO Expert Series!

51Blocks is one of SEOblog’s Top SEO companies in Denver.

Michael started his career as a computer programmer, moved into database administration and found a perfect match for his technical skills with internet marketing. Michael is originally from Minnesota, where the handshake is the agreement. This is how Michael’s grandfather did business and it is how he runs his various agencies. His businesses include 51blocks, a successful white-label company, and BionicWP which is a fully managed hosting platform.

What is the most challenging thing about running a successful white label SEO project?

“The most challenging thing isn’t around strategy or results like most SEO agencies; it’s providing a world-class experience for every partner and their clients at scale. Every process and system we use – and, most importantly, the results – represent another agency. It’s important we are incredibly diligent with thinking outside the box to keep clients engaged and to provide the best experience for our partners on every SEO campaign.”

How does your agency stand out compared to other agencies?

“We provide a streamlined structure, turnkey with sales material and a client-facing team to relieve our partners of people and client management. This allows them to focus on growing their business instead of managing their vendor.”

Can you share a success story from a white label SEO campaign?

“We identified the biggest issue with a veterinarian client was lack of content strategy; they needed direction on which keywords to target that would help improve organic traffic. We started writing keyword-focused blog posts. One of those posts began to get high traffic, so we optimized the structure on the page so it would get Google Answers. It did, and we got even more traffic to that post. We did further keyword research to look for keywords with the highest search volume and found that there was an opportunity for content around ‘why does my dog…’ and ‘why does my cat…;’ for example, ‘why does my dog scratch his face on the ground?’ We wrote around these topics and added attractive CTAs for both free consultations and scheduling an appointment, with more conversions coming from the schedule an appointment CTA. We added that in the middle of the content due to a featured image above the text itself. We continued working that strategy, making sure to follow the Google Answers page structure and started to see an increase in organic traffic of 625.8 percent year-over-year (YoY) and a 25 percent increase in calls.”

How do you set fair expectations for new clients?

“It all starts with educating our partners on expectations. We provide every expectation to begin on our product pages at checkout. From there, we reiterate expectations to clients on our monthly calls. It’s important to lay the milestones for our KPIs around lead generation, so we all remain on the same page. It can quickly go sideways if 1) a partner is charging far more than we’re working with in terms of budget and 2) if expectations were set in the sales process we wouldn’t set ourselves. We built our partner center as a way to help train agency owners on setting expectations.”

How long do you usually tell clients it will take to see results?

“On average we see 20-40 percent growth YoY in about 6-9 months with a healthy SEO budget. The quick wins around ranking, Google Maps and traffic all come much faster, but we consider organic lead generation as our primary goal to focus on.”

 Any predictions about the future of SEO?

“We are starting to see that speed plays a role in rankings, and we do believe this trend will continue. Fast sites, a great mobile experience along with quality SEO and content will be a tried and true methodology.”

What do you think is the most important contributor to a successful digital marketing campaign?

“Great results = a successful campaign. Managing expectations will be the most important factor in achieving this.”

Interested in being considered as an SEOblog “Featured SEO Expert”? Reach out to our team at [email protected]! We’d love to hear from you and give you a high-traffic platform to share your SEO agency’s story and insights.