A few years ago I started my first business. Everyone told me I needed SEO. Every agency I called quoted $3,000 to $5,000 a month. I had exactly one of those months covered, and choosing between SEO and payroll was an easy call. So I skipped SEO.
I told myself I’d come back to it later, but later never arrived. Looking back, I can still feel how I wrestled with that decision. Was all the stuff I’d heard about SEO actually true? If I’d invested a year into it, would my CPA be 80% lower right now? Maybe. But the truth is, I didn’t really have a choice — I didn’t have the money, so I couldn’t do it. Now, three years later, I’m playing catch-up so I can spend less on ads and other marketing.
Here’s what I’ve figured out since: SEO shouldn’t cost what agencies charge. The only reason they can charge so much is that we’re running businesses and don’t have the time or desire to learn how to optimize our own sites. Let me let you in on a secret: agencies use the same tools magie does to discover keywords, find blog topics, and research backlinks. Every piece of that is software. They get the information handed to them. The only real work they do is implementation. So why do they charge so much?
Because they can.
I’m not saying there’s no value in what agencies do — creativity, strategy, thinking outside the box. That stuff matters. But you don’t need it on day one. I wish I’d had magie when I was starting out. After a couple of years I probably still would have gone on to hire an agency, but at least I wouldn’t have been starting from zero. By the time I switched I’d have had 25 blog posts, content refreshes, backlinks, keyword tracking, and all the technical on-page SEO already done. Why pay an agency $4,000 a month to do what you could have had software doing all along?
I built magieSEO so other founders don’t have to make that trade. It’s as good as an agency without the cost of one. Software doesn’t turn over, doesn’t get pulled onto a bigger client, and doesn’t cost as much because there’s no office to pay for. And because every site we manage feeds the same learning engine, we get smarter every month.
If you know you need SEO but can’t justify thousands a month for it, magie is for you. Set it up once, check in when you want. It runs on its own. In a year, if you want to graduate to a full agency, you’ll be in a position to afford one. Until then, we’ve got you.
Give it a shot. Your future self will thank you.