How I started a consultancy business and failed

Back in 2015, I once started one-man consultancy business in an seo industry. So what is an seo? Basically its a method where website, blog, video etc. try to be in the first page of search index such as google, bing to get a free or organic traffic (if it makes sense). It is very lucrative if found the right angle of doing it. Also Seo is a multi billion dollar industry.

First an example

Let’s say someone is looking for ‘personal injury solicitors in London’ and that person is based somewhere in London obviously. He/she would dial a number for inquiry. But wait he/she does not have a solicitor number in first place. Where does the person gets a number from? Phone directory? There is a less chance of that happening. The more chance is errm… from google. That’s right. The person would have to type the actual phrase ‘personal injury solicitors in London’ on google to find what solicitors are available.

As you can see in above image. The ad in the yellow box are all paid to be in there via ppc (pay per click). The people who are doing SEM (search engine marketing) to be on the top are spending big amount for ‘personal injury solicitors in London’ search term. And the ones in the green box are organic placement meaning they have earned their first position using SEO and does not require running ads (they can if wanted to).

Ad campaign

Now take a look below to roughly what It actually cost to run an ad campaign. It has monthly search volume of 390. It cost them £32.28 cpc (cost per click). Every time when someone clicks on one of them ad, £32.28 will be added to their ad billing. Usually, to run ad campaign – Google adword or Microsoft advertising (formally known as bing ads) account is needed. I still have accounts on both. And I do use them for SEM time to time.

Lousy sales pitch

When looking for possible clients, I would type the same phrase ‘personal injury solicitors in London’ and skip the first page of google to second, third, fourth pages and so on. See below.

Then I would contact the website that are in those pages – basically emailing something to the effect of:

“hey wagwan,

I see your solicitor site is not on the front page of google for search term XXXX and that you are on X page. It cost you £32.28 x 390= £12,589.20 a month to advertise ‘personal injury solicitors in London’ that are potential clients for your business and yadiyadada blabla”.

And I would tell them I can take your website to first page of google at a fraction of cost maybe £2,000 a month like that. Basically, outrank their competitors. They either say yes or no and not response at all. If said yes. Boom. Client achievement unlocked. And when I get that upfront money, I would go and outsource the job to other freelancer or other seo service provider like Fiverr, Hothseo etc. From there rinse, repeat and scale up.

At least that was my plan. But I could not succeed on this business as I had other project on hand (I think).

Website revealed

I built a basic website. I even put my photo, real name, personal phone number and email address. But later I changed it and opted to rent a virtual phone number – London number that would either be routed to my mobile number or telephone answering service on behalf of me. Not only that I also rented a virtual address. They offer scanned mail and mail forwarding service too which I had opted. I still use that address sometime to this day, even though I cancelled the subscription. See address below.

I changed my site theme few times. See my site below. Also I have censored my name in website image. Although its not live anymore, I took site snapshot from archive.org. I had this site running for 3 years I think. My total costs were around £300 (estimate) – expenses includes – domain and site hosting, virtual phone and address, article, social media accounts etc.

Website Version 1.0