Adapting to Industry Changes with Agency Director Gareth Hoyle

Gareth Hoyle built a link building agency to three hundred staff, running three shifts a day, seven days a week. Penguin ended it overnight. What he runs now is a team of twenty, and this interview with Mark A Preston is mostly about what the first business taught him about the second.

Key takeaways

• An algorithm update can end a business model in a day. He says it plainly, and extends the same sympathy to the people currently being displaced.
• Marketing without operations is money leaking out the back. His flyers-outside-a-bar analogy is the clearest thing in the episode.
• Conversion is the cheapest growth lever left. One per cent to two per cent doubles the leads with no extra traffic.
• Creative people are not automatically commercial people. His fix was a commercially minded head of strategy whose first report slide is money, not activity.
• The four-day week and full remote are hiring tools. Adopted to stand out in a crowded market and to hire anywhere.

On this page

• Three hundred staff, then nothing
• The flyers and the bar
• Making creative people commercial
• Why the established brand still wins
• Chapters and timestamps
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

Three hundred staff, then nothing

I built a link building agency up to 300 staff at our peak, working seven days a week, three shifts a day, mainly out in India, just a handful of staff in the UK. Penguin came along and just destroyed that business model overnight.

— Gareth Hoyle

He tells it without drama, which makes it land harder. The business was legitimate by the standards of its moment, built on an outsourcing model he had learned working at General Electric while still at university, and then one update made the entire premise worthless.

So I do have empathy for these AI bros that are getting kicked left, right and centre this month and last month.

— Gareth Hoyle

Marketing Signals is what he built next, deliberately narrower. SEO, PPC and paid social, and no web design or development at all.

The flyers and the bar

I’m in marketing, I’m out there handing out flyers getting them to come into the bar. If nobody’s serving them a drink when I get them in, they’re going to leave.

— Gareth Hoyle

It is the same objection every honest agency owner eventually raises. If the phone is not answered within three rings, if nobody works the pipeline, if the warehouse cannot fulfil what you generated, then the money at the front end is being poured out at the back.

He argues that surviving in search gives you an efficiency mindset other departments never had to develop, because you spent fifteen years being told the thing you built yesterday no longer works.

Making creative people commercial

The problem he keeps returning to is that content and digital PR attract creative thinkers, and the commercial half does not come free with the talent. His response was stricter time tracking, and a change of perspective he asks the whole team to hold.

If you’re not willing to stand in front of the accountant and explain how you spent the money, you probably shouldn’t be running that account.

— Gareth Hoyle

That is aimed as much at the client’s budget holder as at his own staff. Whoever signs off ten thousand a month has to defend it to somebody, and an agency that cannot help them do that is a line item waiting to be cut.

If I can increase the conversion rate from 1% to 2%, we get twice the leads.

— Gareth Hoyle

Which is his argument against obsessing over traffic. Sometimes the growth is already on the site. If you want to size that before chasing it, the expected click-through model covers the traffic half of the same sum.

Why the established brand still wins

He is unsentimental about why agencies chase recognised names. A department store already carries the brand signals, so ranking it for a well-known product is a shorter job than ranking an unknown shop. Journalists take the call, too.

The cost is speed. Quiet periods before results, internal protocol, tickets sitting in a queue years after the contract ended. He notes, almost in passing, that a strong brand routinely outranks technically better sites, which is the whole argument in one observation.

It’s just marketing at the end of the day. It’s just marketing, in the same way that digital PR is just PR but just in a digital arena.

— Gareth Hoyle

And the closing reality check, from a man who has spent his life in search: he is an investor in a dating app for widows, and its best conversions come from television advertising. SEO is one channel among many, and the bubble is smaller than it looks from inside.

Chapters

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• What happens to an agency when a Google update ends its business model?
• Why does marketing fail when operations cannot keep up?
• Is improving conversion rate better than chasing more traffic?
• How do you make a creative marketing team think commercially?
• Does a four-day week help an agency hire?
• Why do agencies prefer working with well-known brands?
• Should a digital PR agency work alongside the in-house PR team?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• Kevin Indig, from the same run of Preston interviews, on the in-house and advisory side of the same industry.
• Kevin Gibbons, another UK agency director in the archive, for a second read on running the business rather than the campaigns.
• the tactic library, if you would rather have the executable version of all this than the argument.

Watch the interview

Find Gareth Hoyle

Gareth Hoyle on LinkedIn, which he says is where he is most active. He also says he will happily solve a problem for free if it interests him.

Cite this episode

Hoyle, Gareth. Interviewed by Mark A Preston. “Adapting to Industry Changes with Agency Director Gareth Hoyle.” Unscripted SEO, 2024. https://unscriptedseo.com/gareth-hoyle/