[Top Agency Series] Mastering SEO and Web Design With Ryan Tomlinson of Gooder Marketing

Ryan Tomlinson is the Founder and President of Gooder Marketing, a web design agency specializing in creating visually appealing and highly functional websites tailored to clients’ needs. Launching the agency in 2011, he leveraged his self-taught web development and SEO skills honed during the online poker boom into providing value for local businesses across various industries. With a focus on SEO and comprehensive digital strategies, Ryan has become an expert at helping clients establish a strong online presence. He believes in fostering relationships and has maintained several client partnerships for over 10 years, signifying his commitment to consistent, quality service.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [03:33] Ryan Tomlinson discusses the full range of services offered by Gooder Marketing
• [04:53] Ryan’s unexpected entry into the world of digital marketing
• [08:59] How Gooder Marketing obtained and retained its first significant clients
• [11:28] The evolution of Gooder Marketing’s services
• [13:43] Ryan shares his philosophy on pricing and legacy client relationships
• [18:29] The importance of niche marketing and how the agency found its sweet spot with property management companies
• [21:27] The challenges and rewards of securing government contracts for web design projects
• [31:10] How to avoid common mistakes made by business websites
• [34:12] The evolution and growth of the Gooder Marketing team

In this episode…

Have you ever wondered how some businesses keep their clients happy for over a decade? Outdated website and internet marketing strategies could be costing you business. So, what’s the secret behind creating and maintaining a website that drives traffic into conversions and leads?

Ryan Tomlinson, a website and internet marketing guru, dives into the strategic world of digital marketing and web design as he shares the origins and growth of his company. Starting as a self-taught SEO enthusiast during the online poker boom, he transitioned his skills to meet the needs of local businesses, building a web design agency renowned for its quality and custom solutions. Ryan provides candid insights into the nuances of acquiring government contracts, the benefits of niche marketing for property management companies, and the fine-tuning required for successful e-commerce platforms. He also discusses the significance of SEO and how even simple missteps can affect a website’s performance, like neglecting proper title tags.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz hosts Ryan Tomlinson, Founder and President of Gooder Marketing, about effective web design and SEO strategies. Ryan discusses the full range of services offered by Gooder Marketing, how it obtained and retained its first significant clients, and how to avoid common mistakes made by business websites.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Ryan Tomlinson on LinkedIn
• Gooder Marketing

Special Mention(s):

• Google Workspace
• WooCommerce
• WordPress
• FreshBooks
• QuickBooks

Related episode(s):

• “[Top Agency Series] Expanding Your Brand Impact Through Social With Duncan Alney of Firebelly Marketing” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Navigating a Merger and Becoming an End-to-End Digital Partner With Kevin Hourigan of Spinutech” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Sweet Process Series] How to Save Hundreds of Hours a Month Using Top Productivity Tools with Adi Klevit of Business Success Consulting Group” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable moments:

• “You need to make that good first impression and have a good call-to-action.”
• “Our clients also push us to grow and expand.”
• “You’ve got to step outside your comfort zone at the beginning.”
• “We strive not to be the most expensive and not to be the cheapest.”
• “I quickly learned, actually — talking to competitors, they’re going through the same problems.”

Action Steps:

1. Explore and leverage Google Workspace: Google Workspace provides a comprehensive suite of tools for collaboration and productivity, which can greatly enhance team efficiency and communication.
2. Invest in SEO best practices: Implementing effective SEO strategies can tackle the challenge of driving traffic to a site, ensuring that potential customers can easily find your business online.
3. Adopt a versatile web development platform: This approach can address the common issue of outdated and difficult-to-manage systems, ensuring your site remains functional and appealing over time.
4. Utilize networking and referrals for business growth: These connections are invaluable for acquiring new leads, enabling businesses to overcome the challenge of initial client acquisition.
5. Engage with competitors for shared learning: This action fosters a learning ecosystem where shared challenges in the industry can be addressed collectively, turning potential competition into a source of innovation and learning.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22 

Dr Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today, is no different, I have Ryan Tomlinson of Gooder Marketing. And Ryan, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast. People should check out, since this is part of the top agency series I had Duncan Alney on the podcast actually, he specializes in CPG companies, and they do social for CPG companies. And we’re going to talk Ryan and I were talking before we hit record here about niches and how he came to some of the niches that he serves. So that’s a great one with Duncan. Another one is Kevin Hourigan. Kevin Hourigan had an agency. Ryan, you’ve been doing this for a long time. He had an agency back in 1995 and so it was interesting here just the evolution of business, of the internet and of agency life back from 1995 to the present day.

So that was a really good one, and Adi Klevit is also a favorite one. She is an agency. She’s a done-for-you service for SOPs, for a company. So, people are looking at streamlining their onboarding for clients or staff. And she goes in and helps the company document those things, and we geeked out on our favorite software tools and productivity. So that’s a good one to check out more on inspiredinsider.com. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. And how do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. So we do the strategy, the accountability and also the full execution behind the scenes.

So Ryan, we call ourselves kind of the magic elves that run in the background to make it look easy for the host, so they can create amazing content, create amazing relationships, and, most importantly, run their business. For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships, and I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I found no better way, over the past decade, to profile the people and companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So you’ve thought about podcasting. You should, if you have questions, go to rise25.com, or email us at [email protected].

I’m excited to introduce Ryan Tomlinson. He’s the Founder of Gooder Marketing. They’re a web design agency that specializes in creating not only visually appealing sites, but also highly functional websites. And It really tailors to their clients needs, because they have all sorts of clients. He started the agency back in 2011 they’ve helped anyone from property management companies to brokerage companies to drug removal companies to construction companies. They have like, 16 pages of work that I was going through and looking through. So check them out at goodermarketing.com. Ryan, thanks for joining me.

Ryan Tomlinson 3:19 

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Jeremy Weisz 3:21 

So just start off and talk about Gooder Marketing, and what you do. Also, there’s going to be a video portion, and I’m going to share the website as Ryan’s talking.

Ryan Tomlinson 3:33 

Yeah. So Gooder Marketing is a digital agency. We focus on website development and internet marketing. We have a full in-house team of four developers, a project management team, a design team, and then also a marketing team. So we do SEO, social media, Google ads, and any other type of online marketing that you may be interested in. And yeah, we’ve got quite a bit of experience under our belt and really able to help a business from whatever need they may have. And if we can’t help with our internal team, then we often have a good resource of referral partners that we can find an expert for whatever the case may be and help our clients out, and that’s what we strive to be. Is kind of a one-stop shop. We’re never going to be experts at everything, but we know our stuff, and we also know who other experts are, so we can bring in the needed people for whatever the project may be, to help out our clients.

Jeremy Weisz 4:49 

Talk about when you first started, what made you first start the agency?

Ryan Tomlinson 4:53 

Well, I’ll take it maybe a step even farther before we started the agency. So my introduction to web design, web development and marketing came in the age of the online poker boom. So I was kind of interested in playing poker, and I was at a young age, so I didn’t have a lot of expendable income to actually play anything. So I found myself looking for promotions here and there, and something inside me asked, how are they able to give away these promotions? So I’m talking about they’d give me 50 bucks to come

Jeremy Weisz 5:33 

It’s like free money. What’s the catch?

Ryan Tomlinson 5:36 

Yeah. So as I started digging into that, more and more, I found out the people that were giving away those promotions were actually getting a kickback for sending new players to online casinos and poker rooms and stuff like that that paid more than the 50 bucks that they were giving away. So it was kind of a pretty good system that these people had created. So I kind of took advantage of that idea, and I started learning how to build my own websites to promote where to find the best poker bonuses, or how to play poker online, or where to get the best sportsbook bonus. And I grew up probably a network of about 12, 15 websites about all these different topics. And so I kind of taught myself how to build them, design them, and most importantly, how to market them through SEO. And that was really my strength throughout, well, even now, as SEO was my strength. And as I did that, I found and I brought in team members.

I suck at design, so I quickly found a designer to help us out and make the sites look better, and then brought on a developer to help make them function better. And at some point, I kind of lost, not lost interest, but kind of moved on that. I got to a peak where the boom was over, and kind of the market was saturated. So I took, kind of all those skills of learning how to build my own site and rank it on the top for a very competitive keyword, and started applying that to local businesses in my area, and started building websites for clients and helping them rank tops of Google. And it was fairly easy, because online candling and poker was one of the most competitive keywords. And then when I started helping out the local plumber, it was like, wow, this is a lot easier.

Jeremy Weisz 7:47 

We’ll talk about your first customer in a second for the agency. But what did life look like at that time, when you were do building the sites? Were you just doing this on the nights and weekends and you had a separate job? What did your life look like at that time?

Ryan Tomlinson 8:03 

All of this was kind of done at the end of high school and through college. So I was young, and it was paying enough for beer money at college and to do the fun things that I wanted to do in college, so it was kind of like my part-time ish job in college, and gave me what I needed to do to get by. And then it was after college where I got a co-op position with another person, and that’s when I kind of got into doing what I do now. And yeah, it was just about after a year after college, is where I kind of transitioned into what we are now.

Jeremy Weisz 8:51 

So talk about your first significant customer and how you got them.

Ryan Tomlinson 8:59 

I would say some of the first customers that we ever had, and we still have them today. So that means that we’ve been working with them for close to 15 years, which is impressive on their end to still be doing what they’re doing and I think also very impressive on our end, that we’ve kept them happy, that they’ve continued to work with us for such a long period of time. They’re not my aunt or uncle or my significant family member, so there’s no reason that they have to stay with us, other than we deliver good customer service and have provided what they’ve needed throughout the process.

Jeremy Weisz 9:43 

How did you get those first customers? Did you cold call, you knocking on their door. What did you do?

Ryan Tomlinson 9:50 

You know what, I’ve been very fortunate, I think, with referrals. A lot of our business has come through referral base and it’s something that I continue to do. And local networking, either at the chamber or in networking type groups, is I get involved and people hear things and mention my name and things kind of circle back and so that’s how we got all of our clients at the beginning, and still to this day, referral, either from past clients or people that know us in the community, that is still today, one of the biggest ways we get our leads.

Jeremy Weisz 10:33 

So in the first, in the beginning, you joined a lot of different networking groups, and you kind of shook a lot of hands, and from there, just foster relationships and more referrals.

Ryan Tomlinson 10:45 

Yeah, it wasn’t easy. It’s not my favorite situation to be in. I mean, I’ve grown into it, but definitely at the beginning walking into a room not knowing anyone, and just saying, hi, my name is Ryan. I am the owner of Gooder Marketing, and we do this, this and this, that was a little difficult. But you know, you’ve got to step outside your comfort zone at the beginning, for sure.

Jeremy Weisz 11:11 

In the beginning, just talk about the evolution of services on those first customers. Obviously, they’ve been with you for some of them, like, for over a decade. What did you start doing with them, and then did you add on other services as time went by? Or do you have them all from the beginning?

Ryan Tomlinson 11:28 

No, that’s a great question, because I think our clients also push us to grow and expand. So I don’t like often saying no, we can’t do it and just close the door on it, even if we can’t do it, I do like to introduce someone else that can to just keep helping in any way I can. But our first services were website design, SEO, and way back when it was called Google Works Well, G Suite. So Google has gone through so many different names, but basically Google workspace is what it’s called now, and we were one of the very first to get into offering and reselling that service as well in our area.

So we were switching a lot of companies over from their old webmail type thing that really had so many problems getting them over onto what is now Google Workspace. So that was also another foot in the door, because at the time it was really wanted, it was fairly easy to sell, sometimes a little easier than trying to pitch SEO or marketing or new website to clients, because they see the value of an upgraded email system for a relatively cheap cost. And then again, once we are able to help them with that and build a good rapport, then we can do other services for them when they may need it.

Jeremy Weisz 13:03 

I love that. And, yeah, I can’t remember the names because they’ve changed them a bunch of times. But yeah, it’s really valuable, kind of professionalizing their whole email system, and you said it’s a foot in the door. How did you decide early on, from like, a pricing perspective, because maybe, okay, from that one in particular, for the, kind of upgrading their email, because you go, okay, great, we know they’re going to love us, then they’re going to want the website, they’re going to want the SEO and these other services. How do you decide to price that initial kind of foot in the door based on that?

Ryan Tomlinson 13:44 

I think we strive not to be the most expensive and not to be the cheapest. So that saying, I think it’s thrown around quite a bit, although it’s difficult sometimes to even know what those high levels and low levels are. I mean, at the beginning, again, I was younger then, so I was more eager and not as much overhead and bills to pay and all those different things. So I may have been a little on the cheaper side at the beginning, so that possibly helped us get our foot in the door. But even today, like that’s kind of our pricing model is to be in the middle there.

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