This interview is with Ben Seidel, CEO & Founder, Igniting Business.
For Featured readers, how do you describe your role as CEO & Founder in IT services when you’re helping businesses with web design, SEO, and affordable marketing?
We’re an intentionally small team hyper-focused on helping small businesses succeed. I still genuinely enjoy the work we do at Igniting Business, which is why I remain hands-on, managing select projects and staying involved in the details. And yes, I know what you’re thinking, but no business coach or acquisition offer is going to pull me away from that (trust me, they’ve tried).
I continue to serve as a key visionary for the company, always looking for better ways to serve our clients while maintaining strong, sustainable operations.
We’re grateful that the demand for our services has grown to the point where we’re at capacity with a healthy pipeline, allowing us to be selective about the clients we ultimately serve.
What pivotal choices or turning points took you from hands-on web development to leading an SEO-driven, results-focused agency?
I started designing websites as a teenager, with my first paid project for a local company at the mature age of 13. As you can imagine, I was undercutting much of my competition early on with pricing and focused heavily on small business web design. However, after designing websites for several years, I found that many web design companies were good at just that: design. They could build a beautiful new website that perhaps functioned well. But barely anyone actually found the new website online due to a lack of search engine optimization or unoptimized digital campaigns.
As such, I focused Igniting Business on not just designing sites, but more importantly, making sure they are found online by their ideal clients. While we still design websites today, our major differentiator is our deep expertise in SEO and complementary digital marketing. Naturally, our services continue to evolve as SEO is in a constant state of flux, especially with AI/LLM usage and features increasing.
Building on that, what repeatable framework do you use to align web design, development, and SEO from project kickoff through launch?
Before we ever focus on designing a website or issuing any sort of SEO/marketing proposal, we start with the client’s goals. We dig into what they are looking to accomplish, what they’ve tried in the past, and ultimately how they define success.
Surprisingly, success can look very different from one small business to another, even if they are in the exact same industry and same city.
From there, we tailor our proposals to work toward those goals of success with a tangible action plan. That plan is certainly repeatable, but it is heavily customized based on success metrics, what talent the client has in-house, and a set of predefined factors.
For small-business budgets, what specific tradeoffs do you recommend in design and features to protect SEO performance without overspending?
We have to constantly fight shiny-object syndrome, where business owners have heard of a new “shortcut”, fancy website feature, or “viral marketing method.” We emphasize that there are virtually limitless marketing avenues a business can pursue, but unfortunately, we haven’t met anyone with a limitless budget.
Thus, whether they be website features or specific marketing campaigns, we focus on what provides the best bang for the buck. It also helps that we implement a platform-agnostic advanced conversion tracking tool, which helps point out which marketing campaigns are generating which leads.
On the tech side, how do you select your CMS, page builder, and hosting stack to hit Core Web Vitals and keep long-term maintenance simple?
Core Web Vitals is pretty low on the overall totem pole of priorities. However, we certainly carefully select the tools we use to maximize our own efficiency as well as make our clients’ day-to-day activities as easy and straightforward as possible. This does mean we don’t always use the tools that are most popular. Instead, we focus on the tools that work best for our clients’ needs and for our team to maintain operational efficiency.
As AI-driven search results expand, what on-site and off-site steps have most improved client visibility in your recent campaigns?
We are constantly studying AI-driven search results, and how they operate and what features are included are constantly changing. We actually see tremendous overlap in factors for traditional SEO and AI optimization. However, their weighting systems are drastically different. As a result, if we find a client is doing well organically on Google, but is struggling within ChatGPT, we may re-prioritize which optimization efforts occur next.
On the content front, how do you operationalize first-hand experience and information gain across your team so every piece earns trust and rankings?
We have long preached that prioritizing information gain (PIG) is critical for SEO. As such, when we are working on content creation tasks, our client and their in-house subject matter experts are heavily involved in each step of the content creation process.
This can include:
- Co-creation of content
- Interviews with the client’s subject matter experts
- Research compilation
- Case studies
- Client reviews and feedback
The point being that the only way to truly achieve information gain is to look for the gaps and ensure that we are sourcing information from the right expert to answer the right questions.
When performance dips, what single Google Search Console or GA4 workflow do you rely on to diagnose the issue and decide your next action?
It’s also critical to remember that when performance dips, there are many different factors that can influence that: Google’s constant changes and algorithm updates, new AI features within search, glitches with tracking tools, consumer behavior shifts, competitors rolling out changes to their online presence, etc. Thus, the very first step is to identify if this is actually a trend worth investigating or a temporary fluctuation. We don’t want to change a bunch of tactics simply as a knee-jerk reaction to a fluctuation.
Google Search Console and Google Analytics are certainly useful tools, but it takes a true SEO expert to read between the lines to assess what’s going on. This typically means looking at other data sources and using additional tools in our toolbelt to assess website technical health, content gaps, competitor analysis, company reputation shifts, and more.
To keep SEO services affordable and accountable, how do you package deliverables and cadence for the first 90 days so clients see meaningful progress without leaning on paid ads?
Interestingly, we are one of the few SEO companies that actually offer our SEO packages completely on a month-to-month basis. We do not lock in customers with a 6-month, 1-year, or 2-year contract like many of our competitors.
That said, we transparently set expectations with our clients about SEO from the beginning. We delve deep into the analogy of SEO being a marathon (slower, more affordable growth) and targeted ads as being a sprint (fast leads coming in the door, but at a higher cost for scaling). With SEO being a marathon, we encourage our clients to mentally commit to working on their SEO for about 6 months before trying to evaluate whether it is working and justifies continued investment.
Depending on the client’s priorities, sales pipeline, and budget, we may implement only SEO, only targeted ads, or a planned mix.