How I Built a $1M+ SEO Agency With No Sales Team

In this Ahrefs interview, Steve Toth describes an agency built around public proof of work and useful teaching. The path includes a successful in-house SEO campaign, freelance clients, a weekly newsletter and a team of 25. His account also includes savings, a badly timed launch and changing demand as AI search developed.

His first relevant role was as a copywriter at a web development company in 2010. He wrote about when to rebuild a website because those readers might need the company's services. The post ranked first, ahead of an article by Seth Godin, and made him want to learn more about search.

At a later agency, he worked in social media but sat beside an SEO manager and asked questions for two years. Another colleague helped him find knowledgeable people to follow. He began blogging about what he learned. The public writing grew alongside the practical learning, before it became a deliberate source of leads.

At FreshBooks, Toth's team identified “invoice template,” which he says had about 300,000 monthly searches and many related long-tail terms. The company was already bidding on it, giving the team a reason to pursue organic rankings.

He reports that the main page reached the top position and that it, together with 110 related pages, generated about $50,000 in weekly traffic value at the peak. He also describes 650 blog posts later generating 50,000 daily clicks. Traffic value here is an estimated paid-traffic equivalent; it should not be read as cash revenue.

Those results mattered to his career because they were concrete work he could discuss publicly. He had a specific campaign, a business-relevant search term and evidence of an outcome, rather than only a general claim to understand SEO.

Toth posted the invoice-template result while waiting for an Uber to an escape room. He says he had no particular expectation. Later that evening, the post had about 200 likes and a message from someone interested in hiring him.

That inquiry became a client paying $5,000 a month. Until then, he had imagined needing a salesperson to close deals while he concentrated on strategy. The experience showed him another route: share useful knowledge and visible results, and let interested people initiate a conversation.

It was one successful post in a longer history of learning and publishing. His account does not turn that event into a guarantee that a single post will create a business. What changed was his understanding of how people could come to trust his work before a sales conversation.

He did not immediately quit FreshBooks. By the time he left, he says he had saved roughly $100,000 from freelance work, enough in his estimate to withstand a year if the independent business failed.

His description is that he kept his job until remaining in it was costing him money. Having salary income also made quoting $5,000 a month feel manageable. If a prospect declined, he still had the job; an earlier client had paid only $1,200 a month.

Toth's warning is about bargaining from necessity. Quitting with no plan can make someone charge less or accept work they should decline. His savings did not remove uncertainty, but they gave him more room to make those decisions.

His first full-time entrepreneurial day was March 2, 2020. Lockdown followed two weeks later. Four sales calls around that transition went nowhere for the first couple of months, and some existing clients cut their budgets in half.

He describes a recovery during the summer of 2020. Work for BrainStation and Signaturely produced strong search outcomes, and he says his monthly income reached $50,000. The figures he gives for those campaigns include traffic value and organic visits; those measures are separate from his own income.

The interruption matters to the story. The safety net preceded a shock he had not planned, rather than being a detail added after an uninterrupted rise.

In January 2021, a prospect who had seen his LinkedIn work requested a consultation. Toth charged $500. The call lasted about three minutes: the prospect said he liked the work Toth was doing and wanted to hire him.

Toth was then having his busiest month for inbound leads and usually charged $5,000 a month. He tested a $10,000 proposal, and the prospect accepted without questions. He says that interaction led him to double his price, maintain it and later increase it further.

The sequence includes demand, confidence from prior results and an actual proposal. It is an example of testing what a client would pay, rather than evidence that every consultant can double prices without changing anything else.

Toth had begun collecting his SEO strategies in Evernote. Once he had about 10 to 15, he wondered whether he could email one page each week. He bought SEOnotebook.com for $750 and started the list.

Someone later told him his approach resembled The Go-Giver. He read the book after that suggestion and felt it affirmed what he was doing. In the interview, he emphasizes giving useful knowledge at scale: one-to-many teaching instead of spending all available time repeating it individually.

He also makes the invitation explicit. Readers can subscribe, book a consultation, ask him to speak or become clients. Sharing expertise and making those routes visible are connected parts of his approach.

08:41View full image

At 08:41, the video illustrates sending one SEO Notebook lesson to many subscribers; this is an explanatory animation, not audience analytics.

Another rule was to set a high personal hourly value and delegate work below it. His example is hiring someone to create an advanced spreadsheet for planning internal links, even when the bill initially felt expensive.

Notebook Agency launched in September 2024. At the time of the interview, he describes a team of 25 and says 99% of leads came through the website. That is his report of the intake route, not a measured attribution model for everything that first created demand.

Audience feedback still informs what he teaches. A reader mentioning a particular note at a conference becomes part of his qualitative sense of what people value. He connects that with the idea of a committed audience: consistency and useful expertise matter more to his account than being the largest name or owning the largest list.

The arrival of ChatGPT initially made Toth question the future of the business. If people stopped clicking search results, work built around organic visits could change substantially. He describes moving toward influencing decisions in an environment with fewer clicks.

His AI Notebook site began simply, with his name, some information and a form. Before concentrating on it, he prepared six or seven weeks of SEO Notebook issues to keep the existing schedule running.

He says about 90% of current inquiries wanted to discuss AEO specifically, and some prospects found the agency through language models. That percentage describes inquiry interest; it is different from the earlier claim about leads arriving through the website. His account ends with why he still enjoys the work: SEO, AI search, collaboration and teaching.

Adapted from Ahrefs' interview “How I Built a $1M+ SEO Agency With No Sales Team.” Business and campaign figures are Toth's reported experience. The sponsor segment is omitted.