The Tiger of SaaS: SEO and Growth Strategies for Agencies with Jeremiah Smith

Gray MacKenzie is joined by Jeremiah Smith, president and CEO of SimpleTiger, an SEO agency with over 15 years of experience helping SaaS companies grow through search engine optimization, content marketing, and link building. Jeremiah shares how SimpleTiger carved out a dominant position in the SaaS SEO niche and the operational strategies that have allowed the agency to scale beyond its founder.

Niching Down to SaaS SEO

SimpleTiger’s growth story is anchored in a deliberate decision to specialize. Rather than offering SEO services to any business willing to pay, Jeremiah chose to focus exclusively on SaaS companies. That decision created a cascade of advantages that generalist agencies struggle to replicate.

First, specialization accelerated expertise. When every client operates in the SaaS space, the team develops deep knowledge of SaaS-specific challenges - long sales cycles, complex buyer personas, competitive keyword landscapes, and the relationship between organic traffic and product-led growth. That depth of understanding translates directly into better results for clients.

Second, niching made it easier to build social proof. Case studies and testimonials from SaaS companies resonate powerfully with other SaaS companies considering an SEO investment. Each successful engagement becomes a sales asset that speaks directly to the next prospect’s situation. Jeremiah notes that building this proof requires intentionality, especially when client confidentiality limits what you can share publicly. He recommends finding creative ways to demonstrate results - aggregate data, anonymized case studies, and industry-specific thought leadership all work when named case studies are not an option.

Practicing What You Preach

One of Jeremiah’s core principles is that agencies should invest in the same marketing channels they sell to clients. If SimpleTiger sells SEO, SimpleTiger had better be excellent at its own SEO. This sounds obvious, but a surprising number of agencies neglect their own marketing in favor of client work.

Jeremiah treats SimpleTiger’s content program with the same rigor as any client engagement. The agency publishes consistently, targets strategic keywords, and measures the results against the same KPIs they track for clients. This approach serves multiple purposes: it generates inbound leads, it provides a testing ground for new strategies before recommending them to clients, and it builds credibility with prospects who can see the results firsthand.

The content investment compounds over time. Early articles may generate modest traffic, but as the library grows and the domain builds authority, each new piece of content benefits from the foundation laid by everything that came before. Jeremiah emphasizes patience here - agencies that expect immediate returns from content marketing will be disappointed, but those that commit for the long term build a durable lead generation engine that reduces dependence on referrals and outbound sales.

From Sales Execution to Sales Leadership

As SimpleTiger grew, Jeremiah faced a challenge common to agency founders: he was the primary salesperson, and his involvement in every deal created a bottleneck. Scaling required transitioning from personally executing sales to building a sales system that others could run.

This transition involves more than just hiring salespeople. It requires documenting the sales process, defining qualification criteria, creating proposal templates, and establishing the metrics that indicate whether the pipeline is healthy. Jeremiah found that the operational rigor he applied to client delivery needed to extend to sales operations as well.

The shift also changed Jeremiah’s role from closer to coach. Instead of being in every sales conversation, he focused on training the team, refining the process, and stepping in only for strategic or high-value opportunities. This freed his time for the strategic work that only a founder can do - setting direction, building partnerships, and investing in the company’s long-term positioning.

Moving Beyond Commodity Positioning

Jeremiah discusses the danger of being perceived as a commodity - interchangeable with any other SEO agency competing on price. The antidote is positioning yourself as a strategic partner rather than a vendor.

Strategic partnership positioning comes from demonstrating deep industry knowledge, proactively identifying opportunities the client has not considered, and tying SEO recommendations to business outcomes rather than vanity metrics. When a client sees their SEO agency as a growth partner who understands their business model, switching costs go up and price sensitivity goes down.

Referral networks play an important role in this positioning. When other trusted advisors - consultants, investors, complementary agencies - recommend SimpleTiger, the introduction carries credibility that no marketing campaign can replicate. Jeremiah invests time in building and maintaining these referral relationships because they consistently produce the highest-quality leads.

Implementing EOS for Operational Scale

To support SimpleTiger’s growth, Jeremiah implemented the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS). The framework provided structure for goal-setting, meeting cadence, accountability, and issue resolution - areas that tend to become chaotic as agencies grow past the point where the founder can personally manage everything.

EOS gave the leadership team a shared language and a consistent rhythm for running the business. Weekly meetings follow a defined format. Quarterly goals cascade from annual targets. Issues are identified, discussed, and resolved rather than lingering indefinitely. For Jeremiah, the biggest benefit was removing himself as the bottleneck for decisions that did not require his involvement.

Resources Mentioned

• Jeremiah Smith on LinkedIn - President and CEO of SimpleTiger
• SimpleTiger - SEO agency for SaaS companies
• EOS - Entrepreneurial Operating System - Operating framework for growing businesses