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MB Melissa Bouma On Smart Agency Masterclass with Jason Swenk: Podcast for Digital Marketing Agencies

“One of the things that made it work best for us is it was something people wanted to buy, not build. So that was an opportunity for us to be acquired as the air-quotes digital arm.”

Smart Agency Masterclass with Jason Swenk: Podcast for Digital Marketing Agencies · Agency Business · November 2026

“One of the things that made it work best for us is it was something people wanted to buy, not build. So that was an opportunity for us to be acquired as the air-quotes digital arm.” — Melissa Bouma, Smart Agency Masterclass with Jason Swenk: Podcast for Digital Marketing Agencies

Context

Melissa Bouma on her first agency sale. SEO was seen as a silver bullet at the time, and bigger agencies preferred buying that capability to building it.

Transcript

Smart Agency Masterclass with Jason Swenk: Podcast for Digital Marketing Agencies Around 06:53 into the episode
Melissa Bouma

So we did that for about four and a half, five years until we sold. And then we sold into a pretty large content agency because searching content even back then was very that's a really

Jason Swenk

quick that's a quick path for a lot of people so you know walk me through kind of some of the phases that you guys went through

Melissa Bouma

yeah so it was a quick path and i think it had a lot to do with where seo was in the course of digital marketing and just how quickly it was becoming you know the silver bullet that was going to move your business um really one of the things that made it work best for us is it was something that people wanted to buy not build so that was an opportunity for us to be acquired as the air quotes digital arm even though there's much more to digital than that um you know the path was i wish it was incredibly structured that i could give you a framework but it wasn't it was figure out what our approach and methodology was for me it was figuring out how to explain seo to business owners in a way that made sense for them uh without making it too complex but also not dumbing it down too far because we wanted them to engage us and then it was figuring out how to scale sales and a lot of that had to do truly with word of mouth i wish it was like a big architected growth…

Jason Swenk

so it was an existing partnership or client that bought you

Melissa Bouma

yeah we well they it was a larger agency that is now what is manifest it was named something different at the time uh that was white labeling their seo services

Jason Swenk

yeah i always tell everybody when if the goal is eventually selling a lot of times you already know the potential buyer

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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