AGENCY GROWTH CLUB
Michael Ryan (Ink Digital) on Becoming the Agency Clients Can’t Avoid
Guest: Michael Ryan
Guest: Michael Ryan
Michael Ryan, founder of UK travel, hospitality and B2B SEO agency Ink Digital, joins Josh Peacock to break down how “search everywhere optimization”, showing up on Google, AI search, and YouTube at once, has become the actual differentiator for agencies, not a nice-to-have.
He walks through the four-month sprint model Ink Digital runs instead of 12-month contracts, the recruitment mistake he calls the most expensive of the last six years, and the plan to double the business to £350K MRR.
Pulled from the transcript’s real per-line timestamps, matched to where each topic starts.
Michael opens with a story about a luxury hotel business that booked a call with Ink Digital a few weeks before this recording. When he asked how they’d found the agency, the prospect said, “I didn’t really have a choice in a way because I found you on Google, I found you on AI search, and I also found you on YouTube.” Three separate channels, no single deliberate touchpoint, the prospect arrived already convinced.
It’s the thesis for the whole conversation: visibility isn’t about winning one channel anymore, it’s about being unavoidable across several at once.
Michael started the agency in October 2019 while working in-house for a travel brand, managing SEO and some digital PR across three or four travel brands. When COVID hit and the travel industry began cutting costs, he was initially “Mr. SEO”, just his name and what he did, before rebranding.
Early on, most of the work was white-labeling SEO for bigger agencies. That model capped out: “you only get like a maybe 70% of the SEO fee, so you’re not really delivering the full amount that the client’s kind of expecting.” That ceiling is what pushed Ink Digital toward targeting direct brands instead of subcontracted work.
Actionable advice:
Michael’s in-house experience was with Ocean Holidays and its niche brand Ocean Florida, competing against major OTAs like British Airways and Virgin in a high-ticket segment, Florida holidays that could run £25–30K for an extended family group. That’s a different buyer than a £500 week in Spain.
Rather than treating COVID as a reason to avoid travel clients, Michael and his team bet on pent-up demand: “the brands that really did kind of invest in you know SEO um you know their website kind of CRO when that pent-up demand did drop and people were allowed to travel, they had really good couple of years.” Brands that kept investing in SEO and CRO through the downturn were positioned to capture that demand when it returned.
Michael describes a shift in how both consumers and B2B buyers research: people are using multiple platforms, TikTok, YouTube, LLMs, before they book or buy. He references the same luxury hotel prospect from the cold open as proof the same pattern applies in B2B: the prospect had found Ink Digital across three separate platforms before ever speaking to them.
His framing for this is “search everywhere optimization”, the idea that a business’s job is to be visible across all the platforms its buyers actually use, not just to hold the top spot on Google.
Actionable advice:
YouTube is a newer channel for Ink Digital. Michael says most of the content going onto YouTube now is content they’ve already been creating for three or four years, just repurposed onto a new platform, they post daily or a few times a week on LinkedIn, and those same assets are being built into YouTube scripts with the help of a specialized B2B YouTube agency.
He’s explicit that view counts aren’t the goal in B2B: “we’re not here to try and go and get thousands and thousands of views. 20 to 30 views of people that the right ICP, the right decision maker is actually probably going to make YouTube pay for itself.” The approach mirrors what they already do for SEO, rank for “travel SEO agency,” “restaurant SEO agency,” and similar terms, now extended to AI search and YouTube as additional surfaces for the same practicing-what-you-preach philosophy.
Michael says a growing share of inbound requests are from businesses asking to rank in AI search before they’ve addressed basic SEO foundations, sites with a handful of unoptimized landing pages, or missing services altogether. His view: foundations come first. “I still think most businesses are missing out on the foundations from SEO and that’s kind of where I think they should start before they start diving into um kind of bespoke sprints around AI.”
Ink Digital doesn’t treat AI search as a separate service line from SEO, the same fundamentals (schema, XML sitemaps, structured content) that help Google crawl a site also help AI search surface it. One specific tactic he describes: a brand mention gap analysis, where they map where a client’s competitors are being cited by AI search tools for relevant prompts, and where the client is missing, then work with the client’s PR team to close those gaps.
Actionable advice:
Ink Digital runs an initial five-month sprint focused on research and strategy sign-off, followed by four-month delivery sprints with a clear scope of what’s being done, by whom, and when. Each sprint closes with a round-up, what was done, what results came from it, what’s next, rather than a routine monthly report.
Michael’s stated reason is transparency: “I want our customers to be able to see exactly what we’re doing when we’re doing it.” The sprint structure also keeps the agency closely coordinated with the client’s own plans, if a client is about to hire an in-house social media person, Ink Digital can hand off a content calendar and repurposable blog content in time for that hire to use it.
Actionable advice:
Michael initially built the agency without a dedicated client services layer, SEO specialists spoke directly to clients, based on his own frustration at a previous agency where he wasn’t allowed to talk to the customer whose results he was responsible for. That model worked well up to roughly 12–14 people.
He’s since “gone back on my word in a way” and built out client services, because that team surfaces cross-service opportunities client specialists alone might miss. On the value of specialist teams versus in-house hiring, Michael’s pitch is direct: a full in-house SEO function, technical SEO, PR/link building, CRO/design, development, could run six or seven roles at £40–60K each, versus an agency retainer around 5K a month, roughly the cost of a single £60K salary.
Ink Digital roughly doubled in size every year for most of its first six years, before growth flattened somewhat over the last 18 months as the business settled around £1.5–2M in revenue. Michael describes the current stage as a shift from serving mostly SEO-only clients to more established businesses asking for multi-service support (SEO, PPC, digital PR, email), a different challenge than scaling one department.
“It’s almost like feeling like we’re restarting the business. We’ve built out a really strong SEO team, scaled that department. Now it’s about how do we scale out different departments within the business.”
Team members posting on LinkedIn, video, webinars, wasn’t a top-down mandate at Ink Digital. Michael says it grew organically, starting a couple of years into the business, with Head of Growth Dave pushing it internally. Michael himself has shifted a meaningful amount of his own time toward LinkedIn and LinkedIn ads over the last few years as the SEO team has scaled without him.
His broader take: “any B2B businesses really need to be looking at LinkedIn because it’s it’s ultimately free impressions… your ICP is there for B2B.” He also notes he’s aware of other agencies paying staff specifically to post on LinkedIn, and sees it as a good idea worth exploring.
Michael learned LinkedIn ads largely by doing, he spent two weeks over a Christmas break a few years ago watching content from a niche B2B LinkedIn agency and building campaigns himself. One concrete example: when Ink Digital moved offices to Brentwood, next to the station, he built a list of local business owners in Brentwood and the surrounding Essex area, uploaded it to LinkedIn, and targeted content to them, generating local leads tied directly to the office move.
He frames LinkedIn and SEO as complementary rather than competing: “if someone types in a commercial keyword, you want to come up first… but also, if you know that someone is looking for a job in SEO or an agency is looking to recruit and you’ve got those people kind of uploaded as a list on LinkedIn, you’re almost targeting the person rather than just like targeting the keyword.”
Actionable advice:
Michael describes real risk in the rebrand, Mr. SEO had a personal-brand ceiling, with his face on the website and an implicit expectation that he personally would do the work, the client communication, and the tech audits. That wasn’t scalable. He says a fashion-brand client spending 10K a month across several brands specifically told him not to rebrand, calling it “the worst decision you’re going to make”, but he went ahead anyway.
To protect existing SEO equity through the move, Michael made and published a migration case-study video documenting how he avoided losing traffic from Mr. SEO when moving to Ink. That approach has since brought in five or six businesses asking Ink Digital to help with their own domain or brand migrations.
Actionable advice:
Asked to name the most expensive mistake of the last six years, Michael doesn’t hesitate: recruitment. Early on, he had no structured hiring process, no technical test, largely “a bit of a chat, bit of an interview, and then cool, let’s crack on.” He’s explicit that he didn’t come in knowing how to hire, write contracts, or build a repeatable process, and that this has been an ongoing area of improvement rather than a one-time fix.
“An expensive mistake has been recruitment in the sense like early in the journey, we probably tried to do ourselves too much… there needs to be a structured process to make sure that you bring the right person into the business.”
Michael’s stated goal, discussed openly with his leadership team, is £350K MRR, roughly double the current business. He frames the number partly as a genuine growth target and partly as a shared incentive for the team, rather than letting the business “go through the motions.”
On what’s most likely to be tested as the business scales, Michael points to process and delivery efficiency, not headcount alone, investing in internal tools and AI to keep quality high while reducing how manual the work is, so the team can deliver more without burning out: “if something like a tech audit takes you 12 hours… how can how can you achieve that same quality for six hours?”
Mr. SEO was built as a personal brand with an implicit expectation that Michael personally would deliver the work, which capped how much the business could scale. The rebrand to Ink Digital was designed to make the business less dependent on any one person.
The business is currently at roughly £1.5–2M in revenue, with a stated internal goal of £350K MRR — approximately doubling in size.
It’s Michael’s term for being visible across every platform a buyer might use to research a business — Google, AI search tools, YouTube, LinkedIn — rather than optimizing for a single channel like traditional SEO alone.
Michael says the sprint model gives clients transparency into exactly what’s being delivered and when, and lets the agency stay closely coordinated with the client’s own internal plans, rather than locking into a long, open-ended retainer.
Michael treats AI search as tied to, not separate from, traditional SEO — the same technical foundations (schema, sitemaps, structured content) support both. One specific tactic is a brand mention gap analysis comparing where competitors are cited by AI tools versus where the client is missing.
Michael mapped rankings, traffic, and lead sources before the migration and documented the process in a public case-study video, which has since become a lead source for other businesses facing similar migrations.
Michael names recruitment — hiring without a structured process, including no technical interview stage, early in the company’s history.
Michael Ryan founded the agency in October 2019 while working in-house for a travel brand, initially operating as a white-label SEO provider under the name Mr. SEO before rebranding to Ink Digital and shifting toward direct client work.
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