Learn what it’s like to be a woman SEO agency owner.
This episode of the SEO Podcast by #SEOSLY features Adriana Stein. She is originally from the US and now living in Germany, Adriana Stein is the CEO and founder of the agency, AS Marketing.
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PandoraInterview with Adriana Stein (video)
I record both the audio and the video version of each episode. Here is the video version for you.
Interview with Adriana Stein (podcast)
You can listen to this episode of the SEO Podcast by #SEOSLY below.
Interview with Adriana Stein (notes)
Here are more detailed notes from the interview.
About Adriana Stein
- Adriana moved to Germany 7 years ago to pursue a master’s degree, which required her to learn German. After not passing the difficult language exam, she pivoted to content writing and translation roles leveraging her native English and newly-acquired German skills.
- Through working on German-English content and localization projects, Adriana gained crucial exposure to SEO concepts and strategy. Realizing the global demand for multi-language digital marketing, she founded her agency focused on holistic, multi-lingual solutions.
- Over the past 7 years, Adriana grew her freelance work into an established agency managing 30 languages. She serves as the CEO overseeing finances, operations, training, quality assurance, and business development. Her project managers handle direct client relationships and coordinate the work.
- While Adriana doesn’t do hands-on SEO audits much nowadays, she remains involved in sales, account management, branding, and exploring new service offerings for the agency as part of its next growth phase. Her priority is enabling the team to do their best work.
Adriana Stein on Being a Business Owner
- Adriana struggled with maintaining quality across growing number of clients and projects as her agency scaled up initially. She worked on developing standardized processes, training her team, calculating finances per project, and setting timelines.
- Adriana now works about 25-30 hours per week on average. She groups tasks into 2-3 key areas per day to avoid context switching and brain overload. This has greatly improved her work-life balance compared to working 12+ hours daily when she first started out.
- Adriana is revamping her agency’s services to focus less on traditional digital marketing and explore new offerings at the intersection of marketing and other domains. This will help them stand out from competition and not rely solely on AI comparatives.
- Finding the right people and training them has been one of Adriana’s biggest challenges. Developing efficient internal processes has taken years of testing different approaches to optimize quality and output.
Tips from Adriana Stein
- Learn by working on real client websites and projects rather than merely studying. Apply your skills and experiment under actual business conditions and metrics to accelerate your learning.
- Always seek to expand your capabilities. Say yes to new tasks and chances to learn. Use your successes as leverage to take on more responsibility and get paid more over time.
- Avoid spending too much time passively reading versus actively working on and learning from real projects. You can gain significant experience in just a few years this way.
- For volatile search performance, look at averages over 3-6 months rather than reacting to short-term fluctuations. Understand the reasons and data behind volatility before deciding if/what changes are needed.
- Google Search Console provides free yet powerful SEO insights. Use it alongside paid tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and SEOquake. Focus on business results more than vanity metrics.
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