How We Work

Growth Machine is a boutique content marketing agency that focuses on producing long-form written material that is optimized for search performance.

We partner with brands of all sizes, from startups to enterprise teams, to produce strategic, keyword-optimized website and blog content.

Our process begins with onboarding, which consists of a survey and meeting that allow us to familiarize ourselves with our clients, their needs, goals, and existing brand voice and tone.

From there, we conduct category and keyword research, focusing on targeted keywords that indicate a need or problem that our client’s solution addresses, ensuring that the traffic we generate represents new qualified leads to the site.

Once our client approves the initial round of content planning, and selects the project writers from a vetted and prioritized list of subject matter experts in our proprietary writer network, we get started on the production.

Producing an article from drafting to publishing takes 10-14 days, after which our clients review and approve the final draft before publishing. We take care of the rest – including staging or publishing live to your site.

From there, we rinse and repeat, producing high quality content on an ongoing basis, and providing our clients visibility into their project’s progress with KPI tracking dashboards, weekly top-line email updates, and monthly deep-dive strategy meetings, as well as access to your dedicated project team for any additional questions that arise between scheduled check-ins.

Frequently Asked Questions About How We Work

We’ve curated a proprietary network of subject matter expert (SME) professional writers so that we always have the right writers available for every project.

With access to over 3,500 SMEs across dozens of categories, we never have to rely on AI or use generalist writers, and can produce the authoritative, thought-leadership content that Google prefers to rank.

Our keyword research is conducted by senior-level project managers whose extensive experience allows them to successfully incorporate your marketing goals and SEO best practices to produce a custom list of keywords that are the best fit for your specific brand.

We set ourselves apart from other agencies by never going for high competition, broad-appeal keywords. Instead, our approach targets longer tail queries that align with relevant research or purchase intent, and are rank-able for your site.

Other agencies might get you traffic, but our approach results in a sustainable stream of qualified leads to your site.

We have developed a rigorous multi-step process that every article undergoes to ensure it meets a high standard of quality when it comes to strategy, research, planning, production, revision, and publishing.

From start to finish, a single article takes around 6 weeks from keyword research to publishing. Our detailed production process allows us to produce high-quality content at scale without missing a deadline.

Our content plans (detailed editorial calendars) are planned in rolling 6-8 week segments, so you will always know which keywords are scheduled and exactly which day they will be published.

Not unless we’re hired specifically to do so.

Although we’ll occasionally use AI tools for preliminary research, that’s where the use of AI ends. We’ll never use AI to write, edit, or revise an article unless we’re specifically commissioned to do so (and even then it’s 20% AI/80% human).

Because AI produces its work by amalgamating information that’s already out on the internet, it is unable to produce authoritative content that moves the discussion forward – the kind of content Google ranks highest.

In fact, most AI tools aren’t even sophisticated enough to write a coherent 1,500 word article on its own without including redundant or inaccurate information.

Of course! As our client, you’ll have the opportunity to approve each 6-8 week round of content before it goes into production, and each article is submitted for final approval before we publish for you.

If at any point you want to switch to direct publishing – where you feel we’ve nailed your brand voice, tone, and message and want us to publish without you taking the time to review and approve each individual article, we can do that too.

We tailor each project scope to your goals and budget, so your content plan really determines the answer to this question. However, our typical project scope is between 6-12 articles per month or 1 to 3 articles per week.

Our rigorous production process ensures we are able to publish on time, every time. Assuming we get your feedback and approval on time, we’ll always publish each article on the date we committed to in the content plan.

Our job is to take as much of the content burden off of your plate, so all of our managed content plans include publishing support at no extra charge, for which we’d need access to the administrative side of your site.

However, if you prefer to publish your content yourselves, we can either stage the draft in your CMS (which we’d still need admin access for), or turn over a final version of the article to you to upload and publish live on the site.

We provide the appropriate number of attribution-free, licensed images for each article, based on total wordcount, and including a header image.

However, if you would like us to use your custom image library, we can easily do that instead. Just let us know!

Each project gets a dedicated project manager to handle strategy, planning, research, and analytics; a dedicated editor to handle writer training and management, editing, and communication about individual articles; and a subject matter expert professional writer or writers (most projects have 2-3 writers working on them concurrently).

It depends on what you mean by results.

While our methods are sound and have been proven out repeatedly over the last 7+ years, the reality is that SEO results are ultimately up to Google and its users.

Although we are able to project how long it will take to see results, and track KPIs throughout the lifecycle of the project, we will never promise that you’ll get X amount of traffic/revenue/conversions by Y date. Any agency who tells you otherwise shouldn’t be trusted.

But here’s what we do guarantee:

Our proven process has been stress-tested across dozens of industries across the last seven years.
Our keyword research and content strategy is bespoke for each client and tailored to your goals.
Our editors are some of the best in the business, and seamlessly marry SEO best practices with editorial prowess.
Our core values of transparency, hard work, and kindness translate into successful and happy long-term relationships with our clients.
We’re excited and ready to help fuel your brand’s growth and success.

This is a long response and hopefully all of the information above helps round it out!

But here is our elevator pitch:

Growth Machine is a boutique SEO content agency that partners with leading brands to create effective and lasting SEO results.

We’ve worked with multiple Fortune 500 brands including Adobe, Quickbooks and Yelp but also have a passion for lifestyle and CPG companies.

We’d love to tell you more about how we work and how we’re different from other agencies like us. Feel free to reach out and we’ll get back to you with more information.

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