Why We Stopped Calling Ourselves an SEO Agency

For years we sold SEO. Same as everyone else. Discovery call, audit, technical fixes, content plan, link strategy, monthly reporting. We were good at it. The work was honest. The results were real.

And it kept ending the same way. The client would land a small win, ask "what's next," and we'd realize the next move wasn't SEO at all. It was a paid media problem. Or a positioning problem. Or a conversion problem. Or, increasingly, an AI visibility problem that didn't even exist as a category two years ago.

So we stopped pretending SEO was the answer to questions SEO couldn't answer.

The problem with vertical agencies

Most growth agencies sell one thing. They have to. The economics only work if they specialize hard, build an internal playbook, and run that playbook against every client. Specialization is how you get good. Specialization is also how you start force-fitting clients into the work you sell.

If you only sell SEO, every audit ends with an SEO recommendation. If you only sell paid, every audit ends with a paid recommendation. Both can be honest people doing honest work. Neither can give you the answer that's actually right for your stage and your market — because the answer might be "stop doing what we sell."

This isn't a moral failing. It's an incentive structure. We were inside it for years and felt the pull every week.

What changed our mind

Two things, both happening at once.

First, the channels stopped being separable. AI search is not SEO. It's also not content marketing, not PR, not paid. It's the messy intersection of all four, and the companies winning at it are the ones treating it as a system, not a department. The SEO agency that doesn't know how Reddit gets cited by Gemini is missing half the picture. The PR agency that doesn't know how schema markup affects ChatGPT is missing the other half.

Second, the buyers got tired of the carousel. Every founder we talked to had been through three or four agencies. Each one came in promising to fix everything, ran their playbook, hit a ceiling, and the founder fired them and tried the next one. The pattern wasn't about agency quality. It was about scope mismatch. The founder needed strategy. The agency sold tactics. Both were doing their jobs.

The general contractor model

So we rebuilt Growing Pies around a different shape: we own the strategy and the relationship; specialist partners own the execution.

Think about how a good general contractor builds a house. They don't pour the concrete. They don't hang the drywall. They don't wire the electrical. They hire the plumber who's actually good at plumbing, the electrician who's actually good at electrical, and the framer who's actually good at framing. The contractor's job is to know which trade you need, in what order, and how to hold each one to the spec.

That's the model. Our job is to walk into your business, figure out what's actually broken, and bring in the right specialist partners to fix it. SEO partner for SEO. Paid media partner for paid. AI visibility for AI visibility. Content partner when content is the bottleneck. We architect the strategy. They execute. We measure. You see one strategist managing a coordinated team instead of four agencies fighting over scope.

The tradeoffs (because there are tradeoffs)

This model isn't strictly better. It's better for a specific kind of company.

If you're a Series A SaaS that knows exactly what's broken — you need backlinks, you need a paid spend audit, you need a landing page redesign — you don't need us. Hire the specialist directly. You'll save 20% on the markup and get faster execution.

If you're somewhere between $1M and $20M ARR, you've hired two or three agencies, you can't quite tell what's working, and your team is too small to manage four vendors at once — that's where this works. You get one strategic relationship instead of four tactical ones. You stop being the integration layer between people who don't talk to each other. And when the right move is to fire one of the partners, we're the ones who tell you that, because we're not the ones losing the contract.

Why this matters more in 2026

The discovery problem is fragmenting. Five years ago you could win on Google alone. Today you have to win on Google, on AI search, on the platforms your buyers actually use to research you, and on the comparison sites AI cites back. That's not one channel. That's a system, and systems need an architect.

SEO is still part of it. It's just not the whole job, and pretending it is leaves money on the table. We'd rather tell you that honestly and bring in the people who can fix the parts we can't.

That's why we don't call ourselves an SEO agency anymore. We do SEO. We also do everything around it. The work is bigger than the label.