The Agency that boosts your business digitally
Rank My Business is the fastest-growing digital marketing agency in Australia with clients across the globe. Kunal Shah, the Director, and Zuber Sheikh, the Managing Director are the key people to build this digital empire.
The founders started off this journey by offering only SEO services way back in 2015. However, today, Rank My Business has grown to a full-service digital marketing company in Melbourne with a passionate team of over 150 people. Despite the pandemic situation, their agency has grown tremendously in the last two years and they have grown our employee strength from 60 to 150 plus employees. And they recently organized a corporate event for all employees across India as a token of appreciation for the hard work they’ve put in during the tough times.
The Key People
The director of Rank My Business, Kunal Shah, moved to Melbourne for his higher education and worked in a corporate environment to better understand the Australian market. It didn’t take him long to make the decision to start his own agency, which he used to provide local Australian businesses with digital marketing solutions before subsequently expanding to other nations.
Rank My Business India’s managing director, Zuber Shaikh, comes from a non-digital background yet has extensive experience in the business world. His interest in the digital world has been piqued by his work with Sony Pictures Networks. This gave them the chance to team up with Kunal Shah and launch the Indian division of Rank My Business together.
Through a recent conversation with Entrepreneur Insights, they have shared some useful insights about their entrepreneurial journey and how they are helping their clients grow.
Biggest challenges to overcome
The digital environment is dynamic and ever-evolving, thanks to the changing Google and social media algorithms. Top this up with high client expectations, especially during the 2 years of the pandemic when market scenarios had changed drastically. But we took these challenges as an opportunity, and we focused on improving our game, while meeting client expectations at the same time.
One thing that could be done differently
Having a dedicated R&D division since our initial days could have helped us a lot as that could have alerted us of Google algorithm changes as they happen, given that it is one of the biggest platforms. But now we already have it and our continuous R&D work helps us understand what these changes are, and allows us to experiment with different things that can keep our clients a step ahead. Contact learning happens across the organization through our R&D department, which is quite unique compared to other agencies out there. There are agencies whose style of execution is different – where they put the product/website live and then start the observation; whereas, at Rank My Business, we believe in research and experimenting with everything before implementing any solutions for our clients.
Revolution means
Disrupting the industry with greater results and better outcomes for clients, in this very competitive world.
Industry evolution in the last few years
The industry has become quite sophisticated to what it was, especially with regards to the evolution of the tools and technology we use. There are companies in the market which give you 3rd party data access. For example, they provide you video recordings to show user journey of the website which was not possible two years ago. One can literally see when any customers are scrolling through your website and what do they do! So, these types of updates give us an in-depth analysis about what the customers’ requirement is, and help us accordingly to improve their website / page. This is known as CRO Techniques (Conversion Rate Optimization).
With such tools and data on hand, we are able to deliver more and fulfill clients’ expectations in a better way.
Another really important change in the industry is the clients’ knowledge about our product. Few years back, not many people/companies were aware about SEO. But again, internationally, companies/ SMEs understand the importance of SEO. India is still a growing market when it comes to understanding how Google ranking works or the benefits of SEO. Though major brands in India use SEO services, SMEs in India are yet to adopt it as part of their regular work.
Client base
We have overall 500 plus clients based out of Australia, Dubai and Oman Market. We are planning to explore other countries in and around Dubai. We are trying to build our base in countries like US, UK, Singapore, Malayasia and beyond.
We started from Australia and explored Dubai which is our 2nd best market place. We have range of clients spanning different industry verticals – from retail to corporate, hospitality to healthcare, FMCG, e-commerce and B2B clients as well. We work across a wide range of business/streams where we help different clients grow their businesses through our SEO + digital marketing services.
Priceless Asset of the company
I believe that any company is incomplete without their loyal employees and strength. At Rank My Business, we are truly proud of our team, and can unabashedly say that they have been, and continue to be the key pillar in our growth journey. Having the right people with the right skillsets and knowledge has helped us to grow at 2X the page. Moreover, the collective integrity towards our work and clients allows us to maintain transparency throughout the progress of our work. In fact, our customer retention is over 70%, and employee retention is nearly 90%, which is much higher than most other agencies that we know of. We have not let go of any employees due to the pandemic but instead, have more than doubled in team size!
Entrepreneur Insights: The most difficult task in being in your Industry
As mentioned, our industry is very dynamic with the Google algorithm changing frequently, and new trends in content marketing. To maintain quality and deliver great results amidst all this is certainly challenging, but also enjoyable.
Entrepreneur Insights: What are the most important decisions you make as leaders?
In leadership positions, there are many tough decisions that one has to make on a day-to-day basis. This could be based on client targets, employee concerns or other business pressures. But this notwithstanding, one of the most important decisions to run a successful business is hiring the right staff for the organization. This, and timely decisions to take care of any emergency situations are some of the most important choices that we look into.
Encouraging creative thinking
As a company, we support creativity, and encourage employees to come up with ideas to help the company grow, or to help departments work more efficiently. We consider all these suggestions. If their idea for any department is accepted, then they would also get an opportunity to lead it. And if the company derives any profit from the same, 50% of the profits will be shared with the employee. We believe this is a good way to inspire the team to think and share ideas that can help the company.
Future endeavours
We would surely want to take the company to the next level. We have seen the growth in past two years and are heading towards the new stage. We would like to take the company public in the next three years. We plan to put in all efforts to get our processes better. Go for funding, reach to a stage to distribute employee shares which we are planning to do in the coming year.
Entrepreneur Insights: What is the best advice you can give to entrepreneurs?
The best advice that I can give, especially to entrepreneurs or business owners… and I can only speak from the digital perspective is that Google can change your business, if everything is done right. Do digital right, and your business will always thrive.
– Indrami Banarjee