“Get Next Action”: The Secret to Boostability’s Success
It’s an exciting time to work at Boostability.
As we enter our ninth year in business, the company continues to grow beyond all expectations. We currently provide SEO services to tens of thousands of small businesses—more than any other company in the world. We’ve almost cornered the market here in the US, and growth is expanding in Europe. Our clients and partners are reporting more success and satisfaction than ever.
Looking back, there’s no shortage of theories and explanations for how we got here. But to me, the secret to our success can be summed up in three words:
“Get next action.”
If you work at Boostability, you know these words well. But what you might not know is that they were the spark that ignited our company into existence. And even though we’ve changed a lot since the beginning, they still capture the heart of Boostability better than anything I can think of.
So as we approach the end of our first decade in business, it’s worth taking some time to talk about “get next action”—how it impacts what we do and how understanding it can help us better serve our customers.
The Story of “Get Next Action”
Many of you know that Boostability started out as a do-it-yourself platform. Nine years ago, SEO for small business was a puzzle that no one had quite solved.
Why?
Because SEO service is a complicated product, and like most complicated products, it requires a lot of workforce, time, and money to run. Of course, these are things that small businesses are always short on.
But Boostability was born out of the realization that SEO didn’t have to be complicated. We saw that if we could untangle the complexities of search engine optimization, we could make it cheap and quick to accomplish. And doing that would tear down the barriers that kept small businesses away.
So we invented the concept of “get next action.” We knew that each individual SEO action itself was simple: Add a meta tag. Fill out a profile. Create a link. It was when these actions stacked on top of each other that service became expensive and time consuming. But if we could reduce SEO down to short, simple actions, we believed that small business owners could actually complete those actions on their own.
And that’s where our DIY platform came from. We built software with SEO strategy programmed into it that dictated which actions to perform and when. It also provided simple instructions on how the client could complete each of those actions on their own, one by one. And then we added the “Get Next Action” button—the functional and conceptual centerpiece of the platform. All the client had to do was click the button for the next brick in their SEO path to be elegantly delivered. That’s where our logo depicting two footprints came from. It represents how we outline the simple step-by-step actions for boosting your online presence.
Of course, the first few iterations of the button didn’t actually say “Get Next Action.” We placed little quips that would rotate in and out, things like: “Lights, Camera, Get Next Action!” We had a lot of fun with the concept.
And small business owners loved the platform. They liked the idea of “get next action” and the way we made SEO a simple exercise they didn’t have to hire high-priced experts to perform. Early on it was clear from our internal sales and online sign-ups that small businesses wanted to have SEO for their websites.
But over time we saw that even though clients liked the idea, finding the time to actually use the platform was an enormous challenge for them. So we made a big change. We moved our get next action software in house and started to perform SEO actions for our clients, rather than asking them to do it themselves.
This shift changed a lot about what we do, but “get next action” remained and still does to this day. And it’s effective as ever. The way I see it, there are three big reasons why.
Why “Get Next Action” Still Works and Why It Always Will
1. It’s simple
In the same way “get next action” originally took the complexity out of SEO for our clients, it’s now making SEO even more intuitive for our teams at Boostability. Because of this, we can often prioritize hiring incredible, intelligent people without having to worry about their expertise in SEO. Even if a new employee comes through our doors with minimal knowledge on the subject, our get-next-action system gives them the support they need to do incredible work for clients.
Of course, with time, all of our employees become experts at what they do. And many of them take it a step further. They use their work with us as an opportunity to learn as much as they can about SEO and online marketing so they can better serve our clients and fulfill their own goals and aspirations.
2. It’s efficient
Most of us here at Boostability know “get next action” as the big red button we click to receive our next task. But there’s a lot more to it than that. Before you ever hit the Get Next Action button, an entire range of sophisticated functions have to occur to make sure the work’s delivered to you in the right order at the right time.
To accomplish this, we focus a lot on efficiency by frontloading the more complex work. This means that the frameworks for our SEO campaigns are designed upfront before any work is done. Those frameworks include instructions on which tasks are to be completed and when, the sequence they’ll roll out in, the team that will complete them, and more.
And to ensure that efficiency continues when the work’s delivered to employees, the system measures how we interact with it. It tracks a specialist’s performance to identify how quickly and efficiently we complete our tasks. The system then uses that information to design a personalized work flow that plays to each specialist’s specific strengths.
Most importantly, all of this efficiency allows us to complete more than one million SEO tasks a year. It’s a game changer for many small businesses that have few other avenues for growing their online presence.
3. It gives our clients what they need
The real marvel of our get next action system is that the efficiencies that allow us to service thousands of clients at once also make it possible to treat each client like an individual.
This is by design. I like to describe our scalable-yet-personalized system as a freeway with many lanes moving at different speeds. We build our clients’ SEO strategies, lay their tasks out, and then set them on that freeway. But, to keep things personalized, we’ve made sure to design exits where their work can easily be paused, examined, and redesigned. During this process we can dialogue with the client, collect more information, and confer with our experts. Once the work’s better adjusted to the clients’ needs and preferences, it’s sent back on the freeway to continue progress.
This is a simple way to describe a very complex process. But what it means is that we can produce quality and quantity in our work—two things usually at odds in SEO. But because of our highly efficient “get next action” system, we’re able to merge the two in a marriage that’s gotten tens of thousands of small businesses on the first page of Google and helped them reach their goals.
There are so many reasons to be excited about the work we do! It’s my commitment that as we move forward we’ll continue to improve—to make the same types of strides that have produced our one-of-a-kind “get next action” system and have made us the envy of our industry.
