The SEO Agency Rollercoaster with Taras Vasylyshyn of Panem

[Music] Welcome to the SEO agency roller coaster podcast. Here we sit down with agency leaders to fuel the ambitions of up and cominging SEO entrepreneurs, equip them with insights they need to start, grow, and scale an SEO agency. Think of it as a road map to success packed with lessons from industry leaders who have been there and done that. My name is Andrew Zeruni and I'm from Mr. Ranking. And as always, I am joined by my co-host, agency coach Chris Simmons of the OMG Center and of the Worshipful Company of Entrepreneurs. Today, we're thrilled to have Teras Vasolition of Panm on the show. We're excited to uncover the highs, lows, and game-changing moments of running a digital agency. If you're ready to take control of your future in SEO, buckle up for a thrilling ride and insightful, packful event. So, let's get started. Welcome to us. Hey Chris. Hello. Hello. Hello. Ready to rock and roll. I think we're we're we're just talking about

fake spring. So, I've got the heating back on at home again. I thought we had the windows open at the weekend and now we got the heating back on. So, jumpers in the house, the heating on for us. Don't know what it's like for you guys where you are, but uh not very nice. Welcome to the podcast, Teras. So, what we really want to do in this in this episode is kind of really get under the skin of like what makes you run this agency, what makes you get involved in this industry because it it is constantly changing. It is a roller coaster. It is up and down every single day. Some days you pop in the champagne, other days maybe popping something else, but we won't talk about that. So, do you want to tell us a little bit about, you know, what your personal journey's been like? How did you get into this and what's uh what's the story? Thanks for the questions. My professional journey has been quite diverse. I've got experience working as a freelancer SEO specialist and head of e-commerce. Over time, this experience have led me the co-founder and CEO of Pan agency and I truly believe that every experience regardless on the role provides valuable lessons that can help you grow and

succeed in the future and experience is it's a great Was it an obvious path? you know, you follow the the the trajectory you've gone from freelance to this to this to this to to running pan or what was like the initial vision what got you go what got you waking up in the morning go ah I'm going to do this myself and and have all the wins and all of the pain I guess it's a game motivation to founding partner and from the very beginning my vision was to create a company that's not to the success of the few organizations in the time you can deliver exceptional results to the wider wider list of clients and uh I guess it's uh to create additional value to to your client and to your maybe partners of the business. It's it's the main idea. Yeah. So we understand that there's a lot of risk involved in this journey that you chose to have in your life and I was wondering what is the most important risk you took at Panm and why you decided to take it. We just want to understand like what was there like a moment that you were having a sleeping really poorly because you were just

struggling with deciding what to do next and I just want to understand what you think was one of the most important risks for Panm. Maybe the biggest risk I took at Panm was transition into the role of CEO and in the early days of Panm and few next years we had very flat structure. my partner and I we we were SEO team leads we we had teams and uh it's not managing role and uh switching from SEO team leads to traditional executive and it's was a big step to be honest taking on the SEO role was a major leap for me I wasn't sure I would be able to handle with uh this broader list of responsibilities make the right strategic decision ers and lead the companies. Looking back, it was that defining moment that helped me and company grow both personally and professionally and it's uh ultimately allow PANM to evolve into more mature

and scalable organization. Besides the fact that Panm is still working, what is your biggest moment that makes you proud? The biggest achievement of Panama so far in your journey? Actually, it's hard to choose one thing. First of all, I'm proud we have built a strong team of professionals with diverse expertise. Secondly, we are known for delivering outstanding results for our clients, helping their businesses grow online and achieve their goals. All right, so let's move on to the present section of uh of this uh discussion. Running an agency is a bit stressful at times. Uh a lot stressful at times actually. What is it aside from your alarm clock that gets you up in the morning? What keeps you going when things are hard? set up this Morgan because I believe that Ukrainian businesses are now one of strongest voice of Ukrainian in the world. Our mission is uh to integrate into the global business community into global SEO community marketing community. It's about resilience. It's about excellence and showing the world we are capable to

be an trusted digital partners. that what's uh makes me going every day and even on the weekend even on the weekends like it's like mission it's uh nowadays we should provide better results and it's moving fast I I had to look at your website earlier today and um you offer a lot of different services what specifically do you if you were to sort of say this is this is the niche the specific services that we're we're offering or like how are you kind of tailoring all of these services to you to meet like a client's unique set of needs and and desires. I guess first step is I really understand your ICP customer profile and uh main perspective it's like our like main idea it's problem solving and and trying to understand how we can solve some problems for our clients and when you understand your ICP industry region and main maybe industry insights it can help uh to create better communication and

collaboration with you nice I like that just This might be something that uh that you bring into the agency as a business part rather than for the clients. But what I've been working on with um with the SE ranking team recently is tools and and and content to help um improve agency profitability. One of which I've built a a tool recently, Andrew has seen it. And and what I'm adding on to that at the minute is a way that a new lead comes in. It uses the SC ranking API. It crawls all of that data, fires over to the Open AI API. it pulls a lot more insight through and then you can overlay that with the ICP of your business with the the average fees that the clients might spend and it tells you, yeah, you can go and pitch for this. Here's the things that you should include in your in your proposal or your outreach. No, you shouldn't pitch for this. This doesn't fit your ICP. And that's using like two individual tools. One is an uh one is an AI API. The other one is just the a data API from SE Ranking. And then you overlay an additional kind of level of insight that kind of helps you go, "This

is my outreach email. There we go." And uh and I think that you from a business point of view, AI is certainly going to be helping from a workflow point of view, perhaps not just from a content creation side of things, but also probably uh from actually running the business more effectively. And uh I can see agencies starting to want to use these kinds of things for the business aspect. I read I read read the news that one of the AIs is offering uh $20,000 a month super intelligent AI that will just do everything for you like and give you like a super like a billion dollar plan for the next half a year. So yeah that's very interesting stuff. Yeah. I want to talk about the Panama's team. So what was the composition like when you started? How it grew? Is it made up of in-house professionals a lot of freelancers working with you partners? Please just address that situation because we just want to understand how you make up your team so that it performs smoothly and performs really well. Actually we have big team I guess maybe 100 professionals at at Panm. Our

team is structured into several departments into SEO pay-per-click and others. Each fosers divided into teams approximately five to seven to seven specialists. Each team includes SEO team lead, tech leads, uh project manager, middle specialist, junior specialist. Let's take a step back. You're telling me already what the situation is at a at an agency that has over a 100 employees. So that's an exceptionally well performing yeah business agency. So let's take a step back when you had two people. How did you expand that team? What did you look for in new employees to make sure that they're in it for the long game? And what did you avoid? what do you uh try to avoid in new employees and how do you keep them motivated on the team? How do you make sure that they stick around with you for I don't know five years for example? Our growth was very very flat and we we try to hire the right professionals and we uh set up we set up internship and we deliver to

community education content. We educate our people. We educate community. We try to hire the best performer. We try to hire to hire I guess maybe the best soft and hard skilled uh professionals and uh and actually we are here. If you forget the skills based thing because obviously with a large team dynamics is really really important. You know you don't want the SEO team sitting completely separate to the PPC people because there's obvious benefits to those people working together quite well. What is it from a personality point of view? From a from a humanity human point of view because agencies are people businesses. What is it? Yeah. What is it you look at when you when you're hiring it like okay on paper SEO skills 100% PPC skills 10% they're going to be in the SEO team really nice person. How are you deciding out of like two people which one would get the job? What's the what's the human aspect that comes into those decisions? Firstly, when we hiring new staff, we

look for individuals who align with our values and who can contribute proactively. We avoid candidates who lack accountability. We avoid candidates who resist collaboration or are not willing to embrace the growth mindset. Awesome. Looking into the future, what is it like what is one thing um that you would love to change about the whole industry in total? If I could change one thing in the industry, I would focusing exclusively on ethical and white hat industries or niches and it's eliminating sectors like gambling, like adult industries. And uh in my opinion, digital marketing has immersed potential to drive sustainable long-term growth for businesses that create real and prioritizing transparency services for ethical industries would not only improve their

reputation on the field but also foster more mindful and responsible business practice. Let's talk about goals like a big goal cuz you said once the company was flat, it was not growing. So you realized there were different goals for 2022. The war started 2023 2024. Let's talk about last year and what is the goal for this year for PANM. You know our country is at war with Russia and I believe that keeping our entire team intact and continuing continuing to grow is already a major achievement. This year's goal is became an even stronger company boosting efficiency and develop even better results for our clients and uh team I guess 20 20% it will be the understood thank you for sharing the plans. So quickfire round I've got three questions for you quickfire. So cats or dogs? It's definitely dogs. I have a companion name but Kobe just like Kobe

Bryant. Tea or coffee? coffee but with some limitation number of copies in a day. Yeah. Well, fair. We have to regulate ourselves otherwise we'd be uh moving too quickly. And then the final one and this is this may well get you cancelled in the SEO industry or maybe not. Links or content. Content is a king but distribution is a queen and she runs. Yeah, that was really good. All right, thank you Tus for coming on and let's do the outro and I want to say that that's a wrap for this episode of the SEO agency roller coaster. A huge thank you to Taras Vasilion of Panam for coming on and sharing his journey and inspiring the next wave of SEO entrepreneurs. This podcast is powered by SE Ranking, the SEO tool set that helps agencies scale smarter and achieve lasting success. If you're serious about building up your agency ranking is here to help you make your mark online. Hit subscribe for more expert insights, motivation, and agency growth hacks. Keep pushing forward, stay ahead of the curve, and remember, your agency success story starts with action. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Tas, for coming on.

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