How Stewart Vickers (SEO Jesus) Grew His Agency With YouTube
Michael met Stewart Vickers, better known as SEO Jesus, at an SEO event. It seemed like everyone there knew him. In this conversation Stewart talks about building SEO skills on the side while working in corporate, what he learned the hard way about retention, and how starting a YouTube channel in 2023 turned a bad week of client cancellations into his fastest growth.
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Topics covered
- Moving from corporate to self-employed without a big leap
- Using side projects and employers as your first case studies
- Why agencies are in the "satisfaction game", not just the deliverables game
- Reporting habits that help retention
- How a YouTube experiment became his main client channel
- The story behind the SEO Jesus name
- YouTube monetization and where to learn SEO
Key takeaways
- You don't have to make a big leap. Stewart built skills and results on the side, used them to land better jobs, and only quit once he had runway.
- Your employer and your own projects can be your first case studies.
- Clients judge an agency on the experience as much as the results. Account management and regular check-ins matter.
- Show the work. A screenshot of a rising graph lands better than a spreadsheet of keyword positions.
- In-person events can get you to around $10k a month, but Stewart found them hard to scale beyond that.
- YouTube is a conversion machine as well as a traffic source. Viewers who've watched hours of your videos arrive ready to buy.
- Keep it simple. A quick, low-production screen recording is enough to start.
Show notes
💼 From corporate to self-employed, one step at a time
Michael often hears that his guests all went straight from school into business, so he asks Stewart how he made the switch. Stewart did things the "safe" way. He went to university and got a graduate job in London, learning SEO from podcasts on his commute.
His side-project shaving blog was doing well, so he walked his employer through how it worked. They tried the same approach on hyper-niche insurance products, and the phones started ringing within two weeks. That got him headhunted into a bigger insurance company, where he saw how big corporate SEO agencies worked and realized he could do better. He left corporate in 2022 with savings and the money from selling an affiliate site.
“I'd taken years and years of proving myself before I took on a single client.”
Stewart Vickers, 9:38
🤝 The satisfaction game
When Stewart first started his agency, he refused to have account managers. They'd just do the work and deliver results. Then he noticed clients weren't staying long. After a new client complained about a lack of onboarding, people at a conference told him the truth: someone who spends $3,000 with you wants to feel like they've spent $3,000 with you.
Michael shares what helped his own retention. One thing is a live dashboard with a weekly automated summary. Another is breaking the work into small steps and updating clients at each one, because "work that's not communicated isn't appreciated". Stewart adds a simple fix of his own: if the graph is going up, send the client a screenshot of the graph.
“You think you're in the deliverables game. You think it's all about doing the SEO. You're in the people pleasing and the satisfaction game.”
Stewart Vickers, 11:42
🎥 How a YouTube experiment changed everything
Stewart built the agency's first clients through in-person events, including a high-ticket mastermind in Colombia. That got him to around $10k a month within six months, but it didn't scale. In late August 2023 he tried YouTube with a basic screen share. One of his first videos, about publishing 500 AI blog posts, got 10,000 views in two days. He calls it beginner's luck.
Two weeks later, three clients paused or left in a single week. But in that same week, people who'd watched his videos started emailing to ask whether he was taking on clients. There was no call to action and no funnel behind it. Stewart says he went from around $15 to 20k a month to $50k a month within about six months of starting YouTube.
“it's not just a traffic machine, but it's a conversion machine because we know that the more time you spend with someone, the more likely they are to convert.”
Stewart Vickers, 22:44
🙏 The story behind the name
The SEO Jesus brand came from viewers' comments and from strangers telling him he looks like Jesus. Fellow YouTuber Julian Goldie told him at a conference to rename his channel. Stewart already owned the domain, so he went for it. He says even skeptics usually come round once they've watched a video.
💰 YouTube for B2B
Stewart lays out what he calls the YouTube monetization pyramid. Ads and affiliate income sit at the bottom, then services, consulting, courses, coaching and brand deals, and at the top, equity in businesses. He mentions that his last brand deal was worth 10K.
Both agree you don't need fancy production for a B2B audience. Download Loom, record a quick walkthrough and publish it. A video with a couple of hundred views can still bring in a client.
📚 Where to learn SEO
Stewart's advice is to pick who you trust and avoid the hype. The fundamentals haven't changed much: write the right content and get other websites to link to you. He points people to his YouTube channel and his one-page websites course. In that course you build a lead generation site on an exact-match domain, add basic content and do foundation links like directories and press releases.
About Stewart Vickers
Stewart Vickers, known as SEO Jesus, runs an SEO agency and a courses and coaching business. He started with his own affiliate sites, including a shaving blog that earned commissions on products like shaving brushes. He then worked in corporate marketing and SEO roles in London, including at insurance companies, before leaving corporate in 2022.
He started his YouTube channel in September 2023, posting a video a day at first. At the time of recording he had just published his 401st video. His courses include YouTube Millionaire Mastery and a course on one-page lead generation websites.
Episode links
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