A Chat with Simon Schnieders, Founder at Blue Array

Blue Array is a proudly ‘bootstrapped business’ that started in 2016 and is now the UK’s largest SEO agency.

The agency has over 50 employees, who are obsessively focused on delivering results via organic search for clients including GoCardless, Pret, Future, RAC and Boden.

 

How did you come up with the idea for Blue Array?

 

There was a real gap in the market at the time for a specialist SEO agency.

The common wisdom back then, was that you needed to become a generalist to offer full-service solutions and to diversify revenue streams. Generalists have lots of cross-selling abilities, so you can see the logic here. However, this made no sense to me given CMOs were getting much savvier and far more performance driven. They wanted clear vertical expertise, where generalists often had a very superficial understanding of organic search.

Having held senior positions at Zoopla, Mail Online and Yell, I knew how important this area of search was for these businesses, and when executed well, could be the dominant source of traffic and acquisitions. To give you some perspective, at Zoopla, non-brand organic search was driving around 16 million visits and was responsible for a £1 billion IPO during my tenure.

Executing on SEO to the highest of standards and results is what we’ve been obsessively focused on, as well as setting the bar for our industry. Our mission statement is “to elevate our people, customers and industry through SEO and use our business to positively influence a better world”.

 

 

How has Blue Array evolved during the pandemic?

 

We’ve become a UK-wide employer with a distributed workforce, which has been a huge change for us and something we’re still adapting to. Tactically speaking, we really ramped up our e-Learning software ‘The Blue Array Academy’ and made that available for free to help those that had been furloughed or made redundant during the pandemic.

We subsequently discovered that this could be a good strategic enabler for us in elevating both our industry and our brand, so we’ve just launched a completely free Technical SEO training course.

 

What can we hope to see from Blue Array in the future?

 

We’ve got solid systems and processes to allow us to scale rapidly, so we’ve got our eyes firmly on internationalisation. Expect to see us continuing to raise the bar in our industry, never resting on our mission.