My SEO Story In Under 2 Minutes
I didn’t grow up dreaming of becoming an SEO agency. In fact, for years, I was just a confused teenager trying to figure out what I was good at. Failing in school subjects, failing at business ideas, and constantly second guessing myself. But through trial and error, obsession, and real world business experience, I found my path.
Today, I run SEO With Senthil, an SEO agency in Singapore that helps service based and e-commerce businesses in Singapore rank on Google and AI search, and grow their revenue using SEO. This is the story of how I got here, including countless setbacks I faced, meeting my co-founder Rohith and building our SEO agency together.
I Was Clueless About SEO At First
Back in 2014, I received an unusual birthday gift from my dad, a 3-day internet marketing program costing $3000. It was completely unexpected, and I remember asking myself, “What is SEO? Would learning SEO even be worth it?”
I was clueless when I walked into that SEO workshop, but by the end of it, I was excited by the possibilities of mastering Search Engine Optimization. The instructor gave us all a challenge, to start a website around any service in Singapore and work on dominating the first page of search engine rankings for keywords related to the service.
Me and my group decided to start a cleaning services website offering cleaning services in Singapore. Within 4 months of applying the SEO strategy and tactics taught to us, we ranked on Google Page 1 for “Office Cleaning Services Singapore” and were getting enquiries.
Though we sold off that business eventually, my experience showed me the power of ranking on search engines. It taught me that SEO works if you do it right. The prospect of starting a business around SEO excited me. Most importantly, it gave me the belief that “SEO services could bring in targeted traffic and grow the revenue for any business”.
Around that same period of time, I had joined my university’s minor in entrepreneurship program, where we were pushed to start our own business with other students.
While we started off customising notebooks for gifting, we pivoted to offering notebook and t-shirt printing services soon after. Following the pivot, I was tasked by my team members to work on the SEO for my company’s notebook and apparel printing services.
Yes.
I had to take charge of all aspects of our SEO marketing. From keyword research to content creation, on page SEO, technical SEO and even off page SEO.
My First Wins in SEO
Armed with curiosity and a desire to test my new knowledge (on my own this time), I immediately began applying SEO strategies to my printing business. It wasn’t easy. Google’s algorithms were (and still are!) a tricky puzzle that is always evolving. I spent countless nights figuring out how to increase our organic traffic, understanding the impact of high quality backlink building and and experimenting with my content strategy.
And then came the first “aha” moment. With each small adjustment I made (tweaking meta titles, fixing site structure, writing better content), I saw my website climb Google search rankings for relevant keywords in our niche. While we were first only ranking for less competitive keywords like “Notebook Printing Singapore” and “Hoodie Printing Singapore”, we soon began to dominate Google Page 1 in the search engine results pages for highly competitive keywords like “T-Shirt Printing Singapore”.
It felt like magic, but really, it was just the result of persistence and learning by doing. I wasn’t just seeing higher Google search rankings and more organic traffic. My company started generating leads, traffic turning into customers, and before I knew it, we had achieved half a million dollars in annual revenue for our printing business by December 2018.
Search Engine Optimization wasn’t just a side experiment anymore. It was the engine that drove all my business growth.
My First Business Challenge
Unfortunately, despite our large revenue numbers, we were making a nett loss. We had built a business with poor business fundamentals, due to mistakes like over-hiring, financial mismanagement and insourcing our printing services too early.
We even completely lost focus by starting a new business in 2019, an art studio where people across Singapore could paint on t-shirts, tote bags, sneakers, and more.
Eventually, we shut down our printing business to go all-in on the studio. And once again, I was in charge of growing the business through SEO, this time with a shorter timeframe and even higher pressure.
The Turning Point: A Different Kind Of SEO Strategy
A typical SEO agency might have helped us rank for keywords like “Art Jamming Singapore”, “T-Shirt Painting Singapore”, or “Tote Bag Painting Singapore”, keywords with decent search volume and purchase intent, but low revenue potential. These searches would bring in people willing to spend no more than $30 to $60 per session.
But I knew that wasn’t going to move the needle.
That is when I decided to take a completely different approach. I started targeting higher-value, high-intent, higher revenue potential keywords like “Team Building Activities Singapore”, “Indoor Team Building Singapore”, and “Kids Birthday Party Ideas Singapore”.
Because while these keywords were harder to rank for, the ROI per client was dramatically higher. A single team-building client could spend $500 to $2000. A parent booking a birthday party? Easily over $500.
So instead of chasing traffic, I focused on building content that was better, more useful, and more engaging than anything else online, what SEO experts call “skyscraper content.” Then, I backed that content with high-quality backlinks, and optimised every page for both rankings and conversions.
By Quarter 3 of 2019, it all clicked.
Our studio was booked almost every day, corporate teams on weekdays, birthday parties on weekends. And in December 2019, we hit our best month ever: $60,000 in revenue, all from organic search.
I turned that approach into a framework I now use for my own agency and for my agency clients.
If you are curious to find out how this framework can be applied to your business, book a competitor gap analysis with us here.
As our sales continued to grow, we were looking to move into a bigger studio at a more central location. Then, something completely unexpected happened. The first Covid19 cases were discovered in Singapore.
Transitioning to a SEO Agency
Government policies such as venue capacity restrictions and lockdowns hit us hard. Our revenue plunged, slumping more than 90%. We were devastated. We still had loans we had taken for our previous t-shirt printing company, loans we had taken for our art studio renovation and high monthly overheads to pay for.
We vacated our studio, downsized our team and pivoted our business to a 100% e-commerce model.
The next 2 years were tough. 7 team members including staff and co-founders had to leave the team one after another. Only I was left to manage the entire business.
I had to tweak our SEO strategy to generate more sales for our art jamming kits. I had to streamline our business operations while minimising our overheads. With the right strategies in place, business began to slowly pick up again.
As the Covid-19 pandemic came to an end in 2023, I began to reflect on whether I wanted to open up my art studio again. But deep down I knew that art was never my passion.
Why not do something that truly excited me instead?
Why not do something that I had grown to be an expert in?
The thrill of watching my businesses grow, thanks to ranking for our target keywords on search engines, had fueled my passion for SEO. And I wasn’t just interested in ranking my own sites anymore, I wanted to help other small businesses experience the same transformation with my SEO services.
So I decided to sell off my art studio and start my SEO agency, SEO With Senthil.
While initially I was focused on launching a SEO course for founders, I decided to pivot to a 6 month SEO program offering unlimited SEO help for founders. As a unique perk of my SEO program, I did the SEO keyword research for my clients, came up with a SEO content strategy for them to rank faster on search engines and consulted them whenever they got stuck.
I remember the excitement and sense of relief of helping my first clients hit page 1 on the search engines successfully. Even one of my clients, who was in the ultra competitive real estate industry in Singapore, started ranking on Google Page 1 in as little as 4 months..
However, I noticed a significant number of my clients struggling to find time to do the SEO work themselves too. This pushed me to pivot into a full fledged SEO agency offering SEO services instead.
The Next Chapter: Meeting Rohith
Building SEO With Senthil taught me one thing clearly. Doing everything alone has a ceiling.
In December 2024, Rohith messaged me on LinkedIn. He was planning a birthday trip to Singapore and simply wanted to meet people in the SEO industry. We met once, had a meal, talked about SEO and business, and parted ways.
Then he went back to India and started digging into my clients’ websites anyway. Pointing out technical SEO fixes I had missed. Fixing issues a technical SEO freelancer had messed up. Without any contracts or payment terms.
That is when things clicked.
Rohith owns the technical side: audits, site architecture, speed and crawlability. I own strategy, content and client growth. Together we move faster and deliver better results for our clients than either of us could alone.
In early 2026, SEO With Senthil became SEO with Senthil – Seedscale, with our SEO agency billing falling under the entity name ,Seedscale Pte Ltd.
Building SEO Success Stories For Our Clients
Everything I learned the hard way, through businesses that grew, businesses that failed, and the long climb back, now goes into one thing: getting results for our SEO clients.
At SEO With Senthil, Rohith and I don’t chase rankings for the sake of a report. We focus on helping our clients rank for keywords that actually moves your revenue. On Google and increasingly on AI search like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews.
That approach is what’s behind real businesses seeing real growth, including ours, documented step by step:
- SEO With Senthil Case Study: Ranked Page 1 for “SEO agency Singapore” in 4 months against decade-old competitors with $0 in ad spend.
- Floristique Case Study: Added S$143,593 in additional organic revenue and +74% organic sessions in 3 months after switching from a larger SEO agency on this list.
- Sunday Bedding Case Study: Ranked #1 for “bedsheets online Singapore”, moving from position 33 to the top spot.
- Transform Borders Case Study: Rescued a site completely blocked by Google, generating 2,580 organic clicks and +700% growth in 6 months.
Right now, we are offering a free SEO audit and competitor gap analysis for a limited time. We’ll show you exactly where your rankings are leaking, what your competitors are doing that you aren’t, and the fastest path to closing that gap.