How This Side Hustler Makes 7500 Monthly as a Freelance SEO Strategist

Lucas: So a few weeks ago I was talking to a friend who runs a small bakery — four locations in the Pacific Northwest — and she mentioned she pays a freelancer seven hundred a month just for SEO. And I thought, that's interesting, but I didn't think much of it until she said the freelancer has fifteen clients like her. Luna: Fifteen clients at seven hundred each — that's ten thousand five hundred a month. That's not a side hustle, that's a full-time salary. Lucas: Right. But the person I'm profiling today, Alex, actually keeps it smaller on purpose. He does eight to ten clients, charges between six hundred and a thousand a month, and clears around seventy-five hundred monthly. And he treats it as a side hustle — he works maybe fifteen hours a week on it. Luna: Fifteen hours for seventy-five hundred dollars. That's a hundred and twenty-five dollars an hour, roughly. So what exactly is he doing for that money? Lucas: That's the key question, because 'SEO' can mean anything from rewriting meta descriptions to rebuilding an entire site architecture. Alex focuses on three specific services: technical audits, content strategy, and link building — but he packages them as a monthly retainer that includes a fixed set of deliverables. Luna: So it's not open-ended consulting. He has a defined scope. Lucas: Exactly. He gives each client a one-hour kickoff call, then a written audit report in the first month. After that, every month includes one content brief — not the full article, just the research and outline — plus a link outreach report, and a thirty-minute check-in. That's it. The client knows exactly what they're getting. Luna: That repeatable structure is smart. It scales. He's not reinventing the wheel for every client. Lucas: And that's how he keeps his hours low. He told me he spends about four hours per client per month — two hours on the content brief and research, one hour on the link report, and one hour on the call and misc. With ten clients, that's forty hours a month. Then he has a few one-off projects like site migrations that he bills hourly at a hundred and fifty. Luna: So his core recurring revenue is basically set. How did he get his first clients? I always wonder about that when I hear these numbers. Lucas: It's a great story actually. Alex had been doing SEO as an in-house marketer for a mid-size ecommerce company for about four years. He knew the craft but had no freelance experience. He started by offering free audits to five local businesses he found on Google Maps — independent coffee shops, a yoga studio, a plumber. Luna: Free audits — scary to give away work, but a classic foot in the door. Lucas: Yeah. He spent about two hours on each audit, found three to five specific issues — like slow page speed, missing title tags, broken internal links. Then he sent them a clean PDF with the findings and a one-page proposal for a three-month retainer at five hundred a month. Two of those five signed up. Luna: Two out of five — forty percent conversion. That's pretty good for cold outreach. Lucas: Right. And then he used those two case studies to approach similar businesses. For example, after he helped the coffee shop improve its local pack ranking, he emailed ten other coffee shops in the same metro area saying 'I helped X Coffee rank for best latte in Portland — here's how.' He got three more clients that way. Luna: So niche targeting by industry and location. That's a smart way to build credibility quickly. Lucas: Exactly. He also built a simple website that just lists his three services and includes a calculator — you select your number of locations and your industry, and it spits out a recommended retainer range. That tool alone has brought in a few inbound leads from business owners who found his site through search. Luna: Wait — so his own website ranks for SEO keywords? That's meta. Lucas: It is. He wrote a few blog posts targeting phrases like 'local SEO consultant for bakeries' and 'SEO for yoga studios.' Those are low-competition keywords. And because he practices what he preaches, his site loads fast, has clear site structure, and gets backlinks from a couple of those client case studies. Luna: So his own marketing is basically a living portfolio. That's compelling. Lucas: Totally. And over two years he built up to ten recurring clients. But here's what I found most interesting: he said about half his clients don't actually need monthly SEO work after six months. They just need the initial cleanup and then quarterly maintenance. So he's had to train himself to proactively downgrade clients instead of milking them. Luna: I love that. That builds trust and referrals. If you tell a client 'you don't need to pay me every month anymore,' they're going to recommend you. Lucas: Exactly. And several of those downgraded clients have come back when they launched a new product line or expanded to a new city. So it's not lost revenue — it's relationship management. Luna: What kind of results does he actually get for clients? I mean, SEO is notoriously hard to measure. Do clients expect guaranteed rankings? Lucas: He's very careful not to guarantee rankings because Google can change its algorithm anytime. Instead, he guarantees deliverables — the audit, the content brief, the outreach report — and he tracks leading indicators like organic traffic growth, keyword position improvements, and click-through rate changes. For example, one client went from four hundred monthly organic visitors to twelve hundred over four months. Luna: That's a triple in traffic — that's the kind of story that sells itself. Lucas: It does. And he shares those numbers in anonymized case studies on his site. He told me the biggest mistake new SEO freelancers make is trying to do everything — keyword research, content writing, technical fixes, link building, social media promotion. Alex says pick two or three things and package them. You can't compete with agencies on breadth. Luna: That reminds me of something we talk about a lot on this show — the importance of a narrow offer. When you try to be everything to everyone, you end up being nothing to anyone. Lucas: Exactly. And the other mistake is undercharging. Alex started at five hundred a month and now charges between six hundred and a thousand. He says if you're charging less than five hundred, you can't deliver real value because you can't afford the time to do deep work. You end up doing surface-level tweaks that don't move the needle. Luna: So what about tools? Does he use paid tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush? Lucas: He uses Ahrefs for keyword research and backlink analysis — that's a hundred and eighty dollars a month. He also uses Screaming Frog for site crawls, which has a free version but the paid license is two hundred a year. So his software costs are under two hundred a month total. He passes those costs through in his retainer implicitly. Luna: That's pretty lean. So even with tools, his margin is huge. Fifteen hours a week, no overhead, seventy-five hundred a month. That's a serious side hustle. Lucas: And he's not a special snowflake — he learned SEO on the job. He didn't take a course. He just started doing it at his day job and then applied those skills on the side. I think that's replicable for anyone who already works in marketing or runs their own website. Luna: Yeah, that's a good point. You don't need to be a guru. You just need to know more than your clients, which isn't a high bar if they're busy small business owners. Lucas: Speaking of replicating, I want to pivot slightly. One thing Alex mentioned that stuck with me is how he structures his workweek. He does all his client calls on Tuesdays — four calls back to back from 11 to 3. Then he blocks Thursday afternoons for audits and content briefs. The rest of the week he's at his day job. Luna: That's a great system. Batching the calls prevents context switching. And it also signals to clients that he's professional and organized. Lucas: Right. And it protects his evenings. He said he never works after 7 PM or on weekends. That's a non-negotiable for him because his day job is demanding enough. Luna: I think that kind of boundary is what makes a side hustle sustainable. If you burn out, you can't help anyone. Lucas: Totally. And that's actually a good thread into something I want to mention. We keep this show going without any ads — no sponsors, no affiliate links, no ads read in the middle of an episode. And the reason we can do that is because listeners like you choose to support us directly. If these conversations have moved your work forward in some small way, or if you've ever thought about starting a side hustle because of something you heard here, you can support us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That's buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: Yeah, we really appreciate it. It keeps the show exactly what we want it to be — just a real conversation about smart ways to earn extra income, no interruptions. Lucas: Okay, back to Alex. One more thing I want to share — he's now starting to train a virtual assistant to do some of the link outreach. He's paying her five hundred a month to handle the manual work of finding relevant websites and sending pitch emails. That frees up another five to six hours a month for him. Luna: So he's essentially leveraging his time to potentially take on more clients or just lower his hours further. That's the next level. Lucas: Exactly. He's thinking about raising his rates to twelve hundred a month for new clients and using the assistant to handle more of the execution. He wants to get to a point where he's only doing strategy and client calls — maybe five hours a week — and still earning close to ten thousand a month. Luna: That's the dream, right? A truly passive side hustle that doesn't feel like a second job. Lucas: For sure. And if you're interested in trying something similar, start with a free audit for one local business this week. Just pick one you like. See if you can find three things they could improve. You'll quickly find out if you enjoy the work and if you're any good at it. Luna: Great advice. And if you do it and get a client, let us know. We'd love to feature you on a future episode. Lucas: Absolutely. That's all for today. Thanks for listening.