Latest / The Side Hustle Career Podcast with Fexingo: Second Income, Freelancing While Employed / How a Marketing Manager Built a 18000 Monthly Side Hustle in SEO Auditing
Transcript
- Lucas: So today I want to talk about a side hustle that is hiding in plain sight for anyone who has ever opened Google Analytics. It is SEO auditing — and specifically, the story of a marketing manager named Priya who turned a weekend experiment into eighteen thousand dollars a month. Luna: Eighteen thousand? And she was working full-time as a marketing manager while doing this? Lucas: Yeah. And what's interesting is she didn't have a technical background. She was a generalist marketer — content, social, some email — but she noticed something frustrating. Her company was spending fifteen thousand a month on Google Ads, but their organic traffic was flat. When she dug into it, the site had basic SEO issues: missing meta descriptions, slow load times, broken internal links. Luna: Right, the stuff everyone knows they should fix but never does because it's not urgent until it is. Lucas: Exactly. So she started fixing those issues on her own time at work. Within three months, organic traffic was up thirty percent. And she thought — if my company is paying fifteen grand for ads and ignoring this, how many other small businesses are doing the same thing? Luna: That's the moment the side hustle clicked. She realized the gap wasn't knowledge — it was someone actually doing the work. Lucas: Right. So in early 2025, she put up a simple landing page: 'SEO Audit — $500.' No fancy tooling, just a ten-point checklist she'd developed. She posted in a few local small-business Facebook groups and got three clients in the first week. Luna: Wait — $500 per audit? And she did three in a week? That's fifteen hundred dollars while still working her day job. Lucas: Yeah, but here's the smart move. After those first three audits, she noticed something. Clients would get the report, say thanks, and then — nothing. They didn't implement the fixes. So she pivoted from one-time audits to a monthly retainer: $1,500 per month for ongoing monitoring and quarterly deep-dive reports. Luna: That's the real insight. The one-time audit is a product. The retainer is a relationship. And relationships are recurring revenue. Lucas: Exactly. She lost two of her first three clients on the retainer, but the one who stayed — a local dental chain — saw their organic leads double in four months. That case study got her six more retainer clients within sixty days. By mid-2025, she was at twelve retainers, each at $1,500. That's eighteen thousand monthly. Luna: I love that she didn't try to build a big agency. She kept it to twelve clients max because each one takes about five hours a month. That's sixty hours on top of her day job — which is a lot, but doable if you're disciplined. Lucas: And she was. She blocked Sunday afternoons and two evenings a week. Used tools like Screaming Frog for crawling, Google Search Console for performance data, and a simple Google Data Studio dashboard for reporting. Total software cost: maybe fifty bucks a month. Luna: So the margins are insane. Twelve clients at $1,500 — that's $18,000 revenue, with maybe $200 in overhead. She's pocketing nearly all of it after taxes. Lucas: Which is why I think this is such a compelling side hustle for anyone in marketing, communications, or even operations. You don't need to be a developer. You need to understand how search engines read a page and be willing to check a few boxes every month. Luna: But Lucas — isn't the hard part getting those first clients? Most people don't have a dental chain in their network. Lucas: True. But Priya's approach was actually pretty replicable. She started with businesses that were already spending money on ads — because if they're spending on ads, they care about traffic. She'd search for 'plumber near me' or 'dentist near me' plus 'Google Ads,' find the small businesses running ads, and send a cold email with a free five-point mini audit. Just five issues, no charge. Luna: That's smart. She's giving value upfront and proving she can find problems. The full audit is the upsell. Lucas: Exactly. Out of every ten cold emails, she'd get two replies. Out of those two, one would convert to a paid audit. And from that, about one in three would convert to a retainer. So roughly one retainer client per thirty cold emails. Luna: That's a lot of emails, but the math works. Thirty emails for a $1,500 monthly client? That's a pretty good return on a Sunday afternoon. Lucas: Especially since you can automate the mini audit using free tools. Google's PageSpeed Insights, a broken link checker, a manual check of the title tags. You don't even need Screaming Frog for the initial outreach. Luna: I think the biggest takeaway for me is that she didn't invent anything new. She just packaged an existing need — SEO maintenance — into a service small businesses could actually afford and use. Lucas: That's the thread through most of the side hustles we cover on this show. They're not about being the smartest person in the room. They're about seeing a gap that everyone else is ignoring and being willing to do the boring work consistently. Luna: Priya is still doing it, by the way. She told me she's thinking of quitting her marketing manager job by the end of this year. At eighteen grand a month, I don't blame her. Lucas: Yeah, and that's the dream, right? Not just extra income — a real option to walk away if you want. Which actually ties into something I wanted to mention. Luna: What's that? Lucas: This show. We keep it ad-free, and the only reason we can do that is because a small group of listeners chip in through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's literally what funds the research, the editing, the hosting. Luna: Yeah, and I think that model — listener-supported, no sponsors — it makes the show feel cleaner. We're not trying to sell you anything. We're just sharing stories that might help you make a move in your own career. Lucas: Exactly. So if you've gotten value from an episode — maybe it gave you an idea for your own side hustle, or just helped you think differently about your career — that's the way to keep it going. No pressure, but it does make a difference. Luna: Alright. Back to Priya. I want to dig into one more thing — the actual audit process. What does she do each month for those twelve clients? Lucas: Good question. Each month, she runs a crawl of their site — that's the Screaming Frog part — and checks for technical issues: broken links, duplicate content, missing alt tags, slow pages. She also reviews Google Search Console for any manual actions or drops in impressions. Then she writes a one-page summary highlighting the top three fixes. Luna: So it's not a massive report. It's focused. Busy business owners don't want a fifty-page PDF. Lucas: Right. And the quarterly deep-dive includes a competitive analysis — looking at what the top three competitors are doing for keywords the client wants to rank for. That's where she adds the most strategic value. Luna: And how does she handle implementation? Does she do the fixes herself? Lucas: She offers it as an add-on. Basic fixes — like updating meta descriptions or fixing broken links — she charges an extra $200 per hour. For code changes, she subcontracted a freelance developer from Upwork who charges $50 an hour. She marks it up to $100 and keeps the spread. Luna: So there's even a mini-agency model inside her solo practice. That's smart scalability without adding full-time employees. Lucas: Exactly. And it keeps her from getting bogged down in technical work she doesn't enjoy. She's the strategist and the client relationship person. Luna: One thing I'm curious about — how does she handle the conflict of interest with her day job? She's a marketing manager for a company. Isn't she basically doing the same thing on the side? Lucas: She was careful. Her employer is a B2B SaaS company. Her clients are all local service businesses — dentists, plumbers, HVAC companies. Totally different industries. And she never works on client stuff during work hours or uses company tools. She has her own laptop for freelancing. Luna: That's the right way to do it. I think a lot of people worry about that, but if you're in a different vertical and you're not competing, most employers don't care — as long as you're not burning out. Lucas: Right. And Priya was very transparent. She checked her employee handbook — it said outside work was allowed as long as it didn't interfere with performance and wasn't for a direct competitor. She was fine on both counts. Luna: So for someone listening right now who thinks, 'I could do this' — what's the first step they should take tonight? Lucas: Run a free audit on your own company's website. Not to share with anyone — just to see if you can identify five issues. If you can, you have the basic skill. Then pick one local business that you know spends money on ads — maybe your dentist, your mechanic, your kid's soccer club — and offer them a free mini audit. Luna: That's really it. One email, one hour of work. If they say yes, you've got your first case study. If they say no, you've lost nothing. Lucas: Exactly. And if you want to see Priya's exact audit checklist and the cold email template she used, we'll link to them in the show notes. No paywall — she shared them freely because she believes in paying it forward. Luna: I love that. Alright, next episode we're going to look at a completely different angle — someone who built a side hustle around voiceover work. It's not what you think. Lucas: Looking forward to it. Thanks for listening.