Topnotch SEO: an SEO service for New Zealand local businesses at $7K a month

Topnotch SEO sells search engine optimisation services to local business owners in New Zealand, and its founder reported $7K a month in revenue in an October 2022 Starter Story founder interview.

How it started

The founder, Eddie, came to SEO from offline sales. Before starting the business he worked as a sales representative for Renewcar, promoting headlight restoration kits to car-industry owners, and he says he sold to over 150 mechanics across New Zealand. He describes a stretch of credit card debt and COVID-19 pressure on his business before that. Topnotch SEO was started in December 2021, and he works with local businesses in Auckland, New Zealand.

His own account of the switch is straightforward: as devices spread, people began searching for services online instead of looking offline, and he decided to learn SEO rather than stay on the offline side. Pricing was the part he found hardest at the beginning.

What it sells and how it charges

The official website, as fetched on 2026-09-30, presents the business as an "SEO Company New Zealand" and lists four services: Local SEO, GMB Management, Ecommerce SEO and Technical SEO. The industries it names are trades and automotive work — electrician, painting, HVAC, roofing and auto repair — alongside an ecommerce track. It also publishes free tools: an SEO ROI calculator, a SERP simulator, and a robots.txt and sitemap generator.

The website does not publish prices, and the founder did not state rates in the interview. What he did describe were the variables that made pricing difficult: how widely a business owner wants to advertise, locally or nationally; how competitive the market is; and how much each business is prepared to invest. He says he arrived at a clearer structure after taking courses on selling SEO from Chris, who owns Anerdsworld, which helped him think about pricing from the client's side of the investment rather than from a fixed package.

How it got its first customers, and what kept growth going

Social media came first, then search. He used Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, publishing a new blog post each week and repurposing it as infographics and images on Instagram, on the reasoning that people open different platforms for different purposes.

He is clear that this was not where the leads came from. In his words, "most of them come from Google." He also posted on Korean community websites — he is fluent in Korean — which he says let him reach a market that would otherwise have been inaccessible.

The client example he points to is K Chicken, a Korean fried chicken restaurant that had been using its website only to take orders from people already coming into the store. After three months of work, he says, "they continuously get 29,000 visitors every month."

The numbers

Figure	What the founder said
Revenue	$7K a month, founder-reported in the interview dated 27 October 2022; he describes it as recurring income
Team	1 founder, 0 employees at the time of the interview
Started	December 2021
Start-up cost	The founder did not state one
Client example	K Chicken: 29,000 visitors a month after three months of SEO, as he reported it

These are figures from one interview at one date. They are not current revenue, and nothing on the website confirms or updates them.

How it compares

The following medians and shares come from 1M.chat's analysis of 1,997 businesses with founder-reported revenue in Starter Story interviews from 2015 to 2026 — a self-selected sample of founders who chose to be interviewed, not a random sample of all businesses. There are 381 businesses in the Agencies & services category.

Measure	Topnotch SEO (October 2022)	Agencies & services category
Monthly revenue	$7K, founder-reported	$48K median
Against the category median	Below the median	—
Employees	0	5 median
Started by one founder	Yes	63% of the category
At $1M a year or more	—	35% of the category

Growth channels in the category, measured across the 272 businesses that report channel information: organic social media 61%, SEO and organic search 51%, word of mouth and referrals 51%, paid ads 28%. Topnotch SEO's own mix — social posting for awareness, Google as the lead source, plus a language-specific community channel — sits inside that pattern rather than outside it, with the difference that he runs it at zero headcount.

What a founder can take from it

If you already sell to a defined trade, treat that as your first market. Experience selling to mechanics across New Zealand gave him a buyer he understood before he had a service to sell.
Narrow by geography and trade at the same time. "SEO" is a crowded phrase; local SEO for named trades in one country is a much smaller room.
Build pricing from scope, not from a package list. Reach (local or national), market competitiveness and the client's own budget give you three defensible variables to quote against.
Separate awareness from acquisition. Posting weekly kept him visible, but he attributes the leads to Google; watch which channel actually produces enquiries rather than assuming the busiest one does.
Use a language or community you already have. Fluent Korean and Korean community sites gave him access to a segment that competitors without it would struggle to enter.

Sources

Revenue, team and start-cost figures are what the founder reported at the interview date, not current figures and not a prediction of what you will earn. Product and pricing facts come from the business's own website as checked on 30 September 2026. Method & sources · Disclosure