fatjoe hits £400k from its own SEO, proves practice matters

Joe Davies has a clean answer for agencies that sell search marketing but never seem to rank themselves: build the machine you want to sell. At fatjoe, that lesson now shows up in hard numbers, with the company saying its own organic SEO brings in about £400,000 in annual sales.

That matters because fatjoe is not a toy operation. Davies and Joe Taylor founded the business in 2012 after Davies had worked in an SEO agency and as a freelance SEO consultant. The company was built to solve a familiar problem for agencies: finding reliable, high-quality suppliers for backlinks and content without drowning in fragmented vendors and messy order tracking. What started as a fix for agency procurement has turned into a productized service business with scale.

fatjoe says it now serves more than 40,000 agency accounts and is trusted by more than 5,000 SEO agencies worldwide. Its services are used by more than 1,000 agencies every month for deliverables such as blogger outreach, link building, local citation building, content plans, keyword research and content writing. In other words, it has not just sold SEO to agencies, it has systematized the delivery side enough that agencies can buy it like infrastructure.

Davies has been blunt about the commercial value of that model. In March 2025, he said fatjoe was earning about $12 million a year in revenue with a team of just 15. By the second year of the business, the operation had already outgrown spreadsheet-based order management, forcing the company to build software to streamline delivery and scale operations. That move is the real lesson for other agencies: once the service is repeatable, the bottleneck is usually not demand, it is process.

fatjoe also marks its progress by keeping the original mission intact. On April 5, 2023, the company said it was 10 years old and said its focus remained helping agencies scale and deliver better SEO. That kind of consistency has helped it grow without losing the productized-service edge that made it useful in the first place.

There is also a quieter commercial signal in the background. fatjoe says it donates £1 for every order to Birmingham Children’s Hospital Charity. That is not the growth story here, but it reinforces the same point: a disciplined agency can build a business that sells, delivers and differentiates at the same time.