Michael Ramirez is the founder and CEO of Austin-based evisio, a search engine optimization software company.
Evisio helps agencies, marketers, SEO consultants, and businesses of all sizes improve organic search results, no matter their level of SEO knowledge. It takes the guesswork out of SEO by giving users strategic insights and actionable tasks that can be assigned to team members right inside of evisio.
By bringing all parts of the SEO process together in one powerful platform, evisio makes SEO simple and easy.
Ramirez is originally from San Antonio. He is Mexican American with deep roots in Texas and grew up on San Antonio’s West Side and graduated from Lanier High School. He studied at the University of Texas at San Antonio for two years before transferring to and graduating from The University of Texas at Austin.
“So that’s what brought me out here 16 years ago,” Ramirez said.
While attending UT Austin, he studied advertising and specialized in digital media.
“That’s when I first heard about SEO – back in 2007-2008,” Ramirez said.
In the summer of 2008, Ramirez landed his first internship at a digital marketing company in Georgetown, TX as an SEO specialist. As an intern, he remembers working on reciprocal link-building campaigns and a lot of other tactical SEO work. However, he never lost sight of the bigger opportunities Google was creating in this rapidly growing field.
“I really was inspired by and loved the idea of this new, massive channel – Google – and that it was the entryway to the Internet,” Ramirez said. “That was the place you had to be to be found and get traffic.”
“I was so in awe of the creative process and the art and science around the field,” Ramirez said.
After completing his summer internship, Ramirez worked full-time for the agency in Georgetown for three years. However, in 2012 the company fell on hard times and announced it would be laying off employees, Michael being one of them, before closing its doors a few months later.
Before severing ties completely, Michael took a chance and negotiated with one of the partners to contract him to fulfill the remaining SEO contracts. And it worked. Michael took on the remaining contracts and launched his SEO agency, SearchRPM.
While running his agency, Michael quickly realized the challenges of selling, managing, and executing SEO services. Prospective clients didn’t trust SEO companies due to the lack of transparency in the services being provided, managing a team of technical and creative contractors was difficult, tactical solutions would remain untouched inside multiple project management systems, Google Docs and Sheets for months, and this made it extremely difficult for the agency to scale.
That experience led to the product birth of evisio in 2017, an SEO management platform. Michael’s vision was to bring SEO together in one place. Evisio gives agencies and consultants a central hub for automated auditing, analyzing, organizing, and executing tasks to increase efficiency and accountability. It’s a software-as-a-service business model with monthly subscriptions starting at $79 for a basic plan up to $499 for a custom plan.
Evisio is in a hot market. The global market for SEO agency services market is expected to grow from $42 billion in 2021 to $51.2 billion this year at a compound annual growth rate of 22 percent, according to a report on ResearchAndMarkets.com. The market is expected to reach $109 billion in 2026 with a compound annual growth rate of almost 21 percent.
Not to mention the pandemic led to an increase in business from everyone going online, Ramirez said.
Evisio is a bootstrapped venture that launched to the public five months ago and is actively seeking new customers. Michael is focused on investing in technology and building the best product for his customers.
“The goal is to make it one of the most competitive SEO tools in the industry,” Ramirez said.
For more information, listen to the Ideas to Invoices podcast with Michael Ramirez below. Or visit evisio.co or contact them at hello@evisio.co