Meet Marvin
Hi, I'm Marvin Russell and I created SEOgroup to help people grow their businesses online. As a digital entrepreneur and owner of several small businesses I know the desire and determination it takes to succeed online as well as the frustrations and disappointments that always accompany new ventures. I hope SEOgroup will alleviate some of those frustrations and a few of those disappointments by building a digital community where small businesses and entrepreneurs can connect, share information, and find resources to help their businesses grow online.

When I originally launched SEOgroup.com in 2008 it was used mainly to generate leads for my digital marketing agency. In addition to some basic information and a contact form I created a SEO tool where visitors could scan their website and get graded on how SEO-friendly their website was. Within 2 years I had about 30,000 submissions, 20,000 email addresses and very few leads. Being a small business owner myself I realized that most small businesses are on a budget and are always looking for ways to conserve money. Spending thousands of dollars per month on a SEO campaign wasn't realistic.

So for the last two years I've been developing the new SEOgroup.com, which is what you're using now. Its sole existence is to help people grow their businesses online for little or no cost. So I hope you're finding the SEO tool useful.

How I got started
I got started in digital marketing in 2003, when I launched my first company, Ocean19.com. Ocean19 was a simple web design company my roommate and I founded in our two-bedroom apartment at Chicago and Western in Chicago, Illinois. After going page by page through the phone book and making 100's of phone calls I started looking for a way to better market our website online. It quickly became apparent to me that getting our website on page #1 of major search engines would produce a ton of leads. I became obsessed with SEO. I stayed up till 4am every night reading everything I could about SEO while teaching myself how to implement it. I would check our rankings the second I woke up, all day, everyday. When we finally got ranked on page #1 of Google for "Chicago web design" everything changed. We didn't have to call anyone. Everyone was calling us.

The Ocean Agency
I founded The Ocean Agency in 2007. It was actually just a name change from Ocean19 but I also saw it as something bigger. It was a realization that noone really wants a website, they wanted more business. A website is just a tool to get them more business. Thinking two steps ahead and thinking about the big picture allowed Ocean to grow, becoming one of the most well-known Digital marketing agencies in Chicago. As a full service digital marketing agency, The Ocean Agency helps big brands and large corporations build brand awareness and increase leads, sales and conversions through organic search marketing, social media marketing and web development.

The SEOgroup Team
For now we're starting off small. We have a front-end developer and back-end developer along with three interns. I will be introducing them on the site soon. That's it for now; check back later for team updates.