Mark Luckenbaugh and the business of making room

Allen Levings wanted to learn SEO. He could not afford the course. So he offered Mark Luckenbaugh a bargain: let him do some grunt work in exchange for a place inside. Luckenbaugh said he did not really have work for him, but could send over a video or two. What arrived, Levings later recalled, was full lifetime access to the course.

It is an enjoyable little reversal. The proposed transaction had been labor for tuition. Luckenbaugh quietly removed the labor, expanded the tuition, and left Levings to discover the difference. Levings remembered a touch of teasing in the exchange. He also remembered the help. Luckenbaugh became his SEO mentor and friend.

The story offers a useful entrance to a career spent building things for other marketers. Luckenbaugh’s businesses sit around the places where an agency owner gets stuck: learning the work, repeating the work, finding enough people to finish the work. Sometimes the answer has been a lesson. Sometimes it has been software. Sometimes it has been a company prepared to do the job behind somebody else’s name.

Based in McSherrystown, Pennsylvania, Luckenbaugh is a founder and interim CEO of WEB20 Ranker. He is also associated with Growth Foundry, the training venture Local Client Takeover, and local search software Local Viking. His own compact description of his interests is a better introduction than a crowded business card.

“I start, buy, and invest in digital marketing businesses.”

Mark Luckenbaugh

The queue behind the sale

For a marketing agency, winning a client creates a pleasing problem. A person has agreed to pay. Now the agency owes them work. Add enough clients and the pleasing part can begin to arrive faster than the people, processes, and available hours needed to support it. The calendar becomes an unusually blunt management consultant.

Luckenbaugh was discussing this constraint in 2018. His approach allowed agencies to use outside fulfillment while they developed the scale to justify bringing work inside. WEB20 Ranker supplied services that agencies could resell under their own brands. The client-facing agency kept its relationship with the customer; the provider supplied capacity behind it.

He described an operating habit with implications beyond SEO: identify a problem inside the business, build a solution, test it, and consider whether other agencies might need it too. An internal inconvenience could become a service. It is a sensible place to look for a product, since the first potential customer is already complaining from somewhere inside your own organization.

There is an important human detail inside this model. An agency owner can be perfectly capable of doing a task and still have too many tasks to do. Training improves the person’s ability. Software reduces repetition. Fulfillment adds hands. Luckenbaugh’s portfolio brings those different responses into the same professional neighborhood.

A referee for the SEO argument

In November 2017, Luckenbaugh appeared in a video debate with Matt Diggity about client SEO versus affiliate SEO. Dino Gomez served as referee. Even digital marketing, apparently, occasionally benefits from having someone available to separate the contestants.

The subject was a real choice about how to make a business from search expertise. Client work puts the marketer inside another company’s commercial ambitions. Affiliate work involves building properties that earn through referrals. The debate gave the distinction a face and a little theater, rather than leaving it as a spreadsheet argument about business models.

Luckenbaugh’s wider interests help explain why he belonged in that conversation. In his writing about digital businesses, he described moving into company acquisitions and equity arrangements, using marketing knowledge to help businesses grow. He enjoyed unfamiliar products and industries, and the challenge of applying what he knew somewhere new. Search expertise could be a service to sell, but it could also be a skill to bring into ownership.

Those are different relationships with the same ability. A consultant is hired to solve a problem. An owner has to keep living with the consequences of the solution. His public career moves between those positions, with agency work, software, education, and investment all appearing in the picture.

Giving a ranking a street address

Local search rewards an unusually concrete kind of curiosity. Where is the business? Where is the person searching? Does the information agree? Luckenbaugh’s Local Viking writing gets down to the interface level of those questions. In June 2019, he announced GeoGrid support for service-area businesses, walking users through map URLs, keywords, grid sizes, and distances between points.

He addressed readers with a Viking-themed greeting. The product instructions then proceeded with considerably less pillaging: choose the relevant option, enter the information, and wait for the report. The joke supplied some company; the instructions did the work.

There is a broader appeal to showing visibility geographically. A single position invites a tidy answer to “How are we doing?” A map encourages a more useful follow-up: “Where?” It gives the agency and its customer something specific to discuss. The relationship between a tool and a conversation is easy to overlook until the conversation becomes difficult.

His public teaching took a similarly practical turn in a June 2021 webinar about Google My Business listings. He covered auditing the business name, checking addresses, looking for duplicate listings, choosing categories carefully, and keeping listing information consistent. The subject was visibility, but much of the work involved patient attention to details that a hurried owner could easily miss.

That is an instructive counterweight to the spectacle surrounding search marketing. Before discussing an elaborate tactic, someone needs to establish whether the business has represented itself accurately. It is hard to make a convincing entrance when the address on the invitation is wrong.

The people who hold the system together

Tools and instructions still need people to use them. Luckenbaugh’s December 2019 discussion with Mads Singers turned toward investing in management: giving managers and team leads support and training, and accepting the responsibilities that come with ownership. The discussion placed the fit between people and products alongside the ambition to build more businesses.

That distinction matters in a portfolio like his. Software can repeat an action. A manager has to decide whether the action still makes sense, whether someone needs help, and whether a promise made elsewhere in the company can actually be kept. Delegation leaves a founder with a different set of duties, including preparing other people to make decisions.

At the time, Luckenbaugh’s stated direction was to fund software development and acquire businesses or stakes in them. The management question followed naturally: what sort of team would allow those businesses to function? Ownership expands the scope of the work. It also expands the number of people who need a clear understanding of what they are responsible for.

Education runs through the story at several scales. Local Client Takeover offered free agency training as well as more advanced courses. His webinar work explained specific search problems. The course access Levings remembered operated at the scale of one learner. Different audiences, different formats, and a recurring need to make professional knowledge usable.

Luckenbaugh also helped start The SEO Vault in 2019 with Chaz Edwards and Mike Milas. The show’s discussions of search news, testing, and audience questions gave that educational work another format. A changing subject lends itself to an ongoing conversation. There is always another update, another result, or another agency owner asking why yesterday’s tidy answer has become complicated.

Buying back into the work

In April 2023, Luckenbaugh and Nate Fischer acquired WEB20 Ranker. For Luckenbaugh, already part of its founding story, the transaction added a new chapter to an existing relationship with the business. A November announcement laid out the intended direction: more specialized services, technology development, stronger educational resources, and clearer communication with clients and partners.

The plans fit the problems he had been discussing years earlier. Specialized services address the differences between customers. Technology concerns the work that can be organized or repeated. Education helps the people involved understand what they are doing. Communication determines whether an agency can explain that work to the business paying for it.

None of those subjects is finished by an acquisition announcement. They belong to the ordinary life of an operating company: the next campaign, the next handoff, the next person who needs an answer. The transaction gives the timeline a date. Delivery gives it a daily test.

Luckenbaugh’s career is most revealing at that smaller scale. A course opens for someone who expected only a few videos. A product update helps a marketer inspect a business from more locations. A fulfillment service gives an agency another way to take on a client. Each changes what someone else has room to do next. For a founder moving among teaching, tools, and ownership, that is a substantial amount of work to have in common.