How Kevin Miller Went from Google to Startup Success

Kevin Miller is the Co-Founder and CEO of GR0 and The Word Counter, with valuable expertise as a growth marketer, search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing, and paid acquisition.

GR0 is a Los Angeles-based marketing agency that offers SEO and digital marketing services that include content writing, performance PR, and on-page optimization to brands at various levels of growth in order to build up their digital platform.

The Word Counter is a tool for online usage that is capable of counting words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, and pages, all in real-time.

But before GR0 grew to over 75 full-time employees, 150+ clients, a pair of office spaces, and monthly revenue of approximately 1.5 million, Kevin Miller was first an employee of Google.

Georgetown to Google

Earning a position at the most widely used search engine on the planet is an exceptional achievement on its own. But Kevin’s ascension into startup success all started with him as a student from Ormond Beach, Florida, who studied at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business in Washington, DC.

When it was time to transition from college campus to the workforce, Kevin relocated to California to make his way towards that dream job of his at Google. But as fate would have it, the position he would be hired for was originally offered to his friend, who declined the offer.

Kevin asked his buddy to put in a good word with Google on his behalf by recommending him as a candidate for the job. Kevin Miller has stated that the timeline between dream and reality for that job was four months and seven interviews.

Then something that would come as a shock to Miller’s father happened, Kevin quit Google after just two years.

Full of ambition and feeling, Kevin felt he had hit the ceiling for everything he could learn in his role at Google. Kevin Miller was on his way to building a future of his own design.

Starting the Startups

Kevin Miller enlisted in a coveted $14,000 marketing bootcamp called Tradecraft, where the majority of his peers expressed interest in working for Google, the company Kevin had just left.

But Miller had other determinations on his mind, to learn how to build businesses, product development, and form positive company culture—with opportunity and passion pulling him towards SEO.

Miller quickly hit the startup world by taking a Director of Growth position with Spire, incorporating his growing interest in SEO. Kevin also worked as the Head of Growth at Open Listings in Los Angeles; Kevin saw so much success from his SEO tactics that he eventually decided to work as a consultant for other Direct To Consumer and eCommerce brands.

In late 2019, Miller would get to utilize his SEO methods on one of his own brands with a basic English-language tool he developed called TheWordCounter.com, achieving over 750K unique visits per month and ranking on Page 1 of Google for more than 300,000 keywords.

Emergence of GR0

Then in April 2020, during the global confusion of the pandemic, Kevin Miller and his long-time friend Jon Zacharias launched GR0, their SEO agency in Los Angeles. Zacharias brought a decade of SEO knowledge and was also a former Google employee.

Miller and Zacharias established their own approach to SEO that consisted of content writing, backlink acquisition, and on-page optimization, with the ability to garner organic traffic for their clients.

Kevin Miller also has the added advantage of having started about ten different website brands since he graduated from college. Even though he admits that these pre-GR0 website ventures lost all of his investment in them, they were able to teach him valuable lessons hands-on.

One of those lessons that he has carried over with him into GR0 is the power of outsourcing as soon as possible instead of remaining confined to being a jack of all trades for far too long.

By reinvesting to make it possible to hire more people so that the focus can be placed into creating growth campaigns, the rapid scaling that GR0 has benefitted from has continued well into 2021 and beyond.

GR0’s growth

After Kevin Miller and his partner Jon Zacharias worked as a two-man workforce with the first five to six clients that they pulled in themselves, they divided out some contract work to content writers and engineers that they recruited through Upwork and LinkedIn.

Finally, they pulled in their first hire, a content editor. Financing for the business came courtesy of Miller’s and Zacharias’ own pockets, with each investing $20,000. This means there were no lenders or venture capitalists involved.

Kevin Miller has stated that the best strategy to help grow GR0 has been to ask satisfied clients to refer their colleagues and friends to the agency. This tactic has allowed GR0 to experience a 3x higher conversion rate from these warm referrals than from cold ones, with exponential expansion occurring in this manner.

Just how important is the SEO that GR0 offers its clients? Approximately 70% of search engine users choose top-ranking websites that are pulled up in their searches. So, think about the benefit of those potential results when hiring GR0 to push you up in the Google ranks.

In closing, Kevin Miller’s growth with GR0 has led to partnerships with recognizable companies like Universal Music Group, Theragun, Pressed Juicery, Venus et Fleur, and Ritual. GR0 has even managed to win a plethora of awards in its first year of business, such as:

· 5 Comparably Awards: Best Company in Los Angeles, Best CEO for Women, Best Leadership Teams, Best Company Happiness, and Best Company Career Growth

· 2 Stevie American Business Awards

· Recognitions from Clutch, UpCity, and Great Places to Work

Kevin Miller himself was awarded a Glassdoor Employees’ Choice Award as a top CEO and a 100% approval rating from anonymous and voluntary employee reviews on Glassdoor.

From the multi-billion-dollar Google empire to creating one of the most popular growing SEO agencies in the United States that are pushing websites higher up in Google’s keyword algorithms, Kevin Miller has come a long way in his search for search engine success, and he is just getting started.