About the Company

ProStar SEO was founded in 2019 by Eric St-Cyr, and the origin story says everything about how the company operates. Eric was running a different business when he went looking for SEO help. What he found frustrated him: agencies talking about backlinks, black-box approaches, no transparency, no accountability. He decided to learn SEO himself, built a business that became highly successful using what he learned, and when friends started asking him to help them too, he saw a gap in the market.

The gap was simple: an SEO company that treated the discipline as a science rather than an art, operated with full transparency, and offered no long-term contracts.

"You're talking to an algorithm, you're talking to a server. It's only maths."

Today ProStar SEO has over 100 clients across multiple sectors, with particular depth in plastic surgery and healthcare. They operate in English and French, run multiple niche websites targeting specific industries, and their approach — no hidden methods, no binding contracts, open communication — has built a client base through trust rather than lock-in.

The Challenge

ProStar SEO's business model depends on attracting the right kind of cold lead — businesses who are already looking for serious SEO help, who can afford a professional service, and who are open to a data-led approach. Generic outreach does not work for that profile. Eric needed a way to filter for fit and establish credibility before a call ever happened.

He had previously used an audit tool that came bundled with SEMrush's Business package. When SEMrush retired it, he went looking for a replacement, found SEOptimer, and built his entire lead generation system around it. Today the embed tool appears on every page of the ProStar SEO website — in both English and French.

The System Eric Built

The setup is elegant in its simplicity. A visitor arrives on any page of the ProStar SEO website, sees an invitation to get a free SEO audit, enters their URL and email, and receives the full white-labelled report automatically. Within 15 minutes, the first follow-up email lands in their inbox — branded as ProStar SEO, with customised text, customised colours matching the page, and a personalised introduction to the company.

The report itself is fully white-labelled, the colours match ProStar SEO's branding, the logo is theirs, the text is customised, and there is no visible trace of the underlying tool.

"It really looks like it's coming from our servers. The report is more serious than just a machine counting stuff. There's depth to it."

From there, Eric takes a deliberately restrained approach to follow-up. He does not believe in battering prospects with 26 emails after a single audit request. In a B2B context, he argues, if someone is genuinely interested they will book a call — and if they are not interested enough to do that after a couple of well-timed emails, they are probably not the right client anyway. The funnel is designed to qualify, not to pressure.

But there is a layer of personalisation on top of the automation. Eric reviews every single person who runs a report. When he spots a business he knows would be a strong fit — a plastic surgery clinic in the right city, a healthcare business matching an existing client profile — he writes a personal email himself, not a template. A specific message that says: I went through your website, here is what I found, here are clients we work with in your sector, here is what we could do for you. Book a call.

"I bring them value they may decide to act on, or they may just implement it themselves," he says. "But because we give that value for free, a lot of clients decide to book an hour with us — and during that hour, we run them live through their website for at least an hour."

The Results

The conversion metrics Eric shared are impressive, especially for cold inbound traffic.

  • Of the visitors who run a report, roughly 10% book a call — filtered down to those who are a genuine fit for ProStar SEO's service level and pricing.
  • Of those who book a call, ProStar SEO closes 80%.
  • 10% of total business now comes directly from people arriving on the website, running an audit, and converting through that automated sequence.

That 80% close rate on calls is the number that stands out. Most agencies would consider a 30-40% close rate from a qualified discovery call to be strong. Achieving 80% consistently points to something specific: by the time someone gets on a call with ProStar SEO, the trust has already been built. They have the report. They have seen that he understands their website. They have read about clients in their sector. The call is not the beginning of the sales process — it is the end of it.

"For business that is relevant to us, we close 80% of the calls."

And the broader ROI case is one Eric makes directly: "You get one new client a year, you more than pay for it. If you get 20 clients a year, it's been a hell of a good investment."

What the Report Actually Does

Eric is clear-eyed about what the report accomplishes in the sales process. It is not primarily an educational document — most prospects are not going to become SEO experts from reading it. What it does is establish trust.

"I don't think it's really important that they understand every line of it. What's important is that you're creating trust — because you know what you're talking about, and you're giving them a document that appears to have real value in it. What you are building is trust. I believe trust is the key here, and the report looks and is genuinely trustworthy."

He draws an analogy to asset management. Past performance builds credibility, but what you are really selling a client is confidence — confidence that you know what you are doing, that you are not guessing, and that your approach is grounded in data rather than vague promises. A detailed, professional, branded audit report communicates all of that before a single word is exchanged.

SEO in the Age of AI

On what AI means for the SEO industry, Eric's view cuts against the prevailing anxiety.

"Many gurus say it's the death of SEO. To me, it's the opposite — it's the SEO of everything."

His argument is that AI has expanded the surface area of search rather than replaced it. Clients now need to be positioned on Google, on Bing (which feeds ChatGPT results), on AI Overviews, and in the top results of the major LLMs. That is more SEO work, not less.

ProStar SEO already gets 10% of its own clients through AI recommendations — people who asked an AI tool who the best SEO agency was for their sector and got pointed to ProStar SEO. And Eric notes something important about the quality of those leads: "The clients you get from AI are already sold. If ChatGPT said you were the best, there's no discussing that."

Contrast that with traditional SEO leads, where a prospect in the top three results is still comparison shopping. AI-referred leads arrive with the decision already made.

"I think it's the golden age of SEO. It's never been a better time to be in this business than it is now."

Why SEOptimer

Eric uses SEOptimer for one specific, high-value job: generating and converting cold leads through the embedded audit tool. And for that job, ProStar SEO have not found anything better.

The white-label depth matters to them — the ability to customise colours, logos, report text, and automated emails so that everything feels like it is coming from ProStar SEO rather than a third-party tool. The simplicity matters too. And the fact that it is on every page of his website is the clearest possible signal of how central it has become to his business development operation.

"It's by far my favourite one. I've tried a few others, and we're going to stick with it."