Today we’d like to introduce you to Michael Opoku.
Hi Michael, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
OPO SEO is a family business – my sister Rayna and I run it together, and the story really starts with her. Right before the pandemic she started out as a content writer, and she turned out to be seriously good at it. Within a couple of years she was writing for companies like Asana, WooCommerce, Ramp, SendBird, 6sense, Compare.com and XE. Before long she had more work than one person could handle.
That’s where I came in. I started working with her in 2022, and in March of 2023 we made it official and founded OPO SEO. Between the two of us there’s more than ten years of experience in content and SEO, and we built the agency the way we’d want to be treated as clients – flat monthly retainers, no long-term contracts, and when you call, a real person picks up.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Smooth? Not even close.
The first grind was trust. SEO has a reputation problem, so most owners we met had already been burned by somebody promising page one, so walking in as a brand-new agency meant starting from behind. We earned our first clients by charging way below market and letting the results do the talking. It kept the lights dim for a while, but it built the case studies everything since has stood on.
Then there was learning what actually moves rankings. SEO is a field where the people who know the most share the least. Nobody hands you a playbook, so we built ours the hard way, which meant testing, measuring, and throwing out whatever didn’t move the needle. We also learned early that SEO never lives in a vacuum. Sites needed redesigns before they could rank, and busy owners don’t always have time to send photos or approve pages, so we rebuilt our process to carry as much of the load ourselves as we could.
The biggest gut-punch came from AI. Rayna built her career on content writing, and around the time we launched, that work started drying up because companies that used to hire writers were suddenly generating articles themselves. Watching that happen to something she’d spent years building was scary, and it forced a decision: fight the change or get ahead of it. We chose to get ahead of it. We went deep on how AI search actually picks its answers, and that became the AI visibility side of our agency. The same shift that took away her freelance work is now the thing clients hire us for.
Running the business was its own education. Rayna had been a freelancer for years, and freelancing trains you to do everything yourself; an agency only works when you build systems and let go. That transition took real intention from both of us. We even signed up for business coaching before we could really afford it and went into debt to pay for it – which taught us plenty about business, including the part about not buying things you can’t afford yet.
And some struggles have nothing to do with strategy. One of our clients lost their entire business to a fire. No marketing plan prepares you for that call. It was a hard reminder of what’s actually on the line for the families we work for.
So no, it hasn’t been smooth. But every bump made us better for sure. Now we are smarter about pricing, tighter on process, quicker to adapt when the ground shifts. If the road had been smooth, there wouldn’t be much of a story to tell.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about OPO SEO ?
OPO SEO is a local SEO and AI visibility agency based in Morgan Hill, California. In plain English: when someone in your town needs what you do, whether a contractor, an accountant, a repair shop, we make sure you’re who they find. That used to mean Google’s map pack and page one. Today it also means being the name ChatGPT, Gemini or Google’s AI actually recommends when somebody asks. We do both, and the AI side is what we’re becoming known for.
Day to day, that looks like tuning Google Business Profiles, building service pages that answer the questions people really ask, earning reviews, fixing the technical stuff under the hood, and writing content a real person would want to read and easy to digest. That part’s in our blood, since Rayna came up writing for some of the biggest names in tech. And because AI search moves fast, we track where our clients show up in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity right alongside their Google rankings. Most owners have never seen a report like that before. It’s an eye-opener.
What sets us apart is partly size and partly structure. OPO comes from our last name – Opoku – so when you work with us, you talk directly to the people whose name is on the door. And we run on flat monthly retainers with no long-term contracts, which means clients stay because it’s working. That keeps us sharp.
Brand-wise, the thing we’re proudest of is the trust. Family businesses hand us the keys to something they’ve spent decades building, on nothing more than a month-to-month handshake. We don’t take that lightly, and it’s why our name being on the work matters to us.
If there’s one thing readers should take away, its that they should take look. Open ChatGPT tonight and ask who it recommends for what you do in your town. That’s the new word of mouth, and it’s already shaping who gets the call. If your business comes up, wonderful. If it doesn’t, that’s a fixable problem, and it’s a lot easier to fix now while most of your competitors aren’t paying attention yet. The businesses with the best stories are usually the small ones. Our job is making sure that when somebody asks – a search engine or an AI – the answer is you.
So maybe we end on discussing what matters most to you and why?
Trust, more than anything.
Almost everything good in our story came from somebody extending it before we’d fully earned it. Our first clients took a chance handing their websites to a brand-new agency, and the owners who stay with us do it month to month even though no contract is holding them there. Rayna and I extend it to each other too. When your business partner is your sister, there’s no hiding a bad week. That keeps you honest in a way no paperwork ever could.
Why? Because what a small business hands us is a livelihood. Behind every site we touch there’s a mortgage, a family, decades of early mornings. Treating that with care is the whole job. Do right by people and the rest tends to take care of itself, from the referrals to the reviews.
It’s also why education matters so much to us. SEO is a noisy industry where owners get pitched plenty that doesn’t matter, so we teach as we go – what actually moves rankings, what’s just noise, and why we’re doing what we’re doing. We spent years figuring that out for ourselves, but our clients get it handed to them. An owner who understands the work can spot real progress from a mile away, and after that nobody can sell them snake oil again, not even us. That’s the point.
We’d rather be known as the family that kept its word than the agency that grew the fastest.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://oposeo.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/opo.seo/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/oposeo
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/opo-seo/
- Twitter: https://x.com/opo_seo
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@OPOSEO
- Other: https://clutch.co/profile/opo-seo
