Published by Sue Johns-Chapman
Published Date 25.06.2026 
In my grand plan, this wasn’t supposed to happen for several years…
My 3-year-old boutique SEO agency, Aloha Life Digital, was just shortlisted as a finalist at the US Agency Awards for Best SEO Agency.
I’m staggered. These are nationwide awards; this is nationwide US recognition.
For a girl from a small town in the industrial heart of the UK, this is not what I foresaw in my life plan.
We’re up against four other agencies, all far more established than me, with teams many times the size of Aloha Life Digital, all hugely respectable and worthy of this award.
For someone who never planned to move to the US, who resisted starting an agency, who never had this goal in mind, this blows my mind.
If it goes no further than this, I am already delighted.
But I’m also not ashamed of wanting to win this award.
The credibility it would bring to my agency, the confidence it would bring to my clients; the pride it would bring to my team.
I want those things.
So there’s a spark of hope in me that dares to hope that we might, just might, be in with a chance.
Especially because my agency is a lot different from a lot of other agencies, and I’m hoping that this might be what the panel is picking up on.
You see, so many SEO agencies have poor reputations for reliability and trust, or for delivering few or no results. I didn’t want to start one for such a long time because I didn’t want people to automatically think less of me, or my work, or to think it didn’t have value, when I knew it did.
But when I realized I could build an agency around values that were important to me, which were wildly different from most SEO agencies, I knew I could create something that was really special.
Aloha Life Digital is built on a foundation of kindness, empathy, and a commitment to really building meaningful and lasting relationships with our clients and partners.
In doing so, we’re able to deliver outstanding results for clients, my team operates with purpose, trust, and job satisfaction, and I get the joy and fulfilment that I was seeking in starting a business.
We go out of our way to help as many people as possible understand search, and AI search, and empower them to build their own websites using SEO techniques that adhere to ethical SEO practices.
We weave kindness and empathy into every interaction: with clients, between team members, through to the way we strive to be kind to website visitors looking to answer search queries in the most useful way. These values underpin literally everything we do; every interaction we have.
Of course, we get great results for clients – but any agency who is shortlisted as a finalist will have that; it’s a given.
So I’m wondering and hoping if the uniqueness of our approach is what the judges have seen in our offering, and that they’re just as keen to see change within this industry as I am.
And perhaps that’s why we’ve been compared alongside other agencies with many times the level of staffing and resource, and revenue, than we have.
If we don’t win, I’ll be sad, of course, but I’ll be OK. Because what we’re building is worth having, and the clients we have already know our value.
The shy female entrepreneur in me always doubts herself.
But why not us? We got this far.
Why not?
Why not me?
We’ll just have to wait and see.
Author Claire Ransom
Founder & CEO, Aloha Life Digital
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