How I Built It

A Podcast Helping Small Business Owners Grow

SEO

Improving Customer Relationships with John Vuong

May 26, 2020

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John Vuong know SEO. But he knows relationships even more. AT a time where connecting with people face-to-face has become harder, John offers some fantastic advice for forging better relationship through communication – both with your current clients, and the ones that will soon be clients.

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The Importance of Niching Down, Part 2 with Sara Dunn

April 7, 2020

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Sara Dunn is one of my favorite people to talk to, and for good reason. She’s fun, honest, and has a lot of great insight! Today we’re following up on episode 69, where we talked about her starting to niche down. Now, 2 years and nearly 100 episodes later, she’s fully into her niche business. We talk about making some tough decisions, and how to stay motivated. I truly think this is something every freelancer and small business owner should hear! 

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Sara Dunn: That was when I was talking to a prospect in the wedding industry, so I had geared up enough that I was getting some consultations coming in, and I always like to ask people, “How did you hear about me?” Because I want to know how did we end up on a phone call? What’s the source of this lead? She said, “My friend Suzanne told me all about you. That you’re the expert on SEO for wedding professionals.” I didn’t know who Suzanne was.   Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” It is Episode 163, and I am talking to one of my favorite people, Sara Dunn. She is one of my favorite people to talk to for good reason. She’s fun, honest, and has a lot of great insight. I’m excited because today we are doing a follow up, “Where are they now?” episode. I talked to Sara back in episode 69. That was nearly one hundred episodes and two years ago, and where we talked about her starting to niche down. She was just beginning her niching down journey. So now, again two years later, she’s fully into her niche business. We talk about how she fully made that transition, how she came out on the other side, and how she had to make some tough decisions and stay motivated. I truly think that this is something that every freelancer and small business owner should hear, and that’s why I’m having her on the show again. So let’s get to it, talking to Sara Dunn.   Break: This episode is brought to you by Ahrefs. Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO toolset that solves that problem. It gives you the tools you need to rank your website in Google and get tons of search traffic. As someone who struggles with what kind of content to create or what’s ranking best in Google, or anything SEO-related, Ahrefs has been instrumental in increasing traffic to my website over the holidays. I had my best quarter for affiliate income because Ahrefs showed me my most popular pages and topics, and I was able to optimize my content and my gift guides and update them accordingly. I would have never updated one of my gift guides because I didn’t think it was that popular, and Ahrefs showed me it is my most popular page. Ahrefs makes competitive analysis easy as well. Their tools show you how your competitors are getting traffic from Google and why. You can see the pages and content that send them the most search traffic, find out exactly the key words they’re ranking for, and which backlinks are helping them rank. From there, you can replicate or improve on their strategies. Now, as I said, I don’t think I’m getting significant search traffic, so I use Ahrefs tools to help find topics worth creating pages or content for. I can easily see estimated search volumes and gauge traffic potential with their keyword explorer tool. It’s been a fantastic addition to my toolkit. Just this morning, I learned that My Everyday Carry post has been popular, and lots of people are coming, so I think it’s time to update that because it’s five years old. If you want to gain a following or just improve traffic to your website, Ahrefs is the tool for you. You can get a 7 day trial for $7 dollars over at Ahrefs.com. That’s Ahrefs.com for a seven day trial for $7 dollars. If you’re anything me, you’ll be hooked. Again, that’s Ahrefs.com for a seven day trial for $7.   Break: Before we get started, I want to tell you about a new– Or, newly redesigned resource I have called the Podcast Workbook. 2020 is sure to change a lot of things, including the podcast landscape. If you want to start your own podcast but you’re not sure where to start, check out my free podcast workbook at PodcastWorkbook.com. It will give you everything you need step-by-step to launch your show. With checklists and equipment and service recommendations, it’s everything you need to get started. It’s newly redesigned, so it looks a lot better, and it flows a lot better, and it answers some of the feedback and questions I got from people who have already started using it. So, go get it now. It’s the free podcast workbook I’ve put together to help you launch your podcast in 2020, and it is at PodcastWorkbook.com.   Joe Casabona: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today I am so excited to have a repeat offender back, and her name is Sara Dunn. She is the founder and project lead over at 11Web/SaraDoesSEO.com. Sara, how are you?   Sara: I am doing great. I am so happy that the last interview was good enough to get some sort of sequel. This is fun, and I’m glad to be back.   Joe: Absolutely, I love talking to you. I love talking to you for a few reasons. One, you’re great. Two, you have taken what feels like a vested interest in my pen obsession.   Sara: Oh my gosh, I love the pens.   Joe: That always brings someone up four hundred notches.   Sara: We have to tell the listeners that every time I see you, you now bring a pen for me to use, and I get to hear all about the ink and the tip and what kind it is. I still definitely am not on the geek level with the pens, but it’s super fun to write notes about how cool Joe is in Joe’s pen.   Joe: Thank you. That’s part of the reason I bring it because you always write, “Joe is so cool.” I just look at those notes, and I’m like, “I feel cool now.” So, that’s great. If I remember, I made a note in my documents, but I’ll take a picture of my pen collection, and I’ll link them in the show notes for this episode over at HowIBuilt.it. But enough about me, let’s talk about you, Sara. Can you tell us–? First of all, we’re talking about niching down today, which is what we talked about last time, but today it’s going to be a bit more focused. You’re further along in your journey, so why don’t we start with who you are and what you do?   Sara: This is fun to be talking about this topic again, because I went back to that first episode that we did, and I listened to it last night, just because I didn’t remember what we had talked about and what we had said. So, that episode number 69 of your podcast was back from March 2018, and this was very early. I had just decided on what I was going to niche into. Let me just do the very quick version, because the very long version is in that prior episode. But I started a web agency in 2012, I did web design for five years, and then I got an itch to become a specialist in something crazy specific. I wanted to narrow it down and become known for something, but I didn’t know what that was. I started a YouTube channel, I talked a lot about that journey in the last episode, and I have landed in the last couple years now on doing search engine optimization specifically for the wedding industry. I now work every single day looking at websites for wedding planners, photographers, venues, florists, those types of businesses that serve couples getting married. I work on their websites to help them get found on Google, and at this point in my life, that is pretty much all of the work that I do. So, that’s me.   Joe: That’s great. I’m glad to hear that it worked out because I know that when we spoke, you weren’t sure and you were exploring, you had started a YouTube channel. I think I first heard you talk about it on the Matt Report with Matt Medeiros, a friend of the show. Definitely check that out, it’s over at HowIBuilt.it/69. If I was good at editing, I might do a little flashback music right here and cut to you, explaining a little bit more about it.   Sara: That’d be cool.   Joe: I made a note to do that too, so we’ll see how closely I pay attention to my notes. But nearly a little more than two years to the date is when this episode will come out. Your episode came out on March 6, 2018. That was my daughter’s first birthday.   Sara: Amazing.   Joe: As the listeners are first hearing this, it’s April of 2020. I’m glad to hear it’s working out. The reason I wanted to have you back on the show was because this season I’ve focused in on freelancers and small business owners and how they can grow their business, and lots of my guests– Jason Resnick, Erin Flynn, Nathan Ingram and just a whole host of people have said, “Find the thing you’re good at, niche down and focus on that. Because it makes your work more predictable, and it lets you solve a problem.” So, maybe we can talk a little bit about– From when did when do you feel like your niching down started to pay off? Because you were like, “I’m doing this. I’m not sure, and I’m taking a risk.” Two years later, we could say, “Hooray. It’s working out for you.”   Sara: I love this question because I want everyone that’s thinking about niching down to know that it took a long time. I’m speaking to you right now from a place where I have an email list full of people who are in my target market. I’m booked out three months in advance. But when you hear people talk like that, it’s like “I have no idea how to get from where I am to that place where you’ve niched down enough that you’re well-known in your industry and building some sort of a following.” It took a long time. As I mentioned, it took like eight months just for me to find my specialty. I wasn’t someone that fell into a certain specialization naturally. You’ll occasionally hear people that say, “I did this one project, and then I started doing a lot that were similar, and it just happened.” I think that’s wonderful. But that did not happen to me, and I very intentionally was like, “I want to be a specialist, and I don’t know what.” I tried a couple of things that didn’t work, so I tried to do Facebook ads for chiropractors, which I didn’t like. I thought about doing–   Joe: Was it a pain in the neck?   Sara: It was a pain in the neck for sure. I just didn’t like the work, and I found that out the hard way after I invested several months in creating content, learning about the market, learning about Facebook ads. This is not a quick process for someone who’s interested in it. To answer your question, “When did it feel like it started working?” I have one particular incident that I remember, and that was when I was talking to a prospect in the wedding industry, so I had geared up enough that I was getting some consultations coming in, and I always like to ask people “How did you hear about me?” Because I want to know how did we end up on a phone call? What’s the source of this lead? She said, “My friend Suzanne told me all about you. That you’re the expert on SEO for wedding professionals.” I didn’t know who Suzanne was. At that moment, I realized that people were talking about me and following my content, and I was getting referrals from people I didn’t even know, and that was a first in my business. Six years into doing business, getting referrals from actually just having a following as opposed to getting referral from a friend or someone I knew from a networking event or someone who was in my close circle, that moment I was like “This specializing thing does work. Because people are listening even if I don’t know about them.”   Joe: That is awesome. Very exciting to hear.   Sara: That was fun.   Joe: Because that’s a big deal. I don’t know, and sometimes I feel like people say, “It seems like you do a lot. I don’t know what you do.” And it sounds like a compliment, but it’s not. People should know exactly what I do, or at least the main thing I want to focus on. Because I do a lot of things, but I want to be known as the podcasting guy in certain circles.   Sara: Exactly. That makes it so much easier when people want to help you out or refer you, if they can be like, “I know this person who is a wedding planner. She needs more inquiries for her business. You should talk to Sara about search engine optimization.” It’s so much easier than when I was just generalist web design person, and it was like, “My friend Sara knows something about websites. She could probably fix your email.”   Joe: Or, “You’re good with computers. My printer doesn’t work.”   Sara: Yes.   Joe: I don’t charge for that. I don’t do that. That’s great, and so you’ve established yourself as an expert in this field. How did you do that? Did you–? I know you had your YouTube channel, did you go to conventions or expos, that’s what they’re called maybe? Did you go to events and stuff like that? How did you build up that network to make sure you established yourself as an expert?   Sara: I tried all sorts of things. And again, not fast, not easy. The first thing that I did, and this is what I would recommend anyone to do if they’re thinking of exploring a niche, is not put up a website and come up with a separate brand name, start all the social handles. No, it’s talking to people in that industry and seeing if you can do work for them. That’s how I got started. I did some free work for a wedding planner who needed help with her SEO, and I know people are down on free work in a lot of cases, but you can’t say that you are a repeatable expert at anything if you’ve only done it one time or if you don’t have a case study you can share. So in some way, you have to get yourself out there. For me, I just had a good feeling about the person that I offered to help out. She was well-connected, she really needed help and appreciated it very much, and when we got good results for her– She had a website disaster where she fell off Google, and we got her back to the first page. She wanted to talk about it, so that’s where some of those first leads came from. Once I did a good job for her, she was very excited to refer me on to other people in the industry that she knew. That was a really good way for me to do more work and get started and make sure that I liked the work. As I said, I did some projects that I didn’t like in different niches. It was important for me to be like, “Could I see myself doing the same thing with the same type of person over and over again?” And the wedding industry, I said, “Yes. Absolutely.”   Joe: That’s great. That free work was an investment. An investment in– Imagine having a marketing budget, but you learned the skill, and then you found somebody who was willing to be your first big fan of that work.   Sara: Yes, and I was able to say, “If I do this for you for free, can you give me really honest feedback throughout the process about how you feel it’s going?” When you’re charging someone a premium price, it’s hard for you to be like, “I’m doing you a favor, you do me a favor.” Even if you’re giving someone a discount on a service, they still feel like they’re paying for it, so they have pretty high expectations of what you’re going to deliver. But if you’re like, “I want to test out this market. I think you’re an expert at your market, and I’d like to work for you and learn a little bit more.” They will probably be flattered that you see them in that way, like “You’re an expert at what you do, and I’d love to work for you.” Also, that opens the door for them to tell you exactly what they think. So, “This is too slow. I don’t understand what’s going on right now. The results are taking a while, is this normal?” That’s really good feedback to have when you’re getting started in a niche, even if you feel like you’re an expert at the service you’re performing, just to have at least one experience where you can get a really deep conversation with someone about how you’re doing the work and how it would apply to others.   Joe: I think that’s great advice. I took a slightly different route with my podcasting service, which by the way, back to your point about it taking a long time and letting people know. I’ve had conversations this week with people where I’m like, “I have this done for you podcasting service–” And they’re like, “I didn’t know you had that. But now that I know you have that, I can refer people to you.”   Sara: Yes.   Joe: Again, it’s not like I built a page and assumed people would come. But you got to put yourself out there, but going through the process, I think, is important. And more than once, like you said. Because you do have these fake experts online who are like, “I did this thing once, and now I’m going to make an online course about it.”   Sara: Yes.   Joe: So, you did it that one time. Who knows how it’s going to go the next time? I think it’s important to try out a few things, make sure what you’re doing is repeatable. Brian Castle is going to talk about that on the show. Productized services and making sure things are repeatable, but you started out, and you did some work for somebody in the industry. You asked for real and honest feedback, so before we get deeper into that and how you fully made– It sounds like you’ve made the full switch into being in this niche.   Sara: I have.   Joe: That’s amazing.   Sara: That’s scary.   Joe: Yeah, and that’s wild. I do want to ask you a couple of questions about that, but how did you know the other niches you chose were not for you? You mentioned Facebook ads for chiropractors, and you just didn’t like that. Was it basically that? You were just like, “I’m not enjoying this, and I can’t see myself doing it?” Or were there some–? Was there something you   liked, but you knew it wasn’t the right niche for you?   Sara: I think there’s two things. When you’re testing out a niche, you have to like the work, and you have to like the people. You don’t necessarily have to niche as narrowly as I have, which is sometimes considered a vertical and horizontal specialization, as in I’m specializing in one service for one industry. But you have to like what it is enough to want to do it every single day, so for me, I ran into fit issues in both directions. I didn’t like Facebook ads, and I found out I didn’t love working with chiropractors, so that was a problem on two different levels. Also, I found out I liked working with the wedding market, and I didn’t like doing web design for them. So I started out, I was going to do SEO and SEO optimized websites for the wedding industry, but working with a creative person who pretty much knows what they want their website to look like and just wants you to execute it. Was not the kind of work I wanted to do. So after doing one of those, I had to throw out that idea too and just continue to follow those things that I enjoyed and that were working and resonating with the audience. It’s always a little bit of tweaking to figure out what that right service is. At some level, you can think in your head, “Would I like this?” Even before you do it. But sometimes, you might have to go out and try it and get a couple projects and see for yourself if you like it or not. I think that it’s a problem when someone tries too hard to figure out everything about a niche without getting into the work and doing it. Again, that’s why I recommend free work. I recommend talking to people in the industry because I’ve had a lot of conversations now with people that are interested in niching down, and they’re like, “What’s my first step? Do I need to put up a page on my website about it?” And I’m like, “No. Just go do the work and see if you even like it. Stop agonizing over all of the different factors that go into it and just go do the work for someone who’s a real person and see how it turns out. Then you can think about marketing yourself for that service later.”   Joe: From a practical standpoint, how are you going to make a landing page for that service if you don’t know what the problem you’re solving is?   Sara: Yes.   Joe: Again, with podcasting, I thought the problem was launching the website, but it was everything else.   Sara: It’s doing everything.   Joe: Yeah, it’s doing everything. I didn’t know I had to do all that stuff. I think just to mirror your story a little bit where you looked and saw what you like, and I was starting to have conversations with people– This happened especially at CaboPress. I was going through the things I did, and I was like, “If I could pick one thing to do all day, it would be podcast.” A lot of people at CaboPress were like, “Do it for other people. I would buy that. I’ve tried to start a podcast, and it was a problem.” I had those conversations, and a month later, I landed my first client. So having conversations about, again, what you like to do and then actually doing the work. I knew I liked doing the work because I’ve been podcasting for seven years or so now. It’s really important, but understanding the problem that you’re solving is also incredibly important.   Sara: Yes. Some people even recommend if you know you want to serve a certain audience, you can even approach that without knowing how you want to serve them or what service you want to offer. If your spouse works in a certain industry and you want to be involved in marketing for that industry in some way, get in deep and figure out what their problems are and then identify how you could help with those. That’s definitely an option, too. A better option than just being like “I think chiropractors need Facebook ads.”   Joe: But that exploration, I think was obviously– It totally worked out for you. I think it’s an important lesson for people who are listening too, and you don’t have to commit forever to a niche. A niche is not like marriage. If it’s not working out, you can ditch the niche.   Sara: Totally. Or broaden it, or pivot it again. Keep offering what you’re doing and add something on. It’s definitely an iterative process, not like that marriage commitment where you’re like, “I’m into this for a lifetime.”   Break: Today’s episode is brought to you by Smile and their product TextExpander. Save time typing and boost your productivity with TextExpander. You know I’m all about automation, and TextExpander is a great way to get started with automation. It allows you to create your own snippets for repetitive text that you tend to use everywhere. Add the text, create a snippet, and boom. Save precious time and keystrokes. One of my favorite snippets is for my address. Instead of typing out my full address and risking typos, I simply type “$ADDR” and TextExpander does the rest filling in my full address for me. I also have snippets for my street, my city, and my zip code. But that’s not all TextExpander does, with its advance snippets you can create fill-ins, pop up fields, and more. You can even use JavaScript or Apple script. Another one of my favorite and most used snippets is when I type “PPT.” That will take whatever text I have on my clipboard and convert it to plain text, so I’m no longer fighting formatting when I copy from a word document, a Google doc, or a plain HTML page like a website. I also use it for common links, email messages, which I can completely customize with fill-ins and drop-down menus, and even date calculations. I’m currently writing a book, and TextExpander has been instrumental with that. TextExpander is available on Mac OS, Windows, Chrome, iPhone, and iPad. So, pretty much anywhere you do computing. If you’ve been curious about trying TextExpander or automation in general, now’s the time. As a listener, you can get 20% off your first year, just visit TextExpander.com/podcast and let them know How I Built It sent you. That’s TextExpander.com/podcast for 20% off your first year. And now, back to the show.   Joe: So, you found your niche. Out of curiosity, do a lot of people in the wedding industry use a specific platform for their websites?   Sara: Most of the websites I work on are in Show It, Squarespace or WordPress.   Joe: Nice. I’ve never heard of Show It, so I’m definitely going to check that out. Does it look good?   Sara: It’s OK. It builds the blog on WordPress, and then the pages are built on a flexible platform, so it was made for photographers who wanted a open canvas to work with   Joe: Makes sense. “Show It,” pictures, got it. Cool. I was very curious about that because I’ve also heard Squarespace and Shopify, though that’s unrelated, are not good at SEO. But I feel like most sites are if you’re starting at neutral, not great.   Sara: Squarespace and I had some issues when I first got started working with it. I wrote a whole blog post about Squarespace SEO issues they needed to fix, and I’m not going to take credit, but they have fixed a lot of those issues at this point. I think that they are doing a good job at listening to feedback. There are still some issues with it because it’s a closed platform, but it’s definitely better   Joe: Gotcha. #Influencer. Very cool, awesome. So you have your niche now, you are horizontally an SEO person, and vertically, you’re in the wedding space. Is that how it works out? For people who are wondering?   Sara: Yes, exactly.   Joe: Transitioning from just generalist web designer to SEO extraordinaire, wedding SEO extraordinaire. Was it hard to say no to those general web design inquiries?   Sara: Incredibly hard. Absolutely. It was something that I did slowly, so it’s only maybe in the last six months or 18 months in to declaring my specialty that I’m like, “I’d no longer take on new website clients.” For a while, I was still open to new website work that came in through my agency website. If it sounded interesting, I kept doing it. Then I realized that doing that work, even though it was higher dollar, it was what I was used to was taking away from the progress that I could be making in my specialized business. So taking away from my marketing time, taking away from me serving clients in my niche that would be more repeatable type of work that I could learn from, and so I said “I need to stop doing this as tempting as it is.” So my agency still does support our prior website clients who are on maintenance and support packages, and I think that’s great. But all of our new work is specifically in SEO for the wedding industry. At this point, it feels empowering because it’s a really easy way for me to turn down inquiries I don’t want. “I’m no longer taking on new website work. This is all that I’m doing now. I’m happy to refer you to someone else.” It started to feel good instead of giving me a scared pit in the feeling of my stomach.   Joe: Yeah, we Italians call that agita. But that is great, saying no can be super empowering. Even over the last few months, I’ve said no to work, and my mastermind group was impressed that I said that. But I’m trying to make things work, and I have had the privilege, at least at that point, to be able to say no. I still do, I’m making it sound like in three months I’m bankrupt. But in a previous episode, I spoke to Erin Flynn, and she said, “If you’re starting out, you might not be able to say no. Saying no is a privilege.” But you did it over time, and then you realized it’s costing me more to say yes than it is to say no.   Sara: It is. Thankfully, I had built up some recurring revenue type of work with prior clients, so I use that as more of the base that I was able to pivot from. I think it would have been a really hard shift to shift so far from general web design for insurance agents and dentists into SEO for the wedding industry, but I had a base of some recurring things. I didn’t have to go out and sell website work in order to pay the bills, and I had some clients that helped to support the baseline expenses I had so that the new work could be focused on SEO. That is something that I would recommend for someone that wants to make a big business shift, is find some way so that you’re not in a famine cycle when you’re trying to invest in something new. Because at some points in this pivot, I have felt like I started a new business even though I’ve done marketing, and I’d done marketing for five years prior. I was starting at zero. Social media accounts at zero, audience recognition at zero, and I had to build all of that back up. I also had to build up pricing, so as you often do when you’re starting something new, I priced it too low, and people were willing to pay more, but I didn’t feel confident enough to charge more. I felt lie that pricing discussion internally with myself was back to where I was when I first started my web agency, so it does sometimes feel like starting a new business. But if you can give yourself a basis of revenue in some way that makes you feel more comfortable, that can help a lot in a pivot.   Joe: I think that’s great advice, and definitely something that resonated with me. Because I pivoted from web design, web developer. People mostly knew me from my coding tutorials and my coding books to site builder and now general freelancers. Those are the courses that I’ve been making, and those are the ones that I’m selling. I felt like I also relearned a lot of lessons that I spent 10 years plus learning from freelancing. Maybe there is some takeaway here too, remember to bring those lessons along with you. Just because it’s different work doesn’t mean that people are different. People are basically the same, and lessons can be transferred.   Sara: Bring some confidence into your pivot. It’s hard to do, though, when you feel like you’re starting something new and risky to trust yourself about it.   Joe: Absolutely. Because again, you’re not sure if it’s going to work. That little demon on your shoulder is saying, “Is it going to work? I don’t think you can charge that much yet.”   Sara: “It’s not going to work. You went too narrow. That was stupid. You should’ve kept doing what was paying your bills for five years.” There are so many brain games that get played when you look at the market of services you can offer and go, “I’m only going to offer services to this tiny sliver of the universe.” And mentally, it doesn’t make sense a lot of the times. But I promise, if it’s the right niche, it does make sense.   Joe: Absolutely. It’s like going to a steak joint for a good steak versus going to, I don’t know, Wal-Mart and then finding a good steak. I feel like that analogy is falling down, but you go to a steak joint for a good steak, and those are the people who know how to make them good.   Sara: Yes. There are other restaurants that have menus that are 30 pages long, and you can’t figure out what to order, and you’re going to guess that nothing on that menu is very good.   Joe: So you’re going to go with something that they probably can’t mess up, like a burger. Exactly. All right, good. That analogy worked out.   Sara: It does.   Joe: You mentioned your web design agency was not just you, you had some employees, right?   Sara: I had three regular contractors. No actual employees, but people that I worked with on a regular basis.   Joe: Did you bring them along with you for the niching down?   Sara: I’m so glad you asked that because one of the biggest and hardest decisions I had to make was cutting some people. I had a designer that was on a regular monthly retainer, and as we started doing less web design work and less design work for existing clients, I had to eventually let her go. It was hard for me emotionally, because I had tied a lot of my business success to the number of people who worked on my team. When people would ask me, “How’s your business doing? How many people work with you now?” I could be like, “There’s four of us now.” So for me, for whatever reason, I was like, “I feel successful when I’m adding people to my team.” To have to let someone go and say, “I need to focus on bottom line profit, and this person isn’t needed anymore to execute the work that we’re doing.” I’m down to mostly just working with a virtual assistant and a coworker who does client support, and we’re just as profitable as we were before with fewer people. The other thing I had to let go of is top line revenue. We used to do bigger projects, bring in more money, but also had a lot more expenses to get that work done between designers, developers, and other specialists. Now revenue is a bit lower, but so are expenses. Profitability is very similar. That has been another mind shift for me to just work through fewer people, less top line revenue, still just as much success.   Joe: That is great to hear. I always find it questionable, and people are like, “We made $100 million dollars in revenue last year.” All right, what were your expenses? Because if it was $100 million and one, then you are not running a good company, and you’re not running a successful business.   Sara: Or all the influencers online who talk about having a six figure business or a seven figure business, they’re just talking about top line revenue, and you don’t know how profitable that is. What if they’re not paying themself at all?   Joe: Exactly.   Sara: It’s not very impressive.   Joe: Exactly. The way I run my businesses, I pay me first. There’s a great book, Profit First, and I’ll link to it in the show notes over at HowIBuilt.it. But I pay me first and taxes, and then my business gets paid. If, after I pay myself and taxes, if I don’t have enough to go on that $10,000 dollar conference trip in the Bahamas or whatever, I can’t do it. Because I’m taking care of my family first.   Sara: It’s really important. I read that book last year, and I also read Company of One by Paul Jarvis, which was my transformational book for 2019. Just the concepts of it and a lot of the ways he challenges growth. That was one of the reasons that I felt comfortable and empowered to let a person go. I didn’t personally like the work of managing someone on a regular basis, so Paul Jarvis says, “Can you figure out automation or some other way to get those tasks done where you don’t have to manage another person?” And I was like, “I probably can. I’d love to do that.” So that was a very empowering for me, reading Company of One, and just thinking about the way that I thought about growth in the past.   Joe: That’s fantastic. I’m going to echo those sentiments, because I had always been at a “I don’t know if I want to grow, I don’t know if I want employees, it seems like a pain in the neck.” But I thought I was crazy for thinking that, and then reading Company of One, I’m like, “Paul Jarvis is from the outside, at least, he seems very successful.”   Sara: Yes.   Joe: His book is killing it, and I think he publishes his numbers or some semblance– Maybe he doesn’t publish his numbers, but he gives you a pretty good idea of how he’s doing. I feel like in one of his e-mails at the beginning of the year, and I’m like “Great. He’s a company of one, and I’m a company of one.” I do have a couple of contractors to do things that I can’t, or I would rather not do, like transcripts and editing. I have an editor. He does great work but supplemented by automation. Once you send me your audio, it’s going to go in a Dropbox folder. He’s going to get it, and then I never have to touch it again.   Sara: Amazing.   Joe: I think I’ve published that flow already over on my blog or on YouTube, but automation is super key. I know that’s not exactly what we’re talking about, but it helps.   Sara: It does help. Maybe it is related because you can do a lot more automation when you’re doing repeatable work over and over again. I’ve definitely been able to automate more of my business, or at least have a procedure for a lot more things that someone else is able to follow because I only offer two packages anymore. I never do a custom proposal, so I’m doing the same type of work over and over again and doing very minimal work on the sales side.   Joe: That’s amazing because a proposal is so time consuming.   Sara: They suck.   Joe: You do 10 proposals, and maybe one hits.   Sara: Yes.   Joe: The rest of that time, maybe 20 hours, is wasted.   Sara: Yes.   Joe: The fact that you already have a– I assume you have just a templated proposal or whatever, or just a list of services that you send out?   Sara: It’s a welcome and pricing guide, and people don’t even have to talk to me to get it. They go to my website, opt in, anyone listening to this podcast can opt in to see how it works. But it immediately sends them the welcome and pricing guide, which answers common questions and gives them pricing, and it enrolls them on my email list. If maybe they’re not a good fit for a one on one services right now, I’ll still email them every week on my email newsletter, and we’ll stay in touch. It’s been a huge, great thing for email list building, just having an automation that sends my prices out. It’s kept me off a lot of those consults that I had when I first started where people were just getting on the phone with me to ask what the pricing was, and they weren’t well-qualified. The conversations I have now, people have looked at the welcome and pricing guide. They’ve weeded themselves out based on frequently asked questions, and it’s generally “Do you think this is a good fit for me? Which package should I choose, and when can we start?”   Joe: Awesome. Again, I know I’ve mentioned Erin a couple of times, but she said the same thing in her episode. I feel like I know I am doing the right thing with this season because a lot of really great advice keeps coming up. I’ll be sure to link to her episode in the show notes as well.   Sara: Awesome.   Joe: We are coming up on time. This has been such a fantastic conversation, as I knew it would be, but maybe as we wrap up, can you give the listeners two or three tips for niching down? If they’re like, “This all sounds great. How do I do that?”   Sara: Definitely, my number one trade secret for niching down is to lower your own perceived risk as much as you can. It’s scary to think about going after a certain niche, so how can you make yourself feel better about it? Number one, don’t go and say, “I’m going to change my entire website to this new positioning and get rid of all the past clients I’ve had.” Take really small baby steps. Instead of doing the risky thing, which is taking over your whole brand and website, shutting it down and changing your business name, just go do a little work for somebody and see if you like it and work in those small baby steps rather than in grand gestures. I know we all like making some big announcement on social media and getting a lot of attention, but the secret to niching down is to do it slowly and make sure that what you’re doing will work and that you enjoy it.   Joe: That’s great advice. It reminds me of a lot of advice that came up in the first season of this show about Olympic athletes. You’re not just going to go be in the Olympics on the first day you decide you want to run a marathon. You’re going to train for a long time. It’s a long process. Eventually, maybe you’ll get to the Olympics. That’s great, really great advice. I love it. You said that is maybe your trade secret, so if I ask you, “Do you have any trade secrets for us?” Have you already given it to us?   Sara: Yes, I would say, definitely. Just moving in small baby steps for niching down.   Joe: Awesome.   Sara: There isn’t necessarily a certain process I can recommend for it, I wish I had found one that was like “Look at this place for ideas and use this matrix for decision making,” but it’s very much a personal and a gut decision. I hope everyone is able to find some work that they enjoy and just find a way to do more of it.   Joe: That’s great. This is an art, not a science. Love it. Sara Dunn, always a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for coming on the show. Where can people find you?   Sara: If you’d like to learn more about specializing, I do have a website at Sara-Dunn.com, where I’ve got lots of blog posts and YouTube videos about what I did to specialize. If you just want to connect, my Twitter is @Sara11D. If you want to take a peek at my SEO services for the wedding industry, that’s over at SaraDoesSEO.com.   Joe: Fantastic. I will link to all of those things and everything we talked about over at HowIBuilt.it. Sara, thanks so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.   Sara: Thanks, Joe. This has always been great.   Outro: Thanks so much to Sara for joining us today. Like I said, I hope you heard why she is one of my favorite people to talk to. For one, she indulges in my pen addiction, which is fantastic. I will link to that in the show notes. You can find all of the show notes over at HowIBuilt.it/163. But I like a lot of what she said, especially the incident about how she didn’t know this person who described her as an expert. That’s how she knew that she made it. She talks about how there’s no quick process, and the time it took to find her specialty. I liked everything that she said in this episode, and I hope that you got a lot of good advice out of it, so thanks again to Sara for joining us. Thanks to our sponsors as well, Ahrefs and TextExpander. They help expand my business by making me more efficient and by finding the right content to write or put out on my various content channels. Again for all the show notes, you can go over to HowIBuilt.it/163. If you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe, rate, and review the show. It helps people discover the show, and I think that all of the guests I’ve had so far this year have been great in helping people grow their business. If you think so too, be sure to subscribe and rate and review. If you are interested in starting your own podcast, like I talked about at the top of the show, head over to PodcastWorkbook.com to get your free podcast workbook. That is all the requests I have for you on this fine day. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, get out there and build something.  

Lindsay Halsey and Pathfinder SEO

September 11, 2018

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Closing out this miniseries on SEO is Lindsay Halsey. She’s the co-founder of Pathfinder SEO and in this episode we talk about how her product basically combines a lot of what we talks about over the past month – automated tools and stats, with a coaching component that can really help you up your SEO game for you or your clients. She has a really great analogy for it that I don’t want to spoil!

Show Notes

Be sure to check out the new shop: https://howibuilt.it/shop/ and the Facebook Group

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Transcript

Intro: Hey everyone and welcome to Episode 93 of How I Built It. Closing out this miniseries on SEO is Lindsay Halsey. She’s the co-founder of Pathfinder SEO and in this episode we talk about how her product basically combines a lot of what we talks about over the past month – automated tools and stats, with a coaching component that can really help you up your SEO game for you or your clients. She has a really great analogy for it that I don’t want to spoil!

Before we get to the show, I also want to tell you about a new shop I launched, that has t-shirts and mugs with the show’s tagline, “Get Out There and Build Something.” I’m excited to finally bring these to market. You can see them at howibuilt.it/shop/.

And of-course, this show (and the whole season) is brought to you by Pantheon. You’ll hear about them later on. SO for now, on with the show.

Joe Casabona: Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today my guest is Lindsay Halsey, co-founder of Pathfinder. Lindsay, how are you?

Lindsay Halsey: I’m good. Thanks much for having me on the show.

Joe: Thanks for being on the show. I appreciate you taking the time. I’m very excited to talk to you about Pathfinder. The full official name is Pathfinder, or Pathfinder SEO?

Lindsay: Official name is Pathfinder SEO.

Joe: Cool. I’m very excited to talk to you about that because it looks like a very interesting service. Why don’t we just jump right into it and why don’t you tell us who you are, and what you do?

Lindsay: Awesome. My name’s Lindsay Halsey, and I focus on search engine optimization and specialize in helping businesses get found in Google, Yahoo and Bing. I have been a partner in a search engine marketing agency for 10 years here in Basalt, Colorado. In the past year we developed a new product, Pathfinder SEO, and are excited to share it.

Joe: Very nice. In a nutshell, why don’t you tell us a little bit about the product and maybe how you used your experience to come to the conclusion that this is a product that we need.

Lindsay: Perfect. Pathfinder delivers a process for people to go from lost to found in Google, Yahoo and Bing. It is for small business owners and web freelancers. We came up with the idea for this product based on our agency experience. At our agency [Web Shine] we do custom search engine marketing projects for businesses small to large, and along the way we found people coming to us echoing different challenges they had faced with SEO. Either it was too expensive, too time consuming, they had an SEO software that had too much data.

But overall, we were hearing people feeling very frustrated and lost in the space, and we could solve that quite easily for folks when they signed up for our services at our agency. We could collaborate and demystify SEO and deliver really great results, but we were leaving some folks behind. Those were primarily small business owners who may not be able to hire an agency, or web freelancers who were actually thinking they wanted to offer this as a service themselves but weren’t quite sure where to get started.

Joe: Gotcha. That’s really interesting. Because I’ve been a web developer for 16 years or so, and I kind of know the technical aspects of SEO like how to properly structure a page. But keeping up with the ever-changing landscape of SEO is one trouble I have, and then the other is just that’s not what I specialize or focus in. And I certainly don’t have the budget to hire a full-blown agency to do something like that. So it sounds like you’re serving a really good market here.

Lindsay: That’s our hope. We’re trying to share our 10 years of industry experience in the form of a process. We give people the map, which is one of the things we think is most missing from SEO softwares that give you a ton of great data. They don’t always lay it out in a process-oriented format and provide that step-by-step coaching that folks need to really take a do-it-yourself approach. So we share that process, which is your map.

We come alongside as your guide and we assign a dedicated SEO coach to each subscribers account, and you meet with that coach monthly. You can think of this as like going to your personal trainer. If a subscription to Pathfinder SEO is like a gym membership, then your monthly meeting with your SEO coach is like your monthly meeting with a trainer. We do integrate in the SEO tools you need, just like other SEO softwares would. Things like keyword research, monthly reporting and rank tracking.

Joe: Gotcha. That’s cool. For the monthly subscription I get access to your tools, I got some guides, and then I actually have a person I get to talk to. And unlike a gym membership, I probably will see real return on my investment.

Lindsay: That’s the goal, of course.

Joe: Not that getting healthy is not a return on your investment, but going to the gym probably won’t help me make any more money. Cool. So you’ve been doing this for the better part of, or maybe over, a decade you said. When you decided to make this product, what kind of research did you do in developing it?

Lindsay: We did a few internal exercises within our team, to talk about what would happen if we tried to turn the SEO industry upside down. We made lists of the attributes of hiring an agency, of what happens in search engine optimization. And we circled all of the attributes that we really loved and all of the things that we think make the industry great. And then we thought about, “What would be the opposite of this? How could we change the way something that already exists and does well and works, but actually improve upon it?”

That was part of how we came up with some of the foundational components of what Pathfinder SEO entails, and then we took a quick and dirty business plan approach. We talked to some experts in the field and then from there it was just heads down work for about four months. We launched our new product and ran off to a WordCamp in Dallas, Fort Worth last year. It was great to have a strong deadline to make sure that we brought our product to market as quickly as we could. It was a great experience that was four or five hard months of solid work and we enjoyed it along the way.

Joe: Cool. So, first of all, I love that. Because when I come up with an idea I sit on it and I’m like, “I don’t know if I should do it,” and I code a little bit. But when I’m doing a coding project and I’m thinking about going public it takes me a very long time to do it. It sounds like you just came up with your requirements, you built a prototype, maybe an MVP. And then you took it to Dallas, Fort Worth. Were you a sponsor there? Did you demo it, or–?

Lindsay: We did a little bit of everything. I did a workshop, and my business partner Lori Calcott did a talk, and we had a booth. We really just tried to dive in head first and get as much feedback and talk to the community as much as possible. We went on to a handful more WordCamps really quickly back-to-back, because for us after having her head down in the office working really hard on it for a couple months we knew we were missing some components. A lot of the feedback that we got from others was hugely helpful in our evolution to where we are today.

Joe: That’s phenomenal. First of all, there’s a very good takeaway here in the sense that getting a return on your investment from a WordCamp when you sponsor a WordCamp can be pretty difficult. But it sounds like you took a really good approach. You didn’t just give out stickers or cards or a discount, you actually sat down with attendees and said, “We’re building this thing that we think can help you. Would you mind taking it for a spin?” Is that about right?

Lindsay: We did a little bit of both. Sometimes we demoed it for folks and got direct feedback, that would happen if someone stopped by our booth. But even more valuable were the lunchtime conversations that we had, where we could just say, “What’s your experience with SEO? What’s been frustrating, what’s going well for you?” And just get more general feedback from people about what their experience with SEO was.

Because even though we had talked to hundreds if not thousands of people in our SEO agency, trying to really understand the problem that people were facing so that we built our solution accordingly, when we come to WordCamps we get to have 10, 20, 100 conversations that can help inform. Instead of just going in with, “How many sales do we need to make to get a return on investment?” We were really looking at our attendance at WordCamps as, “How many people can we talk to, to get to know what their experience and what their pain points are with SEO?” And make sure that what we’ve built solves for those.

Joe: That’s great. You probably end up saving money if it’s just the price of the WordCamp, rather than paying for user feedback through a service or something like that. That’s really great because I think about that a lot, but this is not a podcast on getting your return on an investment at WordCamp. That’s a whole other show. We’re talking about research and this really cool tool called Pathfinder SEO. So, you talked to a bunch of people. You took your experience and then you decided to build it. The first question I have is, is this a service that’s built on top of WordPress? Or is this a standalone SaaS, or is it a little bit of both?

Lindsay: It’s built on top of WordPress. One of the challenges we faced right out of the gate actually came from branding. Our original brand name that we went to market with was WP SEO Hub, which is a lot of letters. And we found that it was tricky for folks. Within the WordPress community people instantly thought that we were a plugin, and maybe a competitor of Yoast. Whereas we were thinking of ourselves as a Yoast ecosystem product, something that works alongside Yoast.

So we had some issues with our name when we first went to market, and we also had some bugs within the software because we moved so quickly through the development process. What we’ve spent the last six months doing is rebranding and rebuilding as Pathfinder SEO. It sort of felt like we built a house, and we went quickly and we learned a lot along the way, and then it was even more fun to rebuild the house from square one. And it is built upon WordPress.

Joe: Very nice. I will ask you the title question then. How did you build it?

Lindsay: That’s a good question. And I pause because there are a lot of elements that went into play. One of the things that we did right at the beginning is identify our team’s strengths and weaknesses, and partner with others. We haven’t built this alone, we worked with Zeek Interactive out of Huntington Beach. That was really helpful in bringing in the piece of the puzzle that our team couldn’t go at it alone. So internally we were able to do all of the design work and user experience, and we did a lot on content.

For us, the process piece was pretty straightforward, because the map is exactly what we’ve created out of Web Shine. So we already had that, we just had to put pen to paper and expand upon in a “What, why and how?” fashion, so that people could really understand that process. And building it was really just that heads-down work, coming into the office on a Saturday morning for a couple hours and working a bit around the clock so that we could maintain our service space business while still building a product.

Sponsor: This episode is brought to you by Pantheon. WordPress 5.0 and the new editor, Gutenberg, are coming. Are you prepared? Do you want to learn about the changes in advance? Pantheon has gathered resources to help you prepare including webinars and tutorials. Pantheon has also made it easy and free to try Gutenberg with your site before the official launch. Visit pantheon.io/gutenberg. Let them how How I Built It sent you!

Joe: Gotcha. First of all, I love Zeek Interactive. Steve Zengut is just one of the coolest people.

Lindsay: We do too.

Joe: But that was another question I had, because another thing a lot of freelancers or self-employed folks deal with or struggle with, I should say, is “I have client work that I’m doing. Client work very clearly and very immediately pays the bills. But I also have this product that I want to build, where that’s more of a long term investment.” Did you have a hard time balancing that?

Lindsay: We did, and we still do, to be quite honest. We are trying to do a better job of time-blocking, saying “This is when I’m working for a Web Shine and this is when I’m working for Pathfinder SEO. Really laying out what the goals are for the week, and making sure we don’t stop until we accomplish those tasks or projects. That’s helping a lot.

Joe: Very nice. So, you’re the co-founder. I don’t think I asked this earlier on, but do you have a team? How many people are on your team?

Lindsay: Our team is a group of four. I’ve got a business partner, Lori Calcott, who you also see at WordCamps and things along the way. And then we have two team members, and we all work out of one office space in Basalt, Colorado. We do have a handful of contractors who also help us on a project basis, mostly on our service side of our business. But mostly we’re a small little team of four here.

Joe: Gotcha. I know that one thing that we tried to do at Crowd Favorite a little bit was kind of what you did. Blocks, where this will be for internal projects. Or I’ve got 10 of my 40 hours a week dedicated to internal projects. I know some agencies will do it a different way, where they have maybe two dedicated team members for a product, and then the rest for the client services. But it sounds like everybody on your team is working on both, a little bit.

Lindsay: That’s true. We all wear two hats.

Joe: That’s really cool. And then you hired Zeek to do the heavy-lifting, kind of developer-y stuff, right?

Lindsay: Exactly. Our team internally has the ability to build a WordPress site, but we really look at ourselves as site builders. We for the most part don’t write any of our own code, and certainly don’t have the capacity or ability to write the code that would have been required to build the software side of things for us. So we knew right out of the gate that we needed a strong development partner there.

It was a bit daunting to go into the SaaS space as a co-founder without being able to write code, because it felt like such a critical component, obviously, of what we were going to need to accomplish. But we went back to that soul-searching that we did when we first got into this industry space, where we said, “We really are going to specialize in one thing, and that is search engine marketing and SEO.” And so in keeping that core competency, we’ve been very purposeful along those lines. Thus we haven’t hired any in-house development support to date.

Joe: Gotcha. That’s a really important distinction to make. Maybe it’s just because I see it more in the WordPress space, or because I have a degree in computer science, but a lot of us are like, “We can build this thing, so we’re just going to build it and not pay for someone else to build it, or a tool that maybe is already built.”

It’s a mature business decision to say, “No. We know what we’re very good at, and we’re going to hire out to do the rest.” Justin Ferriman from LearnDash did the same thing. He’s not a coder, but he had this idea for an LMS built on top of WordPress. So he hired developers and he drove the project because he understands the LMS world and he found good developers to help build out the product that he envisioned. So that’s a really good point.

Lindsay: Thanks, it’s really worked well for us here at Pathfinder.

Joe: Absolutely. And again, that’s just a great decision. You guys get to focus on the things that you know best. Very cool. So the next question I generally like to ask is, has the product gone through any transformations? But it sounds like it went through quite a few in its short lifespan. Is that accurate?

Lindsay: That’s very accurate. The biggest transformation that we’ve gone through is a rebranding. The main reason was because we spent a lot of time when we were developing the product just on that product development, and at the very last minute we slapped a brand on top of the software. We didn’t do a lot of the deep dive soul searching about what our mission was, or why we existed. We really didn’t know what to call our solution when we referred to it.

Was it a software, was it a platform? Was it DIY? So we didn’t dig deep enough when we did that marketing and that branding around WP SEO Hub. And so we very quickly, when we started going to market and bringing our product to market, going and talking to people, we very quickly knew we made a significant misstep there. But we were still getting really great feedback that people liked the concept behind the product once they could understand what the product actually did.

So the biggest transformation was to stop and slow down and ask ourselves those much more challenging identity questions, and out of that came a new brand and that brand resonates a bit more with us. Because we do feel like we provide the map. We also live in the mountains, and so for us it’s very fun and comfortable to be in this little bit more of an outdoorsy space in terms of brand identity. So it’s been much easier to tell our story behind this new brand, and that’s been our biggest transformation to date.

Joe: That’s great. And I want to ask, because I’ve had similar troubles in the past. I guess it’s a twofold question. How important do you think good branding, like a good name for your product is?

Lindsay: It’s pretty essential. From having made the misstep in the beginning, we were just finding that we were turning people off for confusing people from our brand identity, before the conversation even got started. And what we’re finding now, Pathfinder SEO as the new brand has been live for about a month. We’re finding that in demos and in conversations or pretty much everywhere we go, the leap from the concept of our brand to what we’re describing the solution as, which is guided SEO as opposed to DIY or hiring an agency. We provide a guided approach and we’re finding that’s something that people can wrap their heads around. Even though it’s a third solution that’s out there, that’s somewhat new, and changes things up from the more traditional models of how to approach SEO.

Joe: Gotcha. The follow up question there is, do you find that the brand drives the content? Or do you think it’s the other way around? I know that people will say, “Write an outline and then write your thesis, the one sentence and then write everything,” or, “Write your whole paper or your whole presentation, and then do the introduction last.” Which do you think is more akin to the branding?

Lindsay: I can’t say I’m an expert in that space, but we have been doing a lot more writing the content and then bringing in the brand, and just finding that to be a little more natural. Most of the content that we produce is on our blog and blog content tends to be pretty industry-specific, very how-to oriented. Trying to share some of our opinions about SEO as well, because it is an art and a science. So it’s an opinionated space. I can’t say that’s the right way to do it, but we tend to write first and bring in the brand second.

Joe: Nice. I’m not a content expert, per say, either. But I would agree. I would spend too much time trying to force the brand into the content if I started with, “I have this, so I need to put this in the content.” As opposed to just writing what I think is best and then adding it later.

Lindsay: Yeah. One of the things is that we knew that building a new product was going to take a lot of time, and one figure of time I would not really want to know the statistic on would be how long it actually takes to build a really good home page for a brand. Whether it’s a product, a service, a local business. Building a good home page was actually probably the most challenging thing that we’ve done today, and that we’re still iterating on and trying to improve. I don’t know if you’ve had a similar experience.

Joe: Yeah. I have said things like, “I’ll just build this landing page real quick.” And it is never real quick.

Lindsay: Nope. I can write about 10 blog posts for every 1 landing page I’ve built.

Joe: Absolutely. And on that same token, home pages and landing pages, they’re probably slightly different to what you’re trying to do. But when you’re talking about a product you want to present the product. There’s a great podcast called Landing Page School, that has been super helpful for me building landing pages because I’m very developer-y. I’m just like, “I’ll just tell them what it does, and then people will want to buy it.” But that’s not really true. You’ve got to tell the story, and tell people the problem that you’re solving for them, and stuff like that. That’s been a very helpful podcast for me, at least.

Lindsay: I’ll have to check it out.

Joe: I will list it in the show notes for this episode as well.

Lindsay: Perfect.

Joe: Cool. So early on you went through a big transformation with the rebrand, and I know Pathfinder as the name is relatively new, but do you have any plans for the future? Or maybe a roadmap for the next few months that you can share with us?

Lindsay: Of course. We are an open book. Our roadmap right now is we’re mostly focused on expanding our subscription to better serve the web freelancer audience. Right now our subscription is for one website, designed for the local business owner who wants to get involved. We’re actively developing and getting really close to launching new tiers of service where a freelancer can come in and sign up and manage 10, 20, 50 of their customers SEO accounts.

We’re excited about this because we think it’s a great opportunity for freelancers to create recurring revenue. And beyond the economics of it, it’s also a great opportunity for them to stay in touch with their clients and be long-term trusted partners by working with them on not just designing and developing websites but also the ongoing maintenance and the ongoing SEO. We really see a strong relationship-building opportunity there.

Joe: Wow, that’s really cool. Right now a subscription gets you the educational material, the coach, and the tools on the dashboard. If I were a freelancer and I’m like, “I have five clients I want to sign up for this.” Would I get five hours with the coach, or would my clients be able to sit down with the coach? Or, what would that look like?

Lindsay: Good question. We have two solutions. One is you can introduce Pathfinder to your client and have one subscription, it’s $99 dollars a month. So the client might want to be involved in those coaching sessions, and you may even break down within our SEO checklist, which really is our map, which of the steps the client would be responsible for. Then maybe, which of the steps as the freelancer or developer, you’re going to take care of for them.

We’re always trying to encourage people to put the best resources to the best tasks. If maybe some of the slightly more technical SEO type projects better land on the freelancer’s plate, and maybe the more content-oriented ones end up on the client’s plate. So there we’re really working as a team of three, where Pathfinder SEO is coming alongside your efforts and your client’s efforts to get found on Google.

The other way were seeing freelancers use the product right now is behind the scenes. We’re kind of like the back office, they can have the white label reporting and do SEO for their clients, and we’re the SEO software provider that goes one step further. Instead of just giving you good keyword research tools, and good rankings data, and sending you a monthly report. We’re also sharing with you the process that we use at our agency so that you can use it at your own agency.

And along those lines, you can go in and do SEO on behalf of your client and then communicate with them results on an ongoing basis. That’s really the piece of the puzzle that we’re working on now, is making that a little easier. Instead of having to have one subscription for every one of your clients, which is a little bit cumbersome and unnecessarily more expensive. Having one home where you have multiple campaigns under that one log in so that you can take on 5, 10, how many ever client projects you’d like to within Pathfinder.

Joe: Wow. That sounds insanely valuable to a freelancer who’s offering these services.

Lindsay: We’re hoping so. We’re talking to a lot of freelancers to make sure we don’t miss anything in our MVP roll-out here of that version of a Pathfinder. And we’re getting pretty close to launch.

Joe: That’s great. It sounds like you’re taking the right steps. I’ve been hearing more lately about how important in-person conversations are, and I’m a very extroverted person so I like having those in-person conversations. But I’ve never had a conversation with your students about what they thought. I’ve never thought about that, because everybody keeps talking about, “Scale, scale, scale.” One on one conversations don’t scale very well, but they’re immensely valuable to your business so they can help you scale in a different way.

Lindsay: We’ve found we’re similar, pretty extroverted. Enjoy taking a break from doing that hardcore computer work, taking a break and talking to people. But also my personal experience when I sign up for subscription as a service products, is that I tend to say, “OK. Great. This tool works great. You have a really good onboarding process that both provides me with some education, and walks me through the steps I need to take to get this set up and working for my business.

But I still would love it if I had 30 minutes of someone’s time to run through the use cases and the different scenarios that I’m thinking about. That can give me some high expert-level advice that is specific to my business, and that would really help me use that product much more effectively and probably be a longer term client.” We really wanted to build that in so that people don’t say, “OK. This is great. It gets me almost there, but if I could just talk to somebody and ask questions that are pertinent just to my business, I would get a lot of value out of that.”

Joe: Wow, that’s great advice for anybody building products and anybody using products. Again, I go through the onboarding process and I’m like, “I guess their documentation is what they have. I’ll just figure it out on my own.” But maybe a 30 minute call on how to use Zapier, which is something I’m trying to get really good at right now, would be fantastic for me. Because then that 30 minutes helps me automate countless hours.

Lindsay: Exactly. And I think it’d be great for them, too. Because they’d get to see their product in action. So it’s really a reciprocal relationship that we’re finding out of those coaching sessions. Rather than looking at it as being a scalability challenge, where we’re going to have to staff coaches as our product grows, we’re looking at it much more along the lines of, “We get this great opportunity to talk to our customers once a month and share with them our unique perspectives and hear from them what’s going well and what isn’t in their world of SEO and trying to get found in Google.”

Joe: Built-in monthly customer feedback. That really sounds like you nailed a good business model here.

Lindsay: We’ll see.

Joe: I sound like I’m gushing, but there’s just a lot of really great information here. So even though you’ve given us so much great information, I still have to ask. Do you have any trade secrets for us?

Lindsay: Yeah. Instead of talking product I’ll share a trade secret in the world of SEO. Everybody thinks with trade secrets and in terms of SEO that there’s this little snippet of knowledge in my back pocket that I’m not willing to give because it’s my one way of getting somebody found in the search engines, and I keep it really close to heart. But that’s not the trade secret of the day. Instead, the trade secret of the day is a piece of advice to change how you distribute the hours you apply to SEO.

Let’s say you’re a small business owner and you have two hours a month to apply to SEO and trying to get found in Google. So you have a two hour window of time, within that two hours I’d encourage people to spend over 50%, maybe 50-60% actually doing the things that are going to have an impact on their website. Those things are like writing content, and getting links, or getting reviews in Google My Business.

Think of it as, going back to that gym analogy, you want to be 50-60% of your time in the gym actually working out. Because that’s what’s going to move the needle in the search results. Then take that other 40% of your time and break that out to the original research and strategy that goes into getting found. Things like keyword research and looking at your competitors’ websites, and then following up on reporting.

Following your results and transitioning your strategy. What we tend to see is people spend 90% of their time in SEO softwares looking at data, lost in Google Analytics, freaking out about the meta description that’s deep in their website that has the red flag in the SEO software. And not doing the things that really matter, like writing a blog post once a week, or going out to a favorite customer and asking them to put pen to paper with a Google Review.

Joe: That’s great. It goes back to the time blocking that we talked about earlier. Take the time that you have and block it into most of the time actually writing content and getting reviews, and stuff like that. That’s great. So I am going ask a follow up here, because this is now for my own edification. This is probably because content reviews, they probably could act on a more personal level. The other 40%, you’re appeasing the robots. But for the 60% you’re doing things to help the actual person. Is that an accurate summary?

Lindsay: That’s a great summary. One of the things I like best about the evolution of SEO over the past few years, is that it’s real marketing. So instead of saying I’m writing this blog post for the search engines, really what you’re doing is much bigger than that. And you’re writing good content, you’re sharing your expertise online whether it’s via your blog or elsewhere, for your customers, for your prospective customers, for your existing customers.

It’s just a benefit that you get more traffic from Google, but everything is about being user-friendly, customer-friendly and really part of an online community of sharing. To us that makes SEO much more natural and less cryptic, whereas ten years ago so much was done behind the scenes. Now it’s all very forward-facing, very collaborative, and I personally like that quite a bit more.

Joe: Yeah, that suits me better too. I definitely like that a lot better. Awesome. Lindsay, thanks so much for joining me. Where can people find you?

Lindsay: You can find me online at PathfinderSEO.com, and then also on Twitter.

Joe: PathfinderSEO.com, I will link that and your Twitter handle in the show notes. Do you want to maybe say that out loud, so people listening can just tweet you right now?

Lindsay: Sure. It’s @Linds_Halsey.

Joe: @Linds_Halsey. Perfect. Again, both of those things and everything we’ve talked about will be linked in the show notes. Lindsay, thanks so much for joining me today.

Lindsay: Thanks so much, Joe.

Outro: Thanks so much to Lindsay for joining me today. I love the concept of a trainer at the gym who teaches you how to exercise and then lets you go off and do it. You get to improve your SEO, and learn why and how it’s improving.

And Thanks again to our sponsor Pantheon. Their support this season is making the show possible.

The question of the week for you is how do you apply SEO to your website or business (if at all)? Let me know on Twitter at @jcasabona or email me, joe@howibuilt.it.

Don’t forget to check out the new t-shirts and mugs at howibuilt.it/shop/

For all of the show notes, head over to howibuilt.it/93/. If you like the show, head over to Apple Podcasts and leaving us a rating and review. It helps people discover us! You can also join the Facebook community over at howibuilt.it/facebook/. I want to build a strong community for this podcast, and Facebook is the place to do it. And until next time, get out there and build something!

Pam Aungst and SEO Process

September 4, 2018

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So far this season we’ve looked at starting an SEO agency and an SEO product. But what we haven’t looked at was a good strategy – especially when it comes to Pay per Click and the like. Well that changes this week with our guest, Pam Aungst. She’s an SEO expert with her own agency that wants to make sure SEO is a personalized strategy. She tells us how in this episode.

Show Notes

View on separate page

Transcript

Intro:
Welcome to episode 92 of How I Built It! In this episode, I’m talking to
Pam Aungst and we’re talking about SEO Process. So in the last couple of
episodes we talked to John Doherty about his product, and before that we
talked to Jeremiah Smith about how he built his agency. In this episode we
talk to Pam about process. And I really like this episode because I had
some immediately actionable advice. Essentially as soon as we hung up, I
applied some of what she taught me.

Sponsors:
Today’s episode, by the way, is brought to you by Pantheon and Traitware.
You’ll hear about them both later, so for now, on with the show.

 

Joe Casabona:
Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast
that asks, “How did you build that?” Today my guest is Pam Aungst. She is
an SEO expert and we’re going to talk a little bit about her process. We
were introduced to each other formally by a friend of the show, Liam
Dempsey of Hallway Chats. I’ll link that in the show notes. Pam, how are
you today?

Pam Aungst:
Good. Thank you for having me.

Joe:
Thanks for being on the show. This is a little bit more nebulous. We’re not
talking about a specific product, or thing. We’re talking more about SEO
process and strategy and things like that. Why don’t you tell us, and the
listeners, a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Pam:
Sure. As you said I’m Pam Aungst, my company is Pam Ann Marketing, and we
also now have a sister company which is also an offering. Which is Stealth
Search and Analytics. Both companies offer SEO, PPC and analytics services.
Pam Ann Marketing works directly with clients and Stealth Search and
Analytics works on a private label basis through other agencies that want
to offer those services, but not hire in-house staff to provide them to
their clients.

Joe:
Gotcha. Cool. So you’ve got a little bit of the client services going, and
then some of the white label services going with agencies and folks who
might want to outsource their ability to do SEO stuff.

Pam:
Yes. We were getting requested to do that so often that I had a light bulb
moment, and I was like, “We’re getting these requests without even saying
to the world that we are capable of doing this. I wonder what would happen
if we said to the world that we were capable of doing this?” And that’s how
Stealth was born.

Joe:
That’s fantastic, and a great name for that service because you are being
stealth in who exactly is doing the work, I guess. This is not a question I
decided to ask until right now, but why would somebody or an agency, or
another company want to outsource their SEO strategy?

Pam:
It’s primarily because of the fact that SEO is so complex. And PPC, and
analytics. All three are very complex. SEO does have the most moving
pieces, though. And it’s just really hard for design focused firms and
branding agencies, or just broader scope marketing agencies. It’s really
hard for them to fully understand it, and if they did they probably would
hire in-house. But it’s hard to provide a service and hire and train people
to do something that you yourself don’t know how to do.

Obviously, they could try to hire someone that claims to already know it,
but how do they know they already know it? There’s some comfort level with
not having to go through all of that training, hiring, sourcing talent,
training them, managing them for something that they really don’t
understand. There’s just a comfort, and it’s easier to turn to a firm that
has got all that figured out, and has got a good reputation already. Then
they can just capitalize on what’s already been built.

Joe:
Absolutely. If you want to be an effective manager you should at least
understand the people you’re managing. I’m not going to go hire an
illustrator because I can’t tell an illustrator how to do their job.

Pam:
Exactly.

Joe:
I’m going to hire an independent person that I don’t need to manage. I just
say, “I want this. Go do that.”

Pam:
Yes. It’s certainly simpler. And sometimes too they don’t have a full time
need, they don’t have enough of the work. It’s only a couple clients that
are asking for it, so they couldn’t even justify hiring a full time person
or even a steady part time person. They just need it on a project basis.

Joe:
Yeah, and that’s a great point. I asked that question not skeptically, I
knew full well why. I just wanted to hear it from you because SEO is a full
time job. Just like how people scoff at social media managers. As somebody
who’s trying to do it all, including managing my social media queues, that
takes a large chunk of my week. If I want to do it right.

Pam:
Oh, absolutely.

Joe:
So you want to have the right people in place if you want to be effective
with that stuff.

Pam:
Yeah. And the process is part of what we sell, to touch upon that, because
we said we were going to talk about the process. Having the process figured
out is a whole separate thing from knowing the theory. I find in my hiring
for my company, that people who haven’t had a lot of work experience in the
field yet, they may understand the theories behind a SEO perfectly well and
thoroughly but practical application of a theory in the real world where
things are messy and there’s constraints and there is layers of red tape,
and maybe even politics within the client’s organization that are
restricting them from being able to do things a certain way.

That “In the wild” type of experience, having a process that is nailed down
that can navigate all of that real world, practical application, and know
those challenges. It’s another reason for subcontracting an agency or
company who already has that all figured, out as opposed to hiring an
individual employee.

Joe:
Absolutely. Having somebody that can navigate those waters is important.
It’s like when you’re playing baseball. It’s easy to say, “Square your
shoulders, keep your eye on the ball, swing and follow through.” That’s
great if somebody is throwing you a fastball and you’re expecting a
fastball. But if somebody throws you a curveball and you’re expecting a
fastball, then you’re going to miss no matter how well you keep your eye on
the ball. So you want somebody who can be prepared for that.

Pam:
Yes, absolutely. And have a process in place that takes into account all
the different types of balls whether they’re fast or curved, or whatever.
You’ve got plans and processes and ways of dealing with it already figured
out.

Joe:
Absolutely. Let’s get into this then. Talking about Stealth, you got this
idea because people were already asking for it. When it comes to maybe
starting that company, and then moving into your process, what kind of
research was involved in that?

Pam:
Like you said we did get asked for it. We didn’t really have to research if
there was a demand. Although I did do research on the competitive offerings
that were out there, because I needed to come up with a way to, if we’re
going to expand this, to differentiate ourselves and come up with marketing
messaging and whatnot. And what I discovered in my competitive research was
that obviously there’s a lot of other companies out there offering this.

But what seemed to me to be missing, and what I was hearing from the
prospective agencies that we had that wanted this from us, I was hearing
that they needed a custom approach. And a lot of the white label offerings
SEO re-seller programs that are out there are very cookie cutter, pre done
packages. You just sign up slap your name on it and it’s unable to be
customized. We have agencies asking us all the time to just do one piece of
our process for them or to handle a unique challenge for a client.

What’s interesting is that a very comprehensive process that we developed
for Pam Ann Marketing over the last seven years, we’re actually cherry
picking individual pieces of that come up with custom offerings through the
other agencies on the Stealth front. Because that’s what they want. Like I
said, most of it is project basis. That’s one of the reasons they’re coming
to us, they don’t have a full time need. They just have this one project at
hand.

It’s got these unique challenges. “How can you help us?” We can hand-pick
pieces of our whole process and put together a custom approach for each
agency, for each project for each agency. They really like that. So my
research helped solidify our marketing plan and our marketing messaging,
because I realized that most of what you find is this cookie cutter package
type approach. We do have a very solid process that’s repeatable but we are
willing to customize it. And that was an important piece of research and
strategy for this.

Joe:
That sounds really interesting. It almost sounds like the companies who are
doing the cookie cutter stuff are thinking, “This white label service will
just be passive income for me,” or, “Semi passive income.”

Pam:
Yeah, perhaps. And also perhaps there are agencies out there that want
that. They want something that’s incredibly predictable, the same every
time. I guess it just so happened that we attracted agencies that wanted
these unique solutions. And I don’t know, maybe because of our reputation
we got approached with more complex things that they knew weren’t a fit for
a cookie cutter program. For whatever reason it just so happened that these
were the types of inquiries we were getting. There very well may be
agencies out there that want the cookie cutter stuff, and that’s fine, but
the niche that we’re going after is those that need something unique.

Joe:
It all depends on your needs and your budget. Maybe you want something
cookie cutter until you know what you want, or until you know what you
need, maybe, is a better way to put it. Just, “Give me what most people
have.” And then you take that and you’re like, “All right. Now I understand
the process a little bit more. I don’t really need the leather seats in my
car just give me the regular seats, but I want a really good sound system
in my car. So give me that.”

Pam:
Yeah. Perhaps. Also though, one of our core values all along has been that
we don’t believe that cookie cutter approaches work. Because every single
business is different, every single website is different. They’re like
snowflakes, they’re each completely different. So although we have a
predictable, repeatable process, that process allows for and accounts for
those differences and has flexibility in it to account for those and take
those into the strategy and deal with those. So I don’t think that a truly
cookie cutter package approach gets the best results anyway.

Joe:
Again, that makes sense. That segues perfectly into, what is the research
process for maybe when you have a new client? First of all, when you’re
dealing with maybe not the agency stuff and when you’re dealing directly
with clients, who do you deal with mostly? Is it e-commerce people, or a
certain type of business that you work with?

Pam:
We work with businesses across all verticals. But the common thread is more
the situation that they’re in. They tend to be more established businesses.
Because we’re niche and we only offer a few services, two out of three of
which are focused on search engines, we’re perfectionists about our
approach to SEO and PPC and everything. We like to go in deep and cross
every “T” and dot every “I” and be thorough with our strategy.

We’re just a better fit for helping companies who have the basics in place
already, to take their strategies to the next level. As opposed to a new
mom and pop shop that just opened up and they don’t understand the role the
website’s going to play for them, and they don’t understand what a SEO is
yet. We’re just a better fit for established businesses that need to take
things to the next level. That’s the common thread as opposed to certain
industry or type.

Joe:
Gotcha. OK. If I can put you on the spot just a little bit. My podcast has
been around for over two years at this point. I get a decent amount of
downloads but I want to take it to the next level. If I were to approach
you, what would your process be for, “Am I a good fit for you, and what
should my steps be?”

Pam:
Sure. That’s a great way to discuss this, to use a real world example.
First of all, are you a fit? I can usually tell that right away just by
talking to someone about their business, and making sure that they are
already at the point where they know the role their website plays, and they
know it’s important. They know they have to invest in it. I could tell
pretty quickly that you’d be a serious prospect that would be able to work
effectively with us.

And that’s not just being picky because we don’t want to work with the
other kind, because we find it annoying or something. We can’t be as
effective unless we’re working with someone who really understands the role
their website plays in their business and understands at least at a high
level how SEO works and why we need to do what we need to do. Once that’s
all vetted out, then we’ll move into, if we’re officially kicking off and
working with someone we’ll move into what we call our Phase 1 planning
process.

That starts with a deep dive discovery conference call where we have the
client pre-fill a questionnaire and then we go over it together and flesh
it out even further. About the company, the company’s history, what makes
the company different, who their target audience is, keywords they want to
get found for, wording that they don’t want to be associated with and so
on. A deep dive on the brand and the company.

We then take that and we do our keyword research process, which is very
in-depth. We go through thousands of potential keywords that could possibly
be a fit for that site. We just hoard it all into a big spreadsheet of good
potential candidate keywords, and then we cull it down based on
supply/demand calculations. We’ve come up with a couple of our own metrics
that we use that measure the size of the difference between the search
volume, and the competitiveness of phrases.

To find good opportunities for those that are searched often enough, but
not too competitive. And we come up with a list which is still pretty long
of phrases that are really good contenders, then we zoom out and we look at
that from a 30,000 foot view and come up with some key takeaways to discuss
with the client.

Joe:
Just to stop you there for a second. When you talk about “Choosing the
keywords,” in this example I wouldn’t want “build” or “podcast” because
that’s a super common keyword. But I also wouldn’t want “podcast on how to
build super specific WordPress plugins.” Both of those are bad for
different reasons.

Pam:
Those are opposite ends of the spectrum. The single words, like “build” or
“podcast,” or sometimes even two word phrases if they’re really popular,
are too popular. But we don’t want to go to the other end of the spectrum
and pick phrases that are too long and too specific that are hardly ever
typed in but may be very easy to rank for, but they’re hardly ever typed
in. So we’re going to find that sweet spot in the middle.

We also focus on right-sizing our selections for the client’s existing
traffic. If their website was getting, let’s say 900 visits of organic
search traffic a month. We would not want to pick a key phrase for you that
was searched 90,000 times a month because, to try to explain the rationale
behind this. If Google was willing to, or any search engine, I just
reference Google a lot as an example.

But if Google is willing to rank your site for a keyword that had 90,000
searches a month, your site would probably already have more than 900 total
hits a month. So it’s not an exact science and it’s not an exact math
formula, but we use that to stay in the realm of what would be attainable
for that site. If that makes sense.

Joe:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I guess, to go back to baseball. It would
be like if I just decide one day I want to play for Major League Baseball.
At 32 years old if I want to play for Major League Baseball I probably
would have already been on that path to play Major League Baseball. I’d be
playing Triple A ball or something at this point. I can’t just knock on the
Yankees door and be like, “I want to play for you guys.”

Pam:
Right. That’s something that needs to be worked up to gradually. That’s the
approach that we take, so we can use higher volume keywords eventually over
time. But the way that we get there is we pick a whole bunch of right-sized
volume keywords and get traffic going for those until the point where the
site’s average is bigger and Google’s willing to trust it more. And then we
can work our way up.

Joe:
That’s very cool. And I like that you said the word “trust” there. Because
that’s what you’re trying to do with good SEO, is Google’s almost like that
friend who you’re like, “Who’s the mechanic I should go to?” Google is
trying to be more like that now.

Pam:
Absolutely. They want to show the results that are trusted resources for
the information. And there’s a lot of signals that go into showing Google
that your site is trustworthy, and one of them comes from ranking for a lot
of keywords and getting a good amount of traffic for those keywords that
are all ancillary angles of a single topic.

I describe it like building out chapters in your book. Showing Google that
you not only have a single page about this thing, but you have a whole
section on your site about this topic. Google’s indicated in the patents
they’re applying for that they’re trying to become more of a topical match
engine, showing up sites that holistically represent a whole topic as
opposed to a single simple keyword match engine. So that’s another reason
to pick a bunch of right sized smaller volume longer tail keywords, and
build up a whole portfolio of those, because then Google will eventually
trust you more for the broader or higher level higher volume general topics
that you’re trying to represent.

Joe:
Gotcha. So if I want to become an authority within Google on podcasts, I
shouldn’t just write one blog post with a keyword. Maybe it’s the perfect
podcasting keyword. But it shouldn’t be one article, it should be, “How to
interview?” And, “How to pick the music?” And, “What editing software you
should use, what’s the best microphone?” I have an entire section now
dedicated to podcasting authority.

Pam:
Exactly. To use podcasting as an example. There’s a bunch of legs about
that topic. Like you said, equipment and marketing of the podcast, getting
sponsors, etc. And some of those subtopics may even have more subtopics.
Hardware could have, the microphones versus the processing. That wouldn’t
be hardware, but the equipment could have hardware and software and other
subcategories so you can build out an outline.

You can just use Google search suggests to see what other terms come up
when you start searching a certain topic, and build out an outline to work
off of so that you fully flesh out each angle of the topic. And that’s the
next step in our process. Once we’ve gathered all those keywords, we look
at it from the perspective of, “How do we build this into an outline?” Then
we compare that to the sitemap and the existing content on the site, and
look at that from the perspective of what’s missing.

Now we know all these good keywords we want to use, all these good angles
of the topic we want to cover. What do they already have, what needs to be
built out, what’s the fit for the main part of the site to build out there
versus what are we going to do with blog content? So we really strategize
about what content we’re going to put where and how, and how to flesh that
topical outline out into a sitemap of pages and articles.

Joe:
Gotcha. So once you have the right sized keywords, you come up with content
strategy. Is that reasonable? Is that a reasonable thing to say about it?
Or is it more like, this is the type of content you should build your own
content strategy around?

Pam:
It is content strategy to a degree. We come up with at least a high level
content strategy, and we focus a lot on information architecture because
the way the content is organized and how it’s linked to each other and
whatnot very much matters for a SEO. So I would say it’s a content strategy
step but heavily focused on information architecture planning.

Joe:
Gotcha. When I blog I notice that Yoast SEO, the plugin always yells at me
for not having an internal link. Is it stuff like that? That you talk
about? Like, “You’re going to write a post about this, and you should link
to a post you wrote about this. Because it’s important to forge that
connection.” Or is that oversimplifying?

Pam:
Yes, that is a simplified version of what interlinking is and why it’s
important. We do try to look at it a little more holistically and look
ahead a bit, because we want to build out hubs and spokes of interlinks
that are very logical. Whereas on the lightest level, yeah, you can
absolutely just make sure that each of your blog posts is linked to
something else. That’s similar. But it’s even better when you really plan
it out in advance and think about what kind of content hubs do we want to
have on this site and how are we going to link them together? And that
keyword research data really helps visualize that from the get-go.

Joe:
Very cool. Very cool. So we are chugging right along in this interview. I
know that we’ve talked a bit about coming up with a keyword strategy, you
also mentioned PPC is something you focus on, right?

Pam:
Yes. SEO is not a fit for everyone. It takes a lot of time and effort and
resources and patience. So paid search and other forms of PPC are perfectly
suitable ways to get traffic quicker. Obviously, cost needs to come into
account. One of the analysis that we do there to determine if PPC is a fit,
is the estimated cost per click for the keywords they want to come up for.

And that’s important for setting a monthly budget. Because you have to cast
a wide enough net. Not every single person who clicks is going to become a
paying customer, so you have to make sure you get quite a good amount of
clicks out of your PPC effort. And if you set something like a $1,000
dollar a month budget for keywords that are averaging $30 dollars per
click, a thousand dollar a month budget boils down into approximately a $30
dollar a day budget.

So you’re allowing for one click a day. That’s not going to work. Then
you’ve got to go back to the drawing board and look for either more
longtail phrases, or just more specific aspects of the service or the
competitive angle or whatever it may be that might not cost as much if
that’s the fixed budget. Or, just use the PPC data to set a higher budget.
keyword analysis is very important in advance of deploying a paid search
strategy to make sure that it’s going to work and that you’re casting a
wide enough net.

Joe:
Gotcha. So when we talk about PPC, “pay per click.” Those are the ads that
you’ll see on top of a Google search or perhaps Google ads embedded on
other sites. Do you consider things like Facebook ads part of that
strategy, or is that something completely different?

Pam:
I do. I consider anything that you can pay for on a per click basis, or
even a per impression basis, to fall under the realm of PPC. We do other
types of PPC advertising like Facebook ads, YouTube ads, LinkedIn ads,
banner ads, retargeting, etc. But we highly encourage people to start with
paid search because even though the targeting options on those other forms
of advertising.

Particularly Facebook, the targeting options are great and you can be
pretty sure you’re going to get in front of the right type of person, but
it may not be the right time that they want or need something. There’s just
nothing like the high level of intent to buy that comes with someone who’s
sitting in front of a search engine and typing something in. They’re doing
that because they want or need it now or soon.

Joe:
I see. It’s like driving past a billboard versus actually going into a
store.

Pam:
Exactly, yes. If I drive past a billboard and I happened to be the type of
person that likes Coca-Cola, maybe that will make me think of one and make
me want to go out of my way to get one, or get one next time I’m in the
store or whatever. But there’s just nothing like the likelihood of
purchases of, “I was a paying customer with money in my hand already,
walking into a store, or searching for a store that carries Coca-Cola
because I intend to get one right now.”

Joe:
Gotcha. Wow. That is really fantastic advice. Usually people are just like,
“With Facebook ads just offer something for free and you’ll get more sign
ups.” And I don’t experiment that much with Facebook ads. I’ve been
thinking about it for one of my courses, but if people don’t care about
Gutenberg or don’t need to know about Gutenberg while they’re browsing
their Facebook profile, like you said. It’s not going to convert very well.

Pam:
Right. And it does have its role, and it can convert some of the time. You
can catch those people who happen to be thinking about Gutenberg while they
happen to be scrolling through their Facebook feed. It can work. And it is
less expensive, so that is something to take into consideration too. Less
expensive on a per person reached basis than paid search. Paid search can
be pretty pricey.

Sometimes the budget isn’t there for that and then Facebook ads can be used
as a secondary choice, or if paid search is already in place and working
well and the brand wants to just get in front of even more people,
something like Facebook ads can be layered on top of that strategy. We just
encourage people to consider paid search as one of the primary tactics
first for budget allocation.

Joe:
Very cool. We are coming up on time here. I’m going to ask you a very
nebulous question, I guess, based on how much of your process you have
described. What major part of your process, if any, are we missing? How do
we wrap up? Or is there a big piece in the middle that you’re like, “We
definitely should talk about this.”

Pam:
Yeah sure. There’s probably just two more things I want to make sure to
touch upon to round out our Phase 1 planning process. The steps that we’ve
talked about thus far, the kickoff call, the keyword research step, the
information architecture content strategy step. That’s mostly content
strategy, so to wrap up and finish out content strategy, we do one final
step which is keyword mapping.

Now that we know the keywords we want to have and the pages we’re going to
have, we do more than one to one match up of exact phrases to exact pages.
We make a spreadsheet of the sitemap, this page should use these primary
phrases, these secondary supporting phrases, and so on. And we map that out
for the most important content on the site. Then we put together a
PowerPoint and wrap up the whole content strategy for the client.

And that rounds out the content strategy. But there’s a very important
piece that I didn’t mention yet, which is the technical planning. That runs
concurrent with the content planning during our holistic Phase 1 planning
process, and there we’re doing technical auditing of the site and checking
it for about 50 different technical best practices. We like to go deep and
cross every “T” and dot every “I”.

And we truly believe that crossing every “T” and dotting every “I” is
necessary for brands to compete well in the SERPs. I definitely don’t want
to glaze over the importance of that process, because that is something
that is super important, and we believe plays a very crucial role in any
SEO strategy. So the technical planning and auditing process when we take
on a client is very much a key part of the process.

Joe:
Gotcha. I’m a developer by trade, so you’re speaking my language now. What
are maybe some of the most common things that people miss? What are the
things that you see come up in a lot of your technical planning audits?

Pam:
Sure. Actually, some of the basics are often overlooked nowadays. I guess
there’s an assumption that some of the simple stuff isn’t needed anymore,
but we do see it make a big difference. For example, XML sitemaps. Making
sure you have one that is dynamically generated and that it’s submitted to
search console, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools. Those small
little basic best practices still very much matter and have an impact.

We do see those skipped, and the number one thing we’re dealing with right
now is speed. Site speed has been in the desktop algorithm for several
years, so we’ve been focusing on it for some time. And it’s going to be
included in the mobile algorithm as of July of this year, and over 50% of
searches occur on mobile on Google. So that’s going to become even more
impactful. That is something that’s like the number one thing we see
developers, designers, and everyone turn a complete blind eye to.

It never occurred to them to develop the website to load quickly. And it’s such an important thing, not only for SEO but for conversion rate
optimization, too. The falloff stats for every second of page load time in
conversion is just unbelievable. But a lot of people, clients, developers,
designers. They are guilty of not paying attention to it at all. And so we
end up having the conversation for the first time, and sometimes it’s very
far off from where it needs to be, which is three seconds or less. Google
wants that on both desktop and mobile. That is definitely a huge part of
our technical analysis now.

Joe:
Gotcha. One of my favorite stats, if you’re an e-commerce person, is 80% of
people will abandon their cart if it takes more than four or five seconds
to load. I just think about that. If you have a slow website, you could be
losing 80% of people who have already decided to purchase your product.

Pam:
Wow. That’s an impactful stat.

Joe:
Do you think that’s because people assume their content management system
handles that for them, or they’re willing to sacrifice speed because
they’ve got these big beautiful images and background videos? Or some
combination of the two?

Pam:
I think it most of the time just hasn’t occurred to them. Probably because
they just never got to the point where they were personally frustrated with
the load time of their site, which they may not realize that other people
have a different experience than they have. If you go to your own site so
much, you’ve got the content cached in your browser. It’s not taking all
that long to load. You don’t think of it as unacceptable or problematic in
any way shape or form, and they don’t realize that it can differ for other
users. So it’s just not on their radar.

Joe:
Here’s my developer tip for those of you making websites and you want to
test the speed. Go to an airport, Philadelphia Airport is great for this
because their internet is so bad, and connect to their Wi-Fi. Or go to
Starbucks on a very busy day, like Saturday afternoon, and try to load your
website and see what happens.

Pam:
That’s another great point. Because a lot of people don’t realize that most
of the world may have a slower internet connection than them, and that
Google wants you to optimize for 3G mobile speed, not necessarily the 4G or
LTE or whatever you may happen to be lucky enough to have. They want you to
optimize for 3G connection.

So they came out with a tool recently called Lighthouse and it’s in dev
tools in Chrome. You can also get it as an extension. And that emulates a
3G cellular connection. And that is what we believe they’re going to use,
that testing technology, is what we believe they’re going to use for the
way they judge mobile speed on sites with this upcoming mobile speed
algorithm change.

Joe:
Gotcha. So we today have the ability to test the exact way Google will test
our sites for speed, and determine–.

Pam:
We assume it’s the exact way. We’re inferring that they’re going to, just
to cover our own butts here. We’re inferring and assuming that that’s the
method they’re going to use. That does rely on the computer, and you can
get some differences between different computers. So take it with a grain
of salt. They have said that a plus/minus fifteen point score difference is
expected between machines. But do make sure that you’re testing incognito,
logged out of your WordPress admin, and with all browser extensions
disabled. To minimize those variances.

Joe:
Man, that is some great advice and a really good way to wrap up the show.
Except I need to ask you my favorite question. You just gave us a bunch,
but do you have any trade secrets for us?

Pam:
Yes. My trade secret is to not keep your trade secrets a secret. I’ll
explain that a little more. We have found that one of the best ways we have
succeeded in growing a reputation, growing a business, winning clients is
to be completely transparent about all the ways that we do things. All of
our expertise. How we do things. We will train, if a client doesn’t want to
pay us to do it, we’ll train them. We’ll show them how to do it themselves.
We don’t care, we’re not being protective of anything that we know.

And that’s really set us apart, especially in this space which is full of
snake oil sales people. What’s been important in setting us apart and
building trust, is that we’re willing to tell you exactly how we do what we
do and exactly what tools we use. It definitely builds trust. And we’ve
even been paid to train some of our competitor’s staff. And I’ll do it, I
don’t care.

There’s plenty of business to go around. I don’t worry about it. Obviously,
I don’t publish everything that we’ve built over the past seven years for
free on the internet completely, but we do intend to turn some of our
process into online video courses that we can make money off of and
whatnot. I guess I should just rephrase it and say, don’t be overly
secretive with your trade secrets. Obviously there has to be some degree of
secrecy.

Joe:
Absolutely. But even training your competitors. Sure, I’m a developer, and
I have a development course. I could be training my competitors, but with
development I’m sure much like SEO. Part of it is not just knowing it
today, it’s knowing how to know it three months from now, or six months
from now, or five weeks from now. You could teach a person all you want but
you can’t force them to keep their knowledge updated if they don’t want to.

Pam:
Yeah. And there’s also something to be said for that real world practical
application and experience. Teaching the theory does not give away our
competitive edge at all, because a big part of our competitive edge is how
much experience we’ve seen in the wild, applying that theory with real
world practical application in all those messy situations, and knowing how
to navigate that. I’ll teach theory all day long and I will not be worried
that we’re going to lose any business for giving away our secrets.

Joe:
And bringing it back to the baseball, the batter analogy. The Yankees in
the early to mid-2000s always hit Pedro Martinez well even though he was an
incredible pitcher, because they saw him pitch a lot, and they knew what to
expect and how to handle things. It’s a lot like that. The more pitches you
see, the better hitter you will be. So, awesome.

Pam:
You really like the baseball analogies.

Joe:
I love baseball. And at the time of this recording the Yankees are on a
tear right now, and they’re my team, so I will stick to that as long as
possible.

Pam:
Awesome. I’m not too big of a baseball fan, but I could talk football with
you someday maybe, if you like football too.

Joe:
Absolutely. I love football. Are you from Pennsylvania?

Pam:
I’m from New Jersey, so I root for both of the local teams. The Giants and
the Jets, but more so the Giants because I’m forced to. All my good friends
are Giants fans. Except my boyfriend will kill me for saying this, because
he’s from Virginia and he’s a Redskins fan, so I have to root for them too.

Joe:
Gotcha. Understandable. So you are from northern New Jersey, it sounds
like.

Pam:
Yes.

Joe:
OK, cool. I’m from New York, so I am also a Giants fan. Very cool. Pam,
where can people find you?

Pam:
I can be found at PamAnnMarketing.com. All of the social medias that go
along with that. And our Stealth site is StealthSearchandAnalytics.com.

Joe:
StealthSearchandAnalytics.com. I will link both of those in the show notes.
Pam, thanks so much for joining me today.

Pam:
Thank you so much for having me. This was fun.

Outro:
What a great conversation. I really liked what she said about Pay Per Click
vs. Facebook Ads and how Facebook Ads are kind of a billboard. I also like
the tools she told us about, like light house.

And Thanks again to our sponsors Pantheon, and Traitwar. Their support is
deeply appreciated.

The question of the week for you is have you ever tried pay per click or
Facebook ads? Let me know on Twitter at @jcasabona or email me, joe@howibuilt.it.

For all of the show notes, head over to howibuilt.it/92/. If you like the
show, head over to Apple Podcasts and leaving us a rating and review. It
helps people discover us! Thanks to those reviews, the show is currently
#22 in Apple Podcasts for Technology podcasts, so thank you so, so much.

You can also join the Facebook community over at howibuilt.it/facebook/. I
want to build a strong community for this podcast, and Facebook is the
place to do it. I ask the question of the week over there too. And until
next time, get out there and build something!

John Doherty and Credo

August 28, 2018

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John Doherty is the founder of Credo. I met John at CaboPress, an incredible business mastermind week, and we got to talking about the marketing and SEO side of things. Know I don’t know much about that, but Credo is definitely something that can help me in a unique way. In this episode we talk all about the importance of finding the right people to help you in your business.

Show Notes

Question of the week: Have you ever had a business coach or mentor? Let me know on Twitter at @jcasabona or email me, joe@howibuilt.it.

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Transcript

Intro: Welcome to episode 91 of How I Built It! In this episode, continuing this SEO miniseries, I talk to John Doherty, the founder of Credo. I met John at CaboPress, an incredible business mastermind week, and we got to talking about the marketing and SEO side of things. Know I don’t know much about that, but Credo is definitely something that can help me in a unique way. We’ll talk about how in a minute, but first…

Sponsors: Today’s episode is brought to you by Panethon, Traitware, and GravityView. You’ll hear about Pantheon and Traitware a little bit later.

 

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Joe Casabona: Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today my guest is John Doherty of [Hired Gun LLC] and founder of Credo. John, how are you?

John Doherty: I’m doing well Joe. How are you today?

Joe: I am fantastic. It is towards the end of March as we record this. I’m hopeful that it will get warmer. I’m on the East Coast, the northeast, where it’s always cold. I’m not sure where you’re located.

John: I’m in Denver Colorado. Actually it’s funny you bring up the weather because it was 67 and sunny and gorgeous here yesterday. And then at about 6:00 PM last night it started dumping snow. So, Denver gets some crazy bipolar weather around this time of year, basically through May. But we’re starting to get little buds on the trees. I’m hopeful that spring is going to pop through and it’s going to get hot as anything.

Joe: Very nice. When I worked at Crowd Favorite, I heard from a lot of my Denver co-workers that they basically have to leave with a coat, and then it would be shorts weather by the afternoon. And that’s very interesting to me. I think I’m very much like, when I get one nice day, it has to be nice the rest of the year now. It has to just be nice until November.

But I guess if I wanted that, I could move to maybe, Cabo. Where we met, at Cabo press. And that’s how we got connected. Today you’re going to be talking about Credo, a product or service that you’ve created. So why don’t you tell people about who you are what you do, and how you came up with the idea?

John: for sure. Credo is, I think the best way to describe it, is a productized service. Which I realized actually when we were in Cabo. I did think that I was building a product company, and then I was sitting at dinner one night and I went to the product dinner, and one of the guys there was like, “Are you building a product or service?”

I was like, “Of course it’s a product!” And then a couple hours later I was like, “Shoot. You’re right. It’s a service.” So that was mind blowing on the first night. But basically, what we do at Credo is we help businesses that are looking to take their business to the next level. Through SEO, Content Marketing, Facebook ads, PBC that sort of thing. We help them connect with the right agency or marketing provider for their specific needs.

So there are a lot of people out there, the Growth Geeks of the world, where it’s people that come and they say, “I have $200 dollars and I need four blog posts a month written.” That problem is solved. But the people that are like, “I have $3-$4,000 dollars a month to spend, I have a team in place internally. And we’re really looking to scale this thing and hire the right person. But we’re an e-commerce company, we need SEO and Facebook ads.”

At Credo we know who’s good at that stuff. We know he does amazing e-commerce work, e-commerce SEO and Facebook ads for example. And we can connect those two up, then we help the business with reviewing proposals and basically following through until they feel comfortable and confident making the right decision for their business. So we get paid by the agencies and the consultants.

Joe: Nice. Very nice. And that’s interesting. When we were in Cabo I was trying to figure out what exactly my niche is, and how do I really understand my audience. I know you gave me some really good advice about the Facebook Pixel. But as a one-man band, especially, it’s a very hard thing to manage. I almost need to remember, “Set up my social media for this episode. How do I even Facebook ad? I don’t know how to do that.” So I mean, if you’re not ready to take on an employee to do that full time, then this sounds like a great service for you.

John: Totally. It’s that, and then it’s also the companies that we’re best at helping to find a provider Are companies that most of them are around like $1 million plus a year in revenue, so $80-$90K a month in revenue, and we can help ones that are smaller than that, but they have to be really focusing on growth and focusing on marketing. And I’ve found it works best when there is someone that is basically heading up marketing that’s not the founder.

Because founders have so much going on, founders are also really afraid to pull the trigger on any real budget. And so when you have someone that really understands marketing and owns it and is focusing on it, that’s when it’s best to work with a consultant or an agency. Especially on the strategy and services side.

Joe: Nice. That makes even more sense because they know what they need right. I’m not just walking in cold and saying, “I’ll take one of the social media, please.”

John: Totally. And as You said, exactly. “One of the social medias,” like, what are you talking about? And founders, we’re so busy. We have so much going on. You’re recording podcasts, you’re editing them, you’re publishing them, you’re promoting them, you’re doing all that stuff. If you’re building a product you’re also probably writing content, you’re building the product, you might be coding. There’s all this stuff going on.

I’ve been building a team to help me out with a lot of that stuff over the last six months, basically since Cabo. But there’s so much going on that it works best when you have someone that’s really focused on doing it, and their full-time job is doing marketing, producing content, promoting etc. And if you don’t have the budget, or I worked in-house for some big companies where I had to say six months ahead of time who I wanted to start hiring six months from then.

And when you’re trying to move fast, you can’t wait six months. You have you have to get it done then if you’re trying to move fast. Often You have marketing budget to spend on an agency or something like that, but you can’t open up ahead. So that’s when an agency can be perfect to engage with, even short term, until you can hire someone.

Joe: Gotcha. That sounds great. And it’s already giving me stuff to think about. Because doing the podcast, making my courses, doing whatever else I do. I want to make sure that I’m doing this right. When I went out on my own, I thought I was doing it right because it was just like, it was my side gig first. And whatever income that was generated was good enough for me.

And then I went out on my own, and I thought, “I actually need to generate real income here. And what I’m doing isn’t cutting it.” for extra income it’s fine, for like my full-time, “got to support my family” income, I need to do something a little different.

So there’s definitely a lot of things to consider there. And it’s also really hard to keep up with. I like to ask this question, But I feel like we’re going to get a pretty good answer from you. No pressure. What research do you do to stay on top of this stuff?

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John: Oh man. That’s a great question. I’m a professional marketer, right? I’ve been a marketer for about a decade now. Agency side, in-house, running my own company. So I’ve specialized in search engine optimization for a long time and then I’ve done a lot around content and that sort of stuff. Now I’m really getting deeper into marketing funnels, e-mail funnels, that sort of stuff. And basically the way I do it is three different ways.

One is Twitter. I carefully curate who I follow. So I have about 500 people that I follow. I have high 20,000 followers, but I only follow about 500. And that number has actually increased a bit recently because I’ve been following different types of people. Product people, more General Growth people, more of these funnel hacker people. Simply because I’m trying to learn more there. The second one is podcasts. Listening to things like Mixergy is really good. Smart Passive Income has some really good stuff in it. CreativeLive by Chase Jarvis is another one that I listen to that’s really good.

And then I follow a few specific newsletters, Hiten Shaw has a really good one, Product Habits. Grow.co has a good weekly newsletter that comes out. Those are some of the places I basically try to find, just like Credo. There’s so many people out there that say that they’re an expert. But a lot of them actually aren’t. There’s a lot of noise in the space on trend to provide the signal to the digital marketing world, of who is actually good. Same with content.

I’m trying to follow the high signal to noise people, and the newsletters are not sending me something every single day. I don’t need a growth tip Every single day. Give me like the six best articles from the past week around products and growth and revenue generation. That’s what I’m looking for. That’s what actually helps you build your business, as opposed to just getting overwhelmed with all these like little tips and tricks and hacks.

You actually need that strategy. And then you could find, and You can learn the tactics, and you hear the hacks all over the place. There’s no shortage of those. You actually need to know how to put together the strategy first. So that’s what I try to get to.

Joe: Absolutely. I mean, if all you do is hacks, then eventually you’re going to chop off your arm.

John: Exactly.

Joe: It’s like how in math class. The teacher teaches you the long way, and then they teach you the shortcut. Because you need to understand the process before you can actually do the shortcut. So I love that. Studio Neat has a really good newsletter for me, it’s two guys, they send one link each that they like and then a picture of something they’re working on. It’s easily digestible and for somebody who’s trying, we’re both trying to read and consume and learn a lot, stuff like that is excellent.

So that’s awesome. I want to touch on something you said about a lot of people saying that they’re experts out there. When I was, I’ll say I was a kid, but I was in college. I was like, “SEO is easy. I’ll just write the HTML markup and boom, SEO.” And a lot of people feel that way. People feel that way about WordPress. “Making a website is easy. Just WordPress and done.” So how do you cut through the noise and put yourself out there as a signal?

John: That’s a great question, and you’re absolutely right. I think a lot of actual experts, I’m guilty of this myself. I had a friend the other day basically tell me that she was trying to do something new with her site, trying to change some form styles and that sort of stuff. And then she wants to do a paid course. She was like, “Restrict Content Pro and WP Simple Pay, and you’re on WordPress already,” and shout out to Phil Derksen and Pippin there.

But I was like, “Just use these.” And she’s like, “Wait. What are you talking about?” And I’m like, “Oh right. There’s no ‘just’ there. This is old hat to me.” But I think there are a couple of things there. One is when someone is an expert they are going to say stuff like that.

Where it’s, “Just use this,” and “Use that.” You might not have any clue, but they’ve gone in and done the work. Otherwise they might be like, “What about this? What about that? You could do this thing.” And there is all that ambiguity there, but they can see the full range and know what’s actually good there.

Joe: Right. They can pull from their experience to give you a guided answer.

John: Exactly. And then the big thing is I think showing their work. So going back to math class. I was always told, “Show your work.” I hated showing the work, I was bad at it. I got terrible scores in math because I hated showing my work. I was like, “No. I can’t do this in my head and this is the answer.” And they’re like, “Yeah. But how did you get there?” And I’m like, “The way you told me to in class. I just did that in my head, not on paper. I don’t want to write that out, I have bad handwriting.”

But it’s something that I’ve really learned recently is if you’re an expert and you’re trying to show someone that you are actually an expert, you have to show your work. You have to show a proof point, a case study for everything that you’re claiming to do. So if you want to grow your membership site through SEO, do X Y and Z. “Oh, by the way, here’s a membership site that I helped do this on.” I think actually showing your work, and then if you’re looking for an expert, find the people that are actually showing their work.

That’s legitimate stuff that they’re being open about it. So I think that’s really key there. Find those that are willing to teach, and those are the ones that are actually the experts.

Joe: Awesome. As an online teacher I’m really liking that you’re saying that. But it’s true. It’s so funny because in the last maybe, 10 years, 15 years there’s been such a shift from like, “You can’t see what I’m doing. Just know that I’ve done this, and you can’t see what I’m doing or how I’m doing it.” And now it’s, I mean maybe it’s just in the WordPress space. But I feel like It’s a lot more widespread than that. Like a GitHub account is really important.

But it’s like, “This is what I’m doing, and how I’m doing it, and why I’m doing it.” The guys at base camp, a little bit smug as they may be, are very open in the way they do things. And they’re clearly doing something better than me. So maybe it’s not undeserved, but they’re very open about running their business. And Pippin who you mentioned, he’s one of the most open people about his business that I know.

He’ll talk about the decisions he’s made, and why and how it’s affecting his business. It’s no secret why he’s an expert in our field, because people see what he’s doing, and they see his success, and they know why he’s successful.

John: Totally. And I think that that is carrying over to some other industries. I think it’s starting to come around in the SEO world. The Digital Marketing world. You still get the “make money online” people that are very close lipped and all of that. I tend to be very transparent and very open. Some people say I’m bragging, but it also works. I’m showing what I’m doing, I’m showing the results and that builds trust with people.

I’m honestly not trying to brag about it. I’m just saying, “Hey this works.” Like, “Learn from this.” I come from a family of educators. I want to teach people. I love teaching. I think that is coming about, and I think it’s very important as well for people that have built something of value to also show how they got there.

Joe: Awesome. I love that. So moving from the research and the signal versus noise, which I guess ironically is the Basecamp blog. I guess I’ll ask you how you built Credo? Or we could talk about how you build a strategy for somebody. So I’ll give you some time to mull that one over.

But I started this podcast, I want to get back to the root of this question. I started this podcast because I was talking to other people about starting my own online courses, and I was like, “I should record these conversations.” And it was like a mini-mastermind. Do you mastermind with Anybody? Are there people that you bounce ideas off of?

John: I had some people that I bounce ideas off. I don’t have an official mastermind, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about doing. Connecting with other peers and such has been a focus of mine for the last six months.

Joe: Nice. Very nice. And do you find that stuff helps? Being a fairly solo entrepreneur, you’re building a team, but I don’t know if you work from home. I know I work from home, I’m a solo guy. Just talking to people once or twice a week has been great for me. I miss having co-workers in that regard.

John: Yeah. I definitely find that is something that I need. I mean, even if you’re building out a team. The thing is, being an entrepreneur, even if you’re not a solo entrepreneur doing everything, but you’re a solo founder. No one else within your company understands what that means. Even if you’re really good at giving people the full scope of, “This is what’s going on, and this is what’s happening in the business,” which I’m really bad at that, by the way. And that’s something that I’m working on as a founder and as a CEO.

Because I have employees. But they’re never going to understand the emotional stuff that you go through, and the emotional challenges that happen there. Where it’s like, “Stuff is a little slow right now.” And that happens every single year, because it’s this time of year and everyone is super busy, they geared up at the beginning of the year, and they’re going to rework their strategy middle of the year, and then end of the year they’re going to be thinking towards the next year.

But March and April is a little bit slower. I know that intellectually, but I feel it deeply emotionally. They don’t feel that, because it’s not their baby. I definitely find that useful, and find it useful to have other people to commiserate with where they’re like, “Yeah. When I go through slow times I struggle, and I wonder if I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. And I wonder if I’m delivering for my clients what I need to be delivering.” So I found that super helpful.

And honestly, I’ve just found it helpful to build out levels where I have some people that basically I mentor. Very unofficially, but people I help with their business because they are just getting going. Then I have other people that are about at the same level as me, been on their own working for themselves, building a company for the last two to four years, really. I’m about two and a half years in.

And then I have people like Chris Lema and Dan Martell, and people like that, that I consider my mentors. That are numerous steps ahead of me, three or four or five steps ahead of me. And they for some reason graciously give me their time and I can ask them questions, every now and then they’ll meet up with me, every now and then if we’re in the same area. And I can pick their brain for an hour or so. Those are the ones that really take it to the next level. But you have to have all those different levels there.

Joe: Absolutely. So you touched on the empathy factor, that’s something that’s not impossible for somebody who’s not in the same position, but it’s very hard. Because I have found that people who are not in the same position think that either, I’m extremely poor or I’m very wealthy. And that’s like, neither one of those is true. Like, “You have your own business. Are you rich?” And I’m like, “No. I’m not at all rich.”

So the empathy factor is very important, and that was another big thing I got from Cabo Press, because I had just gotten out of a very slow period where I thought, like right after I went out on my own, I was like, “I have absolutely made the wrong choice. I have a five-month-old. I’m not making any money.” And Jennifer Bourn gave me incredible advice on that. She was like, “Yeah. The summer is slow. Save a portion of your income and be ready for that slow period. We go on vacations because I know there’s going to be no work, and I don’t want to panic about money.”

Jennifer Bourn is a very successful person by most people’s accounts. So her telling me that made me feel a lot better. The empathy factor is so important, and having mentees and mentors. Mentees I think keep you grounded, because you’re remembering what it’s like when you first started. So you can empathize with the new person which is very helpful in my online courses. And then Chris Lema is an excellent person, he always offers great advice. Shawn Hesketh has been a personal mentor to me quite a bit. We’re in a similar field, and I’ve learned a lot from him. But all of that is very important.

John: Totally. And let me give one more piece of advice there. Beginning of 2015 my business had grown to a certain point. I think we’re doing like $12-$13K a month in revenue and I was at a breaking point. I was like, “I cannot do anymore.” Like, “I do not know how to take this thing to the next level. I’m overwhelmed. I’m working way too much.” I had just moved to Colorado and wanted more balance in my life, a bit more time. And I actually went and hired a business coach. I still work with them.

I pay him a couple grand a month, we catch up a couple times a month. And he has helped me out a ton with getting clarity about who I am as an entrepreneur, what my skills are, the roles I need to hire for, the highest leverage. He’s always really good at being like, “Is that thing you’re working on the highest leverage thing that you could be doing?” so it’s a combination. And I always push back, I’m like, “Long term I think it is. Short term, it’s not the thing that’s going to double my business next month.”

Which if you’ve been in business for a little while, you know that there’s really nothing that’s going to double your business next month. But it is good to constantly have that push of, “Is this the highest thing you think you could be working on? Or do you actually need to push that off until Q3?” And having someone like that, that you’re paying, because then the mentors, like Chris etc. And I know Chris does consulting and coaching as well, and so does Dan, but neither of them is my coach.

But having someone that you’re paying that basically you’re paying them for their advice, and then you also know you’re going to get their advice consistently. And basically, they know that like, if they’re not helping you grow your business you’re going to stop paying them. So they’re also incentivized to help you out. They don’t go three weeks without getting back to you. Versus when someone e-mails me and they’re not paying me for something, guess what? They go to the back of the line behind the people that are. I think that’s something that a lot of people should consider. Getting an actual coach. I think more entrepreneurs need an actual coach.

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Joe: especially the people who are moving from freelance to entrepreneur. Because I freelanced all through high school, all through college, a little bit after grad school. And There are two things you said. I never saw the value in paying for something that I could do myself. I never wanted to invest because that was money out of my pocket. But it’s an investment. And then the other thing is what you said about, “Is that thing you’re doing the best thing, the high leverage thing?”

Because I can totally empathize with the freelancer who just takes any job because it’s money in their pocket, but over the last couple of years I got to work with Brian Richards and a bunch of other really smart people. And we talked about how, “If you’re taking just any old job, that could be costing you money in the long run.” You’ve got to do the thing that’s best for your business, even if it doesn’t mean immediate money in your pocket.

Both of those things are Just fantastic advice for really growing your business and taking it to the next level. If you don’t want to scrape by all the time, then What are you doing in your business? It’s very stressful. So, cool. We are almost coming up on time. We’re like 20 minutes in and I haven’t even asked you the title question yet.

So here’s the title question. So much good advice in this episode already. How did you build it? You said Credo is a “productized service” so maybe, how did you design that service? And how do you build out that service for, let’s say, we have a sample client?

John: It’s been through a lot of trial and error. My site is all built on WordPress. I’ve been developing on WordPress for a long time. WordPress plus paid memberships pro, and GravityForms, GravityReview. Some of those different plugins. And I put all of the tools that I used to build a Credo on GetCredo.com/recommended-tools. But basically, how I went about designing the product, the company has been through a bunch of different iterations.

Started off with me betting out every single project and then emailing friends, and then basically when they closed it. You’re emailing friends, “Do you want to talk this person?” when they closed it, then I’ve got a commission. To basically a fully functioning marketplace without processing payments, where a project would come in and we’d set it live on the platform, add a custom e-mail system that would e-mail it out to people, that did that kind of work within that budget.

That it pasted based off of how many leads they had received that month, or contacted. If I had a contact cap for each lead of four, if that wasn’t reached in four hours, it would e-mail a couple more. Basically the number left times two. Super complicated stuff that never really worked well. And so my developer and I recently just blew all of that away, because I basically realized it didn’t make sense to have people– and at that point agencies were, and consultants were paying basically on the number of leads they want to be able to contact each month.

Which didn’t really makes sense for a couple of reasons. One, I wasn’t playing the quantity game. I’m playing the quality game. These are these are not the $200 dollar a month, “I need four blog posts a month,” sort of crap. It’s, “I need a super expert, an SEO expert that I can pay $5 grand a month to grow my business that’s already at $2 million, and I want to take it to $5 million a year.” So It didn’t really make sense for someone to be paying the same amount for a $1 thousand dollar a month lead or a $5 thousand dollar a month lead. Plus those leads weren’t closing, they weren’t closing for the agency.

So basically, I then pivoted again, just before Cabo Press last year. So in September of last year I launched an annual plan, so I have a directory, and then I have about 15 agencies I work directly with. They pay us per month and they also pay us a commission in perpetuity on the work that they close. And we help them close that work. So basically, it’s a productized service, basically we’re a regeneration agency for marketing agencies. So it’s meta as anything.

People on our preferred plan are basically our clients. I think of them as our clients. I do my own SEO consulting as well. Those are my clients. Our preferred agencies on Credo are the agency’s clients. So basically the way we do it, is when a business comes in and says, “We’re an e-commerce company,” or let’s say you’re a membership site. A Membership site and you’re doing $1 million a year in revenue, let’s say, and you want to grow it to $3.

Or even $500K and you want to grow it to $1 million. But you have so much going on. You submit our form, schedule a phone call with us, hop on the phone with my customer success person, she talks with you about who you are, what your business does, how you make money and what you need. What you’re looking for. And then once she gets all that together, she puts together what we call a project description. Which is basically six to eight sentences about what you need.

All those things that she just went through with you, you approve that on the platform so that’s built out, and then she sends that project description to agencies or consultants that do that work. Once they accept it we make the introduction and then we follow up a week later, make sure everyone got to connect. And then once you have proposals in hand we hop back on the phone with you, review the proposal, say “Do you have a good understanding of this from this agency? I didn’t see this from this agency that we talked about.” So we help that client get to the point where they still make the decision, they sign the contract directly with the agency of their choice. But we basically help them get to the point where they’re confident that they’re making the right decision.

Joe: That’s incredible. So you’re providing a network for your clients, where you’re saying, “These are the people I know. This is who I think will be a good fit for you.” But I think the big value add is the last thing you just said, “We review the contracts or the proposals with you.” Because that is an overwhelming process. Because everybody says, “This is a standard contract.” Is it a standard contract? I don’t know what that contract looks like everywhere.

So just like having somebody who sees proposals like that all the time, and saying, “This is probably not great for you,” or, “This should be included. This has been included other places.” And I feel like that’s a huge value add, and something that takes a long time of trial and error or hiring an expert who knows that stuff and who has seen it through experience.

John: It’s a value add on both sides as well, because it’s a value add to the agencies because we’re reviewing their proposals with them, and also giving them feedback. I had one agency recently that they were sending through basically a Google doc of their proposal, and they had awesome stuff in there but they’re going up against this agency that was super polished.

And so I went back and told this agency, I was like, “You might only be three people, and talk about being a micro agency of experts, but you need to up your brand a bit.” And we talked through that, and he came back two weeks later, and he had completely redone that. So that’s huge value to him. And then on the client side, I mean we’re not giving legal advice.

But I’m saying like, “We talked about X Y Z, we talked about Facebook ads.” They don’t mention Facebook ads in this proposal at all. Like, “What’s going on there?” Or if it’s a bigger agency, and they said, “We’ve worked with the big agency in the past and didn’t really like that because of the account manager set up,” and then we introduced them to smaller agencies because of that, when they come back we still ask, “Do you have a good idea of who’s actually going be working on your project?”

Because there are definitely agencies, and this is the right fit for some people, where there’s an account manager and like four different teams with junior people working on your project. But For certain businesses you need a ten-year veteran directly working on your project, not some junior person that they’re farming out work to. So we really help them think about those questions, and then go back with better questions. And we don’t hear the phone calls that they have with the agencies and all that.

We’ve had the initial contact, and we’ve seen the proposals and we get some other bits and pieces throughout. But the hardest part is actually helping someone pull the trigger, and a lot of businesses will get scared off. Like, Joe, if you were trying to grow this podcast and you wanted someone to help you out with promotion and all that, and someone comes back. Even if you know that you have $2,000 dollars a month to spend on marketing, someone comes back and proposes you to spend $2,000 dollars a month with them for X Y and Z. You’re going to be scared. Right?

Joe: Yeah. That’s More than rent.

John: You’re going to put it off. You’re not going to respond for a little while. We can actually help the agencies close more work because we’re also keeping the client involved. We keep you involved., “I know you got proposals from this agency and this agency, let’s schedule a cal. Let’s hop back on. Let’s talk through your fears.” all that stuff.

Joe: Right. Because in my head, I just see the money flying out the window. Oh my God, that is more than I pay in rent per month. But you’re saying, “That $2,000 dollars a month, can make you $5,000 dollars a month,” or whatever.

John: It’s that investment mindset that we were talking about just like five minutes ago.

Joe: Yeah exactly. And the bit you said about providing value to agencies too, because there have been proposals I’ve sent out that I’ve just gotten a “No,” and then I haven’t gotten a reason why. You can now provide, maybe not the reason why, but at least feedback to say, “This is where you can do things better.” And that is so important because that feedback means that I’m not going to lose the next one for that mistake.

John: Exactly.

Joe: You’re just helping everybody. This is fantastic.

John: Trying to.

Joe: We are totally, slightly over time. That’s OK. You’ve answered your question about transformations. So do you have any big plans for the future, or anything coming down the pike?

John: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, a few things. I have a couple of new offerings that I’m planning to launch soon. Actually, by the time this comes out One of them should be launched. But I’m not going to say what it is yet, in case it’s not. But basically What I’ve realized is everyone always says, “Focus on one offer, one model,” that sort of thing. But I also believe that there are a lot of ways you can provide value to people.

So I’m looking for a few different ways to diversify our revenue streams to help us invest back into growing the company. The lead side is good, I’m doing more affiliate stuff. I have a couple of other paid offerings I’m going to be launching as well. So that’s the future, and then as I said, I’m really trying to learn to be a CEO and not just an entrepreneur and a solo, lone wolf, Do-it-yourself kind of person.

I’m Really trying to hire good people to take Over stuff that I’m not amazing at, like operations. I’m good at sales But I shouldn’t be hopping on the call with someone that has $1,200 dollars a month to spend on Facebook ads. I can pay someone who is much cheaper than me to do that. Who can do it just as well if not better. So that’s really where my company is going over the next year.

Joe: Nice. That sounds fantastic. Well I’m very excited to see how that works out. When this episode drops I’ll look for that new feature.

John: I’ll send it to you.

Joe: Awesome, sounds great. So my final question, my favorite question. Do you have any trade secrets for us?

John: Trade secrets? Let’s see here. I think when it comes to growing your company, one of the trade secrets that I always like to tell people is, and I don’t know that’s really a secret. But when it comes down to marketing it’s all about, who is the person that you’re trying to serve and how do you serve them best? People talk about their personas. So you have a persona, for me it’s marketing directors, for example. I have to get down deep into, “What are their fears? What are the things they’re struggling with?” All that sort of stuff, to really know, “What is the offering? How do I message it to them? How do I get in front of them?” I think this is something that I personally have missed for a long time. Like I was saying at the beginning, tactics and tips and tricks are all a dime a dozen. You actually have to get down to the strategy.

I feel like I’ve I built my business backwards, like starting on, “I could drive traffic to these pages, and write content or whatever.” But now really, if I’m going to get to the next level, I have to actually think about, “What is the longer-term strategy of my business?” And actually getting down into, “Who is my customer?” So get down into, if you have a business that’s doing okay, but you really want to take it to the next level, you really have to go back to, “Who is my customer? Who is my audience, and what do they really need from me?” And that’s going to drive your future decisions. As opposed to, “I want to build a product. I want to build a membership site.” No. You want to serve this audience, and what is the best way to serve them? Is it a product? Maybe. Is it a membership site? Maybe. Is it a podcast? Maybe. Your audience can tell you that.

Joe: Awesome. That’s fantastic. And it goes right back to the empathy factor, you understand what your customer needs and then you can build around that. Very cool. John, thanks so much for joining me today. I really appreciate you taking the time.

John: Yeah. My pleasure. Thanks for having me on, this has been fun.

Joe: Absolutely. Where can people find you if they want to learn more?

John: The best place to find me is my company site. GetCredo.com And the best place to connect with me personally is on Twitter @DohertyJF.

Outro: Thanks so much to John for joining me today. He offers a lot of great advice and works hard at his craft. You can tell by the way he talks how passionate he is, and that shows in a great product (or productized service)!

And Thanks again to our sponsors Pantheon, Traitware, and GravityView. Their support is deeply appreciated.

The question of the week for you is have you ever had a business coach or mentor? Let me know on Twitter at @jcasabona or email me, joe@howibuilt.it.

For all of the show notes, head over to howibuilt.it/91/. If you like the show, head over to Apple Podcasts and leaving us a rating and review. It helps people discover us! You can also join the Facebook community over at howibuilt.it/facebook/. I want to build a strong community for this podcast, and Facebook is the place to do it. And until next time, get out there and build something!

Jeremiah Smith and SimpleTiger

August 21, 2018

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Jeremiah Smith is founder of SimpleTiger, an SEO company that focuses on SaaS companies. This episode is going to kick off a miniseries about SEO and I’m happy that Jeremiah is starting it off. He offers so much incredible advice about SEO and life in general. I love his story, and I think you will too.

Show Notes

Check out my new show, Creator Toolkit and join our Facebook community. Question of the week: What’s the best piece of SEO advice you’ve ever gotten? Let me know on Twitter at @jcasabona or email me, joe@howibuilt.it.

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Transcript

Intro: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 90(!!) of How I Built It. In today’s episode I get to talk to Jeremiah Smith, founder of SimpleTiger. This episode is going to kick off a miniseries about SEO and I’m happy that Jeremiah is starting it off. He offers so much incredible advice about SEO and life in general. I love his story, and I think you will too. We’ll get to all of that and more, but first…

Sponsors: Today’s episode is brought to you by Panethon, Traitware, and GravityView. You’ll hear about Pantheon and Traitware a little bit later.

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Joe Casabona: Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today my guest is Jeremiah Smith of SimpleTiger. Jeremiah, how are you today?

Jeremiah Smith: I’m doing awesome. Thanks for having me on the show.

Joe: Thanks for being on the show. I really appreciate it. When you guys reached out, when your company reached out there were a few suggested topics. And I think we’re just going to talk about how you created a SimpleTiger today, is that right?

Jeremiah: Yes sir.

Joe: So why don’t we start off with who you are and what you do, and how you came up with the idea?

Jeremiah: Sure. My name is Jeremiah. I’ve been in the SEO industry now for about 12 years, and I pretty much discovered SimpleTiger. It was a marketing agency where I used to offer a whole bunch of different services. From building websites, to designing logos, to actually even printing business cards. I did everything. I thought I could do everything, at least. And I stumbled across Search Engine Optimization through building a website for a client. And after building their website, showing it to them, and they’re like, “This is awesome.” And then a day later they’re like, “OK. Can we get it in Google?”

And I just thought that it was filling out a web form and submitting it to Google, and then you’re done. But I didn’t even realize there’s a whole industry underneath that has so much to do with keeping your site to show up well on Google. So when I discovered that I was immediately like, “This is intriguing. I want to do this for this client. But I can’t really sell this yet.” But they agreed to have me do it as a full-time job for them so long as it worked.

That was their thing. They were just focused on results. And so I had this immediate desire to start learning SEO by doing it. But my goal was obviously to yield results for this client. So that’s when I dove in and it actually worked extremely well. Their company grew massively in a matter of six months and I was ecstatic. I couldn’t believe what I had just learned. And I knew that if I’d just done all of this by learning it, imagine if I knew how to do it and was able to do it for clients.

So I parlayed that into a career in SEO, and went to work for some big ad agencies, and really learned how the big boys do what I do now. That started this side business of SimpleTiger being focused on SEO and consulting, and just got rid of all the other junk I used to do. Building websites, designing logos, printing business cards. All that had to go. I wanted to focus on a SEO. So that is where SimpleTiger was born.

In those days though it was a consulting company, where I didn’t have the personnel to do campaigns for all these huge clients. So I just spent my time consulting them. And that was pretty much how it started.

Joe: Cool. Very cool. Learning by doing is something that I preach all the time. And I’ve said to people, to make them feel better, “You never learn something as well as if you break a client’s site and then have to fix it.” I have always learned the best that way, or at least the fastest.

So what was it like, learning by doing, as far as SEO goes? Because you don’t necessarily see results right away. If I write a line of code and it breaks, I see immediately that it breaks. But with SEO it’s a little bit of a longer game, right?

Jeremiah: Yeah it is. And that was a bit of a challenge. Now what’s awesome is when I was learning SEO, 2006 through 2007, that was the very beginning for me. So when I was learning, those days SEO was much easier than it is today. The tools at your disposal were really good. The stuff that Google gave you access to in regards to keyword data, and things like that, were fantastic. In those days you could you could change a title tag on the website and immediately start ranking better.

That’s totally different nowadays. It’s much harder to rank in Google nowadays. And so I actually was blessed to have that, because it was a good teacher. It allowed me to quickly learn things in those days. But you’re right. SEO does take a little while to take effect. And sometimes that can be a challenge especially when you’re trying to learn something.

So the hard part for me in those days is probably knowing exactly what to do. I didn’t have the experience to filter out what I was reading from what might work and what might not. Nowadays I have that experience and I can quickly tell what I need to do. But that was probably the hardest part in those early days.

Joe: Gotcha. That’s really interesting. That makes a lot of sense, and it was probably easier back then. Because I know when I made my first website I would get links and I would get e-mails all the time, “I’ll trade you link for a link.” And that was the strategy in 2003.

But I mean, 2006-2007 is when Twitter started and then a few years later it started to get big. And the Google algorithm changes quarterly. And because it changes so quickly, what kind of research do you do to stay on top of SEO? I know that there are some big names out there. Matt Cutts used to be a big name, and I think Danny Sullivan. I don’t know if he’s still doing that.

Jeremiah: Yeah. He’s still around. And I definitely recommend people follow Danny Sullivan. He actually left Search Engine Land and joined Google, which is really cool. So now we’ve got somebody who is really involved in the SEO community for a very long time on the inside at Google, which is awesome. I love that. Of course he’s limited with what he can talk about, but he does throw us a bone every now and then.

So I will say following him is a great idea. But if you really understand what Google’s “Why” is, why they exist. And you understand their ethos. If you’ve built a relationship with Google over time like I have, then you can to a large degree predict what they’re going to do. You don’t really need to follow all the news and hype so much.

And that’s one of the biggest filters for me, is I look at the commercial interest that Google has and everything they’re going to take a step in. Because Google’s not going to try to quit making money. They’re going to try to make more. We have to keep that in mind as they move and as they operate. And to a large degree what I’ve learned, and this is the big secret that’s not really a secret in the SEO community, but I want everyone to know about this because I think it’s important.

Be authentic with everything that you create. And if you’re always doing that, you’re doing it creatively and you are doing it prolifically, and you’re creating large pieces of content and several of them. And you’re consistent with that. You’re going to have a fantastic future in search, insofar as Google’s concerned. Because their algorithmic updates are looking for your kind of stuff to promote, and other kind of stuff to disappear.

They want a better index. They want better content to wrap their advertising around. They make more money off of that. So keep that in mind as you build things, and then that will help you predict what Google is going to do next.

Joe: Wow, that’s fantastic. It’s almost like if you want to run a TV ad, you’re going to want to run it either during the Super Bowl or a really popular show, and not just any old thing that some smaller network is putting out. Right?

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Jeremiah: Yeah, pretty much. It’s being creative about what you’re doing. But at the same time understanding that you’ve got to provide value at some level. And being creative is interesting because you bring up a great point. Super Bowl ads are your most creative ads all year, and they’re so exciting to watch. I love it. That’s my favorite part of the Super Bowl, actually. It’s awful.

But I remember that, not this past Super Bowl but the one before that. Miller bought a one second spot because a Super Bowl ad costs a hundred thousand dollars per second. And so they bought a one second spot and it was just a guy for the miller factory wearing a Miller shirt standing in the factory with all beer behind him, and he just goes “High life.” And that was it. It was just a one second thing. And it was it went viral, it was so huge. And that was the cheapest Super Bowl commercial of all time, proportionally speaking. That’s a guerrilla technique of being very creative in capturing your audience, who are very occupied.

And I thought that was cool. I really dig that. But when it comes to SEO, there’s a common misconception. And this is another thing that I try to teach and promulgate this throughout the web. But a lot of people compare SEO to advertising. And that’s the worst mistake you can make because it’s so different. If I were to really explain what a SEO is to you, insofar as what we do in Google, it would be reverse engineering another company’s intellectual property– Google– in order to leverage it to your business’ benefit. So it’s really strange. It’s not advertising.

Joe: Right. I mean, you can throw money at advertising reasonably, and eventually do well. If you have an unlimited amount of money for Google or Facebook ads, eventually you’ll start to convert. But SEO, you need to actually understand the problem that you’re trying to solve. I mean, “optimization” is in the acronym.

Jeremiah: Absolutely. And the funny thing for us has actually been, I would say the hardest challenge for me growing this business over time, has been pricing things appropriately. And the reason being that our inputs are pretty much the same almost no matter what client we work with, because there are certain things that have to happen every single time. Content has to happen. Links have to happen. Things like that. Of course there are more difficult industries than others, but we’ve niched down over time and we figured out our target market.

Because of that, everything looks the same. Almost every campaign we get into there are the nuances and the differences there, but because of that I can build a pricing model that works for what we do. But what’s crazy is what comes out the other end for the client is vastly different in regards to scale and in their industry. So with advertising, that’s not quite the case. Advertising’s got a flat fee for pretty much flat return.

Whereas with SEO, you can scale dramatically. Of course it might be expensive in the beginning when you’re spending $5,000 bucks a month and you’re not getting a lot of results out of it. But a year from now, you might have so much business coming from search that we’ve actually had some clients tell us we have to stop working with you for a little while. Because we’ve got to re-engineer parts of our company to handle the business we’re getting. And that just shows you what kind of power is in SEO.

Joe: Wow. And again it lays credibility to the fact that it’s a long game. I think a lot of people in general believe that the internet could be a get rich quick scheme. Like, “I’ll set up a site. I’ll start a Kickstarter, I’ll start making money. I’ll just SEO my site and I’ll start making money.” But it’s a game of patience.

And I fell into that trap too, when I started my online courses I was like, “I’ll release a course and people will buy it, because people want to learn this.” No, not at all. Why would somebody buy a product from me if they don’t know me? So that’s really interesting. I also like to ask if you’re the mastermind, if you get business advice from folks. And I do want to hear the answer to that question.

But I’m also interested in the discovery process for a client, because you come up with a pricing package, but you said the results could be so different. What kind of stuff do you look for? Do your clients know what they’re looking for when they first come in? Or do they just say, “I want to be number one in Google.” what’s it like?

Jeremiah: Good question. I love that question. I can go deeper on that. It took us a long time to develop the new process that we have for client intake, but this new process is fantastic. We do something in the very beginning that I recommend, pretty much any company that’s offering a service, even down to just building a website. Highly recommend you do. And it’s basically just an intro phase to a project. We call it an opportunity assessment.

With SEO, we’re going to assess your opportunity in regards to search. A lot of SEO companies out there do something similar, but they don’t do anything quite like we do. And there are few agencies that do. And what I see them do it works so well. So we jumped on board with this. The opportunity assessment allows us to check all the different areas that are going to impact them from a SEO perspective, and see how they stack up. Where their strengths and their weaknesses are.

Because what I don’t want to do is try to take some cookie cutter approach to every client and say, “You always need technical optimization. You always need new content. You always need links.” While that may be true that they will always need some amount of those, those proportions may vary dramatically. We’ll deal with some client websites where from a technical perspective, the thing’s built on WordPress, they’ve got all the right plugins, it loads really fast, it’s very clean and smooth. Good user interface.

They don’t really need any technical optimization. Let’s not sell them that. Let’s say, “A lot of companies do need technical optimization. But you guys check off that box, so we’re not going to invoice you for that. Moving on into content. You might need a little bit of content. But where you guys really need help is in your links area.” So we’re going to do a proposal that’s heavy on the links side of things, that’s medium on content and doesn’t include technical. But that’s our full suite.

The opportunity assessment allows us to see all that ahead of time. Now what’s different for us, and we have strong business reasons for doing this. We charge for the opportunity assessment, whereas a lot of companies do it for free. We used to do those for free. But what I found, and this is a nugget that I’m giving your listeners here. What I found is you’ll get a ton of tire kickers coming through and people that want to get this assessment for free. And Our assessment carries some value in it.

When we do that technical chunk, we list the top 10 things that could go wrong from a technical perspective and whether or not they’re wrong on the client’s site. And then we dive into some content strategy and we dive into some offsite strategy. We’re actually providing value in this. So first of all, we charge for that. But second of all it limits the amount of people who are trying to get this free opportunity assessment, down to the ones who are serious and they’re ready to invest in SEO.

And what’s crazy is we charge $200 bucks for our opportunity assessment, which is super-duper cheap compared to the $10,000 dollar Phase 1 project that we’re going to do next. But what that does is that warms them up with a buying relationship with us, and then when it comes to the proposal they’re so much more ready to continue working with us. Because we already feel like we’re engaged in a business relationship. So it works really well for that.

Joe: Very cool. I love that. Because you’re right. You do get a lot of tire kickers. It’s like the people who say, “Design me something, and if I like it I’ll pay for it.” Like, OK. “Give me a meal and if I like it, I’ll pay for the meal.”

 

Jeremiah: Right. You got all the time in the world.

Joe: Yeah, right. And $200 bucks, to be honest, is not a very high barrier. But it definitely weeds people out. My friend Erin Flynn recently changed her membership model. She used to have this free membership area that she decided that she was going to charge $12 dollars a year for. And what that did was weed out the trolls. The people who were just there, not providing value, being jerks to the community. And she immediately saw an increase in the community, because $12 dollars a year is not a lot of money.

If people answer one question that you post, you have that value. But the people who don’t want to spend any money and get all the free advice are the ones bringing the community down. When I was at Crowd Favorite we did the same thing with that, we charged for the discovery phase because we put real resources into it. We didn’t just look at the website and go, “I think you need this.”

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Jeremiah: Right. We noticed a couple of immediate things that happened after doing that. The first thing that happened was, first of all my sales were up. I spent probably about a third of the amount of time doing opportunity assessments, because now I don’t have a ton of people signing up for these free assessments.

The second thing was our close rate from opportunity assessments increased dramatically, from 20% to 70% to 80%. And it was like, “Heck yeah. Now we’re getting somewhere.” And then the third thing was what you just said. The quality of clientele that we started getting was fantastic, and the retention rates were so much better because we put them through a strict vetting process before we ever began a serious relationship with them. Figuring out all that stuff in the beginning, because SEO is quite frankly, and I hate to say it but It’s very complex.

There’s a lot to a good search engine optimization campaign. I’m not saying smoke and mirrors, I’m just saying there are a lot of things to it that need to be figured out ahead of time. And doing that allows us to figure out a lot of that, instead of just the right campaign for them. To where when we pitch that campaign, and we walk them through the parts that we’re recommending, it all just makes sense. And then they understand, they know, they learn something in the process and they’re ready to buy.

Joe: again, that’s fantastic. I keep saying the same thing over and over again. But you’re making a lot of really good points.

Jeremiah: Oh, good.

Joe: I just thought of a random question that you probably get a lot. This is maybe not usually what I ask, but it is very complex. We talk a lot about Google. Google is always the one that you’re optimizing for. Do you optimize for other search engines? Or is it basically, “I’ve optimized for Google, so I’m pretty much optimized for everything else.”

Jeremiah: Great question. I love this. Side note here, I’m actually teaching at the University of South Florida. I’m teaching senior level marketing students. I taught a class last night, it’s a nice three hour class to give them a deep dive into search engine optimization. And in that class, I got the same question. And I said, “When I’m teaching this stuff and when I’m working with clients, 99% of the time it’s Google. They are the 600 pound gorilla.

And in regards to general commercial web search purposes. But when we really take a step back, Search Engine Optimization is agnostic from a platform perspective. It will work in Amazon. It will work in the Apple iTunes store. If you’ve got a podcast, or you’ve got an app or a song, that kind of stuff. It will actually take effect there. Heck, even an eBay SEO works. So it’s amazing.

I’ve seen eBay stores do really well by having a good SEO strategy for the eBay platform. Everything that applies to Google in regards to how you optimize for Google, does not necessarily apply to Amazon or eBay, of course. Because in Amazon we’re not talking about websites anymore, we’re talking about listings or product listings that you’ve created, and stuff like that. So different rules to the game but the same concept still exists there. But to answer your question, yeah, what we do is primarily for Google.

Joe: Gotcha. Cool. Sweet, I mean we are more than halfway through, I can’t believe how fast this interview is going. And I haven’t gotten into the title question yet. So let’s do that. We’ve talked about SimpleTiger, we’ve talked a bit about strategy and things like that. But how did you build SimpleTiger?

Jeremiah: Oh man. That’s a fun story. I mentioned at the beginning there how I did SEO for the one client and then decided that was that was it for me. I wanted to do that full time. I cut out everything else and focused in on SEO, put that on my resume. Knew that at the time I couldn’t just build an agency out of nothing, I didn’t have anything. I didn’t know how to build an agency. I didn’t know how to run an agency, I didn’t even know how to work at an agency.

So I thought, “I need to go work in an agency and really see if this is it for me.” So I got a job at a huge agency in Atlanta called 360i. And I love those guys, to this day they’re fantastic. They’re huge movers and shakers in the enterprise SEO space. And all of my clients there were Fortune 500 companies. Every single one of them. They were just massive. And I got to see how SEO works on that grand scale. And I quickly learned, that everything is exactly the same for them as it was for that little tiny mom and pop shop that I got my start with. It’s just scaled up.

If it’s content that needs to be created, they create more content. If it’s links that need to be built, they build more links. But the same rules still apply. The same techniques still happen. So I got to learn that and then do that for a lot of huge clients, and while doing that I’ve built my consulting practice on nights and weekends. Just consulting smaller businesses that would never fit 360-I’s budget, that kind of thing.

And over time I just built a bit of notoriety in the community for that. And then eventually I decided to venture off on my own. This was right around 2008-2009 when the economy got really tough, advertising was the first to go. So there was all kinds of shuffling around. I got let go from 360i because We had a lot of SEO people there and everything.

And I was so, at the moment, checked out and checked in to my entrepreneurial idea of building my own thing that it was really a good boost for me. And I’m sure they could probably sense that too, that I was ready to go do something of my own. But they are a really sharp company. They move their people up really well and have a strong tight knit team.

So I left there to go work for another smaller agency, because I still didn’t feel quite ready. And that smaller agency, I brought them an SEO department, basically by building something that they didn’t have there and getting a bunch of clients on board. And that really was where I learned how to take nothing and build an agency out of it, But for someone else. So I had the security blanket of a daily income.

And then I finally hit that that final straw. “I’m totally done working for somebody else, I want to build my own thing. I really want to take SimpleTiger and turn it into an agency.” So I left that last agency there, went off on my own, and that was a little bit terrifying for a moment. But there was actually a deeper, longer term feeling of fear that stuck with me for quite a while. That it was all on me. And so I dove straight into consulting and just picking up consulting clients left and right.

In those days I didn’t have a process put together or anything. I was taking anything I could get, in terms of SEO consulting work. And I had some awesome projects, I had some terrible projects. But after a little while I realized I made really good money doing it, but I was working myself to death. I realized, I’m going to have to build a team. I need people who can help me actually produce results and do the SEO stuff, so I can go out and sell it.

And so I brought my brother on full time. He was interested in SEO at the time, and I taught him a little bit about it. He went to work for another agency for a while just like I did. That was my rite of passage for him. I was like, “You’ve got to go through this. It’ll be good for you. You’ll learn it, and then I’ll be able to afford to pay you to work here because then you could pull some weight.”

And that’s exactly what happened. He came in all beefed up ready to go. He knew how to do it. And so we joined forces and took SimpleTiger from a consultancy to an agency, and started hiring employees and actually building a team. And that’s how we got from there to where we are today. Now our evolution as a company since we started hiring a team has been really fun and exciting. Way easier, and sometimes a little painful, but way easier than just being the consultant doing my own thing by myself. I love having a team.

Joe: There are two things I want to parse out here. Right at the beginning of this story You gave an incredible piece of advice that I want to make sure it lands with the listeners and that’s when you said, “I needed to go work at an agency. I needed to get experience in the industry.” Which is very clairvoyant for a young entrepreneurial person, because I was in that very same situation.

I got a piece of advice from a family friend who said, “When you get out of college you need to get a job at a company and learn how they do things. And then you’ll be ready to go out on your own.” And I being the stubborn New York Italian male that I am, thought, “I know everything. I’ve been doing this since I was 14. What more could I possibly learn at 21?” It was super low risk because I was living at home, I was in grad school for a time.

And it wasn’t until I actually got my first real job that I actually learned, man. I should have listened to that family friend right off the bat. I put myself back maybe two years, or three years. For people who are coming out of college that have the entrepreneurial spirit, you hear about Snapchat and Facebook who get the billion dollar IPOs and they’re college dropouts or whatever. But for most of us, get that experience and make those connections.

Jeremiah: Absolutely.

Joe: And that’s the other question I wanted to ask you, is that you went to a smaller agency after 360i and built out their SEO department. Did you bring your clients with you, or did you start from scratch there?

Jeremiah: Started from scratch there. There’s a huge thing in the agency space, and I didn’t have any real strict non-competes or anything like that in those days. But there was definitely a respectful line, where it is just like, you don’t do that. And I didn’t want to hurt my name at all. I really wanted to keep my relationships with everyone at 360i fantastic. It was purely a logistical reason that I got let go during that whole downturn, and so I wanted to keep those relationships healthy.

Because later on they ended up sending me business. Because believe it or not, 360i’s minimum budgets are massive, and sometimes they’d have some really cool companies come through and they’d refer them over to me and I was able to build my agency based on my past agency relationships. So that was awesome. But I think that’s one big part of it.

What you just said though, about getting a job in the industry, and all that. That is so huge. Because that one year that I did that, I mean it was just one year that I worked at 360i. It wasn’t a really long time. But I learned so much in that one year, I learned several things that I needed to do for my SEO agency. And then I learned a few things that I would probably never do for my agency by working there. And it’s nothing against 360i.

It was just learning my style and figuring out what I wanted to do, and what I wanted to build, versus what there already was out there. And I decided I wanted to build a boutique agency that grows very small, very slowly, very steadily. Very small amount of people that yield massive results. Whereas 360i was not lean. They were huge, we had a ton of people. But we also offered a lot of services outside of SEO.

And I really just wanted to focus on search engine optimization, and also just wanted one niche category of clientele. Because I learned that’s a fantastic way to make money. And I’ve only practiced that over the past year or so and it’s really paying off. I recommend people out there pick a niche. I saw you had a previous podcast of niching down, and I think that’s so powerful. Not enough people do that. But that was something I couldn’t do at 360i.

We had so many huge clients and so many diverse industries, it just didn’t make sense. So I learned all kinds of stuff through that experience and that relationship. And I also learned how to just deal with massive companies, and how at the end of the day, they’re all the same. The numbers might be a little bit different but don’t let that kind of stuff sway you. Continue doing your job based on what you need to do. And you can move the needle for a company as big as NBC or E-Trade. You don’t really have to get bent out of shape over the fact that they’re huge, or anything that. Don’t let that scare you.

Joe: Wow. Great advice. And I will link to the Sarah Dunn episode of niching down. I think that is more excellent advice, especially in software engineering. We call that “domain knowledge.” We want to have domain knowledge of the software system we’re building so that we can build a better system. We understand the users, and our user’s users. Understanding the industry and having that domain knowledge allows you to offer a better service, because you come in knowing a little bit, or maybe a lot, about what your clients need right off the bat. And you can ask those questions that a generalist might not know to ask.

Jeremiah: Right. And that’ll definitely help you close that business well, but that will also help you market your business well. So if we’re talking about search engine optimization again, and it’s for your company and you’ve chosen a niche. Let’s say for example, you’re a software as a service company, and you’re building a piece of software that’s maybe a piece of invoicing software. But your invoicing software just so happens to work best for maybe other software companies, and that’s the niche that you’ve decided to go after.

Now let’s just imagine for a second that you didn’t decide to go after that niche. The keywords that you would write would be things like, “invoicing software.” And you get to compete with the Intuits of the world with QuickBooks and FreshBooks and Zero and all those big names. But if you are invoicing software for software companies, the game changes a little bit. Your key word targeting is going to be software-based or “Software-focused invoicing software,” or “Invoicing software for SaaS,” or something along those lines.

And now your key word pool’s a lot smaller and your target audience is a lot smaller, but they are much more likely to do business with you because of that level of targeting and because of that domain knowledge, like you’re talking about, that you have. I don’t want to go too deep into that. I know you have a separate episode all about niching down, but I would just like to also throw my two cents in that, “Yes, it is very valuable, and it works really well.” Highly recommend it.

Joe: Fantastic. So you told your story and it was a lot of transformation. And we’re totally coming up on time here. I do want to ask you what your plans for the future are. Is it keep an eye on the pulse of SEO? Is AMP going to affect the way you do things? What are your plans for the future?

Jeremiah: Good question. There’s so much about the future of SEO, and that was my finishing statement to my class last night at USF. That was the one thing they wanted to know. “You’ve taught us everything up to now, what’s going to happen in the future?” And that’s such a fun question for me to answer. Because I love theorizing about this stuff. But I will say in regards to SEO looking forward, there’s a bunch of stuff going on that I think your listeners might be interested in hearing a little bit about from someone experienced, like myself, on the subject.

Just so they don’t get swayed by a lot of the hype. And I want to clarify this. Voice search is a big thing that’s happening right now. People are concerned about what that means. People are using the Amazon device, which I can’t say her name right now. She’s listening, and she’ll start talking to me and ruin the whole thing. But there’s that, and then we’ve got the Google’s home device and stuff like that, that are always listening. And those devices, in regards to voice search, those devices are primarily going to help you answer simple questions that just have a very clear black and white answer to them.

They don’t have as much commercial intent capability yet that’s being leveraged. As people I think assume will dominate, I personally don’t think I’m going to be buying a whole lot of products through my Amazon device. That’s just me. But I prefer to look at some things and read a little bit about it, and then click the buy button. Something about that process, actually I literally enjoy doing. So I don’t want a break from that too much, and I think a lot of people are actually a lot more like that.

We have to keep in mind that voice is just an input method, like the keyboard and mouse. It’s just another way of entering in a search query. And then the result that you get, if it’s not going to be on a screen, if it’s going to be vocal then it’s got to make sense to come through that medium. So just keep that in mind. Don’t let the news and hype about voice search throw you off, that “SEO is going to die because voice search is going to take over.” No, there’s going to be a whole new level to it there.

And that’s what that means. It’s going to filter out a lot of the garbage search from what you want, most likely. That’s one part. Another part gets into artificial intelligence, which I don’t have time to go over there. But I wouldn’t worry about that either. Just refer to my first note on SEO which is just be authentic in what you create. Create really good stuff for humans.

Artificial intelligence will learn that and will keep up and you’ll be fine. So those are a couple of things about the future of search. Insofar as my agency is concerned, and growing SimpleTiger, again my goals are just to keep it a boutique agency and focus on delivering the best results for our clients that we can. I don’t have any plans to just blow it out of the water. Of course I do want to see massive growth. I don’t want to grow so fast that it’s a flash in the frying pan experience for us and we have to shut down. That’s something that I fear. So I would rather just grow steadily and healthfully and always be around. So those are my plans for the future.

Joe: I dig that, and I appreciate and I’m sure a lot of the listeners appreciate you not saying the bigger names for the At Home Smart Devices. Awesome. And we’ll leave with this, though I think you just gave us a bunch. Do you have any trade secrets for us?

 

Jeremiah: I would say a lot of your listeners are probably very tech savvy, and in that regard when we do SEO we break everything down into technical, content, and off site.

And off site usually means link building. Your audience is probably going to be strong on the technical side of things and doesn’t need to do much technical optimization. I’m just going to assume that right out. So because of that I would focus on the meat and potatoes of SEO, which really are building good quality content that’s very user specific, it’s very audience specific. It answers their pain points.

So build that content on your site, and then go get links to that content from other relevant sites. Whether those are blogs or publications on the web, or friends’ websites or whatever. Get links back to that content and you will perform well on SEO. I can guarantee it. That’s the best course of action. And that’s something that you should constantly be doing. I would try my best to plan out some content in advance so that when you start working at it, you don’t have to stop.

Google likes to see fresh content and you will to see it when you start realizing that every blog article you stack up, if it’s part of a plan, brings a new chunk of visitors to your site that are keyword targeted and ready to buy from you. So every time you stack one of those up you’re just compounding the amount of traffic and business you’re ultimately going to get. I’d recommend that your audience just focus on building content, and building links to that content and They’ll do well.

Joe: Focus on building content. Awesome. Now I like to end with that question, but I can’t leave this follow up on the table. Which is, is there some magic publishing schedule? Three blog posts a week? Do I need to blog daily? Or is it just consistent, Good stuff?

Jeremiah: Tim Fair said something fantastic a while back. He said, “What is better? The strict diet that you will not adhere to, or the less strict diet that you will adhere to?” And I love that advice. So come up with a schedule that is not so strict that you won’t adhere to it, but is strict enough that you can handle it. I think that’s fantastic. Now on the opposite end of that, people like Nick Eubanks who are colleagues of mine and have been in SEO forever.

They’ll post case studies where they spent months developing lots of high quality content without publishing any of it. And then one day they’ll publish a hundred articles all at once, and they’ll publish all this stuff. And this is tests that he’s doing in the SEO industry. And he’ll show going from zero to 100,000 monthly search visitors in the span of like a month, after launching the site with all this new content on it.

So Google’s very sharp. Google can quickly determine what’s going on. A lot of crazy things can happen in Google very fast. And he was testing the edges of that. So you’re not going to publish content too quick for Google, I’ll tell you that. When in doubt, if you can publish faster, if you can publish more, do it. But not at the sake or at the cost of quality.

Because that is a big algorithmic indicator, is quality content that people are really going to digest. So longer form articles that go deeper into subjects and provide lots of steps and how to’s, and have some rich media with images, and some video links and stuff like that. That’s going to do way better than a 500 word article on a subject. So keep that in mind too.

Joe: Great advice. I think I’m going to have to change my content strategy a little bit right after we get off this call. Jeremiah, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Jeremiah: Awesome. I really enjoyed it and I appreciate the show. I love what you’re working on here, and I was just happy to be a part of it. So thank you.

Joe: Great. Thanks so much. And where can people find you?

Jeremiah: Sure. At SimpleTiger.com. You can also find me on Twitter. Twitter handles are @SimpleTiger, as well as myself, @JeremiahCSmith. So hit me up with any questions or anything, I’d be happy to answer questions for your audience anytime.

Outro: I’m so grateful that Jeremiah and I were connected because this interview helped me frame my content strategy, at a time where I needed it. His advice about needed to work in the industry first was some of the best advice I got in college, which I never took. I’m glad Jeremiah did, and I’m glad I eventually did.

And Thanks again to our sponsors Pantheon, Traitware, and GravityView. Their support is deeply appreciated.

The question of the week for you is what’s the best piece of SEO advice you’ve ever gotten? Let me know on Twitter at @jcasabona or email me, joe@howibuilt.it.

For all of the show notes, head over to howibuilt.it/90/. If you like the show, head over to Apple Podcasts and leaving us a rating and review. It helps people discover us! You can also join the Facebook community over at howibuilt.it/facebook/. I want to build a strong community for this podcast, and Facebook is the place to do it. Finally, if you’re interested in the different tools and services I use to build websites, check out my new podcast, Creator Toolkit over at creatortoolkit.com.

And until next time, get out there and build something!

Sara Dunn and Niching Down

March 6, 2018

Sponsored by:

Continuing our series on How You Build a Business, today I get to talk to Sara Dunn about niching down. She’s been pretty public with her process, starting a YouTube channel to discuss her decision making. I loved chatting with her about this because it can be tough and scary to decide to limit your potential client pool, but I think Sara is doing it the right way.

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Transcript

Intro: Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of How I Built It! Continuing our series on How You Build a Business, today I get to talk to Sara Dunn about niching down. She’s been pretty public with her process, starting a YouTube channel to discuss her decision making. I loved chatting with her about this because it can be tough and scary to decide to limit your potential client pool, but I think Sara is doing it the right way. We’ll get into that in a minute, but first, a word from our sponsors…

Sponsors: This season of How I Built It is brought to you by two fantastic sponsors. The first is Liquid Web. If you’re running a membership site, an online course, or even a real estate site on word press, you’ve likely already discovered many hosts that have optimized their platforms for a logged out experience, where they cash everything. Sites on their hardware are great for your sales and landing pages, but struggle when your users start logging in. At that point, your site is as slow as if you were on three dollar hosting. Liquid Web built their managed word press platform optimized for sites that want speed and performance, regardless of whether a customer is logged in or logged out. Trust me on this, I’ve tried it out and it’s fast, seriously fast. Now, with their single site plan, Liquid Web is a no-brainer for anyone whose site is actually part of their business, and not just a site promoting their business. Check out the rest of the features on their platform by visiting them at buildpodcast.net/liquid web. That’s buildpodcast.net/liquid web.

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And now…on with the show!

Joe: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It the podcast that asks how did you build that. Today my guest is Sara Dunn. Sara, how are you?

Sara: I’m doing great, Joe. How are you today?

Joe: I am fantastic. We are recording on Star Wars Z. I am wearing an R2D2 t-shirt, and in T minus two hours, I will be seeing The Last Jedi, so I couldn’t be more excited. This is like my last work thing before I knock off for the afternoon.

Sara: That’s perfect. Sounds like a perfect day.

Joe: Thank you very much. I am very excited about it, but we’re not talking about Star Wars today. We are talking about you and your business, and your recent decision to niche down. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are, and what you do, and how you came to this conclusion.

Sara: Sure. I will try to keep it to the shorter version. My name is Sara Dunn. I operate a micro agency, which is a remote group of four coworkers. I’m located here in South West Michigan, and I have coworkers throughout the country. I’ve been doing web design and development for clients for about five years now, and we generally have worked with a very wide variety of clients. Kind of the, if you have a checkbook and want to hire us, we are your agency, which I have discovered in the last couple years, is not a very powerful or particularly interesting position to be in, in business. It was about two years ago, actually, that I first started throwing around the idea of specializing. By that, I mean becoming more well known for something more specific rather than just we’ll make you a website.

I don’t know how deep you want me to get into it now, but I have been very actively pursuing this for about eight months, and creating content around the idea of a web agency that wants to specialize. Just recently, I have finally landed on something that feels good to me as a specialty for my business. It’s a really exciting time for me, and I really appreciate the opportunity to be on your show and share a little bit more about where I am right now.

Joe: Yeah. Absolutely, and this is a great thing to talk about, I think, because I think a lot of freelancers probably fall into that same position. I certainly did when I was freelancing. If somebody said, “Hey, I need a website,” I’m like, “All right. Well, if you’re willing to pay how much I’m charging, I will make that website for you.” I carried that mentality over into the product space where I’m like, “Well, it seems like people want a course that does this, so I’ll make this course.” But this is a whole another show. That’s a terrible way to sell products, right? You don’t see Nike making like a printed pictures of whiteboards, right? They don’t specialize in whiteboards. This is, I think, a great thing to talk about. What did you decide to specialize in? You’ve made that public, I believe, right?

Sara: Yes, I have. If I could, I’d love to tell a little bit more of the story of how I arrived there. It was about eight months ago, that I think was really the height of my frustration with where I was in my agency. It wasn’t that we weren’t getting work, it was that we weren’t getting work that I really found fulfilling. I was occasionally losing prospects or projects that I really wanted to agencies that were more specialized and did a better job at conveying their value proposition, and how they were experts in a certain field. It was earlier this year that I said, “I have got to figure this out.” I knew that there were other freelancers and small agencies out there that felt the same way. I felt like there wasn’t a lot of content around the idea of niching down as a web developer.

I actually created a video, just me talking straight to camera, and I held on to it. I recorded it in mid March (2017), and I held on to it for almost a month, just kind of embarrassed that I had it. But it was my husband who really encouraged me to post it online, on YouTube, and start to share a little bit more actively about the process and the struggle of specializing and trying to find a certain area that we wanted to become an expert in. In April, I did. I actually posted it online. Shared it on Twitter, and started a blog that’s been about weekly where I do a video, and also write a blog post about where I am in my journey to specialize.

Here we are eight months later, and I have to be honest with you. I thought it would happens so much faster. Like, “Okay, I’m really focusing on this. I’m talking about it every single week. I’m totally going to figure this out in a week or two,” and it didn’t happen. Nothing that I came up with felt right. It didn’t feel good. I wanted to really have that moment where something just felt like, “Oh, I think that’s the right choice. Yes, this is a specialty of a kind of work or a kind of person that I want to work with week in and week out.” As much as I tried to analyze every piece of it, none of it came through analysis. Nothing really happened for about seven months. It was just me making videos every week, going, “This is what I’m thinking about, but I still haven’t figured it out, so sorry if you’re watching this.” Bless anybody who did watch those videos, because I didn’t get much of anywhere for a while until it was a couple months ago, I met someone at a conference who’s quickly become a good friend of mine.

She is a high end wedding and event planner based in Chicago. As soon as we met, she said, “Sara, I’ve got a question for you. Can I ask you about SEO?” I said, “Sure, that sounds great. What can I tell you?” She said, “I had my website redesigned a couple months ago, and while I used to rank right on the top of page one for Chicago wedding planner, I have fallen off the face of the earth. I am down to like page six or seven for this very important keyword, and my traffic is totally tanked because of it.” I said, “Let me look at your site. I want to know what’s happened,” and I got into it, and about five minutes of looking around, I realized that her web developer knew nothing about SEO. They had inaccurately represented themselves as someone who did, and they made so many basic mistakes. It had cost her significant leads in business. In a job that is her livelihood.

I was actually really offended by it. Because I felt like she had been so misled. I made a video about that and started helping her out. It was pretty quick, and pretty clear that I realized this was very interesting work for me, and I loved it, and I would do it for free all day long, and I wanted to do more of it. Just a couple weeks ago, I made it official, I put out a video that I am going to focus on SEO and SEO optimized websites for the wedding industry. Professionals who sell to brides and grooms like planners, florists, photographers, caterers, those types of businesses. Here I am finally.

Joe: That’s fantastic. I mean, the journey is super important, right? I always ask about research, and you can throw a dart at a wall and say, “Oh, I’m going to specialize in construction website,” which is what I did when I was … I was going to say a kid, I guess I basically was, but in my early 20’s, I was like, “I want to specialize. I want to niche down into construction sites.” I didn’t know anything about construction sites. It just seems like construction people have money, like that was the thing in my head.

Sara: Oh my gosh, I love that.

Joe: Right? But what’s super important when you choose to niche down, or niche down, I think there’s like, I always say it both ways, is you should have what’s called domain knowledge, right? Which is knowledge of the industry you’re specializing in. It seemed like working with this person in Chicago either helped you gain or helped you realize that you have that knowledge and that passion. Is that accurate?

Sara: Yeah, it is. Actually, I have found, and I was surprised by this, I was telling myself that I had to choose a specialty where I had a ton of experience, and a ton of that domain knowledge. That was actually slowing me down and holding me back, because I haven’t had a consistent pattern of past work within the same industry. When I looked at past clients, nothing really seems like the right choice, and that’s why I think I was so stuck for a while. I actually don’t have a ton of experience in the wedding industry but I know that there is such a need, and I know that my skills can make an immediate impact there, and they already have for a couple of people that I have helped out for free. That’s what I found as far as the amount of expertise required.

Joe: Awesome. Then, of course, as you do more, you’ll get more experience, more domain knowledge, which is the important thing about niching down, right? Because without specializing, you have four sites that are different, completely different, and you basically have to start from square one every time. But with specializing, you’re starting from square two or three, or depending on the client, right?

Sara: Yes.

Joe: Cool. Plus, like SEO is, I write search engine optimize HTML…I don’t know if I should say publicly. I think I do. But there’s a whole industry based around that. Rebeca Gil was my second guest on this show, and she talked about her course and how she built the whole course around SEO, because it’s so important, and doing it right versus doing it wrong has severe ramifications for the client.

Sara: Yes. I think Rebeca is a genius and she’s taught me pretty much everything I know over the past couple of years, so I am super indebted to her.

Joe: Awesome. Yeah, she is fantastic. I will link her episode in the show notes if you haven’t listened to it. I strongly recommend it because she’s fantastic. Now, as you’ve decided on your niche, you’ve helped a couple of people out already, now that you know exactly kind of you know who you want to market to, what kind of research are you doing for both getting those clients and the services you’re providing those clients?

…What kind of leg work are you doing to get people in that industry, and then help people in that industry.

Sara: Sure, yeah. What I want to find out first, and one of the first things I did when I thought about this is a possibility, is I wanted to find out who are people in this industry listening to when it comes to marketing, and SEO, and anything else that brings them business. The first research I did was into who were the thought leaders for wedding professionals. One of the things that indicated to me that this might be an interesting direction to go in is that I actually found it interesting to listen to who they’re listening to. I enjoyed content that is going around in the industry, and that again, makes me feel like these are people that I want to hang out with. That is the biggest research I’m doing, is finding out where my potential client are getting their information. That’s been really fun, and it’s been easy because I can just quickly talk to people I know within the industry and say, “Who are you listening to? How do you find out about this or that?” It’s been a lot of personal directory search, and just some Googling around.

Joe: Man, that is … Before you answer the second part of this question, that is fantastic advise. Never would have dawned on me. I am very much not a marketing person, or anything like that. I’m a developer, I take a very field of dreams approach to things, like if you build it, they will come. But finding out who your clients listen to is great, because then you can, I mean not parroting back with the thought leaders are saying, but you can build on top of that. They’re being told they should do this, I can help them do that, right?

Sara: Yes.

Joe: I think that’s my big takeaway from this episode, and we’re like half way through. As far as the second half of that question, what kind of research are you doing in order to help people within the wedding planning industry?

Sara: Yeah. I think my next step, and I don’t know if I’d call It research, but in order to do outreach and provide services, what I did was actually create a separate micro site all around this specialty. This was something that I debated a lot. I got some advice early on that when I specialized, I should just make a page about it on my existing agency website, because the site already has domain authority and some SEO value, and it’s been around for a while, and actually decided not to follow that advice. I love the idea of having an entirely separate domain, and a very small site that is 100% focused on this service and this vertical, so that when someone goes there who is the right client, all they see is information that’s pertinent to them. They really get that immediate feeling, “Wow, Sara is super specialized and knows exactly who I am and what I need.”

To me, this also is a slightly lower risk strategy. If this doesn’t work out, I’ve got this all on a separate site. I haven’t taken over my main agency site with this specialized information. I can just delete the thing and say, “Well, I tried. On to the next thing.” I don’t intend to do that but inside, this is a very risky decision, so I had to make some decisions for myself that lowered the perceived risk that I was feeling. That separate site does that for me. That has been my first step in pursuing this direction, is to have that separate marketing site.

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Joe: Got you. I mean, that makes sense, right? If I want to spin by bar into … If I had a bar, and I want to add a kitchen to it, I might just rent a kitchen space. I’m to going to put like a professional grade kitchen on my bar. What if nobody wants food at my bar. I mean, totally not the same thing because spinning up a website is easier than building a kitchen, but it’s the same idea. You’re not going to get rid of your entire agency site for this right off the bat, and correct me if I’m wrong here because you’re certainly the expert in this topic, but there are SEO benefits to having a domain, let’s say, one of the keywords you want to rank in it, right?

Sara: Yeah. Definitely. There is a definitely a benefit to having content that’s all focused around a certain topic area. The fact that I’m going to write about mostly SEO related topics on this site is going to help us build topical authority around SEO and around the wedding industry. It’s going to look highly specialized to Google, too, which is something that Google does like.

Joe: Awesome. Yeah, it’s like going to a department store for a suit versus going to a tailor for a suit, right? A tailor specializes in making suits. If you haven’t noticed, I’m big on analogies.

Sara: I love it.

Joe: Awesome. Research aside, I know that you mentioned that you blogged this whole journey. Did you talk to a lot of people, or do you have a core group of people that you consider your confidants, that you would bounce ideas off of?

Sara: Yeah. What was funny was when I first started thinking about specializing, before I even started the video series, I would ask anybody who would listen to me. Like, “Hey, oh, what do you think about specialized agencies? Have you ever tried to specialize your agency? Blah, blah, blah.” I’m sure I drove people crazy, which is one of the reasons that I was just like, “I’ll just make my own site around this, so I could leave people alone, and just share what I’m thinking.” I have definitely collaborated with a small group of friends that I found through the Genesis office hours community. The old slack group that Carrie Dils, and some friends that I’ve grown from there. There are a lot of people in the industry that I’ve bounced some ideas off of and who had really supported me in just being there and being like, “You got this, you’ll figure it out.”

Joe: Man, that’s fantastic. I want to phrase this the right way, because well here, I’ll tell another similar story. The wedding industry is like a billion dollar industry. Getting married, I got married in 2016, and I was astounded by just how much everything costs, or the fact that a part bus costs more if you say it’s for a wedding. I argued with the limousine company about that so hard, until somebody explained to me why. I just wanted to know, why are you charging me a premium? There’s a lot of money in it.

One of the things I thought when all of my friends were getting married, is I’ll build websites for people who are getting married. That is not a good niche to get into because people who are getting married don’t want to spend a few thousand dollars on a website, because they’re spending lots of thousand dollars on other things. Was that a consideration when you were deciding to niche down? Obviously you want to do something you love and you don’t just want to follow the money, but you have a business and employees to support so you want to make sure that the way you’re specializing, there is demand and money in that field, right?

Sara: Yes. Yeah. It has to be a concern. There, of course, are specialties you can get into where people would love for you to do services for them, but they don’t have any money to pay you. That is definitely part of the consideration. I thought about things like bakeries, and other businesses like that but I realized how many cupcakes someone would have to sell to make back the cost of my services. It was a lot. When I look at the wedding industry, however, if I am able to help a wedding professional to book one or two extra jobs, it’s likely that they have made a return on the investment that they’ve put into working with me. There is value there. I do want to caution though, I, like you, consider it specialties just because I thought there was money there. I actually did a very short stint doing Facebook ads for chiropractors, which was pretty successful in getting a lot of interest and getting people willing to hire me. But it was something that I wasn’t particularly interested in. I only chose to do it because I thought there was money there.

After working on a few of those projects, I said, “I just don’t enjoy this work and this isn’t something that I want to do day in and day out.” That was something that ultimately wasn’t successful as a permanent niche for my business. There has to be that balance of work you enjoy, and work that people are willing to pay you for.

Joe: Absolutely. Right, there probably is money and working with a chiropractor certainly isn’t a pain in the neck, but you have to … Sorry everyone. But you do have to love what you do. I love what you said about projecting value. How many cupcakes does a bakery have to sell for my services, versus there’s pretty immediate value to a wedding planner. If I get you one or two more clients, you’ve paid for me. It’s the same thing with offering a coaching program. You’re paying me $1,000 but that first job that you’re going to get is going to make you a thousand more dollars than you would have thought. That is an excellent way to look at it. I would strongly urge anybody who is considering niching down to look at it that way too. You definitely need to project your value. The title question is, how did you build it, and let’s make it talk about the website that you created for your niche. Was there anything special that you decided to do for your specialized website versus just your general agency website?

Sara: Sure. Yes, absolutely. I think the biggest consideration in how I built that micro site was to make sure that I only launched it with things that were absolutely necessary. I have a big vision, of course, for what I would love this site to grow into. I’m a web designer, I know how I would love it to look. I know how much content I’d love it to have, but I really just wanted to get something launched so that I could put out my shingle and say, “This is a market I’m looking to work with.” The most important thing I did was cut back my big list of nice-to-haves and say, “What do I need just to get this launched?” There are few things I said no to. I said no to custom design. I went to studio press and this site is almost entirely one of their themes straight out of the box. I only customized a couple fonts. It serves my purposes very well. It looks very professional and no one who is a potential client for me is going to look at that and go, “Oh, I’ve seen that theme before.”

That is something that I used, and that was a good choice. I also launched it with just three pages. It’s got an “About” page, a “Service” page, and a “Contact” page. That was my minimal content. I actually had to talk myself out of designing it with a blog section on the home page, because I said, “You know what, this doesn’t need a blog post right away. I’ll add that back in when I’ve written a few but that’s going to slow me down from launching.” Really, the only technology here is WordPress on Flywheel hosting, the Genesis Framework, and a Studio Press theme, the total build. Writing the content probably took me about three hours. Building the site probably took me three hours or less. The thing was out there and I was able to share it. I’m really happy with how that turned out.

Joe: Man, I love that. Now, you specialize in SEO, are you also a web designer? You can make your own custom themes and stuff like that?

Sara: Yes. Now, I used to do all of the design and build myself, and thankfully I’ve hired people that are better at design and better at development than I am. At this point in my web business for clients, I don’t do either of those pieces, and I am mostly lead strategy. But yes, I can do all of that if needed, and I did all of this site by myself.

Joe: Got you. I ask because I am also a developer. I’ve written books and have courses on how to make WordPress themes, and so when I created my online courses site, it was a very hard decision for me to say, “I’m not going to custom build this theme,” because I felt like a fraud, but my focus was on the content. That’s what you’re saying too. Your focus was on something very specific that had nothing to do with syncing 20 or so hours into building a custom theme.

Sara: Right. Totally, not necessary. Just to get the idea out there, to test the waters.

Joe: Cool. That’s awesome. I will link to StudioPress. I actually just this week, as we record this, started using my first one, which is Academy Pro for the relaunch of my online courses site in 2018.

Sara: Oh, that’s a great theme. I can’t wait to see what you do with it.

Joe: Thank you very much. Now I’ve got some pressure on me.

Sara: It’s gorgeous straight out of the box, so I think a win no matter what you do with it.

Joe: It’s so good. It makes just enough of the decisions for me, and I don’t have to worry about a whole lot of things. I’ll certainly link those in the show notes. Now, as we record this, this was a recent decision, we kind of talked about your journey as far as the transformation to choosing your niche goes, but what are your plans for the future? What is six, 12 months down the line look like?

Sara: Yeah. I’m trying not to put too much pressure on it, and say, “Oh, in six months, I want to have thirty clients within this specialized niche.” I have found through that process of the eight months of trying to figure out a specialty that great things don’t necessarily come to me when I force them. I really just want to continue to build content in the future around this niche. I’d like to start writing really good, weekly content and sharing it via Facebook and Instagram. I think it will be very sharable within the industry with other people sharing it out. I think that that is really going to be my main driver of outreach, is content, and I might even consider some low budget Facebook ads just to get the content into the right hands and in front of the right people.

I’m also actually starting on a couple projects that I’m doing for friends of mine within the industry that I’m doing for free. I recorded a video about this, this week, that it doesn’t sound very fun to do free work, but in this case, I think it’s really necessary.

I want to build up some really good case studies and have those on my website showing some significant ranking improvement, and also so that the friends I have, if I do a great job for them, I’d love for them to spread the word. The future to me looks like content building, authority building, and friendship building within the industry. I’m happy to report just from getting the word out there that this is the kind of work I was interested in. I actually got a referral from another person who does SEO. Said, “I have a client, I think, would be good for you, and I’d like to make an introduction.” I have already booked work within this specialized industry just by hanging my shingle here and talking about it.

Joe: Man, that’s great. That’s the due to the network that you’ve built up before this. Being so open and creating really good content about it. I love that. You mentioned that doing free work doesn’t sound great, and it’s something that a lot of freelancers might rally against, but when I want to learn a new skill as a programmer, it’s pretty easy for me to just, if I want to learn view, I’ll just write a simple view app. I actually have an app that I iterate on every time I want to learn a new skill. You can’t really do that with SEO, right? Because you’re just talking to yourself about, “Hey, what do I think a wedding planner or a photographer for weddings wants, how do I prove that it’s going to rank better?” You need to do real tangible stuff to get real tangible results.

Sara: Yes. The problem with SEO, and this might be a separate discussion, but there’s so many people that have done a bad job and made a bad name, so I really need some positive case studies behind it.

Joe: Yeah. I mean that’s absolutely true. SEO does get a bad name because everybody says they can do it. “Oh, just give me $5,000 a month and I’ll make sure you’re number one in Google.” You absolutely do need good testimonials, and you need results. “This website started here, after I was done with it, it’s now up here. After X amount of time,” and things like that. Being as open and honest as you can, especially with SEO, and in our field is very helpful, because people view us as just, “Well I’m going to tell you to do something, and then you’re going to sit in a room and do it, and then it’ll be done.” But there’s a lot of communication that needs to go on.

Sara: Yes, you’re absolutely right.

Joe: Cool. I’m going to end with my favorite question, which is do you have any trade secrets for us?

Sara: It’s funny. I don’t really have a lot of secrets given that I have been making a, what I hope is an open and honest transparent video every single week for about eight months. I will say that I hope that I will discover more secrets through the process of specializing my web agency. I had desperately hoped that I was going to come up with some sort of process that would make this easier for other people, because this decision to specialize a niche down in services is such a scary choice. I was like, “Okay, I’m going to do this, and hopefully I’m going to come up with this formula that other people can follow to find the right niche.” That totally didn’t happen. It totally just fell in my lap due to one relationship that I had, and one situation I encountered, and no amount of analysis or research got me to the right place. No trade secrets. I’m not sure there are any, but I will continue to share openly about how this goes, and anything that I determine might be a best practice in the future.

Joe: That’s great. That is different from any other trade secrets that I’ve gotten on the show, so I love that. I will say that while there are no secrets, I think the big takeaway is keep your options open and have conversations with people. Because that’s how a lot happen.

Sara: Yes. Outside of the web design industry also. If you just hang out and talk to people in WordPress and ask them what they think, they might not always have the answers. I was actually at a women’s business conference when I met this person, put this all into motion for me. If I hadn’t been having those interactions across industries, I might not be here yet. Yeah, just get out there and talk to people and make relationships as much as you can.

Joe: Man, that is … See, I don’t know who I’m looking at. That’s a great trade secret right there. Get out of the industry, out of the echo chamber. Sara, thank you so much for joining me today. Where can people find you?

Sara: Thanks for having me, Joe. I share all of this on my personal blog. That’d probably be the best place to go if you’re interested in specializing information, and that’s Sara-dunn.com. I’d love to connect with any of your listeners on Twitter, and my handle there is Sara11D. If anybody’s in Instagram, that’s my favorite place to hang out, so I’m there at SaraDunn11.

Outro: Thanks again to Sara for joining me! She’s fantastic to talk to and offers lots of great information. A transparent process can be SO helpful to new freelancers and agency owners.

And Thanks again to our sponsors – make sure to check out Liquid Web for managed WordPress hosting. I use them on all of my important sites – they are that good! They are at buildpodcast.net/liquid. They’ll give you 50% off your first 2 months just for being a listener! If you want to save your clients (or yourself) money through recovering abandoned carts, check out jilt. They are over at buildpodcast.net/jilt. And finally, if you want to build incredible websites at a fraction of the time and cost, check out Beaver Builder. I use it and I love it. They are over at buildpodcast.net/builder/

For all of the show notes, head over to howibuilt.it/69/. If you like the show, head over to Apple Podcasts and leaving us a rating and review. It helps people discover us! Finally, last week I published my brand-new Patreon page. It offers a lot better rewards, and great goals, and I’m really doubling down on it. So if you like the show and what to support it directly, head over to patreon.com/howibuiltit/. You can support the show for as little as $1/month.

Continuing our series next week, I’m talking to Rian Kinney about the legal side of starting a business – specifically copyright and trademark. I heard her on Office Hours speaking about contracts and really wanted to get her on the show. It’s been one of the most educational interviews for me, so be sure to tune in! And until next time, Get out there and build something!

Episode 8: Joost de Valk and Yoast SEO

October 11, 2016

Sponsored by:

In this episode, Joost and I talk all about his incredibly popular Yoast SEO plugin. Running one of the most popular plugins globally is hard work and it shows in the Yoast SEO team’s development process. We talk about everything from good readability and supporting multiple languages to the rigid development and testing processes. We also wax poetic on the evolution of the development and how it is affecting the WordPress community.

Show Notes