EP 9: Celebrating SEO Success With Sara Dunn

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Podcast Transcript

Intro: Welcome to SEObits, the podcast that helps smart business owners jumpstart their SEO strategy. Tune in each week for fresh SEO insights and actionable tips that will help you improve your site’s SEO one bit at a time. Now, here’s your host, SEO Trainer and Consultant, Rebecca Gill.

Rebecca Gill: Today, we’re going to detour from our regular format so I can introduce you to Sara Dunn. I can’t remember when or where I met Sara but I remember I immediately thought we need to keep an eye on her. Something inside me could see that she had not reached her full potential and I could just tell that there was going to be tons of goodness oozing out of her.

And I wasn’t wrong. A little time has passed and now I see Sara all over the WordPress community. She is on podcast. She is speaking. She has become my star SEO student. When Sara wanted to come to my SEO bootcamp training workshop, I knew I needed to make sure I could get her there.

So much so that I opened up a coupon code to offer a discount for Sara and others like Sara. I just knew she was going to be a great participant and I wasn’t wrong. I was so happy she came. We spent 3 days together in January and it was so fun to have her and the value that she brought to our classroom discussion. I was just really pleased that she was able to come and bring along her cute little dog to hang out with her while she did her homework.

As I’ve watched her take her newfound SEO knowledge and apply it to her client’s sites, I knew she would make a conversation for the podcast. I believe her progression can help others see the possibilities of SEO and how it can make a measurable impact.

And that’s why today, we’re going to veer off my normal conversation with myself and I’m going to bring in somebody else, something that I actually swear I wasn’t going to do. But I just know she’s going to provide value to listeners and I really wanted to make sure that you could hear Sara tell her story.

So with that out of the way, let me introduce you to Ms. Sara Dunn. Sara, thanks so much for joining me. I’m so glad that you’re here.

Sara Dunn: Absolutely, Rebecca. I really appreciate the opportunity and I’m excited to be part of this new podcast that I’ve really enjoyed listening to.

Rebecca Gill: Excellent. So Sara, tell the listeners a little bit about you and your business.

Sara Dunn: Sure thing. So I run a small visual agency out of Battle Creek, Michigan, which is Southwest Michigan, not far from you, Rebecca. And we’ve been in business for about five years. I’ve got a team of four people and we have been working on WordPress projects for a variety of small business clients and really enjoying the work.

And I just knew once I met you, I believe it was at WordCamp Edinburgh that SEO really needed to become more of a concern in the work that we did because I knew it would add so much value to the work that we do for clients. So here we are about six months later and we’re still doing WordPress work. We’re doing higher quality work. And I have a little secret I wanted to share that we’ve increased prices too.

Rebecca Gill: Excellent.

Sara Dunn: So everything has been great. And I’m excited to share a little bit more about that process in the last few months.

Rebecca Gill: So before you came to SEO Bootcamp, were you doing any SEO for your clients?

Sara Dunn: No, not really. Not in any way where I actually explicitly said that SEO was included in a project. I never sold SEO services. I did try to self-teach. And I think what’s really important to know is that what I know about SEO before Bootcamp was completely cobbled together from just dozens and hundreds of blog posts that I had read in the six years that I’ve been building websites. And I thought I knew a little bit of something but not enough to be confident to say to a client that I was actually working on their search engine optimization.

So no, I’d never previously sold SEO services or really done SEO. Well, I did kind of try to throw some keywords in there as a last minute consideration and try to write some interesting meta descriptions and I used some WordPress SEO plugins. But really, nothing that was really in an organized way doing SEO for clients before bootcamp.

Rebecca Gill: I remember when you were sitting with me at bootcamp and we were talking about one of your client’s sites and I said to you, “You need to start doing SEO services.” And you hesitated and you said, “Well, I don’t know enough.” And I’m like, “No, you do. The light bulb has gone off.” Like you got it. You get the process. You get where you need to now make changes.

You know how to make incremental movements for your clients. And I could just see it in your face and see it in the discussions that we had together, which was great because like I said, I really want you to come to bootcamp. And then once you did and I could see that it was giving you value, it really made me happy.

So, when you were at bootcamp and I said that it felt like you had some light bulbs go off, tell me how having formal training and just for everyone who has no idea about my bootcamp, it is – we do it periodically throughout the year. It’s 3 days of like 8 to 5 SEO training in a group of like 20 people and it’s pretty hardcore and you have homework before you come and you have homework every night that we review in class the next day. And I do really push people through it.

But I do it because I want to immerse in the process and really change people’s view of life and Sara was a great participant in that. Even though she did the night she was supposed to be writing the blog post, go to the bar with her dog.

Sara Dunn: I was still writing.

Rebecca Gill: She was still writing. She sent me the video that said, “I’m not in my hotel room like you told me I needed to. I am out.” But she was writing. And so we reviewed her blog post the next day and it was of course stellar. So I could light bulbs went off.

So tell me how that experience and that training kind of shifted what you thought before and what you thought today? And I’m asking this question because I know people are hesitant about SEO and they think it’s overwhelming and they think they can’t learn it but I really think the majority of people really can as long as they just get the right education and they have someone get them in a solid process.

Sara Dunn: Yes. And actually, that’s exactly the word that I was going to use is process. Instead of just having tiny bits of knowledge that I would try to pull out of my brain and say, “Well, I kind of thought about SEO for this project.” After bootcamp, I was actually able to feel like I had a process for SEO. There was a certain place I was supposed to start.

Questions to ask there was keyword research to be done and a process for doing that. And that was really the light bulb that went off was that SEO isn’t just about writing loads and loads of content being chained to your desk all the time, creating content, writing 1000-word pages and 10,000-word page. There  are so many more things that you can do to make SEO actually successful.

And that’s I realized that if you follow the process, it takes a lot of work and it’s very time-consuming, but the process really works. And it’s really important not to just have those little bits of SEO knowledge but to actually have the process put together from start to finish to make sure that you’re setting up a website in the right way and writing content in the right way in the future if that’s something you choose to add rot eh SEO mix.

So, process was totally the light bulb for me at bootcamp. And I was able to implement so many of the things that we learned that weren’t just about writing content. The process is something that I’ve been really trying to preach probably the last year and a half because I think that it just skipped a lot. People say, “Do this little bit. Do this little bit. This is new. Worry about this algorithm change.” And they’re just pushing all of these massive amounts of information on people and they don’t actually teach them a start to finish process.

And I think part of it is because there’s a lot of people that don’t have a start to finish process. But after doing this for 15 years and getting myself booted off of Google in the early days and having different types of organizations and websites I’ve worked with, I do have a solid process and that’s why I just want to always push that home with people whether it bootcamp or conference. And I’m glad that that made an impact with you and your business and your clients because that’s the full goal of me in my soap box of getting on it.

Sara Dunn: Yes. And the other light bulb along that line is that in addition to process, I think a lot of times SEO is overcomplicated. If you’re just watching the latest news that comes through on Twitter about algorithms and things that sound really confusing, it can feel so overwhelming but what you taught us is to always go back to the user experience and helping Google to find the best information for a keyword term. And if that’s what you keep top of mind, SEO isn’t really as hard as it is if you try to get really technical with it. So those bases ideas are really.

Rebecca Gill: See? And this is why I call her my star pupil because that is something that I can’t tell you I’m preaching [Phonetic] [0:09:04]. It is. It is about the user experience and making sure that you’re helping someone solve a problem, and that’s the core of SEO is trying to do good and do good for everybody around you and the work that you do.

So let’s look at when you came back from bootcamp and you came back home. You’re back in your office. You’re back with your clients. How did your newfound SEO education shift what you were doing either on your website, on your client’s website, in your proposal process, however areas that shifted? Tell us about that.

Sara Dunn: So immediately when I got back, I knew that SEO had to be part of our process in building client websites. Just knowing what I knew, having the process, knowing how to do keyword research, I just knew I wouldn’t feel good about the results that we were getting for clients or the work we were doing unless I put some thought into SEO in our planning process.

So I immediately started implementing keyword research as a part of the project that I didn’t necessarily put that right in the proposal because as we mentioned, I didn’t really feel confident enough to pretend I was selling SEO services. But I immediately started implementing some of those planning phases that I had never known existed but realized after bootcamp were so important and I just couldn’t leave them out of the project.

And I actually felt kind of sad about projects that were kind of in process during the time that I went to bootcamp because we had skipped some of those steps. So thankfully all of our clients are on on-going service agreement so I’ve gone back and actually retroactively done some of the work and implemented some of the learnings into projects that were finished.

But I think the biggest change we made was immediately starting to do keyword research on every project we started.

Rebecca Gill: So one of my favorite quotes in all of life is one from Maya Angelo and it’s something like, “You do the best that you can and when you know more, you do better.” And this is like SEO is a perfect example. There’s always because of the environment that we work in, there’s always something new to learn. Google is constantly changing things and Bing may come up with something or someone discovers something from looking at Google’s patents or just trial and error. There’s always something that we can learn. And when we learn that information, we just improve our process and we try to help our clients even more than we did in the past.

So you took some of your knowledge and tell me about any client you’d like to talk about and how you implemented SEO on their site or their blog and how – like what kind of tactics did you do or steps and what type of short-term results did you see?

Sara Dunn: Sure. Yeah. There’s one client in particular that comes to mind. And what’s really funny about this client is that I started out implementing what I learned at bootcamp on a site we had already launched. So we had already done their project and I just said, “I know some things that can improve this website and I’m going to make some small incremental changes and incorporate some of the things I learned back into this project that’s finished.”

And the site wasn’t mine. I didn’t have hours and hours to spend on it and I didn’t have a lot of on-going work budgeted in so I had to decide what were some of the highest value things that I could do immediately to improve this site as far as SEO.

And let me tell you a little bit about the client because you’ll understand why SEO is so important. They sell a very specific type of medical equipment that helps with recovery after a specific eye surgery. And they most do rentals. So a lot of people who need to have this surgery head online as soon as they find out that they are going to have the procedure and they start looking for where they can rent their equipment.

So it’s very niched. It’s a little bit difficult to understand what someone might search for, but most of the people who are searching for this are actually going to make a transaction. There’s no reason for them to search for these products unless they are going to have the surgery and going to need to make this rental. So, I knew this was one that we needed to address first. And I did a few things that I learned at bootcamp immediately without writing any new content, without spending hours and saw some immediate improvements.

So a couple of those things, some very basic keyword research using KWFinder which is a tool that you recommended in our bootcamp class. That one was really fun. I could spend hours playing with that but I just spent a little bit of time and the tool helped me to put in some keywords that I knew about and suggested some additional keywords that might be useful, which was really helpful in this space because the terms are very technical and I wouldn’t have thought of some of the things that people were searching for.

So I pulled down that list and had a lot of new ideas. And then I kind of looked at it and determined what are the most relevant and the most important keywords and actually map those keywords to specific pages on the site which is again, one of those big light bulbs that I got at bootcamp that each page needs to have its own specific keyword focus. That wasn’t anything that we considered in building the site so I just mapped which keyword applied to which page and tweak the content that we already had just a little bit to better serve those keywords.

And then with the content we already had, I built a few internal links. That was really fun, kind of looking through the site where could those links be natural and make sense and just help the important pages on the site get a little bit more authority in traffic. And then just a couple other technical things, making sure Search Console was set up right and that everything was being tracked properly in analytics.

But those words – the immediate things I did after bootcamp to that specific client site, it was really fun because we’ve honestly didn’t write any new content but we saw some immediate improvements.

Rebecca Gill: So the fun which you said repeatedly when you were just describing that. And the reason I point that out is because a lot of people say SEO is mind-numbing, it’s hard, it’s difficult, it makes them stressed, all these negative words to describe it were what you just said was fun. And the reason it’s fun for you most likely is because you felt empowered. You felt like you actually had direction. You knew what to do. And you were excited to see what was going to happen once you did it. And that’s the heart of SEO is that experimentation. And while you don’t want to do it at the client’s site, and I’m not saying that you experiment in client’s website, you just applied what you had learned.

But back in the day when I was learning, I was just doing like not on my company’s website, on other things so that I could test things out and see what happen. And that’s when it is really fun. And then you start to see the results and you’re like, “Holy cow! This actually works.” And it benefits you.

And here’s the cool thing about that story. It didn’t just benefit you because it did because you made your client happy. It benefited your client and then it benefited all the people that they’re actually serving because it’s answering – it’s giving them a solution to their problem. And it’s medical. How would you not want to make that all worked for people and just give them something better to help them heal with? It’s just very cool. That’s why I love SEO.

Sara Dunn: Yes. I think SEO is a lot less fun when you’re just throwing dirts at a dartboard and you have no idea if you’re doing the right thing and you pull up then articles and go, “Oh, this one says to do this and this other says to do something different. So I’m not really sure what to do.” And of course, that’s stressful.

But I personally think that SEO takes a certain mindset and I just kind of love the game of it and testing things out and helps a lot too. So it just kind of speaks to me in a way that I enjoy the work and being thorough in doing what’s required to follow the process.

Rebecca Gill: I love when the underdog can win. And my husband is the exact same way. And I think with SEO, that’s – SEO makes that possible. You can be this little tiny website in the middle of nowhere in Montana, I don’t know why Montana, but you can compete against this large company in New York and you can win against them because you may have a better process, more direction, and more focus than they do where they’re just throwing the snowball at the website and seeing what snow sticks on what pages. You’ve got more of a process. And that’s one of the reasons why I love it so much because it does let that underdog win and excel and achieve their goals.

So long-term, is the client hiring you to do any additional SEO or not part of their focus since they’ve already seen results and probably happy?

Sara Dunn: Well, that is a good question because I’m not sure I ever would have admitted to this but I have actually started selling SEO services, not outright saying, “I’m an SEO consultant but I felt so good about the immediate work and the results we got for this client that I did pitch them on and additional several hour package of work to continue to write some content for them, improve the content that they already had. Just being able to show them some opportunities in the keyword list I had created, some keywords they weren’t ranking very well for that were kind of synonyms or related that I think that we could have really targeted.

So we did end up in the last six months, specifically just in the last two months, doing some additional SEO work and we’ve really seen big improvements in a lot of the focused keywords that we’re working on. And it has been very exciting.

Rebecca Gill: Oh, that’s great. I love it. I love it. And why I’m not going to push every developer to sell SEO services because I don’t think it’s right for every developer because it’s not a good fit for their business or their client-base or just them personally. They just may not like it. I did think that from the day in bootcamp when you were seeing exactly what to do in your client site and after bootcamp when you would message me or post on social media some of the wins that you’ve had with clients.

I mean you do know a lot more than you’re giving yourself credit for because you’re making progress with your clients and you’re really giving them better position in search than they had before and if that is a service that you’re offering then that’s a service you should be charging for because you’re doing the work and they’re seeing results.

And quite honestly, they’re probably seeing way more results with you than anybody they’ve tried to work with before because I mean the SEO industry has really bad – yeah, you’re shaking – Sara is shaking her head, it just has a really bad name for itself. There are so many people who sell the services that they just don’t have the skillset.

I have a private Facebook group and I have people in there that ask questions and it’s really basic questions and actually it’s a developer company, I mean we were in Twitter privately and go, “Dude, the questions you get in that group …” and then I go to these people profile and they say they’re an SEO expert. They are asking you basic questions. And that’s just the industry. It’s because there’s no governing board to say you’re certified or you’re not or you’re experienced or you’re not. And that’s who you’re working against.

So yes, I definitely would encourage Sara and the people like Sara who are clearly making progress to put that shingle out there and say, “Yes, I can help you with local SEO,” which I’m hoping that’s going to be a part of announcement, which can you tell us now what your announcement is?

Sara Dunn: I don’t know if I have a particular announcement but …

Rebecca Gill: Well, you’ve said that you’ve maybe shifted a little bit of your services. You’ve raised your prices. And I’m hoping that SEO is now enrolled to your web design and development process.

Sara Dunn: It is, yes. So on that note, I did after doing the work, seeing the results, and also, knowing the amount of extra time I was spending on projects to increase the value and the success of them afterwards. We did increase prices by actually almost double on our most popular website package. And I have a lot of confidence in selling that new pricing because of what I learned at bootcamp and because I know that the sites we are making now are going to rank better, the clients are going to be more proud of them, they are going to easily find themselves in those searches that clients always do for themselves online.

And I think that this was a big deal for me just in general and learning how important an on-going education is when you run your own business to be able to increase the quality of the work that you’re doing and always be adding on and doing more and doing better. So yes, we’re definitely continuing to focus on service-based businesses, mostly serving their local area. So I’m doing a lot more local SEO these days and having a really good time with it.

Rebecca Gill: Oh, I’m very happy to know that because I know that you’ll do a great job for people. So if I were to ask you just your journey with SEO because I always say SEO is a journey, what would you give me like three top takeaways that you have so far? It could be light bulbs. It could be anything. Just your view of your business. Anything. How has the SEO journey changed you or what would you give to our audience to say, “Here’s what I want you to take away from my story,”?

Sara Dunn: Sure. Yeah. I think one of the major takeaways is just – if you follow a few basic SEO principles, you really can have a big impact. It doesn’t have to be a huge strategy. It’s just knowing the basics and making sure that you’re doing the right things, white hat techniques, not trying to game the system. And those are the ways to get long-term results without putting even a ton of effort into it.

The second big takeaway is really that most small businesses are in low competition markets or competing against sites that have done a really bad job following modern SEO practices. And that’s what I found as I’ve continue to work especially in the local space. It doesn’t take us a lot of work to get a site from several pages down to page one. It’s just doing the right things and making sure the content is actually unique and not copy and pasted from elsewhere and setting things up in the right way.

So just proper setup, simple changes can really increase a site’s authority with Google in a lot of markets. And for a lot of beginning consultants doing those things is a really big deal and isn’t actually that hard. So, that’s takeaway number two.

And I guess for a third takeaway, and this is just kind of a thought that I’ve been having recently. I’m personally really excited about SEO because I think it really sets us apart. I think that in the future, it’s going to be easier and easier for people to DIY their websites. They will be able to design something simple when they get started in business, which I think is great. But they’re going to start looking for a consultant when they say, “No one can find this website that I designed myself.”

And I really see this as future-proofing my business at some level. Knowing how to do SEO and being able to take that person who is not happy with how their site is ranking and doing a better job for them I think gives us a place in the future of the client web services market. So that’s something that I’ve really thought of a lot as we’ve integrated more SEO into our website process and packages that I really think that this is important to my business as a whole and I’m really excited about it.

Rebecca Gill: And I think point number three is so valid because it’s how Web Savvy has survived through downturns in the industry. And WordPress has been – WordPress industry has been tough for a lot of companies and a lot of freelancers this last year because there are a lot more templates and people are doing DIY websites and it has had impact.

But us being able to do SEO and having a mix of online courses and in-person workshops, just consulting, has really helped to keep us solid and in the green and bringing in revenue and helping people which has been great.

And so, one question for you which I’m sure if there are end users listening, they are curious about, you deal with local or businesses that have a local focus a lot, are you just serving clients in Michigan or do you serve clients throughout the US?

Sara Dunn: Yeah, we serve clients throughout the US. Absolutely. And a lot of our clients, while they have been mostly referral-based over the last five years, a lot of times people in Michigan knows people elsewhere. So we have always served national market. And actually, I’m really excited about a project we’re launching soon for a concrete company in New York State.

Rebecca Gill: Excellent!

Sara Dunn: Yeah.

Rebecca Gill: All right. So if you are listening and you are a small business and you would like professional assistance with your web development as well as your local SEO, I would encourage you to give Sara Dunn a shout even though she is technically a competitor of mine. I don’t view people like that in our industry because there is enough business that goes around and we all have different types of niches that we serve and different types of clients that we’re a good fit for. So I don’t try to like hog all the business for us. I encourage people to reach out to other firms. So I am encouraging you to reach out to Sara Dunn.

And Sara, when people would like to do that, while, I will put it on the show notes, why don’t you tell people who are listening on iTunes how they could find you and maybe reach out?

Sara Dunn: Yeah, absolutely. Please check out my agency website. We are 11 Web and that’s 11Web.com, spelled 11Web.com. I’d love to connect with anyone on Twitter. My personal handle is Sara11D. We also have a business handle @11Web. So that would be a great place to get in touch.

Rebecca Gill: Wonderful. Well, Sara, thank you so much for joining me today. I just thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. I love seeing your progress. I love seeing the progression of you being able to help clients and do better work for them and more involved work and it has just been so fun. And I look forward to seeing how your business is going to continue to mature and change over the next few years.

Sara Dunn: Thank you, Rebecca. It has been great.

Rebecca Gill: All right. Bye-bye everybody. So we’ll talk next week for our next podcast as we continue our SEO journey together.