How to Accel at SEO

[00:00:00.940] – Speaker 2
You have found Authentic Business Adventures the business program that brings you the struggle stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land. We’re locally underwritten by the Bank of Sun Prairie. Downloadable audio episodes can be found on the podcast link found at drawincustomers.com. We are locally underwritten by the Bank of Sun Prairie. I already told you that so we’ll just keep rolling here. Today, we’re welcoming/preparing to learn from Camilla Hallstrom, co-founder of Zalstrom. So, Camilla, how about you? Tell us, what is Zalstrom?

[00:00:29.000] – Speaker 1
Sure. Yeah. So we are a newly founded SEO agency. I’m located in Europe, but my co-founder is in New York, in the US. So we’re based both in the US and in Europe, and our clients are too. We mainly work with B2B software companies as well as service based businesses. So we have a dual audience there. And yeah, so we just founded in August this year, so a couple of months ago and going strong.

[00:00:59.710] – Speaker 2
All right.

[00:01:00.470] – Speaker 1
How did you end up with someone from New York, here in Germany? How did you guys connect?

[00:01:07.140] – Speaker 1
Exactly. Yeah. It’s a funny story. I’m originally from Finland and she’s from the US. But we’ve been working together, she was my client. I was a freelancer and consultant before this within SEO and marketing. So she was a client and she had her own businesses, basically, and she’s very well established. And so ultimately, we decided to just combine our powers and start our agency together.

[00:01:36.600] – Speaker 2
All right, very cool.

[00:01:38.160] – Speaker 1
So, she was a client of yours. Which one of you brought up the idea to start a business together?

[00:01:44.110] – Speaker 1
It was really her. She’s quite well known in her niche and in her industry. I was very flattered by that and didn’t see it coming, but it was very cool because I do feel like we can do a lot together. But it was really her. It wasn’t my idea, but I was immediately jumped on board.

[00:02:04.900] – Speaker 2
And you had… Were you on your own? Did you have a business where you were doing work solo?

[00:02:12.240] – Speaker 1
Exactly, yes. I was doing work solo, mainly. I had a few freelancers I outsourced to, but it was really a freelancing plus consulting business, so a solopreneurship, if you will.

[00:02:25.020] – Speaker 2
Got it. All right. So bringing on a partner, bringing on a business partner can be tough. So you must have known her for a little while to make sure that everything was cool in that regard.

[00:02:36.040] – Speaker 1
Exactly. It helped that we had been working together for a few years already, that we really knew each other and how we work and everything. So that really helped.

[00:02:45.370] – Speaker 2
Got you. All right. So how do you market your business? Because essentially your business is helping other businesses market. So it’s always interesting to talk to marketing companies and they’re like, Well, how do you market your business? So what has worked for you guys?

[00:03:00.120] – Speaker 1
Exactly. Well, I said we just started a few months ago, and the idea is to start also using SEO and content marketing for our own business in January, February, next year. However, it’s obviously a long term game. So if you’re or us right now, it made more sense to, well, A, continue working with the clients I had from before, and B, so we did have clients from day one. And then B, cold pitching companies is also a strategy we’re using just because there are more shorter term strategies, but we’re definitely going to use our own strategies to build our company as well.

[00:03:36.650] – Speaker 2
Got you. So how long have you been in the B2B marketing space?

[00:03:41.300] – Speaker 1
Yeah, it’s been like six years or almost. Yeah, I’ve been like, well, I was freelancing first as a content writer, and then from there I established my niche as B2B software business and service based businesses. So they can also be consultants or coaches and people or businesses like that. But yeah, it’s really been almost six years now, a while.

[00:04:06.440] – Speaker 2
So what made you choose those specific businesses for your target?

[00:04:11.200] – Speaker 1
Well, mainly because that was the niche I was in. But originally it just happened that I started working with a software business. And through that, I really found it interesting, the whole business model. And it’s interesting from an SEO perspective, just how you build SEO for those companies. And it’s really through that avenue that I came into contact with software businesses. And then after I started working with a few service based businesses, I added that on as well as a target audience.

[00:04:45.990] – Speaker 2
Got you. All right. So SEO seems to be somewhat of a moving target because I guess when I was thinking around with websites in the, I would say, way late 90s, early 2000s, it was a way different game than it is now. Absolutely. I haven’t even kept up with this game. It seems as the rules come out from the search engines, the players come out to try to manipulate those rules, and then it just things change. And it leaves, I guess, from my point of view, I feel like the search engines have a little bit of a hard time because you have the people that are very good at manipulating the rules of the game that aren’t necessarily published but can be figured out more or less. Yeah, yeah. They get better at that. And businesses, just the typical mom and pop business, they’re almost left in the dust because they may not have… I mean, one, they may not even have the awareness that SEO is a thing if they have a website. And then beyond that, they do have a website, they do know SEO is a thing. It’s just one of those, Oh, my gosh.

[00:05:51.030] – Speaker 2
I got to constantly keep up with that on top of doing my day to day business, employees, selling, all that stuff. So tell me, where do you find, I guess, where do you find businesses typically hanging out? And what would you recommend businesses do to improve their SEO? Should I just throwing you a bag of money or two, right?

[00:06:10.580] – Speaker 1
Exactly. Yeah. So you’re totally right that for small businesses, it is a problem because while SEO takes time to learn and to implement and you do have to usually have like, if you want to really scale, you have to have a team. That said, though, if we were talking about really small businesses like mom and pop and so forth, then there are definitely strategies they can use as well. However, what you’re saying about awareness and there not maybe being awareness, that’s true. And that’s also why I love coming on air just talking about SEO and educating people a bit more because it is such a profitable channel for many businesses. But jumping back to what small businesses can do, they’re definitely like… So SEO has definitely evolved, but the basis is always the same. And that Google, which is the biggest search engine, wants you to deliver good content to its users. So searchers on Google, right? And so basically what these small businesses can do is write content and publish content consistently on their blog. And it doesn’t have to be a huge undertaking if they’re doing other marketing as well. Let’s say a small business has a YouTube channel where they post YouTube videos, they could take that YouTube video and repurpose it.

[00:07:36.420] – Speaker 1
They can’t just publish the YouTube video and call it a day. They do need to include some text as well. But still, that’s a very easy way to get started. I think it’s a huge misconception that you need to be very technical to get any benefit from SEO. Yeah, sure. You can maybe scale to the size of Facebook or something, but you can still get all get clients through SEO by just publishing content on your website, basically.

[00:08:06.900] – Speaker 2
Sure. Well, I look at a website like Craigslist and I’m like, Well, a lot of people know about Craigslist, but I don’t know if they’re really doing a whole lot of SEO. So a business or a website like Facebook, I don’t know if they have to do a whole lot with that CEO.

[00:08:20.990] – Speaker 1
No, they’re so big, they don’t have to.

[00:08:22.810] – Speaker 2
So much traffic already.

[00:08:24.140] – Speaker 1
Yeah, exactly.

[00:08:25.520] – Speaker 2
The Amazons of the world. But on the flip side, I guess, Amazons, when you look for something online, you can tell that Amazon is throwing a fair amount of money at advertising, so they continue to show up. Let’s talk about the advertising. I mean, just paying the search engines for you to get on their first page or towards the top of the list versus sticking money and time into SEO. Have you seen pros, cons, benefits either way?

[00:08:54.710] – Speaker 1
Yeah, exactly. Ads are basically a whole different animal, if you will. They have different strategies than what we call organic SEO. So what I do, meaning ranking organically on Google. But paid ads, those are… I said they have different strategies. So I don’t actually really work with paid ads at this point. We might add that on at a later stage, but right now we focus mainly on organic SEO. But paid ads definitely have their time and place. I would recommend most businesses to pay that can come in sooner when you start scaling and just want to grow your business versus SEO comes in a bit later because it requires more energy and effort to build that up. But both, I think, have a place in most businesses strategies. So they can be used together as well. And especially paid ads work well for keywords that have very high buying intent. So when people are searching for something where they’re really looking to buy something, like a classic example is best running shoes. That’s maybe where paid ads can really work well in addition then to organic SEO, if that makes sense.

[00:10:20.240] – Speaker 2
Yeah. Got you. Interesting. Just like any other business owner, I get inundated with emails all the time that’s like, first page of Google, click this link thing. And it seems like all these promises. Yeah. Tell us, if I were to start a business brand new from scratch today and I were to just hire you or implement the best SEO strategies in the world, how long would it take for me to actually start getting found from the typical customers that I’d be after?

[00:10:53.750] – Speaker 1
Exactly. That’s an excellent question. And as many times in marketing, it depends on your industry and your website and so forth. But usually what I see is that it takes… If you have a brand new website, no work done on that website, then it will take a bit longer, about six months or so to really see a difference. But again, that depends. Maybe you’re in an industry that’s a bit easier, and then it can be faster and vice versa. And then if you have a website that’s a bit more established, maybe you already have a blog, you already created some content and such, then it’ll be faster. Then we’ve had clients who made a return on investment just in a few months. So it totally depends on the website and industry and strategies and so forth.

[00:11:51.400] – Speaker 2
Got you. Interesting. So if I were to start, let’s just say a hypothetical. I want to work this hypothetical because I have a very hard time with just wrapping my head around the whole SEO thing. I’ve had companies come to me and say like, Hey, pay us a nut every month and we’ll make sure your SEO strategy is taken care of. I’m like, What does that mean taken care of? Because does that mean that you’re producing content for me? Are you adding all takes the pictures? What does that mean? So can you just walk me through? Let’s just say I have James’s pizza emporium hah, I don’t know. Local delivery in a given, I don’t know, 10 mile radius or something like that. And I’m like, hey, I just started my website. So far, it’s got a homepage with a smiling picture of me and a pizza or something like that. Tell me, where would you typically start with a client in that realm? So super local, fairly as niche as pizza is. I don’t know if everybody likes pizza, but in that world.

[00:12:55.470] – Speaker 1
Exactly. Yeah. So that’s if it’s a local business like a pizza business, like a pizza business, for example, or a restaurant, then what you want to start with or serve the lowest hanging food is, of course, local SEO. So because you’re a local business, you want to get local people to find your business or visiting people. But anyway, people hurt in your area, and that’s where we… It’s called local SEO, meaning you optimize your website specifically to rank in your area. And so there are different ways you can do this. But just to give you a few… There are different strategies, but where I would start is first of all, make sure that your pages are optimized for Google. And that means implementing keywords, especially around pizza, around the area you’re located in. So just as an example, if that pizza restaurant is in New York City, then you’d want to mention that a few times throughout your pages. Also, on your contact page, you just want to make sure that Google understands you’re located in this area. And then you can do a lot to optimize your Google search result listing, the listing that comes up when you search for something.

[00:14:12.580] – Speaker 1
And there you can do a lot to optimize images, stuff like that. And also ask customers to leave reviews because reviews are a huge factor that Google takes into account when it ranks something locally. So those are just a few things. Then going even further, the next step would be to reach out to maybe some media in your… Some newspapers, media, different businesses, organizations in your industry or area and get links. So they give a back link to your website from their website because those links show Google that they trust your business and that helps you rank on Google. And especially those websites are local, it gives even more of a boost to your website. And Google says that even more favorably, basically.

[00:15:15.320] – Speaker 2
Interesting. All right. One of the things I want to ask you about this just as just things that I’ve discovered. We created a forum recently on one of my business web pages, and I don’t even know if it was a day, maybe two, before a bot came and filled out some spam thing. Russian brides or whatever. I’m like, How in the world did a bot find that fast when I’m pretty sure a human, besides the person that programmed it, hasn’t seen it yet? There’s no link to it outside of… I guess not even on our web page, there’s not even a link to it. How do bots find just all the web pages, deep down in the caverns beyond the homepage of all these websites?

[00:16:08.470] – Speaker 1
Yeah, it depends on the bot, of course, and how they find your website. But there are bots that stimulate search. So basically, when your website ranks on Google, it’s Google’s bots, but they’re not spammy bots. They’re just Google’s bots. They’re called spiders that crawl your website and just to understand your website. And so they’re able to run your website. And basically, what these spammy bots are doing instead is just stimulating those bots. And that way, like finding your website, they can also do this in other ways. But that’s just an example of how they would do it. And I agree, they’re super annoying.

[00:16:52.390] – Speaker 2
It was surreal because it was so fast.

[00:16:56.590] – Speaker 1
Yeah. And it’s so typical that if you have a blog and you have a comment feel like the spam will just be so massive, like in the back end, basically. So it’s a problem, I think, but not much you can do about it.

[00:17:14.450] – Speaker 2
So yeah. Interesting. Yeah, it was funny because I’m like, who? I don’t know if the person or people that put this together, if their intention, if they make money off this somehow, there must be somebody clicking on that. I told you want a Russian bride or something like that.

[00:17:31.010] – Speaker 1
Exactly. Yeah. Or something else.

[00:17:32.380] – Speaker 2
Is it just a stepping stone, like, hey, let’s just try to attempt to hack into this website, and then we’ll work on breaking into Fort Knox later or something like that.

[00:17:43.000] – Speaker 1
Exactly. I mean, they’re both. So yeah, it’s always a mystery how they can make money. But I guess they do since there are so many of them.

[00:17:53.700] – Speaker 2
How about you tell us about the name Zalstrom? How did you guys come up with that? Yeah.

[00:17:57.880] – Speaker 1
So it’s basically a combination of my name, which is a Paulstrom, and then my business partner’s name, which is Sue. So basically, yeah, it’s a combination of both names. And we just thought it was like a funny way to name our company and leave our mark on it. No.

[00:18:17.910] – Speaker 2
You said the name was Sue or Sue?

[00:18:20.940] – Speaker 1
So it’s pronounced Joe, but it’s written like Zet H O U. My business partner’s name. Yeah. very nice.

[00:18:30.440] – Speaker 2
So tell me, the size of businesses that you guys typically work with or that you target, just tell us about that.

[00:18:36.900] – Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely. So basically, the types of businesses we work with right now are mainly midsized software businesses and then also service businesses with a few employees. So they’re all midsized businesses. Our goal is to also expand to bigger businesses, but right now that’s our niche. Got you.

[00:19:05.760] – Speaker 2
And midsize business, how many employees are we talking? Midsize means a lot of different things, different pay.

[00:19:10.990] – Speaker 1
Exactly. Yeah. So it depends, of course. They could be, let’s say 5, then 40. So it’s like the whole spectrum.

[00:19:21.000] – Speaker 2
Got you. All right. So let’s go do another exercise like what we did with the local thing with the software company. It’s a software. They’re not necessarily local as far as who they’re looking for for clients. They may be looking all over the country or world, maybe, for what they’re offering. So how do you tackle that? They call you up and they’re like, Hey, Camilla, I got this sweet software. I got a homepage on a website. What now with SEO? I want to get found.

[00:19:50.330] – Speaker 1
Yeah, exactly. So basically, as you say, they have a different approach because they’re not local, right? So they want to be found everywhere or in specific markets, but still probably globally or on a bigger scale than locally. And so here the approach is still we want to create content for them. That’s always the basis of SEO. We want to look at their pages, the product pages, as well as their overall website to make sure that it’s optimized for Google. Then we want to start creating content set up a content plan where we produce blog posts for them every month. And the third one is then again, the back link building, but on a global scale. So there you go to general media or other websites to get those back links back to their website. And of course, all of this happens on a bigger scale than if you have a small pizza joint somewhere in a small city. It just happens on a bigger scale so that we can grow and scale that business as fast as possible. Got you.

[00:21:06.250] – Speaker 2
Interesting. I’ve talked to a lot of business owners. I ended up selling some of my businesses and I talked to a lot of business owners that have sold, bought all that jazz. One of the things, especially for a small company where you’re not necessarily McDonald’s or some huge Nike name or something like that, I always think how much would it cost starting from zero to build brand recognition for any brand in comparison to just buying a given business that’s already in existence. When you are talking to a company to figure out, hey, what is a practical number for you guys to spend? And let’s just talk percentage of revenue without talking actual dollars. Are we talking like 5 %, 20 %, 50 % of revenue? What’s a typically practical percentage in regards to what a business can expect?

[00:22:07.020] – Speaker 1
To spend on a CEO? Yeah, exactly. Okay, then I got you. Basically, we don’t work with percentages of revenue. It’s more a flat fee. Of course, that means that the business does have to have some type of revenue to be able to afford those services. But now our services are for these midsized companies. Obviously, that’s a certain price range. But then also you have other SEO agencies who are catering to smaller businesses, for example, and that’s a different price range. It totally depends. But as I said, we don’t base our fees on revenue, like a percentage of revenue, but rather like a flat fee, which includes all these services. And then, of course, as we move forward with the business and their traffic and business growth, then we f, once we’re at a certain level, we then increase the rate so that we can do even more to scale faster, add more services into the mix or do more. And yeah, that’s how our pricing model looks like.

[00:23:15.960] – Speaker 2
Got you. When it comes to SEO, you talked a lot about content, blogs, videos, all that jazz, super cool. I imagine you have the people that are like, Hey, I’m in some super niche business, whatever. I don’t know. Maybe it’s software for accountants that only work on Tuesdays or something like that. Exactly. Yeah. We’ll play around to the second decimal. Whatever it is, and they’re like, How are you going to write a blog or enter information on my website that has any value when you’re not an accountant, you don’t work only on Tuesdays or something of that nature? How do you respond to something like that?

[00:23:56.300] – Speaker 1
Yeah, that’s a great question. Basically, obviously, if you’re that niched and you only work with accountants who work on Tuesdays, then that’s your audience and that audience has a certain cap where how much you can make as a business working with them. As an agency, what we would do, if you decide to just stick to this very small niche is that we help you rank for those keywords in that section or sector and industry. But of course, then to really expand, you might also have to add on more other types of products or broaden the audience ultimately. But it’s definitely not a problem to start in a very small niche because there are usually keywords that cater to that niche. They’re also looking for information on Google, but it’s more like the problem comes in if you decide to stick to that niche and you want to scale. That doesn’t go hand in hand, if you will. It’s not just a problem with SEO, right? Overall business.

[00:25:03.900] – Speaker 2
Fair. Totally. Yeah, that’s probably a bad example. I guess the… What do I want to ask? Typical… I’m just thinking of the softwares that I’ve looked at have been pretty niche commonly. And a lot of times the software customers may not even know that that software exists to look for it.

[00:25:26.320] – Speaker 1
Yeah, exactly. That makes total sense. And I mean, your previous question as well, because it is a concern for many, like, can I even use it? I mean, it’s such a small niche. But of course, if it’s a software product or any product where the customer doesn’t really know their need or their want for that product, then what we do is look at related industries or related… Because if you have a product that you sell, then there’s a problem to be solved for your customer. And so what we would look at is, or tackle it instead from the problem angle. So what are customers searching for when they’re thinking about their problem? Whatever that may be, they’re probably like, some of them are going into Google and or another search engine and just looking for a solution to the problem. And that’s then how if you with your niche software business rank for those keywords, then that’s how you get customers. Of course, it’s not as straightforward as if I’m searching for pizza restaurant in New York City and I go to the nearest pizza restaurant, that’s a very fast conversion. But here we have to tackle the customer journey a bit from a broader angle.

[00:26:48.440] – Speaker 1
Sure.

[00:26:49.360] – Speaker 2
All right. You mentioned Google, biggest search engine, but you’ve also got the others. Even in Europe, maybe there’s some that I don’t even know about. So how do you play the game with all the different search engines and they’re changing rules? And I imagine sometimes their rules may be opposed to each other.

[00:27:11.170] – Speaker 1
Yeah. No, actually, most of them work in the same way because all of the search engines have the same goal of ranking the best content or the best information, if you will. It doesn’t have to be blog content. It can also be YouTube videos or videos in general or images or whatever that might be. But their goal is to rank the best ones from a user perspective. And so they all have the same goal. And of course, Google being one of the first bigger search engines and the biggest today, they’ve set the rules for how algorithms work and so forth. So most of these other search engines are trying to emulate what Google is doing. Then, of course, you have a few search engines where their selling point is privacy. We protect your privacy and that’s our selling point. But they’re still, like the search algorithm works in the same way. It might just be that from a privacy perspective, you might have a harder time, for example, ranking in certain searches, or it might be harder to rank locally because it’s harder to track where people are and so forth.

[00:28:29.390] – Speaker 2
Got it. Yeah, I think of something like… Is it duck duck go?

[00:28:35.200] – Speaker 1
Yeah, that’s one. And then there are a few newer ones as well. There are some of those search engines that really look at privacy.

[00:28:42.770] – Speaker 2
Interesting. Yeah, I saw billboard for them. A little while ago, it was interesting because that’s… Yeah, trying to beat Google at that game is.

[00:28:52.640] – Speaker 1
Tough game.

[00:28:53.580] – Speaker 2
Yeah, it’s a tough game for sure. All the power to them. Hope they do well.

[00:28:56.490] – Speaker 1
Yeah.

[00:28:56.750] – Speaker 2
Exactly. With your business, is the idea that you’ll scale? Are you guys going to stay the two of you? I guess from a business standpoint for you guys, what’s the plan moving forward? Short term.

[00:29:10.440] – Speaker 1
Basically right now, we do have a pool of freelancers we work with. Right now, that’s the situation or what our business looks like. But moving forward, we’re definitely going to build a team and also scale quite. Our goal is to scale quite fast, especially given that we already have an existing pool of clients from before and quite a lot of business experience. That’s the goal to not stay just the two of us, but rather scale rather fast. I get it.

[00:29:45.460] – Speaker 2
I can see either way because I have employees and there are days that it’s super awesome and there are days when you’re like, You know what? I get the whole one person and then the thing.

[00:29:57.130] – Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely. I did that for a number of years, like being a freelancer and consultant. But now I just feel it’s time for something bigger. Got you.

[00:30:08.550] – Speaker 2
Totally fair. Now, I want to talk to you about working with your partner, partners across the ocean. So is that challenging? I mean, you got time difference. You’re not in the same office. I mean, that’s the world that we live in now with a lot of businesses. So has that been a challenge communicating or keeping in touch or just keeping in the loop? Or how do you guys work through that?

[00:30:29.530] – Speaker 1
Yeah, surprisingly, it hasn’t. I would have thought the same, that it would be challenging. But I think with just straightforward communication, it’s quite easy. Also, my co founder being in the US and me being in Europe, there’s still some overlap in terms of hours, like where it’s my business hours and her business hours. So it’s fairly easy to set up calls and such. And then, of course, the rest is through email communication. But it’s really not. I think it comes down to establishing the goals from the start. What are your expectations? What are my expectations? And what are our goals? And then clear roles within the business. And that really helps. This is my area and if I need some information or input, I’ll just shoot an email. And then we have regular calls where we then look at things in a more broader strategic level. One.

[00:31:34.760] – Speaker 2
Of the things…

[00:31:35.710] – Speaker 1
There’s.

[00:31:36.360] – Speaker 2
A little construction going on here. It’s all good. Oh, yeah. One of the things that we have with my calls on call business is everyone’s remote, they’re doing well. But I feel like there’s just some of the camaraderie or a little bit of the culture that you would have in an in person office is lost or it’s not as easy to maintain because before you just walk in the door, people be there, be like, Hey, good morning. How’s it going? I ran over a dog on my way in or whatever, something like that. Hopefully not. Yeah, hopefully not. Now you do have instant messaging set up, but it’s a lot of… It’s business strictly. So I don’t want to say strictly necessarily, but you’re just not telling about your day. Maybe one because you’re not driving anywhere, so you’re not running over a whole lot of dogs. But it’s one of those, you know what I mean? Where it’s just… You don’t want to pollute the instant messaging channel with, Let me tell you about stuff that’s not necessarily relevant to the business. But you also have to maintain humanity and enjoy the people that you work with and keep the culture happy, positive, all that jazz.

[00:32:50.050] – Speaker 2
So how do you guys take care of that? Because that’s got to be especially tough with just two people. Yeah.

[00:32:55.760] – Speaker 1
Well, I imagine it’ll be tough also when we have a because now we work with freelancers, so obviously that’s very project based. But with employees in a team, I can imagine that being very challenging. How do you create that culture? But I think for us, it works because we also have our own project going on. So it’s not really basically… For us, it’s not a problem where we would need to really chitchat a lot during the day. I guess we have different avenues to get an outlet for that, if that makes sense. It totally.

[00:33:32.250] – Speaker 2
Makes sense.

[00:33:33.170] – Speaker 1
But I said I can totally imagine it being a problem with employees because then you really have to make sure for retention and things like that, you really have to make sure that people are happy and enjoying the work environment.

[00:33:47.490] – Speaker 2
Yeah, it’s definitely a delicate balance because I… Even on instant messaging, I try to have fun every once in a while and I ended up making an employee mad, not intentionally, but I put a little smash in the forehead icon thing when somebody made a joke about a mistake.

[00:34:06.060] – Speaker 1
Yeah, that’s the hard thing, right.

[00:34:07.960] – Speaker 2
I heard somebody’s feelings. I didn’t mean to.

[00:34:10.320] – Speaker 1
Yeah, in text format, it’s just so much easier to get that communication.

[00:34:17.420] – Speaker 2
They’re gone.

[00:34:19.740] – Speaker 1
Just.

[00:34:21.530] – Speaker 2
Talking to business owners about the whole remote work experience and what they found works is always interesting.

[00:34:28.720] – Speaker 1
Yeah, exactly. I think for me personally, what I like to do is not just work from home, but take that time during the day and see other people and just go to maybe that’s a co working space or an outside office or something like that. Like me being totally remote from my clients and from my business partner and so forth. So that’s how I handle that is to instead find those other ways to just get that human contact in the day. Human.

[00:35:01.190] – Speaker 2
Yeah. Tell me about your freelancers, because that’s got to be tough to find. I imagine just like it’s tough to find good employees, it’s probably tough to find good freelancers, right?

[00:35:12.470] – Speaker 1
Yeah. I think I like it. They don’t.

[00:35:14.420] – Speaker 2
Necessarily come out and say that they’re the worst at what their job is. They always talk.

[00:35:18.790] – Speaker 1
About they’re the best.

[00:35:20.020] – Speaker 2
Exactly. How do you vet them? How do you find them?

[00:35:23.220] – Speaker 1
Yeah, that’s a great question. And I guess it’s one of the biggest problems for most business owners is to find the right employees or team members of freelancers. So the way I handle this is I work with the same freelancers. So when I find a good freelancer, I really work with them and I make sure to work with them and give them a good amount of work as well. So they’re incentivised to work with me. So they’re covered a bit in that sense. But of course, to find them, it’s really just about searching and finding. So like, I’ll go, I’ll find some of my freelancers on Upwork, which is this freelancing platform. And then, of course, there are different ones, but Upwork works for me. And there I just basically the manual thing where you go to Upwork and you’re searching for the right profiles and then reaching out and doing this a lot to find the right people and then testing them to see if it’s the right fit, both from a skill level but also from just working with them. That’s basically how I do it and it works well for me, of course.

[00:36:36.040] – Speaker 1
It is time consuming. I think any higher rate is time consuming. Let’s talk about.

[00:36:43.010] – Speaker 2
How you ended up in the SEO world. Can you tell us how you ended up in the event?

[00:36:47.500] – Speaker 1
Yeah, sure. B asically, I got started, like I said, about six years ago, but then I was doing content writing. T hat’s really how I then just got involved because content writing has a lot to do with SEO. And I wanted to… I saw an opportunity to stand out as a content writer with the help of SEO and learning more about SEO. And that’s really how I started getting some results from my clients, unintentionally, basically. And then I started learning more about SEO and how that works and how I can implement that into my content. And fast forward a few years, I was taking care of more and more SEO tasks and ultimately then entire project and building the traffic for entire website, basically. And yeah, here we are today.

[00:37:39.250] – Speaker 2
Like moving it.

[00:37:40.870] – Speaker 1
Into an agency setting. Sure. So was the.

[00:37:43.690] – Speaker 2
Intention six years ago? Six years ago, did you have a day job, essentially doing content writing?

[00:37:48.790] – Speaker 1
No, I had quit my day job to try out freelancing. And then that led the way to me just starting consulting as well and so forth. But it wasn’t like the goal at that time. It wasn’t like, oh, I’m going to start an agency. It was more like, I want to be a business owner. So what skills do I have? And then writing was the first one. And then from that, I grew it to SEO and so forth. Got you.

[00:38:17.530] – Speaker 2
So when you had your day job, was the idea like, Hey, screw this job. I’m going to start my own business. Or was the consulting on content writing, essentially, this is a stepping stone or holding pattern until I find my next day job, whatever that may be. Yeah.

[00:38:35.280] – Speaker 1
No, it wasn’t like I needed to find a new day job. It was more like, I want that flexibility and freedom of being a business owner. I found it to be more creative than being in a day job, just that you decide on everything, which has its pros and cons. But still, I find that more freeing for me and more creative. And so that was really what I was looking for. And I couldn’t find that in a day job. And yeah, that’s really why I started my business and didn’t look back because I always felt like this is the right lifestyle for me.

[00:39:18.520] – Speaker 2
It’s interesting that you use the word stability along with freedom because I feel like people with day jobs presume that their job is stable and they’re sacrificing some freedom in exchange for that stability. But I find it’s interesting because that’s not necessarily the case or rarely the case.

[00:39:42.740] – Speaker 1
Yeah, exactly. I mean, as we see now with all these layoffs, right? They’re speaking about in the media, not only Twitter, but also Meta and so forth, and this whole recession and so forth, the recession we’re probably going into. That just shows no job is secure. There’s no stability really.

[00:40:02.900] – Speaker 2
Yeah, people have been shaken up a little bit. I know for the past, oh, man, four or five years, it seems to have been an employee market rather than an employer market.

[00:40:18.160] – Speaker 1
Exactly.

[00:40:19.740] – Speaker 2
I’m hoping that that tide is changing or shifting a little bit. Not necessarily because I wish bad upon people or anything like that, but I feel like a lot of people gotten lazy from my perspective. So I don’t know where you’re at with that.

[00:40:40.480] – Speaker 1
Yeah. I think maybe the bigger problem is just balance, right? And just in general, yeah, this just goes to show basically that there is no stability. It’s a good thing to keep in mind, even though people are, of course, suffering through this as well. Yeah, it’s.

[00:41:02.630] – Speaker 2
Just I am reminded of that. I can’t think of the exact quote from the GECO when they let go a bunch of people. Jack Welch let go a bunch of people and one of the guys complained. He’s like, Hey, I’ve been here 20 years. You’re letting me go. And Jack Welch is like, We’re also hiring, but you got to keep your skill set up to the modern era. And if you’re not constantly growing and constantly improving yourself as an employee for the job that you have and the job you want, etc, you can get outdated pretty quick. Yeah.

[00:41:40.980] – Speaker 1
This day and age for sure, especially if you’re in any digital space. That’s definitely something most people need to keep track off. Tell me, I.

[00:41:54.720] – Speaker 2
Want to talk about some black hat SEO stuff that you should not do. This reminds me of… Oh, my gosh. I started my first business in 2006, so this is probably… Let’s just say 2006 ish. I built my website and I had read somewhere online that people, the viewers of your website, only want to see so many words, but search engines want to see a lot more words to actually know what you’re about. I remember I put this laundry list of towns that we did business in, and then I made the list of those towns the same color as the background of the website so that the viewer wouldn’t necessarily see it unless they selected all the text. But a search engine, in theory, would. Then I learned later that they’re like, No, don’t do that because it shows that you’re trying to hide stuff from people and search engine will black flag you. And I’m like, Oh, that was not my intention. And we’re small enough website where it probably didn’t matter either way. But can you tell us just about some practices that people may be implementing with presumably positive intentions that are not a good idea from the search engine point of view?

[00:43:13.430] – Speaker 1
Absolutely. So that’s one, of course, but two big ones come to my mind. So maybe just to back up or back a bit is that Black Hat SEO are strategies that are basically against Google’s user guidelines. And so you shouldn’t use them because your website might get basically your traffic content because Google stops ranking your website. And some black hat strategies that people might be using is one, first of all, paying for links. So Google actually says you should not pay for links. This is in their guidelines very clearly. And this is also a problem that a lot of people who work as SEOs use paid links. And that’s actually not a good idea just because while it might work right now, you don’t know, in a few years, Google might go in and say, Oh, paid links are such a huge problem that we need to crack down on this. And we’re going to implement this new algorithm update that’s going to take care of this problem. And that means that if you have paid links, your traffic is gone. So it’s just not a very good way to grow your traffic, even though you might get some results right now.

[00:44:37.900] – Speaker 1
So that’s one thing which I think people just like from not knowing any better are doing. So that’s one thing you definitely shouldn’t do. And you can pay for links, but then the website which links to your website needs to market as sponsored, that link is sponsored. So that’s totally fine, but it does need to be linked. So on a website where you have branded content where a business has clearly paid for that content, that’s totally fine. It’s more like if you do it without any highlight of that whatsoever. The second thing is reciprocal links. So if you and I would like exchange links to our websites, that’s also a no go. A few of those links are fine because it’s how websites usually work. Like that sometimes you just have the same websites linking to each other. So that’s fine. The problem is if all of your links are those types of links, that’s where it looks spammy to Google. And again, your website might get affected from that. Got you.

[00:45:45.650] – Speaker 2
All right. See the link thing? Yeah, I guess I didn’t… I don’t know. I’ve had to reach out asking if I wanted to pay. For sure.

[00:45:53.710] – Speaker 1
Yeah. And it sounds like a good deal, right? Why not make a bit of money? I don’t get.

[00:45:57.010] – Speaker 2
Up to the whole Russian bride thing. I’m just like, yeah, exactly.

[00:46:02.650] – Speaker 1
And it sounds… It’s like, Well, I have this website. Why not make a bit of money just from links? But it’s not a good idea unless you’re actually saying that those are sponsored links. Yeah, I.

[00:46:14.980] – Speaker 2
Guess I have had people reach out to me about other websites that I have asking to pay me for me to post their blogs on the website. Yeah, exactly. I guess that’s not really the realm of where I make my money.

[00:46:29.850] – Speaker 1
Yeah, so you haven’t just done it. Yeah, exactly. But some websites are. I’m certain.

[00:46:36.740] – Speaker 2
There’s no doubt. Yeah, it’s interesting when you do a search on something and you end up on a web page where it’s 50 gazillion ads. I see what’s happening here.

[00:46:50.580] – Speaker 1
For sure. Yeah. So where do you.

[00:46:53.800] – Speaker 2
See SEO going in the next few years? I mean, it’s tough to tell very far ahead, but it’s changed quite a bit in the past few years. So there are certain things that you’re prepping some clients for or learning more about. I’m not even going to speculate on what that could be. I have no idea.

[00:47:10.410] – Speaker 1
Yeah, that’s a really interesting question, I feel, because also there are so many new technologies right now that there’s just so much possibility, right? And of course, I can’t say for sure. Well, first of all, what has always been the same in terms of SEO and how SEO works is the user experience. So search engines like Google want to keep a good user experience for their users. So good content, those kinds of things like authoritative websites. So those will probably keep the same because they still want to present the best content to their users. However, the way we search is changing. So for example, voice search is getting bigger and bigger, and AI is taking more and more space. And then younger people like Gen Z and so forth, they’re searching more and more on TikTok, for example. So they’re using TikTok a bit like we’re using Instagram or Google or other platforms. And so we can definitely, probably in the future, Google will have to change some of the way it presents search results just to cater to those changes in how consumers use Google. Yeah, it’s really interesting. And it’ll be exciting to see where it goes.

[00:48:28.310] – Speaker 1
But it’s hard to tell right now. But there’s my top area where it’s changing a lot.

[00:48:36.760] – Speaker 2
All right. Now, I heard somebody use the term Web 3.0. Yeah.

[00:48:43.620] – Speaker 1
What? I haven’t heard.

[00:48:44.460] – Speaker 2
That Web 2.0 thing with social media. And I remember I had… Oh, my gosh. This is this woman that was paying for… I think I was paying her to build social media posts for one of my businesses. And she asked why I even have a website because I should just rely on Facebook. And I think her game was for me just to pay her to build that. And I’m like, That seems like the dumbest thing in the world to put all of my eggs into a basket that I have less than zero control over. Exactly. But she tried to talk me into she’s like, The web, as we know it, is going away. It’s going to be exclusively Facebook in this… And of course, we know that’s not the case. So it was interesting, her perspective. I’m not really sure if that was a sales pitch on her end or if she actually truly believed that. I hope it was a sales pitch because…

[00:49:41.820] – Speaker 1
Yeah, exactly. I think that’s a good point to make that with your website, you are in control of your audience, your traffic, and so forth. Versus if you rely on social media, like we are seeing now with Facebook or Meta these days, how it’s getting less and less relevant. So if you’ve built your whole business on that platform, you need to move to other platforms. But then also in terms of Web 3 and those types of things, I don’t know that much about Web 3, but from what I know, it’s like, maybe the Internet will change, but I don’t think it’s going to change fast enough for us not to be able then to adjust once that change comes.

[00:50:28.910] – Speaker 1
Totally fair.

[00:50:30.460] – Speaker 2
It’s interesting. I can’t even tell you what I read that was talking about Web 3.0 or that used that phrase, and I can’t even say that what was written there was compelling enough for me to be like, Oh, I have to change everything I’ve known about the web.

[00:50:46.380] – Speaker 1
Yeah, exactly. I think there are different opinions on Web 3 as well. Is it a thing even or is it not?

[00:50:53.470] – Speaker 1
It’s just a marketing thing like white ticket or something. Yeah, exactly.

[00:50:58.820] – Speaker 1
So there are different opinions, I think, on that. But yeah, it’ll be, of course, interesting to see. But overall, as with business in general, I don’t think you should jump to the next shiny thing, but rather keep your existing, what you have and build on what’s working now and then look into the future, of course. Fair.

[00:51:21.130] – Speaker 2
I love it. So, Camilla, you’ve been in business a little bit. You’ve been on your own for a while. What are some of the, I guess, what are some business advice that you give someone that was considering starting their own gig or just going off on their own even as a consultant? Yeah. Well, I

[00:51:36.900] – Speaker 1
think the biggest thing is if you’re totally new to business is to really focus on what your focus on a few marketing channels, focus on one service or one product or whatever that is, and really double down. Then once you see, of course, in the beginning, you might need to try a few things to see what’s working, but once you see what’s working, double down on that. So instead of being on, let’s say, LinkedIn and Instagram and TikTok and whatnot, if you see a LinkedIn is working well, that’s where you should focus on.

[00:52:13.790] – Speaker 2
So push.

[00:52:15.810] – Speaker 1
Yeah, exactly. Instead of just trying to spread it everywhere. Maybe push

[00:52:19.120] – Speaker 1
what’s working. Yeah, exactly. I think that’s the biggest learning I’ve had from my journey and what I always try to remind myself. Even now, that at every stage you have to also focused. You can’t just spread yourself in. Cool.

[00:52:36.870] – Speaker 2
I love it. Well, Camilla, thank you so much for being on the show. I appreciate your time. Thank you so much.

[00:52:42.820] – Speaker 1
This is really fun. Tell me, I didn’t

[00:52:44.990] – Speaker 2
even ask your website, you were on an SEO program. How about you tell us your website? Yeah, sure.

[00:52:52.400] – Speaker 1
It’s Zalstrom.com, Z, A, L, S, T, R, O, M.com

[00:52:58.430] – Speaker 2
Perfect. I appreciate it. So Zalstrom.com, Z, A, L, S, T, R, O, M. Yes. Sweet. Thank you so much. Thank you. This has been Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggle stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land, even across the pond here. We’re locally underwritten by the Bank of Sun Prairie. If you’re listening or watching this on the web, you could do us a huge favor. Give us a big old thumbs up and of course, subscribe. That’s a big deal. The algorithm wants to know. And I guess most importantly, if you don’t mind, throw some comments out there. Tell me what has worked for your SEO, what has not worked for your SEO, and just any questions that you may have for Camilla. Outside of that, my name is James Kademan and Authentic Business Adventures is brought to you by Calls on Call, offering call answering and receptionist services for service businesses across the country on the web at callsoncall.com. And of course, The Bold Business Book, a book for the entrepreneur in all of us available wherever fine books are sold. We’d like to thank you, our wonderful listeners, as well as our guests.

[00:53:57.420] – Speaker 2
Camilla Hallstrom, co-founder of Zalstrom. Can you tell us that website one more time? Yes, it’s Zalstrom.com.

[00:54:04.620] – Speaker 1
Perfect.

[00:54:06.320] – Speaker 2
Past episodes can be found morning, noon, and night. Podcast link found at drawincustomers.com. Thank you for listening. We will see you next week. I want you to stay awesome. And if you do nothing else, enjoy your business.