Welcome to a new Weekly Interviews edition where we interview brilliant women in our industry and share their stories with the world! Anyone is welcome to share their story by simply filling this form, we encourage women from all walks of life in our industry to do so.
Introducing Barb Davids! Based in Las Vegas, Barb is an SEO consultant and owner of Compass Digital Strategies. Driven by data and analytics, she works hard to get business-changing results for her clients. Barb has provided a 256% increase in website traffic and 22% more leads. As lockdown began and clients lost budget, she continued working on some accounts pro bono for a couple of months, offering free help to select industries. Her own business as a result has pivoted and begun to offer online courses so that business owners can work to gain more site traffic and leads at a more budget-friendly cost.
We asked her everything from how she first got into SEO to what empowers her to be the brilliant woman she is 💪🏽
When beginning to increase organic traffic to my photography business website, I found how confusing it was. Even for me who has been in the digital marketing space for a number of years. I started networking with other photographers and worked on some one-off projects, finding SEO was a black hole for many. Around the same time, I decided I wanted to work for myself and be able to work anytime, anywhere. I niched down into SEO and so began Compass Digital Strategies.
Keyword and content creation research. And then organizing and planning out the content. It's the part of my day that I lose track of time.
ClickUp, my task management tool. I would be lost without it. I manage my own business and my clients' projects all in one tool.
How important a great copywriter is to SEO and your website. A great copywriter will keep SEO in mind knowing what words to use in the heading tags for example. And great copy is what encourages users to convert.
Every time I can help my client's hit their goals. The one that comes to mind recently is for a local flower shop. The goal was to increase revenue by 26% from 2019 to 2020. We hit a 50% increase!
The first thing I recommend is to network. I think for some that sound like a dry, sleazy idea. And it's not just exchanging business cards. It's a way to build up your professional contacts in a supporting and engaging way. I network first to help others. And learn from others. If you go into it thinking who's going to give me sales, you will not benefit from it.
Second, understand your capabilities and resources. If you sell your time in some form, for example as a consultant, you can take on only so many clients or accounts. How can your business grow when you have a cap on time? What can you outsource?
Third, schedule time to market your own business. I once heard it said that fish won't jump in the boat if you don't put your boat in the water. Fish don't ever just jump in a boat of course, but the idea is how will your customer find you if you are not proactively marketing your business. It's very easy to put your own business on the back burner to take care of clients.
For sure Areej AbuAli for the amazing work at building the Women in Tech SEO community. Melissa Fach and Shelly Fagin. They came across my path a few years ago at my first PubCon. I was like wow, they know a lot!
"When you have clarity of intention, the universe conspires with you to make it happen." -Fabienne Fredrickson
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Thanks Barb for a truly insightful interview, you can learn more about her through her website and connect with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.
To view more interviews with brilliant women, check out our Interviews page. If you've enjoyed reading this interview, then we'd love for YOU to share your story with the world! Simply fill this form here, we welcome brilliant SEOs from all walks of life! 🙌🏽