Laura Kåmark
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Be Bold Make Waves Podcast, a show bringing you inspiring stories of women who are growing and scaling their business. I’m your host, Laura Kåmark, a website and tech integration specialist who works with online business owners who love their work and not their website. Join me as we have incredible conversations about business mindset, productivity, and of course, the website and tech behind the business. Let’s go ahead and dive in to this week’s episode.

Laura Kåmark
Hello, and welcome to today’s show. For those of you who don’t already know me, my name is Laura Kåmark. I’m a website and tech integration specialist who works with women who love their work, but not their website. I’m so excited to introduce my guest today. Meg Clark, the owner and founder of clapping dog media, AKA your new SEO best friend. Meg is a master at growing organic traffic and has spent years learning everything she can about how exactly Google works. Now she combines all of that data experience to help you turn your website visitors into raving fans that actually stick around. For all of the businesses both big and small, who do good work for people. Meg is here for you. She’ll give you the megaphone, you need to make sure your voice is heard. Meg, thank you so much for being on the show today. Can you tell our listeners just a little more about who you are and what you do?

Meg Clarke
Yeah, first of all, thank you so much for having me. It’s just so fun to have an hour just to chat with you. So yeah. And then Matt Clark, I live in Northern Virginia, we live in a suburb of DC. I’m a mom to three boys and a golden golden doodle who is our mascot for clapping dog media. And, you know, I started, I don’t know, a million years ago, I was a web designer. In my first career, and then in 2010 12 ish, I transitioned home. Because we started the family and I had kids. And I started just freelancing, right, I started working for other women who had transitioned home, and did web design for them. And it took me like, three sites to realize that I didn’t, that I needed that whole team that I had at my marketing agency when I was working and out of the house, to help promote the site and to do all the things that, you know, I was just so naive that I thought just a good design and good service would just bring in all of the people. And so I got into SEO then and started understanding analytics and user interface and why why people do what they do. And I’ve been doing SEO ever

Laura Kåmark
since. I love that so much, I find SEO very overwhelming. And we actually have I had a client who was very concerned with her SEO when we were getting ready to launch a new site. Or when we were we weren’t ready to launch, we were getting ready to build the new site. And I said, I reached out in a group of colleagues and said, I need an SEO expert. And Meg was the name that came up. And so I gave that client your information. And then we’ve been working together with that client now for a number of years. Yeah, several

Meg Clarke
years. She’s just old school now.

Laura Kåmark
And it’s just been amazing for me because, like, again, I mean, I build websites, but I do very minimal with anything SEO. Because it’s a whole nother beast, in my opinion. It’s completely separate from the skill set I have. And that’s why I appreciate so much like what you do you and what you bring to the space, because it’s there’s a lot that goes into it. I would love to know, can you tell us a little bit about when someone is building their website? Like what are the most maybe like the three most important things you would say that they need to focus on with SEO?

Meg Clarke
Sure. Well, you know, I’m gonna back up a little bit more, I think we’ll, we’ll come around the corner. And we’ll get there and explain a little bit about what search is and how Google thinks about search, because it’s all related to user interface and design. And so from Google’s perspective, so they define search as when trillions and trillions of people are searching on Google in hundreds of different languages. And they all expect an answer in less than a second. And so from Google’s perspective, they are constantly reading, all reading and understanding all of the search queries, while at the same time scanning the Internet to figure out what a good web page is to match every search query. And so that’s what search is. And so from an SEO perspective, our job is to make it as easy as possible for Google to understand who you are and how you want to be found. But from a user usability and website perspective, the idea is, can the site be fast is it easy to download? Is it easy recrawl are the headlines set up so that you so that Google can quickly scan and skim your site and see what your site is all about. So what the most important thing from an SEO, when you’re building a new site is have a site that’s fast, that’s easy to navigate, that doesn’t take five or six clicks to get to any one page. So having an A smart taxonomy or structure to the site is really, really important, like the architecture of the site has to be there, or Google can’t easily crawl it. So easy to navigate, strong structure and fast are the things that are the backbone to having a good a well found site.

Laura Kåmark
I love that, I find that one of the biggest things with site speed that I have found with clients is a lot of that is based on their hosting. Yes, other things that contribute to site speed. But I, my mind is blown constantly, when I move clients from not the best hosting that kind of you get what you pay for, it’s the cheaper the starter hosting, and move them to like flywheel or WP Engine, and their site speed just shoots through the roof. And all I did was move them. That’s it,

Meg Clarke
right. And that’s 1,000%, right, we experienced the same thing. And so when we get when we get the technical stack, if you will, from our clients, and we’re like, Oh, I’m sorry, you’re gonna have to pay more than $12 a month for hosting. Because there’s so many sites on your server, you really need to get if you need to get a better host, that’s more expensive. But it makes a really significant difference in all kinds of things. I mean, it’s not just SEO, which just use a built usability, it’s safer, it’s more secure, and then it helps with your SEO. So it’s these foundational things like kind of side note, we really only work with clients who have a well made site. So it’s like, if they come to us with this with a site that maybe they bootstrapped, or they did a little bit here, they hired somebody for this, we know that the gains that we can get from an SEO perspective, are so much smaller than if the site had a really strong foundation. And so our once we kind of understand where they are, our first recommended recommendation is always to go get your site shored up with good hosting, a good theme, a good template, a good structure, and then come back because then SEO will be much more impactful.

Laura Kåmark
I love that. And I think that is such incredible information to share with our audience, because that’s the piece that I see is missing often with clients, because I’ll get a lot of people that come to me, they’re like, oh, I need SEO. I’m like, Well, I can send you to other people. I said, but first we need to get your site ready, because there’s no point in you being found if once people get there, they leave used they leave. It’s too slow. I know I leave a site if it’s like, and I try to give everyone benefit of the doubt. But sometimes you go on a site now. Oh, I mean, like the hotel sites.

Meg Clarke
Yes, apps Absolutely. Absolutely well in, like they say it’s like less than three seconds on the desktop. But it’s like less than one second. Like if you’re on your mobile device, if you’re walking down the street, and it takes a long time for the site to load people will leave. So you’re absolutely right, that we can get SEO can get people to your website. But if your website doesn’t isn’t good or isn’t easy to use, if it’s slow, if you don’t, I mean, it’s not good. It doesn’t it doesn’t matter, because traffic for traffic sake. Who cares? Nobody cares about traffic for traffic sake. We want people to come to your website and get engaged. Become a raving fan and buy from you.

Laura Kåmark
Yes, absolutely. Oh, I love that. Yeah. So what would you say? That? Were some of the fears and doubts that you had when you were first starting your business? And how did you overcome them? So many

Meg Clarke
fears? Gosh, I get I think I wake up with fears every day, every day, it’s a chance to overcome them. Well, you know, at first, you know, it’s funny because I went into my kind of when I started my business confident because I had majored in design. I had worked in the industry for 10 years that I felt really confident in my skills, but from an ignorant perspective, because I was on a team. You know, I was one of a team I never worked for a small where I was like the person who wore all the hats. I was just I was the designer. And so I walked in to my mike my my business as an entrepreneur thinking, oh, you know what all those other people did? We’re not really important. It’s all about the way the site looks. And so I walked in thinking very confidently in art, my design skills, which looking back were terrible if we’re being real, but then when things stopped were raking, because I burst and continues now I really love to work with people that I like that are doing good, good business. And so I was kind of picky in the big, I’m still picky with the clients that we work with, I want to feel good about helping more people to find them. And so in the beginning, I did these designs for these wonderful people who had a great service, and they had given me you know, their, the money to help them stand up their business, and it wasn’t working. And so, because for all kinds of reasons, but mainly it was I read lots of reasons, but I felt terrible. And so then I was like, that was when the fear started to sink in was, I don’t know what I’m doing. And I can’t help these people. And these people are gonna give me all that they have, and I’m gonna, you know, bankrupt them. So, but get over that was, you know, that was that fear was driving me to learn about analytics and what it means and what’s important. And what does Google care about? And how does Google work. And so then you can kind of learn all those things and apply them to the site. And then it’s really fun when we can get traffic and we can help them meet their goals.

Laura Kåmark
Do you find that when people come to you they need to have, it’s important for them to have a validated offer first before sending the traffic because I know like one of the things that I try to explain to my clients is I can build your website, which is just a tool. But once you have the tool, just because you build it, they will not come to you need to go out you need to tell people about it. You need to market your business, you need to make sure people want the thing you’re offering. And then I feel like at that point after it’s been validated, that would be the step to then expand your reach, doing ads, working on your SEO working with a specialists, like would like you to drive more traffic because you already know it’s validated. Is that all? Would you agree with all that

Meg Clarke
1,000%. Like I said, it doesn’t matter if we bring traffic to your site, if it that if people leave, like that’s not going to like traffic for traffic sake is pointless. And so you really do need to have a valid offer and connect with your people and know what you’re doing is going to work. So 1,000%. And, you know, we always say I always say that SEO is a layer of your marketing, but it isn’t your marketing department. Like you do need that social aspect. You do need all of the other pieces of having a good business because SEO is a part of it. But it isn’t the whole thing. So 1,000% Do I agree with you.

Laura Kåmark
I love how you talk about how it’s the piece of it. Because that, again, is something that I feel that I see that people come to me and they don’t understand that like you need all these different layers that make us work and make the traffic and yeah, I love that.

Meg Clarke
Gone are the days where you can just show up on Instagram, and, and then make all of your clients like, it’s part of it. It’s really important. But it’s not the whole picture. And nothing is like the content marketing, the ads, the social, it’s together, it’s that holistic view of your marketing that SEO is really SEO will build that foundation and lift everything higher. But it’s really important, but it’s not the whole picture. Love that.

Laura Kåmark
What would you say are some of the tools that you love to have your clients have in place to help them with SEO?

Meg Clarke
I love it analytics. Number one, we want them to be on analytics so we can at least measure it’s so important to know your numbers. So we love I mean, we we you can work with any SEO works with any platform that we prefer WordPress. WordPress is a really great highly customizable, customizable, highly crawlable and indexable platform to build a website. So we prefer WordPress. We like Yoast a lot. We also like rankmath, which are two plugins. They have free and premium versions. Both of them we like they help with dynamic sitemaps. They do. It’s easy to write metadata. We like both of those. And then analytics, of course, are is kind of the where we like to get started. Now we do have clients on Shopify and Squarespace. And their sites are well found and well crawled. But our preference is

Laura Kåmark
WordPress. I love that, especially since I work in WordPress. But that’s the thing I’ve always heard is that WordPress is more Google kind of favours WordPress is what I’ve always heard.

Meg Clarke
Yeah, we have, like I said, we have clients on all platforms and they’re all getting found but WordPress is just open. It’s just, it’s just easier. It’s just easier

Laura Kåmark
makes, like, easy. Easy? Yes. Let’s find ways to keep it more simple. For someone who doesn’t know a lot about Google Analytics, or maybe feels intimidated by it to advice for them on, like, what to do with analytics, or just get it set up and let it collect or what, what’s your advice there?

Meg Clarke
Analytics is such a tricky beast, because currently Universal Analytics, which is the analytics until July 2023, and that’s going to be replaced by a completely new version of analytics called GA for or Google Analytics for. But Universal Analytics has over 200. That’s like 260 different reports that you can pull for the data for your website. So you can look, you can slice and dice anything. And that can be super helpful for some people. But for the majority of us, it’s extremely overwhelming. And so the things that I care about, which is because Google cares about them, we call them the metrics that matter. And the what we would love for you to get out of Google Analytics is install it, let it collect data. And the things that we look for that you should look for is that your traffic is increasing month over month, and that people are engaging with the site, meaning they’re spending more than, honestly, 10 seconds on the site, the average length of time that people spend on a website is 10 seconds. So if you can get people to spend 45 seconds or a minute and a half, then that is telling Google that your site is engaging, and that people want to be on it. And the same kind of in the same vein, the amount of pages or pages per session, that is something that we can get from Google Analytics. And that will tell us like our Is it easy to navigate are people binge reading your content, are they Is this like a Netflix series where they just one after another, they they click and they read your content or listen to your podcast. So we love Analytics, you should install it. And if you can narrow it down on the main page, they’ll tell you traffic, you can compare it with the previous month, the average time per session, we look for anything over 10 seconds, and the pages per session, which is anything over one, if you can get people reading two or three pages, that’s a really positive, very positive thing. And so that’s what I would like for people to get out of Google Analytics. Oh, I

Laura Kåmark
love that. I love how you just broke that down. Because that’s like, that’s, that’s great for me, I can’t wait to after this call, go look at my Google Analytics and see some of those numbers. I love that. Would you say? Do you have a plug in a WordPress plugin that you refer for connecting Google Analytics? Or? Or do you believe more in just doing putting the code in?

Meg Clarke
You know, I just put the code in. But I know that you can. There are, there are analytics plugins that work and that are great. We, you know, I did say there’s over 200 reports, we get more than what I had just explained. So I like to go into analytics specifically for each client and pull some of these reports for people. But as a business owner who’s just starting out or is completely overwhelmed with analytics, I think the plugins are really great choice.

Laura Kåmark
Make it easy. I always put Google Site kit because Google created. I’m like, Well, if Google created, they must like it. Like that’s the one to go with. Yeah, I

Meg Clarke
totally agree. And I think that’s wonderful for business owners. And even if you just want to check like, Hey, I just wrote a blog post, I put it out. Are people reading it? I think that things like that are track is traffic increasing? And I think that’s a really great, really great tool. Absolutely.

Laura Kåmark
What are your thoughts on Google Search Console?

Meg Clarke
Well, is overwhelming, because there’s 1000 things that you can get out of it. But it is really important. Google Search Console is like the interface that Google has to speak with web owners. So as an example, if your site got penalized for something, or if you got a spam attack, you can get a mat, you can get penalties. And you’re the only way that you’ll learn this is via the Google Search Console. But I like the console, because that’s where we can connect and we can force Google to read our sitemap we can ask Google to crawl pages. So from an SEO perspective, I find it to be very helpful from a business over owners perspective. I don’t know it’s it’s a lot right there. It’s a lot there. I can’t tell you the last time I looked at Google Search Console for my own website, but I do look at it

Laura Kåmark
for my clients websites. I know I get because I set up a lot of analytics and Search Console for clients. I get a lot of reports it’ll send me and it’ll send me these errors. And I’m like, I don’t even know what this is a software for. I had one that came through this morning. I’m like a soft, warm does that even mean?

Meg Clarke
No? Like, is there a medium? Wait for a bar? isn’t a word of war just a word for but it is it is helpful for those things. But I don’t know, for most business owners, I don’t think they need to get too too involved with it too into the weeds

Laura Kåmark
with a good solid advice right there.

Meg Clarke
Keep it simple. Yes, absolutely.

Laura Kåmark
So I would love to know, what would you say some of the biggest challenges that you’ve overcome since you first started your business? Oh,

Meg Clarke
gosh, well, I gosh, I can talk about these, like, from a business perspective, from a family perspective. Like, it’s like, you know, I am Meg, I’m a business owner and a mom and, you know, a wife, there’s like, we, there’s so much going on. So I think some of the biggest challenges is like setting up personal and business boundaries, and, you know, feeling the confidence or saying, wait a minute, this is my like, this is my space, this is my workday, I’m working on clients, you know, protect getting boundaries for the people who are in my life, to respect that I that I’m running the business and that it’s May at the beginning, it may not be much, but it’s going to be and just setting those boundaries, I think was really important. Because, you know, I was always like, Oh, something else came up, it’s more important. And so like, Oh, let me make you a sandwich. Let me do this, oh, let me drive you here. And I didn’t respect my business enough to give it this space, it needed to thrive. So I think at first I need it. It was self respect and self and belief in myself belief in the business. And knowing that if I wasn’t there to make them a peanut butter sandwich, they were not going to starve somebody else would make a peanut butter sandwich. Or they would, they would do it themselves. Right? They figured out, like open popcorn. And so I think that was the that was the first challenge was that, taking it seriously and giving myself that credit. And then as we’ve grown, you know, bringing people on and scaling I have, there’s three of us who work who I work with. And then I have a number of contractors that we lean on heavily. But you know, hiring people and I brought on a partner, three ish years ago, because, you know, there was so many things that I was doing everything, okay? And I but I was not being a good CFO, I was not being a good marketing manager, I wasn’t doing good for my own CFC, SEO. So there was like all these things that I wasn’t doing great at. And so being it’s scary to hire people, it’s scary to hire full time people, it’s scary to bring on a partner. But just kind of doing it and gritting your teeth and closing your eyes and taking the jump. That was kind of the second thing. The second big scary thing that I had to come over, just but it again, it’s like having belief in yourself, knowing that you can do it, or, you know, having the belief that it’s gonna all be okay, one way or the other.

Laura Kåmark
That’s scary. It is scary. But I love that, because it is so important in the self belief. Because if we don’t have that, it’s going to make business that much harder. Because we can create, we are so talented. And in the online space, we’re able to create these just amazing businesses and have this incredible ripple effect in helping others. And so believing in ourselves enough to know that the work we do matters, and affects other people and helps them make their dreams reality is just really incredible. So

Meg Clarke
this and protecting that space to give myself a chance to do it. So I didn’t get defeated before I started.

Laura Kåmark
It takes time. I don’t feel like people talk about it that much. Like it is not this like smooth sailing. Oh, messy. And there’s ugly crying that happens

Meg Clarke
all the time, all the time. But like because our online persona is not actual reality. And that’s hard to learn. Because it’s hard. It’s hard to believe that because you think oh, well look at them, like I’m comparing myself to them. And we’re all in this like messy middle place. Because there’s there’s no real destination, there’s no real like, you Okay, how many times do you say, Well, when I just make this much money, or when I when I just get here or when I get to when I have this type of client or hack. If I lose 10 pounds, I’ll be everything is going to be better, and that you actually never get there. And so I understand learning that and understanding that there is no destination and, gosh, whatever we get to do now whatever we get to learn in this particular moment is really cool and it’s really important. So I think that is it. it. I mean, I feel like there’s so much inner work when it comes to running a business that it’s, you know, 10% working with your family 10% getting new clients and skills and 80% in our work to get yourself the ability to do it.

Laura Kåmark
100% I agree. So, I have been struggling with like, getting over my perfectionism. Then the last couple years, I’ve worked been working with a mindset coach, Alicia St. Germain, she was on one of the earlier episodes. And that’s been huge for me, because for a long time, I didn’t want to get visible because I was too upset and concerned about like, what are people? What if it’s not perfect? What are people gonna think? What are people gonna say, and like getting over that hurdle of it’s okay, to have typos to miss links to just show up as me and not and not stress over it being perfect, because you can’t relate to that.

Meg Clarke
Right? And, and we are not our and this is also really hard that I work at I work at all the time, I remind myself all the time is that we are not our accomplishments and our failures. Like, we get to do this. And it’s awesome. But I am not defined by rankings on page one is just like you’re not defined by how beautiful or now how beautiful or successful a website is. It’s like, our Bing is separate from that. But it’s hard. It’s hard to it’s hard to make that separation. So yeah, again, it’s like 80% of internal work to run to start a business. It’s hard. Get a good coach and therapist, and then you’re gonna

Laura Kåmark
be okay. solid advice right there.

Meg Clarke
We know what to do without my person. Oh, my

Laura Kåmark
goodness. Yeah. Yeah, I would love to know, you talked about scaling. So what are some of the things you’re doing now? In scaling your business?

Meg Clarke
Great question, Laura. And gosh, so, um, so we have a one, we typically work one on one with clients, we get highly collaborative, we’re in the weeds, we talk to our clients a lot, we really want to understand who they are, and how they want to show up online. And SEO is like exercise, you can’t just work out once and expect to be in shape you it’s an ongoing process, it’s very smooth, it’s very similar to exercise, if you want to get in shape, you got to exercise and eat healthy. And so our current, our main work is long term, highly collaborative in the weeds of our clients. And that can scale as we add more people to the team. And I don’t love delegating, and I don’t love managing a team. And so currently are we have, we’re kind of at max ish capacity, we’re close to the top. And so we are looking and we’re, we were we have a product that I’m hoping to scale that makes SEO that makes analytics easier to understand. And it’s for people who are not quite ready to have to talk to me all the time and not, they’re not quite ready to have me in the weeds of their business. This is what this product is for. And so, you know, we my partner, and I had to make a conscious decision of like, do we want to add more people and do more of this highly in depth work? Or do we want to add another service. And so we’re keeping our in depth of work and hoping to add this, this product that gives sheds the light on sheds the light of SEO to people so they can understand it a little bit more.

Laura Kåmark
I love that so much. Because that’s like, the piece that I feel a lot of my clients are at, quite ready for the one on one long term commitment, they’re ready to just sort of dip their toes in and have a little more understanding.

Meg Clarke
And you know, with it, it’s an easy to read report that has just not it doesn’t go into all the all the 200 reports. It’s kind of high level this is hey, this is what people are reading. This is this is how many new people you’re getting. This is how many people you’re getting from social. So it’s kind of high level. And but it comes with a lot of support, like office hours and training so that you can start to learn it because like I said, SEO is similar to exercise where your house coach and with our in depth clients. We tell you how you need to do this and cut this and do that and I’ll see you at the gym and I’m here to motivate you, but we’re not the experts in what you do. And so like we have clients, we have a client who’s a neurosurgeon, and it’s like I can tell him what he should write to appeal to his audience because it’s data backed information, but he needs To do the work, he’s the one that’s going to create the video or create the podcast or write the article. Because we’re not neurosurgeons, we can just tell you what people are looking for. And so all of that to say, business owner needs to kind of do the work. And we’re here to support you and cheer you on and encourage you and give you lots of cool data. But you need to do it. And so I feel like having a product that makes it easy for people to understand you don’t want that high touch, who aren’t quite ready for that high touch. This is a really helpful tool, because in the end, it’s you guys need to create the content that you’re excellent at. Anyway.

Laura Kåmark
I love that sounds like an amazing offer. And I can’t wait to check it out.

Meg Clarke
Thank you. Yes. It’s called the Insights report. And it’s just just the information you need to make the next best business decision.

Laura Kåmark
I love that. I yeah, I hadn’t I haven’t done much with SEO for my podcast. So I’m glad you just mentioned that, because that kind of triggers my little, my wheels. Spinning that I probably need to be, would you say? What are some of the things as someone with a podcast? Who I put the show notes I do I transcribe all the episodes and put the show notes in it’s in a drop down or a collapsible? What other important things would you say for someone with a podcast for SEO Help

Meg Clarke
I, I have all kinds of all kinds of tips. Because you know, most a lot of our clients don’t blog regularly, but they do do podcasts or they do videos on YouTube. And the process is the same. Our number one recommendation is to have an is a unique page on your site for each episode. So that you don’t have the page that’s like all of your podcast, I mean, you can for a landing page, but we want you to be able to click on an episode and then get the notes. And so we do recommend having having a template that doesn’t feel too template ish. So in one thing that we see with clients a lot is they’ll have a section that’s like what you’ll learn. And then they’ll have some bullets underneath it from the episode. And we recommend that you maybe you make that headline instead of what you learn, like what you learn about SEO as an example, make it a little bit more specific to that episode, because we want each page to be found by Google. And if you have, you know, five seasons a podcast and every page has what you’ll learn on it. It’s not unique enough, Google doesn’t know where to put that in their category of memory. So to make good show notes to make them a little bit customizable. And then to make the titles. If you just read the title, you would know what the show is about. Oftentimes we get clients with podcasts, and they’re that title, the page is like episode 500. Laura chats with Meg, and you’re like, what does that even mean? Who’s mag and who’s Laura? It’s like, it’s episodes are great. Episode numbers are fine, but put a conversation about SEO, web, SEO and web design, just make the if the user just read the title of the page, they understand what the conversation is about.

Laura Kåmark
I love that. And I think that’s like one of the things I’ve been struggling with the most is coming up with the title for each episode. And I’m like what’s like the one nugget I can pull from here that will make it really clear what we talk about. And then I also make sure to include the name of who I’m speaking with. And then if they have a separate business name, I put that in there too.

Meg Clarke
Perfect. Yes. Because you want to get out for the person you’re interviewing, as well as the topics that you talk about. Oh, I love

Laura Kåmark
that. Those are great tips. Thank you for that. You’re welcome.

Meg Clarke
You’re welcome. Absolutely.

Laura Kåmark
What would you say that you’re doing that’s sort of making waves in the industry, and things that you’re doing different than some of the others or you’re making a stand?

Meg Clarke
Well, that’s a really that’s a really great question. So SEO comes in lots of forms. Most of the time, when you hear the word SEO, you get like a negative kind of connotation like cheesy used car salesman. Everybody has a story of they’ve hired an SEO they paid lots of money, and they have no idea what they did. And so are the way I want to make waves in the SEO industry is to make it easy to understand and make it simple and very approachable. And to not be that sleazy person who’s like, just give me money, and I will make it better. Because there’s to me, this is a long answer. There’s two, yeah, there’s kind of two parts to SEO. There’s the technical back and it’s like, Can Google effectively crawl the site? Can it go Can Google get in and do its thing? And I think that’s responsible anywhere from 10 to 12% of your total traffic. But the heart of SEO is showing up authentically as who you are showing people your value through your content through your words through your consistency, and really being the person that you that you say you are. And that’s where that authentic person is really what are the authentic business is really what we are passionate about is helping people understand the value that you bring, helping them helping you answer the questions that you may not even know your people are asking, but giving you that data to say, hey, there’s a space for you show up and shine, and you’re going to attract your people. And maybe you don’t get a million hits a month, but the 1000 hits a month that you get are people that really resonate with you. And that’s the value of SEO. And that’s the type of SEO that we like to do, versus finding technical loopholes that may work for six months. And then six months later, they don’t work anymore.

Laura Kåmark
That’s so good. I love that explanation, really breaking that down into those different pieces of it. So thank you for sharing that.

Meg Clarke
Sure. I hope that wasn’t too much.

Laura Kåmark
I thought that was great. I find I find when I talk to clients about SEO, they’re just not necessarily really understanding, like what it is. And they’re like, I want to be number one on Google and I need to change, you know, I want to switch my website and not lose my rankings. And I know I had a client I said to that’s not possible for us to make changes, and it not to change your rankings. And that’s just that is what it is. And then I also have found that sometimes clients are like, Well, why am I showing? How do I explain this? I have a story about my husband will do that one. My husband has his business and I built his website. And he has a like affiliate link for a cover he does Canvas, boat, canvas and upholstery. Wow. So he has an affiliate link for another business who he can take order from and they’ll have the pre made more, the ones that don’t need to be a custom covers. And so he’s like, oh, we need to add this to the website. Now that I’m affiliate. I’m like, okay, he’s like, okay, so you added it. Now I’m gonna show up number one in Google. When someone searches for that company. It’s gonna show my website. I’m like, Honey, that’s not really how it works.

Meg Clarke
Yeah. Think. I wish there was I wish there was but no, that doesn’t. That doesn’t, it doesn’t work like that. That’s when you have to really build that expertise, the authority and the trust so that you can show up on page went

Laura Kåmark
for that. So I told him as I need words, to go with it, and we need to be creating blog posts, and like when he has his jobs, we need to create, you know, highlight those jobs in either blog posts or projects. And just really explain like, what happened on the project, what the problem was, what your solution was, and just really create that conversation. Talk

Meg Clarke
about it. Show your value. Show your value, and you have a lot of it. So yeah, show your value. And then Google will and then people will respond. And when people respond, Google will respond. And the flywheel starts.

Laura Kåmark
Yep. Love that. Now. Well, maybe we are getting close to our time today. I do have one final question that I asked everyone who comes on the show. What is a one piece of advice you would give to someone when they’re first starting out in their business that would help them be bolder, be louder, and make waves

Meg Clarke
show up as you because you are enough. And your people are out there. So don’t pretend to be anybody else. Don’t look at all these other people and get intimidated. Just show up as you consistently and you’ve won.

Laura Kåmark
I love that so much and think that’s a great place for us to wrap things up. Meg, can you tell everyone where they can come hang out with you find you online and spend more time with you?

Meg Clarke
Absolutely. I want more friends. Come on over. My website is clappingdogmedia.com. And I hang out on Instagram @clappingdogmedia. I go in spurts with Instagram to be honest, but there’s lots of good stuff there.

Laura Kåmark
Wonderful. I will link all that up in the show notes. Meg, thank you so much for coming on the show today. This was such a fun conversation.

Meg Clarke
Thank you so much, Laura. And thanks everybody for listening.

Laura Kåmark
Thanks so much for listening to this week’s episode. Be sure to check out the show notes at Laurakamark.com/podcast. And if you’re ready to grow and scale your business, and your current website is outdated and doesn’t reflect the magic you bring and the results you get for your clients. Go to Laurakamark.com To find out how I can help bring your vision to life. Thanks so much for listening. See you next week. By now!