Essential Tips for SEO Experts: Networking, Expertise, and Entrepreneurial Insights

Hey, hi everyone. Welcome to your show, E-Coffee with Experts. This is your host, Ranmay here. Today we have Joy Hawkins, the owner and President at Sterling Sky Inc, with us. Hey, Joy, how’s it going?

Good. How are you?

All good. I can’t really complain. Joy, before we move any forward, why don’t you talk us through your journey? Let’s get to know the human behind the mic. Also more about Sterling Sky, your agency. What do you guys do? What do you guys specialize in? We take it off from there.

I’ve been doing SEO for almost 20 years. I started back in 2006. It was an accident getting into the industry. I went to school for marketing, but I had no idea what I wanted to do with it, and then just got a job selling Google Ads. Also, I also didn’t really know anything about Google Ads at the time. From there, started teaching myself SEO, which launched my career. Then I started working at two different agencies before eventually deciding to start my own.

What inspired you to do that, that entrepreneurial gig, where does it come from?

Yeah, it’s very much not a planned thing. Actually, when I left the first agency, it was an integrity thing. I realized they were not very good at what they did and what they sold. I was in sales, so I was selling all this stuff and realized really quickly that, wow, they’re not delivering on their promises. My clients were annoyed and frustrated. It’s not a company that you’d want to stay working at. I thought at that point, I was in my 20s, and I was like, There’s no way I would ever want to start my own company. This is terrifying. My sister, who worked at the time, went to a different company, and I worked there for eight years. It was really more of like when I left that company, it was just they had very different goals than I did and what they wanted out of their clientele, what they wanted me to do. They kept trying to push me back into sales because that made them the most money, and I kept telling them, I don’t want to do sales. I really like learning SEO. I really like doing SEO. I like figuring out Google’s algorithm, and that just It was just such a misalignment in direction there.

Yeah, I don’t know, I just decided to try working for myself. Had no idea if it would work or not. Then seven years later, here we are.

Lovely. You’re talking about algorithms. You have been in the industry for a couple of decades now. You have been a partner in the local SEO industry, right? You have seen enough summer, summer, summer, winter, and of Google algorithm updates hitting us. What, as for you, has been the biggest shift when we talk about all these Google updates needs?

The one that was the most substantial for the sector of SEO that I work in, which is local SEO. We deal with small businesses where their customers are local to them. So think dentists, lawyers, plumbers, that thing. I’d say the biggest impact that we saw in that sector of SEO was last winter. There was a major algorithm update that made it so that businesses rank differently based on their opening hours. So essentially, when businesses are open, they rank and when they’re closed, they rank worse. This was huge because we have a lot of clients that maybe their customers are searching for them after hour. I think about when I’m searching for a dentist, isn’t always when the dentist is open. That’s got substantial impact because now if I’m at home at 8:00 PM at night and I’m searching for a dentist near me, I’m actually not getting the majority of the dentists around me because they’re all closed. And so Google is actually prioritizing the ones that are still open. So it has pretty significant impacts on small businesses that I think a lot of people still are not aware of.

Right. Absolutely. And then starting your own agency, understand the transition takes time. But the initial days are really difficult. Getting the first client, setting up the finances, the HR, getting the right team under the roof. What were those initial challenges, Joy, and how did you overcome them?

Yeah, one of the biggest challenges was finding a good lawyer. There are so many, and oh, man, I’ve switched many times. That’s the one that stick me well to find someone good. I think once you found a good lawyer, you’ll know, right? You won’t want to ever deal with anybody else. But that was probably the most challenging thing as a business owner. I found a good accountant pretty early on, and that was a lifesaver because accounting was one of the things that terrified me about starting a business. I’m like, I don’t know anything about taxes and implications for things. He’s almost like my personal CFO. He answers all my questions, and I love my accountant. I think that having a good lawyer and accountant is a necessary thing, but it’s not always easy to find.

Yeah. Then you have a quite a sizable team at Sterling Sky, right? You must have been involved in the hiring processes, setting up teams, and building the processes for your agencies. While building a team, what qualities would you look for, let’s say you’re hiring a resource for your agency?

Yeah, a couple of things. Actually, one of the early decisions that I made is I actually put somebody else in charge of hiring because that is not my strong suit. I’m very analytical. I’m good with figuring out Google’s algorithm, and I’m not great all the time with people. So managing people is not necessarily my forte. I think when we hire people, we’re learning that some people are really good at certain jobs. If you can figure out what somebody is good at and put them in that thing, then they will Excel. But if you try to fit somebody into a job that’s really not meant for them, I’ll give you an example. We all work from home. I’ve hired a few people that are amazing individuals but really cannot work from home. They are just not set up in a way work from home is a viable option for them because it involves a lot of things. You have to be able to not have tons of distractions around you. You have to be able to really be able to focus. There’s a lot of self-motivation involved because the accountability is not the same as when you’re in an office environment.

We’ve been learning slowly how to weed out people that are not a good fit in that aspect. But if I had to pick one thing, I’d say, ultimately, you want to find people that are really passionate about what they do. That’s one of the first things we look for is, do you actually care about what Local SEO? Is this something that excites you? And is it something you want to do long term, too? Because I’m not looking to have a revolving door. Those are the big things that we want to know right out the get-go when we hire people.

Absolutely. Passion is very critical in terms of whatever you want to do in life, not only job, but otherwise as well. Given your extensive experience in local SEO, you have quite a name in the space. So what do you believe is the most critical aspect of local SEO and that small businesses often overlook?

Yeah, I would say these days, it’s as simple as just not doing the fundamentals of SEO. A lot of business owners really neglect their website, and they don’t look at it from a strategic perspective. A lot of them just, for example, the ones that do actually look at their website, they’ll just publish constantly. They’ll be like, Oh, I have to publish a new article every week, which is not always a good idea. We’ve seen lots of cases. We’ve had clients where they’ll send us article after and they’re like, We want you to publish and optimize this, and they do nothing. These articles don’t rank, they don’t get traffic, and they’re not useful to users. I think having a really strategic approach to content where it’s not a volume thing, I think people look at that as a KPI, and it really shouldn’t be a KPI, going back and spending more time on the small number of pages that you have that actually lead to conversions will go a lot further. I feel like that’s one of the things that we see a lot of small businesses miss.

What is your take on the Google algorithm leak that happened recently? How do you think the local search strategy is going to get impacted with that?

It confirmed a lot of things for me, which was great. Things that people thought were controversial, one of them being just click through rate impact ranking, and If people click on your listing or your business on Google, does that help you? We’ve known for a long time, yes, definitely does. There’s systems that they have to detect fake clicks and things like that, but they’re not perfect. We’ve known that for quite a while. We’ve done a lot of testing on it, but it was really fascinating to see that the documents confirmed some of those things. I think it put some of the skepticism to rest.

Yeah. It does suggest a potential shift towards conversational search. How do you think it is going to impact the local search and voice search optimization?

So far, a lot of the updates Google has been doing, I think, are really good for small businesses. What we’ve been seeing is that if you have an established brand, and let’s say you’re a local lawn care company It’s funny. As long as you have customers and people are searching for your name, your business name, things like that, you should be relatively safe from some of these updates that you hear people saying or killing off SEO. The sites that they’re killing are sites that were made just to rank on Google and gain affiliate traffic There’s a lot of them out there, like thousands upon thousands of websites that just got completely crushed in the last year. They aren’t real businesses. They’re literally pages that are sending traffic to other pages. Google’s Why would I even bother ranking these? Small businesses don’t do that. They’re not sending anybody elsewhere. They are fulfilling the customer. If I’m looking for a lawn care company, a lawn care company is giving me exactly what I’m searching for. I think small businesses have been protected in that way. A lot of people were saying that local SEO was not really impacted in a negative way in last year at all, whereas a lot of other parts of SEO were.

I’d say it’s a good time to be in local SEO.

Then with the increased emphasis on E8, how do you feel then local businesses build stronger authority signals?

I’d say the big one is social media. I think getting a following on the platforms that your customers are using is super important. If you’re a restaurant, you should really be on Instagram. You should have a lot of followers there. I’ve seen some lawyers now getting into YouTube, and their YouTube videos are not only driving traffic to them, but they’re increasing their branded searches, increasing their brand’s presence. I think all that stuff is something that is challenging for the average small business to get their head around. But don’t put all your eggs in SEO. You have to be doing other forms of advertising as well to drive up that brand awareness because that helps your SEO perform better. We find clients of ours that do the best and have the best success, or often ones that are doing ads on Google or doing massive advertising outside of Google. In the offline world, they are such easier clients to get ranked. It’s so much easier than a brand new business that has no established presence on Google. Nothing to say for their name. It’s a lot longer of a journey for people like that.

Talking about AI, how do you see AI impacting local search and SEO as a whole, rather?

We’ve been using it as tools, mainly. I say AI is your best friend as a tool. I’ve used it. An example of where I’ve used it in content is, Oh, I need to naturally work in this keyword into this sentence. How do I do that? Chatgpt can do that better than I can, faster than I can. Things like that. We are definitely not using AI for full-blown content. Hey, write me an article on this topic, yada, yada. I would say that’s dangerous territory, so we’re not doing that at all. But I am definitely using it for lots of tools, especially to help craft things like titles, stuff like that. It’s very good at things like that.

Absolutely. You have been a driving force in the local SEO community. For our listeners, what would you want to say? How important is networking and building relationships in the SEO industry? You have been a speaker at quite a few prestigious conferences, so You know a thing or two about networking for sure.

Yeah, networking has been very important to my career for sure. I wouldn’t know or I’ve met all the people that helped launch my career without meeting them in person. I really do feel like the pandemic killed some of that. I’ve seen that some people are almost reluctant to do conferences anymore. I’m like, Guys, we need to get out there. The virtual world is great, but it doesn’t replace reality. I think it’s really important to make real-world life connections. The only way to do really meaningfully is in person.

Lovely. Finally, Joy, you have worked in agencies. Now you are running a successful agency yourself, right? You have been on both sides, I would say. For our listeners, for the young listeners, especially, any piece of advice that you’d want to give to them, the ones who are trying to make a mark in the digital marketing SEO space, or let’s say you’re not trying to venture out on something on their own, on their entrepreneurial journey?

Yeah. I mean, before you can really start a business, I think you have to be an expert in something, right? I think it’s harder when you’re just starting out and you’re like, I don’t know anything about SEO, but I want to start a company. That’s, in my opinion, a really bad idea. Who would hire you? Why would anybody hire you? I was 11 years in when I started my company, and I think it really should be more like that where you are an expert first. But I also don’t think owning a company is for everybody. Take that with a great assault. As far as learning goes and getting further in the industry, I think becoming an expert is the thing everybody wants to know how to do. For me, it was helping out in forums. I started answering threads in forums. Forums are very much still a thing, which is crazy. We have the local search forum that’s owned by Sterling Sky, and I’m also a moderator on Google’s forum for the Google business profile community. I learn a lot by helping people, right? Seeing their problems, seeing the challenges that come up, that actually makes me better at my job.

I would say if you’re really looking to learn, that’s one good way to do it. I feel like videos, obviously, there’s million YouTube channels as well that have really awesome stuff to learn there.

Lovely. Great joy. This has been a lovely conversation. But before I let you go, a quick rapid fire, if you’re game for it. Sure. All right. Your last Google search.

Oh, my. Sorry, I’m trying to think. I literally just got on here. I think I was looking up this protein shake that my friend just gave me.

All right. What did you do with your first paycheck, Joy? First paycheck of your life?

I probably spent it at KFC because I was in high school. Kentucky Fried Chicken. That’s fast food.

All right. When do we find you on Friday evenings after office or after work?

Oh, that one’s easy. I’m usually playing board games with my board game group.

All right. Great. I will not really any further. You have been a sport joy. Thank you so much, once again, for taking our time to do this with us. Really appreciate it. Cheers.

Thank you.