Podcast appearances and mentions of rebecca gill

This morning, the UK regulator Ofcom released its Children's Safety Codes. These are the regulations that platforms will have to follow to protect young users and abide by the Online Safety Act. Platforms will have three months to carry out a risk assessment and bring the codes into effect. Ofcom can start enforcing the regulations from July. The most significant aspect is the requirement for strong age verification. Anita Rani hears from Baroness Beeban Kidron, founder of Five Rights, an international NGO working with and for children for a rights-respecting digital world, and Ian Russell, Chair of the Molly Rose Foundation. Ian's daughter Molly took her life at the age of 14 after being exposed to harmful content online.A new report says 91% of organisations in the UK's women and girls sector have seen a rise in demand for their services, but only 52% expect to be able to meet it. The report - from Rosa, the UK fund for women and girls - also found that 1.8% of charitable giving goes to women's charities although they represent at least 3.5% of charities. Anita is joined by Rebecca Gill, Executive Director at Rosa UK fund for women and girls and Cecily Mwaniki, Director of Utulivu, who support Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic and refugee women, girls, and their families in Reading.According to campaigners, people who have committed murder, manslaughter or stalking offences should be forced to live in restricted areas after being released from prison on licence. Anita is joined by BBC journalist Gemma Dunstan and law-change campaigners Rhianon Bragg and Dianna Parkes. 29-year-old Pippa White shares her daily life as a vicar to millions of viewers on TikTok. She joins Anita to discuss being a young woman in the Church, making religion fun and connecting with a younger audience.Presenter: Anita Rani Producer: Rebecca Myatt

As a petition threatens the nascent Starmer Government (it totally doesn't), Jen takes a look at the plan to "Get Britain Working". Hannah's talking about the aftermath of the Conor McGregor rape trial in Ireland. If you thought that leaving Earth was a way to avoid sexism, we've some bad news for you, but there's good news in the form of some Rosa grants for women and girls' groups. And in Jenny Off The Blocks, we're talking cricket, tennis and some confusion over where East London is.  Hannah's interview with the Spycops women is here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/sim-ep-744-chops-255-groomed-gaslighted-ghosted/id1080808404?i=1000568597088 Hannah's interview with Liz Carr about the assisted dying bill is here: https://podfollow.com/1080808404/episode/563ef5c2e2f8dc772733939451b4f4a66670e4ab/view Mickey's interview with Rosa's Rebecca Gill is here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/sim-ep-849-pod-253-pod-save-the-women-and-girls-sector/id1080808404?i=1000612424467 Find out more about how to apply for a Rosa grant here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Helping people who want to help others is Lyn Tomlinson's (Head of Impact and Philanthropy at Cazenove Capital) main focus – whether through how they allocate their investments or via their charitable giving. Our podcast series Practical Philanthropy shines a spotlight on some inspirational people giving their time, skills or money to help others and what we can learn from them. In this episode, Lyn speaks with Rebecca Gill from ROSA – a charity working to deliver equitable and participatory grant-making for specialist organisations led by and for women and girls.

Now then, it'll probably come as no surprise to you that we reckon 51% of the population deserve to get a bit more than the 1.8% of the grants awarded to charities in the women and girls sector. That the number is so low is new info uncovered by Rosa and its fresh research into the state of funding for women's and girls' organisations across the UK, so Mick got on the Zoom with Rosa's CEO Rebecca Gill to find out more and organise a sky scream flashmob. Hannah's been chatting with journalist and fellow podcaster Coco Khan, who's just hit the podwaves as co-host of the new Pod Save the UK alongside comedian Nish Kumar. They're talking politics and Politics and whether we're always bound to catch a cold when America sneezes. Jen's feeling a bit sheepish at the top of Jenny Off the Blocks, but makes up for it with some good news of double headers. And just how creepy can one, potentially Vaseline-smeared man be? Rated or Dated takes a look at 1993's Indecent Proposal, and really? You couldn't pay Mick and Hannah enough. Jen's got her 50p ready though. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/standardissuespodcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Success doesn't come easy but we believe that is a good thing. What you learn on the path to success is an integral part of embracing your true potential.In episode 3 of Finding Career Zen, host Pete Newsome invites special guest Rebecca Gill to share her story of how she became a successful owner of a digital marketing agency and an alpaca farm. Rebecca didn't have an easy childhood but that did not stop her from working hard and pursuing her career goals. At just eleven years old, she began working at a local store and learned quickly how to be self-sufficient.Fast-forwarding to after college, she found a passion for software and search engine optimization. Once she was burnt out from corporate life, she decided to pave her own way and create her own digital marketing business. Since she made a name for herself in her previous role for her ability to get pages to rank on google, clients flooded in and she was making over six figures in no time. Which by the way was in a middle of a recession. How did these experiences shape her future and what advice does she have for people in similar situations? Tune in to listen to this inspiring story of overcoming adversity and reaching career zen.Career Advice:Embrace being uncomfortable. Most of the time, being uncomfortable is necessary to grow and evolve. Achievements usually require encountering a few failures and frustrations along the way. Take ownership and accountability for your own success. How well you can take the things you learn and then apply them to situations is very powerful. You cannot wait around for someone to hand you success. Confidence is key. You have to be confident in yourself and know what you don't want to do, don't like to do, and aren't willing to do. Find balance. Money gives you options but your happiness is just as important. You may have to sacrifice things while you're young to set yourself up for the things you want later in life. Find your balance and what makes you happy.Be introspective. Don't discount your future for today. Success happens for everyone at different times and in different ways. Know where you want to end up and then work your way to get there.Find something you want to wake up and do. Whether there is money involved or not, find something you are willing to immerse yourself in and sacrifice time doing. You spend a huge portion of your life working, make sure it's something you are passionate about.  Additional ResourcesCheck out the alpacas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2KzZSyC_bIVisit Cotton Creek Farms: https://www.cottoncreekfarms.com/Contact & visit Rebecca's website: https://www.rebeccagill.com/GoDaddy Article: https://www.godaddy.com/garage/author/rgill/Interested in working with Rebecca?: https://www.web-savvy-marketing.com/seo-consulting/

Too many people decided they want to make an online course, spend 6 months making it, and launch to crickets. Rebecca Gill knew better, and her advice from Episode 2 can save you a ton of time (and heartache).Listen to the entire episode at https://howibuilt.it/002Be sure to subscribe at https://howibuilt.it/subscribeThis clip is brought to you by WP Wallet ★ Support this podcast ★

Too many people decided they want to make an online course, spend 6 months making it, and launch to crickets. Rebecca Gill knew better, and her advice from Episode 2 can save you a ton of time (and heartache). Listen to the entire episode at https://howibuilt.it/002 Be sure to subscribe at https://howibuilt.it/subscribe This clip is brought to you by WP Wallet

Too many people decided they want to make an online course, spend 6 months making it, and launch to crickets. Rebecca Gill knew better, and her advice from Episode 2 can save you a ton of time (and heartache).Listen to the entire episode at https://howibuilt.it/002Be sure to subscribe at https://howibuilt.it/subscribeThis clip is brought to you by WP Wallet Get your FREE copy of my Automations Library ★ Support this podcast ★

Too many people decided they want to make an online course, spend 6 months making it, and launch to crickets. Rebecca Gill knew better, and her advice from Episode 2 can save you a ton of time (and heartache). Listen to the entire episode at https://howibuilt.it/002 Be sure to subscribe at https://howibuilt.it/subscribe This clip is brought to you by WP Wallet

Rebecca Gill is the co-owner of Cotton Creek Farms. These adorable alpacas eagerly welcome visitors to their Northern Michigan farm

For over ten years I've led Web Savvy Marketing as the Founder and President. In this role, I provided full-service SEO consulting and one-on-one SEO coaching, created online SEO courses, hosted an SEO podcast, and teach onsite SEO Bootcamps. As an agency, we've also performed a whole lot of website design, development, and WordPress theme sales. In total, we've served over 6,000 clients in 185 countries over the last ten years. I've personally worked with all types of clients from entrepreneurs and small business owners to enterprise-level organizations and Fortune 500 companies. I've also partnered with other WordPress developers and agencies.https://www.rebeccagill.com/https://digitalmarketingkitchen.com/

Are you sure the SEO strategies that you’re using are up-to-date and actually working?   Rebecca Gill, Founder of Web Savvy Marketing, does some myth-busting with me in today’s episode as we talk about growing your website through the use of SEO. This episode is highly insightful. We cover everything from what happens if you use traditional SEO methods, what techniques are now considered old-school,  and, more importantly, why backlinks are not as important as you think.   Step out of SEO’s danger zone by tuning in now! Episode Highlights: The dangers of using old-school SEO techniques [03:13] SEO myths you need to be aware of [08:44] Are backlinks really all-important? [12:24] Internal links: the superheroes of SEO [17:11] The best tools for internal linking [17:58] What happens in an SEO audit [19:40] Why you also need to look at SEO when buying a website [23:28] How often should you do an audit? [25:05] Does keyword density still matter? [29:14] Questions to ask your applicant about SEO [33:12] Resource Links: Buying Online Businesses Website (https://buyingonlinebusinesses.com)  Download the Due Diligence Framework (https://buyingonlinebusinesses.com/freeresources/) Visit Niche Website Builders and get EXCLUSIVE OFFERS as a BOB listener (https://www.nichewebsite.builders/bob/) Check out Semrush (https://www.semrush.com/) Visit the Screaming Frog Website (https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/) Try the KWFinder tool (https://kwfinder.com/) Visit Rebecca Gill’s Website (https://www.rebeccagill.com/) Listen to the SEO Bits Podcast (https://www.seobits.fm/) About Our Guest: With over 11 years of experience, Rebecca Gill knows the ins and outs of digital marketing, emphasizing SEO and WordPress development. She founded Web Savvy Marketing in July 2009 and has since continued to make great strides in the digital marketing industry. In 2019, she co-founded Digital Marketing Kitchen which is designed to help website owners with SEO, content creation, and email marketing.   If you liked this episode, please don’t forget to subscribe, tune in, and share this podcast. You may also leave us a review anywhere you listen to and share your feedback! Connect with Jaryd Krause of Buying Online Businesses: Follow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JarydKrause1 Subscribe on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ3g6G2USlnq7EgnUsajTBw See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a story about how a sense of belonging heals the wounds of loneliness for women. Loneliness is a human condition that has existed forever. But, if you’re an analyst of social, challenge, and change like me, you may have discovered that feelings of loneliness are increasing rapidly, a result of many factors that are different for everyone. I struggled with a serious bout of loneliness that lasted about two years, my first two years of self-employment, and feeling so lonely made it extremely difficult for me to focus on anything else. Loneliness made me behave in ways that didn’t align with my true self; I stopped seeing friends, I stopped taking care of myself, I stopped doing things that bring me joy, and I became really snappy and defensive when people tried to come into my life. I was really hurting so in many ways, I think my loneliness led to depression and for two years I didn’t know how to get out of it. In this episode, I’m talking with Rebecca Gill, an extremely warm and compassionate woman with a portfolio career. She runs a business called Shop Thing, which is an incredibly smart retail service that sends personalized sale items to your phone via video, check it out at shopthing.com, and Rebecca also runs Her People, which is like a new-age community centre for women who are struggling with loneliness, like I was. Let’s talk to Rebecca.

In this episode of The Scripted podcast we sit down with founder and CEO of Web Savvy Marketing Rebecca Gill to talk about the important relationship between marketing agencies and content writers. We discuss how she identifies a great copy writer, what skills are important for an agency when hiring a copywriter, and the SEO and Content Marketing landscape in these uncertain times. We also start a new segment called "Solve My Problem" where we present an SEO or Content Marketing problem for our guest to solve. It was a great discussion and we thank Rebecca for joining us and sharing her expertise.

* Le lien vers le site de la Croix Rouge pour les mesures d'aide du Québec pour les entrepreneurs indépendants. * https://inscription.croixrouge.ca/#/0ABFBD4F-AF68-EA11-A812-000D3AF422F3 * Lien vers l'article pour le forfait de 1500 euros offert en France * https://www.lci.fr/politique/forfait-de-1-500-euros-pour-les-petites-entreprises-et-les-independants-au-chiffre-d-affaires-impacte-par-le-coronavirus-etes-vous-concerne-2148248.html * Coordonnées pour Dominique Vanasse * Son site web : https://wizzdomservicesvirtuels.ca/ * Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/wizzdomservicesvirtuels/ * LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/company/37827169 * Webinaire de Cory Miller et Rebecca Gill * https://digitalmarketingkitchen.com/cookbook/office-hours-march-27th/Pour de l'information concernant l'utilisation de vos données personnelles - https://omnystudio.com/policies/listener/fr

Hey Boss!   Look I know what you are thinking, SEO is dead. Sure, Google and others want you to believe that, but are 10000% sure?   In this very eye-opening and strategy-driven interview, I speak to Rebecca Gill - a smart and savvy SEO consultant, teacher and educator - I took plenty of notes - so listen up - be ready for more clients easily and effortlessly.   Be You! Be Real! Be a Winner!   Like A Boss! Insights With Influencers! Helping You Rise To the Top! Heather Havenwood https://www.InfluencerTribe.com (https://www.influencergrowthformula.com/) Follow Heather on Instagram for all of her stories: @HeatherHavenwood Support this podcast

Rebecca Gill is Vice President of Digital Services for emagine, a digital marketing agency in the Boston area. Her agency helps companies of all sizes, from startups to large hospital systems. In this interview Gill explains how dramatic changes made by Google are affecting search marketing. Read the full article.

Rebecca Gill is the founder of Web Savvy Marketing - an agency that has served over 6,000 clients in 185 countries over the last ten years.

One reason SEO remains a challenge is the shrinking SERP real estate. Rebecca Gill, founder and president of Web Savvy Marketing, drops by to shed light on how to succeed with unique opportunities for medical providers and organizations even as Google’s knowledge graph gives more competition. All that, plus the 3 focus areas for today’s search strategy and the lovely summertime weather in northern Michigan. Thanks to Xpressdocs, Ultera Digital, and the Podcast.Healthcare Network for helping us spread the awesome, yo! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Now, something that is not visible in the front end of the website often gets ignored. Schema markup is a vital component of SEO optimization for better ranking in Google search results. Unfortunately, Schema markup is often painted as a difficult concept to grasp in the SEO ecosystem. Simplifying this concept, here is Rebecca Gill…

Rebecca Gill is the SEO instructor at DIYSEOcourses.com with over 20 years of experience in sales, marketing, and SEO. She teaches her students how to succeed with internet marketing by working hard, being smart, and always staying focused on the visitor and solving their problems by creating a positive user experience.   Quotes To Remember: SEO is about helping Google figure out what is the best content. When SEO has to trump usability, there’s a problem. The wonderful thing about the internet today is that there are lots of resources available for learning SEO. Over 50% of the searches now happen on mobile. If someone has enough desire, they can learn SEO.  The people that are successful are the ones that have the follow through.   What You’ll Learn: Optimizing your SEO campaigns Finding the right keywords How to discover what your audience wants The search engine signals you need to know How to optimize blog posts, podcast episodes, and videos for SEO   Key Links From The Show: Rebecca's Site DIY SEO Courses Kwfinder Answer The Public Google's SEO Documentation   Recommended Books: Content Marketing Secrets by Marc Guberti Podcast Domination by Marc Guberti   The 12 Week Year by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington Content Rules by Ann Handley

This is a little bit of a departure for us today because we take a deep dive into the life of our guest - Rebecca Gill. Typically on the podcast we chat about plugins and themes and talk to developers about their ideas and their code. Not today, well not just that today! Today we listen to the story of how life has shaped Rebecca, and I can tell you that so much has happened to her that it's amazing that she's still able to get up in the morning. Many people faced with a poor start never recover from it, but others seem to be able to rise above it, they have a tenacity that enables them to keep going, to take charge of their own destiny and to flourish. Rebecca chose to flourish. Find out how...

This is a little bit of a departure for us today because we take a deep dive into the life of our guest - Rebecca Gill. Typically on the podcast we chat about plugins and themes and talk to developers about their ideas and their code. Not today, well not just that today! Today we listen to the story of how life has shaped Rebecca, and I can tell you that so much has happened to her that it's amazing that she's still able to get up in the morning. Many people faced with a poor start never recover from it, but others seem to be able to rise above it, they have a tenacity that enables them to keep going, to take charge of their own destiny and to flourish. Rebecca chose to flourish. Find out how...

Matt Medeiros continues Season 8 with the third roundtable episode talking to Naomi Bush, Brad Williams, and Rebecca Gill. Matt discusses a recent podcast with Matt Mullenweg and Kara Swisher where he says that he is staying with WordPress for the rest of his life. WordPress powers 31% of the Internet and this panel discusses how there are still so many options for people needing consulting advice and support in the WordPress space. Listen to this episode: Matt Report - A WordPress podcast for digital business owners Finding opportunity while WordPress is changing Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:39:03 Subscribe Share RSS Feed Share Link Embed Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:39:03 Watch this episode: Brad Williams – Builds sites with WordPress and runs a company called WebDevStudios.com.  (0:33) Rebecca Gill – Owns a WordPress agency called WebSavvy Marketing that is located in Traverse City MI. Rebecca is an SEO Consultant and provides a lot of education about SEO. (0:50) Naomi Bush –  runs a company called Gravity Plus. She builds products to help people do more with Gravity Forms. (1:03) Changing WordPress Marketspace: Naomi – Has a focused product centered around Gravity Forms in her business. Ninja forms keeps up with the changes and offers an inexpensive forms solution for WordPress users. There are a lot of people that wanted to get into the WordPress “gold rush”. Even though there is a lot of competition in WordPress it still has a broad ecosystem. (2:23) Rebecca– would not consider going back into a market with stock themes. She would consider the plugin market.  You need to think carefully about the saturated theme market and support that comes with Themes. There is not a lot of money in that market anymore. (2:56) Brad  – There is saturation in the WordPress market. There are many agencies and freelancers that build websites using WordPress. (4:05) Future of WordPress: There has to be an effort to simplify the WordPress experience. Brad – WebDevStudios is 100% WordPress. They can have applications that evolve using APIs and integrate with other systems. They are always looking at what is new and interesting but they still plan on building on WordPress. (5:51) Rebecca – Many businesses are coming to agencies after they have flopped on an in-house experience. They are looking for external expertise. People are realizing that they have made a big mistake sometimes after their SEO drops on a redesign and their traffic has changed. (12:15) Naomi – Gravity forms has been waiting for the new editing experience before making a lot of changes. Add-ins will need to integrate with the software. Naomi has seen that different 3rd parties to plugins have had different approaches to blocks. She will wait to see how this changes in newer releases. (17:16) Brad – Automattic is in the business to make money. There is a new verticle for blocks with vendors. Website builders will need to make a decision on what they use. Brad does not feel that Gutenberg WordPress users will have an advantage in the development space of WordPress. You still need a design eye when creating websites so it is nice to be able to use structured themes when you can.  He fears that the impact of Gutenberg may influence the reputation of WordPress. (14:15) Opportunities for Growth in WordPress: Rebecca – a freelancer or small business agency can concentrate on Gutenberg support for users. Many clients will just want somebody to do the work and not want to learn the blocks themselves. There will always be service opportunities for SEO with website audits and training. (21:15) Training: Rebecca uses Learndash and WooCommerce for courses. She uses GoToMeeting for group or one on one training. There are still clients that just want you to do the work and will pay for that. (27:21) Naomi – Pick a space to specialize and find a niche if you can. Understand your customer and provide a solution for what they need. (22:39) Training: Naomi creates field guides and links to relative documentation for her customers. (28:36) Brad – freelancers will need to understand their WordPress product and also the customer. Many WebDevStudio customers have not shown an interest or desire to know what Gutenberg is about. The Gutenberg discussion has brought the conversation to using page builders like Beaver Builder. (23:54) Training: Documentation with screen sharing is provided to clients. There is training provided around user permissions for clients so they can understand how to add a user who can safely navigate the site. The more information you provide to your clients, the better off they will be. (25:56) To Keep in Touch: Brad: Web Dev Studios Brad on Twitter Lunch with Brad Rebecca: emagine Rebecca Gill Rebecca on Twitter Naomi: Naomi C. Bush Naomi on Twitter Episode Resources: Podcast with Matt Mullenweg and Kara Swisher Gutenberg Conductor Plugin Google Meet Google Hangouts WooCommerce Freemius Shopify Magento Beaver Builder REST API To Stay in Touch with Episode Guests: Watch the panel discussion on Matt's YouTube channel. To stay connected with the Matt Report, head on over to mattreport.com/subscribe. If you like the show, please leave a 5 Star review over on the Matt Report on iTunes. ★ Support this podcast ★

Matt Medeiros continues Season 8 with the third roundtable episode talking to Naomi Bush, Brad Williams, and Rebecca Gill. Matt discusses a recent podcast with Matt Mullenweg and Kara Swisher where he says that he is staying with WordPress for the rest of his life. WordPress powers 31% of the Internet and this panel discusses how there are still so many options for people needing consulting advice and support in the WordPress space. (more…)

Tune in to this episode of PressThis where we interview online marketer, WordPress expert, and SEO consultant, Rebecca Gill. Rebecca has been focusing on SEO and WordPress for over a decade and now you can listen in as she shares her tips and opinions on how to wring the most out of your digital experiences. We'll cover all of the latest technologies that are driving modern SEO best practices including semantic markup, accessibility, and much more. Don't miss out on this opportunity to hear from one of the most compelling and articulate speakers in the WordPress SEO space. Listen now!

Tune in to this episode of PressThis where we interview online marketer, WordPress expert, and SEO consultant, Rebecca Gill. Rebecca has been focusing on SEO and WordPress for over a decade and now you can listen in as she shares her tips and opinions on how to wring the most out of your digital experiences. We'll cover all of the latest technologies that are driving modern SEO best practices including semantic markup, accessibility, and much more. Don't miss out on this opportunity to hear from one of the most compelling and articulate speakers in the WordPress SEO space. Listen now!

Rebecca Gill Rebecca Gill is a seasoned SEO expert and is the Owner of Web Savvy Marketing. Today, she shares her journey and insights into how businesses can keep going and attract more clients in the long run. “It's making incremental changes over time that together make your site more user-friendly and easier for the… The post Rebecca Gill A Sustainable Business with SEO | Ep. 229 appeared first on Bottleneck Distant Assistants.

Search engine optimization has this reputation for being a mysterious and difficult job, though a very important one. But in reality, a savvy DIY-er can learn to do this effectively themselves if they just put in just a little bit of time to learn it and dig in. Even if you do decide to hire out for your SEO needs, every business owner should at least know how to find where their website ranks, which keywords are and aren’t working for them, and what kind of content is both valuable to the search engines and effective at helping to grow their online footprint. It’s all about prioritizing usability and keeping content and keywords fresh. https://www.theagentsofchange.com/257

Rebecca Gill has a well-rounded business background and over fifteen years of experience in sales and online marketing. Her love for WordPress website design and her strong belief in the user experience is equally matched by a fascination with search engine optimization (SEO), blogging, and social media marketing. As an early adopter of blogging, her online marketing efforts have been highlighted by media outlets such as Wired Magazine, Ziff Davis, and IT Toolbox. Her writing has been featured in a variety of publications that range from technology outlets such as Backbone Magazine, Social Media Today, Sphinn.com, and Search Engine Roundtable to industry specific magazines such as Contract Manufacturing & Packaging, Food Manufacturing, and Progressive Distributor. Rebecca has appeared on Detroit2020, spoken at WordCamp Miami, DFWSEM Meetup, WordCamp Toronto, Higher Ed Web, WordCamp San Diego, WordCamp Las Vegas, WordCamp Ann Arbor, WordCamp Chicago, and Girls Are IT Conference. She is also a WordCamp organizer. Rebecca has been a guest speaker on a variety of WordPress podcast series and has also guest lectured and presented at the Grand Valley State University, and Michigan State University and the University of Toledo.

Rebecca has a well-rounded business background and over twenty years of experience in sales and online marketing. In addition to running the day to day activities of Web Savvy Marketing, she also provides full-service SEO consulting, one-on-one SEO coaching, publishes online SEO courses, hosts a weekly SEO podcast, and teaches onsite SEO Bootcamps. She loves to teach the latest SEO strategies and help businesses grow their online footprint. Top 3 Value Bombs: 1. SEO allows you control the journey of your online brand. 2. Gone are the days of keyword density — it’s now all about semantic searches. 3. You have to ask the right questions to be able to set up the right SEO for your business. Check out Rebecca’s business - Web Savvy Marketing Sponsors: Billy Gene is Marketing: My friend Billy Gene has a completely free training that will teach you exactly how to use paid ads to get more customers in ​any niche. Visit WatchBillysVideo.com to access his free training today!

Rebecca Gill has a well-rounded business background and over twenty years of experience in sales and online marketing. In addition to running the day to day activities of Web Savvy Marketing, Rebecca also provides full-service SEO consulting, one-on-one SEO coaching, publishes online SEO courses, hosts a weekly SEO podcast, and teaches onsite SEO Bootcamps. She loves to teach the latest SEO strategies and tactics to others, helping businesses grow their online footprint. In my conversation with Rebecca, we learn about her best practices to build a long-lasting business which is applicable to any industry. She focuses on providing value and not locking anyone into a long-term contract. She treats her customers the way she wants to be treated. We also dig into some real, actionable SEO advice for any business owner.

SEO or search engine optimization is a key component of online business. It’s what allows you to be found. It can also be confusing, complicated and often ignored. Joining Adam is SEO specialist, Rebecca Gill. In this episode you will learn: ​Why SEO is a process, not a plug-in; If you can really do SEO […]

Rebecca Gill has over twenty years of experience in sales and online marketing. In addition to running the day to day activities of her company, Web Savvy Marketing, Rebecca also provides full-service SEO consulting, one-on-one SEO coaching, publishes online SEO courses, hosts a weekly SEO podcast, and teaches onsite SEO Bootcamps. As you can see, […] The post ML62 – Using Lighter Fluid to Ignite Your Company’s Future with Rebecca Gill appeared first on Jake A Carlson.

At the age of 11, Rebecca Gill emancipated herself and became a ward of the state in northern Michigan. With grit and resilience inspired by her SpitFire grandmother, Rebecca now focuses on creating value and helping people to grow her web marketing company into a six-figure business in the first six months. Nine years later, her company, Web Savvy Marketing, provides e-books, Webinars, Masterminds and one-on-one guidance to help individuals and companies build an effective online marketing strategy leveraging SEO. Check out her resources at www.rebeccagill.com https://www.diyseocourses.com/sp/ 

In this episode, I interviewed Adam Feldman. Adam is currently a Fellow in the Empirical Study of Public Law at Columbia Law School.  He has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Southern California as well as a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall). Prior to receiving his Ph.D., Adam practiced law at McDermott, Will and Emery (Century City, CA) and Kendall, Brill and Klieger (Century City, CA). Adam and I discuss his interesting study on the gender dynamics of the Supreme Court justices and the underlying, surprising statistics of interruptions and how they play into gender roles. Topics covered: Exploring the data Adam recovered in his research. Understanding the importance of the study and benefits of the research moving forward How Feldman's personal perception evolved throughout the study   Questions? Comments? Email Jeena! hello@jeenacho.com. You can also connect with Jeena on Twitter: @Jeena_Cho For more information, visit: jeenacho.com Order The Anxious Lawyer book — Available in hardcover, Kindle and Audible Find Your Ease: Retreat for Lawyers I'm creating a retreat that will provide a perfect gift of relaxation and rejuvenation with an intimate group of lawyers. Interested? Please complete this form: https://jeena3.typeform.com/to/VXfIXq MINDFUL PAUSE: Bite-Sized Practices for Cultivating More Joy and Focus 5-week program. Spend just 6 minutes everyday to practice mindfulness and meditation. Decrease stress/anxiety, increase focus and concentration. Interested? Please complete this form: https://jeena3.typeform.com/to/gLlo7b Sponsor: Spotlight Branding provides internet marketing services exclusively for solo & small law firms. Unlike most internet marketing firms, they do NOT focus on SEO. Instead, they specialize in branding their clients as trusted, credible experts, increasing referrals, and ultimately driving growth. For our listeners, Spotlight Branding is offering a complimentary website review. Go to: SpotlightBranding.com/trl Check out this episode! Transcript Adam: The Supreme Court justices had all reached this real pinnacle of legal profession that, perhaps, they were on more equal footing than we would see with mixed genders in lower level legal proceedings or practice. Intro: Welcome to the Resilient Lawyer Podcast, brought to you by Start Here HQ -- a consulting company that works with lawyers to create a purpose-driven and sustainable legal career. In this podcast, we have meaningful, in-depth conversations with lawyers, entrepreneurs, and change agents. We offer tools and strategies for creating a more joyful and satisfying life. Now your host, Jeena Cho. Adam: My name is Adam Feldman. I recently completed a Ph.D. in Political Science with the emphasis focusing on law at the University of Southern California. I'm an attorney. I practiced law for about 4 years prior to entering the Ph.D. program. I completed my legal studies at Boalt Hall School of Law in Berkley. A little over a year ago I started a blog called Empirical SCOTUS where I look at contemporary and historic issues facing the Supreme Court from a statistical perspective. That goes on my academic work looking at the Supreme Court mainly empirically and also recently extended that work to other court systems both domestically and internationally. My work is mainly focused looking quantitatively at studying judges, judging courts, court opinions, and other phenomenon in the legal sphere. Jeena: Today I want to talk about the study that you've published titled Echoes from a Gendered Court: Examining the Justices' Interactions during Supreme Court Oral Arguments. Can you tell me the genesis of the study and how you became interested in this topic? Adam: Sure. Around 2010, there were few thousands by political scientist that focus mainly on public law. Looking at oral arguments at the Supreme Court and particularly at this phenomena of interruption between justices. It was an interesting focus because although in prior work there was clearly instances of justices interrupting attorneys -- especially the focus on points that were of interest when attorneys were deviating -- there wasn't really much of any scholarship looking at what happens between the justices at oral arguments. There were two studies that looked at interruptions and looked at oral arguments and the justices' speaking behavior and interactions. I initially was going to look at this from an updated perspective. I wanted to see what was happening with the more modern court where Sotomayor had a few more years on the court where there's some data on Justice Kagan. I uncovered the data for the 2015 Supreme Court term. I did this kind of soon after the… I actually did this after oral arguments last year before all the decisions were made. I noticed this kind of interesting from a statistical perspective, difference between the male justices on the court interrupting the females and the females interrupted versus the males where the male justices were interrupting in higher numbers and the female justices were interrupted in higher numbers. This seemed to be interesting because there was this clustering aspect where it wasn't just one justice but there were multiple male justices interrupting at the high end and multiple female justices interrupted at the high end. It seemed like something that was interesting. It was notable because of the scholarship on gender interruptions which I was somewhat familiar with prior when look at greater detail after completing this pilot study. After I completed this pilot study in May of last year, I became very interested in doing a follow up where I look at multiple years of data and also have other variables in the mix. So control factors such as how often the justices were speaking and then other things that might spew interruptions differently for the justices to really focus in on this behavioral interaction between the justices and see if there was really a gender dynamic at play in more than one term. Jeena: To back up a little bit, can you talk a little bit briefly about what you mean by interruptions. I think we all sort of have an intuitive sense of what interruptions are and also the two different types of interruptions that you talk about in your study. Adam: It's somewhat variable how there actually… There's multiple ways that interruptions could be conceptualize. One way would be -- and as I'm listening to oral argument audio and then coding any time, one, justice speaks over another, two, to look at this large number of potential interruptions in our study, we use the transcripts from oral arguments and we use all the available transcripts from 2004 through 2014. We did this because prior to 2004, the justices' names weren't listed on the written transcripts. So we couldn't differentiate who is interrupting whom prior to 2004. Starting with 2004, the justices' names are written on the transcripts. Any point in time when one justice or when any person at oral argument starts speaking and then stops when another one cuts them off, there's a mark in the oral argument written transcript where there's a double dash prior speaker's at the end of their speech and that moves into another attorney or justices' speech. So we were able to use the coding on the written transcripts to then come up with statistics of interruptions where essentially one justice was speaking and before the justice was finished speaking, another justice began speaking. Jeena: In your study you say, at a basic level, research suggests that men tend to dominate conversations while women are traditionally more passive participants. Do you find the same trend at the Supreme Court? Adam: This was somewhat interesting for myself and my co-author because we had some prior expectations on this based on literature that was available to us in prior studies. But there weren't any studies within a political institution at the elite level like the Supreme Court. So we had hypothesis based on other conversational dynamics that we studied but we're applying them to a totally new area. Although based on non-prior literature, even in the legal spirit, we found that men tend to talk more often and to also be more aggressive in conversation where they would interrupt both male and female colleagues at a higher rate. We weren't sure if that was going to translate in the elite environment of the Supreme Court. But once we actually ran the numbers, we saw multiple different trends overtime. One of which was the male justices ending speak more often but also the male justices would interrupt the female justices more often than they would interrupt their male colleagues. Jeena: Why does that matter? Why does interruptions matter? Adam: They matter for several reasons. One is that they can be perceived as threatening. One area of interest for us was what is the effective and interruption. Does it lead to any noticeable effects? One that we pinpoint right off the bat was that when somebody is interrupted they lose their opportunity to speak at a given point in time. This is meaningful in Supreme Court oral arguments because a lot of what is asked is contextual based on the point in oral argument. If a justice is asking a question based on the previous questions and based on where the point in oral argument is at any given point in time, if they're interrupted then it's unlikely that they're going to get back to that same exact place again. The interest of interrupt the justice might be forever lost and so that question is never necessarily answered. Also then the information is lost that might be useful for the opinions for the justices both on the merits. This could potentially shift the outcome of the case depending on when an interruption occurs. A second effect that we found -- and this was something that was drawn from the data -- was that there's a differential impact on the male and female justice on the court for when interruptions occur. This was one of the more interesting and somewhat startling findings of the study but it reverberates based on prior evidence from the studies both within and outside of the law where female justices, when they were interrupted, would tend to speak less after an interruption and would speak less for the oral argument than male colleagues. So there's this perceived threat that we identified in the data where when female justices were interrupted, they tend to speak less. This wasn't only a point in time when they wouldn't speak more -- when any justices would speak more interruption but actually a behavioral shift that we saw that was different in female justices than male justices that very well might disrupt the female justices' positions and the questioning at oral arguments. Jeena: That's fascinating. Is that isolated to that particular argument or does that have a ripple effect meaning the female justices interrupted and cheat then tends to speak less in that particular oral argument but does that sort of carry over into the next oral argument? Adam: We didn't find downstream effects beyond oral arguments in isolation. We think this might have to do with the different questions that are asked in different oral arguments. The justices' engagement often times has a lot to do with both their preparation in given phase, their interest in the subject matter. There are multiple factors that we engage the justices from the outside of oral arguments. We think that it has more to do within oral argument effects and that between oral arguments there are so many factors that need to… whether a justice is prepared to speak at greater length or less. Jeena: I found the study just so fascinating because it really confirmed what I know from my own life experience of being interrupted and having been in lots of different meetings with other lawyers where you just notice the male lawyers just tend to occupy more of the time that's actually available to speak and also has a tendency to interrupt each other more. I'm curious, after having done this study, did that shift your perceptions or shift your own behavior about interruptions and how much you speak? Adam: To better answer that, I should back up for a second and just get into a little bit of how I ended up co-authoring this paper, it shifted the way that I thought about this dynamic between male and female justices and male and female interaction in general. After I completed the pilot study, I went to a friend and colleague who I respect greatly. Who also studies public law but also has background studying gender dynamics. Her name's Rebecca Gill and she's a faculty at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in Political Science. I had several discussions with Rebecca about what I had found in the pilot study, what was interesting about this to me, and how I was thinking about this and how I was interested in studying this in greater detail. Rebecca really had much greater background knowledge of the interruption subject matter than I did. That, along with the first person anecdotal evidence of this, really made it interesting to me to engage her and to see if she would be willing to work on this project with me because I knew she had experience and knowledge that I don't have and that would very possibly deepen my ability to fill in some of the nuances. So, this was really an educational experience for me from the outset. Going through the literature with Rebecca helped me understand a little bit deeper of a level of what the gender dynamics in conversation really amount to and how the effects of interruptions effects the impact men and women in conversation -- how men and women and how different types of speaking behavior. Although this was something that I had seen both in my legal career and in other work settings, it was not something that I studied before and so qualitatively I could base some hypothesis on the observations that I had. I didn't really have a deeper understanding of this behavior in a sociological context. It was very helpful, for me, to have a co-author who would really help me learn about this dynamic and how we could apply what was already known to the Supreme Court. Jeena: I'm curious after, or before or after you've done the study -- I don't know if you'd be willing to out yourself. Do you notice the trend in yourself, just that natural tendency for males to interrupt females more? Adam: I've been more tuned in to this since then. I think you would actually be done to ask a question before about the two different types of interruptions. We look at both interruptions that end up cutting a justice off at a given point in time where a justice brings up a new point. We also look at interruptions where a justice might be supporting in other justices' point but still talking in their place. Even if it's a support of interruption, this very well might lead to the interrupted justice losing their train of thought, losing the ability to ask a question at a given point in time. What I found in speech, and I found this much more in my interactions with female friends and colleagues, was that I might want to insert a point not to change the topic but maybe to echo a thought or to add something that I thought was important into the conversation before the other participant in the conversation was finished making the point. I did notice this happen relatively frequently in conversation. It's something that I was not really at all tuned into prior and it was interesting to me because I never thought of myself as an interrupter. I'm actually, I think, often times somewhat soft spoken. When actually tuning in to this, it was much more of a trend that I notice within myself that I'm happy that I'm more tuned into now because, I think, the first step in changing behavior step we're not thrilled about is becoming aware of them. Jeena: Yes. I teach mindfulness which is all about awareness. I want to put a pin in that about what we can actually do to change this behavior. But before we do that, you talk about the difference between the genders when they speak. So you think about apologizing, politeness, and differential speech. Talk more about that. Adam: We wanted to, in the study, look at speaking behavior in general and see… Sequentially in the paper, we look at the differences in gendered speech behavior prior to looking at the interruptive behavior. Based on prior socio-linguistic literature, there were many different phenomena that we could attempt to understand at the Supreme Court level and that we also thought would correlate with interruptions, that would correlate with aggressive and passive behavior. We thought that if these interruptions were really significantly impact in female justices' ability to speak oral arguments that we might see some of these other behavioral pattern in speech. Two of the patterns that we looked at were deference and politeness. Politeness more in the apologetic sense really. We want to see if the female justices were apologizing more frequently than the male justices. We're also interested in whether the female justices were actively differing to the male justices more often. If two justices were competing to speak at a point in time, if female justices would yield the oral argument speaking time to their male colleagues. We did find that in raw numbers that both of these expectations were occurring where the female justices and one in particular, Justice Sotomayor, was apologizing at a grade higher than her male colleagues. But this was also linked  to the female justices on the courtroom generally. We did see this apologetic behavior and a little bit less so but still to a… This was in the female direction where we saw this deferential behavior as well where the female justices were willing to yield the floor. This was a little bit muddied because we have Chief Justice Roberts also who is a male justice and often times will be the justice that dictates who should speak when it's unclear which justice had the floor at a point in time. Because Chief Justice Roberts has a little bit of a different rule than the other justices as he's somewhat the unofficial moderator of oral arguments, this change, I think, the deference dynamic somewhat from what would have been… We're looking at nine justices who were in exactly equal roles during oral argument. The apologetic behavior was a little bit easier to identify than deferential Jeena: Looking at the study, it's really interesting that Roberts, his “I am sorry account,” is at 30, 34 followed by Justice Kagan at 92. Now, of course, we have more female justices on the court than before, did that actually change the rate of interruption? Adam: It did. What we found which, I think, kind of helps explain the story and conceptualize a little bit more is that the two more recently appointed Supreme Court female justices: Justice Kagan and Sotomayor were more active speakers in oral argument than the two prior female Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg and Justice O'Connor. There is a correlation that we found between how often the justice speaks, how many words a justice speaks, and how frequently they're interrupted. With greater rates of speech we did see more interruptions. But we also found that Justices Kagan and Sotomayor were interrupted at higher rates than Justice O'Connor and Justice Ginsburg. Justice O'Connor, we only have limited data for because she retired in 2005 and our study begins in 2004. We only have preliminary remarks that make about interruptions that involved her. We do see the rate increase with Justices Kagan and Sotomayor and it made us wonder whether their increased speech or their greater speech relative to the other female Supreme Court justices acted as some… would have been a threat to a male justices' dominating oral argument and backlash to that whether conscious or more likely subconscious was more aggressive behavior from some of the male colleagues. Jeena: Interesting. Is that because they're violating gender norms? Adam: Very possibly. We did find that gender norms were prevalent in oral arguments. Somewhat surprisingly getting back to this point that we began kind of naively, assuming the possibility that because the Supreme Court justices had all reached this real pinnacle of legal profession. That perhaps they were on more equal footing than we would see with mix genders in lower level legal proceedings or legal practice. We expected, at least the possibility, that the gender norms wouldn't hold strongly in the Supreme Court but they did for the most part. And so because of the other norms that we noticed and that we found with our data, we think that a greater number of these norms were likely and are likely prevalent in the Supreme Court oral arguments and justices' interactions. Very possibly, this is due to the socialization of the justices because even though they're at oral argument, they're at this high point in legal profession, the justices all had careers prior to that and had backgrounds where they were raised based on gender stereotypes and where this likely created into their subconscious behavior from an earlier point in time. At the point where they reach their careers in the Supreme Court, they're already prime gender norms that were not, and are not, easily shed. We assume that the justices' backgrounds likely contribute to the way that they interact in oral argument than the way that the interrupted behavior is really spewed to where the female justices are interrupted at a greater rate than the male colleagues. Jeena: You point that in your study that professional women, including politicians, are expected to sort of conform to the gender norms. What happens when we break these gender norms? What happens if a woman justice, or a woman lawyer, or woman politician asserts herself, becomes more aggressive .What does the study tell us about what happens when women break the gender norms? Adam: We find in the Supreme Court that when the female justices are more active speaker, they're also interrupted more frequently. This seems like almost like a backlash and then it can work to… Since we see that female justices tend to become more passive after they're interrupted, this backlash is somewhat effective if the goal is to reassert these gender norms where the male justices speak more often and the female justices was often. One thing that we found from other studies that was really interesting that we can't say for certain apply at the Supreme Court level but we do feel like there's a relatively reasonable chance because this works in other settings but is also occurs at the Supreme Court level is that in behavioral studies of gender interactions, when females interrupt male, this has been seen both by the group as a whole as more detrimental and really is more a negative behavior than when males interrupt. This notion that females interrupting are judged to a higher standards or to a different standard than men, this plays into our findings that the female justices are treated differently and treat themselves differently after they're interrupted in the Supreme Court. And that this very well might have to do with these differing perceptions on the effect of male justices interrupting female justices. Jeena: When women break the gender norms, they're judged more negatively by both genders. It's not just the other men in the room that sort of judges that behavior as a negative behavior. Adam: Yeah. Both the literature and our own findings show that both genders are -- both men and women, I should say, are judging according to the same standard or similar standards that the priming really [unclear 00:34:42] to everyone. Because we're primed and socialized into this culture of male dominance, we see this effect in both men and women. Jeena: What is the goal? Is the goal to sort of get rid of these gender norms? Is that even possible? Is that even desirable? Is it a matter of train the men to interrupt less? Is it training the women to speak up more and to take a more assertive position? What does literature say? What are your personal thoughts on this issue? How do we change this? Adam: I think there are two ways to look at that question. One is what might be the best approach and two is what is most practical. If we were looking for true equality, we could come up with a system, through oral arguments, that is more equitable from the starting point so that more aggressive behavior doesn't necessarily garner the ability to speak more often. Whether that's pushing a button when the justices break speak, whether that's ordering the justices eventually so they each are given equal share of time to question or even having the chief justice possibly be the one who has a greater role in moderating with this notion in mind that the allotment of speaking opportunity should be equal between the justices. There are some of these more rigid frameworks that could be employed although we don't think are necessarily practical given the history of oral argument and the likelihood of major change at this point in time. It's a practice that's been in place since… We are from England prior to coming to United States and so it's unlikely that we're going to change the dynamics so greatly in a formal way. Although we think of these as possibilities, we think that informal means of change might be the most effective. We're not certain that, just like I noted in my own experience, we're not certain that the justices are aware of this behavior. We're not certain that they're not only aware that behavior occurs but also at the numbers and the relative frequencies with which female justices are interrupted and male justices are interrupted. The starting point might very well be to educate the justices a little bit about both the differential behaviors and about the differential outcomes between the male and female justices and how this affects the trajectory of oral argument, we think that a starting point might very well be to make this more of a conscious subject on the justices' minds rather than something that's whether subconscious or conscious, something that is done because the justices are used to certain gender dynamics due to their socialization. Jeena: Will the similar awareness training be effective for the general populations or for lawyers in particular? Adam: Possibly as a starting point. But the problem with going about it this way is that some of this is so deeply rooted in our culture and in our psyches that it's unlikely do necessarily change even with education. It might be something that shifts in the short term. But to make long term change, it's a point that really has to be reasserted and on a continuous basis. One approach might be changing the setting somewhat making settings more accommodating for the speakers. This might be taking more active approaches for lawyers, taking more active approaches in meetings to engage the female attorneys and then to prevent some attorneys from taking most of the time from others. I think, at some situations, there might be more formal means to shift this differential type of interaction. So education is definitely a starting point. It's not an end point. And because this is something that most everyone has grown up with, it's not likely that education, in one point in time, is going to then drastically change behavior moving forward. Jeena: Right. And I would also imagine it's not just enough to educate but also that there has to be a desire to actually want to change it. If a male just thinks, “Well, I'm happy with the way I talk and I think it's just fine that I'm interrupting,” I think all the awareness in the world is probably not going to shift the behavior. Adam: Yeah. I think that's definitely true. What's hard to gauge is what level of awareness both men and women have of this to begin with because as I've seen and as the studies show, this has become… we become so acculturated to these type of interruptions that it's not even recognized. It's just a normal pattern of speech. Education is definitely, at least it means, to make sure that this becomes a subject of discussion. That it's something that's on the forefront rather than the background of people's minds. You're right that education isn't going to change somebody's behavior that doesn't wish to change if there are no associated penalties for acting in a certain way or no guidelines that specify the way that people should talk in a given environment, giving equal opportunity to all participants. We really see this, the possibility of bringing this up as bringing this to people's attention as it might not be. Beyond that, more active approaches within different settings, I think, could equalize the situation somewhat and then some of this is going to likely have to be the way that we socialize the next generation so that the norms that were set that are really hard to move away from, that are still being reiterated with current professionals, don't take hold as strongly in the future. Jeena: At what age do these gender norms become the norm? Are there studies that show at what age that you're seeing these gender norms in? Adam: I guess the differentiating factor is there's studies that are pre-oral behavior -- so pre-speaking -- that show that we're already priming boys and girls to act in a certain way, to interact in a certain way. Where some of this… looking for more differential behavior in females, girls, and more aggressive behavior than men is already becoming something that boys and girls are shown and are taught. Some studies also show that kids mirror their parents. They see the way that their parents interact. When they see these gendered rules that they very well might see that as a way that they should act as well. This happens from a very early age. By the time that kids are beginning to speak and interact with one another, some of this already might be filtered into their understanding of how to behave. Jeena: Wow, that's shocking. How do we reverse this? How do we change this if these kids are sort of soaking up these gender norms before they're even able to speak? Adam: Well, I think that gets back to somewhat how we educate ourselves; how we raise the next generation. If we're somewhat conscious of this and also take a more active approach to equalization in different settings and allowing equal opportunity to both men and women, then perhaps we'll have a better shot at beginning to mirror the types of behaviors that we hope to see in the next generation in ourselves. It's a multi-faceted approach to both educate kids when they're young and to try to engage in some of this shifting behavior in ourselves. That's really the only way that we're going to see change from the ground up. It's important to both integrate this as best we can within our own lives but also to start kids off in early age and seeing that it doesn't have to be a situation where males are dominating interaction. Jeena: Adam, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate the conversation. I think it was really enlightening. Adam: Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it as well. Jeena: Adam, for those that are interested in learning more about your study or want to get a hold of you, what's the best way? Adam: My email address is adfeld@gmail.com. I'm more than happy to respond to questions via email. If people are interested in some of this empirical work, along with the pilot study and want to look at in greater detail, my blog is Empirical SCOTUS. So www.empiricalscotus.com and you're more than welcome to browse the site. Jeena: Fantastic. Well, hopefully our listeners are a little bit more educated about these gender norms and interruptions and, perhaps, might feel inspired to just notice these patterns in their own lives and perhaps we can slowly, but surely, change these interruptions between people so we can all have better communications. Adam: That does sound like a plan that we should try to bring to fruition. Closing: Thanks for joining us on the Resilient Lawyer Podcast If you'd like to build a more profitable and purpose driven law practice, learn more about us at startherehq.com. If you've enjoyed the show, please tell a friend. It's really the best way to grow the show. To leave us a review on iTunes, search for the Resilient Lawyer and give us your honest feedback. It goes a long way to help with our visibility when you do that so we really appreciate it. As always, we'd love to hear from you and you can drop us an email anytime at hi@startherehq.com. Thanks and look forward to seeing you next week.   Closing Thanks for joining us on the Resilient Lawyer Podcast. If you'd like to build a more profitable and purpose driven law practice, learn more about us at startherehq.com. If you've enjoyed the show, please tell a friend. It's really the best way to grow the show. To leave us a review on iTunes, search for the Resilient Lawyer and give us your honest feedback. It goes a long way to help with our visibility when you do that so we really appreciate it. As always, we'd love to hear from you and you can drop us an email anytime at hi@startherehq.com. Thanks and look forward to seeing you next week.

In this episode of the Founder Origin Series, Sherry interviews Rebecca Gill, founder of Web Savvy Marketing and an SEO consultant, about her early life in Michigan as a child. And some of the pivotal moments that helped shape her success. Support ZenFounder Rebecca Gill Episode Transcript Rob Walling: On this week’s ZenFounder, we continue […] The post Episode 124: Founder Origin Stories: Rebecca Gill appeared first on ZenFounder.

In this episode of the Founder Origin Series, Sherry interviews Rebecca Gill, founder of Web Savvy Marketing and an SEO consultant, about her early life in Michigan as a child. And some of the pivotal moments that helped shape her success. Support ZenFounder Rebecca Gill Episode Transcript Rob Walling: On this week’s ZenFounder, we continue our Founder Origin Series with Sherry interviewing Rebecca Gill. Rebecca is a Michigan based WordPress SEO consultant. She’s an educator and an author, as well as the owner of a digital agency for website design and development. In this episode, Sherry and Rebecca walk through Rebecca’s Founder Origin story and look at how it has shaped her both personally and professionally. In a couple of months, Sherry’s going to be launching another Zen Tribe’s coaching group. The first one sold out so quickly that she and Cory from iThemes are already talking about gearing up for the next one. If you have any interest in being in a small online group full of other entrepreneurs who are trying to push their business forward, head over to zenfounder.com, sign up for the mailing list, and we’ll be in touch the next time a group has an opening. Sherry Walling: Let’s just begin by you introducing yourself and letting people know a little bit about what your business is. Rebecca Gill: My name is Rebecca Gill, I run a Michigan agency that does custom word press design and development. I spend a lot of time working on SEO and educating people on search engine optimization. Sherry Walling: In my head, at least, you’re the queen of word press. You spend a lot of time at conferences, you spend a lot time talking with people about how to run their businesses well. Rebecca Gill: I do, yes. I like to empower people. Sherry Walling: You’re also kind of a teacher and a leader in the WordPress community? Rebecca Gill: I am told that, although that’s not how I would self describe myself, but yes. I’ve definitely been told that I’m one of the well known people and the one that is constantly being seen. Sherry Walling: Yeah. I think it needs to have a variety of different voices that are leading different communities and even if that’s not a title you would give yourself. It’s one that you have come into, because people are interested in what you’re doing and seem to trust you. Rebecca Gill: Yeah. I tend to stand out because I don’t code, and I don’t design. I don’t have graphic design skills or coding skills and it’s more business ownership and internet marketing and SEO. So, I bring something different to the table than a lot of the other speakers or people in word press. The fact that I’m a woman helps me stand out a little bit too, because it is a sea of men. There are some women, but there’s definitely a larger population of men, without question. You tend to stand out. Sherry Walling: Yeah, absolutely. I was at a co

On this week’s episode, Brian and Lauren discuss their favorite moments and guests that have appeared on the show during Season One of StudioPress FM. In this 25-minute episode Brian Gardner and Lauren Mancke discuss: Their favorite episodes of Season One The most downloaded shows Most memorable guests and topics What they’re looking forward to in Season Two Listen to StudioPress FM below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes The Show Notes Follow Brian on Twitter Follow Lauren on Twitter The Transcript The Season One Recap of StudioPress FM Voiceover: Rainmaker FM. StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder Brian Gardner and VP of StudioPress Lauren Mancke share their expertise on web design, strategy, and building an online platform. Lauren Mancke: On this week’s episode, Brian and I discuss our favorite moments of Season One of StudioPress FM. Brian Gardner: Hey, everyone. Welcome to StudioPress FM. I am your host, Brian Gardner, founder of StudioPress. Today, on this very last season episode for Season One, I am joined, as usual, with Lauren Mancke, vice president of StudioPress, mom of one, soon to be three. Looking forward to just wrapping up Season One. Lauren Mancke: Yeah. Thank you for joining us again this week. We’re closing out Season One and we will be doing this week a little different. We have no guests. It’s just Brian and I talking about some of our favorite moments on the podcast so far. Brian Gardner: Typically we like to go somewhat scripted, where we prepare questions for those that we’re talking to, but Lauren and I, this morning, we’re going to just completely wing it. We have just some general idea of what we want to talk about for this closing episode. It won’t be long. It’s hard to believe it’s been 16 episodes already. I know that for you it might feel a little bit longer because you started editing the first handful of them or first half of them and then we turned that over because you have more important things to be doing, but can you believe, 16 already? Lauren Mancke: No. It’s really flown by. Brian Gardner: I remember when I did No Sidebar, it seemed like it took just forever to edit the shows. I wasn’t structured when I set it up and it felt like it was hard to find ideas and guests and things like that. I’m almost forcing us to close the season down because we have a lot of stuff we have to do before the end of the year, but I don’t want to, because I’ve been having so much fun. It’s been great talking to the members of the community. When I sit down and try to think of who do we want to talk to next or what series we want to have, I’m loaded with all of this, these ideas, these people. There are so many people. I want to do two episodes a week, which of course isn’t realistic. There’s just so many people to talk to and so many topics to cover. For me, it’s been fun so far. Lauren Mancke: Yeah. We’ve already got some great people lined up for next season, so it’ll be good to take a little bit of time off and get that all organized and lined up for next January. Brian Gardner: I almost feel like we have a legit show here, where we actually follow a format and we have a good audience. We get at least a few thousand listens on every show, if not more. I don’t know. I feel really good about what we’ve done. It’s our first full-time gig together, doing the podcast thing. What do you think so far? Have you felt like this has been a successful journey? Lauren Mancke: Yeah. I’ve really been happy with who we’ve gotten a chance to talk to and hearing everyone’s story. It’s really cool how so many people have that same sort of, they were doing something else and they found WordPress and then they built this whole thing. It’s great to hear everyone’s different take on that journey. Brian Gardner: The good thing about WordPress and the cool fascinating thing I find is that even though we have generally that same story, we all come from just much different backgrounds. We also are in the middle of just different types of expertise, where some people come in as designers, some people come in as marketers, some people come in with a technical or programming background. You’ve got a designer who was sitting at a bored day job and then you’ve got like a technical guy who was working for the man and wanted to do his own thing. There are so many different levels of skillset and just expertise that’s being represented within the WordPress space. It’s fun to watch just how many people from how many different avenues of life are coming together in this whole open source project. Lauren Mancke: For sure. So many different types of personalities, too. It’s not just the same type of person. You’d think all these WordPress people would be maybe slightly nerdy or whatever, but it’s not true at all. It’s so many different types of people, and they’re all really cool. Brian Gardner: Yeah. Even within the short spurt we did here at the end with the designers, even the designers that we talked to like Bill Kenney at Focus Lab and Jason Schullermega and Megan Gray, even within just one segment of that audience, you’ve got people with different personalities and flavors. Bill works and owns a creative agency and Megan’s by herself and Jason’s doing a startup. Yes, there’s a lot of resonating stories, but even within a certain sub-niche of the WordPress designer ecosystem, there’s just so many types of different people represented. That wasn’t boring because everyone brought something unique to the conversation. Hopefully, designers and people who don’t design and do other things even were able to pick up something from that as well. Lauren Mancke: In WordPress, I think, when you mentioned the guests specifically, it makes me remember all the different things that make each one of those people unique. You got Bill, who is very, very good at being efficient and I love that about him. He has so many ways of doing that and that’s his focus. He can tell other people about that. Then you got Jason, who is; he’s just a family guy. That’s his passion and you can see that with everything he does and everything he talks about. Those are just fun and unique things that everyone who works on WordPress, they can be their own person and tailor their job and their company around those skillsets that they have. The Most Downloaded Shows Brian Gardner: You know one of the things I think for me that I found for me interesting as a metrics guy and somebody who looks into that kind of thing? There were certain episodes that I thought would have been more popular than others and vice versa. When I would go in and see the analytics and the number of downloads and so on for each one, there were a few that surprised me where I was like, “Okay, this one’s probably not going to do as well, maybe because of the audience. It isn’t such a widespread thing or an ‘interesting topic.'” Then those were the ones that got the most distribution and those that were shared the most. It’s funny how you can draw up a game plan. Nine times out of 10, things go the way you want, but then once in a while you get that one where I’m like, “Wow. That was the one I almost didn’t even suggest doing and it was the one that was in the top three or whatnot of most listened to shows.” That just goes to show, you never know. Lauren Mancke: What were some of the more popular shows that we had this season? Brian Gardner: You’re going to make me look that up, so I’m going to make you talk while I go look that up. Lauren Mancke: You know, we can edit this, so we can break for a second. Brian Gardner: I know. All right, so I was able to pull up the analytics. Sadly enough, three of the bottom four episodes were the first three, which were my story, your story, and the redesign of StudioPress. I don’t know if that’s an indicator of the fact that it was new, and not as many ears were on the show, or if people were just don’t find that interesting. Lauren Mancke: Yeah. Let’s go with the first. Brian Gardner: I’m going to go with that one. Top to bottom, I’m just going to spitball these out here quickly. A Beginner’s Guide to SEO That Works is the number one show. We did that with Rebecca Gill at Web Savvy. I had a feeling that that one … SEO is a topic that a lot of people want to talk about. Lauren Mancke: I thought that was a very informative episode. Lots of good nuggets on that one. Brian Gardner: Yeah. I actually took the show notes to that and the transcript, and wrote up my own little iteration of that. I think I talked about this back then, that I was going to try that a couple of times with these and try to use that from a curation standpoint, a re-purposing content, and so I pulled some of the best things that Rebecca had to say and wrote a blog post about that, and tried to rank for, I think it was a Beginner’s Guide to SEO or something like that. I think last time I checked, that was on page three of Google, so it kind of sort of working. Yeah, there was definitely a lot of stuff that came out of that that was good. Number two, and this does not surprise me just because I know that Matt and some of the folks at Automattic were helping with the distribution of this, and that was the show we did, How and Why It’s Okay to Make Money with WordPress, which of course we just talked about just all of the different types of people within WordPress, so that makes sense because that would appeal to everybody. The next one was How to Scale a Freelance Business. That, I believe, was the one that we did with Bill Erickson. Then How to Build an Online Education Business, now this is the one I was referring to earlier that I didn’t think was going to strike a chord as much, just because it seemed a little bit more of kind of a sliver segment specific to doing an online education because that’s not what we’re all in the deal here for. We did that with Tonya Mork. That was a good one. Great information. She’s got a ton of knowledge. She’s worked 20, 30 years in her field, so she has a ton of expertise that she brings to the table, so that was one a little bit surprising. The How to Sustain a Profitable Creative Agency came next. The Importance of Entrepreneurial Mental Health with Cory Miller. That was probably my favorite episode that we recorded just because it kind of dove a little bit more into just the personal touchy-feely stuff, which I’m a huge fan of. Again, a lot of these were within 1% to 2% of downloads, so it’s not like certain episodes crushed other episodes, but that’s a quick recap. Then of course you and I, and our whole stories, are down there at the bottom, pulling up the caboose. Lauren Mancke: Nobody cares about us. I’m just kidding. Brian Gardner: Which is why we have guests on the show. Lauren Mancke: Yes, exactly. Brian Gardner: Because they’re the ones people will want to listen to. Their Favorite Episodes of Season One Lauren Mancke: I think the Cory Miller episode was very good as far as the content. I think all three of us were tearing up on that one. Brian Gardner: Yeah. I wish I would have seen Cory’s talk at WordCamp Denver just because, and I’m sure it’s on WordPress.tv, but that is something that I think without a doubt every single person who listens to the show struggles with in some regard. Some better than others. I’ve had my seasons of even within the last six years, after we merged the company, of really struggling, especially early on. This was before we brought in the mid-level management and brought in people like you, who came in and really helped do a lot of the stuff that I do. I remember, I think it was within the first year, we came together as partners in Boulder. I had a meltdown and I was like, “Look, guys, I’m just completely fried.” I remember Brian Clark said to me … He says, “Just take the next month and a half off. Do nothing.” I was like, “What?” Like, “No, I m a creative. I can’t do nothing.” It’s one of those things where it creeps in and life gets in the way and clients get in the way. Hard work and stuff like that do pay off, but the whole entrepreneurial mental health thing is something that I think far too many people don’t discuss or don’t have an … It doesn’t even have to be talked about across the internet via a podcast. You got to have a couple of people in your life who even if it’s a Skype call … I know Cory a lot of times has tweeted things out saying, “Hey, I just got a message from a friend and it meant the world.” Just things off radar, offline. Just check in with the people, whether they are people who you work for, who work for you, or people like Jason, who are just peers within the community. That stuff matters, so I’m glad we had a chance to talk about that. Lauren Mancke: Yeah. I think when you’re working on the internet, it’s easy to get lost in that. You’re connected to everyone, but you’re also connected to no one if you’re just in your own little bubble and you’re not really able to sit down and talk with people face to face or, like you said, even on a Skype chat or something like that, so it’s an important issue. Brian Gardner: All right, so let’s talk about some of the other episodes. I’m just going to look down and just see. I know we talked, as I mentioned earlier, Brian and Jennifer, husband and wife team. They own their own agency and we talked a lot about … You weren’t on that episode because I think you had mom duty that day, but that was a good episode because it talked about work and family balance, which is in a way relevant to the mental health thing, where as creatives and those who do stuff online, we have access to the internet 24/7, and so it is difficult at times to balance work and home life. I struggle with it sometimes. There are times where I literally have to just shut my laptop and tell Shelly, “Do not let me open this because I need to go play catch with Zach because that’s important, because I don’t want him growing up thinking the computer is more important than him and so on.” For you even, you’re a mom and have two more on the way, and all of that. I mean, what’s that going to look like for you next year? Lauren Mancke: Well, I thought that episode would have been good for me to be on because I ran a creative agency with my husband, so I know a little bit about that. I even notice my son isn’t even two and a half yet and he’s already … He’ll come in and sit at my desk and say, “I’m working. I got to get on a conference call.” He picks up. He puts on the headphones and he pretends that he’s on a conference call. I’m like, “I don’t know that I want that to be my legacy with my son.” So spending more time with family is definitely a priority. Brian Gardner: Yeah. Going back to Jason and the episode that we had with Tim, that was the one thing, over the last few years, of things that I see online that I get envious about, is the ability that some people have to do that and make that so important. By all means, I don’t shun my family. Shelly is at home all day long, so we get to talk to each other. I’m home at 3:00 o’clock when Zach comes home, so we do have our time together, but Jason, of anybody I’ve ever seen online, puts more importance on his family, his wife, especially his daughter. I can’t imagine the bond that they’re going to have throughout their life because of how much importance he placed on the balance of work versus time with them. It’s fun and sometimes, like I said, I get envious of the fact that people are able to do that, maybe not so much as I wish I could, but yeah, it’s important too to balance that out because relationships, marriages, mother-daughters, father-sons, those types of things, in my eyes, big picture, matter way more than what we do for our jobs. Anyway, that’s the kind of thing that I think just everybody needs to hear, that it is important to balance work and life. All right, so another one of my favorite episodes was when we had Shay Bocks on and talked about food blogging. That also is something that I thought would have been a little bit more less heard because of the fact that it was very niche-specific. I think it resonated with a lot of people because people took things that she said out of the food blogging discussion we were having and those are the things that could have been easily applied to any other niches. So I think even thought it was a food blogging episode, a lot of the stuff that Shay talked about, things that we discussed, could have certainly been used across the sphere. Food blogging to me is interesting because it’s one of the … It sort of came out after real estate, which is sort of not really been that big a thing anymore, but the food blogging industry has exploded. You know, Will, your husband likes to cook and you like to take photography and you’ve done a couple of food-oriented themes on StudioPress. I can’t believe how popular that still is and how many people still … Foodie has regained number one status on theme sales on StudioPress. With the exception of two, maybe three months over the last almost two and a half years now, it’s been number one every single month. Shay and I talk probably at least once a month just about stuff in general and she’s always like, “I’m waiting for the ship to sink.” I’m like, “Don’t.” I’m like, “Embrace the fact that …” Shay has done something of a big lesson for all of us. If you do something that works, instead of trying to replicate that somewhere else, really hone in on that. She’s really crafted her business around the idea of food blogging and she re-branded her company, called Feast Design Company. How more relevant of a brand name than to work within the niche? That is also something I think has been fascinating for me to see, is people within our community really identify where they belong and then really attack at that point. Lauren Mancke: Shay is also just a great person. It’s really great to see her succeed and all of her success. She’s just a wonderful, wonderful human being. I think too, also, food blogging, people … We’ve talked about focus on family. I mean, that’s a trend. People are spending more time, I think, focused on their family and eating and community and all of that, so I don’t see food blogging going anywhere any time soon. Brian Gardner: Yeah. People always eat. There’s always going to be the internet and the will to make money. For people, not so much Shay, but the people who use Shay’s themes per se, that’s the dream, right? Living the dream, we talked about that with Jason, is to take your passion, something … In this case it’s something that you do at home, so you could literally be hanging out with your kids and working at the same time, and even having them help. I recently redesigned a website called Simple as That Blog with Rebecca Cooper. She’s got to a really, really big website. She’s got four kids and she’s a great photographer. She does a lot of her DIY craft and recipe type of things with her kids. She uses them as props. They get dressed up and they do things. For her, it’s a really creative way to do that work-family balance thing because she includes her kids with her work, and so therefore there’s no … I don’t know. Just disconnect between the two, and so I think food blogging is just another example of where that can be done. All right, so the episode that I actually wasn’t sure we would be able to do, mainly because I know Matt sometimes is a little bit slow on email as he should be … I’m sure he gets thousands of emails a day and from probably people way more important than me. I reached out to Matt Mullenweg to talk about WordPress and making money. He wrote back within like a day or two. I was very surprised and very pleased that he was very open to talking to us about that. It was a great episode. We talked almost an hour, I think, on that one, and probably could have kept going. The premise of that show was very obviously how to make and that it’s okay to make money with WordPress open source community. We did a couple of episodes on that. Also I remember we did one with Carrie Dils. With Matt, we talked about just the WordPress ecosystem and different ways that we can make money with WordPress, that it’s okay to make money with WordPress, and the fact that he even endorses the fact that it’s okay to make money with WordPress because I think at this point, the community as a whole has identified that WordPress is a business in a sense. Even though there’s a free version of it, even though it’s an open source piece of software, there’s a full blown ecosystem, as we talked at the beginning of the show, just all the different ways that people use WordPress and can offer WordPress as a business, either as a service or like what we do with commoditized type things with selling themes and plug-ins and so on. It was fun to talk to the guy, right? The guy who founded all of it. I was a little bit star struck, as I always am every time I talk to him. It’s a little bit difficult to … I don’t know. Feel like we were pulling our weight in that conversation, but what did you think about that show? Lauren Mancke: Oh, we’re totally BFFs now, so it’s all good. Brian Gardner: You guys on HipChat or Slack together? You just ping each other with ideas and whatnot. I like to think of Matt as like the mini Richard Branson because he’s always … At this point in his life, he’s probably got tons of money and he’s out travelling around. He’s out in Bali or in Antarctica. I forget that he’s probably 30-something now or late 20s or whatever, but to me he’s always going to be a kid. I don’t know. The whole thing is a great story. Just imagine how many people, their lives have been changed by what he’s done. Mine, yours, everybody who listens to the show, everyone in our company. It’s kind of crazy if you think about that. Lauren Mancke: Yeah. I think he’s around my age, but yeah, he’s definitely prolific and I too am a little envious of his schedule. He gets to go everywhere and do all sorts of fun, cool things. Brian Gardner: Again, I think that goes back to the point of, if you have some crazy idea, sometimes you just need to execute it. Like, what if he never decided to fork b2 back in the day. We all have that question in our life. What if I never left my job or what if I never asked people if they would buy a WordPress theme or any of that stuff? I think the moral of the story here is that sometimes you do need to take that risk and just do that thing, as George Costanza did in Seinfeld back in the day. Do the opposite, right? Because if what you’re doing isn’t working, maybe the opposite will. That was a great episode, by the way. Lauren Mancke: I always get tuna on toast. Brian Gardner: Ah, there you go. Seinfeld, one of the best shows ever, if not the best show ever. What They re Looking Forward to in Season Two Brian Gardner: All right, so moving forward, we are going to take break here. We ran that through our guy in charge of the podcast network and said, “Hey, we’ve got a lot of things we’re working on.” We will not be discussing any of those here on the show because they’re just fun, internal projects that will make a big splash and a big difference next year to everyone listening to the show. What are the types of things you want to do as we probably open back up in January of next year, after the holidays? Who are the types of people we want to have? Anything specific you want to see happen? Lauren Mancke: Well, I know we have Dan from Dribbble lined up, Dan Cederholm. I’m excited about that one. He actually came up to the Northbound office a few years ago when ConvergeSE was going on. That’s a conference in Columbia, where I live. It was great to meet him and Rich, and spend time with him. It’ll be fun to have him on the show. Brian Gardner: Now one of the things I want to do and throw out there is, we would love to hear from you guys, those who are listening to the show. At the bottom of the show notes, we’re going to put mine and Lauren’s Twitter handle. If you have any ideas or suggestions or people, if you want to nominate people, we are definitely open to hearing from the community. I know you and I are both creatives and designers, and so we err a little bit more on the side of that, in terms of show. I do want to make sure that we don’t forget our nerdy friends who are developers and programmers, and bring those types of people in as well, and talk to them because I’m sure they have a ton of wisdom to share with our audience. I’m trying to think of who else I would want to have on the show. I know that we have a little Google doc where we keep track. I want to get outside a little bit of just the general WordPress space and just find some really big entrepreneur type people who happen to use WordPress, but it’s not their business. I know people like Paul Jarvis is a guy that I want to bring on the show, possibly Jeff Goins. From my perspective, those are a few of the people that I plan to hit up. Maybe we’ll see if we can get a guy like Chris Brogan on just to talk some sense into us all and whatnot. We’ll have to think about that over the coming weeks, who else we want to have on the show. Lauren Mancke: Yeah. We’d love to hear from the audience, of suggestions. That’s a great idea, Brian. Brian Gardner: Hit us up on Twitter, @laurenmancke or @bgardner. We’ll put the link in the show notes. Even if you don’t even have a suggestion for the show and just want to say, “Hi. Thanks for putting together the podcast,” we would love to hear some of that feedback as well, good or bad. Let us know. We will wrap the show up. This is our 17th episode, I believe, which still amazes me. Sorry for those who really like the show and want to hear next week. We won’t be here because that will be Thanksgiving week. Actually, you know what? This will air the day before Thanksgiving. Nonetheless, people will be out shopping. No one wants to listen to us anyway. December is really a time for that family and stuff that we talked about. We will be back in January of 2017 with Season Two of StudioPress FM. On behalf of Lauren and I and all of us within our company who touch the StudioPress brand, we thank you very much for your support as customers, as listeners and those who spread the gospel of StudioPress. Thank you very much and we will talk to you next year.

SEO is something we all know we're supposed to do. So we get the Yoast SEO plugin, name our images with relevant keywords, follow some of the tips from Yoast and aim for the 'green light' from Yoast (I won't get into readability right now, because as I've been testing posting my emails as posts and those never get a decent readability score, but we'll leave that for another conversation). Deciding to re-focus my efforts on a solid content strategy led me back to looking at SEO and what I can do to improve what I'm doing (or simply do it correctly... no shame here, it is what it is). If you're going to take the time to create content, share it and go so far as to do content upgrades (again, that's for another conversation), then isn't it worth it to make sure your content continues to work for you after you've hit publish? Needless to say when I started diving into all of this I knew who I wanted to talk with. Rebecca Gill of Web Savvy Marketing I've been following Rebecca and her team at Web Savvy Marketing (full service agency that also sells their own Genesis child themes) and have had the good fortune of connecting with Rebecca through a mutual friend, Carrie Dils. Not only is Rebecca wicked smart when it comes to SEO but she's pretty fun too (and I've only connected with her through Skype calls. I have no doubt she'd be a blast in person). I'm going to be jumping into Rebecca's DIY SEO Course soon and will be blogging the journey (what I'm learning, data beforehand, etc.). I've been holding off jumping into the course because I know I need to set a certain amount of time aside to implement everything (mind you... the longer I wait the less optimized my site is, right? #assbackwards). Regardless, that will be happening this month (November, 2016). Questions I Asked Rebecca What were you doing before you launched Web Savvy Marketing? Can you share what Web Savvy Marketing is with the listeners? What does your agency do? What made you decide to create a DIY SEO course? We've all heard "SEO is dead"... what's your take on this? If you could recommend people do one thing with SEO, what would that be? You've got an SEO even coming up in January with Cory Miller of iThemes and our lovely friend, Carrie Dils: Is this your first event? What made you decide to host a live event? What's going to be covered? What can people expect? What's coming for you & Web Savvy Marketing in the next year? What You're Going to Learn Why SEO isn't just about getting a 'green dot' on your content (or a green 'Y') Where you should start if you're new to SEO Why SEO & content should be a primary focus for your website What free tools Google gives you and why you should use them ( nothing like a little free data, right?) What SEO can do for conversions on your site and in your business Why you should attend the live SEO event (O.K., this was more me plugging than Rebecca) Where to Connect with Rebecca Website | Twitter | Facebook

Season 3 of OfficeHours.FM is here! My panel of guests includes Rebecca Gill, Diane Kinney, and Matt Medeiros. Sometimes irreverent, sometimes serious, we cover the WIX GPL debate, subscription-based business models, and the impact of the REST API on businesses.

Andy and Barry review the many choices you make to optimize the design of your blog for a great user experience. Special guest: Rebecca Gill.

In this round-table show, we go deep into SEO and what works in 2016 and what can damage your website's Google ranking. We look at black hat SEO techniques you should avoid, and outdated SEO myths that do more harm than good.   This week, we're talking black hat SEO, and the outdated SEO techniques you  might be using that will do more harm than good for your Google rankings. Our panel this week: Jackie D'Elia https://jackiedelia.com/ Jonathan Denwood https://www.wp-tonic.com Sallie Goetch https://www.wpfangirl.com/ John Locke https://www.lockedowndesign.com/ We have some weekly WordPress news stories that we hit in the first half hour: 1 - ButterBean Post Meta Box Framework 1.0 Released https://wptavern.com/butterbean-post-meta-box-framework-1-0-released 2 - WordPress for Enterprise: Why Your Enterprise Business Should Use WordPress https://kinsta.com/blog/wordpress-enterprise/ 3 - Why customers want WordPress Page Builders http://chrislema.com/want-wordpress-page-builders/ Show Table of Contents: 0:00 Intros 2:02 Weekly WordPress stories 2:05 Jason Tadlock releases ButterBean Post Meta Box Framework 1.0 6:40 Using WordPress for your enterprise business 17:20 Why do customers want page builders? 37:14 What are the crazy outdated SEO myths that people still believe? 38:10 Duplicate content / plagiarized content 38:40 Buying links / link schemes 39:30 Spam comments 40:00 Article spinning 40:15 Keyword stuffing / location + service keyword stuffing 42:25 Buying backlinks 44:20 Blog networks 44:46 Confessions of a Google Spammer https://inbound.org/blog/confessions-of-a-google-spammer 45:17 A link from a very reputable source can help your rankings 46:20 The meta keywords tag hasn't been relevant in years 46:56 Over-optimizing a site with very little content will look like spam 47:37 Duplicate meta descriptions 48:10 People don't want to hear that SEO takes time 48:40 Sallie's awesome tagline "SEO Is not a condiment" 48:50 Rebecca Gill's SEO Course https://www.web-savvy-marketing.com/2016/02/learn-seo/ 49:40 Internal linking also matters 51:12 How do you know who to trust when hiring a SEO expert? 52:00 Jackie has a great real-world story about how user experience makes a huge difference in SEO 55:15 You are optimizing your site for users, not Google 57:13 Google won't make money if they don't give people accurate results 58:40 Performance and mobile-friendliness are important for SEO 1:00:30 Some enterprise websites are still not mobile-friendly 1:01:25 We STILL don't design websites for mobile-first 1:03:05 Wix is still the dirt worst for SEO and user experience 1:05:23 Podcast outros Subscribe to us on iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/wp-tonic-wordpress-podcast/id893083124?mt=2   ===========   Read more content on the WP-Tonic website: https://www.wp-tonic.com/podcast/128-black-hat-seo-outdated-seo/   ===========   WP-Tonic is not just a WordPress maintenance service, but publishers of a twice weekly

On this week’s episode, we’re joined by Carrie Dils. Carrie has been around the Genesis community for a number of years. She s a WordPress developer, consultant, speaker, and teacher. She loves sharing what she s learned with others to help them be more successful in their business. She hosts a weekly WordPress podcast at OfficeHours.fm and is a course instructor for Lynda.com. In this 29-minute episode Brian Gardner, Lauren Mancke, and Carrie Dils discuss: What open-source means How open-source projects can be attractive to developers The pros and cons of open-source Using helpfulness to build authority The benefits of an open-source ecosystem The expansion of the Office Hours podcast Listen to StudioPress FM below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes The Show Notes Follow Carrie on Twitter Visit CarrieDils.com The Office Hours Podcast Carrie on Lynda.com The Utility Pro Theme The Genesis Facebook Group The Transcript Why Open-Source-Based Communities Are So Powerful Jerod Morris: Hey, Jerod Morris here. If you know anything about Rainmaker Digital and Copyblogger, you may know that we produce incredible live events. Well, some would say that we produce incredible live events as an excuse to throw great parties, but that’s another story. We’ve got another one coming up this October in Denver. It’s called Digital Commerce Summit, and it is entirely focused on giving you the smartest ways to create and sell digital products and services. You can find out more at Rainmaker.FM/Summit. We’ll be talking about Digital Commerce Summit in more detail as it gets closer, but for now, I’d like to let a few attendees from our past events speak for us. Attendee 1: For me, it’s just hearing from the experts. This is my first industry event, so it’s awesome to learn new stuff and also get confirmation that we’re not doing it completely wrong where I work. Attendee 2: The best part of the conference for me is being able to mingle with people and realize that you have connections with everyone here. It feels like LinkedIn Live. I also love the parties after each day, being able to talk to the speakers, talk to other people who are here for the first time, people who have been here before. Attendee 3: I think the best part of the conference for me is understanding how I can service my customers a little more easily. Seeing all the different facets and components of various enterprises then helps me pick the best tools. Jerod Morris: Hey, we agree — one of the biggest reasons we host a conference every year is so that we can learn how to service our customers, people like you, more easily. Here are just a few more words from folks who have come to our past live events. Attendee 4: It’s really fun. I think it’s a great mix of beginner information and advanced information. I’m really learning a lot and having a lot of fun. Attendee 5: The conference is great, especially because it’s a single-track conference where you don’t get distracted by, “Which session should I go to?” and, “Am I missing something?” Attendee 6: The training and everything, the speakers have been awesome, but I think the coolest aspect has been connecting with both people who are putting it on and then other attendees. Jerod Morris: That’s it for now. There’s a lot more to come on Digital Commerce Summit, and I really hope to see you there in October. Again, to get all the details and the very best deal on tickets, head over to Rainmaker.FM/Summit. Voiceover: StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder Brian Gardner and VP of StudioPress Lauren Mancke share their expertise on web design, strategy, and building an online platform. Lauren Mancke: On this week’s episode, Brian and I are joined by Carrie Dils to discuss why an open-source-based community is so powerful. Brian Gardner: Hey, everyone. Welcome to StudioPress FM. I am your host Brian Gardner, and I’m joined, as usual, with the Vice President of StudioPress, Lauren Mancke. We are very excited about today’s show because we are continuing the series where we talk to members of the Genesis community. Today, we’re joined by Carrie Dils. Carrie has been around the genesis community for a number of years. She’s a WordPress developer, a consultant, a speaker, a teacher, among many other things. She loves sharing what she’s learned with others, and she wants to help them be more successful in their business. She hosts a weekly WordPress podcast called OfficeHours.fm and is a course instructor over at Lynda.com. Carrie, it’s a huge pleasure to have you on StudioPress FM. Welcome to the show. Carrie Dils: Hey, Brian and Lauren. It’s so great to be here. Brian Gardner: Now this is full circle for us both as we’ve both been individually guests on your show, and now we get to come back to the point where you are a guest on our show. Carrie Dils: Yeah, and just to be clear, there’s no money swapping hands there for the podcast swapping. Brian Gardner: This is like a weird version of linking back and forth, reciprocal linking, right? Carrie Dils: I’ll link to you if you link to me. Brian Gardner: I’ll have you on my show if you’ll have me on your show, that kind of thing. All right, let’s get this going. Carrie Dils: Let’s do it. Brian Gardner: Carrie, you’ve been developing websites for many years, almost 20 to be exact. We won’t ask how old you are, but you built your first site back in 1997. Some of our listeners may not have even been born then. That’s funny, but give us the low down on your career path — how you became a developer, when WordPress came into the picture, and also what got you involved with Genesis. How Open-Source Projects Can Be Attractive to Developers Carrie Dils: Just to be clear, I was a toddler when I started developing websites. That’s how I started in 1997 and still have this great youth about me. I started working with websites back when it was plain old basic HTML days, working with FrontPage and other cringe-worthy tools at that time. My career has taken many winding roads, but five years ago, I discovered WordPress and was in love with it and the power of what it could do right out of the box, started tinkering with the code base, and got into starting to customizing themes. As I was getting into the theme space, I tried out a bunch of different themes and eventually stumbled on Genesis. What I liked about Genesis, for some reason it clicked. It clicked to me the way that it’s built around action hooks and filters. I felt at home with that and started to dig in there. I think that was four, five years ago. Feels like forever. Lauren Mancke: I also built my first website 20 years ago. I was in middle school, so toddler is very impressive to me. Brian Gardner: Now you guys are making me feel old because, 20 years ago, I was out of high school, out of college, and a grown adult so let’s move on. Lauren Mancke: Anyone who’s listened to your podcast knows you are from Texas, and you’re a fan of craft beer. You actually picked a pretty good one out when I was down in Texas last. Another little fact about you is that you worked at Starbucks as a barista. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about that experience? Carrie Dils: Yeah. First of all, when I found out that Brian Gardner loves Starbucks as much as he did, I immediately started to bribe him with coffee. I had this wild hair in my mid-20s. I thought, “I want to open up a coffee shop,” but I didn’t know a thing about business or running, specifically, a café for that matter. So I decided to go learn on somebody else’s dime. That somebody was Starbucks. I was with them almost nine years in various capacities. At the end of that career, I’ve decided that under no circumstances do I want to own a coffee shop. Brian Gardner: Now the beauty of being an online entrepreneur is that a) you can work in your underwear and b) work whenever you want. As I know, I worked in a convenience store, retail really is the pits if you’re not overly passionate or making a ton of money from it because then you’re working for someone else, the holidays, weekends and nights, and things like that. I’m sure with you at Starbucks that probably was the same way. Carrie Dils: Oh yeah. No pun intended, but the grind of it was tough. My weekends happened on a Tuesday and a Wednesday. The hours were odd. Sometimes I would be there at five in the morning, and other times I wouldn’t be leaving until close to midnight. It’s just a weird … it’s for young people. I’m too old for it now. Brian Gardner: Its for people who were not 20 in 1997. Carrie Dils: Just to come clean, I’m in the plus-40 crowd now. I lied about the toddler thing. Brian Gardner: Lauren’s the one drinking Similac these days, right? All right, back to nerd talk. WordPress open source, Genesis open source — coincidence? Or are you someone who truly believes in the open-source community? In other words, did you choose these platforms which happen to be open source, or did you choose them because they are open source? Carrie Dils: That did not even enter my thought process. I can’t say when I started that I fully even understood what open-source software meant, so it turns out that it’s a happy coincidence. Having now worked in an open-source community, there’s so many things that I love about it. Not just the community of people, but the actual process of developing open-source software, it’s cool. Of course, Genesis, too, you guys wisely or unwisely gave me access to the repo, and I’ve gotten to contribute a couple lines of code to the Genesis project. It’s fun. It’s fun to have your name on something bigger than yourself, and I think open-source software lets you do that. Lauren Mancke: Speaking of WordPress and open source, there seems to be a lot of drama involved when it comes to the word ‘open source’ because it could be the interpretation of what it actually means, but it seems like there are a lot of people who point fingers of other people misusing it. Would you agree or disagree with that sort of thing? Carrie Dils: I try to steer clear of all DramaPress, as WordPress drama is lovingly called. I think there is a misunderstanding of what open source means and maybe what the ‘rights,’ big ol’ air quotes there, are of people being able to contribute to a project. I think the misunderstanding there is that, yes, while anyone can contribute, it’s not a free for all. There’s process. There are ultimately decision makers deciding what goes into a code base and what doesn’t. I think there’s disagreement there about whether the decision makers are either the right decision makers or making the right decisions. That’s the drama I just try to steer clear of. What Open-Source Means Brian Gardner: I’m going to jump ahead to a question I have because I realize there’s a good chance some of our listeners don’t know what open source actually is. I don’t want to assume that they do, so I’m going to actually read the definition from the website. “Open-source software is software that can be freely used, changed, and shared in modified or unmodified form by anyone. Open-source software is made by many people and distributed under licenses that comply with the open-source definition.” Basically, you can inherit the code base of any project and do what you want with it — and this is the big thing — as long as you also then release whatever derivative you do or come up with, with the same license. Basically, it’s a kumbaya-ish feel where opportunists have a tendency to come in, and this is where the drama starts, to try to selfishly monetize and then close off pieces and parts of their business. The phrase that we use is the ‘spirit of the GPL,’ which is the General Public License. That’s more or less open source and what WordPress is released under. You have a good thing. You have someone with some bad motives come in. Then all of a sudden drama starts. The hope is that everyone really freely … it’s an open community. They help each other. They take code from somebody. Then they better it, or they use it to build something else. Both WordPress and Genesis work within that ecosystem. There’s clearly some perceived downsides in an open-source community, but at the core of it all are some values that we all share, as I just mentioned. WordPress has grown tremendously, as has StudioPress and our Genesis community. Do you think the growth of all of that, as a whole, would be less if the software that we’re working with was proprietary? The Benefits of an Open-Source Ecosystem Carrie Dils: I think so. I don’t have any solid data to actually back that up, but my gut is that because of that spirit you mentioned it, kind of that helpful spirit of, “Hey even if you’re my competitor, let me show you my code and how I fixed this problem.” That pushes the software forward more quickly than if that was not the case. Again, just conjecture, but I think definitely the fact that it’s open source has made it as popular as it is. Brian Gardner: What was that noise? Carrie Dils: That was my dog shaking. Lauren Mancke: That’s a big dog. Brian Gardner: No kidding. That was an earthquake. Carrie Dils: Actually, you mentioned I was in Texas. I have a couple of horses in the house. Brian Gardner: Horses, armadillos, rattlesnakes. Genesis, the community that we’ve built, for sure has grown, at least in my opinion, because of the fact that it’s open source, and we’ve basically given the license or the ability of people to build off of that in any way that they want — whether that’s taking code and teaching and training around that or whether it’s taking our themes and developing other themes as derivative works of our themes. There’s been, as you know, with your Utility Pro Theme, a lot of work that has gone into it from our end, but the community has given back so much. I just got 20 emails overnight from Gary Jones, committing to the core project of Genesis. The good thing is, when it is working the way it should, I realize Gary has incentive to help build Genesis the framework. He has a business built around that, and if he can contribute code back to the main project, that helps benefit him and helps expedite and speed up processes by which he uses our work to then make money off of it by doing free-lance projects and so on. I’m totally cool with that. It’s win-win. He helps us with his work and his code, as you have, Carrie. Then you get the benefit of that. Bill Erickson and Jared Atchison, two other guys I know that have come to us and said, “Hey, happy to help because this will help me and my freelance business.” Carrie Dils: That’s where the beauty of it comes in. People are giving and taking, and we’re all benefiting from it. You mentioned even sharing code with competitors. We call that ‘co-opetition,’ where we’re going up against each other, but also helping. The hope is that 1+1 really becomes three. A lot of times your competitors are the ones who get too busy and then have to refer work even to you then because they just can’t take it all. It’s really a great system when it’s working properly. Carrie Dils: Yeah, it’s an interesting ecosystem. You’re so right, that co-opetition term is an interesting one, one I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about and won’t ramble on here on your show. But I think there is certainly a ‘you get back what you give,’ and even if you’re giving with some ulterior motive. Ulterior motive doesn’t have to be negative. It could be somewhat self-serving, but you’re still contributing and giving and doing that. One of the things that folks that are new to WordPress, or even new specifically to Genesis, I always encourage them to dive in, start getting involved in the community. The best way to do that is through forums, just answering questions. Even if you’ve been around WordPress one week, then you know more than somebody who’s only been around it one day. You have the knowledge to start contributing back by just helping somebody else. Lauren Mancke: We talk a lot about all the good things of the Genesis community, the WordPress community. That’s only natural for this show to do that. But what are some things that you’d like to see differently in the Genesis community? The Pros and Cons of Open-Source Carrie Dils: This isn’t going to be specific to Genesis, but I see it a lot in Genesis because that’s one of the communities I’m more heavily involved in, but there’s this disparity between … let me just get down to the point. I hope that I’m not going to offend anyone. No names mentioned, but I had a support request come through — and this is not a one-time deal, it’s happened multiple times — where someone is being paid as a web developer or a web designer to deliver a website for a client, and what they’re asking for in support forums is for the work to be done for them. I realize I’m painting in broad strokes. That’s not everyone. What I would love to see is that, if people are going to take this on professionally, that they actually are professional about it and take the time, invest the time to learn the skills to do that. I think that type of individual can devalue what a lot of people are doing legitimately and well, if that makes sense. Brian Gardner: I know you’re not referring specifically to the people who really just don’t know how to do something and are really asking for help on how to accomplish a task. Rather, you’re addressing more the people who I guess ‘lazy’ would be the right word. “Oh, will you just do all this work for me, so I don’t have to do it for my client?” That’s one of the downsides, then, of this open-source community — and this gets into that dark side — is that there’s a tendency for certain behaviors or patterns for people to come in and, to some degree, can be toxic. There’s an expectation that, “All of a sudden I’m going to start mooching off of and expecting … ” I think of the TV show Survivor. We’re huge fans of survivor. Once in a while, you get somebody who comes in there, and he starts eating more rice than he should. He’s drinking more water than he should, and he’s not playing fair. He’s sort of disrupting that community by being self-serving and selfish. The open-source community is more of a servant-first mentality, and everything in life, not everything is perfect. And I’ve seen it, and I try to address it and encourage behaviors to change or otherwise. A lot of times the community corrects itself, which is good. I can see what you’re saying, that there are people who have a tendency to come in and take more than they give. I guess we all go through seasons that we have to, but the hope is, at some point, that person says, “I’ve taken enough. I’ve built a business around this with the help of a lot of other people. Now it’s my turn to give back.” Carrie Dils: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been that person asking questions in support forums when I was first starting out — so certainly not at all. To your point, being clear about I’m not talking about people who genuinely don’t know and want to understand. It’s, I guess, maybe a difference in attitude. I wish I could attribute this quote to the right person because I just heard it, and I don’t remember who said it, but in regards to seeking help in an open-source community. It was, “For every question you ask, answer another question” — that idea of balance and being reciprocal with your knowledge. Rather than just showing up and taking, to also give back. People that are new to WordPress or new to open source, I don’t think they maybe even know that conceptually that’s a thing they ought to be doing. Maybe we have to teach other people how to be good stewards of open-source relationships. Giving Back to the WordPress Community Brian Gardner: We speak about this in terms of Genesis, but also, to some small degree, I do feel a bit of conviction myself just with StudioPress and our company as a whole that we’ve benefited so much from the creation of WordPress, what Matt did back in the day, and all of that. I feel like over the last few years we’ve been so busy and doing our thing that we’ve probably taken a little bit more than we’ve given. So we’ve tried to do our best. Maybe it’s come out in just by providing opportunities for people like you and others in the community, just a way to monetize and build a business around it. I know that, as we move forward, there’s a few things we’re doing within our company to help give back to the big project of WordPress. One of those things is we’re going to take some of Nathan’s time — Nathan Rice, our lead developer — and earmark some of his time throughout the week to give back to WordPress, the big project, as a way to pay that back. There’s a few other things. I’ve actually tried to spend a little more time on the support forums at WordPress just to help people out because I forget. It’s easy to get complacent, on cruise control, and say, “Thanks, WordPress, for helping us kick start our business,” and then to go back and remember that there’s so many people who are new and just need help. Their questions aren’t dumb and things like that. Moving forward, I’m trying to go out of my way to help bring back a communal sense that I felt years ago that I’ve lost over the last couple of years. Carrie Dils: That’s awesome. That’s really exciting to hear about Nathan. Brian Gardner: So going along with what we just talked about, by far, in my opinion, the best thing about the Genesis community is the Genesis community. There are so many folks out there willing to lend a hand, whether it be, like you said, in the forums, or the Genesis Facebook Group, even the Twitter hashtag. That’s a great place for people to ask questions and to give back, like we talked about. No question here really. I just wanted to thank you as a member of that community. I’ve seen you on a number of occasions go out of your way to help people. You write tutorials, and you do all of this stuff for people. I know a lot of people have helped you along the way, too. No question here, really — just a way of saying thank you for your participation and helping build our ecosystem. I know that you have your own incentives for that. You’re building a business, which is great, and I hope that that continues to grow and to flourish. Just wanted to say thank you for what you’ve done. Carrie Dils: I appreciate that. Right back at you. You guys have had an incredible way of supporting the developers and people in the Genesis community that want to build businesses around it. It’s kind of great. StudioPress can make money off of WordPress, and StudioPress customers can make money off of StudioPress. It’s a giant circle of life. Brian Gardner: Yes, we love it. Lauren Mancke: So speaking of making money off of a wonderful community, is there a strategy involved for how being helpful and having the gift of teaching can affect your business? Using Helpfulness to Build Authority Carrie Dils: Absolutely! It wasn’t something I started out with in mind. Really, giving back to the community was something I started doing just as a thanks for all the community had given me. As I started to blog tutorials and that sort of thing and grow an audience that needed help with WordPress or Genesis, I saw opportunity there. Definitely, Brian, I can’t remember the exact phrase you used, but yes, there is an incentive for me to continue giving back to the community. I guess it comes back to me in indirect ways, but certainly helps to build authority and teaching courses. Helping other people just lends back to the credibility and my personal brand. As always, even now in my 40s, I’m not sure what my personal brand is, but I know that it’s a good thing for it. Brian Gardner: We talked about your podcast, OfficeHours.fm. A lot of people may not know this — it started out as a Genesis podcast, one that I was on a number of times, as was Lauren. Midway through, you switched to just Office Hours. In other words, you ditched the Genesis name, which I am completely okay with. In fact, I don’t know if I ever told you this, but I applauded that move. I realized that, to some degree, Genesis within the context of the whole Internet is a very small piece of the pie. WordPress, in and of itself, is a bigger piece of the pie, and there’s even more outside of that. So I commended you for that in my head. I think it’s a smart move. I completely understand that. Just talk to our audience a little bit about why you made that transition and how that’s been for you since then. The Expansion of the Office Hours Podcast Carrie Dils: First, thank you for that. I appreciate that. I started realizing that the topics that we were talking about, they could apply to broader WordPress principles. We’re talking about development tools, or hosting environments, or process and things that would apply to anyone working with WordPress. I was limiting my audience to people who thought we were just talking about Genesis all the time, so if someone wasn’t familiar with Genesis or wasn’t using Genesis, they were never ever going to tune into the show. By dropping the name Genesis and just going with OfficeHours.fm, I felt like that was my opportunity to stretch my legs a little bit and invite other people within the WordPress community on to share their knowledge. Even since that transition from Genesis to just plain Office Hours, the show has shifted. It’s still somewhat techy, but it’s not super techy. It’s really been more focused around the business of WordPress and those of who either provide services or products based around WordPress, what are some of the business skills and things that we can do to be more successful. That’s more the recent direction of the podcast, and that’s kind of a sweet spot for me. I’m going to go ramble again. Brian Gardner: Ramble away. Carrie Dils: As web developers or designers, we’re technicians, right? We like to get in code. We like to solve problems — whether we’re solving it with code or with a beautiful user interface. Those are the things that we’re good at, but actually running a business is not a skill that is inherent to most people. Unless you grew up as a kid working in a family business or unless, Brian, like you did, working in a convenient store, and just being around business, you don’t know that. You just get stuck. Here, you’re a technician and you want to be successful and make money doing web development and doing the thing you do, but if you don’t have the right business skills, then you kind of stagnant there. When I say my ‘sweet spot,’ I really enjoy business. That sounds nerdy, but I like the numbers. I like everything that goes along with the mechanics of running a business. To be able to take that knowledge and share it with people who are like me, other technical people like me, my hope is that they can be more successful in their business just by doing things a little smarter. Brian Gardner: When Lauren and I were heavily asked by those in our company to come up with StudioPress FM, one of the big concerns I had would’ve been the same thing you felt with that Genesis name, in that people would think we’re only going to talk about StudioPress stuff or Genesis stuff, try to sell our products, or whatever. This series is the first step in trying to go outside of just that perception. I didn’t want the same 30 people to be listening to our show, and I wanted to open it up to topics and things that, even though they pertain to Genesis and our ecosystem, can go well outside of that. For instance, we had Rebecca Gill talking about SEO, and that’s clearly not a Genesis thing. It’s not even necessarily a WordPress thing. It’s something that a general business owner, or someone who’s online trying to become an entrepreneur, that’s something that they can take away. The hope is, I’m sure this is the same case for you, when you shed that and go more ambiguous, you turn it from a ‘I’m just going to talk to my people’ to a potential lead generator, right? Getting people from the outside who don’t even know who you are, what products you build, or any of that. The hope is they’ll say, “Wow, I like what these people are doing or what Carrie’s saying,” and it’s an authority opportunity where you can teach somebody something they may not know, then bring them in. The podcast for you, now that you shed the name of Genesis, really, I think there’s a lot of opportunities, especially Office Hours. That’s a very broad term, and you could do all kinds of things with that. I look forward to seeing where you go. Carrie Dils: Thank you. Lauren Mancke: What does the future hold for Carrie Dils? What are some things that you’re working on, and what should we expect to see from you in the next year or two? What to Expect in the Future From Carrie Carrie Dils: Well, you mentioned Rebecca Gill and SEO. I’m not sure what all you guys talked about, but I’m actually partnering with her to do an SEO Bootcamp in early 2017 that I’m very excited about. I’ve always admired Rebecca, professionally and personally, and this is an opportunity to get to work with her and partner with her on something. Super excited about that. The podcast season two comes to an end with tomorrow’s show. Then I’m going to take a little break and revamp, redo some things under the hood, and then the launch season three of the podcast later this fall. I can’t tell you what all it is going to be, but it’s going to be awesome. Also, it’s on my bucket list in 2016 to write a book, so I don’t know. Brian Gardner: You’ve got three months to do that. Carrie Dils: I’ve got three months. I’ve been told that, that might be a little ambitious, but we’ll see. Lauren Mancke: You can do it. Brian Gardner: If you’re looking for something to do, in five or 10 minutes when we’re off this, you can go listen to the episode of StudioPress FM with Rebecca because it’s being published probably as we speak. And yes, we did promote the SEO Bootcamp conference on that, so hopefully that will, at the very least, bring a few people interested over there to you guys. Hopefully, that will work out. Carrie Dils: Thanks! Much appreciated. Where (and) When to Catch Carrie’s Show Brian Gardner: So everybody listening, are you looking for success through leveraging WordPress as both a tool and a platform? If so, we heavily encourage you to check out Office Hours, Carrie’s podcast, especially with season three coming up. You can tune in live every Thursday at 2 o’clock Eastern as she interviews a variety of folks within the WordPress ecosystem — from plugin developers to marketers, to business owners. For more information on that, visit OfficeHours.fm. And if you like what you heard on today’s show, StudioPress FM, you can of course find us there at StudioPress.FM. You can also help us hit the main stage by subscribing to this show in iTunes. It’s a great way to never ever miss an episode. Carrie, we want to thank you so much for being on the show. As we look forward to doing more episodes, we’d love to have you back to talk more specifically about some of things that you’re doing as a way to take that expertise you have and bring that to our audience. Carrie Dils: Thanks, guys. I always enjoy chatting with y’all.

Learn about SEO from WordPress legend Rebecca Gill. She shares valuable insights into Search Engine Optimisation, and unpacks her journey from self taught SEO to full service web agency offering a wide range of online services. Blumin Brilliant! Key Influencers: Cory Miller - https://ithemes.com/our-founder/ Barry Schwartz - https://twitter.com/rustybrick Danny Sullivan - https://twitter.com/dannysullivan Fave Plugin: Gravity Forms - http://www.gravityforms.com/ Rebeccas Courses: SEO Courses - https://www.diyseocourses.com SEO Training Course - https://www.diyseocourses.com/courses/online-seo-training/ Selling SEO Services Course - https://www.diyseocourses.com/courses/selling-seo-services/ I am doing the "SEO Training Course". It is well worth the investment of both time and money in this course if you are able to commit to it as Rebecca goes into great detail in a way that is easy to understand, and she provides actionable step by step advice and actions through the process. Connect With Rebecca: Site - http://rebeccagill.com/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/rebeccagill Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/rebeccagill --- OUR EVENT: Do you want to make real change in your business? Join us at our in-person event Agency Transformation Live Meet Troy Dean; Lee Jackson, Chris Ducker, Kelly Baader, Amy Woods, Paul Lacey, Dave Foy and other legends in this fantastic conference focused on actionable steps that you can use to transform your agency. --- See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Rebecca and I talk about building an online course, the necessary dedication you need to be able to teach, and some great tools for setting up your own online course! Links from the show: DIY SEO Courses SEO Bootcamp LearnDash Follow Up Emails for WooCommerce Sponsored by: LearnDash WP in One Month: Used code BUILD for 10% […] The post Episode 2: Rebecca Gill and DIY SEO Courses appeared first on How I Built It.

On this week’s episode, we’re joined by Rebecca Gill of Web Savvy Marketing. She is a WordPress developer, an SEO consultant, and a general business consultant. She s an active member of the WordPress community, participating as a WordCamp speaker, podcast guest, and SEO educator. Her company, Web Savvy Marketing, was founded in 2009 and is a creative agency based in Southeastern Michigan. They work with clients across the globe who range from bloggers and small businesses to large enterprises and universities. The Web Savvy online store offers more than 20 professionally designed Genesis themes ideal for businesses, marketers, educational institutions, and bloggers. In this 39-minute episode Brian Gardner, Lauren Mancke, and Rebecca Gill discuss: The accidental entrepreneur Empowerment in training others A holistic approach to SEO How to avoid risky black hat tactics The 3 most important elements of SEO Long-term SEO strategies Listen to StudioPress FM below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes The Show Notes Follow Rebecca on Twitter RebeccaGill.com Web Savvy Marketing Web Savvy Marketing Themes SEO Consulting DIY SEO Courses SEO Bootcamp The Transcript A Beginner’s Guide to SEO that Works Jerod Morris: Hey, Jerod Morris here. If you know anything about Rainmaker Digital and Copyblogger, you may know that we produce incredible live events. Some would say that we produce incredible live events as an excuse to throw great parties, but that’s another story. We’ve got another one coming up this October in Denver. It’s called Digital Commerce Summit, and it is entirely focused on giving you the smartest ways to create and sell digital products and services. You can find out more at Rainmaker.FM/summit. That’s Rainmaker.FM/summit. We’ll be talking about Digital Commerce Summit in more detail as it gets closer, but for now, I’d like to let a few attendees from our past events speak for us. Attendee 1: For me, it s just hearing from the experts. This is my first industry event, so it s awesome to learn new stuff and also get confirmation that we’re not doing it completely wrong where I work. Attendee 2: The best part of the conference, for me, is the being able to mingle with people and realize that you have connections with everyone here. It feels like LinkedIn live. I also love the parties after each day, being able to talk to the speakers, talk to the people who are here for the first time, people who ve been here before. Attendee 3: I think the best part of the conference, for, me is understanding how I can service my customers a little more easily and seeing all the different facets and components of various enterprises then helps me pick the best tools. Jerod Morris: Hey, we agree. One of the biggest reasons we host the conference every year is so that we can learn how to service our customers — people like you — more easily. Here are just a few more words from folks who have come to our past live events. Attendee 4: It s really fun. I think it s a great mix of beginner information and advanced information. I m really learning a lot and having a lot of fun. Attendee 5: The conference is great, especially because it s a single-track conference where you don t get distracted by, Which sessions should I go to? Am I missing something?” Attendee 6: The training and everything — the speakers have been awesome — but I think the coolest aspect, for me, has been connecting with both people who are putting it on and then other attendees. Jerod Morris: That s it for now. There is a lot more to come on Digital Commerce Summit. I really hope to see you there in October. Again, to get all the details and the very best deal on tickets, head over to Rainmaker.FM/summit. That s Rainmaker.FM/summit. Voiceover: StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder, Brian Gardner, and VP of StudioPress, Lauren Mancke, share their expertise on web design, strategy and building an online platform. Lauren Mancke: On today s episode, we are talking search engine optimization with Rebeca Gill of Web Savvy Marketing. We ll cover this topic from all angles, so listen in. Brian Gardner: Hey, everyone, welcome to StudioPress FM. I am your host, Brian Gardner. I m joined, as usual, with the VP of StudioPress, Lauren Mancke. We are very excited about the show because right now we are starting a new series where we are talking to members and experts, mind you, of the Genesis Community. Lauren, what do you think about that? Lauren Mancke: Very excited to have everyone on. Brian Gardner: We could probably go 30 or 40 episodes deep easily with people that I want to talk to. We ll break them up into little compartments. But it s going to definitely be fun for us. Today we’re joined by Rebecca Gill of Web Savvy Marketing. Rebecca is a WordPress developer, an SEO consultant, and a general business consultant as well. She s an active member of the WordPress community with a variety of participation as WordCamp speaker, podcast guest, and SEO educator. Her company, Web Savvy Marketing, was founded in 2009 and is a creative agency based in Southeastern Michigan. They work with clients across the globe who range from bloggers and small businesses to large enterprises and universities. The Web Savvy online store offers more than 20 professionally designed Genesis themes, ideal for businesses, marketers, educational institutions, and bloggers. Rebecca, it s our pleasure to welcome you to the show. How are you? Rebecca Gill: I m great. Thanks so much for having me here. Brian Gardner: Yeah, it s funny. When I sat down to think of the people who I wanted to have on the show there were a few names that instantly popped up, and yours was one of them. I was kind of hoping at some point, and maybe … I know down the road we have another series that I m going to talk to Chris Cree who worked with you very closely and just recently left. We ll be able to tackle both sides of your business where he also was involved. Let s kick this off. I ve known you for a number of years. You’ve been around the WordPress space for some time. Walk us through the early years of how you got started as an online entrepreneur and how you created Web Savvy? The Accidental Entrepreneur Rebecca Gill: I didn t set out to be an entrepreneur. I was at a small company and I was their VP of Marketing. I was with them for about 10 years in total. The company dynamic shifted and it was evident that I really needed to leave, but it was the heart of the recession and there were no jobs in the Detroit area. The situation in the company got so bad that I was so distraught and distracted from it I actually mixed up my medication, put myself on the ER for eight hours, and ended up on the couch for a week recovering. It was at that point my husband and I were like, You know what? It doesn t matter what s going on with the economy, you need to leave It just it was affecting our personal life more than we could tolerate, so I quit. I was going to go into SEO consulting and I started to do that. I actually had some initial success, but I quickly realized that the companies I was working with didn t have access to their websites. Everything was in HTML and nobody could actually go in and make implementations of my SEO recommendations. I went back to my experience with Joomla and WordPress and started to work on web development. That was just a means to be able to get the SEO out there that I needed to for the small businesses. I quickly fell in love with the WordPress community and dove in. We started creating custom themes and development, and then when Genesis came out we jumped on the Genesis bandwagon and it s been a great ride ever since. Brian Gardner: It s funny how many stories start with, “How I became an entrepreneur online more out of need than want.” Not many people have the luxury of saying, I just think I m going to wake up and one day I m going to start this. It s really, “I got fired,” or “I had to leave my job,” or, “My husband lost a job and so I had to basically figure out how to make money online.” It sounds like your story is somewhat that way. Sometimes it s also health-related and things like that. thank you for sharing that. It s encouraging to other people to hear how that type of thing gets started. Rebecca Gill: I always joke that I m the accidental entrepreneur. My husband jokes that I can usually slip and fall but I always end up smelling like roses at the end, and I think this is a good example of that. Lauren Mancke: Running a small business isn t always easy, what are some of the things that you struggle with? Rebecca Gill: I think, for me, my biggest struggle is a mental struggle, because I now have an agency and I hadn t planned in having an agency. I spend a lot of time on operations and worrying about payroll and receivables and things like that, checking on projects. That s all things that I don t like. I would rather be doing SEO consulting and training and marketing and sales, because that s really what makes me happy. I think if I were to say what is my struggle, that s the biggest struggle. That I don t get to focus on what I really want to focus on and where I know I m really good. I have to focus on these other things. That can be a mental challenge that you just have to overcome and push through daily. Brian Gardner: For me in StudioPress back in the day — I think at the core that all comes down to that struggle and how it affects us mentally. It’s sometimes related to our inabilities to let go off control. When we as independent people start something and do it all on our own, obviously it comes to a point where we need to scale and get bigger. With that comes the pain of doing things that we don t want to do. For me it was support — as much as I love working with people, it just got to a point where I couldn t work 85 hours a week. You have to entrust people — as you have, and have done successfully. Start to grow the company and entrust those responsibilities to other people so that you don t become a nut case. That s what I had to do. You know what I mean? Rebecca Gill: That s so true. Brian Gardner: Genesis — let s go right into this because you were one of the big, popular, most known Genesis agencies, along with Brian and Jennifer Bourn. Talk us through how Genesis came into your picture. Rebecca Gill: I actually tried the beta version of it. When it didn t have trial themes. I created a website that is still out there today, that is using that original version. That was me going in –that was still when it was me hacking themes and customizing myself, which I shouldn t be doing. I m not allowed to do that anymore. I had a familiarity with it, but then Chris Cree, who you mentioned earlier — when you came out with the real Genesis framework and the trial themes, he said, We need to start using this. He explained to me how we can have a base trial theme of the things that I like and we can use that as our box that we are going to play in. We started with it and I quickly found that it was just such a good path for us. Not only do you all produce really good code and a great framework for us to work within, it creates a box for my team where we have a set of best practices and standards. We’re all beating at the same drum. I think that from agency owner’s perspective that s really invaluable to me. Plus, I just know that my clients — somebody has got their back besides me. If I get hit by a train — or whatever reason Web Savvy goes away — I know they have you and they ve got the Genesis community that can pick right up where we left off. That makes me really happy. We made that decision early on, jointly with me and Chris. We ve never strayed from it and I ve never regretted it. Brian Gardner: That s music to our ears, right, Lauren? Lauren Mancke: Definitely. Rebecca Gill: I m a Genesis cheerleader, I can t help it. Brian Gardner: We like those. Empowerment in Training Others Lauren Mancke: Aside from the general services you offer. I heard you ve gotten recently into training. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Rebecca Gill: I ve actually been doing group training since 1995. First it was an operational training. My first job out of college I was an Operations Manager. Then, when I worked for the ERP Software Company, I was doing training for the user base. I d go onsite for five days and walk people through the setup of the system and talk about everything from bill of materials and manufacturing production lines through the general ledger and accounting. That s been in my blood. I haven t done it for years because I ve been so busy building up the agency, just with the daily to-dos. We ve got a really good project manager now who manages all of our custom developments. That s freed me up so that I could go back to training and start really using my SEO education and sharing that. The reason I ve been doing it is because, from an SEO standpoint, it s a lot of labor. There is only so much of me to go around and I only have so many hours in the week. I don t want to be working those 85 hours that Brian mentioned. I ve been starting to do more and more training — both in the course and then with the boot camp — so we can really spread that education and empower people. Let them have that education so they can have a long-term path. Honestly, I love it. It s like Chris creating the support forum, he loves that and I love training. You just empower people and you make them happy. The light bulb goes off and they are thrilled with that. Then you know that you ve given them a foundation that they’re taking forward with them. Brian Gardner: When I started StudioPress, training was definitely not something on my radar. Only because — like I said earlier — I was so busy trying to keep up with the creation, the ideas. This even was before Genesis, back in the days of Revolution. I was just creating the product and micro-training in the sense of writing tutorials and things like that. For me it never clicked, there was never that, Hey, you should do paid training. That s basically a way to scale your time because you can create something and then charge for it and then build that out. Not until StudioPress merged into Copyblogger did I really understand. Back then, Teaching Sells was our big training thing. I realized very quickly that there was a lot of opportunity, just in general, across the Internet space for training. You see places like Lynda.com and stuff like that now. It seems like everyone’s doing training. That s interesting. On your website, you have a dedicated section to SEO consulting. As you mentioned, you like to teach, you like to do SEO, and folks can hire you to do SEO consultant. In fact, I just recommended you within the Genesis Facebook group. Someone asked about SEO. They lost their SEO person. I don t know if they contacted you or not, hopefully they did. Let s talk about what got you interested in SEO. From a web standpoint, from a design and development it’s less appealing. It s that almost taboo word where people are too afraid to even mess with it because they’re not sure what it is or how to do it. It s easy to make something pretty and put it online, but as I ve always said, a well-designed website without traffic is a well-designed website without traffic. Talk to us about SEO and how that came into your life from an important standpoint, and just a little bit about the consulting that you do. Rebecca Gill: My background with SEO was at my prior job where I was the head of marketing. We didn t have a big marketing budget, and I taught myself SEO because I was in the marketing department. I competed against people like SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle — really large organizations that had teams of marketing people and teams of SEO people. I quickly learned that that team environment was very fragmented and they didn t have a good structure. If I could just learn and apply I could beat them and get on page one. I grew the sales that we brought in from the Internet — it became our lead source and the majority of our sales. We grew the company 400% in two years. When you are selling a $100,000 product, that s a lot, that s a huge shift. To me that was empowerment. I really fell in love with SEO then, because I realized how much control you have over things and how much good you can do when you just work hard and do the right thing in the right path. That really got me set. I had SEO on our website for a while but then I pulled it back because I didn t have time to do it. I was so busy with custom work that I didn t have time to work on the projects. Again, bringing Mary back on with project management — it’s freed some of my time up so that I can do consulting projects with people. Now we do a mix of both. From an SEO project standpoint, I will work through the project with you — keyword research, sitemapping, down to optimizing your content. We also do customized boot camps on-site for SEO, blogging, and social media. Now we ve got the courses that we re offering at diyseocourses.com, as well as the seobootcamp.com, which is our new in-person training in a group setting in Dallas. We ve evolved it, and it s really my effort of trying to help as many people as I can and teach them the right way to do things. I don t want to everything for everybody because I don t think that that s good for them long term, but I want to teach and I want to train. That s the heart of our SEO. Even when we’re doing a project with somebody, I m not going to just do everything for you. I m educating you along the way with best practices and the right way to do things, so when I m gone you can take that forward and continue on your path and have good success. Brian Gardner: That s like the whole “teach a man to fish and he eats forever” type of thing. The Facebook group — when someone says, I lost my SEO, if they’re not taught good SEO or at the very least, the fundamentals of what the person that hired them to do has done, then they feel completely lost. Like this person probably says, Oh my gosh, my person fell off the radar,” or they closed their business or whatever, “What will I do? The services that you offer — it s great that you teach them at least the basics. That way, if something would happen to you, God forbid, they don t feel completely in the dark. They can at least take that and try to apply it towards the stuff that they produce there in the future. Rebecca Gill: One of the questions that I ask people — it s an onboarding question when I first get an inquiry in about SEO — I always ask them, “Have you hired an SEO consultant in the past and what did they do for you?” You would be surprised at how many people have hired somebody and it s not just one, it s two or four or five at different stages through their business, but they have no idea what the SEO company did. They don t know what they were doing behind the scenes, if they were doing anything. Every time I hear that — and it s like 80% of the time I get that response — it makes me sick to my stomach. That s like the guy in Facebook. He may not even know what his SEO person was doing, if they were doing anything. It s tainted the SEO industry and the consultants. There’s a lot of really good SEO consultants, but there’s a lot of less aboveground people that are really doing high-quality work, telling their client what they are doing, and showing them what they are doing and educating along the way, which is the way it really should be. Lauren Mancke: That s true, that there’s a lot of stereotypes in the SEO world. You say on your website that you have a more holistic approach. What does that mean? A Holistic Approach to SEO Rebecca Gill: For us, I m not going to just do for you. We’re going to take you in the process from start to finish and you’re going to learn along the way. Whether I m doing a consulting project, whether you’re taking my course — which is 8 hours and, I think, 65 lessons — or whether you are doing our boot camp. Holistic, to me, is we first start with your target market, we define who that is and who you are selling to, and what are their pain points and what solution you offer. That kind of information. We look at your competitors. You do research. From that research, now you ve got some data that you can start to plan and start to strategize. Then as you work through that, now it s under education. Then you look at analysis to see what worked and what didn t work. You go back and you rinse and you repeat. That s about keyword research and sitemapping and investigating competitors, auditing your content in your existing site, down to writing the really good content that s going to be good for the user and optimizing it. Then, off page, link building and things like that. Unfortunately, a lot of old-school SEO consultants still focus on link building. That s their primary focus because they can control that themselves and they don t need the client involved. They can do it all on their own, so they say, That s what you’re paying me for. That s the wrong approach in today s world of Google and Bing. You have to have holistic. You have to have the user, the website visitor at the forefront of your objectives and goals to make sure that they’re happy. Because if they’re happy, that makes the search engines happy, and the search engines will reward you with more traffic. When I say holistic, it s a full circle from start to finish. With, again, education along the way, because I want people empowered. Brian Gardner: Before I get to my next question, I want to go back. You ve said these phrases a couple of times now, and I want our listeners to understand. You said, keyword research and sitemapping in particular. Let s do a quick definition of a what each of those are just to give them an idea, for those who don t know. Rebecca Gill: A lot of people, when you talk to them they will write a piece of content and throw it up in the web, which is great. I wrote the rant I had the other day about SEO, but before I actually posted that I did some keyword research to see what phrases would relate to that so I could utilize that within the post and optimize it. That s one form of keyword research, and that s the shortest version. The other version is really doing a full plan to say, “What is a phrase or multiple phrases that people might search to reach my site or my blog?” What are they searching for, whether it s their pain points or it s solutions or it s people — going through analysis. You start with a seed list. You generate your seed list. You come up with all of your potential possibilities that you think. Then you look at your competitors and you learn from them. You do things like you look at Google auto-suggest and related searches and you add that. Now you go to keyword tools to see what volumes and what other variations you can have. Then you look at that and you compare that to your existing site and what your future content may hold. You start mapping one keyword or phrase to a particular piece of content. That s the sitemapping part. That part is not a quick process. It takes weeks to do it if you are doing it right, because it s data, it s analysis, and it s research. That s the part everybody skips. They just go and they jump to content, and they may or may not have a keyword for the content. Or, worse yet — and I hear this from mid-market companies, which is a dagger through my heart — they say, We look at the website as a whole. Our website is optimized for X, Y and Z. But they never actually assign it to content. What the problem with that is, is when you’re doing that you’re asking the search engines to decide which piece of content is the best one for a given phrase. That s the wrong approach. Keep a simple form, don t make them think. Make it easy for the search engines to find the exact right page or post or product for a given phrase. There is no question if they know this piece of content on your website is the best piece of content for this phrase. That s the whole purpose of keyword research and sitemapping, is to do that. Once you get yourself into that process you ll never leave it, because you ll realize it just makes common sense. You’re doing what s right for the visitor as well as the search engines and it helps you win in the end. Brian Gardner: Not only does it make common sense, it s probably something that bears fruit, too. I think the way you explained SEO probably resembles to some degree the idea of — and this is a great time for us to talk about it because the Olympics are going on — it sounds like SEO … There is a lot of training in a lot of endurance in things like that where you have to do the right steps. You can t just hop off a couch and run. You have to eat well. You have to sleep well. You have to train well. To some degree, it sounds like you can cut corners in SEO but then you just won t run as far and things like that. Rebecca Gill: Correct, and it s short-lived. The one problem that I see all the time on people s website is you ask them and they say, My focus keyword is X, Y, and Z.” You say, Okay, tell me what piece of content on your website is reflective of that. They either give you 10 or they have no idea. That s the same problem with the search engines. They are not going to know either. If you do and it s short term — you’re trying to build a long-term plan for yourself, your visitors, and the search engines. The more research and planning you put into that and more due diligence at the front of the process, the more results you have and the longer your results are going to sustain. There are still people sitting on page one of Google for highly competitive phrases that I helped optimize eight years ago. That s because they did it the right way and they had the planning before the actual execution. Brian Gardner: House built on solid rock versus house built on sand? Rebecca Gill: Yes. It s hard to get people to do that because they want to rush ahead. They want to see that end fruit and they want to just plow ahead. It’s like, No, no, no. You’re pulling the reins back and not letting them do it. Sometimes I feel like I’ve got to lock them in a cage and say, No we’re not doing that. Lauren Mancke: I had a client one time ask us to call Google. They wanted us to call them and get them on the front page. Rebecca Gill: Isn t that funny? There is consultants that promise that. That say, I know Google, I know exactly what the algorithm is. That s BS, you don t. You don t know people at Google. Just because Matt Cutts may have tweeted you five years ago doesn t mean you know people. You surely don t know the algorithms. You may suspect elements of the algorithms and what factors are, and you may have learned something through trial-and-error, but you don t know precisely every single algorithm, and you’re supposed to because the search engines don t want you to. The 3 Most Important Elements of SEO Lauren Mancke: For people that are a little bit overwhelmed when it comes to SEO — they hear the phrase and they are just like, I don t even know where to begin. Can you break it down into the three most important elements of SEO? Rebecca Gill: My three most important would be keyword research, sitemapping, and then high-quality content. Granted, there is a lot that falls underneath each of those, but those are the buckets. I ve structured my online course to have that. You start with basics, then you go to keyword research, the next segment is sitemapping, the next segment is content, and then you have the gravy that is the offsite stuff. If you skip those three blocks you are going to never succeed. Because the offsite activity that people want to do is pointing to a bunch of garbage that s gobbledygook that the search engines can t understand. The offsite that you’re doing will never help unless you ve got that core foundation set. Brian Gardner: We talked about keyword research, and you also mentioned how you got your clients on page one of Google eight years ago. It reminds me back to eight years ago — remember the shoe money days and all of that stuff? I want to be very specific , keyword research is not the same thing as keyword stuffing, which is something that back in the day — people don t even know what that is anymore because it s so archaic in a sense. This was back when Google actually cared about the keywords that you would put into the post meta that would show up in the source heading. Google finally said, People are obviously stuffing keywords by trying to cram them in and make every other word ‘jewelry,’ ‘diamonds,’ and stuff like that, to try to whatever. Even back in the day — Rebecca and Lauren, you guys probably both remember — I think I even tried this at one point, where at the bottom of your page you would write a bunch of keywords and then change the font color to white so no one would see it. Google finally got smart enough to realize that that would — and they would then penalize you. There was actually a non-benefit to doing something like that. It reminds of all of the black hat tactics that would be used by either people who didn t know any better or people who were just following like sheep the people who said, Hey, this black hat stuff works. How to Avoid Risky Black Hat Tactics Brian Gardner: You, Rebecca, you’re stand up. You certainly prefer to keep your hat white. What are the points of establishing a I guess this goes along with the three most important elements of SEO that we just talked about. The encouragement to do it the right way. To keep your hat white, which is what s called white hat SEO, which basically means you are just doing it the right way. You are not trying to trick the system. I m assuming you are an advocate of that and you would encourage anyone who is trying to really invest in SEO to do that, right? Rebecca Gill: Yes. First, your point of the hidden keywords at the bottom and the meta keywords in the source code stuffed with just a bunch of words — I still encounter that every single week with prospects or clients. You called it old school. You know it s old school, I know it s old school, but people still do it today. There’s still that philosophy that that s what works, but it doesn t. If you break down white hat SEO to this: to be successful in search you have to make the search engines happy. Let s take Google, for example. What is their goal? Their goal is to make money. They are a for-profit company. They sell ads, they have other products, but that s their goal. The only way they’re going to do that is if they keep people happy. People come to the search engines, they search for something, they get good results that take them to a good website or blog that answers their question. If you veer off from that and you don t pay attention to the actual user and the visitor to your website and keeping them happy, you are not going to be successful with the search engines because you are not helping them be successful. That s white hat. It s focusing on your visitor. Writing content for the visitor. Making sure that it s fast, it got great performance, it s designed well so it s easier to read and the site flows. Keeping that visitor happy will make the search engines happy, because that visitor will come back to the search engines and use them again. White hat is focusing on that. That s your primary goal. When you start to look at any of the cheats — any time you start to want to manipulate the search engines with quick link building or hiding that text or keyword stuffing or having five pages of the same content with just slightly varied keyword-focused phrases — none of that s going to work. That s all black hat, and the search engines are way too smart for that today. They’re putting more emphasis on bounce rates and click-through rates. That tells us that they are moving even further ahead with a focus on the user experience. Brian Gardner: One thing we didn t talk about with black hat SEO is — I m sure you ve encountered this too — some of these SEO consultants that we ll call black hat, not only are they trying to trick Google and the search engines into stuff that benefits the client. They actually go — I don t even know if it s a blacker SEO or blacker hat SEO, where they would actually go in and try to manipulate the results so that it benefits them as the SEO consultant. In other words, they are stuffing these words at the bottom of the page that may link to their website, which is even worse than trying to do it for the client. They are actually trying to mooch off of that themselves. That s just definitely not a thing that should be happening. It s obviously something that when folks hire SEO consultants like you they really should find someone that they can trust, find someone that has been referred to by them as a successful, holistic, white hat SEO type of consultant. Even if that means pay the extra money, because you do go get what you pay for at times. Let s shift this a little bit away from the technicalities of SEO. For our listeners, who many of which are just starting out on the web. Maybe we call them the DIY-types where they are just trying to get online and just start. They’re not ready yet to hire an SEO consultant in all of that. You believe that great SEO begins well before the website goes live, right? Which means you have to plan before you even just launch? Rebecca Gill: Yes. If we’re doing a custom development project with a small urban market company, for example, and the project includes both SEO and design and then the buildout in WordPress, we don t even start design until we work first on SEO. Going through research, planning and sitemapping and talking about their website personas and mapping the paths for the website that the users are going to take. Then, after we go through all of that, now is when we actually start the design process with the graphic designer. After the things are built out and content is going in, we come back and optimize again, but that design phase doesn t even start yet. I think that that s a mistake that a lot of people make. They look for a theme that makes them happy as opposed to saying, What do I need? What does my visitor need? What kind of content do I need to display? What visitor paths do they have? Then looking for a theme that matches that. They jump ahead. So you get those questions from people and email all the time, and I m sure you guys do too is, “What theme should I pick?” I don t know what theme you should pick. I don t know enough about your content and your personas and your visitor flows and your paths and your objectives to be able to pick a theme for you. That s a process. It should be a process. I think that those are the steps that you need to do before a launch, as opposed to launching a pretty site and then adding in SEO after the fact. That s the wrong path and it creates extra work and a lot of delays and a lot of frustration. Lauren Mancke: I definitely agree with the content-first mentality when it comes to design. I run into that issue all the time with people of stressing how we need to go through the content first because they think that that s just an afterthought, which is definitely not the case. What are some other common mistakes you see businesses and bloggers making? Long-term SEO Strategies Rebecca Gill: I think a big one with SEO is expecting immediate results. It doesn t happen. Can you get immediate results within a week or two for a long tail keyword? Yes. Can you get it for something that s competitive with 20,000 searches per month? No. That s going to take time to work up and build and you have to be really focused. I encourage people to have a couple of those, three to five of those high value phrases and know that it s going to take time to build up. That s definitely one mistake. Skipping the research and the planning phase is a huge mistake as well because, like I said, people want to jump ahead and they’re eager. That s just the wrong way to go. I think the last one, I would say, is outsourcing everything. Don t outsource everything, educate yourself. Read high-quality blogs. Take an online course. Educate yourself on the process and then hire someone to help you execute that. In that way, you are knowledgeable, you know who you’re hiring and whether or not they have a good approach to SEO and whether they are solid. That way you ll have success today and success five years from now. Like I said, eight years from now they are still sitting on Google, even though they may not even be doing anything. Brian Gardner: Dictionary Brian jumping back in. You mentioned a phrase that I want to go over because this is huge. I think another one of the mistakes is people focus on these keyword phrases that are just too broad. You brought up the term “long tail search.” I know what means and I ve gone into my own analytics and seen the effect of long tail search. It s changed the way I — whether it s on StudioPress or the Copyblogger stuff that I write or even my own blog — I try to change how I m trying to write and which words I m trying to write for because I see the benefit of long tail search. Can you explain to our listeners what long tail search is? Rebecca Gill: Sure. When you look at the keywords, you ve got really broad, which in our case would be design. You could be designing anything. You could be designing diapers, or a car, or a website, it s too broad. Now you go into the next category which is more focused, which is website design. Much more focused, although that is still kind of broad because it could be website design in Joomla or Drupal or small business or enterprise. Now go a little bit more focused, which is WordPress website design. Now, from a service page that s a great keyword, because it is your target market, it s what you do. It s going to drive conversions when they actually hit the website. A long tail, which would be more usually focused on a blogpost, could be a problem that someone is having and it could relate to a plugin for a specific function. That s a long tail search. It s very precise, it s very focused. Those are much easier to win on and have success with than something that s very broad like design or web design. What people usually forget is you don t want design. You don t want web design because a lot of those aren t going to convert. You want specific to what you do so the traffic you are getting is precisely focused on your offering and how you can help them. That s really going after that long tail and making sure that you’re providing very focused value to your visitors. That s what leads to success with conversions. Brian Gardner: Not that I particularly care for conversions, especially with this blogpost that I wrote. But an example of the difference between a broad term and more of a long tail search term is a post on my blog where I wrote about my experience buying a MacBook Pro — how I returned my thirteen inch MacBook Air for a Mac Book Pro with retina display. I certainly don t get traffic when people type in “MacBook Pro.” I get a ton of traffic when people search derivatives of how much does a MacBook Pro weigh, which is a much longer term. I will get zero hits. In fact, I probably won t even be on the first 100 pages of Google for something as generic as “MacBook Pro.” But when you write something, and again, there was no intention here. I had no intention of trying to capture traffic or do anything with it. It was just to share a story. When you write something that s a little bit more — maybe answers a question. When you think of writing something, write out in your mind, “What would people Google for?” When you type in, “How much does a MacBook Pro weigh?” I come out, I think I m number one in Google. I might even be in the snippet that shows up at the very top now for that particular question. Start to think about that when you write your content, unless your site is extremely authoritative and gets a lot of Google juice. You may have to bank on the fact that the long tail search type of thing will bring more traffic in the long run. Rebecca Gill: It really adds up. People always want to go after that high volume, that 20,000 searches a month. Guess what? You end up sitting on page 100 in Google and no one ever sees you. Even if you’re on page 3 people rarely see you. But if you take 10 long tail phrases that each have 50 searches per month, that adds up quickly. Now, not only do you have 500 visitors coming, they are very targeted to what you do. It s in your benefit to focus on the long tail. It s easier for you. It converts better. It s easier to win. And it overall will make everybody happy. Brian Gardner: Rebecca, you mentioned a little bit earlier in passing, SEO boot camp. It s something that you just recently that came out with. I m going to do a direct pitch for our audience. I have a question: Have you ever wondered why your online marketing efforts haven t been successful? Learn the right way to do SEO with Rebecca from Web Savvy Marketing, along with other friends of ours, Carrie Dils who will be on a future episode, as well as Coy Miller of iThemes, who is a friend of mine and also will be on a future episode here at StudioPress FM. Jumpstart your website by attending their SEO boot camp conference on January 11th through 13th, 2017 in Dallas, Texas. If you want more information on that you can check it out at seobootcamp.com. If you like what you heard on today’s show, you can find more episodes of StudioPress FM at — you guessed it — StudioPress.FM. You can also help Lauren and I hit the main stage by subscribing to our show on iTunes. It s a great way to never ever miss an episode. Thanks for listening, and we ll see you next week.

Today on this shared episode WP-Tonic & Timelines we have Rebecca Gill from Commerce Township Michigan. She is the founder and president of Web Savvy Marketing, a website, and SEO agency. Now this is an unusual episode so go on over to WP-Tonic.Com and TimelinesNetcast.com, and you will find a slew of bonus content material to include two new YouTube clips but for now let's get right into this podcast with Rebecca Gills. Sign up this week and get the "Basic Course" for Netcasting for free. Go to http://podcastershome.com/launch/ and sign up.

Today on this shared episode WP-Tonic & Timelines we have Rebecca Gill from Commerce Township Michigan. She is the founder and president of Web Savvy Marketing, a website, and SEO agency. Now this is an unusual episode so go on over to WP-Tonic.Com and TimelinesNetcast.com, and you will find a slew of bonus content material to include two new YouTube clips but for now let’s get right into this podcast with Rebecca Gill.   Read more from our conversation with Rebecca Gill at: https://www.wp-tonic.com/podcast/088-wordpress-seo-search-engine-optimization/   ==================   WP-Tonic is not only a WordPress support and maintenance service, but we publish a twice weekly WordPress podcast where we talk with some of the brightest minds in WordPress development, web design, business, and online marketing.

In this WP-Tonic live episode we have a special guest Rebecca Gill, the President & Founder of Web Savvy Marketing. Rebecca talks from her commend center someway from deep Detroit, Michigan. We also have our normal great panel members from the WordPress community. We talk about all things connected to WordPress and SEO, plus we discuss how a user choices a good quality WordPress themes.   =================   WP-Tonic is not only a WordPress support and maintenance service, but we publish a twice weekly, top-rated WordPress podcast where we talk with some of the brightest minds in WordPress development, web design, business, and online marketing.  

It’s a sticky question with no easy answer. It’s also a question we get before we even know much about a project. Our goal today is to arm you with the information you need to get the right answer for your needs and to find the right person to help you. Rebecca Gill is the... Listen to episode

On today’s episode of the WP Elevation Podcast, we’re chatting with Rebecca Gill. Rebecca is the founder of Web Savvy Marketing, a digital marketing firm that specializes in SEO-friendly WordPress themes. Tune in to hear Rebecca detail her journey from the ward of the state to accomplished WordPress entrepreneur. She also sheds light on building a successful team, the importance of communicating with clients, her unique business model for WordPress support, and more on episode 96 of the WP Elevation Podcast.

Crowd Favorite CEO Karim Marrucchi and Web Savvy Marketing owner Rebecca Gill join me to discuss the balancing act of meeting present needs while taking risks for long-term business growth.

Rebecca Gill is the founder and president of Web Savvy Marketing. She has a well-rounded business background and over fifteen years of experience in sales and online marketing. Her love for WordPress website design and her strong belief in the user experience is equally matched by her fascination with search engine optimization, blogging, and marketing […] The post Episode 081: Accidental Entrepreneur appeared first on DradCast.

Joined by WordPress Ecommerce Rockstars Cory Miller (iThemes), Daniel Espinoza (WooCommerce), and Justin Sainton (WP Ecommerce), plus Genesis theme shop guru, Rebecca Gill.

A lot of the entrepreneurs I've interviewed started in the last economic downturn of 2008. So that got me thinking, is WordPress recession proof? WordPress services can be sliced and diced in many ways. It's not creating “work” that's the hard part, it's finding the right vertical. Rebecca Gill of Web Savvy Marketing joins us to share what it was like starting out in the recession, finding a niche and building an awesome virtual team. Interview with Rebecca Gill of Web Savvy Marketing Watch on YouTube Listen to the audio version Matt Report - A WordPress podcast for digital business owners Episode 28: Is WordPress recession proof? Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / Subscribe Share RSS Feed Share Link Embed Download file | Play in new window Recessions, niches and teams — oh my! Can we say AWESOME interview? Rebecca shares a ton of great info about her journey as a WordPress entrepreneur. If you're just starting your business or you're a seasoned veteran, you're going to get a lot of great info out of this one. It seems a lot of great WordPress companies came out of the recession. Folks like Cory Miller and Rebecca saw great opportunity and growth and dove in head first when the rest of the world was running away. These economic swings are like huge reset buttons. You will hear people say no one is spending money, but that's just wrong. When one door closes another opens. They might not be spending money on the “usual” products and services but now is the time to offer an alternative. WordPress was and is poised to do just that. Offer up a complete solution for any size business at any budget  with a community to see it forward. When did you start your business? What was your biggest challenge? Let me know in the comments! Friendly reminder Hey, I'm on iTunes and if you love the show — I'd love a review! Head on over to The MattReport on iTunes ★ Support this podcast ★

A lot of the entrepreneurs I’ve interviewed started in the last economic downturn of 2008. So that got me thinking, is WordPress recession proof? WordPress services can be sliced and diced in many ways. It’s not creating “work” that’s the hard part, it’s finding the right vertical. Rebecca Gill of Web Savvy Marketing joins us to share what it was like starting out in the recession, finding a niche and building an awesome virtual team. (more…)