I fell into S E o completely by accident. I graduated from college in 2000, and most people didn't even know what s e awas at that point in time. But I took a job working with, um, what would later become art dot com and helping them with their affiliate program. And the affiliates needed help creating websites and getting them ranked on Google so that they could drive sales to the company.Oh, just luck. Really? I was in the right place the right time. Ah, lot. Uh, from our dot com. I ended up getting hired with an agency. Locally, Raleigh, North Carolina is where I live, which is on the East Coast in the US, And I just had the good fortune to go in an interview for a position as an account manager with somebody who was very well known in S E O at the time. And, uh, that was great, because I got to meet a lot of great people. And so I'd began networking and building my my career from their work for a couple of other agencies. And then in 2011 I decided to just give this a try on my own and see if I could do it.

biggest challenges were definitely more administrative. Figuring out how to do billing and how toe Make sure that the company was protected in terms of any kind of lawsuits or anything like that. Buying insurance, um, paying taxes, all of those kind of administrative things that you don't really think about when you think, Hey, I'm going to go out and do S e o for a bunch of people on done. Of course, there's just the developing a pipeline and getting people interested in in the services that you offer. I was really fortunate in that I got a lot of referrals just to start my business. Um, so that was not as big an issue for me. But I think that, you know, networking is incredibly key in this industry. Go to the conference is get to know people, um, hang out on Twitter, um, and and really get to be part of the community because there's plenty of work to go around. There's there's plenty of competition, but there's plenty of work to go around. So, um, once you get to know people and they know that you know what you're doing and that you're a good person, then a lot of times they'll just refer work to you.I just kind of started learning how toe balance my time. Um, this first few months of working for yourself just there 24 7. and so it took. I would say more than a few months, probably more like a couple of years. But I eventually figured out how to kind of balance home life and work life and make sure that I was giving equal attention to both.

Yeah, definitely. Um, there is a ton of great S e o tools out there. Um, so as far a software programs, there's so many that I could name. But to that I use on an absolute daily basis, are on crawl and rank ranger on crawls, a great crawling tool that shows you how all the pages fit together on the website and identifies any kind of warnings or technical issues that you need to address and then rank Ranger does a great job of monitoring where you're performing in search, where you're listed on the search engines and what you can do. Thio improve those Another tool that is, uh, just a given any S E o, especially when starting out should have this tool. And that's screaming frog. It's, um, 149 either $149 or 149 euros or something per year. So it's a very small investment, but it's a huge time saver in terms of understanding how websites work