We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Meg Casebolt. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Meg below.
Meg, appreciate you joining us today. Do you have any key partners or vendors – if so, how’d you find them and start working with them?
My SEO business is based almost entirely on referrals. In fact, I didn’t even intend to start an SEO business, but the referral opportunities were so obvious that it guided my whole business model!
At first, I was a website designer. I joined a small group mastermind specifically for other designers, so we could talk about proposals, client acquisition, marketing, systemization, etc. And during a hot seat call, I asked, “How do you all balance the technical skills of website design with the SEO strategy?”
And the whole group, including the mastermind facilitator, shared that they wished they had a better solution–one of them even said, “I wish I had somebody that I could partner with for all my projects, someone I could trust to do high-quality research on time with meddling with my design.”
And I realized that I wanted the opposite — I wanted to be able to do the research without needing to debate with my clients about “Well, I think that green color is just a little TOO green, don’t you think?”
And thus, Love At First Search was born! That mastermind of designers were my first strategic partners, and then my network expanded to include copywriters, bloggers, business coaches and marketing strategists.
Although I have multiple podcasts + a YouTube channel … nearly all my qualified leads still come directly from the designers, developers and writers who are also working on client websites. I have some referral partners that I’ve been working with for over a decade!
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
When I get introduced to potential clients, they often hesitate about investing in SEO services. It’s a marketing strategy that can seem incredibly overwhelming — some teachers can get overly technical in their explanations and my clients don’t understand the jargon. Some SEO agencies have also developed reputations for charging high fees without proven results. And it’s an industry that’s regularly changing (just like any strategy based on an algorithm), so strategies that worked 10 years ago often shift and then people panic because “SEO is dead.”
So a lot of what I do is to explain to my clients how to show up in search results (like Google, YouTube, Search GPT, podcasts, etc) in common language, and developing plans for how to change your copy, images, and code in order to make it easier for Google to understand and more relevant to the questions that your ideal clients are asking.
My business model is often different, too, because I provide keyword-based strategy WITHOUT doing the hands-on implementation or requesting a monthly retainer. Sometimes I partner with web designers, developers & copywriters, since they’re already making updates to the websites without needing another set of hands coming in to mess things up! And sometimes I work directly with clients, without the designer/writer middleman, to explain how to re-write their own copy and update their own information.
Using this approach takes more time & energy than just logging into the websites and making changes myself … but it also means that more people are learning the “how to” of SEO, which feels like a much more empowering, sustainable approach to marketing versus always needing to hire somebody else to make edits!
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
I used to think that I had to do a LOT of marketing for people to trust I was successful … especially because I teach/offer SEO services, I thought I had to ‘put my money where my mouth is’ and show up in SEO search results to prove that i could do it!
So I started a YouTube channel AND did a lot of webinars AND built my email list AND ran a podcast AND blogged …
And I was exhausted from all the marketing, and not all that profitable because I had a huge team to help with video editing, podcast production, etc!
Even then … most of my clients came from word of mouth.
When I needed to prove that I knew what I was doing … I Just used case studies from my clients, instead of feeling like I needed to “prove myself” with my own marketing content in an incredibly competitive field.
And I’m so relieved that I can ease off on constant production and lean more into my relationships.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
The most rewarding aspect of running my own business is the flexibility.
Every morning I get my kids on the bus at 8am and then take the dog for a walk (weather permitting — sometimes the walks are shorter in upstate New York winters!) Then at 3:30, I can open my front door and have my kids run up the driveway from the bus — an experience that i never had as a kid with two working parents (a teacher and an engineer).
I also love that I get to choose every single client I work with, and I get to decide exactly WHEN I work on their projects — setting my own work schedule and deadlines. I can adjust my workload every day, based on my energy levels (because you know some days I can focus for hours, and others after a crappy night of sleep, I need easier tasks).
Contact Info:
- Website: loveatfirstsearch.com
- Instagram: @loveatfirstsearch
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/megcasebolt/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLdWexUUZ_40SPeXvG-nJqg
Image Credits
Lori & Erin Photography