Just before midnight on a Friday in July, I got a series of excited texts from my friend and client Erica.
I was just crawling into bed and plugging in my phone when I got these, but I immediately scrambled out of bed and went straight to my desk. Check it out:
Then she sent me this screenshot:
That’s Erica’s blog post right there at spot #2 on the first page of Google for the term “be gay do crimes” (and her product image too!)!!!
Here's what she said next (my favorite part):
BECAUSE IT DOES!!!
Now, she did a whole lot more than just change the title.
But before we get into that, here's some context.
Meet Erica, artist and founder of Our Back Pockets
Erica is the founder and artist behind Our Back Pockets, a queer-celebrating art and stationary shop.
She designs and sells gender-affirming and sex-positive sticker sheets, celebratory cards that us LGBTQ+ people wish we could find in Hallmark, and apparel like this legendary Gayven hoodie (I'm not saying I want it…. but… I want it).
She's extremely passionate about the cultural meanings and traditions behind physical objects (she has a masters in Archaeology), and Our Back Pockets is all about the queer community to create our own traditions (like cards and trinkets!).
Before I met Erica, she was already creating blog posts on her site, but she was overwhelmed and confused about how to be using these blog posts to support her business (and also to not be gross and unethical/annoying and take away from the valuable content she was creating for her community).
So in May when I launched my Spark+Strategy Breakthrough Sessions, she booked her spot right away.
Here's what happened that led to these awesome results:
The Blog Post
Back in February, Erica wrote an incredibly valuable, informative post about a topic super relevant to her target audience – a meme phrase that's been surging around the queer internet recently.
She told me it was one of her favorite pieces of content from recent times.
It was about something culturally relevant and timely, she referenced the history and origins of the phrase, did loads of her own research, and she also said “I also like that it's a little bit radical, politically” (in other words, she also wove in her brand's core message).
Our Spark+Strategy Breakthrough Session
On our Spark+Strategy Breakthrough Session in May, we had an incredible call and talked about all kinds of things:
🌈 We talked about her ideal customers and how they use Google, what her brand means to them and in what moments they’re looking for or purchasing her products.
⚙️ We talked about SEO, and shifted her mindset for the role her content is playing in her customers’ lives (and her business’s bottom line).
🧠 We talked about her brain’s natural creation process, and came up with a clear content creation process and routine for her to create meaningful content regularly in a way that works for her brain.
Optimizing the post based on our session
When we were talking about SEO on our call, I used this post as an example, walking her through some of the things she should pay attention to when she optimizes her content for SEO and for Human readers on the internet (her background is in academia, so there were some big shifts here for her).
(In her texts she mentioned changing the title, but she did a lot more than that)
She made changes to the content based on what I told her, and within 2 weeks, it shot up the Google results pages to the #2 spot.
Me being a huge nerd, as soon as she told me this, I had to run to my desk to check my SEO tool for more data and details.
Here's the numbers:
The keyword “be gay do crimes” gets approximately 6.6k searches per month in the US, and she's in spot #2.
The keyword “be gay do crime” gets about 5.5k searches per month in the US, and she's in spot #4.
That’s 12,100 people every month (in the US alone!) who are seeing Erica’s brand as an authority on queer culture, and her art that they’re seeing first thing when they search.
PLUS she scooped up a spot on the first page for 8 smaller related keywords, like “be gay do crime meme” and “be gay do crimes origin” (and I'm betting she'll scoop up more of these over time)
AND she’s even been cited in the Wiki page about the phrase! (one of only TWO sources!!! That’s how authoritative she’s now being seen by the internet!)
Then I saw what it did for her traffic:
The picture I sent her is hard to see (it's a photo of my laptop screen 😬 what can I say, it was midnight), but here’s the skinny:
That’s her site’s estimated traffic per month for the last year based on what keywords she ranks for and where she ranks.
You can see it’s pretty flatline for the whole year, until about the last week of June (about 3 weeks after our Spark+Strategy Breakthrough Session).
That’s when it jumped up to about 400. Then by mid July, it skyrocketed up to about 1000.
All from optimizing this one blog post.
Erica basically went through the core process I teach in literally every resource I create about SEO:
Create the content you want to create*, then optimize it for SEO and the internet.
*(content that’s relevant to your business and your ideal audience too. I don’t just mean create content willy nilly about totally random topics, of course. Just, you know, to clarify 😜 )
She immediately booked a follow up consultation to talk more about other content she can create, what else she can do for her SEO, and what to do with all this visibility and traffic now that she’s getting it!
SEO really does work. Yes, even for you.
You don’t have to be a big content production team or have a big marketing budget or publish every single day.
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