I am sure you will be shocked to find out that I have been a bit of a computer nerd for a long time.
In the mid to late 90’s the internet started being a place where people were looking for services and the company I worked for did not have a website. Being a giant nerd I decided to learn web design and so I bought some web design templates and basically backwards engineered it to create a website. I bought the domain 4afastloan.com (its embarrassing by today’s standards) and put my website up. Before getting into SEO I was a loan officer, I was the guy submitting 1003 forms getting appraisals and calculating debt to income ratios to help people get a mortgage. Pretty quickly I got my first loan inquiry from it and I was hooked. It was not long before my fellow loan officers were trying to figure out how I had so many more leads than they did.
As the internet grew competitors started getting their own websites and I had to stay ahead of the competition if I did not want my website to sink into oblivion. I started reading all of the information on the early webmaster forums and IRC about what to do. I tried to avoid the more disreputable ways of ranking, I never did the text in white at the bottom to make it rank I always thought that was just tacky. But as the years went on my employer got their own website so I started doing the SEO on their site and dropped my website in 2004.
In 2008 I decided that I would rather do SEO full time and boy was my timing good. I was fortunate to be recruited to work for Chet Holmes a sales and marketing guru who was a big believer in education based marketing. Chet also encouraged us to have our own SEO Company on the side which was really amazing of him. He knew that we would bring that knowledge that we gained into his company but many bosses would never allow freelancing on the side. So I did both my own company and worked for Chet until Chet passed away. Because of this I was in an excellent position to turn my firm into something special.
The biggest benefit of having worked for Chet was that I really learned a lot about education based marketing and business growth strategies. I learned the value of not just showing up where the customer will be but to have the important information for them to review. To answer all of their questions before they even knew to ask them. How to show that you are the expert in your field, something far too many business owners just do not ever try to show. We want to get you to the top of the search results and help you convert those people in the start of the decision process into customers.