Real life business owners explain their Digital Marketing secrets.
Dom Kimber is an SEO copywriter based on the Sunshine Coast, not only did she build her own website but she grappled the Google beast, boosting her knowledge and confidence.
In the Reality SEO series I interview REAL LIFE HUMANS for who’ve transformed their businesses with simple digital marketing and SEO techniques.
With practical doable tips and advice you can implement today.
Tune in to learn:
- How Dom overcame her fear of SEO
- How Dom built her own SEO friendly website and saved big bucks
- Dom’s and Kate’s top tips on writing killer titles and meta descriptions
- Dom’s number one tip for small business owners thinking about getting started with SEO
About Dom
Dom specialises in ‘words without waffle’ and helps businesses of all shapes and sizes to make their mark in the web-world.
Whether it’s web copywriting, blogging, social media content or more, Dom knows how to create Google-friendly copy that builds your brand and connects with your audience.
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Transcript
Kate Toon: Hello, and welcome to the Recipe for SEO Success Show, and today it’s one of our special reality SEO episodes where I talk to normal humans like you and me who are DIYing their search engine optimization. And today, I have on the show the delightful Dom Kimber. Hello, Dom.
Dom Kimber: Hello.
Kate Toon: How are you?
Dom Kimber: I am good thank you. How are you doing?
Kate Toon: I’m good. It’s very good to have you here. Now, just to express to everybody that you are a real human, do you want to tell us what you do for a living and who you do it for?
Dom Kimber: Sure, so I’m an SEO copywriter, and I’m the owner of Social Swell, which is a copywriting business based on the lovely Sunshine Coast in Queensland. And-
Kate Toon: Who do you kind of work with? Or who are your typical clients?
Dom Kimber: Well, I work with businesses of all different shapes and sizes. I work with a lot of small local businesses, but I also work with some bigger national and multinational brands as well, helping them with their SEO and copy.
Kate Toon: Very lovely, and all done from that gorgeous area in Australia. If you don’t know, it’s a very, very lovely area. I got married up near there. So, it’s very nice.
Dom Kimber: Very nice.
Kate Toon: Very nice, long time ago. So, listen, the goal of these episodes is to give our listeners sort of real life examples of how SEO can be implemented. We have superstar experts on the other episodes giving kind of deep level information about schema and AMP and things like that. But often I find that it’s quite unrelatable to your everyday person. So, take me back a little bit, a couple of years ago when you first started dipping your toe in the murkey waters of SEO. What were your thoughts about search engine optimization and ranking on Google?
Dom Kimber: Honestly, when I first sort of started looking at SEO was when I first started my business as just, not as SEO copywriting business, but just as a copywriting business. I had really no idea about SEO, like many businesses starting out. And when I got my website up and running, I started to think about, “Okay, well how are people going to find me?” And I looked into this new thing called SEO that I’d never heard of before, and found that a lot of people were saying, “It’s going to cost you thousands of dollars every month,” and it was just very overwhelming. And it felt very out of reach for a small business starting up. And then I tried to do a bit of self education, looking around, reading things. And it felt like gobbledygook, most of it. Like, it was really hard to comprehend. And then, obviously, I kind of uncovered through some self education and a wonderful course that I could actually DIY myself, and that it’s not rocket science. It’s not as difficult to implement the basics as people say. In fact, it’s something that every business owner can and should be doing if they’ve got the time to do it.
Kate Toon: Yep, I think that’s really comforting to a lot of people listening because I think it’s almost … it’s not that it’s rocket science, it’s just there’s so much conflicting information. There’s so many things you can do. It is a wide topic. I mean, it’s not like Instagram, which is one platform, fairly straightforward, doesn’t change that much. SEO is impacted by so many different things, keywords, back links, algorithm updates, Google, mobile phones, tablets, AMP, schema. There’s a lot to it. So, I think it’s almost knowing where to start and getting your priorities right and starting small and then building up from there. So, let’s talk about sort of some of the things you learned on that fabulous course, which obviously we won’t name. What were some of the things that you implemented through that course that you can remember now and are still implementing today? What are some of the changes you made to that website that you have?
Dom Kimber: Sure. Well, first of all, I actually started out on a Wix website, which wasn’t yielding the best-
Kate Toon: Oh my god.
Dom Kimber: Bom, bom, bom.
Kate Toon: I’d just like to say here, I am not anti-Wix. There’s a lot of good in Wix, but let’s move on. But anyway, yes.
Dom Kimber: Yeah.
Kate Toon: I might put in some sound effects there, like put a scream or something. I might do that. That’d be funny.
Dom Kimber: But it wasn’t yielding the best results. So, I made a bit of a transition through to WordPress, and it really was just implementing the basics for me, breaking it down into little bite-sized chunks, and from memory, I started off with page titles and meta descriptions. And it was just about doing a little bit of keyword research and finding what those first keywords that I really wanted to target for my core navigational pages, and writing great page titles, and salesy or cleverly written meta descriptions that get people in. And from there, from doing that for my core pages, I kind of went from page 10 or worse or whatever, to then I moved up to page three within weeks. And now, for most of those core keywords for those navigational pages, I’m sitting on page one, which just shows you what a simple step like page titles and meta descriptions can actually do for you.
Kate Toon: That’s awesome. You built your own site as well though, didn’t you?
Dom Kimber: Yeah, I did.
Kate Toon: That’s a bit of an achievement as well, isn’t it?
Dom Kimber: Yeah, definitely. It was something that I never really considered, again, beforehand. I went to Wix because it was so easy to put together and thought that building a site on WordPress was completely out of reach as well. You know? Another one of those things where it’s like the fear around the unknown, I guess. But yeah, I did another wonderful course, which-
Kate Toon: We could mention it. I’m going to mention that one because I do have a little WordPress SEO course, which is pretty cheap. And in Australia, you’d probably be paying about thee grandish to have like a sort of eight page service-based website put together. And so, I think my course is around $250 or something. So, it’s a big saving, but I think, again, it’s that fear. I think the messages coming through from this episode that it’s that kind of like, “I can’t do this” feeling that a lot of businesses have.
And that can cause you to make foolish decisions and spend money on things when really, just a tiny bit of education can turn that around. I want to come back to talking about meta descriptions, because obviously you are an SEO copywriter. So, let’s both share some tips on meta descriptions, because you mentioned a really important word there, which is salesy meta descriptions. So, for the listeners listening, meta descriptions aren’t part of Google’s algorithms, so they don’t look at the content of the meta description to rank you. But what they’re super important for is click through. So, what have you found really works when you write meta descriptions for your clients and for your own site? What kind of things do you pop in the title and the meta to really make the punchy?
Dom Kimber: Yeah, definitely. I think that I often like to use that presenting a problem, that old copywriting strategy that we all know and love of the problem and solving the problem. So, I tend to put forward the question of, are you looking to learn more about X, Y, and Z? Or presenting what they’re looking for and then saying, “Hey, we’ve got the solution here and this is why.”
And saying it in a snippy, clever, and my tone of voice for my business at least is try to be a little bit witty or to get people’s interest and peak people’s interest as soon as they see your results on that Google page.
Kate Toon: Yeah, so, so important because really it is an ad. It sits beneath the Google ads, and then you’ve got your organic listings. And they say that about 20% of the clicks go to the ads, and about 80 go to the organics. But you are still competing with potentially 10 other results on that page, nine other results. But don’t mistake that it is an ad. And I think often it’s the last thing that’s written or the last thing that’s considered. But in reality, it’s the first thing that will ever be read about your brand. And I think people underestimate the power of that Batman and Robin title and meta description combo. I love the question. That’s what I do as well. I do, “Looking for something, something? We’ve got something, something, something.” And I really choose the adjectives well. And another little thing that I like to do is, if possible, pop your phone number in that meta description so that people can call you direct from the results. Yeah, you don’t get the click. I don’t really care about the click. I care about the conversion. So, I think meta titles and meta descriptions are so, so important. And if you’re not confident about writing them, well, you’ve just listened to a wonderful SEO copywriter based in the Sunshine Coast who can do it for you.
Kate Toon: So, obviously, you built your website with my fabulous course, and you learnt the SEO skills, which is awesome. And now, it’s been a couple of years now since you did that, and I can see you ranking very well for your keyword terms. What other … how has SEO changed your business? And how much time do you dedicate to it as opposed to other forms of social media and other forms of marketing?
Dom Kimber: Yeah, I guess it’s … for me, in terms of what it means for my business is kind of two-fold. First of all is that I’m given the opportunity to be found for more and more different things that my business can do and offer as my business grows. So, I implement SEO every week for my business, whether that might be a new sales page, perhaps, or it might be a new blog article, or I tried my hand at schema and did a bit of work on that.
Kate Toon: Oh.
Dom Kimber: I know. And then the second sort of side of it is for clients themselves as well. So, obviously that SEO copywriting is so beneficial to be able to create content that actually understands how Google works but still has the user at heart. So, yeah. I guess that’s how in incorporate it across my business in those two sort of key areas.
Kate Toon: Yeah, and I think as well, having that wholistic view of SEO. So, not just … a lot of SEO copywriters focus only on the keywords and on page optimization, but understanding the tech, the schema, the crawlability, responsiveness, what impact back links are going to have. All that other stuff that makes it clear, that you can then explain to the client that, “Yeah, look. I can write you some great copy and optimise for these keywords that I’ve carefully researched, but your site’s taking 17 seconds to load, and until you fix that, no amount of copy is going to get you out of that hole.” The way I did an analogy the other day, you know like when you’re trying to lose weight and they say something like, “It’s 95% nutrition and 5% exercise.” Like, you can’t exercise yourself out of bad diet. Does that make sense?
Dom Kimber: Yeah.
Kate Toon: You can’t SEO or copyright your way out of a technically flawed site. So, being able to offer those auditing skills as well, even if it’s not a core thing that you want to do, but being able to go back to the client as any kind of marketer or whatever and say, “Yep, I’m happy to do that job. But by the way, I had a quick look at your site and you’ve got a couple of crawlability issues. It’s running a bit slow. You might want to implement schema,” and that’s just like boom. This person really knows what they’re talking about. So, look, to finish up the episode, sorry, I should have prepped you for this and I didn’t. So you’ll have to pull this out of your brain. If you could pass on one tip to maybe somebody who’s in that zone of, “This is beyond me. This is not something I particularly want to do or feel capable of doing. What would your advice to them be?
Dom Kimber: Just don’t look at SEO as a big huge beast that you need to attack in one go. It really doesn’t have to be like that. Break it down into something bite-sized. Do a little bit each week. You might look at one page and just say, “I’m going to update the page titles, the meta descriptions. I’m going to check that my images are of the correct size and format. I’m going to have a little squiz at the copy on that page.” Or, you might take it as a just look at one aspect of your website at a time. Whatever suits you. Don’t look at it and go, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to do this and this and this and this and this,” because then it becomes overwhelming. I did my SEO improvements over at least six months. And then it’s ongoing from there.
Kate Toon: Yeah, you still are fiddling now. I’m still fiddling with mine.
Dom Kimber: Exactly.
Kate Toon: And there’s still something I haven’t done that I tell other people to do that I haven’t done on my own site. It’s that classic line of how do you eat the SEO elephant? Well, one bite at a time. Well, look, Dom, thank you so much for being on the show. Where can we find out more about you?
Dom Kimber: Feel free to jump onto my website. It’s www.socialswell.com.au. I’m on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn, and you’ll find me in all of those haunts where you find all the other copywriters.
Kate Toon: Or you could Google copywriter Sunshine Coast because you’re in the top spot.
Dom Kimber: Exactly.
Kate Toon: So, Dom-
Dom Kimber: That’s me.
Kate Toon: That’s the proof of the pudding ultimately. Thank you so much for being on the show. It’s been awesome to have you on the reality SEO series.
And thanks to you for listening. If you enjoy the show, please don’t forget to leave a five star rating on iTunes or Stitcher or wherever you heard it.
And of course, head over to www.therecipeforseosuccess.com where you can read the notes for the show, leave a comment, and find out more about Dom. And also, nearly forgot, you can also head to Facebook and join the I Love SEO Group.
I Love SEO by Kate Toon.
There’s a few people that have come up with their own I Love SEO groups, but there was one original. Join that one, it’s better than the others. So, thanks again, Dom, and until next time, happy SEOing.
