906 - How To Pivot, The Secret to Great SEO, and Why Business Is More Important Than Craft with Tom Hirst

Live In The Feast

Today’s co-host is Tom Hirst, a longtime freelancer, WordPress developer, mentor, author, and creator. Tom breaks down his outlook on SEO and why landing pages are your best weapon for lead generation.

Like most entrepreneurs, Tom realized at a young age that working for someone else would never fulfill him. Luckily he’s found success as a full-time freelancer and has a few lessons to share about his path to financial freedom. He credits his accomplishments to a focus on business rather than a blind love for coding. And he reminds us that experimentation is key to creating a website that works.

In this episode, Tom talks about his process for driving new and qualified leads, how to discover killer keywords, what most people miss when building a great website, and why there’s more to success than SEO.

“What you’ve got to think is, the person, the prospect, the lead, are coming in and seeing that page, they’re landing on that page, and a lot of the time, they’re not really going off that page. So if you’ve got one page with one specific focus, it doesn’t really matter what the other pages look like, per se.” ~ @tom_hirst

Main Takeaways

• A service-specific landing page is the key to generating leads, and many freelancers miss that when caught up in SEO technicalities. SEO is only one piece of the discovery puzzle.
• When you pivot, there’s no need to create an entirely new website. Just take your existing site and build out a new landing page that calls out the benefits of your new service.
• There’s no exact science to discovering great keywords. Sometimes you just have to experiment with different landing pages that are optimized for different content and keywords.
• Always put contact information on the same page as trust signals. This creates a frictionless experience for users. In other words, it doesn’t leave them searching for ways to find you.
• You have to focus on the business behind your craft to get ahead.

Links and Important Mentions

• Tom on Twitter
• Tom’s website
• Tom’s resources
• Tom’s mentorship program
• WordPress
• WooCommerce
• Gatsby
• Check out a bonus episode with Tom

Stay in Touch

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