If you’re like most of us in the soloist expertise space, you probably think of SEO—if you bother with it at all—as picking the right keywords so that maybe you’ll get discovered in a google search. But marketing consultant Sarah Moon has a different take.

We explore:

Why SEO is not the mysterious, robotic box we’ve heard about—and a new way we can think about it.

How to discover—and capitalize on—the big questions your audience is asking when they search.

When SEO can help you discover a new audience you didn’t even know existed.

The three key elements of game-changing SEO for knowledge businesses.

Aligning your authority not only with your vision and point of view, but with what your ideal clients and buyers are searching for.

LINKS

Sarah Moon | Special Soloist Women Page | Newsletter | Website | LinkedIn | Instagram 

Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram

GUEST BIO

Sarah Moon is a Portland, Oregon-based marketing and business strategist on a mission to rethink modern marketing so it works for us—instead of making us miserable. She's known for her unique knowledge of SEO and how solo consultants and "personal brands" can leverage this underutilized approach to get found and make an impact. She founded Sarah Moon & Co by mistake in 2008 after a layoff from a cushy public sector public relations job and never looked back.

Outside of work, Sarah is a servant to two Australian Shepherds and is an avid cyclist, bread baker, standup paddleboarder, and local food nerd.

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TRANSCRIPT

00:00 - 00:29

Sarah Moon: Nothing makes me more excited when I see someone sort of take something that I have said like, hey, this we can do this better. And they play off of what I've said and kind of make it their own. It's like that. That's that impact that just, yes, obviously I want to make a good living. I want to have a life that's enjoyable and comfortable. I want to be able to buy my dogs a fancy dog food. And yet I want other people to kind of take ideas and make them their own and continue that impact. And

00:29 - 00:31

Sarah Moon: for me, that's part of how wealth is defined.

00:37 - 01:02

Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to Soloist Women, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rochelle Moulton, and today I'm here with Sarah Moon, who I think of as the movement marketing champion for people like us who are leading revolutions. And she is on a mission to rethink modern marketing so it works for us instead of making us miserable. Sarah, welcome.

01:03 - 01:26

Sarah Moon: Thank you. That made me sound really fancy. You are. You're fancy. You're fancy. I am on a mission though. That is something I feel so strongly about because I hear so many people say, Oh, I hate marketing. I hate marketing. I'm like, I don't hate marketing. I love talking about the stuff I care about. And then when I say that to people, they're like, wait, that's marketing. I'm like, uh-huh. It is.

01:27 - 02:01

Rochelle Moulton: Exactly. The new definition. So 1 of the reasons that I asked you to join me is that is really what you have to say about SEO for Soluis because I've you know beyond thinking about choosing smart keywords I've always thought of SEO as a thing that product-based businesses use or like truly local service businesses like you know say a plumber but as you know in the last couple of months I've been reading what you have to say on this and you've been changing my mind, which I love. Yes. So I'm excited to dive in and see

02:01 - 02:17

Rochelle Moulton: if we can't open some eyes to SEO. But first, just as kind of an introduction, I believe our listeners want to hear a little bit about how you got here doing what you do now. So maybe we could just start with like, what made you decide to start your business?

02:18 - 02:54

Sarah Moon: Well, I'd never decided to start a business. And I don't know if you've heard this kind of story before. I bet you have. I was 1 of the many, many, many victims of the 2008 financial crisis. I had a great career in public sector communications. So I had fancy job titles like communications director, public information officer, those kinds of things, working in the public sector, helping the communities that I worked in understand various issues that impacted them by using media. It was the beginning of social media doing a little bit of that. I wrote my city's

02:54 - 03:06

Sarah Moon: first social media policy. So doing a lot of that. And then in 2008, basically the public sector was hit really hard and I, you know, everyone looks around, they're like, we got to get rid of the marketing people. What do they do?

03:08 - 03:09

Rochelle Moulton: Always the first to go, right?

03:10 - 03:47

Sarah Moon: And I was just, you know, I'd been lucky enough to kind of be have like very fast acceleration of my career. And that was very humbling to go from kind of like this sort of young star to like no job. It sucked. I mean, I wish I could be like, it was such a great learning experience. No, it sucked. But what I discovered was because I'd always been experimenting with new ways of helping people get the information they needed, whether it be blogs or it was very early in using Twitter. We played with Twitter for our

03:47 - 04:27

Sarah Moon: bureau, things like that. And I was like, well, this is, I have some interesting knowledge. And I started applying for jobs and it was brutal out there because it was the economic collapse, really. And so I actually was able to pitch my previous employer on a project and did a project for them. And so I kind of did that like, I guess I'm a freelancer now. And we've always thinking like, well, when the right thing came along, I would jump back in to what I was doing. And that never happened. And so my business, it's interesting

04:27 - 04:57

Sarah Moon: because when I started out, I was doing a lot of basically various marketing strategy consulting. And as that progressed, I started doing a lot more work more very much on the digital side and more execution, which I'm gonna be really honest, execution is not my top strength. I'm a strategist at heart. And actually slowly kind of accidentally built up almost an agency model. I had a handful of employees. I realize I bet you understand this story.

04:57 - 05:02

Rochelle Moulton: I totally do. I totally see that. So you had actual employees, not contractors.

05:03 - 05:04

Sarah Moon: You had employees.

05:04 - 05:05

Rochelle Moulton: Yes, actual employees.

05:05 - 05:05

Sarah Moon: And are you

05:05 - 05:06

Rochelle Moulton: saying past tense had?

05:07 - 05:39

Sarah Moon: Yes. Yes. Okay. I technically have 2 employees, but 1 of them is me and the other 1 is my husband. So now. So I don't think we count. And sort of had this agency model that was, I think, quite successful, but it did kind of send me professionally down a direction that was less that me doing that consulting stuff, which I'm really good at, the consulting and the strategy and the really creative problem solving into a lot more of this rolling out work. And I was like, I need to get back to what I really am

05:39 - 05:56

Sarah Moon: awesome at and started emphasizing the Sarah time really being focused on that strategy. And over the last couple of years, that side of the business, I was like, wait, this is what people want. People were literally telling me, Hey, this is what we want from you. Yes. That's the

05:56 - 06:07

Rochelle Moulton: G zone, right? Because we think you have to do certain things to grow your business. But then your people start saying, no, no, no, no, we don't want that from you. We want this thing.

06:08 - 06:41

Sarah Moon: That is such a gift. It absolutely is. And I love that I have been so fortunate to work with really wonderfully aligned humans, many of whom have worked with me for many, many years. So they do tell me these things and they stay in touch and are like, oh, I'm so excited about what you're doing. I can't wait to get in on this and that kind of thing. So, you know, as that agency model is people moved on, I didn't replace them and brought in, you know, contractors to service some of the clients we had like

06:41 - 07:17

Sarah Moon: on a smaller scale. And so now it's kind of scaled back down, which I think in sort of the business world, sometimes people think of in a negative way, which bothers me a lot. But I know this is a safe place to talk about, because what I'm doing now is really actually very much back to my roots 15 years ago, which is really having the space and time to help clients develop really creative strategies that actually work for them and leverage their strengths. I have a lot to say about that. And 1 of the things though,

07:17 - 07:51

Sarah Moon: in that time of that more agency life of this business was I really started figuring out some great ways for my clients to expand their visibility and for me to expand my visibility using the search engine and or using the data that the search engine was telling us. And that kind of got to be something I was really known for. So it kind of all coalesced a couple of years ago in this methodology that I use now. And that's how we got that. They said that pretty quickly, actually. Go me. Yeah.

07:51 - 08:09

Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, like 15 years in a nanosecond. So just 1 more question before we dive into the SEO. So I'm asking everybody this because it's so fascinating, the diversity of answers. So do you remember how long it took you to hit your first 100, 000? And if that was like before you had employees or after?

08:09 - 08:46

Sarah Moon: Yes, it was before. It was just me. And I was trying to remember this the other day because someone asked me and I changed bookkeeping systems. So I'm like, I can't look that up. I'm going to have to guess. In my mind, it was probably pretty far along. Like, because I also missed I skipped the step, the part of the story where I had a part-time job for 3 years, doing writing. And so that was, I don't, that time was weird. So I think it was at the year after I left that part-time job. So 4

08:46 - 08:47

Sarah Moon: or 5 years.

08:47 - 08:47

Rochelle Moulton: So I'm

08:47 - 09:00

Sarah Moon: going to put it up. Yeah. So it was the year, it was that year that leaving that kind of safety net, which was really scary was actually I had 2 part-time jobs because I forgot about how the first 7 years I had a part-time college teaching job as well.

09:03 - 09:28

Rochelle Moulton: Well, you know, everything after 2007, 2008, I mean, it was just, yeah, there was a weird time. Yeah, we all did some weird things then. I hear you. I totally hear you. Okay, well, let's get down to SEO for soloists because I think we might change a few minds here, maybe blow a few minds here. Do you want to start with this basic description of SEO just so that we're all on the same page?

09:28 - 09:51

Sarah Moon: So when you hear people talk about SEO, what they generally mean is they want to get found in Google. And that's the most possible basic way of saying it. Now when I ask people for more information beyond that, they will say something like, Well, what I want is if someone Googles business coach, I wanna come up. And I'll say like,

09:51 - 09:53

Rochelle Moulton: okay. That's a tough 1.

09:53 - 10:23

Sarah Moon: Yeah. Oh, you know what my answer is. That's a tough 1. And also I would argue they don't actually wanna come up when someone is Googling business coach, because the person who is the intention, this is where the fun part of this is, the person who is just at those, like, I want a business coach stage, they actually don't have a lot of clarity on what they want to get out of that experience. So my argument is, actually, that's kind of not where you want to put your efforts anyway in the search engine because you want

10:23 - 10:53

Sarah Moon: to be reaching someone who knows the results they want to get. They know what the outcomes they want to get. And so when I talk about SEO, I talk about it very much deep into understanding your audience and their intention and what they need and all that kind of stuff. But at its core, what it is, is if someone is doing a search of some sort, whether it's in Google or YouTube, because that's a whole part of the search engine as well, or even image searches, that's the results that come up. I do want to say

10:53 - 11:12

Sarah Moon: that about 90% of online experiences start in a search engine. The reality is that most of our audiences, when they have a question, they're going to Google first. So that's something to keep in mind too. I'm like, that's the reality we live in. We may as well figure out how to make it work for us.

11:13 - 11:38

Rochelle Moulton: Yeah. You know, when we were emailing back and forth, you made this comment that search engines aren't just for discovery. We can use search data to help us better understand our audiences and their intention and then develop messages that take flight through that work. I call this SEO-fueled movement marketing. So talk some more about that, would you?

11:40 - 12:11

Sarah Moon: Yeah, so this is such an interesting thing because often when I work one-on-one with clients, What I'll do is I have a whole bunch of software subscriptions that make understanding what's going on in the search engine easier. And I will often pull 1 of those up and I'll plug in just some basic words that I'll ask a client. So what are some of the big questions people ask you when you first talk about your subject matter. So not things like how much does this cost, but more around subject matter expertise. And let's plug them in and

12:11 - 12:21

Sarah Moon: see what people are asking this Google, because sometimes when people are asking Google and what people are asking us are 2 really different things because we're embarrassed to ask the professional sort of our basic questions.

12:23 - 12:24

Rochelle Moulton: That's juicy. Right?

12:24 - 13:03

Sarah Moon: And it's true. It's absolutely true. Like when I was hiring an intellectual property attorney to help me with some trademark stuff. Do you know how much Googling I did so I didn't look like a ding-dong when I was talking to her? So what's interesting is it's almost like a chance to eavesdrop on what people are asking the search engine. And so for example, I was talking to a client yesterday and we were looking, she's a fellow marketer, and we were looking up information around marketing is actually a very interesting keyword in general to start digging into,

13:03 - 13:39

Sarah Moon: we're like, let's see if what you think your people know and what the data is telling us are aligned. Well, it turns out that her folks are at actually a much more, they need a lot more foundational information than she thought they did. So a lot of them don't have, they think that marketing is posting on Facebook. Like that's, they're like marketing. Yeah, I do my posts and that's not marketing. So they don't even the idea of having a strategy, they think that's actually just action steps. So that's what that keyword data told us is basically

13:39 - 14:02

Sarah Moon: like, oh, a strategy is a checklist. So she was speaking at this level that was assuming sophistication and knowledge that her people didn't have. And that doesn't mean that it's time for her to dumb down her message. It's actually time for her to add more context around her messaging so that people feel that she is someone who can actually help them understand and make progress towards their goals.

14:03 - 14:21

Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking about that. I mean, what an interesting use of SEO. I mean, it's sort of like, when I say inbound, I don't mean like inbound marketing, but it's like you're taking what's coming in versus pushing stuff out. It's, you're actually using it to decide what to do.

14:21 - 14:55

Sarah Moon: Love that. Exactly. And yeah, I have a lot of clients who are web designers because that was a service that we used to offer. And they saw that I had a successful web design product that did really well and was very successful. So I actually have a lot of clients that I help with marketing strategies for their web design business. That is a fascinating 1 to start looking at the keywords. My clients will think that their potential clients have a lot of understanding of what they need in a website, what content goes on the website. Yeah,

14:55 - 15:27

Sarah Moon: I know. What platforms to use. And then when you look at the data, it's like someone's like, you see all these searches like do I need a website redesign or a website refresh? And I was again, having a conversation this week where this is what we pulled up and my client was like, oh, I never thought to explain which 1 of those is, and this is a person who offers both of those options and never thought to explain those 2 because it seemed like someone would already know which they need, but they...