64: Rachel Lindteigen Talks About SEO

Greg Mills: Our guest today has a BA in broadcast journalism and an MBA in marketing. She's a marketing expert with more than 20 years of experience, she's focused on SEO and content for the past decade, working with some of the biggest eCommerce retailers, creating strategies that drove eight figures annually.

Greg Mills: From SEO for most of her clients today, she runs etched marketing and teaches SEO to overwhelmed entrepreneurs in an easy to understand non-tech ways so they can get more website traffic without buying ads. She calls herself a nerd who loves words her amongst friends without further ado. Rachel Lynn.

Rachel Lindteigen: Yep. Lynn Hagen. Hi, thank you so much for having me here today. I appreciate it.

Greg Mills: It's our pleasure. Now, Rachel, can you take a few moments and fill in the gaps from that intro and bring us up to with what's going on in your

Rachel Lindteigen: world. Yeah, absolutely. So I've done a little bit of everything. When it comes to marketing over the course of my career, I've worked for special events.

Rachel Lindteigen: I've worked for nonprofits, I've worked for the corporate office of a franchise. I worked in ad agencies and for the last five years, I've worked for myself. Servicing small business owners, helping them with content marketing and search engine optimization, and now transitioning into offering online courses and teaching others how to do this so that they can really understand the power of Google and get.

Rachel Lindteigen: That free website traffic to their businesses so that they can grow without having to invest a lot of money in ads, because so often small business owners and entrepreneurs don't really have a big ad budget to work with. So we've gotta learn how to really leverage the free marketing

Greg Mills: channels. Okay. Now, did you come from an entrepreneurial background at all?

Greg Mills: Did anybody in your family have their own business?

Rachel Lindteigen: Not really. My mom was in real estate for a few years when I was a kid. My dad was in hotel management. My grandparents did my grandparents on my dad's side, owned a marina. And my great, great grandfather was a boat builder in Canada. So yes, generations back, my parents not so much.

Greg Mills: I read on your website that your dad knew that you were a born market. How did he know that?

Rachel Lindteigen: So my dad ran hotels and went to there's a hotel school in Switzerland. He ran big fancy hotels. He always had marketing teams who worked with him and marketing directors. And from the time I was probably seventh grade, when I started talking about wanting to go into journalism, my dad said, oh honey, you're a born market.

Rachel Lindteigen: He just said, he felt like it fit my personality. It fit my interest. It would suit me well, and it would allow me to support myself. Whereas journalism wasn't necessarily going to be as lucrative nor was it going to have the schedule that I would ultimately want. Once I had a family. So he was unfortunately right.

Rachel Lindteigen: He and I had a lot of conversations about it while I was in college. He unfortunately passed away while I was in college. So he never got to see me actually end up fulfilling that destiny that he was certain was going to be there for me. So it's kind of funny. It's also kind of bittersweet.

Greg Mills: Well, I'm sure he is looking down on you and he is proud of you. I would

Rachel Lindteigen: think so. .

Greg Mills: How many hours a week are you working in etched marketing now? And, and what do you do with the remainder of your.

Rachel Lindteigen: Yeah. So my goal right now is to work between two and three days a week. So my goal is to work 15, maybe 20 hours.

Rachel Lindteigen: I try to limit to like Tuesday, Thursday, picking up Wednesdays because things have been pretty busy. But I have a lot that I'm juggling. Not only am I running the business and servicing my clients and my students, but I'm also the one running all the content and everything for my own business. My mother, unfortunately has Alzheimer's in dementia, she's in a memory care center and I am her primary person.

Rachel Lindteigen: So I'm in and out of there on a fairly regular basis. Also dealing with all of her doctors, taking her to all of her appointments and I have a seven year old. So I'm very much in that sandwich generation. I've got pressure on both ends. My husband works a very long, very long schedule, very demanding job and is not available a whole lot to help during the week.

Rachel Lindteigen: So. I staying incredibly busy, even though I only work. Part-time just because there's so much. And that's what I really needed was balance because there were too, I was being pulled in too many directions and I found that I had to reduce my hours, but I was able to maintain my productivity and maintain my sales figures and revenue goals and everything while working part-time because I'm super focused when I.

Greg Mills: And you left out. I think you're also a big sister. Aren't you?

Rachel Lindteigen: I was in big brothers, big sisters for many years. I am not officially, but I am still in contact with my little sister. I'm also on the board of the PTO at the elementary school. And because I'm crazy, I'm the president of the HOA board in my neighborhood because we were having all sorts of crazy problems last year.

Rachel Lindteigen: And it was like, I can help. I can fix this. They just need somebody. To get this taken care of and established communication. And I didn't bargain for being made president, but we've resolved most of the issues. So yeah, it's nuts.

Greg Mills: yeah. So I've heard those HOAs can be crazy.

Rachel Lindteigen: There, there are some people who need more to keep them busy.

Greg Mills: Maybe you should bring them into your business. No,

Greg Mills: you know, I actually said that seriously and I caught myself mid sentence. What are you thinking?

Rachel Lindteigen: It's crazy. The things that people get worked up about when they don't have enough on their time, enough to keep them busy is insane.

Greg Mills: Yeah. Now you were a director of marketing for several firms before you left.

Greg Mills: How'd you get your entrepreneurial start, so to speak.

Rachel Lindteigen: So I wanted to go out on my own probably from about 2006. So fairly early on in my career, I wanted that flexibility and you've gotta remember all of this. Like I went out on my own pre COVID. You didn't have this remote work from home work from none of that really existed.

Rachel Lindteigen: You were lucky to get one day a week. I had always wanted to do it, but I didn't feel like I had enough background. I didn't feel like I had enough experience. I have a real problem with the two year experts. Like some of us worked 20 years to get to where we are. We, we have a lot of education and background and I felt like I needed to have more.

Rachel Lindteigen: To be able to service clients. As far as where, like when I did it, I couldn't find a job at my level. That was going to work. That was flexible enough because again, pre COVID, I was looking for something that would allow me to work like six 30 to three or seven to four, or allow me to work from home maybe two days a week, maybe something that didn't have a huge commute.

Rachel Lindteigen: We were in Phoenix at the time and I was commuting an hour each way. And my son. Like 16 months old at the time. And I didn't see him in the mornings because of the schedule. And if I went in and saw him, it woke him and then he was up for the day and my husband was struggling, trying to wait till the nanny got there, so he could go to work and I just couldn't go on like that.

Rachel Lindteigen: I wanted to be able to be, I waited till I was 39 to have him, I wanted to raise him. So that was my biggest motivat.

Greg Mills: I can understand that. Yeah. I've had a lot of other entrepreneurs say that, having a child kind of spurred them to take action. Yeah. So why the name etched marketing

Rachel Lindteigen: because I couldn't figure out what in the world to call the business and my husband and I were sitting talking about it and I didn't wanna.

Rachel Lindteigen: Our my married name, because it's difficult to pronounce. You can't spell it. Nobody knows what it is. I wasn't gonna try to have that in a URL because nobody's gonna find Lynn Hagen, mark. It wasn't gonna work. So I was trying to figure out, and I didn't wanna do a personal brand. I wanted to build a business that could scale.

Rachel Lindteigen: And he and I were brainstorming and he actually was the one who came up with it. So all sorts of he came home from work one night and he had this brainstorm list. He'd sat at lunch. All sorts of ideas. And it was like, I kinda like that it was the one I hated the least and here we are five years later and several iterations of the website and several iterations of branding.

Rachel Lindteigen: And it's still etched marketing.

Greg Mills: Yeah. I've gotta ask too and feel free to say, Hey, none of your business, but what is your husband?

Rachel Lindteigen: My husband's

Greg Mills: an engineer. Okay. I was kind of guessing he might either be an it or engineering and I'm an it as well. So

Rachel Lindteigen: yeah, he's an engineer. He's got a background in software and hardware engineering, both.

Rachel Lindteigen: He actually is the one who built my current website, along with my course platform. He handles all the tech side of my business for me, because I know enough about coding to break a website. So I'm not allowed to make any changes.

Greg Mills: yeah. I noticed you offered unification and I was like, Okay. That's a little, that's more technical than I than I would've thought you would've been, taking on

Rachel Lindteigen: I there's tools that do ation really

Greg Mills: easily.

Greg Mills: Yeah. I've, managed to mess some of them up too, so, oh, the ation tools and the the website cash tools don't really play well together. Especially if they're different brands I've found out. Yeah. So, so who is your ideal target customer?

Rachel Lindteigen: I love working with small business owners.

Rachel Lindteigen: I have a couple clients right now that I absolutely love small business owners, local businesses, people who have been established and they've been in business. One of 'em. They've their family has run the business for 35, almost 40 years. Another one they've had the business about 15 years, but it's people who are established, they're known in their market.

Rachel Lindteigen: They have a good reputation already and I can help them. Take what they've started and really build from there. I actually talked to one of my new clients today and she was so funny. She have, has the stuff you've done. Like is any of it on the website yet? Is it starting to work? Cuz I've had three phone calls already from people.

Rachel Lindteigen: And when I asked them where have they found me? They told me they found me on Google. Is that what you're doing? And I said, yes, that's what we're doing. She's like, But we keep doing more so we've been working about a month. She's already gotten three leads and they're a real estate property management company.

Rachel Lindteigen: So three leads is really good. It's people like that, that I love to work with people who are excited about what they do. They're good at what they do. And they maybe don't know how to get to the next level, how to be found on Google, how to get traffic from Google, but they are open to learning and doing it.

Rachel Lindteigen: I don't like clients who don't take the recommendations that you give them or give you a bunch of excuses. Why it won't work because it's true. It's not gonna. It's not going to succeed. They're not going to get the results. If they don't do the work or they don't allow you to do the work. And then it's a waste of money for both of you waste of money, a waste of money for them, and a waste of time for

Greg Mills: me.

Greg Mills: Yeah. Waste of money and time. So it's getting ready to say. So walk us through kind of some of the services that you provide through edge marketing.

Rachel Lindteigen: So I have three different core packages depending on a client's needs and their budget. And how comfortable they are with the idea of trying SEO and content marketing.

Rachel Lindteigen: So if they're just starting to dip their toe into it, they just wanna do a little bit to see how it works. Then I have a starter package and that's where we optimize five pages. So I go through, I tell them what pages I think we should optimize based on their Google analytics and their current performance.

Rachel Lindteigen: Then I do some keyword research for them. I write their title tags in their meta descriptions. I minify their images for them. If they. Because so many, they have really big images on their website and they'll slow down the website and Google likes a fast. Images are usually the number one issue. So I do that.

Rachel Lindteigen: I give 'em some tips or feedback on their copy. Some of 'em, so they seem to take either package one, which is that one or package three, which is the everything plan where it's that. Plus we set the content strategy and we do a competitive analysis on. Their local market, where we look at three different competitors and what are they doing from an SEO standpoint and a content standpoint.

Rachel Lindteigen: And I put together a strategy for their blog and I give them ideas. This is how often you should blog. This is the type content. Here's your first 12 ideas. The client I was meeting with today. That's what they're doing right now. And they're like, okay, but when we're done with this, what do we do next?

Rachel Lindteigen: So I do from there, if they wanna do like ongoing, I do create their blog posts. I run their reports. I track everything and adjust their strategy. Some of the clients that I do that side of it for I've been working with for, I think we just passed the four year mark with one of 'em

Greg Mills: when you're generating content for your clients

Greg Mills: how are you doing that? Because who would know better than them, what kind of content that they could provide or what they could do.

Rachel Lindteigen: So one of 'em that I've written their blog post for years is a Montessori preschool.

Rachel Lindteigen: I was a Montessori mom. My son went to a Montessori. My stepdaughter went to Montessori. I have been in the Montessori world for the last 10 years. So it's pretty easy for me to write their blog post. I go through and I identify where the opportunities are for them. So these are the keywords that you could potentially rank for.

Rachel Lindteigen: These are tied to your core business lines. These are tied to revenue. Like here's what I think we should go after. And then I write the initial draft and then they let me know, okay, we do it slightly different. Here. We do this, we do that. And we adjust accordingly some of the other. I've just given them the strategy and the ideas and the keywords and said, this is what you need to write your blog post on.

Rachel Lindteigen: So it really depends on how comfortable they are, what their resources are like, but I've been doing this for a long time. I can write on all sorts of stuff, so, okay. You know, I went to journalism school. You can pretty quickly figure out how to write a blog post on a certain topic when you understand.

Rachel Lindteigen: And you've written that many pieces over the.

Greg Mills: Fair enough. I guess I didn't think that one through, how are you identifying like the keywords? Are you using, special tools like Neil Patels

Rachel Lindteigen: so there's a number of 'em.

Rachel Lindteigen: When I was with the agency MAs. Tended to be my favorite tool, but now that I'm on my own and I'm teaching, I've actually switched over to Uber suggest, which is Neil Patel's tool. It's not my favorite, but at the price point, it's really good for my students. And it's really good for somebody who does not have a professional background in it.

Rachel Lindteigen: It makes it pretty easy to find the opportunities. So I really go about. An SEO informed content strategy. So I use whichever keyword tool there's MAs there's, Uber suggests there's seom rush. There's the Google keyword planner. There's small SEO tools. There's a bunch of them use whichever one you're comfortable with whichever one you like, you're gonna get the same data generally from all of 'em because it comes straight from Google.

Rachel Lindteigen: What you wanna do is look in there and. What keywords show up, like, just start with something that's base related to your business related to your product or your service and go in and just start seeing what shows up. You're gonna see a lot of questions. You're gonna see a lot of queries, things that maybe you can use just as they are in their perfect blog, post title, or maybe it gives you an idea to go from there.

Rachel Lindteigen: What you're gonna look for is. Content where your website has a really good chance of ranking on page one for that keyword. Because if you can't rank on page one for the keyword, you are not gonna get traffic because nobody goes to page two. So you're wasting your time. So you wanna choose a keyword that you can rank on page one, you want to write amazing content that is going to provide value for your ideal customer.

Rachel Lindteigen: You're gonna anticipate their needs, their wants their questions. You're gonna provide value. Your final step is that you're gonna optimize that content for Google. Meaning you're gonna create a title tag and a meta description, and you're going to use that keyword in your file name and in your header tags and all those different areas that Google's gonna look.

Rachel Lindteigen: So the Google understands what it's about. I always start my content strategy, my content development at keyword research, because that's the key to having success with it.

Greg Mills: Now you're a big fan of organic traffic and, I can understand to a point, but you had also listed several other reasons that I had not even thought about on your website.

Greg Mills: Could you talk a little bit about why you're such a fan.

Rachel Lindteigen: Well, organic traffic. I mean, first and foremost, it's free. Right? So it's easier to scale. It's also very scalable because once you understand the formula. Every single blog post that you write is another opportunity for your website to rank at the top of Google, to get traffic, to sell your products or services, to get people to your website.

Rachel Lindteigen: The other thing is that people are more inclined to believe and trust the organic listings than to trust the paid ads. So when we look at the Google search results, those paid ads at the top. A lot of people just skip 'em. So an average click through rate on those, a good click through rate is 3% meaning 97 out of a hundred don't click.

Rachel Lindteigen: But when we get to the number one position from natural search immediately below the ads, the average is 34 to 37%, depending upon which research study you're following. So people are 10 X more likely to. On the first organic listing, then the ads. And then when we start talking about social media, the ad numbers, I mean the click through rates are even lower.

Rachel Lindteigen: A good click through rate on Facebook ads is 1% because it's interruption marketing. Think about it. When you're trying to get somebody's attention on Facebook, you're using bright colors. You're using bright copy. You're using images to catch their attention because they're there for something else.

Rachel Lindteigen: When someone is searching on. And they're looking for an answer they're connect. I mean, you're giving them exactly what they're looking for. You're gonna get better results.

Greg Mills: What are some of the common problems that you know, businesses have with their blogs or their websites that you see?

Rachel Lindteigen: So there's only a handful of them probably number one. So number one, and number two. They've done nothing from an SEO standpoint, they don't have title tags. They don't have meta descriptions. They've just used whatever is the standard that their system produced. There's nothing there.

Rachel Lindteigen: So the second thing that I see that's the biggest mistake is that people think that SEO won't work for them because they've tried it. But they actually got it wrong because they weren't really sure what they were doing.

Rachel Lindteigen: So either they've targeted a keyword that their website's never gonna rank for, or they've written title tags or meta descriptions, but they've not followed the best practices. And so they've not done them the right way. Most of the time though, it comes down to targeting because if you've tried SEO and it didn't work.

Rachel Lindteigen: I can generally look at your website in a matter of minutes and tell you why it didn't work. I actually have this conversation with a client during my call this morning. We, we are looking at what words can we rank for what words can't we rank for? And I say, you know what? We're never gonna rank for the daycare keywords.

Rachel Lindteigen: We're on page two. That's as far as we're gonna get. So if they try to go after daycare where they're up against LA petite and. Tutor time and like all these big national chains and they're one local Montessori school. They're not gonna out rank them because in Google's eyes, they're not as authoritative on this subject of daycare as these big national chains.

Rachel Lindteigen: So it's the same thing. If you are like a decorator and you're trying to go after the word mirror or home decor, like when I worked at the agency and I worked with clients that had three and four and 500 locations, they ranked for those. Us as small business owners and entrepreneurs, we're never gonna rank for them.

Rachel Lindteigen: And that's okay. So we have to kinda shift our thought process. The biggest search demand is not necessarily the best keyword. The best keyword is the best opportunity that we can rank at the top of page one on Google for, and that's a lot of. I work with my clients on, it's also a big part of what I teach my students is how to find those keywords, where you can rank on page one.

Rachel Lindteigen: But the thing that I tell people like in some of my trainings is just think about the words you're looking at. Go to Google. If you are seeing big national brands, You need a different keyword. What you wanna really see in the results are people that, you know, you recognize they're local, they're similar to you.

Rachel Lindteigen: Then you're probably on a pretty good track. You can learn more, you can learn exactly how to do it, but that's gonna get you petted in the right direction. Okay.

Greg Mills: What kind of tools both free and paid tools, do you advocate for people to use, to improve their SEO?

Rachel Lindteigen: So the most important tools, in my opinion are a keyword research tool.

Rachel Lindteigen: Whichever one you want, whether it's Uber suggests Google keyword, you pick Google search console is really good because that allows you to look at used to be webmaster tools. It allows you to look into it and see how's my indexation. Does Google know all the pages that I've submitted. You can put your site map in there.

Rachel Lindteigen: You can do things. There is keyword data, but within the professional SEO industry, we don't really trust that. We say that it's directional at best, because about 10, eight, maybe 10 years ago, Google pulled all the keyword data out of Google analytics. And then they started giving us some over in webmaster tools, but it never aligned.

Rachel Lindteigen: It was never the same. So look at. Consider it's got some benefit, but don't, don't make your decisions based upon what's in there. The other tools that you should absolutely be using would be something like Moss bar to be able to look and see what is your website's domain authority? What is the website?

Rachel Lindteigen: What is the domain authority of your competing websites? There are some tools that you can use to check back links because it's really important back links are part of what impacts your website. Domain authority, which is what Google thinks your website is, how authoritative Google thinks your website is.

Rachel Lindteigen: You're more likely to rank if you've got good backlink so checking stuff like that, you can use a reps. You can use open site Explorer. There's different ones. If you use Uber suggest they have a backlink Explorer. I also like from a content planning stand. I like obviously the keyword tools, but I like to go to Google and look at Google's suggested search and see, start with my, my term that I'm thinking of using and find out what is Google suggesting?

Rachel Lindteigen: What does Google think? I might be searching because that's data that's relevant in recent. You're also gonna get related searches. You're also gonna get people may ask. These are a lot of really great content idea, generat. There's a tool called answer the public it's been private. Uber suggests just recently bought it.

Rachel Lindteigen: I'm not exactly sure how that's gonna impact everything going forward, but it's another great one where you can put your keyword in and you can start to see what type questions people ask. And then ultimately Google analytics. You need to track your performance. So whatever keyword research tool you're using, you generally also have an option of tracking keyword performance.

Rachel Lindteigen: If you have a paid account. So Google does not have that, but like Uber suggests Moz sum rush all of them. Do you wanna track your performance? Because otherwise what's the point so you wanna track your keyword position? You wanna track your organic traffic within Google analytics? You wanna look at your engagement metrics, how much do people like the content that you're creating?

Rachel Lindteigen: Is it the right content? Are they reading a bunch of it or are they just looking at it and being like, eh, out? So there's a lot Those are probably the main ones would be a keyword research tool, a keyword rank tool, something to check the domain authority of the website and content planning tools along with analytics to track your performance.

Greg Mills: Now in 2022 and beyond what online platforms do you see as being the best for small business owners to engage in?

Rachel Lindteigen: I think really, if they don't have a website right now, they're missing out, they need to have a. It needs to have content and it needs to be optimized because without that, without content and optimization, they're not going to show up in Google.

Rachel Lindteigen: They're not going to get traffic. Then I do think they need to choose at least one social media channel. They don't have to do 'em all. They don't have to jump on every trend, but they need to choose one and they need to really think about their ideal customer. What channel is your ideal customer? The most likely to spend their time?

Rachel Lindteigen: And focus on that and follow the best practices for that channel. And that means if it's Instagram, you gotta make reels. Nobody likes to do it. Nobody wants to dance. Nobody wants to feel a fool. Nobody wants to do that, but you know what, if I put up a plain old video, if I put up a plain old picture, I get like three likes.

Rachel Lindteigen: If I do a video where I teach the same four things, I yesterday's video got 3000 views and 40. You have to give the algorithm what it wants and on social it's video. But you've got to do that to expand your reach and to help your audience get to know you, but above all, direct them back to your website, get them on your email list.

Rachel Lindteigen: Get them used to coming to your website because you don't own social. And as the algorithms change, your exposure changes and your building your business on somebody else's land it's borrowed land. It's not yours. The final thing I'm gonna. Is, if you're using an email address, that's your business name at Gmail.

Rachel Lindteigen: You need to get a real email for your business. Set it up through G suite. It's like five bucks a month, but you don't look professional when you are using those other emails. And. I know we're talking we're here. We're over 40 we're let's let's admit right now, if you have an outlook, you have a Y male, you have Yahoo, anything AOL, my friend teases, cuz she's still got an AOL and she sends the grandma emoji every time she gives it out, you need to get rid of that email address because you're going to be seen as obsolete and old.

Rachel Lindteigen: So if you're using something. Regular. It needs to be Gmail, but for your business, it needs a business. Email me@bimybusiness.com.

Greg Mills: What are you hearing from your clients about how etched marketing has increased their their clients and their cash flow, et cetera.

Rachel Lindteigen: So one client we've more than doubled their organic traffic.

Rachel Lindteigen: Since we've been working together, we were looking at it recently. We've had 17,000 unique visits, 17,000 new potential customers. Who've come to the website since we've been working together. The other one was talking about the fact that they got three leads and we've we've barely done anything. We've we've.

Rachel Lindteigen: Five pages and they've already gotten three leads. I have another one where we've gotten about 600 emails on a new email list because we put, we optimized and then we put the opt in on that blog, post that's ranking. So that's part of what we go through is look and see what's the low hanging fruit, but in general, it's that we're driving traffic, we're generating leads.

Rachel Lindteigen: Some, most of my clients, SEO is their number one traffic. Generating channel and the number one lead generating channel. So it's, they're excited to continue working because their phones are ringing. They're enrolling students, they're selling products. And when they're asking people, how did you find out about me?

Rachel Lindteigen: They're saying from Google.

Greg Mills: You've touched on this a little bit earlier, but tell us about some of the courses that you offer. I believe you have got both a free introductory course, as well as your super I'm sorry. I keep wanting to append super to the simple SEO program.

Greg Mills: Maybe you should re rebrand that super simple SEO super.

Rachel Lindteigen: Absolutely. So I do have a free introductory one and that's right on the website and that's where you can start learning how to get traffic to your website. And that's just the intro. It's gonna walk you through a few different things you can do.

Rachel Lindteigen: Ways that you can get traffic. And then it does introduce you to simple SEO content, which is my full course. That's 11 modules. It's a to Z everything you need to know about SEO and content without fluff and without getting super technical. So the reason I named it simple SEO is because when I talked to potential students and I did my research, they were afraid of S.

Rachel Lindteigen: They knew they needed to do it, but there was like this shame around. I'm not sure if I'm smart enough. I don't know if I can figure this out. It's above my pay grade. I don't even understand what SEO is. I've heard about it. And so I wanted them really to understand this is easy. Once you get what you have to do, it's a rinse and repeat process.

Rachel Lindteigen: So I walk 'em through step by step. This is how you come up with ideas. This is how you find the keywords. Here's how you create the content. Here's how you batch your content. Here's how you optimize it. Like just to make it as easy as possible. Here's what you wanna track. These are the reports you wanna run.

Rachel Lindteigen: Here's the templates you can use, really trying to make it easy for 'em because my students are busy entrepreneurs. They're people who don't yet have the money to outsource this to someone. They need to do it themselves, but they also need to make sure that they're getting it right. And there's so much misinformation.

Rachel Lindteigen: Out there when it comes to small business marketing and SEO and content, and it broke my heart because for years, I was at the big agency working with fortune 500 clients. And I would get calls from friends and family members who were small business owners saying, is this what I'm supposed to do? I just got this call.

Rachel Lindteigen: This is they're tell. And I'm like, no, don't do that. Don't pay them. That's a scam. Don't no, no, no, don't do it. I'll walk you through how you do it. That takes you five minutes. Don't do that. And so when I went out on my own, I didn't wanna work with the big guys because they can afford to hire whoever they want.

Rachel Lindteigen: And I had a non-compete, so I couldn't go after some of them, but I really, in my heart, I wanted to help. My friends and my family and small business owners and people who I was tired of seeing them get taken advantage of. And so I wanted to be able to help to teach them. And I tell my clients and my students, my job is to help teach you so that you don't need me ultimately, or so that if you outsource this, you know enough to make sure you're getting your money's worth.

Rachel Lindteigen: Okay.

Greg Mills: Now, what are you working on? That's new and exciting.

Rachel Lindteigen: I'm kind of taking a breather right now because I just launched. So I took simple SEO and turned it into simple SEO content and launched it about 30 days ago because my students were begging to learn about the content side of things. They were going through the course, but their questions were all related to content and they're like, we want a content.

Rachel Lindteigen: So I did that. I also did an entire new website and all the new packages and I brought on a bunch of new clients. So it's working. I'm, I'm very happy. Right now I very thankfully got my son back in school recently and am enjoying, just catching up. As far as, where am I going next? I'm not a hundred percent sure.

Rachel Lindteigen: Part of me is thinking maybe a marketing me. Down the road where I continue to work. I love helping and working with my students. And maybe something like that, maybe taking on a few more clients. I don't know. I'm not a hundred percent sure cuz I just came through this huge, I mean, it was more than a year process in the works and I'm like breathing.

Rachel Lindteigen: I just cleaned off my whiteboard for the first time in months.

Greg Mills: What's been the most difficult part of running etched marketing for you?

Rachel Lindteigen: I think at times it's having faith in yourself because when you work for a company, you feel secure, you feel like, I know I've got a paycheck coming. I know this is happening. I know this'll be okay. And the reality is you're not really safe. Especially when you're in a, a role like marketing and you're older, I've survived 2008.

Rachel Lindteigen: I got laid off. I worked for a nonprofit in oh eight. Well, you know what? Everybody was broke. We were in a recession. Donations were down the very first department to get cut was marketing. So, and then when I left the agency world, it was because we were bought by an investment group and they laid off some of the higher level.

Rachel Lindteigen: I was senior director, they laid off some of the higher level people. They didn't know us. They'd never met us. They just looked at numbers on a spreadsheet and went out, out, out. So it was a false sense of security, but here good or bad. It's all on me. If I am successful or I'm not, if I make money or not, it's all on me.

Rachel Lindteigen: And there are days that that's exciting and there are days that that's really scary.

Greg Mills: In some respects, it sounds like you almost suffer from imposter syndrome, but how are you managing to compete with these two year experts? Well, I say that

Rachel Lindteigen: there are moments. I think we all in some way, one way or another deal with imposter syndrome.

Rachel Lindteigen: I think we all do if we are not at some point dealing with it, we're probably not being very realistic and true in our hearts as for me and the two year experts. God, I love them. I focus on my background. And my experience. And generally I can beat a two year expert any day, because as soon as somebody starts talking and asking questions, I end up with people who heard me on a podcast a year and a half ago, emailing me and saying, I just happen to listen to this podcast and love the way that you explain stuff.

Rachel Lindteigen: Are you taking on clients now? That's where most of my clients come from is either they find my website. They find my blog through. Or they find me on a podcast and they're like, I love how you teach a two year expert. Doesn't have the background. They've never sat in a boardroom at a huge company with the president of e-commerce asking why this happened.

Rachel Lindteigen: Why does our trend line look like this? What's our strategy to fix it. I have, I've been in those meetings. I have sweated bullets through some of those meetings. I think that's the difference. You really truly know what you're doing. And I focus on that. I focus on teaching, providing value. I'm not looking to take advantage of anybody and some of the two year experts think, I mean, they're the bro marketers.

Rachel Lindteigen: We've all seen them. Mm-hmm I'm I'm not gonna ever show a picture of my flashy Lamborghini. On on social. I drive a mom SUV. I drive a Toyota SUV. I'm not super exciting. You

Greg Mills: do have an nice infinity pool. Yes . I'm just, I'm totally joking. I, if you do, I have no

Rachel Lindteigen: idea. I don't have an infinity pool, but I do have a swimming pool and we do have a lot that backs up to the desert and it is beautiful.

Rachel Lindteigen: No infinity pool though. No, no Lamborghini.

Greg Mills: And none here either.

Rachel Lindteigen: So no, you'll find me in the school drop off lane in the morning and I love that. That's why I do this because I can be the one to run him to school and drop him off and give him kisses and pick him up. And that's, that's everything to me.

Rachel Lindteigen: It's worth it.

Greg Mills: Yeah. You found your motivation?

Rachel Lindteigen: Yeah. A hundred percent.

Greg Mills: Well, let's get ready to wrap this up. Is there anything I haven't asked about that you'd like to talk about or. I don't think

Rachel Lindteigen: so. I think you've done a good job of guiding the conversation and asking questions that hopefully will help people learn a little bit more about SEO and content and hopefully make them excited to give it a try for themselves because it can work.

Rachel Lindteigen: It does work. I see it every day and I've seen it every day for more than 10 years.

Greg Mills: Okay. What, what final words of wisdom dealing with SEO? Would you like to share with

Rachel Lindteigen: us? Don't be afraid of it. Learn what to do. Don't try to go it alone. Yes. You can go it alone. You can learn from blogs. You can learn from YouTube.

Rachel Lindteigen: You still run the risk of making a lot of mistakes. You still run the risk of wasting your time of choosing the wrong keyword of doing all those things that we see, where people don't get results. Whether you hire someone, you pay to take a class, you take a free. It doesn't really matter. Just make sure that you're not learning from a two year expert.

Rachel Lindteigen: You're learning from a true expert, whether it's me or someone else that doesn't matter. Just make sure that you are learning from someone who knows. What I would recommend you do is check their website, check their testimonials, go look 'em up on LinkedIn. Those two year experts learn much of anything about them on LinkedIn.

Rachel Lindteigen: But if you look at those, who've been at this for a while, who've done it professionally. They're gonna have a pretty good LinkedIn page.

Greg Mills: Okay. What's the best way for people to check you out and get in touch with you?

Rachel Lindteigen: Yeah, absolutely. Through etched marketing.com is my website. You can find the free class there.

Rachel Lindteigen: You can find my opt-in stuff like that. The social media channel I'm most active on is Instagram. So you can find me over there at etched marketing academy. Send me a DM. Let me know that you saw me on this podcast on entrepreneurs over 40 let's celebrate the fact that we're over 40 and on Insta and trying to be cool.

Rachel Lindteigen: Like the kids

Greg Mills: all right. Are you on TikTok? No,

Rachel Lindteigen: I, but I'm not. So I'm not on TikTok because my husband is in cybersecurity and he is not comfortable with. All the regulations and things with TikTok and how much information they want. So, no, I've not, I don't have it. It's just not worth it.

Greg Mills: Well, it's not worth it.

Greg Mills: And I don't think that there's a lot of, you know, potential clients that you're missing out on. I don't either. I was kind of throwing that out as more of a joke, but you never know when you throw these things out. Sometimes people bite,

Rachel Lindteigen: some are, and there's a lot of pressure within the entrepreneurial world.

Rachel Lindteigen: It's shiny object syndrome. And that's, I think one of the biggest things don't just chase shiny objects, figure out what your strategy is. Cuz remember clubhouse a year, year and a half. Everybody wanted to be on clubhouse. You had to have an invitation. And it reminded me of Pinterest back in the day, where you had to have an invitation to get a Pinterest board, a Pinterest account.

Rachel Lindteigen: Yes. TikTok is the darling today. Talk's not gonna be the darling in another year. Snapchat was the darling five years ago. Just pick one, focus on it, do great things and just really think about your ideal client. Where are they spending their time when they're maybe looking for the information that you have.

Greg Mills: Great advice. Well, that's a wrap. Thank you, Rachel, for being a guest on entrepreneurs over 40.

Rachel Lindteigen: Thank you.