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778 viewsKathy DalPra is the owner of Bride Appeal. She takes the overwhelm out of SEO, sales and website conversion so wedding businesses can turn more curious visitors into high paying clients. Kathy’s strategies began to develop during her time as bridalpreneur when she took a struggling website to the top of Google; gaining targeted traffic, press mentions and celebrity customers along the way. Today Kathy shares her methods with other event professionals at Brideappeal.
Please introduce yourself and where you work.
I’m Kathy with Bride Appeal and I help wedding and event businesses, as well as women entrepreneurs, use SEO to create a more passive stream of traffic. My clients are all over the world, from Mexico to Ireland, Malta, Australia and beyond. As of this moment, I work out of the Chicagoland area, but we tend to move around as a family so that could change.
How do you think SEO has changed over the last 10 years?
To me, the biggest shift has been the influence of quality content on rankings and the standard for that content is much higher today. I think it was always Google’s ultimate goal to rank the best resource, but the benchmark for what the best resource is has evolved. 10 years ago simple optimization could get a page ranked easily in a modestly competitive market. Today, it takes much more valuable, comprehensive content plus strategic promotion to earn rankings. In other words, website owners need to think like publishers to be rewarded with search traffic.
How did you get introduced to digital marketing, more specifically SEO?
I stumbled upon SEO rather accidentally. I had just launched my first ecommerce site selling jewelry I designed and, when analyzing my traffic sources, I discovered that the majority of my visitors came from Google image and long tail searches. I felt like I hit the jackpot and became a bit obsessed with figuring out how to repeat that success.
What are the services you provide to your clients?
I teach my clients how to tackle SEO themselves as well as also offer SEO-driven content marketing services to help them grow search traffic faster than they can going it alone.
What strategy according to you will prevail in 2017 for SEO?
High level content marketing. That is, developing top tier, share-worthy content and building buzz around it. This approach touches on so many top ranking factors (authority, backlinks, behavior signals etc.) that it’s got to be central to any SEO campaign right now.
What would your advice be to people who are looking to take up digital marketing as a career choice?
Companies will always need to be marketed and digital is where the customers are, so I think it’s a no brainer. It’s a bit saturated as a field, but there is always room in any market for shining stars. To stand out, specialize in a specific vertical or niche and master it so that you’re the best in that area of expertise. When you reliably get clients results because you know their market better than anyone, attracting new business (or a well-paying job) is easy.
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