Clemence Coleman is the founder of ClemSEO, a top SEO agency specializing in on-page and off-page optimization for creatives and other small business owners.
Katie: 00:01 Hi everyone, and thank you for tuning into the Hustlenomics Podcast. I’m your host Katie, and today I am so excited to be talking with Clemence Coleman. She is the CEO and founder of an SEO agency called Clem SEO. So Clem, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Clem: 00:16 Well, thank you for having me.
Katie: 00:18 Yeah, absolutely. So I did a little intro for you there, but do you mind jumping in and telling us a little bit more about yourself and everything that you do?
Clem: 00:26 Yeah, I’d love to. So my background is, you’ll hear in my accent. I’m from France originally. I’ve been living in English speaking countries for about 15 years now. I Lived in England for a long time. And I’ve been here in the States for five years. We’ve got our family here and settled and loving it. And my background, I’ve been an STL for six years. I started as [inaudible] at the bottom of the ladder as a fulfillment person. Yeah. Then I moved up very quickly into management, became a consultant, and I’ve had my company for, it’ll be two years in January.
Katie: 01:05 Oh, wow. That’s so exciting. Congratulations. So I would love to go back and talk about two years ago when you decided to start your company, was this something that you had been thinking about for a while or how did this all come to be?
Clem: 01:18 Yeah, so I’ve had several businesses before. But never to this level. I, I’ve never expanded to this, to this level. And I was working for culprit and got pregnant, and a few weeks before giving birth and leaving for my maternity leave, the company that I was working full had a meeting with me telling me that they couldn’t make my wages anymore, so I live in a state where it’s, it’s a right to web state and they can, any companies can basically part with you without giving you a reason whenever they want to. So it was completely by chance. At first, I started this business as this SEO business, though I was known in the industry as well for being an expert. But I started to work by myself a few weeks before losing my job in the corporate world. I was asked by a friend to help her with a website. So I started doing a bit of freelancing and then after I lost my job in the corporate world, I stalled it too. Have a few more clients than I had my baby. And a couple of months after having my baby, I decided to, I decided to expand my business more.
Katie: 02:28 Wow, that’s incredible. So you’re dealing with two babies, your actual baby and your new baby business.
Clem: 02:34 I don’t know which one is the most temperamental, but doing well.
Katie: 02:38 So what was that like? A lot of people like me, I had to deal with, take care of Katie when I started my own business. But you had a lot of other stuff going on. So what was that like? Balancing being a new mom and being a new business owner and having that business in its infancy stages and balancing all of that together at the same time?
Clem: 02:55 Yeah. Well, that’s a great question because I want to admit that it’s not easy to balance motherhood and being an entrepreneur at the same time all the time. You have some good days, and you have some days where you’ve w I feel completely overwhelmed, but it’s, it’s good because I was going through motherhood and having a and you little person to look after at the same time as having a new business to look after. So I was going through the same [inaudible] stages at the same time, but overall it’s a great learning curve, and I’m still learning. I’m still developing, I love learning, call myself a lifelong learner. So yeah, whether it’s with motherhood with my business as a business owner that it’s very difficult. And I, I, Jenny don’t like the word balancing because there is a component with balancing. There is a component that you will be able to have as much time for your personal life and your business life. There isn’t a word that I’ve found yet that defines it very well, but I like to think of waking up in the morning and thinking, okay, today’s going to be a Monday so I don’t have to stress about what’s going to happen with Clem SCO and another day will be a clam SEO day, which is when, and I will be able to put my children in childcare and focus more on my business as well.
Katie: 04:17 Yeah, I’ve heard someone recently call it work-life harmony where it all works together and helps each other move, and you know, move forward together instead of feeling like you have to be pulled in different directions. So I thought maybe that was an interesting way of putting it. And I’ve talked to a lot of people recently, especially people who are mothers who are also business owners about how the idea of work-life balance has completely evolved since even 10 20 years ago and how it’s getting a lot more like harmonious. Like I said, instead of having to break it up into two different sections of your life, it all works together as one.
Clem: 04:52, I completely agree. Especially as the world that the working environment, the working world, is changing as well. Some companies will become more flexible, and they will accept your work from home, and some of those may not be as flexible. Yeah. But I completely agree with you that the work and personal harmony, it’s changing, and sometimes it’s easier, but it can also be most stressful as well.
Katie: 05:17 [Inaudible] Absolutely. Did you have any resources that you turn to or you know, other people who are also business owners and moms communities or anything like that kind of gave you some good tips and tricks and strategies to kind of figure everything out as you went?
Clem: 05:30 I like to listen throughout my day and listen to lots of podcasts. So I’ll cast with a firm, women entrepreneurs like Hustlenomics your podcast data is very good. But I also like to listen to financial outcasts and sometimes there are some golden nuggets that I would apply to my life. And you know, women as women can be very harsh on ourselves. And thinking, especially if it, for me, I’m having a lot of them sometimes have enough of mum guilt thinking that I need, I should be spending all my, you know, more out, more time with my children or more time at home. But then I ran as well. If I spend more time, I wouldn’t be able to provide the life that I’m providing for them right now. So in a way it’s a catch 22, but these financial podcasts really helped me and kind of grind ground me and let me, I understand that actually, my situation is now I shouldn’t feel guilty for, you know, for, for me working and yeah, being able to provide for my family.
Katie: 06:31 Right, right. Absolutely. Well speaking of that, you said you’d had your business for two years, and when you sent me an email in your bio, it said that you’ve already grown to six figures, which is incredible. And so I’d love to hear about what your business is, what you guys offer and how you kind of get started with Clem SEO.
Clem: 06:48 Yeah. So I’m SEO is all about SEO services and as I said, I’ve, I’ve wiped the various SEO companies before. But what I found is when I went to the, I’m especially big corporate SEO companies, they would offer a kind of a mechanical way to optimize a specific website. And as I gain more knowledge in SEO, I understood that the SEO that you need to offer for our client needs to be a personalized service. So if a person comes to me with a website that hasn’t been optimized, then they will have different needs from another website that may have come to me a couple of weeks ago, even on the same day, every website has different needs. So my SEO services are very personalized, and I have found my niche as well. I work with other influences and bloggers on various website platforms, and I’m, I’m moving into more into brand consulting as well nowadays. Yeah. Because my mission is to teach my clients how to optimize their own websites, how to understand what search engines are doing or what they’re looking for to be able to, for their website to appear at the top of the searches. And then once I’ve done all this education, then I can move more into some run consulting and understand and work with my clients as to what kind of content yeah. Would do very well and could potentially go viral for them.
Katie: 08:14 That’s so interesting. I love that you mentioned that teaching is a part of your process and the education with your clients is important because a lot of people I’ve found have their skills, and they offer it to people for a price they don’t want to share or teach anybody what they knew how to do. So I really appreciate the fact that you’re giving back a little bit of creative control and power to your clients and allowing them to be part of that process. I think that’s unique.
Clem: 08:37 Yeah. Thank you, Katie. And actually, I was thinking about it. I attended a conference for women entrepreneurs, and they asked us what, you know, what your passion was as an entrepreneur. And my passion is teaching. And I was thinking, why do I love teaching? I was teaching before I got into SEO; I was teaching languages. I speak different languages, and I love the interaction of, of speaking various languages and cultures and also, you know, at sharing my knowledge with people. And as I was thinking about the importance of teaching, I was thinking, why do I love teaching so much? And in fact, it’s because I empowered, as you mentioned Katie, I empower people to move forward and do better things for themselves. And that’s why I want to focus on teaching my clients how to optimize their website.
Katie: 09:23 That’s wonderful. So if you’ve been in the business world or the online business world at all, you probably know what SEO is. But for any listeners out there who are maybe new to this and they don’t know what SEO means, do you mind just giving kind of a brief description of what SEO is and what it does for people’s websites and blogs?
Clem: 09:40 So ICU has existed since about 1998 in the night and late 1990s. And it’s, SEO is an acronym that stands for search engine optimization. And basically, it’s the way that you code your websites so that search engines such as Google. Yeah. I’m Ken crawl your website and understand what your website is about and if your website has I’m good content then and it’s optimized well, yeah. Then they will put you on the first page. Okay. And the first few rankings of Google search results, I was looking yesterday at an out an article, and daily, there are over 4 billion searches online, whether it’s with Google or other search engines. So imagine if, you know, if you have a website, imagine if your website was to come up for [inaudible] just to one, you know, no point, no 1% of the searches, you would get hundreds of thousands of page views to your website every single day. And obviously, my objective is to increase that for my clients’ websites and to make sure that their online exposure is improving.
Katie: 10:48 Awesome. And I want to clarify, when you’re looking at a Google page, and correct me if I’m wrong on this, but the first three or four at the top of the page, those are paid Google ads, right? And below that, that’s where the search engine optimization starts to put people in a certain ranking. Is that correct?
Clem: 11:05 Absolutely. So it depends on the search that you do. If you do a more general search, yes, you’ll have the first three of 4:00 AM listings. Our results are ads, and you’ll see in fact, underneath the blue link is going to be [inaudible] and little green symbols with the word ad. So it means that people have paid to be at the top of these results and right underneath if it’s a local search. So if you’re looking for a local service, you should have a map with some suggestions for local businesses. And underneath that, you’ll have your organic results, which is where SEO SEO also has some effects on the local, on the map results, but based on more on the organic results as well.
Katie: 11:48 Absolutely. Thank you for clarifying that. I know sometimes it’s confusing the difference between paid organic searches. So awesome. That’s great. So, so SEO is really important for anybody who’s wanting to be found in searches on Google or any other search engine, even Pinterest sometimes. So when you’re teaching your clients how to start optimizing their pages, their websites, their blogs, do you have top three things that you say, this is what you should look at first, that people should know when they want to make their page well optimized?
Clem: 12:19 Yeah, because in STO you have various degree of technicality. I have a lot of clients that come to me and say, I’m not technical. I know I have a WordPress site, but all I do is get some content out, and I’m not sure how to optimize it. And I, you know, I don’t know much about development. So what I tend to tell them is ask them to focus on what’s called the on-page optimization. So when they go and create a new piece of content, whether it’s a blog post or a service page, I will ask them to think about the keyword that they want to Pierre for them to rank as in appearing on the first page. And once they have these, I ask them to drop down five or ten terms that they would like to appear to rank for.
Clem: 13:05 And then I will ask them to go on Google on the search engine themselves and take a look at what kind of results is already there on a first and second page. And if it’s a result that is not relevant to their website, then I will suggest some keywords myself for them. Well, you know, that they can focus their optimization on. And then once we found out the keywords, we’ll go, I will go and give them some pointers as to how to optimize their websites. It’s the best way. So whether it’s making sure that the keyword is on is the blog posts or the webpage whether it’s also about optimizing them metadata. The metadata is the title. And the little description that appears in Google search results. So that will be the three key points that I will share with them without getting into all the technical technicalities of SEO as well.
Katie: 14:05 Awesome. And since you work with a lot of bloggers and influencers, and I also have a lot of photographers or just other visual entrepreneurs that listen to the show, I’d love if you could talk a little bit about optimizing images because people hear a lot about optimizing texts, but not so much about images, even though they have a primarily visual business. Do you have anything to add about how you can make your images more searchable?
Clem: 14:27 Yeah, I have lots to add about that. I noticed in the past couple of years that image searches have become a lot more popular. So searches are nowadays about 80% of the searches I’ve done on mobile devices. So, and what mobile devices do, people want visible results rather than reading lots and lots of text. So it is important for bloggers and for visual business owners to optimize their images. Now if you have a WordPress site, for instance, you can use some plugins that will distinguish your optimization for your Pinterest image and your organic results. And this plugin is very easy to use. It’s called tasty pin, and it will have, it will give you two nines one nine for your Pinterest old text and one line for your organic old text. So this is what I recommend my web [inaudible] website owners to use. And then as Google evolves, where we want to do is be as specific as we can on the images.
Clem: 15:34 A couple of years ago you would be able to put just your brand and maybe your keyword and the image and it would be ranking. But nowadays what search engines and people look for is an actual description of your image. If you have a picture of a family posing in front of the Christmas tree as we’re coming into the holiday season, then it would be good to put the [inaudible] brand. So you can say a family’s sitting in front of the Christmas tree featured by and then the name of your brand. And then add a little bit more details. So what is the family wearing? You know, is anyone standing up? Is there a blonde woman or brunette and this kind of details would get you to the top of search engines.
Katie: 16:16 That’s awesome. That’s such good advice. That stuff that I had no idea about, and I’m learning every day about SEO. So that’s wonderful. I wanted to ask your opinion since we’ve talked about WordPress a little bit, and I’m sure a lot of people do use WordPress for their blogs and websites. How do you feel about the Yoast plugin?
Clem: 16:32 So the Yoast plugging is, is a great plugin. It gives you a great analysis of your piece of content that you want to publish. However, the Yoast plugin is not the Beale. And Oh, yesterday I was teaching a client how to optimize their post. And she was telling me, well, you know, I always get my green lights. So when you optimize opposed to using Yoast, you’ll have a WEX with a set of traffic lights, and you’ve got red, orange, and green. In the middle, you’ve got green. It means that the the the posts or the pages potentially, well up to maze, it means that you’ve taken away all the warnings that the warnings that Yoast had or your piece of content. So the issue is with Yoast is that it cannot, it is not an intelligent machine, meaning that it doesn’t [inaudible] understand what you’ll [inaudible] a piece of content is about.
Clem: 17:25 So right now I have a lot of influences that are coming out as, as, as I said we’re in the holiday season, so they’re all publishing gift guides. Now, for gift guides, you don’t need a lot of content. However, if you go into Yoast S into an SEO Yoast, they will send you a warning saying that the post is less than 300 words. But when you publish a gift guide don’t need to have a 500-word post to explain why you, you know, why you put, you added this gift and the gift guide, et cetera. So to sum it all up, Yoast is a great guide, but it’s not the Beale and, Oh, and there are a lot of other SEO practices. Best practices to use to optimize your post accurately,
Katie: 18:09 Right? So it’s a good start, but you definitely would encourage people to do more research and in-depth SCA. Well, that’s awesome information. What would be one of the biggest SEO mistakes that you’ve seen come up over and over and over again, even specifically with the niche that you work with? Influencers and bloggers.
Clem: 18:28 So one of the mistakes that I see is not submitting your website to Google, Google office to tools, Google analytics, and Google search console. And we want to make sure that your website is with Google on that. It takes on Google search console. A lot of people come to me, and they’ve got their Google analytics account, and they’ve submitted their website, which is great. Now the search consult tool is a tool that allows you to submit your site map, meaning that it allows you to tell Google, okay, my website is 500 page has 500 pages, so you’ll need to crawl and index those 500 pages. If you don’t submit, you’ll sign, you’ll find sitemap in search console. Google may only be indexing and corroding 25 pages out of those 500 pages. So it’s very important to have that.
Katie: 19:21 Oh, wow. Okay. That’s amazing. Another piece of information that I didn’t know about, and I would love to talk a little bit about your specific niche influencers and bloggers and people who are maybe interested in doing that themselves. The word influencer and how to become one is a nebulous topic, and not everybody has the same answer on that, but just a blogger in general. Would you suggest WordPress as being a good place for them to start? And if so, do you have any tips and tricks for them to get started solidly with their SEO and getting ranked in Google?
Clem: 19:53 Yeah, absolutely. So an influence says as you said, a lot of people are still confused as to what an influencer does. I work with them every single day, and I know that they put, it takes them hours and hours to publish content and create beautiful content that their readers and potential new visitors will love. So that’s why I decided to focus on this niche because a lot of content is being put out there but is not being noticed by search engines is not being noticed by potential other new readers. As I said, you know we have all billion searches per day on Google, and only a fraction of that is going to influences when, as I said again, they spent hours doing their content. So my advice would be that if you’ve been a blogger for a few years, five or six years and you’ve re you only realize that SEO is something that you need to focus, then prioritize is my, is my advice. Go back and find out which of your posts or your content is the most, has done very well in the past and focus on optimizing these. If they’ve done very well in the past, it tells me that it’s ranking pretty well. It’s not that yet, but it’s ranking pretty well. So what you want to do is go on these posts, all pages and optimize them to make sure that they rank even better and boost their rankings and as a consequence, reposting that page views as well.
Katie: 21:20 Awesome. Thank you for sharing all that. That’s going to be such valuable information. Definitely can implement some of that on what I’m working on as well. So thank you so much for sharing all that.
Clem: 21:29 You’re very welcome.
Katie: 21:30 It’s just kind of a left turn, but if you don’t mind, I’d love to sort of jump back into what it’s like for you as a business owner. You mentioned it’s been two years and you’ve been working in corporate before, and what has been something that has surprised you the most about being a business owner?
Clem: 21:45 What has surprised me the most is that there is no rest. There’s no, there’s always you can always do something and unless you control your sevens, okay, no, today I’m having a day off. I’m not going to do anything. I’m not going to do it. Then it’s, it’s very difficult. You know, you can be working 24 hours a day if you want this. Always. If, if you’re going to improve your clients round, then there are always some improvements. It’s always an email that you want to send to your clients, which is very different to when I went into culprit or other service-based jobs where, you know, I could work until 6:00 PM and then at 6:00 PM I left the office and then that’s it. That wasn’t until 8:09 AM the following day. So that was very surprising to me.
Katie: 22:30 Yeah, same. I’ve had that same experience. So do you have any books or probably you already mentioned some podcasts that you love, but do you have any books out there or courses or any other podcasts that you found to be helpful, whether SEO is driven or just as a business owner that you would recommend to the listeners?
Clem: 22:47 There are so many books and podcasts out there, but what I learned is that I should not to hesitate to outsource. So if there are things that you’re not confident with, then don’t hesitate to, to outsource and pay for some services that you know a person takes a couple of hours to do whereas it would take me two days to do my taxes, for instance. So I also see my taxes requirements so that I can then focus on the SEO and building a bigger, a better brand for my clients.
Katie: 23:19 Yes, absolutely. I am 100% behind outsourcing, and if you don’t necessarily have the funds, one thing that I’ve struggled with is I’m saying, okay, when outsourcing this, but I can’t afford it right now. There are some great websites where you can barter with other creatives and other business owners to where you can provide a service for them, and they provide a service back to you. So I always like to mention that because you know, sometimes we don’t always have the biggest budget. So I think that’s, that’s awesome and a good to use for the future.
Clem: 23:46 Yes, I am. I’m a big proponent of Facebook pages, you know, community pages. You’ll always find someone looking for, let’s say you’re a website developer, but you need, you need some new business cards done, or you need SEO for your website. I’m pretty sure if you were to go on these community pages and offer your services, people would love to, as you said, bought it services.
Katie: 24:09 Yes, 100%. We talk about community Facebook pages on here all the time. I feel like I should be paid by Facebook for how much I talk about it. But it is so helpful, and I’ve met most of my guests through Facebook pages, so I can’t say how great they are. Enough. And I know a lot of people are going to want to follow everything you’re doing. And you mentioned you might have an offer for the listeners. So do you mind talking a little bit about that and how everyone can find you?
Clem: 24:33 Yeah, absolutely. So for all the Hustlenomics listeners, if they’re interested in wanting to develop their SEO strategy, what I do is I would offer you a free analysis, a webinar basis, which is where I look at your website. And send you the top five projects that you should be working on to increase your organic page views. And the way you can contact me, you can either contact me by email, it’s clem@clemseo.com, or you can find my website, clemseo.com all you can find me on Instagram and Facebook. I also have pages and on LinkedIn as well. I have pages there, and you’ll be able to contact me through these platforms, and we’ll be able to look at your website together, and I’ll be able to give you the recommendations on how to improve your websites.
Katie: 25:34 Amazing. Thank you so much for offering that. That is so much value, and I know the listeners are going to take advantage of that as well. So thank you again for coming on the show. It’s been so great to talk to you today.
Clem: 25:45 You’re very welcome. Thank you, Katie, for having me.
