Today we’d like to introduce you to Shelly Fagin.
Shelly, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
While I was drawn to the internet pretty early on before most of my friends even knew it was a thing, It wasn’t until I was expecting my first child, almost 18 years ago, that I started to realize I had a fascination with websites, how they were built and how they were found. I was determined to figure out how to make a living working from home, so I would not have to put my daughter in childcare. Working remotely was nearly unheard of at the time. I knew I’d have to make my own opportunities.
I started consuming everything I could get my hands on and read about web development. I made a lot of mistakes and learned the hard way. The resources available back then were very limited, especially compared to what we have at our fingertips for free even today.
Not long after I started self-teaching myself to build websites, I was drawn to ways to drive traffic to the sites I was building and started learning about Search Engine Optimization. It wasn’t long before I realized that the shortcuts I was taking to build websites were not optimal for search and that was really my turning point in learning how to write quality code.
I truly had no idea at the time, but I had a pretty rare skill set in the digital marketing world. SEO came very naturally to me, extremely logical. Little did I know that is truly not the case with most people. I can build websites, became more and more skilled at SEO and was even a pretty decent designer, although I never design to my own standards. They’re pretty high.
I have always been fascinated with real estate. It’s sorta my side passion and led to me building my first real entrepreneurial adventure, Realasites. I built Single Property Websites that showcased homes for sale. It’s common practice today, but in 2006, it was definitely pretty new to the market with only a couple of other players in the space. My competition was all well established and funded, where I was operating on a shoe-string budget as I had just given birth to my second child. The best part for me was using all I was learning about Search Engine Optimization to be competitive with these bigger companies. It worked so well. An offer was made by the stronger brand in the space to acquire Realasites, which was absorbed into their company.
I wasn’t rich by any means, but it was an incredible learning experience and made me realize I was knowledgeable enough to start charging for my SEO and Web Development services. It was just the boost of confidence I needed.
I briefly went to work for a large local agency that specialized in Pay-Per-Click advertising that wanted to better establish their own SEO department for their clients. I realized quickly it was not a great match for me. I was way too opinionated with regards to SEO and I did not agree with some of the practices they had established at the time and I was very vocal about it, so we decided to part ways.
I also found out I was expecting our fourth child. We would soon have three under three and a 7-year-old. Thankfully, I immediately landed my first client and soon after a second and third. That first client and I worked together for over eight years in an extremely competitive space. He referred to me as his “secret weapon”.
Over the years, I discovered I had a passion for teaching my trade. I always took the extra time to educate my clients and those who asked to better help them avoid getting taken advantage of or worse by some of the shadier, unethical and uneducated practitioners in our industry.
I spend most of my time today working with my clients, building websites and speaking at industry conferences several times a year. My favorite thing to do is helping developers better understand technical SEO so they avoid making mistakes in the development process that can harm a website’s rankings in Google or Bing. There are so many crazy talented developers out there that have very little understanding of SEO, which is a shame. All web devs need to know technical seo. I am blessed to have built a small boutique agency that serves lots of amazing clients. We work with about half local businesses and the other half are bloggers and influencers. A large chunk of which are food bloggers. It’s a unique niche that I find fascinating and have enjoyed working with lots of talented men and women; most work-at-home parents themselves all across the world. I feel extremely blessed to not only be able to provide a good living for my family, but also being able to help others do the same. It’s incredibly rewarding.
Has it been a smooth road?
It definitely has not been a smooth road. Probably one of my biggest struggles has been figuring out how to scale my business while maintaining the quality of work I have always strived to provide. Because I work from home and run a remote-based company, I have struggled with maintaining a healthy home/life balance. I am always connected and would be returning emails on weekends and holidays.
The other big struggles have always been the inconsistency in income and worrying about having to chase invoices. On the web development side of my work, we typically take 50% upfront and the remainder when the site is ready to launch. Unfortunately, projects don’t always wrap up in the estimated timeline.
There are a lot of reasons for this, though the most frequent cause for a delay in a project is waiting on website copy from a client. It gets really hard to predict when we will get paid. I also made the mistake of taking on a huge client several years ago, who had worked with multiple bad SEO’s before me and had been penalized by Google and got very little organic traffic. This client was spending upwards of 200K per month in pay-per-click to drive business, so repairing all this damage done was a top priority. My team and I spent 4 months cleaning up this site and working with the in-house marketing team to do so. They had been penalized by an update that would require Google to manually push out an update in order for them to recover. Thousands of business & website owners in the same situation had been waiting as long as 2 years almost for this update to occur. Just prior to the update being released, the company decides to bring on a new Marketing Director who had some experience overseeing digital in the past. We did not see eye to eye on marketing tactics he wanted to implement and ended up convincing the CEO they needed a new SEO and my team and I was let go. It was devastating to my business at the time. I learned the hard way to make sure in the future so that a single client can’t hurt our business that way ever again. Luckily for that client, our hard work paid off and Google released the update and the site surged organically. Of course, the new SEO that had been brought aboard took full credit for the recovery. He was fired a couple of months later when they realized he wasn’t doing much of anything at all. He claimed he was building a PBN, which is considered black-hat SEO and would have gotten the client penalized again. That next week I discovered he had secretly hidden a backlink to his own site, rich with his target keywords on the client’s website. It was set to be 2px and colored white on a white background. Let’s say that’s extremely unethical and put the client’s business in jeopardy as well. This SEO still ranks high in Google for “Houston SEO” sadly, due to his black-hat tactics. My heart aches for the poor, unsuspecting clients whose livelihoods are at stake due to hiring this guy.
For my blogging clients, we are focused on driving traffic. For my local B2C and B2B clients, we only care about conversion. Traffic numbers don’t mean anything if your site is not producing sales or leads. I take almost a sense of ownership of my client’s companies, considering them our partners. Because of this, we are more selective about who we agree to work with. I refuse to take someone’s money if I know they will not be a good fit, or if they have unreasonable expectations for their budget. I also consider myself highly connected in this industry due to my years speaking at top conferences. Because of these connections, I have a network of talented individuals who specialize in areas that are not my strong suit. I can easily recognize when someone else would be better suited for the task and am able to pull in experts to assist when needed.
Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
This city has created an amazing environment for entrepreneurs to grow and thrive. Sadly, compared to other Texas metro areas like Dallas and Austin, Houston doesn’t have a very strong digital community, despite the large population. There isn’t enough local talent in web development and search engine optimization, which is a shame. Thankfully I have built a remote team, which allows me to tap into talented workers from all over the world and not restricted to local talent. I am looking forward to presenting in a class coming up at Rice University and hopefully, I can inspire some local future digital marketers.
Pricing:
- Website Development projects start at $6K and up
- Monthly retainer SEO Services start at 1K per month, no contract required
- Web Site Auditing starts at $2500
- Onsite Corporate Developer & Marketing Team Training packages available starting at $200 per hour, 6 hour minimum
- Monthly Website Hosting and Maintenance for WordPress websites, from $250 per month
- Corporate Consulting Available starting at $200 per hour
Contact Info:
- Address: The Woodlands
- Website: https://highlysearched.com
- Phone: 281-220-6905
- Email: shelly@highlysearched.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shellyfagin/
- Facebook: facebook.com/shellyfaginseo/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/shellyfagin
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