Today we’d like to introduce you to Scott Davis.
Scott, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I’ve been in some form of marketing or another since I was in High School. Being raised by a single mother, I was always at work with her after school and during the summers. She had me proof reading her magazine articles when I was in 3rd grade.
In high school, I worked during the summers at A. Larry Ross & Associates as an account assistant sending press releases, digging through Bacon’s books for media contact information and putting press kits together. At that time, I had the fortune of getting to help Rev. Billy Graham and Rev. T. D. Jakes of the Potter’s House in Dallas with their PR accounts.
While attending the University of North Texas, I worked at ClearChannel Communications as a radio promotions grunt. They pay was… well… at least we got a check. I probably would have done the job for free just because of the perks — I didn’t have to pay for food, movie tickets, concert tickets or work clothes for nearly 4 years, but that’s probably why college kids take that kind of a job. I also got to meet a ton of really interesting people between the DJ’s, artists and venue workers. You get to know a lot about people and what motivates them when you’re around strangers every day for a living. Especially when you’re giving away free stuff.
After graduating from UNT in 2004, I attended the University of Akron School of Law for a year. Needless to say, the cold didn’t agree with me up north and law school wasn’t going to work out, so I moved back to Dallas around 2006.
I found a marketing gig at BlueGreen Corp giving away free trips to get people to attend the company’s timeshare presentations. I wasn’t actually selling anything aside from potential vacation savings at the cost of an hour and a half of your time, but I was quickly promoted to managing the OPC’s (other people who did what I was doing). Like anyone who wants to learn how to do a job well, I paid attention to the best closers and learned how to recognize when a deal was closed, shut up and ask if they wanted to pay with cash or credit.
After doing that for a while, I ended up moving over to work for one of their competitors in the Dallas market, Silverleaf Resorts.
I started with Silverleaf right before the Texas State Fair. After the Fair had concluded, I ended up receiving the OPC of the Year award for the company, nationwide… solely based on the State Fair performance. However, after spending years and years driving to events for a living and braving the Texas summers, I decided it was time to work somewhere with air conditioning.
Around 2010, I took a job at 1000bulbs.com building product pages for their website.
They had us changing random things about the pages for what seemed to be no reason, but the excuse was SEO. In an attempt to understand why, I started reading the SEO blogs and forums and learning what was really going on with Google and why website pages needed to be set up in a certain way for the search engines to understand them.
This was also about the time I took over the website and advertising for North Dallas Appliance Repair, a family owned small business in Richardson, Texas. I’ve served as their CMO for quite a few years at this point, and the company is hitting it out of the park business wise. It’s one of my best friends’ companies, and I’m glad I was able to help save his business for him. He was applying for jobs at the time.
After a few years there, I moved on to Valet Interactive in Plano, Texas, where I was in charge of SEO for our hotel vanity site clients and several hundred Hilton, Marriott and Choice hotel corporate sites for Pillar Hotel Management’s portfolio. I wrote quite a few entertaining and extremely educational blog articles (if you can get to the end of them…) and became quite versed in dealing with “WTF Google?!?”.
ReachLocal managed to steal me for the right price a few years later, and I handled their “strategic national accounts”… which is a fancy way of saying HVAC, plumbing, electricians and service area businesses that may or may not have a location. I had 110 or so Service Experts locations and about 30 ARS/Rescue Rooters across the US and Canada.
After that, I did a brief stint as a WordPress Website Developer and SEO manager for a medical group start-up. Six months into that, I decided I needed to be working for myself. After seeing in-house, agency and in-house again. Over a 7-year stretch, I’d seen vendors rip off clients that I worked for, vendors selling products they didn’t really understand to clients and website developers who would steal a website and sell it to some unsuspecting client.
In February, I started Digital Jedi SEO to help business owners market themselves online in a smart, White Hat fashion while proactively dealing with people who cheat in Google.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Going out on your own is never easy. I’ve been selling platinum level services for bronze level pricing, but when the average lifespan of a SEO client is 18 months for my industry — I’ve had a few clients for 5 years or better. As you’ll notice with a lot of internet marketing and website development companies, we tend to spend the bulk of our time on client’s websites and their marketing — which can hinder growing your own client base, but on that note, I can always use more clients.
Please tell us about Digital Jedi SEO.
We specialize in WordPress Website Development, Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing with a focus on Google — because that’s where most of your potential customers are searching. Google has somewhere around 3 billion searches per month globally. The online YellowPages gets searched about 200,000 times a month.
We also handle Google Manual Penalty Removal, Google My Business optimization and Local SEO. While it may sound odd to separate Local SEO from SEO in general, they’re almost two completely different creatures to Google with personalized results and the growth of mobile search, which takes into account the physical location of the person doing the search in relation to businesses that do what they’re searching for and where the business is located.
Whether you run a service area company or you have a physical storefront (strategy is different for each), we can help promote you in Google, Bing and Yahoo.
Personally, I’m a member of the Google Trusted Tester team for Google My Business and Google Maps. Occasionally some of our clients get to beta test new Google products before they are released to the public (assuming they survive the test). I can’t really speak too much about that due to non-disclosures, but some of the stuff they have in the works for Google My Business is pretty cool and should do wonders for SMB’s in the area who have time to make use of them.
As a company, we understand that website traffic is great, but if the client needs the phone to ring… all those clicks on the website that don’t make the phone ring aren’t useful. For the client, it’s about making sure their KPM (key performance metric) is accomplished. For the client’s potential customers, it’s about delivering the answers your customers are searching for online and having a solution ready for them to choose. While still making it easy for them to get in touch with you and navigate your website.
We only use White Hat tactics online and make sure if Google introduces a new hoop to jump through, we jump through it.
Unlike Wix and some of the build it yourself style website builders, we don’t rent clients websites. All of our clients own their own domain (.com) and their own websites. If they ever decide to take their business elsewhere, they can take their site and domain with them because they truly own them (or if I randomly get hit by a DART bus — which almost happened two weeks ago because it ran a red light, they’re not up the creek).
My personal slogan is, “I get paid to make you money”, but I haven’t decided to brand the company with it quite yet.
Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
I don’t know that I can quite pick a single favorite, but I can generalize my answer to every down of football I got to play growing up. I wasn’t the biggest kid in school at 143 lbs. but I was good at physics and I was fast. There’s nothing like hitting a 220 lb. running back at the line of scrimmage on a sweep and knocking him on his butt… especially at a buck 43. I ended up hurting my back playing basketball my Junior year and then again in a car accident later that year and didn’t get to play anything my Senior year of high school due to the injuries.
Pricing:
- New Website Development – $1,000 to $40,000 (Kind of like a car… the more it can do and the fancier it is, the more it ends up costing)
- Search Engine Optimization (Local) – Starting at $500/Month for Websites under 30 Pages
- Search Engine Marketing (Local) – $200/Month per Campaign + 10% of Monthly Spend
- Search Engine Optimizaton (National) – Starting at $1,000/Month for Websites up to 100 Pages
- Search Engine Optimizaton (Custom) – Starting at $1,500/Month for E-Commerce sites and Websites over 100 Pages
- Existing Website Development (Modifications to Your Existing Site) – $125/Hour, minimum of 1 hour
Contact Info:
- Website: www.digitaljediseo.com
- Phone: (469) 701-0232
- Email: info@digitaljediseo.com
Image Credit:
Marcia Davis at Freelantz Media
Getting in touch: VoyageDallas is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
