Rhea Drysdale (@rhea), CEO of Outspoken Media invited me to her office in Troy, New York to talk search. We started off talking about growing up in the SEO industry, the good and the bad of that. We then talked about how her first career was in SEO and then discussed her early SEO career.

She won an award; the 40 under 40, but said awards are not important to her personally but likely will submit for one as a team motivation initiative within her company. But she is personally old-school about not talking about her successes in SEO.

We then talked about making decisions out of fear versus out of courage, and how that was one of the reasons she started the company - kind of out of fear. It is funny how small business owners can relate to about the struggles with running a small business. She said you really have to love not just the day to day with SEO, but also have to love the details around running a business.

There is a value to your clients when you understand what it means to run a business. Being on a budget, understanding financial and resource limitations - all of that can be super important for your client strategy.

Saving clients money is something that is a priority for her and her clients. One of her clients was more focused on saving money and not wasting money. So she came up with a strategy around how to optimize a web site to reduce money going out of the window. SEO is about getting results and showing improvements, all while doing so in a sustainable way.

Local is becoming even more hyper local. Rhea said even within the search results you are seeing those become even more local. Specifically local listing pages are prioritizing aggregators and actual small businesses in that area over businesses that have a national brand with local listing pages. Also if you had a national web page ranking at the top, Google is now showing more aggregators and actual small businesses over that page now. She references how Google was testing adding city names to page titles in the search results. These changes are big changes and you need to judge do you change your clients sites for this or wait and see if things change back.

To learn more about Rhea and Outspoken Media, visit outspokenmedia.com.

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