Today we’d like to introduce you to Rod Holmes.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Rod. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
In 2007 I was managing a medium-sized real estate brokerage that needed a new marketing director. In the job ads, we emphasized we needed someone who understood digital marketing. Of the 100+ resumes we got, only a couple had any mention of digital marketing, let alone experience. Ben Robinson had digital marketing experience and got the job. I had been building websites since the dawn of the Internet and knew it was the future of marketing, and especially for real estate. Ben began teaching me about SEO and PPC advertising and through his work, our brokerage began to compete with the big firms in Chicago in the Google search results.
By the time the real estate market crashed in 2008, Ben and I had been asked to speak about SEO several times and had acquired a few “side clients.” The crash seemed like a great time to start a new business! We started working from our homes, and when we started to accumulate a few clients, we decided to incorporate and open an office.
Through our real estate friends (and a depressed commercial real estate market), we got a great deal on our first office in Lincoln Park—two stories of glass walls on three sides, overlooking the zoo. We were open for business in March, 2009, determined to help our clients’ businesses grow.
For the first year, it was just Ben and I sitting in that room, cranking out as much work as we could. Our focus was SEO and PPC, but we had already realized we had to fix and build websites to do the best job possible for our SEO clients. We could do simple stuff ourselves, but we needed a programmer. Our first addition to the company was the programmer we worked with on the real estate brokerage’s website. Seth lived in Montana, had left his company and had his own SEO/web development company. He was very happy to begin working with us.
Web work, along with the SEO and PPC began to flow in, mainly from recommendations and our own SEO efforts. I was also being asked to speak more and more, which also led to new clients. For the next few years, we grew slowly and steadily, adding a couple of employees most years.
Due to demand and the ever-changing world of Digital Marketing, we added services: SEO began to change focus and that meant we needed to be able to create high-quality, strategic content for our clients. We hired writers, trained them on SEO, and so began our Content Marketing department. In order to get exposure for that content, we began to help our clients with social media and digital PR. Another department and additional employees followed.
In 2014, we outgrew our glass box in Lincoln Park. I went on a city-wide search for a new office that would be big enough for us to grow into for a few years. After a long search, we ended up in the Ravenswood Corridor in—what else? —a converted industrial building filled with tech companies, yoga studios, and other white-collar offices. The space was a great size, had all the trappings of a “Chicago tech company office:” exposed brick walls, ducts, and electrical conduit. It has 14′ ceilings, an open floor plan with plenty of doors to escape behind if it gets too noisy.
2014 was also the year that Ben and his wife decided it was time to head back to her hometown of Cincinnati. We found a small space near Ben’s house and we opened up a branch office with the hope of filling it with programmers. We have two people in that office now, and expect to shortly add a couple more.
We have grown to working mainly with small companies to now working with companies ranging from the huge to the tiny. The majority of our clients are in the Chicago-metro area, but we work with organizations all over the world…and we still find satisfaction in applying our skills and knowledge to help our clients’ businesses grow.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
All businesses have their ups and downs, but I’d say our road has been much smoother than most. We’ve grown steadily over the years with few upward jolts that stress everyone or downward spirals that strain cashflow.
It’s always hard to lose a client, no matter their size. There is always the concern of where the new client will come from.
It’s always nerve wracking to hire a new person. We are a small company, so my first concern is always how they will impact the culture of the company. There’s also the struggle of knowing that the business has to grow to match their salary and benefits as quickly as possible. But people is also one of the greatest joys of owning a business—selecting amazing people to work with, giving them the tools they need, and watching them grow professionally and personally. We take pride in being a small company that provides big-company benefits to our people.
One double-edged sword we deal with daily is the bad reputation of the SEO industry has in some quarters of the business world. Everyone has received those, “We’ll get you to #1 in Google” emails, and amazingly some businesses reply to them. They are always scams, and we often get painted with the same broad brush as the scammers. But we usually are able to turn that perception around, letting clients know that the majority of our business is local and everyone is free to come to our office any time to check us out.
We also combat misconceptions of the industry through education. I speak and teach a lot about digital marketing and we put a lot of effort into educating our clients on best practices and the rationales behind them.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
We are a full-service digital marketing company. The main services we provide are:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
A. Technical SEO – making a website do all the things we know Google rewards.
B. Local SEO – helping local businesses get on the map search results
C. Organic SEO – trying to push our clients to the #1 ranking for their important keywords - Paid Search/Online Advertising/PPC/SEM – this service has many names, but basically it means helping our clients manage their ads online. We manage millions of dollars’ worth of ads per year for clients huge and small. We are a Google Premier Partner, which we are very proud of. But we don’t just work with Google, our clients advertise on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Bing, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and on and on. We manage it all for them.
- Web development – we build websites small to enormous. We build simple everything from 3-page sites, large blogs, to huge, complex sites that help keep doctors informed, large e-commerce sites, and infrastructures to keep national non-profits in the public eye. Our team of programmers is one of our largest differentiators. Most of our competitors rely on the developers who made the site to fix it, but we can handle all problems with websites internally. We don’t have to wait for the web developers to decide to fix something they didn’t realize—and are not enthused about admitting—was broken.
- Content Marketing – SEO used to be a profession filled with ways of tricking Google into liking your site and pages. Google has successfully thwarted all of those tricks and now consistently rewards sites that have great content. In order to help our clients, we have to be able to help them create great content. Our team of writers not only know their way around the “Chicago Manual of Style” but also around a spreadsheet of data on keywords. They know how to write, and how to make sure both Google and people like what they produce.
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) – If you’re a business, half of the job is getting people to come to your site. Once they’re there, the job switches to getting them to convert. Convert means that the visitor does what it is you’d like them to do: fill out a form, download an app, buy something from your shopping cart, or call you looking for answers. CRO’s job is to make changes to the design and text of a site in order to make sure the maximum number of visitors to your site convert into customers.
What were you like growing up?
I grew up in a tiny logging and ranching town on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains in Montana. My family moved to the “big city” of Pierre, SD when I was in middle school. With its 10,000 people, Pierre even had traffic lights and a Pizza Hut. I thought I was very cosmopolitan living there. Growing up in those small towns meant I was able to wander as much as I wanted as a kid. Lots of time playing in mountain streams, riding bikes down dirt roads, riding snowmobiles, and waterskiing.
I was a bit of an outsider, but with many of the insider privileges. I wasn’t exclusive to one click—I hung out with jocks, theater kids, potheads, farm kids, debaters…I had friends in every tribe there was in high school. It wasn’t until a foreign exchange student from Belgium moved to town that I found a really good friend. He was like me…not in one group but friends with them all. And I learned a lot about how much I didn’t know from him. He had a huge perspective compared to the sheltered, narrow life I’d lived in small towns in the country. After meeting him, I knew I wanted to travel…and I have.
Work was a central part of my teenage years. I got my first job sweeping floors in the garage at an auto dealer when I was barely 15. By the time I was 16 I had two jobs: working in a hardware store and as a photographer for the local weekly newspaper. The latter job got me into everything happening in town for free.
I was good at school, but not superlative. I got A’s and B’s without too much effort.
Contact Info:
- Address: 4619 N. Ravenswood,
Suite 104
Chicago, IL 60640 - Website: chicagostyleseo.com
- Phone: 773.809.5002
- Email: rod@chicagostyleseo.com
- Twitter: @roddesu
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