Amplify

Hi, I’m Kendall Bennett. I’m the CEO of AMain Performance Sports and Hobbies. Stephan’s a SEO Expert. We contracted him, we were struggling to get our SEO to work correctly. Stephan came along and he’s very expensive but he’s probably the best SEO guy that we’ve ever worked with.

We have a large e-commerce website, 60,000 plus products. Getting SEO to work with such a huge collection of product pages is actually quite difficult. The first thing he did that was different to most other guys is that he did a very big, deep dive into our website and found out a lot of things that we had missed that were wrong, things that we had to clean up, site map issues and stuff like that, things that just didn’t show up because they didn’t really show up in the front end. He’s really good at actually figuring that stuff out.

He gave us a lot of recommendations about the things that we should do. Everything he told us to do, something he suggested and recommended, actually did work for us. It worked quite well.

He also told us things that we shouldn’t do. Whether I agreed with him or not at the time, he was right. The things that he said, “You shouldn’t do that,” yeah, we shouldn’t have done that. We fixed it. Today, our SEO has been the strongest it’s been in a long time. We credit a lot of that to Stephan’s expertise.
If you’re thinking about using him for SEO, I’d highly recommend him.

Thanks for all your help. You changed our whole model, and as a result we are crushing it.

Working with an expert like Stephan has been amazing. Stephan and his team helped my site recover from a manual Google penalty. He literally wrote “the book” on SEO and so glad to have a cutting edge expert on my side.

I’m an SEO specialist for the past 5 years and I worked with Stephan for about a year on a bigger project, it turned out great. As we go along and things come up, Stephan’s always one I go to for further information, I tell our great ideas, he’s definitely one of the good few guys in SEO.

I’m Steve Spangler and I love to do stuff like this. But there’s no way I’d get invited as a science guy and do any of these cool things on television unless I can get found, unless I had an online presence, unless I had a body of work that people could examine online and truly understand and come to the conclusion that I was the expert that they needed in science education.

Well, this is what happened when we turned to Stephan Spencer back in 2003 and I want to talk to you about three different things. I want to talk to you about the SEO Audit, like to talk to you about our long term relationship and I want to talk to you about the ROI, what really happened to go from a small, little website to now a small company that employs almost 30 people producing the coolest hands on science stories you can ever imagine. Back in 2003 we had a little website, not doing well, not moving products, Google the name and couldn’t even come up with that, so I read somewhere that there was this term that was important, search engine optimization, and right across online of course an SEO Audit. And the master of that was Stephan Spencer. So we turned to him and asked what that would look like. An SEO Audit, I want to think of it as a road map, a blueprint, to be able to fix not only the issues, but allow people to plan for the future. What that actually did for us is put together a strategic plan better than anything that we could’ve ever produced on our own and which said this is where you are now, this is where you need to go and this is what you can be given the work and the dedication that you’re going to put into it. That’s exactly what happened to us. We changed our platform, we focused on all of the important pieces that the SEO Audit provided and the greatest part is it turned into this long term relationship that wasn’t a one and done. Because once we had the platform developed, we turned back to Stephan for more help and more guidance and kept him on for over a decade to produce this long term relationship. Here is somebody that truly understands what it takes to continue that presence that you need online and to continue strategies to keep you relevant, to have your content found amidst everybody else’s now caught on the bandwagon and producing content. We had to make our content the best and that’s exactly what he helped us through. That leads us to the last piece and that’s our return on investment. It was hard to convince our leadership team but this is exactly what we needed to do to take this kind of money and to invest it in the strategic planning that was needed to get the blueprint for moving forward. It’s the best thing that we could’ve ever done because not only did it give us an opportunity to do some planning but it gave us the tools that we could use instantly to be able to do some of the things and implement those ideas on our own. We really learned from Stephan how to focus on content, how to keyword rich content, how to increase our presence online by showing our expertise online, that’s exactly what the whole thing did for us. So from a science teacher in Englewood, Colorado turned to a television personality, and now a founder of an e-commerce company, this type of relationship that we formed with Stephan Spencer and the long term effects are something that we’re grateful for and look forward to our future engagement with him as we move forward and blow up something else I guess.

After the first time going through Part 1 and 2 of the course I can say it’s great value for the money. About Search Console I knew the basics – I did only setup the accounts for my customers and clicked a little here and there. Now I have a guideline to get the full picture!

Screaming Frog I use for more than 2 years and show potential customers in live presentations every day where some problems are but I use only about 8% of the functionality of the software. I several times planned to go through the software on my own to learn how to use it better but with your moderated help it’s the best solution.

I will rarely write a review such as this and frankly, Stephan doesn’t need any more accolades, however, he was key to turning my business from an idea into reality. He defined our entire digital strategy (including the blog, podcast and explainer video), and even created our brand from scratch. Going into it, my 18-year company was American Response, Inc. and we didn’t even have a web site.

He came up with the SkyCover name and the SafeHouse podcast name, acquired the skycover.com domain from a domainer, developed our presence on social sites like Pinterest and Twitter, defined our keyword strategy, drove all content marketing, and assembled a crackerjack team of viral content writers, social media power users, videographers, animators, podcast producers and more. He’s known as the SEO guru and that’s why I hired him. Stephan truly went above and beyond the initial scope of SEO to really drive our business forward across all channels. I never would have dreamed I’d have my own podcast show that I don’t have to host myself or produce and that’s in the iTunes New & Noteworthy and Top 200. Working with Stephan was the best decision I could have made. I am so grateful to have found such a dedicated and gifted expert to navigate me through the choppy waters of launching a startup.

Working with Stephan was without a doubt one of the best investments we’ve made. After implementing only half of Stephan’s recommendations, our organic traffic went up 70%, which is not easy when you already have 90,000 daily organic visits and you’ve optimized your site a whole lot over the years. I recommend Stephan without reservation.

“Stephan’s SEO audit identified some major problem areas in our site that had eluded us. That, along with his expert assistance in creating a more authoritative link profile, was pivotal in successfully resolving a manual action and setting us up for long-term success in Google. Under his guidance, we re-engineered our online business on a level that was far superior to what we could have accomplished alone. It was well worth the investment.“

As a means of raising the profile of The Carter Center and driving traffic to our website, Stephan Spencer suggested that President Carter write a blog. We took that suggestion, developed a strategy around a trip to the West African countries of Togo, Ghana, and Mali, and posted regular blogs from President Carter (with photos, sidebars and news stories, and links to related material on our site) over the course of eight days.

Although he had written reports from the field on previous trips, this was his first experience with the blogging phenomenon and he was eager to participate.

The blogs, which we marketed via press releases, through partner organization websites, and via the Google AdWord program, garnered significant increases in visits to our site, resulting in an average quadruple our normal daily average. We have sustained a significant increase in Web traffic since February 2004, building on the momentum of the blog project, which we intend to repeat both with President Carter and others here at the Center. We are grateful to Stephan for planting the seed for one of the most successful Web projects The Carter Center has undertaken to-date.

The first thing I wanted to point out was how technical he was, his technical ability, how cutting edge some of the concepts he brought to the table were, the observations that he had. We were facing a lot of technical challenges at the time, and he was really efficient in diagnosing those problems, pointing those out, and giving us a clear path to remedy those problems.

He was super creative in putting out content that was super shareable, actionable, and clickable. The other thing that I would point out was that he was unabashedly, unapologetically white hat. So many companies I feel like (and ours was no different) try to come up with short-term solutions to complicated problems – he would never let us do that. Everything that he conceived of was very thorough and meant to be sustainable. In terms of ROI, it was a sizable investment for us at the time but absolutely worth every penny. He gave us a roadmap that we were working on for years after that engagement ended and again it was complete. So in summary, I recommend Stephan Spencer wholeheartedly. He’s certainly a thought leader in the industry and that was evident every moment that he worked with us. Absolutely no reservations and would be eager to work with him again in the future.