How I Survived a Year Without Organic SEO

I hear a ton of things about search engine optimization, a lot of theories, a lot of this'll work, this won't work, all of that. And I test it and I test it on my website. I don't test it on a client's website. That would just be wrong. So on my website, you might see it be organically ranked in my local area. In position 1 through 4. I'll have tried something, experimented with something, and it didn't work. Google hated it, whatever it was. And I tanked my organic listings. And the last time I did that, it took me almost a year to get it back. So it's not like you can instantly retrieve after you've done some grievous thing. So important to know that search engine optimization can destroy you in a day and it can take you a year to get it back. So don't think, even as a website designer, I will never promise you to get you first page ranking in a month. It generally does not work that way. So while I was not on page 1, and we're talking like page 10 and higher numbers than that. Like, have you ever looked past page 2 when you're doing your own searches to find something? Probably not. And you probably wouldn't call somebody, especially in my industry, that's not on page 1. So you can imagine I had zero calls from my organic listings. For an entire year, which would kill most businesses. However, I am always position number 1 in Google Maps in my local area for my main set of keywords. Google Maps has an entirely different ranking system, an entirely different database that they pull from. They're indexed. Everything is different. So if you don't have a Google Business Profile, or I didn't have one back then, I don't know what I would have done. My phone kept ringing and I really, honestly, I didn't hardly notice a difference in phone calls from not being on page 1 organically, as long as I was number 1 in Maps. So, so important.