Josh Gellock is the SEO consultant at Expander Digital, an SEO studio he founded in 2014. Through his business, Josh helps other businesses improve their search visibility. When he’s not meeting with clients, you can find him biking on trails or fishing on the lake.

Company Website | expanderdigital.com

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions, and our guests share their stories, ideas and perspectives.

Liam: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Liam Dempsey.

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by Josh Gellock. Josh is the SEO consultant at Expander Digital, an SEO studio he founded in 2014. Through his business, Josh helps other businesses improve their search visibility. When he’s not meeting with clients, you can find him biking on trails or fishing on the lake. Hi, Josh. Welcome to Hallway Chats.

Josh: Thanks for having me, guys.

Liam: It’s our pleasure, Josh. Thanks for joining us out here. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

Josh: Yeah. So I’m a dad, I have three kids. I have two daughters and a son, and that’s kind of where life starts for me. My kids are kind of my world, like any other parent. Like Tara mentioned there, I enjoy mountain biking quite a bit, and hiking. I’ve had the opportunity to do some trail work up here in the valley. So I helped go out and do some maintenance on some of the parks here. I enjoyed that quite a bit, I like being out in nature. Yeah, I’m a huge Voltron fan. I’m a child of the ’80s, so all those nostalgic shows that are coming back and finding a resurgence, I’m really enjoying that. My kids and I, we like to binge Voltron quite a bit. [laughs]

Tara: I am not familiar with that one. I’m married to a big sci-fi fan, that sounds like a sci-fi show that I’ve not heard of. Is it?

Josh: I’d put it in sci-fi, yeah. It’s got elements of sci-fi, yeah.

Tara: Does it takes place in space?

Josh: It does.

Tara: With the name like Voltron, that sounds like it would take place in space. Alright, that’s an ’80s program I’m not familiar with, cool. And your kids like it?

Josh: Yeah. They just put out season six, Netflix just put out season six, and we just got done wrapping that up. Yeah, we are really excited about season seven. Netflix has made this– they put out a commitment to a certain amount of episodes and we’re kind of getting towards the end, so we’re really excited to see where they go with it. It’s one of our favorite things to do. Typically, when a new season comes out, we’ll order some pizza and we’ll gather around the coffee table and just chill out and hang out and watch the whole season for the whole night. It’s one of our favorite things to do.

Tara: Excellent. I enjoy watching things on Netflix and TV as well and do the same. That’s my main source of entertainment. We are in the same camp there.

Liam: On a vein of Netflix, I’d recommend against binge-watching the entire season of– it’s a mob–

Tara: The Sopranos?

Liam: Yeah. I did that one weekend with my wife and then by Sunday dinner, it was, “Pass the, bleep, bleep, salt please?”, [laughter], “Get your, bleep, bleep, salt.” [laughter]

Tara: Yeah, that’s a pretty intense show.

Liam: That’s just a word of warning, a bit of caution. I can’t imagine Voltron has that concern. [laughs]

Josh: No. We won’t have that kind of stuff going on, but yeah, I didn’t know Sopranos was on Netflix. I’ll have to check that out.

Liam: I think it might have been back on DVD. This was a long, long time ago.

Josh: Okay. I never got a chance to watch that one.

Tara: That’s not the one to watch with your kids, for sure.

Josh: Definitely not. [laughs]

Liam: No.

Tara: Josh, tell us about the Valley you mentioned?

Josh: Yeah, I am one of the co-organizers of the Lehigh Valley WordPress meetup, and Kim Kramer, he’s an organizer, and Kim White as well. The Valley is interesting, we have three cities that make it up Allentown,, Bethlehem and Easton. It’s been interesting to watch the Valley kind of go from this region where Bethlehem still was kind of the icon here for so many years. Many years ago, it got shut down. There’s sort of a transition happening here in the Valley where we’re trying to rediscover ourselves. It’s been really interesting to watch as people take on different careers that are more web-focused to watch out group kind of grow, and to see where different people are at. We have a lot of new people that are very new to WordPress when they come to the meetup. I would say probably more new people than regular people. It’s really cool to be a part of that and to kind of help people along their journey. But the Valley is great, I love it honestly because of the mountain biking. This is some of the best trails in Pensylvania, or on the east side of Pensylvania. It’s just a lot of family fun activities to do. We have a lot of movies in the park, there’s a lot of, I think, historical things around here, they are really cool to check out. There’s a lot of history in the valley. But then it’s just the northeastern United States, just a lot of history. We like doing stuff like that. But yeah, I don’t know, it’s got some big city elements but not too much.

Liam: It’s like a neat little corner of the world, isn’t it?

Josh: It is, it has its own quirks, like any place.

Liam: I’m about 90 minutes away from there and I’ve been up to Lehigh Valley WordPress meetup group and up to the WordCamp there. I did went to a Maker Faire not too many years ago up in Lehigh Valley, and did some co-working up at one of the old warehouses or factories that’s been repurposed by the economic development counsel up there. I want to ask you just briefly, where do you find trail maps? Because I just got my mountain bike out of the shop after about nine years of not riding it, and I’m about to buy a bike rack for the car. Where do you find your trails, and preferably ones that are safe for a guy with a really bad back?

Josh: Yeah. There’s a couple of resources that are online. I’d say Mtbproject.com, I think that’s what it is, Mtbproject.com. But you can go to Bikevmb.com, Bike VMB is Valley Mountain Bikers, which is an organization that I’ve been a part of in the past. On the website, you can find maps, you can find trail days where you can go and help with maintenance and things like that. But they have maps for most of the systems that are in the valley, and if you don’t have one, then usually someone can have one down for you.

Tara: Cool. Let me bring it back to WordPress for a minute. I would like to ask you a little bit more, I’m really curious about the career transition that you mentioned. As you also mentioned, where you live is sort of notoriously steel country. We hear a lot in the news about transitioning from those types of jobs to other jobs. I’m just wondering what you’re seeing there if you’ve met a number of people who used to work in steel plants and then now are exploring tech careers and going to your meetup?

Josh: The plant closed down a while ago but I think just in general, people in the valley, it was sort of this place that didn’t really have an identity for a long time. Now it’s sort of becoming this tech-focused and entertainment-focused kind of place. I think some people when the plant closed, they went with it, there was a different place down south that some of them went there, but some of them stayed behind. I think, especially here, a lot of people were trying to get to more of those tech-focused jobs. It’s really interesting to hear about some of the challenges that they’re faced with. We have some people who are starting new businesses, and they’re using WordPress. Some of them are already part of the business. Maybe the business is going through tough times and they got WordPress dumped on them. Like, “Hey, you’re going to take care of our website now. We had someone before and we know that you don’t know anything, but here you go, make it happen.” That’s challenging, those are real challenges and those are some of the people that are coming to our meetups and asking really great questions and trying to learn more about WordPress and more about where it’s going, lots of where it’s going. And now they can just be better at it.

Tara: Yeah, what a great transition that your area is making, and the community that’s there to support that shows that it’s having an impact. These people have found your meetup and they’re coming there and asking questions and then, hopefully, telling other people about it as well. Yeah, that’s cool, very cool. I’m going to ask you another question that we ask everyone. Josh, it’s time for the success question. Can you tell us a little bit about your view of success, what your definition of that is and how you implement that in your life?

Josh: Sure. I knew this one was coming because I hear you guys ask everybody this question, and it’s such a good one.

Tara: It’s not that easy to answer, in fact. It’s good that you thought about it beforehand but you’ll still find it hard probably.

Josh: It is, it’s tough because I think success varies from person to person. For me, I know that who I am as a person is I like helping people, I like encouraging people. I feel like I’m so privileged to be able to work with SEO because that’s really what it’s about. It is very much a service-focused activity. You’re really trying to help people achieve certain goals and trying to, I think anyway– lots of the people I talk to, whether I’m speaking at a WordCamp or giving a talk at a meetup or just out and about, having a conversation about a website, I feel like SEO is like this thing that a lot of people struggle to understand. It’s so satisfying for me and it makes me happy to be able to sit down and have a conversation whether I’m in the Happiness Bar or out having coffee with someone, and just kind of felt them understand it. It’s so cool I think, and this is kind of where success comes for me, is when you can sort of see this lightbulb go off for them, as you’re talking with them about things and you can start to see them start to understand what you’re explaining. I just think that for me, that’s very, very rewarding. My clients are happy, I’m happy. And I know that’s sort of cliche but really, just my personality, I get a real joy out of just helping people be successful. I love the fact that I can do that with SEO.

Tara: Yeah, SEO, it does have some measurability and accountability to it. You can see the results of what you’re doing in terms of the work. But what you’re describing even more is that lightbulb that you see going off when you show someone how to do something. We’ve spoken to a few people on this show who work in the SEO field. And I would say, without exception, they all are equally enthusiastic and love what they do just like you’re describing. I’m curious about that a little bit. It’s a field that’s very challenging to work in, I think. As you said, it’s hard to learn and there are a lot of changes happening in it all the time. How do you keep yourself in love with it and motivated, besides what you’ve described about seeing that lightbulb go off? There’s a lot of work that’s behind that, a lot of keeping up with things. Can you tell us a little bit about how you keep up with that in your space and what you do to keep learning?

Josh: Yeah. For me, I set a certain amount of time aside each week to either– well, two-fold, one is to learn, so to actually go on and do an online course or maybe a book. Then the other side of it is just staying up to date with everything that’s going on. The search algorithms are changing, it seems like, all the time. New guidelines are coming out all the time. There are a couple of news resources that I subscribe to and I take time every week to sit down and make sure that I’m up to date with what’s going on or if there’s a small change or a small tweak. Usually, these places are really great about staying up to date with that and they share that. That’s been really, really helpful for me. Yeah, that’s kind of how I go about it. The other thing I’ll add to is Twitter is probably one of the biggest sources for me because there are a couple of people I follow like John Mueller, he works at Google. There’s a couple of others too. But really, really I’ve found more often than not that Twitter just keeps me up to date with what’s going on that day or that hour. It’s just fantastic.

Tara: Do you keep it open all the time?

Josh: I don’t keep it open all the time but I do check in a few times a day to see if there’s some kind of fire going off or something like that.

Liam: There’s always a fire on Twitter. [laughter]

Tara: I’m trying to keep it off these days a bit, I don’t keep it open all that often anymore. But I have learned so much from Twitter, to be sure. I got my husband to sign up for Twitter for his work because I told him it’s just an amazing resource. I think it’s a secret for people who have not found it, and a lot of people in WordPress use it, so most of us know about it. Can you talk a little about how you discovered SEO, how this became your thing?

Josh: Yeah. I started doing websites when I was in high school, I think freshman year. This is kind of funny. What I would do is I would go — after school had let out, I would walk down to the public library. They had like a row of computers, computers on both sides of the row, and you would go and get like a little punch card and you’d be able to be on the computer for like, 30 minutes at a time. And then the librarian would come by and she’d check your card and say, “You’re past time. You can go get a new card if you want to but–” Imagine trying to build an HTML page in Notepad on a public computer in a 30-minute window when you’re 14. [laughs]

Josh: I grew up really enjoying anime, Japanese animation. When I got to high school, I started building Dragon Ball web pages and things like this. And this is on GeoCities and Tripod. I think I may have even had an Angelfire page. That’s kind of how I got into the web, just building web pages. When marquees were cool, that’s when I got started.

Liam: Are you suggesting that they’re no longer cool?

Josh: Oh. [laughter] I’m not hating on marquees. Not hating on them.

Liam: Carry on.

Josh: But years later, I found myself in a neat position. I started a job at T-Mobile, the mobile phone carrier, in 2001, and I worked there for 16 and a half years. I left last year, believe it or not. And during my time there at T-Mobile, there was an opportunity for me to work on the knowledge base, which was an internal resource that customer service reps would use to get answers to questions and things like this.

Liam: Like a wiki of sorts, an internal wiki?

Josh: Yeah, it was like an internal wiki. By taking on a special project, I got a full-time role as an editor and things just kind of spiraled, the snowball effect kind of happened for me. And when I left, I was a content strategist managing content strategy and SEO for the T-Mobile support website Support.t-mobile.com. About five years before that, though, maybe five or six years ago was kind of where an opportunity opened up for me to join that team, the support team, and start publishing content on the public-facing wiki if you will. That’s kind of where things started for me. I kind of stumbled upon it that a lot of our visitors were coming from organic search. I thought, “We should probably pay attention to this if a lot of people are coming to us from that channel.” It kind of just turned into an SEO role over time. Yeah, it’s kind of how I got started with it.

Liam: I imagine, with that big of a content base, that big of a website, the kind of learning and value of data and insights that can be gleaned is pretty substantial, right? It’s not a small mom and pop shop with a hundred visitors, and, “What’s the data?”, “Well, we had eight people last week and four the week before that.” You’re able to really see the value of this tweak and that tweak when it can mean the difference between tens if not hundreds of thousands of visitors.

Josh: Oh yeah. We had a lot of visitors on average. We had a consistent number and it was in the millions, millions of sessions per month. Like you said, lots of different interesting data points. I feel I was really fortunate to go through those experiences. Even today when I’m talking with people, whether it be clients or fellow WordPressers or whatever, and we’re talking about ideas of how they can improve, I look back on my time there and we tried a lot of different things. Some were successful, some weren’t, but being able to share some of those insights was really great. I thought that was a really good experience for me.

Liam: I like that a lot. As a designer and a marketing consultant, I talk a lot about Coca-Cola as– when you go into the convenient store and you go to buy a Coke, now they got 97 different varieties of Coke, but you never guess who made it. I kind of try to take those– yes, we don’t have a Coca-Cola budget but we can take that focus on branding and the lessons that those bigger companies are rolling out across the world, like a T-Mobile. We take the same lessons and the same learning and apply them on a thousand-dollar budget, on a hundred-dollar budget, on a ten-thousand-dollar budget. That’s really neat. I wonder how well your clients engage with that. I found initially when I started using that Coca-Cola analogy, there was a little bit of a, “Yeah, but I don’t have 87 million dollars to launch my new project.” I wonder what kind of pushback you might get on that?

Josh: That’s interesting. What’s interesting is that we are doing a project right now where we are trying to build workflows, because lots of times, it’s just, “We don’t care how you do it, just get it done.”

Liam: That’s tough, that’s a challenge.

Josh: It is a challenge. I think it’s a challenge that is very common though, especially for small business, right?

Liam: I’d agree.

Josh: Or contractors and freelancers, they’re just told, “Just get it done.” One of the things I’m trying to help this client with particularly, is bringing some of my experience as a content strategist at T-Mobile into this relationship and some of the work that we’re doing. So I’m trying to help them build workflows from where we’re– when we’re bringing a new page to life, we’re going to follow this set of steps. We need to optimize a page, we’re going to follow this set of steps. We want to sunset a page, we follow this set of steps. And kind of providing that structure really helps people understand their roles and their responsibilities, and when things need to be executed. That sort of brings the clarity and I think a lot of confidence from, especially the people that make decisions. They can see the value that you’re bringing and it also gives them confidence in the process and the kind of quality of work that you’re delivering. That’s an exercise that I’m going through with a very small client. They’re successful but they don’t have anywhere close to the kind of staffing that some of these bigger brands do. Again, I just feel really fortunate that I can take my past experience with T-Mobile where things are very structured and very, very process-oriented, and sort of bring that into a smaller business model.

Tara: Yeah. How have you found the transition into self-employment, running your own company?

Josh: [laughs] I’m laughing because I don’t think I could have ever been prepared for this. There are no shortcuts when you’re a business owner. I don’t think there’s a shortcut in any career but I think my point is I don’t know that I was totally prepared for the volume of work, the volume of learning that has to come along with being a business owner. The challenges, oh my god, the challenges. It’s overwhelming, it really is. But it’s also very cool and very rewarding to sort of– one day, you have this idea and you’re just like, “You know–” and maybe you go back and forth with it, I did for a while. I was kind of, “Ah, I don’t want to do this. I do not want to do this.” And then your idea becomes an LLC or whatever entity you want to form. For me, it was an LLC. Now you have this business and you’re just like, “What do I do with this thing?”

Tara: Were you working remotely for T-Mobile?

Josh: I was. I went through golden years with T-Mobile, I went through dark days with T-Mobile. I watched multiple call centers closed, I watched stocks go through the roof. And there’s times where I went to an office and I sat at the desk, and during my last few years, I’ve worked remotely, almost exclusively out of my house. I do that now. Sometimes I go down to a co-working space. I’ve played around a little bit with co-working this year, I enjoyed that. But yeah, for the most part, I worked out of my house. It’s good. I think being a business owner is nice because of that flexibility. If you’re a parent, flexibility is so big so I like that. But I’ve got to tell you, the challenges are tough. It’s really tough to find your way. At least, it’s been difficult for me to find my way. I don’t really have a lot of family that runs businesses. I don’t really know that I have close friends that run businesses. It’s been a journey of a lot of trial and error, seeing what works and seeing what doesn’t work. But I think we learn that way, right?

Liam: Yeah, absolutely.

Tara: Yeah.

Josh: Lots of failure, lots of learning.

Tara: Yeah. And that’s a benefit of the WordPress community is that there are a lot of self-employed people here who have a lot of forums and a lot of sharing at WordCamps and things like that with business topics, which is really helpful, because we tell our clients, once you start running your business, you’re not doing your trade. It’s not as it used to be because you have to do everything else, too. We might tell them we’ll take care of their website so they don’t have to do that, but they still have to do the bookkeeping or all those other things that you don’t ever think about when you’re not working for yourself. Making websites or doing SEO is probably a small portion, actually, of what you do on a weekly basis or a monthly basis, because there are so many other things, marketing, and processes, and all of that. Do you have anyone working with you or for you?

Josh: No, not at this time. It’s just me. Yeah.

Liam: Josh, as a business owner, I very much get that, especially transitioning where you’re working with other people and you know, “Well, I’m going to ask Mary about this. There’s no Mary. I’ll ask Tom. There’s no Tom.” [laughter] That’s a challenge. Let me ask you this, it’s another one of our big questions here. What’s the single most valuable piece of advice, personal, professional, combination, that you’ve ever received and implemented in your life?

Josh: I would say there’s a guy who I listen to and his show fairly regularly, he sort of gave this nugget that I just really love. His saying is ‘hard work win’. It’s something that his father told him. I just feel like there’s so much truth in that. Though I would say, a close runner-up would be ‘never stop learning’. I think if anybody wants to get ahead, you got to learn and you got to continue to be great. I think that the process of being better, it never ends. But I think as a business owner, you’ve got to find something that you love. Because if you’re going to work hard at it, you’ve got to put extra time in it. And who wants to put extra time on something that makes them miserable? Nobody. Find something you love so that you can not even think about having to put in extra time, you just go and you do it. I think that saying sticks with me every day, it’s something that I think about probably multiple times a day, that this is hard work but that’s how you win. That’s something that I found to be true as I’ve gone along my business journey is that as long as I keep plugging away at this and try to do my best, usually things have worked out pretty well so far.

Liam: Yeah, I can see that. In the sense that if we do our honest best and we keep plugging away and we don’t shy away from hard work, it may not go exactly where we hope it will.

Josh: [laughs] That’s true.

Liam: But we’re going to get some kind of reward and maybe we get to contract and we pay the rent or the mortgage. But maybe it’s just, “Hey, we gave it a good go and we’re going to go somewhere else now.” But I just love that. Just keep learning, keep working, keep working and keep learning. That’s a very practical approach to taking care of yourself and your needs, isn’t it?

Josh: Yeah, definitely. I like making things simple. [laughs]

Tara: Making things simple but working hard. [laughs] Yeah, work smarter, not harder.

Josh: Yes. [laughs] I see that on your wall, I love that, that’s great.

Tara: Well, Josh. We are out of time for this wonderful interview. Thank you so much for joining us, it’s really been a pleasure having you here. Can you tell everyone where they can find you online?

Josh: Yeah. We are at Expanderdigital.com and on Twitter @expanderdigital, all one word.

Liam: Josh, thanks so much for that. I really appreciate it and we’ll have to find the time to hit a trail together and hopefully not hit any trees while we’re on that trail.

Josh: I hope so. Thank you guys so much for having me, I appreciate it.

Tara: Thank you, it’s been a pleasure.

Liam: It’s been a pleasure, take care. Bye-bye.

Tara: Bye.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.