Entrepreneurship

ClickSlice founder Joshua George tells his story

By Joshua George | April 25, 2019

I’m Joshua George and I’m the founder of an SEO agency in London called ClickSlice. We help local businesses increase their online visibility by appearing higher in Google for the services they offer.

I actually got into SEO through selling on eBay. In 2012 I use to run a successful eBay drop shipping business with a good friend of mine. Essentially we would take the best selling items on Amazon and they list them all on our eBay store with a markup. We had Amazon prime which meant all of our eBay customers could benefit from the ultra fast delivery and receive their items the next day. This is unusual for eBay customers as typically they’re using to waiting 3-5 days to receive their items. This ultra fast delivery was our USP and before we knew it we were a top rated seller and selling over 100 items a day.

However, although we were selling hundreds of items and making good money, we were also paying a LOT of money in the form of eBay fees. eBay charges you an insertion fee to list an item and they also charge you 10% of the sale price of the item. It doesn’t sound like a lot but when you’re selling hundreds of items it adds up very quickly.

I wasn’t too happy every month when it came to paying the eBay fee so I came up with the idea of making my own website where I could list as many items I wanted without paying any fees. The only problem I had was I didn’t know how to get people on my website and buying my items.

So I started to Google things like “how to rank on page 1 in google” “how to make my website higher” and as a result, I stumbled across SEO.

From that day onwards, I made it my core focus to master SEO and learn everything there is about it. Appearing higher in Google has tons of benefits such as increased targeted traffic, more inquiries resulting in more revenue.

As time went on I found myself more and more involved in SEO, specifically running multiple tests and measuring the outcomes. This allowed me to clearly see what works and what doesn’t.

I ended up becoming really good at SEO and then had my light bulb moment.

Instead of building this website and coming away from eBay, why don’t I offer SEO as a service and help local businesses to rank higher in Google.

Making money is one thing but making money whilst helping people? That’s a whole new level.

I’m a firm believer of giving back and if I can make money whilst giving back and helping local businesses owners then I’m all for it.

Fast forward to 2019 and I’ve been in the SEO game for 5 years now. The first 2 of them was spent studying and learning the algorithm to determine what’s necessary to rank. In hindsight, this was a big waste of time as although the fundamentals remain the same to rank (great content and links) the algorithm is always changing. What works now might not work next year. If I could give the old Josh some advice, it would be “stop reading about SEO and go out and actually do some”.

I plan is to really scale things up and ClickSlice this year, I want to help 25 business owners this year rank higher in Google and help them generate more inbound inquiries. SEO is indeed getting harder and harder however when done correctly it’s still incredibly effective.

More and more people are using their phones and tablets when searching for things to ensuring your site is optimised for mobile devices will become more and more important in the future of SEO.

To ensure I stay on my top game, I regularly attend tons of SEO networking events and conferences around the world. One of my favorites is the annual SEO Conference which is hosted in the beautiful Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Thanks for reading!