I'm a Southern Indiana girl who dreamed of one day opening my own portrait studio. Back in 2002, I took the leap, quit my full-time job as a television news producer, and opened my studio. A year later, my husband quit his job to help me run the studio full-time.

Our major source of new clients was Google. Until 2008, that is. That's when our phone nearly stopped ringing. It seemed all our calls were coming from repeat and referred clients - no new clients from Google.

So I did some sleuthing and realized our website was no longer on page one of Google. I can't even begin to tell you the impact on our business.

They say that necessity is the mother of all inventions. We NEEDED to get back to the top of Google and get our phone ringing again! We couldn't afford paid ads, we couldn't afford to hire someone, so I taught myself SEO.

Now I work with other business owners to get them to the top of Google and get their phones ringing, without the non-stop nonsense of social media posts or high cost of paid advertising.