We recently had the chance to connect with Khara Wolf and have shared our conversation below.
Good morning Khara, it’s such a great way to kick off the day – I think our readers will love hearing your stories, experiences and about how you think about life and work. Let’s jump right in? What’s more important to you—intelligence, energy, or integrity?
Integrity is the cornerstone of my business and my professional relationships. I deeply believe we are better off working together, than competing against each other. Over the past 20 years, success (in all my businesses and endeavors) has come from the incredible people I have had the chance to work with, learn from, collaborate with, and partner with.
I believe in making my living by helping other small business owners make their living. Especially in my industry (technology, SEO, website design), it is critical to deliver services with trust and transparency, knowing there is a human being, and their livelihood, on the other end of the line.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I am the owner of Websites by Khara, a solo agency I have been running since 2013. As a Squarespace Platinum certified Marketplace expert and certified Squarespace SEO expert, I currently offer custom website design and SEO services to service providers and local businesses.
For the first 8 years of my business, I offered a full suite of marketing services including graphic design, branding, copywriting, SEO, and website design and development. After Covid, I found many small business owners were doing more of these services in-house.
I was also finding WordPress to be a difficult platform for business owners to maintain themselves. The platform breaks, requires regular development maintenance/fees, and is confusing for a non-developer to edit.
In 2022 Squarespace launched Fluid Engine, just off the heels of their 7.1 platform, which provided the perfect website solution for a small business. Their professional tools, the developer community, and the SEO options have grown exponentially since then, giving us (web developers and SEO experts) an incredible platform to build custom, SEO-optimized websites for any sized business. It is quickly becoming an industry standard and I’m excited to be a top leading expert!
Appreciate your sharing that. Let’s talk about your life, growing up and some of topics and learnings around that. What part of you has served its purpose and must now be released?
It is incredibly difficult to give away all of who you are without being seen. This might happen more frequently in a company environment, but it can also happen as a solopreneur building a business online, or in professional or personal relationships.
Twice in my career I have worked for someone else’s company where I gave away my energy, my intelligence, and my passion at my own expense. These experiences have taught me to stay in alignment with my own values, goals, and dreams.
For me, this means staying focused on how I want to serve my SEO and website clients, the incredible professional partnerships I’ve been able to build, and my ongoing endeavors as a professional musician.
Was there ever a time you almost gave up?
There were numerous times I almost gave up over the years – both in music and while building my website and SEO agency.
I can’t count all the moments I was hunched over my reed desk after 8 hours of reed making with nothing to show for it but a pile of tear-soaked bamboo pieces. However, in my business, it really comes down to two moments: one in the beginning, and one 10 years later.
The first moment came three years into my business. I had some marketing and graphic design clients, but not enough to sustain a full-time income. I was down to my last dollar and started submitting job applications for full-time work. Just as I was taking interviews and ready to accept something, I finally had a breakthrough! A partnership with a startup foundation came through and I signed 4 clients on the spot. This got the ball rolling and the momentum built from there.
Fast forward 10 years later, after a decade of running a successful agency, Covid had changed the industry and tanked by business. So, I spent a year re-building and re-structuring my business, investing in education and courses, and then finally hit my income goals.
You wouldn’t think this would be a moment where I almost gave up, but I did. I had reached my financial goal, but it felt unsustainable and something about the current trajectory didn’t resonate. So, I accepted a low-paying contract position with another company in search of something greater. This opportunity wasn’t as advertised, and I found myself at a crossroad again.
Wanting to give up is part of the process. Sometimes we need to pivot, sometimes we need to take a break and come back, and sometimes we need to know what we’ve lost to know how hard we want to fight for it.
Sure, so let’s go deeper into your values and how you think. What are the biggest lies your industry tells itself?
The SEO industry has gotten a bad rap, and for a good reason. There is very little SEO education to help small business owners understand how SEO works, if it is a good fit for their unique business, and what an SEO service should really include.
The industry exploits this gap. Agencies, freelancers, or scammers, will often provide long reports with “critical” errors and use scare tactics to convince small business owners to invest in a service that ultimately doesn’t make them any money.
The biggest lie is around technical SEO optimization and what SEO success really means.
While technical SEO optimization is important, this alone won’t help you rank any better without being combined with strategy.
Strategy is the marketing engine behind the SEO (and now GEO) optimization. It is where we, as SEO experts, understand your business, your revenue goals, your audience, your competition, and exactly what needs to be done to help you make real money using SEO/GEO as a marketing strategy.
SEO/GEO isn’t about impressions or traffic numbers, and it’s not as simple as site speed or keyword placement. It’s a marketing strategy, and a business strategy, and should be executed as such.
Okay, so let’s keep going with one more question that means a lot to us: Are you doing what you were born to do—or what you were told to do?
I consider myself lucky that I knew what I was meant to do with my life at the age of 15.
It was my first time attending a live music performance. I had just picked up the oboe a few months prior and the magic on stage that night left an impression. I walked away saying “that is what I want to do for the rest of my life”.
However, life is rarely black and white. I completed my music performance degree and then found I needed to expand my financial options. So I found a way to pursue a career doing two things I love: music performance and music education, and marketing and design.
At the end of the day, I have always leaned into a business model that is based on a service I feel connected to, and inspired to sell and share.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.websitesbykhara.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/websitesbykhara/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kharawolf/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/websitesbykhara
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/websites-by-khara-durango
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@websitesbykhara
- Other: https://www.kharawolf.com
