Entrepreneurial journeys: Harry Boxhall

Harry is a specialist SEO Ecommerce consultant, working with a range of business-to-business clients nationally and internationally, in a variety of industries, to improve their presence in search engines to increase sales and revenue.

Harry’s journey

Harry graduated from the University of York in 2013 with a degree in economics. Even whilst at University, Harry ventured into entrepreneurship through a number of different avenues including freelance writing and creating eCommerce stores.

“After graduating, rather than taking a traditional graduate job, I actually took up a part-time job to cover my expenses but spent the majority of my effort into affiliate marketing and it was there that I managed to have my fair bit of success.”

“Essentially, the way I went about it was to create specific niche websites that would earn a commission via referring a sale. The issue was trying to work out how to get visitors (i.e traffic) to those websites - and that’s where search engine optimization (SEO) came in.” 

“SEO is basically the practice of gaining more visitors from search engines (mainly Google). Then from there, I have been working on that specific skill for almost a decade now, and offering my SEO services to businesses to help them either generate more leads, sales, or even just visibility for their website.”

Harry's business

“Although I have been freelancing for almost a decade, it is only in the last couple of years that the business has effectively ramped up to a stage where I am in a position to start thinking about hiring for additional help. So that’s pretty exciting! I view it as a long, long journey, however, so in that sense, it is still very early days.”

“My day-to-day involves working with a range of clients to improve their presence in search engines for specific keywords that might be valuable to them. For example, if you are an eCommerce business looking to sell Cheese, I would work with you and your website to try and rank first for terms like “Cheese Online” and “Buy Cheese”. This would in turn improve the amount of traffic that the website received from relevant incentivised users and generate more revenue.”

“The process of getting a page to rank for more keywords in higher positions within the search is ‘SEO, essentially it can be broken down into three main areas:

• Technical SEO: the process of ensuring that your website is secure, fast and friendly to use.
• On Page SEO: what users actually see on a page, this includes the content and images etc.
• Off Page SEO: how other websites interact with your website (mainly in the form of links).”

Challenges

“Obviously, there have been a lot of changes and challenges in the macro environment over the last few years, so there has been a lot of pivoting that has occurred."

"Businesses were forced to change strategy, so in that sense, I have had to adapt alongside them. That can definitely be tough, adjusting to these problems, where the solutions often don’t fall into your lap and you have to go out there and uncover them.”

Words of advice

“One quote that recently resonated with me was from Elon Musk. He was asked to reflect back on his entrepreneurial journey and whether he had any regrets - his answer was to “just stop and smell the roses.”

"I think I sometimes get in a frame of mind to just keep going and going without looking back to see how far I’d come.”

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