Hello *waves*
This page has all the past and present of who I am and what I did for work. If you don’t have time, you can read this:
I am Preeti Gupta, founder and SEO at Packted. For work, I do User-Friendly SEO, and create content on different platforms. Outside of work, I watch tons of YouTube, experiment with cooking, perfect my touch typing skills, and clean my house lol.
This website is my internet diary where I will write about random things that come to my mind.
And now here’s the longer version below.
Table of Contents
Where did everything started?
I could tell you everything from the day I born, but you won’t read all of that lol. So here are some short stories.
When I was in high school, I wanted to become a hacker, and photographer, and work at Google at the same time. (That obviously didn’t happen lol)
I had a general interest in computers. And I was one of the kids in my whole family who was interested in learning about them. I should tell you that I was not nerdy about the technical stuff about computers. I was just interested in using them more. You know that child who used to solve the IT problems their friends and family used to have – that was me.
After completing high school, I wanted to go to a photography school. My Indian dad obviously didn’t approve of it. In the hunt for finding a college, I even went to Bengaluru (which is 2,000 km away from me). I personally didn’t like the vibe (no offense), and I failed my entrance test. So I returned back home. That’s when I went to Banasthali Vidyapith for my Bachelor in Computer Applications (BCA). College was mostly fun, but also traumatic lol.
After completing my bachelor’s, my parents insisted I apply for jobs. I never liked the idea of corporate, and I never saw myself working for someone else. This made things a lot more turbulent than it should be lol. Speaking of which, here’s the next section.
All the professional stuff
Although it says “All the professional stuff”, I am not gonna talk in a professional manner. If you’re more into that, you should visit my work website.
Continuing from the last section, I came across SEO when I was in the middle of the pandemic. I also came across other random things like network marketing (which are basically pyramid schemes), Google Ads, social media management, and more. I liked the idea of SEO. I liked how websites can make small improvements to perform better in search results and become more visible to their users.
After learning about this cool new thing, I went on Google to explore how to learn this. Almost immediately, I was bombarded with tons of resources. And because I didn’t have any way to identify what was good and what was bad, I started consuming what I thought was good.
I also collected a bunch of certificates on the way. This is because someone circulated a rumor that more certificates help in getting a job. If you’re fancy looking at the list, you can check it on my LinkedIn profile.
So in total I failed to complete 3 internships and completed 2. After completing my last internship in Feb 2022, I decided to make my own website to experiment. That’s when I bought the Packted.com domain.
Although I wasn’t interested, for some reasons, I had to do a job. This job lasted 3 months. I was so done with corporate lol.
So in July 2022, I started doing freelance full-time. This whole journey was rough (I will make another post on it soon). I have a LONG way to go and I am not stopping anytime soon.
Now I don’t call myself a freelancer anymore. I call myself a boutique agency owner. Partly because I don’t like the word “freelancer. It doesn’t match my vibe. Also, it has become more of a boutique agency at this point.
Speaking of cool things, I have received mentions from websites such as Search Engine Land (SEL), Search Engine Roundtable (SER), Women in Tech SEO (WTS), Moz, iPullRank, SEOFOMO, Fiverr, and more. As of June 2024, I have 9,000 followers on LinkedIn. And my website, Packted has got more than a million in impressions in the last 12 months.
I attended the Google Search Central live in September 2023. Here’s the proof lol (please don’t judge the camera quality)
Also, I will be speaking at BrightLocal SEO for good about User-Friendly SEO in September 2024 and I am so excited about it.
What do I do for work?
I believe that in order to get more people to buy your solution and trust you is to have a presence that is not just limited to your website. The old approach to SEO is to optimize your website as much as you can. Think about adding a lot of keywords, making a lot of fishy backlinks, and more.
This process has worked for a lot of years, and honestly, it is still working for a lot of websites. On the other side, a lot of websites lost their traffic and they never got it back.
I think chasing traffic from search engines is not a solution to get people to buy what you sell. Today, people don’t buy from companies they don’t trust. People are not just searching on Google. They’re checking out videos on YouTube. Seeing TikToks, and Instagram reels. Asking people on communities like Reddit, checking out reviews, and more. If you are not where they are, then it would be hard for them to find and trust you. You have to be present everywhere so that you build authority and build a brand that people can trust.
This is what I help my clients with. I help them make great content, great user experience, and a great brand across their web presence. I work with them on their website, social media, email marketing, and local and other channels. I call this approach User-friendly SEO.
This is what I do for work. This involves making sure things like:
- Their website is easy to navigate
- Their web copy is easy to read
- Their blog content helps position your product as a solution to their problems
- Their local presence is easily findable
- They’re active in the communities where their users are
- Creating content on social media, YouTube, emails, and much more.
What’s next?
I don’t really like thinking too much about the future. I will write a post on it someday). For now, my focus is to help my clients with their brand. Also, creating content on LinkedIn, Packted, and this website. I am also planning on making a Now page which will tell you what I am doing now.