SEO For Businesses Built On Expertise, Not Keywords ~ With Sarah Moon

SEO for businesses that don’t fit the typical SEO strategies. Sarah Moon shares her wealth of knowledge helping changemakers, thought leaders, and ethical business owners reach their best-fit clients, even if the usual SEO advice has failed them previously.

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Many business owners and thought leaders (especially creative types, ADHD types, geniuses, and experts) feel like “star-shaped pegs” in a world of “square hole” advice. And this is precisely why most SEO tactics don’t work for these types of businesses and changemakers.

In our live conversation on Bluesky, we spoke with Sarah Moon of Sarah Moon Co who specializes in helping “star-shaped businesses” use content marketing to reach their best-fit buyers in a way that defies most of the advice they’ve heard before.

Sarah has been in this field for 25 years, in business for 17 of those years, survived 4 recessions, and is a wealth of knowledge about growing a business with-and-without social media, so of course we had to pick her brain about how to thrive in 2025!

Does SEO Work Anymore? Especially For Businesses Selling Expertise, Not Products?

Short answer: YES!

As we discussed in our previous FernTalk, too many businesses rely heavily on social media for new leads, traffic, and sales. Sure, using social media to grow your business in the beginning makes sense because it leads to quick results and helps get the word out that your new business exists.

But it’s all too easy to keep focusing on social media and never build the SEO foundation for long-term, ongoing success. And as a result, amazing business owners get trapped on a hamster wheel of cranking out content for social media when they should be scaling their business instead.

And as Sarah reminds us, search leads to sales:

2. Despite all the chatter on the internet, about 90 percent of online experiences, day in and day out, start with a search, People have queries and I believe it’s a mistake for expertise businesses in particular to ignore that reality. So that's where I'm coming from with all of this.

— Sarah Moon (@sarahmoon.bsky.social) May 28, 2025 at 8:19 AM

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Why Traditional SEO Tactics Don’t Work For Expertise Businesses

According to Sarah, “most people talking about SEO are not talking about those star-shaped peg expertise businesses.”

They’re talking simple: your local pizza place, a personal injury law firm, or a what I metaphorically call “folks selling white t-shirts.” These SEO agencies specialize in businesses that are the round peg, round hole businesses.

So, when they encounter oddballs like us, folks selling their expertise, they go super basic when we and our clients ARE NOT basic.

~ Sarah Moon

But business owners shouldn’t avoid SEO as a result!

And at the same time, most star-shaped business owners are already intuitively plugged into the content their best-fit audience wants. But they hesitate to publish it because it doesn’t fit into these “square hole” SEO tactics.

I actually think creatives are particularly excellent at intuitively knowing which keywords are great for their audience—they are very attuned to hear their clients' needs in a special way. BUT! The way we talk about KWR is very alienating and off-putting.

— Sarah Moon (@sarahmoon.bsky.social) May 28, 2025 at 8:27 AM

I bet if I rattled off a series of potential keywords to you, you could easily say, "yes, yes, no way, what on earth, OH YES THIS" in a heartbeat. Your creative strategist brain is a superpower here!

— Sarah Moon (@sarahmoon.bsky.social) May 28, 2025 at 8:27 AM

You can click on any Bluesky post embed and it will take you directly to that part of the conversation. Feel free to comment, ask follow-up questions, tag Sarah or join the discussion!

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SEO Strategies That Work For Expertise Businesses

So what does work? What can businesses based on expertise ~ especially expertise that best-fit clients aren’t necessarily Googling ~ do to publish content that reaches the right audience at the right time?

Start with the end goal in mind:

What do you want to be known for? Get super specific. Start with that answer. Then your search optimization can build from that foundation. ~ Sarah Moon

1. One of my goals with my clients is that whenever someone is looking for a specific subject related to their expertise, their name just keeps popping up in the results. I have a specific methodology I use for that, but that repetition is really crucial, more so than raw numbers positions.

— Sarah Moon (@sarahmoon.bsky.social) May 28, 2025 at 8:40 AM

We want to thread the need between meeting people where they’re at (with keywords) and then helping them understand a new perspective—this is where the brand building happens. It’s really magical how it compounds over time.

Basically, provide INSIGHTS in addition to just INFO.

~ Sarah Moon

Next, get comfortable with experimentation and patience.

3. So, that means, assuming you’re following my previous advice, getting super specific about what your audience needs, I want to challenge you to experiment. Very few people get this right the first time. So, create a plan and follow it, but also tweak and adjust once you have good data.

— Sarah Moon (@sarahmoon.bsky.social) May 28, 2025 at 8:35 AM

So, if you’re like many of Sarah’s clients (before working with her), you might be thinking, “Hey Sarah, I get lots of traffic from this content but no sales,”

To which she suggests either creating an offer that fits the traffic you’re getting or shift the content to attract a different audience. Here’s an example:

For example, I work with a lot of web designers, and they are major subject matter experts. And they actually tend to have a pretty good grasp on SEO and content strategy. And, they are generally really good at following a content strategy. HOWEVER!

They also really want to get in the weeds with technical things, how to do XYZ on ABC platform, that kind of thing. So, when they come to me and say, “Hey Sarah, I get lots of traffic from this content but no sales,” we can adjust that.

Perhaps that means adding in a low ticket designer-to-designer offer that’s the call to action for that tech content and then future topic clusters are oriented around what people who can buy a whole website project may need…

…such as “The Pros & Cons of WordPress for Therapist Websites” or “How Squarespace Can Save Your Therapy Practice Hundreds of Dollars a Month.” (Disclaimer: I haven’t researched these topics! Do your due diligence if you use them.)

~ Sarah Moon

This is why experimentation needs to be part of the SEO strategy. Why did those technical posts do so well traffic-wise, but not convert? And what happens when we either add an offer that appeals to that traffic or shift the content topics?

8. Then we have the patience issue. Social media has trained us to look for immediate dopamine hits in terms of likes, comments, and shares. That’s not really going to happen in this kind of marketing. Blog comments are minimal these days, and counting shares is a fool’s game.

— Sarah Moon (@sarahmoon.bsky.social) May 28, 2025 at 8:36 AM

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How Can SEO Help Ethical Businesses Survive Tough Times (Like Recessions?)

It depends. Let’s be real, sometimes recessions, pandemics, politics, tariffs, and other surprises can’t be survived.

Plenty of long-established, recession-proof businesses have closed in the past 5 years.

But having a marketing strategy that isn’t dependent on any single channel/platform helps. Having multiple traffic streams and multiple ways for your audience to connect with your brand makes it easier to sell.

With this in mind, Sarah offers her thoughts on getting your star-shaped business recession-ready:

2. But, during challenging or uncertain economic times, I think it’s wise to be very very strategic and thoughtful about your marketing. Longform content marketing broadly, and search-based discovery more narrowly are what I call “compounding” tactics, which means the results grow over time.

— Sarah Moon (@sarahmoon.bsky.social) May 28, 2025 at 8:48 AM

Doing this can make your business “non-stick like Teflon” to industry chaos (so your audience can rest easy in your safe harbor!)

4. The next best time to do that work, if you didn’t do it 6 months ago, is right now. It’s NEVER too late to start shoring yourself up this way, building your visibility and amplifying your authority. Most people are pulling back on these things right now, so this is a solid time to do so.

— Sarah Moon (@sarahmoon.bsky.social) May 28, 2025 at 8:48 AM

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What can ethical business owners, changemakers, and thought leaders do to create a successful SEO strategy this year?

If you’ve read this far and you’re excited to give SEO another shot (or content marketing in general), but you don’t know where to start, I highly recommend digging into whichever of Sarah’s offers makes the most sense for where you’re at right now.

For those who want a deep-dive without the guesswork, we’d love for you to join us in Sarah’s Summer of SEO program (Mollie of Fern CX is an expert guest speaker this year!)

https://sarahmoon.net/summer-of-seo

We can’t divulge the details yet, but the lineup of guest speakers is like working with everyone on your vision board for 2025 and this alone is worth the investment in the program!

💚💚💚

Or, if you want to try before you buy, check out her free “Engineer Luck” SEO course to get started right away:

https://sarahmoon.net/free-seo-course

And make sure to follow her on Bluesky! https://bsky.app/profile/sarahmoon.bsky.social

You can also read her blog or sign up for her newsletter.

More info about 🌿Fern Talks:

Fern Talks are our twice-monthly live conversations where we publicly chat about ethical business topics. All are welcome to join!

Global-conscious schedule:

2nd Wed at 4pm PT/7pm ET/midnight BST/7-11am oceana and asia

4th Wed at 8am PT/11am ET/4pm BST (4th Wed at 4 London time!)

You can also click on any of the embedded Bluesky posts above to see the full post/conversation on Bluesky.

Or go here ~ https://bsky.app/hashtag/FernTalk ~ to see a record of all our 🌿Fern Talks.