You’ve probably never heard of Victor Smushkevich. But if you read a few major magazines or websites, you’ve probably read some of his work. Victor has been published in several major publications, including Business.com, HuffPost, and Business2Community. He’s been published in Forbes enough times to become a member of the Forbes Councils, a circle of Forbes’ most elite contributors. Through his business, he’s also gotten several of his clients’ work published. For Victor, this is a major part of how he helps to promote his clients.
But Victor wasn’t always a successful media guru. Back in 2012, he had just dropped out of college, and was delivering pizzas for Domino’s. But he wasn’t just another twenty-something spinning his wheels in a dead-end job. Instead, he was earning just enough to survive, while he built and executed a plan to create his own business. Victor had spotted a multi-million dollar opportunity. He had a plan, and college wasn’t part of it.
Victor had dabbled in the field of search engine optimization (SEO), and discovered that many so-called “experts” were years behind the times. SEO is the practice of optimizing web pages to get to the top of Google’s search results. For businesses, this isn’t just a vanity project. It’s an essential way to attract customers. Fall off the first page of search results, and your business is not going to attract many customers. Google is constantly updating their search algorithms, which means that a website that was perfectly optimized a year ago might not rank well today.
Victor Smushkevich discovered that there were several important factors that could boost a website’s rankings, and experts were not using these latest tricks. One thing he discovered is that a page’s word count is irrelevant. Many SEO experts were wasting their clients’ money by creating long web pages to artificially pump up their word count. Instead, what they should have been doing was creating quality content with relevant keywords spread evenly throughout.
In 2013, Victor’s dream became a reality. He founded Smart Street Media, an agency that works with businesses to optimize their websites. Since then, Smart Street Media has generated more than a million phone calls for their clients. This has translated directly into new business. They’ve also generated over a million app downloads, including 600,000 app downloads for the Acorn investment app. All told, Smart Street Media is now worth millions of dollars, and has generated over $100 million worth of business for their clients.
Victor has also been busy as a serial entrepreneur. During his time at Smart Street Media, he built SEOGuestPosts.com, a backlink agency that provides services to other SEO agencies. In total, they’ve worked with more than 500 SEO agencies to help grow their business. Once SEOGuestPosts became successful, Victor sold it to a group of outside investors, in order to focus on his role as CEO of Smart Street Media. Given his status as the founder of two successful companies, we can look forward to even bigger and better things from Victor.