Female Startup Interview: Nadia Mojahed
Autor: womenbiz ag
What does your company do? How did you come up with the idea and what are your visions?
SEO Transformer is an online agency that provides digital and search engine optimization (SEO) services to clients in Switzerland and across the world. We apply the best web practices, and we pride ourselves in the results we bring to our projects from strategizing and implementing lead generation tactics.
Our vision is to become the most user-centric digital agency that provides premium online services to companies that support good causes.
How long have you been self-employed and why did you decide to start your own business?
After having helped various international and local companies in different industries with digital marketing for 12 years, I felt it is time to establish my own agency. That was end of 2018 just before the Corona pandemic started, when I left my job at a telecommunication company.
Doing marketing for companies is different from doing it for your own company and providing it as a service to others. The stakes involved, and the learning curve are much higher and different in nature. Learning to win and retain customers by continuously adding value to them is what motivates me the most.
Each of us learns from our mistakes. What have you had to learn in your self-employment and what advice would you give to other female entrepreneurs?
My most important learning is noting down detailed processes and information about each project. Memory does not retain all info and details, and we should not rely on it for that. Writing down detailed processes help gain time tremendously. At the beginning, I did not realize how critical it is, and lost time to go through the process again. Obvious details while working on a project at hand can be missed nuggets for another project.
Another learning is ‘Do not force it, just outsource it’. If you do not like to do a specific task or if you feel you are not good at it, hire someone who can do it for you. As entrepreneurs, we mostly do not have a team around to help us with the various tasks we need – like for example, accounting, administration, graphic design, social media etc. I learnt to be generous to outsource, and outsource for a good quality. That saved my time for handling clients projects and for the significant tasks that I am good at.
There’s a lot going on in the world. Is there anything that’s particularly on your mind right now?
Employing AI tools in content writing is a hot topic nowadays. Specially when there are apps available to the public to interact with them, ex. ChatGPT, a chatbot launched by OpenAI end of 2022. It is exciting what it can bring into the world, specially in terms of communication, yet it must be used by care. I wrote an article about it: What AI tools are useful for and how to use them to drive value.
Do you see yourself as a role model?
After being featured as a role model by Girls in Tech Switzerland, a community supporting women in tech and being approached by people who aspire to establish their business and expertise in the digital field, I got to realize that I am. Seeing other women’s role models inspires me to continue and build further upon what I stand as a role model for.
If you had followed your childhood career aspirations, what would you be today?
As a child I liked to design my own things, I tried to create a bed, a TV, school gadgets, a magical lens out of glass and write my own stories and jokes. I considered ‘wisdom’ the most important word to learn. I could not wait to grow up to become wise. What made it shine is that wisdom comes through experience and it has been always fascinating to me to explore and experience things.
Putting this mix together, I would say I am living my childhood aspiration for being an entrepreneur and creator of my own career. Working in the digital field requires continuously learning, keeping up-to-date with algorithm upgrades, experimenting with tools and processes, and writing content.
What do you hope for the future – for yourself, your business and the world?
Businesses can use their services into a more sustainable and inclusive world. I believe at each role, one can drive an impact. On my part, that means for example creating websites that use a more inclusive tone of voice and content; implement web accessibility features to audiences with different technologies and physical abilities; and reduce the carbon footprint of websites by making them faster and optimize the user journey to reach to the content they need with fewer clicks and data consumption.
I hope to be able to deliver more on that and have more businesses willing to implement that.
If someone had told us 15 years ago that social media would be one of the most important marketing channels today, I doubt many would have believed it. What are some crazy ideas that you think could become big in the future?
Virtual reality (VR) will be expanding to transform all what we have nowadays as digital tools and infrastructure. My wish is to have an aero wearable device that allows us the option to commute by flying very soon.
