Kevin skaggs

Born and Raised in Los Angeles, College graduate.

I started working at the age of 16 at a sporting good store. It was an amazing first job where I spent half my paycheck each month on golf balls, water balloon launcher, adjustable dumbbells, vibram five fingers shoes and other stupid stuff. I worked there on and off while in college and after, for almost 10 years. While in college I interned for E! Networks in their new media department where I was able to get my foot in the door. After graduating college I continued to do some freelance work for E!, Xivic Media, PJ TV and a few other companies until I found LA SEO.
I started working for LA SEO in July 2014 as a SEO project manager. When I first started working, the company was the owner, the VP and me and because we were a small company I had to wear many hats. I did everything from keyword research, title tag creation, Google Analytics installation, content uploading, and even client management. As the company grew, I grew both professionally in my work and in my knowledge of SEO. 

After doing SEO for several years and helping to grow the company, we started to take on bigger and bigger clients. Many of our bigger clients started asking if we offered Google Ads, AdWords, Bing Ads, and or any type of SEM. I took it upon myself to learn Google Ads so the company could start offering SEM to our clients.
(You can say I am self-taught; I have taken many classes, watched hours of YouTube videos and have taken several tests and have been earned several Google Ad certifications. I believe the best way to learn is to get your hands dirty. In no way do I think I am the best, but I think I am pretty good. I have shown clients 6X revenue return in 3 months and I have reduced client cost per lead by over 70% in just one month. I still have a lot to learn and enjoy working and learning from others.)

Doing both SEO & SEM at the same time helped to change our business for the best. My role in the company changed to Senior SEM & SEO Analyst and we started to unlock more for our clients. We started to leverage the paid data that we got from our efforts in AdWords to the efforts we were making in SEO.

(The Secret Sauce) If you are paying for the data might as well use it where you can. There should always be a synergy between Google Ads paid data and SEO organic efforts. Each arm of advertising should be helping one another. If you are paying for the data you should be using it everywhere.  

I believe our earliest SEM client was in 2016 back when Google Ads was AdWords and the UX was white. I got my first Google Ads certification and Google Analytics certification in 2016. 
By January 2020 we had enough SEM clients that I needed to devote 100% of my time to managing Google Ads. In 2022 and 2023 we were awarded Google Ads Premier Partner, which is given to the top 5% of all agencies for client growth. So you can say I am an “award-winning” SEM expert. Now in 2024, we manage 30+ Google Ad accounts with $44 Million in yearly spend. 

I am now the Director of SEM for LA SEO.