Today we’d like to introduce you to David Kranker.
Hi David, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
The story of my professional career started in the spring of 2014. I had started college in the fall of 2012 and studied computer science for a year, hoping to go into video game development. The more I talked to developers, and the more I learned about the burnout rate in the industry, the more it seemed like maybe video games should be left as a hobby instead of a career. I knew I wanted to transition to something in business that allowed me to use my creative mind. I set the goal of working in marketing, but decided to study accounting, because that was a more versatile degree that would provide me with a stable backup career if marketing didn’t work out. My degree in accounting meant that I would need to earn some marketing experience to be considered for marketing jobs.
So, in the spring of 2014, I started walking into marketing agencies in my hometown of Rochester, Michigan, and asking if they had job opportunities. There was a building in downtown that housed three different agencies. I didn’t know this at the time, because only one had shown up on Google Maps. I had walked in looking to talk to a video production agency called DPro. They turned me away, but just as I was walking out the door, a different agency owner ushered me back in. He owned an agency called Tipping Point. The agency was primarily a traditional media buying agency for broadcast and television, but they were looking to break into the digital space. They were confident that with my background in game development, I might be able to pick up SEO. I’m so thankful he decided to take a chance on me. If not for him, I may not have ended up working in digital marketing.
I spent 2014-2015 learning SEO under Tipping Point. I learned how to properly structure headers, how to work keywords into content, how to optimize meta titles, and how to install Google Analytics, set up Search Console, and track results. Through this work, I developed case studies where I was able to show that I was capable of producing posts and pages that ranked and drove traffic.
In my senior year of college, I had to decide whether I would continue charting my own path at Tipping Point or if it made more sense to get a job at an agency that specialized in SEO to learn how other professionals were performing the work. I chose to accept an internship at an agency called AttorneySync in Chicago (which was where I was going to school at the time). I was ultimately hired on after graduation as an SEO strategist. AttorneySync specializes in performing SEO for the legal industry, which is one of the most competitive industries in search marketing, because lawyers have large budgets to work with. I learned a lot working for the agency, and I also learned that the agency structure wasn’t the right fit for me.
The company culture was great, and the team was amazing. I was juggling many different roles, from handling client communications to execution and strategy. I was working nights and weekends to be able to provide my clients with the high-caliber work they deserved.
AttorneySync had a remote-first culture, and I moved to Grand Rapids from Chicago in 2018 to be closer to family, who were all still in Michigan. I continued working for AttorneySync for a year after the move before coming to the realization that I could probably start my own search marketing agency. Because I was already handling all aspects of service fulfillment for my clients at AttorneySync, the only thing AttorneySync was providing for me was closed deals for me to work on. I thought, if I could build out my own inbound funnel, then that would be the last missing piece that would allow me to start and operate my own business. The goal was to build more of a boutique digital marketing service where I could take on just a handful of clients at a time to really focus on driving the best possible results for them.
David Kranker Creative had existed since 2017, but it was really just a small side business where I would create websites and design logos for clients on the weekends. In 2019, I built a brand new site for David Kranker Creative, optimized it for SEO in Grand Rapids, and set up a Google Business Profile. The first two clients I landed through my website are still with me to this day. Between a mix of leads from my website and referrals from my agency connections, I was able to quit my agency job and work on David Kranker Creative full-time starting in January of 2020.
2020 was certainly a tumultuous year to start a business, but it was actually the right time to be offering digital marketing services, because there was a spike in online shopping when physical shops were closed due to the pandemic. 2020 was also the year I started teaching digital marketing. Similar to getting my first digital marketing internship, I was knocking on the doors of every university in West Michigan that offered a marketing degree, but this time I was reaching out via email instead of visiting the universities in person. At the time, many universities still didn’t have great digital marketing programs. I really wanted to teach the skills I had accumulated over the last 6 years, and thought it could be worth reaching out to universities to see if I could help build more of a comprehensive search marketing course. I ended up hearing back from Davenport University. Originally, they only had an opening for teaching public relations. I have some experience getting clients picked up in the news, but PR hasn’t been the focus of my career, so it wasn’t the best fit. I taught my first class the winter semester of 2020 and the class ended in March just before the world shut down. Davenport eventually did have a position open up to teach a search marketing class. Originally, the class was skewed more heavily towards search ads. I helped build out more course sections on SEO, which has been a blast. I now maintain and update the curriculum for the search marketing class for Davenport each year. I also had the opportunity to teach a video game marketing/development class through Davenport’s middle school summer program, which gave me the ability to do more with my passion for games. That was such a beautiful melding of my passions for teaching, video games, and marketing. I think summer class is one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever been able to do in my professional career.
Over the last 6 years, I’ve continued to teach at Davenport, and my client list at David Kranker Creative has continued to grow from word of mouth with the clients I’ve helped succeed online. My whole world is digital marketing at this point. When I’m not working with clients through David Kranker Creative, I’m either teaching search marketing at Davenport, helping my wife with digital marketing for her business, White Clover Paper Co., or performing digital marketing work for Simple Recipe, which is the mobile app I’ve co-created with my brother.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Running and operating David Kranker Creative certainly has its challenges, but i’ts been a surprisingly smoother experience than I thought it would be. I think the challenges I faced earlier on in my career, working at agencies really helped me build the skills and experience I needed to effectively build a client portfolio, manage client relations, and execute search marketing campaigns. The first half of my career was really trial by fire. One of the first site migrations I performed – I accidentally switched the primary URL from www to non-www, and that tanked traffic for the initial site launch (but it eventually did fully recover). I made sure to always retain the correct URL format for migrations moving forward. Figuring out how to improve site speed for clients was another big struggle. I tested many different plugins and techniques recommended online before finding the best possible setup. Earlier in my career, site speed plugins often weren’t built as well, either, so site components would frequently break. I got very good at fixing cache and script issues caused by speed enhancement plugins. Sites were also more likely to go down a decade ago than they are today. I definitely had a few calls from clients that I had to take on weekends or on vacations to fix sites that had gone down. Site security and backup/update systems are so much better than what they used to be, which makes site maintenance a lot more stress-free. I had sites get hit by Google algorithm updates, and I had to figure out what I could do to correct the ship as quickly as possible. Very often, after having dinner, I’d pull my laptop back out and either conduct research or plan out tests to find ways to improve rankings and grow traffic. I had clients when I was working at the agency cuss me out for poor performance or typos in blogs, and that was certainly tough to stomach, but it drove me to find more reliable ways to earn results and better processes for writing, so that I could avoid those uncomfortable situations in the future. In my first year as a strategist, I was appointed to be the lead SEO consultant for a bigger client in the agency portfolio. In this relationship, I really learned how to confidently provide strategic guidance and how to better manage client communications and expectations. That was a very important skill for me to learn, because when you’re running a service-based business, it’s not just about performing the work, but also communicating work and building a relationship that keeps clients engaged and interested in continuing services. Working at a smaller agency was a huge time commitment, and I was wearing many hats, but I’d still do it all over again if I were to receive a redo, because that experience really prepared me well for running my own digital marketing shop. The more recent struggle currently is figuring out how to continue to drive more revenue and traffic for clients in the shifting search landscape. AI has increased the number of no-click searches, and over half of all searches now result in zero clicks. I’ve had to double-down on ranking for high-intent searches where users need to click to take the next step in their purchase journey. I’ve also had to make some formatting changes to how I structure posts and pages to make it easier for AI to crawl and cite information from the page.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I’ve shared a good bit about my history in digital marketing, but I do have other passions and interests as well. In 2019, I realized many cities and states have coloring books dedicated to them, but I wasn’t seeing one for Grand Rapids. I started taking photos around the city and illustrated those photos to create a coloring book for Grand Rapids called Color GR. I finished the book in 2020, and it ended up being great timing, becuase people were locked inside and coloring was a joyful activity they could do. The news ended up picking up the coloring book and I was interviewed on WOOD TV and WXMI.
I really enjoy photography and graphic design, which have been great skills to have for digital marketing. I had some of my concept photos included in the Public Museum’s COVID-19 collection: https://www.grpmcollections.org/Detail/objects/193848 and https://www.grpmcollections.org/Detail/objects/193849
I’m also really excited about the app I’m working on with my brother – Simple Recipe. Deciding what to eat for dinner can be mentally exhausting, and I wanted to eliminate that decision from my day, because that would be one less decision to make each day. So, I created a Google Sheet that randomly created a meal plan each week based on recipes I saved in the sheet. It was simple and effective, but I thought an app would be better. I am by no means an app developer. I taught myself some React and created a very rudimentary initial app that scraped the ingredients and instructions from websites and saved them as recipes in the app. I then brought in my brother, who is an app developer. He rebuilt the app in Flutter, and we’ve built it out so it not only has a recipe saving feature, but also meal planning and grocery shopping features. It does the same thing my Google Sheet was doing, where it’s automatically generating a meal plan for me each week so I don’t have to think about it, and it’s been a game-changer for our family. We’re currently at just over 1,000 users for the app, and we’re getting ready to launch a discover view, which will let users find new recipes directly in the app.
Last thing that isn’t digital marketing related is my interest in the trades. I’ve been working on teaching myself different home improvement skills. In 2024, we had a construction company build a new building on our property. They built the exterior and also did the HVAC, rough plumbing, and drywall work. I did the electrical, insulation, flooring, finish plumbing, and painting. This was another trial by fire moment in my life, because I had never done these things before, and I was doing them on a large scale for an entire building. It was a lot of weeknights and weekends, but very cool to say that I did that, and the building is now an Airbnb that guests can stay at. It’s been very rewarding to get guests complimenting the work.
Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
I think there are two, and it’d be hard for me to pick just one. If I had to pick one, it would be work ethic. I’ve always had a strong work ethic. In high school, I worked in landscaping, which was a very physically demanding and grueling job. Being willing to sacrifice some weeknights and weekends to learn new things or get more work done has helped me tremendously, and it’s a huge reason why I am where I am today. Focusing on mastering skills very early on in my career opened many doors for me, from working at a leading agency in the legal marketing space to teaching at Davenport University.
The second would be persistence. Search is constantly changing and evolving, and it’s also a field where delayed gratification is the standard. It typically takes 3-6 months to see the results from SEO work being performed now. So, you need to be persistent and be willing to stick with it to avoid losing confidence and quitting. It is also a necessary trait to have with email outreach for link building. It can take 3 to 4 emails to finally get a response from a site owner, so you can’t give up when the first two emails don’t receive a response. Persistence also helped me enter the digital marketing industry. I wouldn’t be here if I had given up when I got turned down by the first business I walked into looking for work.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://davidkranker.com/
- Other: https://simplerecipeapp.com/
