218 | The SEO Strategy That Brings New Clients to Your Website Everyday

If your website isn't bringing in new leads and you feel like you constantly have to be showing up on Instagram to market your services… this episode is for you.

Because the truth is, your business shouldn’t rely on you being online 24/7 in order to attract new clients.

When you have a strong website that's set up with the right SEO strategy, it can continue bringing in leads even when you’re not posting, not creating content, and not actively marketing.

I’m sharing some of the biggest insights I’ve learned from working with clients 1:1 for website redesigns, SEO audits, and optimizing their websites so they rank higher in Google searches.

In this episode, we're diving into:

 • How strong SEO allows your website to bring in clients even when you’re not posting on social media
 • How to make SEO feel simple and more sustainable
 • The most fundamental shift you need to make to rank higher in search results
 • The most common website homepage mistakes that I see (and how to fix them) so you get more leads
 • The key sections every homepage should include if you want it to convert cold leads into new inquiries

If you want your website to consistently bring in new inquiries from Google -- you need a strong & sustainable SEO strategy.

And if you want help creating your own SEO strategy, you can learn more about booking a customized SEO audit here: www.heykristamarie.com/seo

💫 Join the waitlist for the Website Template Shop at narrative.heykristamarie.com 

Ways we can work together: 

• <<Website Design>> Create a website so strong that clients are sold on working with you as soon as they find you!
• <<Brand Photography>> Is it time to elevate your business with new brand photos?

I'D LOVE TO CONNECT WITH YOU!

• Say hello on Instagram 👋
• Join the email community ✍🏻
• Leave a review on Apple Podcasts 🎙

Transcript

Welcome Back & Mission

The Burnout Of Always Being On

Why SEO Changes Everything

Proof: Coast-To-Coast Move Via Google

Client Win: Ranking In Two Months

SEO As A Living System

Personalized SEO Audits Explained

Make SEO A Conversation

Know Your Dream Client Deeply

Turn Questions Into Blog Topics

Homepage Mistakes That Cost Leads

What A High-Converting Homepage Needs

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello friend. Welcome to Amplify Your Brand and Business, the podcast that helps you create a brand that sells out your offers 24-7 so you don't have to. I just have to say, it feels so good to be back here recording on the podcast. I'm here in my office. My dogs are right here. Hopefully you won't hear any snoring, but if you do, it's them. That's what you hear in the background. But if we haven't met yet, first and foremost, thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being here. I'm Krista Marie. I am a website designer, a brand strategist, and a brand photographer for women business owners. Collectively, over the last six years, I've coached hundreds of women inside this podcast programs, inside communities. And in each episode of the podcast, I'm here to help you create a brand that does the heavy lifting for you. And today that's exactly what we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about how to create a brand, but not only a brand, but a website that does the heavy lifting and the marketing for you. Because I can tell you after working with so many clients from brand photography to website design through brand strategy, one of the things I hear the most from my clients is they feel like they have to be on 24-7 in order to get new leads and new clients. And I would say that's where I'm seeing a lot of the burnout happening inside of my community is this overwhelming feeling like if I am not showing up, if I'm not consistently creating content, if I'm not creating reels or if I'm not being visible, my business stops bringing in leads. And I will say that when your strategy is based on you having to show up in that way all the time, 24-7, always being on, not only is it not sustainable, you're going to burn out so quickly, but your business starts to feel not very fun. Like it doesn't feel fun if you constantly have this pressure on yourself to have to show up, to have to always be visible. And so today, what I want to talk you through is some strategies around how to create a website that actually brings in new leads without you having to be active, a website that actually has you ranking on Google, a website that has people looking for someone like you and you showing up at the top of that without you having to actively always be on. And I will tell you, having a strong SEO strategy and having strong SEO in my website has allowed me to do things like continue to bring in new leads even when I'm not posting on Instagram. I have not been super active on Instagram. There was a time in my business where I took a couple of months off, I think it was almost two months off from posting, and was still collectively bringing in new leads and getting new eyes in my business. I have moved my business from San Francisco to New York City, so literally from one coast to another. And after updating my SEO, after implementing my strategies and officially making the switch from San Francisco to New York City, I got a new lead from Google within three days. Like I need you to hear that. Within three days, someone found me in New York City and reached out and inquired because they found me at the top of Google because I had an SEO strategy in place and I was able to move my business from one coast to another without having this huge dip in being able to be found. I'm currently ranked as the number one website for my key keywords. So if you search Brand Photographer New York City, my website shows up. SEO is something that is living and breathing and does move and fluctuate, but I have not been kicked out of the top three to five spots on Google in years. So while that might fluctuate, I'm always found at the top of Google for my dream clients. And when you have a website that actually markets for you, when you have a website that's consistently bringing in new leads, it no longer feels like a huge guessing game. You know, you don't have to sit here and stress about how are people gonna find me or what do I need to say today on Instagram to get people to reach out or how where is my next client gonna come from? Like these questions and these fears no longer really have a place because you have a strategy that continues to work for you, even if you're not actively being visible. And so I want to share with you, I actually recently I've been doing a lot of SEO work for clients behind the scenes. And I recently completed a website redesign, or as I call them, a website glow up for a client. And she came to me and her biggest goal was to increase her ranking on Google. When I asked her what her, like at the end of our time together, once she has the new website of, what is the one thing that she wants to achieve? And her number one goal was to increase her ranking on Google. And so we did our work together. I went into her website, and within a week, I completely revamped the layout of her website, the structure, the copy, the flow of the buttons, the pages, the calls to action, did a complete website glow up. And in less than two months, she actually emailed me to share that she is now ranking within the top three websites for her local searches for her keywords. So when you search for her keywords, she is one of the first three that now shows up in Google in less than two months' time. And I say this because if you are a business owner, I know I have a lot of photographers that listen to this podcast. You are my people. I get it. I know how it feels to grow a business, I know how it feels to be constantly searching for local clients. But this applies to if you're a therapist, if you're a wedding planner, if you are a coach who works with local clients, a fitness coach, if you are anyone who is building a local market. If you don't have a website that's doing constant lead marketing generation for you, and if your website isn't consistently bringing in new leads every month from Google, you are working so much harder than you need to be. Part of my time over the last few years is really understanding what actually makes a difference. And SEO, I mentioned this before, but it is a living and breathing thing. So it's not necessarily just something that you do once and then you never think about. However, once you put in the work, once you have laid the foundation to have strong SEO on your website, it is something that will continue to work and grow for you. It's not something that you have to necessarily focus on every single week or even every month in your business. You might have heard from someone that you have to constantly put a new blog post out every month or every week, or you have to constantly be doing X, Y, Z thing on your website in order to increase your SEO. But if you've created a solid foundation, if you worked on the right things, it is something that will continue to grow and bring in new clients for you. It's just important that you're actually focusing on the things that matter. And as I mentioned, I've recently been diving really deep with clients when it comes to their website SEO, not only in the website glow-ups, but even just doing website audits with new clients. This is something that I found has been really helpful for people that are brand new to SEO. Or if you've dabbled in it, you've done a little bit, but you feel really overwhelmed with what you've learned online. SEO audits that I do, the reason I love them so much and I'm so passionate about them is because my goal is to make SEO feel approachable. I don't want, I'm not gonna send you an entire course on how to learn every detail or every nuance or every single micro thing about SEO. The SEO audits are completely personalized to your website where I'm going in, I'm looking at your website, I'm looking at the metadata you have, I'm looking at the actual keywords you have on your pages, I'm looking at the flow and the structure of your actual website pages. I'm like doing market research around what are the stronger keywords that you could be focusing on, what are your current keywords, like actually going in and doing a personalized deep dive. And I've gotten such great feedback from clients because it's so thorough. And this is where I thrive. I want to help you build a website that feels approachable, that feels easy enough to maintain. I want to take some of the guesswork out for you. And I know that SEO can sometimes feel overwhelming. I do have some clients where after I've completed the SEO audit and I send them the data that I've collected, they are so grateful for the deep dive and for the thoroughness. And they also don't want to do it themselves. So I will work with them to actually implement the things that I found and to implement the changes and implement the strategies that I've created for them. But it absolutely is something that you can tackle on your own because I have structured it that way. And so today I just want to take some time to dive into the most common things that I've seen when it comes to SEO, what are some things that you can do to help improve your ranking on Google to also help it maybe feel a little bit more approachable? If this, if SEO is something you want to dive into, I suggest that if you are, if you're driving, of course, like just listen into this now, like take some mental notes and maybe come back later. But if you're, if you have a pen and paper handy, if you're able to take notes, I highly recommend jotting some things down because this is going to be a very tactical episode where we're gonna dive deep into how to actually increase your SEO, how to feel more confident about doing your SEO and just the things that I'm looking for and the things that I've seen most commonly with my clients when it comes to their SEO strategy of how they can improve it. So the first thing I want to talk about is I want you to think of your SEO strategy less as this strict process and more as if it's a natural conversation that you're having with Google. A lot of the time when I ask people about SEO, the reaction that I get when I ask them about their strategy or what they know about it, what I hear from them is these certain like rules that they've been told that they have to live by and do in order to have a strong SEO presence. And while, of course, there are things that you will want to do in order to have a strong SEO strategy, the energy that I hear from clients is like, I have to do this, I have to do this, I have to do this. Like it's this strict process that they think they have to do and implement in order for them to have strong SEO. And I want to actually tell you a story about this. One of the most common clients that I get in my photography business are therapists. It's and I'll tell you why and how this all started, but it was really interesting to me because for a long time in my business, I would get clients from all different types of niches. I still do, but I get a higher influx now of therapist clients. And I'll tell you why. Oh gosh, I don't even remember when this was. It might have been 2021. I did a therapy branding photo shoot for a client in LA. I was living in San Francisco at the time, and I loved getting to travel to LA to do a session. I thought, how fun would it be to be able to do this more, to get more clients? And so I wrote a blog post about doing this therapy session, this therapy photo shoot for this client in LA. I did not overthink this blog post. I did not do extensive research on how to write an SEO optimized blog post. I knew a little bit at the time, of course, about SEO, but what I'm trying to tell you is I did not write this blog post with the intention of having it rank on Google. I thought it would be cool. I thought it would be nice. My goal actually was maybe I can pin this blog post on Pinterest and people will find it. Like I didn't really have a strong strategy going into it, but I will tell you that that blog post ended up bringing in so many new leads to my business simply because people in LA were searching for branding photographers for therapists. And my blog post was coming up in the top of the Google search. And again, it's not because I like over-strategized it or even had the intention of it being in the first spots of Google. I just wrote the blog post using the keywords. I talked about branding photo shoot for therapist in LA. I mentioned it in the title. I mentioned it throughout the blog post. Like I simply talked about and had a conversation around the topic. And that blog post ended up bringing in so many clients. And it continues to bring in clients. I'm sure now that I'm focusing more towards New York City, my LA market will probably start to die down a bit. But but you see my point. And so when you can think about your SEO as a conversation and less as this strict process that you have to follow, it's gonna feel easier to develop a strategy, but it's also just gonna feel more sustainable because you're not feeling this constant pressure of feeling like it needs to be perfect. And so knowing that, I think it is really important. One of the things I find that clients have struggled with in the past is when I ask them when we go to work on their SEO and to think about their SEO strategy, I'll ask them questions like, okay, who exactly do you help? What specifically do you help them achieve? You know, really getting into the mind of their ideal client. I found that some of my clients have struggled with that. And so I think first and foremost, if you want your website to be ranking higher on Google, you have to have a clear understanding of who is my dream client? What exactly do I help with? Having an understanding of what challenges are they currently experiencing? What are the things that feel like roadblocks for them? What are the things that they want to achieve specifically? Like really getting into the specifics. The more you can understand your ideal client, the more clearly your content will speak to them. And when your content speaks to them more clearly, you're so much more likely to be found on Google search. So, for example, if you are a, let's say a brand photographer, so if you're like me, you're a brand photographer for women, and I'm just going to use the therapist example. If I wanted to bring in more therapist clients into my branding business, I would start thinking about what are the specific challenges that they are experiencing? I know that for a lot of therapists, they are very uncomfortable booking brand sessions. Um, so I want to think about, well, what specifically are they uncomfortable with, right? What are the actual challenges or fears that they have when it comes to booking a brand session? And then I would start creating content. I would create blog posts specifically for those things. I could have a blog post specifically around what props should you bring to your brand session as a therapist. I would also think about how a lot of uh therapists might be wondering, like, what exactly are brand photos? And I might create a blog post that specifically talks about why you need brand photos as a therapist in Los Angeles. Like I would start thinking about what are the questions, what are they thinking about, what are they Googling, and how can I naturally write content that will speak to those specific things? So again, it doesn't have to be overly analytical and a process that you overthink, just getting into the mind of your ideal client and truly understanding them and creating content that they are actively searching for. No industry jargon, no fluffy words. We're not looking to sound smart or sound like an expert. We want to connect with our ideal clients using the words that they are using. And so I want you to think about that when you're writing your content. I also want you to think about when it comes to your website, your homepage is so important. And one common theme that I've been seeing as I've been doing SEO audits for clients, because not only, like I said, am I doing an SEO audit, but I'm also looking at their website, how it's laid out, the format, the content they have, the words they're using, like all of this is going to have an impact on their SEO. And what I've noticed is for a lot of clients, their homepage is more like a landing page. It has some very bare information around who they are, where they're located, and what they do, and then a contact button or a contact form. And that's it. And I need you to understand if you're expecting clients who don't know who you are to land on your homepage and inquire, you have to have more relevant information that's gonna draw them in quickly and help them immediately know this is the person I've been looking for. So if you want to be found by Cold Leads on Google, this is gonna be especially even more important because your homepage is likely gonna be the first thing that they see. We need your homepage to be an immediate yes for them. We need them to, because it's very likely they probably have five websites open, five or more of people who do what you do. We need your website to be the thing that stands out. And so the more that people have to click around on your website, or the more you are expecting them to have to navigate around to different pages to learn more about your offers, the more leads you are likely losing. And so a few quick tips, again, if you're taking notes, I would just jot some of these down. I'm gonna go through these pretty quickly because they could, this could be a whole nother podcast episode. But your homepage should include a really strong hero and intro section. And so a lot of the times we as web designers talk about this as the above the fold. Within the first scroll, when someone first lands on your website, they need to be instantly drawn in. And so if your first section, your main hero at the top, doesn't clearly explain who you are, what you do, where you're located, and like why you like why you're the person for them, if it doesn't explain that, you're likely going to be losing people. The section underneath your hero. So you think about the main hero is kind of that first header image that people see. The section underneath that needs to be strategic. It should not be flip filled with fluff. It should not be a one-sentence line that's a quote. Like we need this section to really draw people in, speaking to them, speaking to how you understand them, you get them, you know where they are. Content that actually will have someone landing on your page and immediately seeing and thinking, no one is, no one's websites look like this. No one is speaking to me as clearly as this person is speaking to me. And that's one big gap that I see on a lot of websites is that first the first two sections of the website are not filled with strong enough content to really draw someone in. And so people are likely clicking away because they haven't been spoken to in a way that compels them to keep scrolling. A few other quick tips on your website, you want to have at least two spots for testimonials scattered throughout your website homepage. And this is for your analytical buyers. You are going to have people that come to your website that the fluffy content is nice. They love learning about you and what you do, but like they want to know, can you actually help me? And so having testimonials or a place on your website in a couple of places on your homepage that actually speak to the results, that have real people speaking to how you've helped them is really going to be an important impact for those analytical buyers. We also want to talk about you on your homepage. A lot of people will just have an about page that's dedicated to them and what they do. But again, if you have someone coming to your website who doesn't know who you are, they've never met you, they've found you on Google, we do want a section on your homepage that builds that connection. It starts to build that relationship. You also want to make sure any press or articles or blog posts that you've written, any sort of credibility that you can add into a section on your homepage is also going to be important, again, especially for those analytical buyers. And then towards the end, having some sort of opt-in if you have a lead magnet or a freebie or something that people can download to join an email list or whatever it is, having that at the bottom as well as a strong final call to action that links to how they can contact you. There are a million tips that I could give you for a homepage, and we're not going to get into the details of that, but I want you to take away from that. Your homepage needs to be so much more than just bare basic information. It needs to be so much more than just a landing page. And we want it to be strategically designed to walk people through the buyer's journey. To walk people through does this person understand me? Does this person get me? Do I feel like I can trust them with my time, my energy, my money? And we need your homepage to walk them through that journey to build that confidence. All of that to say, there is so much that we can talk about when it comes to strategy. There's so many things we can implement on your website for your SEO into your keywords. There's so much strategy that we can create together. But I also hope that you walk away from this episode understanding that SEO can be really complicated if we make it complicated. And I will tell you, I spent years in my business. I I'm talking literal years in my business over complicating SEO. I bought multiple courses from multiple um coaches and other people to learn about SEO. I probably spent, if I had to guess, four or five K. Collectively on courses that taught about SEO and other business strategy, but really the main thing I wanted to learn was SEO. And I learned a lot from those purchases in that the long, lengthy SEO courses, either I didn't get through them, they felt overwhelming, they were too complicated. I'm sure I could have worked it and it would have worked. But for me, the way that I learn, it's not in a course. I realized it's not about deep diving into every nuance and every strategy and every possible way of building SEO. The thing that actually worked for me was breaking it down, was making it sustainable, was understanding what actually makes a difference and what do I not actually have to focus on. And when I got more one-on-one personalized help and support with that, that's when my SEO skyrocketed. That's when I was able to take the SEO and make it into an actual doable system and process in my business that is continuing to work for me and is continuing to bring in new clients. And so if SEO is on your list of things to implement in your business this year, which again, especially if you are someone who works with local clients, I cannot say this enough that SEO is going to be so critical in you growing a business that allows you to not always have to be on and to not always have to be online. If you are interested in growing that, I do have SEO audits available. It is something because they're so personalized, I only take on a limited amount per month because I'm actually going in doing research specifically for your business and then not only sharing a PDF with the insights that I found with the research, but also a video to walk you through those insights and everything that I've written. Because I know if you're anything like me, a PDF doc is not going to be helpful for me to learn and figure out how to implement. So I also include the video because I want you to feel like you have multiple ways to be able to consume the data. And so if an SEO audit is something you are interested in, you can head to heykristamarie.com forward slash SEO, just the three letters, SEO, and you can contact me to learn about how to get how to schedule an SEO audit, what that looks like. I would be thrilled to do that for you. Again, it is something I'm only taking on unlimited amounts because it does take time to actually implement. So if you're interested, I would highly recommend reaching out sooner rather than later, as they do tend to get booked out in advance. But I just I really hope that this episode today inspires you to think about your SEO differently. If you're someone who has overcomplicated and overthought SEO in the past, I hope that you can start to change your mindset around it and start to understand if you can just think about it as a conversation. Think about it as you just talking about what you do, who you help, the services you provide, and talking about it often, talking about it in your website pages, talking about it in blog posts, creating content around it. The more you can just make it a natural conversation, the easier it's going to be to create an actual sustainable strategy. As always, thank you so much for being here. I'm so grateful for you taking the time to listen in, and I'm so thankful to just be a part of your business journey as you are continuing to grow. I hope you always remember you deserve to have a brand and a website that does all of the selling for you, and I look forward to see you in the next episode.