Time for an SEO Refresh? Here's How.

Meredith and her husband discuss the concept of an "SEO Refresh", which involves revisiting and improving past SEO efforts after a period of inactivity. Her husband outlines a five-step process for an effective SEO refresh:

1. Google Search Console: Use it to check performance, visibility, and identify which keywords and pages are gaining impressions.
2. Sitemap Page: Ensure your sitemap is submitted and check for indexing issues.
3. SEMrush Audit: Conduct a site audit to identify errors and issues that might be affecting your SEO.
4. Blog Optimization: Focus on popular blog posts, improve their quality, link them to relevant service pages, and create related content.
5. Call to Action (CTA): Regularly test and update your CTA to see what converts best.

Timestamps
[0:24] The SEO Refresh
[1:09] I don't recommend it, but here's how to do it
[2:16] STEP 1: Identify trends, popular keywords and pages
[3:26] A Quick Tip for Google Search Console
[5:57] Do NOT look at Average Ranking
[7:05] STEP 2: Find pages that are NOT indexed 
[8:10] Some pages are not indexed and it's okay
[9:49] STEP 3: Find more problems with a Semrush Audit
[10:40] Finding errors in your website
[11:37] Common SEO errors when blogging
[14:45] STEP 4: Improve your strongest blogs
[17:46] Example of expanding blog topics
[18:53] Give Google more of what likes... 
[19:35] STEP 5: Revise (and test!) your CTA button
[20:17] Improving business by testing CTA's
[21:17] Next Week: How to hire Meredith's Husband

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Transcript

Meredith's husband 0:24

Today is the SEO refresh. Oh, what does that mean? I get the question a lot oh, we haven't done SEO, or I haven't done SEO for six months or a year or two years. How do I do a refresh? I'm going to dedicate a month or two months, or three months, or a week or a day or whatever.

Meredith 0:38

So what should I do?

Meredith's husband 0:39

It's kind of a question.

Meredith 0:40

I get oh, kind of like a jumpstart.

Meredith's husband 0:44

No, like you know, you did SEO. Let's say you have done some SEO in the past but, you haven't done. Imagine that situation, baby. I can't If you had done some SEO in the past and then something happened and you didn't do SEO for a while, and now we need to get back into SEO.

Meredith 1:02

Get back into the groove.

Meredith's husband 1:04

That's the SEO refresh, get back to the. Seo gym. I don't necessarily recommend this method of SEO. It's better, you'll get better results if you develop some sort of monthly routine or habit and your growth is more steady. However, you know what happens. Life happens.

Meredith 1:24

Life.

Meredith's husband 1:26

And so that's not a possibility. The monthly routine is not a possibility.

Meredith 1:30

It's not always. It's not always, this is true.

Meredith's husband 1:33

So this is better than nothing. Doing an SEO refresh, maybe doing SEO once a year for a week or a month?

Meredith 1:39

Yeah, see, that's Buster Marcel.

Meredith's husband 1:42

Marcel agrees.

Meredith 1:43

He's got his Greek.

Meredith's husband 1:48

If that's what's possible.

Meredith 1:48

I want to tell you how to do it, oh okay. The best way to do it, if we're going to do it.

Meredith's husband 1:51

If this is what you got, I want you to do it right.

Meredith 1:57

A little exercise is better than zero exercise. That's correct. That's correct.

Meredith's husband 2:00

And I do have old clients, like just recently I had an old client, an old consulting client, come back and want to do essentially an SEO refresh. Not an old client in their age, but a former client. So this is kind of what I do for them. This is what I would do. So there's five steps, five things that are going to be helpful in this situation. I'm going to go through them.

Meredith 2:22

Please do.

Meredith's husband 2:23

Are you ready?

Meredith 2:24

I am.

Meredith's husband 2:25

Okay, number one is Google Search Console. If you don't have Google Search Console, you should. If you're doing an SEO refresh, you should have Google Search Console. So this is the first thing I do. If I get a new consultant client, the first place I go is Google Search Console. I look at their performance. What is their visibility like in Google, and by visibility I mean what are their impressions?

Meredith 2:48

What are their impressions? What are their impressions? Yeah, hello, I'm a clown Sorry. Can I do one more?

Meredith's husband 2:57

No, thank you. Okay, what keywords are getting impressions? What pages are getting impressions?

Meredith 3:04

And how do you know that?

Meredith's husband 3:05

You just go to performance. I've talked about Google search console before, so maybe I'll try to find an episode where I do that and I will link it below.

Meredith 3:13

Perfect For all those that are just tuning in for the first time, right, hi?

Meredith's husband 3:18

So you look to see what keywords are doing okay, what pages are doing okay. One method, a trick that I like to use when doing this, is when you look at the Google Search Console performance graph, there are some filters at the top. I choose filters and I say queries excluding your brand name or your personal name, because I don't. It's not really important to me in doing SEO to know how many people are already searching for you by name. That's not like. Hopefully, you're going to appear top if somebody searches for Nerdist Dinner Photography, so I like to exclude those searches so that the information I'm getting is more representative of generic keywords Children's photography, brooklyn, new York, family photography, things like that.

Meredith's husband 4:06

I want to make note of which blogs are getting the most traffic directly from Google. Okay, and right now I just want to make note of that. Yeah, and I want to make note of. You can drill down. It's very easy to drill down in Google Search Console. When you see a popular blog, you click it. It's just going to give you information for that page. Then you look to see what are the keywords leading into that page by just clicking on the tab called queries.

Meredith 4:34

It'll tell you what keywords. Yeah, drill down. What is that?

Meredith's husband 4:38

Drill down is when you're if you're looking at a report, you're looking at a website and let's say there's a piece of information that seems interesting to you, you click on it and more information is available by you're drilling down into that information by clicking on it Okay. You've never heard the term drilling down. Drill down, okay, it's like a dropdown menu.

Meredith 4:59

No, I figured it. Yeah, I mean I do, yeah, but it's just okay.

Meredith's husband 5:05

Okay, so you've got your most popular blogs and the keywords for those blogs. And then you want to look at just overall trend, and Google Search Console will give you the last 16 months. That's where I like to start. Before that, it doesn't maintain information past 16 months.

Meredith 5:23

Okay, but I just want to look for trends.

Meredith's husband 5:26

Then you drill down, then you drill down, got it.

Meredith 5:29

Okay.

Meredith's husband 5:30

If you see any and what I'm really doing here is just checking to see if there's any really alarming changes, right Like, sometimes, somebody changed their website platform and they forgot to do something, and you will see very clearly when that happened, and so you know, okay, something happened when I was doing that, what was it? And then you can go back and undo it. So that's what I'm really looking for.

Meredith 5:56

Ideally.

Meredith's husband 5:56

I want to look to see you know hope to see an upward trend in the number of impressions. And remember there is an option to look at average ranking. Do not use that option unless you are looking at just a single keyword. Never use the average ranking for multiple keywords because it's going to be misleading, Because usually what happens is, as you optimize your white, your white. My white, I don't know, I don't know what that means as you optimize your website.

Meredith 6:23

I guess white is very, very short for website White.

Meredith's husband 6:28

As you optimize your website, hopefully more keywords are going to be gaining visibility. So in the beginning of this, if you're looking at this chart, that shows your average ranking over time. If you have just a few keywords in the beginning and then you start to add more keywords as time progresses, the keywords that you add are going to begin with lesser ranking. Progresses, the keywords that you add are going to begin with lesser ranking. So your average keyword ranking will be going down over time, which is going to look like something bad is happening when in actuality, something good is happening and more keywords are gaining visibility. So don't look at average ranking for multiple keywords no.

Meredith's husband 7:04

Okay, so the second step, the second thing you want to look at, also in Google Search Console, is the sitemap page.

Meredith 7:11

Sitemap page.

Meredith's husband 7:12

This is where you submit your sitemap to Google Search Console. You must submit, must. I'm going to get a T-shirt that says you must submit, and then, in small letters, your sitemap. I'm going to be so popular.

Meredith 7:28

You already are.

Meredith's husband 7:30

But what we're looking for here is we want to see are there any problems? Are our pages not getting indexed? Are they not getting into the Google search engine because of some issue? And this is where you're going to find that out Exactly. So the navigation or the link that you want to click on in the left-hand side of Google Search Console, I believe, is called Pages, and when you click on that it's underneath the option called Indexing. So underneath Indexing, click on Pages. It will show you two boxes one in green, the pages that are indexed. It'll show you a number and it'll show you a box in gray pages not indexed. So inevitably you're going to have box in gray pages not indexed. So inevitably you're going to have some pages that are not indexed. You're going to have category pages, tag pages, author pages, login, et cetera.

Meredith's husband 8:19

It's normal to have some of those. What you want to look for is are your main pages not being indexed, your main website pages or your blog pages? If your category pages and your tag pages are not indexed, that's fine. You also want to check do you have any old subdomains? I see this a lot.

Meredith's husband 8:39

It's like people used to have an old blog and it's on blogmeritazinnerphotographycom. Anything, that's the you know the www. Yeah, that's technically a subdomainotographycom. Anything, that's the you know the www. Yeah, that's technically a subdomain. Okay, yeah, I knew I would lose you there. Anything before your main domain name yeah.

Meredith's husband 8:59

So clientsmeritusinterphotography, yeah. Blogmeritusinterphotography yeah. Something elsemeritusinterphotography Cute fish yes, those are subdomains and if a lot of times I see people they have their blog set up that way at some point and then they just kind of forget about it and it just lingers on, If that's the case, if you have a blog or any other subdomain there that you don't want in Google, it'll appear here and this would hopefully indicate that you should go get rid of it delete it If it's no longer active.

Meredith's husband 9:31

it's not doing you any good. It might be doing you harm, so you want to get rid of it. That's basically what I'm checking for there.

Meredith 9:36

Oh yeah.

Meredith's husband 9:37

How many of your pages are indexed and do you have any old stuff out there?

Meredith 9:40

Yeah, if the old stuff is out there.

Meredith's husband 9:43

Kill it, no, show it the door. Okay, number three a SEMrush audit. So what we did by going to Google Search Console is we went to see hey, is Google telling us about any problems?

Meredith 10:00

That's step number one Step.

Meredith's husband 10:02

number two is we go use an external tool to tell us about problems. Now there's going to be some overlap. If SEMrush is telling you about a problem, it may also be reported in Google Search Console as a problem. If it's in Google Search Console, it's of the utmost importance. Those are the things you want to take.

Meredith 10:17

Okay, then you do SEMrush, yeah, then you do SEMrush, you do an audit. Yeah, how do you do the audit?

Meredith's husband 10:24

The site audit tool.

Meredith 10:26

Yes.

Meredith's husband 10:26

So you you, if you have a SEMrush account, you can do this with a free account. You Begin a project yes Enter your domain name yes, my domain and then, once you have a project inside that project, you use the site audit tool. It's very easy to do. It's a couple of clicks and it just starts going. It's going to come back and tell you if you have one of roughly 100 different types of errors on your site.

Meredith 10:49

Oh boy.

Meredith's husband 10:51

And these are sometimes important, sometimes less important, sometimes not important at all, but it's going to really tell you pretty much everything You're looking, what you're looking for or what I look for.

Meredith 11:02

You need to do that for a personality, sorry.

Meredith's husband 11:04

I can tell you what's working and what's not working. I can tell you exactly where.

Meredith 11:09

Where all the wonderful perfections, endless joys.

Meredith's husband 11:14

So if you are doing an SEO refresh, presumably you have done this at some point. So, in coming back to this, you want to see if your score has fallen. The site audit is going to give you a score. If it has fallen and it inevitably does if you're blogging at all, if you're active at all on your website, your score will decrease over time. Hopefully not sharply, but you want to see. Is it still above a 92? And we want to check for a couple errors that are common when you're just maintaining a website and doing blogging, et cetera. The issues that you might see are things with the title tags they might be duplicate, they might be too long, maybe they're missing.

Meredith 11:54

Yes.

Meredith's husband 11:55

Those are the issues you'd want to look for and the meta descriptions. Meta descriptions also might be duplicate, might be missing, might be too long. You want to fix those. The other thing that I would look for and it's not technically an error in the site audit tool in SEMrush, so it won't lower your score. It's actually in the notices. When you run a site audit, there's going to be three categories of issues errors, warnings and notices. Wow, wow, you just have a 100% glazed look over your face.

Meredith 12:29

Well, I'm trying to differentiate.

Meredith's husband 12:32

I'm pretending you're focusing.

Meredith 12:34

No, I am, this is my focused face.

Meredith's husband 12:37

Okay.

Meredith 12:38

It's my focus, Like okay, let's differentiate between those three.

Meredith's husband 12:42

Yeah, so in the notices section are things that are not going to be lowering your score, things that are usually not a problem, but that, hey, you should be aware of. That's why it's called a notice. Something in that category which I don't think should be in that category I think it should be a warning is permanent redirects. If you have permanent redirects, you want to resolve that issue.

Meredith 13:06

Absolutely. And what are permanent redirects?

Meredith's husband 13:09

Redirects are and again, this happens to any site almost that has any sort of activity is you have a link somewhere on your website from one page to another page? Yes, and then something happens that page changes, or it changes URLs, or you take that page down, or something like that, and then your link gets redirected, but you don't change the link. So what happens is that link is still there, it goes to that page, which is now gone, and then there is a redirect, a permanent redirect, which then sends users to the correct page. Now, for users, this doesn't really matter. It slows down the site a little bit, but it's not. It's not a huge deal.

Meredith 13:51

However, google does not like this because it's all these people just pointing to something and there's nothing there, and they're just waiting on the street corner and pointing to nothing.

Meredith's husband 14:01

If you try to, you know. Imagine what the Google bot does all day long is it just follows links and sends information back to the main Google? Office and outer space or something I don't know. So if so, if all that Googlebot is doing is crawling links every day, probably trillions or whatever is bigger than trillions numbers of links every single day, and if everybody did this had to redirect, you're doubling the amount of work that they need to do.

Meredith 14:28

So exhausting, so that's why you don't want that.

Meredith's husband 14:30

Googlebot, that Googlebot yeah.

Meredith 14:33

You need to go fund me for that poor Googlebot. Give it a vacation.

Meredith's husband 14:37

So those are the things that I would. Those are the typical issues that I would find.

Meredith 14:42

Yes.

Meredith's husband 14:43

When doing a sort of SEO refresh, okay.

Meredith 14:45

So step number four, four.

Meredith's husband 14:47

Blogs. So remember I mentioned. When you're in the Google search console, make note of your blogs that are most popular.

Meredith 14:55

Yes.

Meredith's husband 14:55

Now we want to go look at those and consider how can we make them better. They're already doing well. We want to try to get more out of them. How?

Meredith 15:03

do? We do that.

Meredith's husband 15:04

I'll get to that in just a second, but this is how this is. A really good kind of rule to keep in mind when doing SEO, I think, is to go with what's working. To keep in mind when doing SEO, I think, is to go with what's working. If something is doing well, you can make it do better, faster and easier than you can take something that is not doing well and make it do better.

Meredith's husband 15:24

This is true, okay, so that's the goal here is we take our good blogs, we want to strengthen them more and then expand. So how do we do this? The first thing you do is you just go look at it as a user. Now remember, you know what keywords are leading into this blog, so you know what people have searched for when they arrive on this page. So put yourself in their shoes. Does it make sense?

Meredith 15:44

Is it helpful. There's a ruby that was me in their shoes.

Meredith's husband 15:48

Sure, okay, then yes, the second thing you want to do is for any of your popular blogs that are getting visibility, getting traffic from Google, you want to link those pages to your money pages, your service pages, oh, and I mean, put a link in the first paragraph of text that links to the most appropriate service page, so the most appropriate service that you offer.

Meredith 16:15

Yeah.

Meredith's husband 16:17

Most relevant to that blog entry. So if you blogged about Penny the pig, you remember shooting Penny the pig and you blogged about it, so that would be most appropriate to your pet photography page Right.

Meredith's husband 16:27

So somewhere in that first paragraph just a simple text link. Don't make it a button, don't make it an image. The link's in your navigation. That's not what I'm talking about. Somewhere in the first paragraph, maybe two paragraphs you want to link to your pet photography page somehow. It's up to you how you want to do that. Not a bad idea if you want a link to that also further in the blog, but definitely don't do it more than twice.

Meredith 16:49

Once is really all that's necessary. Yeah, you said a paper link.

Meredith's husband 16:53

No, did I say a paper link?

Meredith 16:55

You said a something link.

Meredith's husband 16:57

A second link.

Meredith 16:58

No, before that. Not a button, not a thing you don't. A text link. A text link.

Meredith's husband 17:06

Okay, just regular text and then try to mention pet photography somewhere in that blog and then link those words pet photography to your pet photography page.

Meredith 17:14

Got it, thank you.

Meredith's husband 17:16

Then you want to think about how can you expand. Is there a blog, a related blog, that you could do? That would be more closely related to your pet photography page.

Meredith 17:25

That you could create.

Meredith's husband 17:26

Yes, yes, okay, yes, because you have some. Whatever that blog was about in your case it was Penny the Pig- Penny the Pig. And you have your pet photography page. Is there some something in the middle, some sort of concept in the middle of those two?

Meredith 17:40

The Brooklyn Fire Department.

Meredith's husband 17:42

Right, but in the middle I mean.

Meredith 17:44

Would it be that? How about this one? So it was through a second photographing Penny the pig. When another person brought their pig, george, I photographed them and then they hired me because they run a school for autistic kids and needed photos.

Meredith's husband 18:06

That is a great example, right? Not all of it, but the first part where you mentioned somebody saw your blog and they came with their own pet pig.

Meredith 18:16

Wait, somebody saw my photos.

Meredith's husband 18:18

Somebody saw your photos and they came to the fire station, right yeah, and they owned a pig they had their own pig. So that pig was their pet. Yeah, so now we're starting to talk about pets Rather than Penny the pig at the fire station. We're starting to talk about pets. You see how we've kind of bridged the gap between pet photography and Penny the pig.

Meredith 18:35

Yeah, and so because we already have some authority around the search for Penny the pig, whichly is going to be probably small no, at least she was on Sarah Silverman Penny the Fire Pig is now huge.

Meredith's husband 18:50

No wonder somebody saw your photo then.

Meredith 18:51

Yeah.

Meredith's husband 18:53

Remember because we found this. We identified this blog because it's a popular one, yes, in Google Search Console, meaning Google is giving it some authority. Google likes it for lack of a better word Because it's Penny the Pig. We want to give Google or we want to create more stuff that Google likes. So we know Google likes our website for Penny the Pig. Let's branch out a little bit.

Meredith's husband 19:15

And that's going to help us go with what's working rather than fighting to get something new ranked See what I mean. And we're going to sort of transition or hopefully redirect some of that authority to your pet photography page. That's the idea here, okay.

Meredith 19:30

Now it's making sense and the eyes are more clear.

Meredith's husband 19:35

Number five Number five is your CTA, and this is something I think you should probably do like quarterly is just revisit your CTA.

Meredith 19:44

This is something.

Meredith's husband 19:48

Yes, test it out. I can't tell you. You're not going to know beforehand what works best. There's no way you can know what will work best beforehand. So test some things out. Change the text in your cta button for a week or a month and see if it makes any difference. I know this can be a little stressful cause. A little stressful cause, a little anxiety, trying to think oh, what's going to work? Is this right? There's no perfect CTA text.

Meredith 20:10

Right, it's not trying harder, it's trying different.

Meredith's husband 20:15

Yeah, good, I just did this for a client and it stressed me out when I was doing it because I don't know what's going to work. But this is a new client and the first month that we started working she had a conversion rate of 0.96%. So less than 1% of the people visiting her site actually contacted her, contacted her business. The second month, just with working with the CTA and some navigation, making some improvements, we moved it up to a 1.57%.

Meredith 20:47

Wow.

Meredith's husband 20:48

Wow, the next month it was at a 2.75%.

Meredith 20:53

That is improvement, and last month it was 3.76%.

Meredith's husband 20:59

Wow, okay, she quadrupled the amount of business her website is getting in four months without getting any new traffic. Now, those are not typical results.

Meredith 21:10

That's impressive. Okay, it does work. Yeah, I thought that was impressive. Thank you for sharing to all our listeners.

Meredith's husband 21:17

And so next week we're going to talk about how you can hire Meredith's husband.

Meredith 21:26

To drill down. We're going to talk about how you can hire Meredith's husband To drill down.

Meredith's husband 21:27

We're going to drill down. We're going to do some major drilling down.

Meredith 21:30

Wow, for dinner we can hire Meredith's husband for dinner.

Meredith's husband 21:37

You're the only person I make dinner for.

Meredith 21:38

Oh, I feel so special and lucky oh that was a good one. And that's with my left hand.

Meredith's husband 21:46

Oh.

Meredith 21:47

I think I snapped.

Meredith's husband 21:51

Oh, people are going to love this. That's not going to be it, thank you, thank you.