Well, hello there and welcome to this week's episode of the simple SEO content podcast, where I'm going to answer the question. What the heck is blogging. SCO and more importantly, do I need to do it on my blog? Long story. Short, quick answer. Yes, you do. But stay with me through this episode to find out why. Hi, I'm Rachel Lindteigen. Again, president and founder, Etched marketing and etched marketing academy. And your host of the simple SEO content podcast. Today, we're talking all about blog SEO. So let's start at the beginning. What the heck is blog SEO, blog SEO. Basically SEO search engine optimization that you do want to blog rather than your website. Very simple and straightforward. You definitely need to do it. And we're going to talk about that in just a minute. But search engine optimization, the reason that we want to do it on a website or a blog. Is because we want to get more traffic from Google. The best way to get more traffic from Google is to make it easier for Google to understand what our content is about. By doing SEO on our content. So when we do that, we make it easier for Google to understand what our content is about. An intern. Google is more likely to share our content with people who are searching for information that is related to our content, our business, our services, our products. So when we think about the like know and trust factors for your business, No is your SEO, your search engine optimization, whether it's your blog or your website search engine optimization. Drives targeted, relevant traffic, and it helps people to better understand your content. Super important that we do this. Your content. Is how we build our like, and trust factors. Your content should be designed to provide value and nurture your ideal customer. Uh, helping those new visitors who find you through search engine optimization, learn about you, get the answers to the questions that they need, and ultimately become raving fans, paying customers. Whatever it is. All right. So. Why do we do it? Well, like we just talked about, we do search engine optimization because we want to grow our businesses. We want to get more organic traffic. We want to get found by more people via Google. It's that simple without doing SEO. You're not going to get the traffic that you would get. If you did it. Google's not going to show you to as many people because they don't understand what your contents about. So if you want your blog, To get read. And you need to do SEO on your blog. And we're going to talk about how you do that in just a moment. So, you know, you need to do it now. Let's talk about how, how you do it. It's a very simple. Three-step process. You choose a keyword. And you write great content that helps your ideal customer. And you optimize for that keyword. And we're going to talk now about each of those sections. So choosing a keyword when you are doing search engine optimization on a blog or a website, The single most important thing that you need to know. Is that the keyword that you choose. Matters. The keyword that you choose matters more than anything else in your SEO. If you choose the wrong keyword, you will get no traffic from it. And you'll feel like your SEO is not working. How do you know if you're choosing the wrong keyword? Let's talk more about how do we choose the right keyword? So the wrong keyword is likely one that's too competitive for your business to rank for, or your website or your blog. It's one that you can do everything right. You can follow every SEO rule. And you choose the wrong keyword and you're not going to get traffic because your website is not seen as authoritative enough. To be the right answer in Google's eyes. Now. What we also want to think about is what keyword is our ideal customer using, because sometimes they use a term that's different from what we use, and it's going to be really important for you to make sure you're focusing on what key word do they use when they're searching for something related to your business? So I have an example from the corporate world. I'm not going to tell you who the company is, but they're a major outdoor retailer. They're everywhere they're sold online. Aline every S every outdoor store you go to all of that. They sell backpacks. Today. But when I first worked with them in 2012, they sold day packs. And they sold day packs because that was their brain term. They didn't want to sell backpacks, backpacks, Jansport sold backpacks, different brands, sold backpacks. Those were used by kids who went to school. However consumer search for backpacks, not day packs. And so we had to do a bunch of research and we had to show them the data. And back at this time, you could actually get data out of analytics that told you exactly how many visits you got from a certain key word. So we could show them that they had made money from the word backpacks, but they've made no money from the word day packs because their consumers weren't searching the word day packs. Oh, back in the good, good old days of Google before term not provided. When we had keyword level data, it was amazing. I digress. I miss those days. It was awesome. It was, it was awesome. Anyway. We don't have that kind of data from Google anymore. They took it away 10 years ago. But we were able to show them you've made $37,000 from backpacks. You've made $0 from day packs. They very quickly changed the word and use day packs. Now, in your case, you're not going to have that same type data that I had to put that study together for them. However, You have that all the volume you need, all the data you need. You're going to go to a keyword research tool and you're going to search for the keyword that you're thinking about using. And you're going to look and see. How much traffic is there, how competitive is it? You're going to look for the opportunity. That's the keyword with the most search volume and the lowest traffic. And you're going to start using that to see if it is in fact, the right keyword for you for this page or this blog post. Now I want you to go to Google, taking that keyword. Just copy paste, go over to Google. Open an incognito window. This is important because Google gives us personalized search results. So your results in your regular Chrome browser could be impacted by your prior searches. I mean, they're going to be, your website is more likely to show up because you go to your website regularly. So use an incognito window. Go ahead and copy paste that keyword that you're thinking about using and take a look at the result who ranks on page one. Most importantly who ranks in positions one, two and three, because the vast majority of the traffic is going to go to those sites positions one, two, and three. Like 60% of all the visitors are going to go to positions one, two or three, they're going to visit those websites. Now I want you to look and see how similar are those sites to me. Are they really, really similar or are the big brands? Are they. Amazon Zappos, Nike. Um, Zillow realtor at sea. Are they companies like that? Are they companies with hundreds of stores or are they local to you? Are they similar to you? Are they competitors that you're familiar with? If they're really big brands. You need to start over because you're not going to rank for that keyword. And it's nothing that you're doing wrong. My friend, it's just not the right keyword for you. You're not going to rank. And so even if you do everything else, I teach you and you do it all perfectly. You're like, Star student. You're still not going to get results. And this is the single most common mistake that I see people make when they're trying to learn to do SEO on their own is they're choosing the wrong keyword. And that's why they feel like I keep trying it and I'm getting no results. I don't know if it's, well, I don't know that SEO is ever going to work for me. It's because you're going after keywords. You can't rank for. So go back to your keyword research tool. Look at another term. Go back to Google. Look, to see who shows up on the top of page one. Keep doing that until you find a term. We're really looks like you have a good chance of ranking. The competition is very similar to you. Then, once you have that keyword, you're going to use that keyword in your blog post title, because that's what your blog post is going to be about. You're going to write your copy. Anticipate your customer's questions. Answer them. Think about what they need to know, help them provide value. Go in depth. Don't just give them some little, two second blog posts. That's going to tell them nothing. Provide value. Then you're going to go back through and reread your blog post to yourself out loud. Here's where you're going to count. Where have you used your keyword? You've probably used it in your first paragraph. If you haven't go ahead and edit that because Google does like to see it in the first paragraph, it is helpful. I'm not going to tell you how many times do you use your keyword? Because Google doesn't want you to write that way. They don't have a keyword density score. They don't have any of that kind of stuff. They want you to write for your ideal customer. And I want you to write for your ideal customer, provide great value to your customer, and you're going to have better results. So go back through. Read your post, get a feel for how many times you've used your keyword. That's going to help you figure out if you've used it too many times. You know, if you read it and it just, you stumble on your words and it feels awkward. Edit it, take it out, use a different word, use a synonym, Google understands synonyms and all that kind of stuff. Like it's still going to be okay. Go back in and edit it in your head or tags. You should have header tags in between your content blocks anyway. So the way header tags work. Each one, header one is what your page is about. By default, a lot of your systems, WordPress in particular are going to turn your page title into your header tag. Then you're going to want to use. H two tags. As your separators for your core, main points. So if you have three points in your post, those three main points are each going to be an H two tag, and you want to use your keyword in there. Now you're breaking. Your H two tag down, you have a point. And now you want to make sub points to support that point. Those are H three tags. Again, if you can use your keyword in there, that's great. Don't worry about H four, five and six. You're going to have those in your dropdown menu, where you format your title tags. Don't worry about them. Just worry about one, two, and three. Those are going to be the most important. Use your keywords in there. Then you're going to make sure that your keyword is in your URL. You're going to write a title tag and a meta description that use your keyword and follow best practices from an SEO standard. Standpoint. You're going to update your image, file name, following SEO, best practices, all the things that Google is going to look for to understand what that page is about now to make it easier for you. And grab my SEO content. Quick start guide it's at the link in the bio or the link. Um, in the show notes, edge to marketing.com forward slash freebies. You're going to be able to find that guide there, and it has everything you need to know to do this and all the rules associated with the title tags in the meta descriptions and everything, so that you really understand what you're doing. Do yourself a favor while you're there requesting the. The quick start guide, sign up for the five day class or take the free class. You want to learn even more the five day classes coming up soon, and it's going to be amazing. It's a chance to work. One-on-one with me in a small group where you have a chance to learn about search engine optimization and start to implement a little bit of it. And then if you're ready, you can join me in simple SEO content, the full course where you get to do all the work and implement and optimize your website and create your content calendar and your content strategy and do all of this and get it going for your business. All right. If you have any questions about today's episode, DM me on Insta, that is the easiest way to find me. Shoot me a note. Let's have a little chat. I am at etched marketing academy over there. I'd love to talk to you, and I want you to have a great day. Thank you for joining me. And I will see you back here next time.