Hey there. Welcome back to the simple SEO content podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Lynde Teigen. And I'm so glad to have you here. Today, we're talking about one of the most common SEO issues, why it happens and more importantly, how to fix it. So if you've ever found yourself wondering why in the world. That page is ranking for that keyword, because it is not the one that you want to rank for it. Stay tuned because I'm going to explain to you why it happens and how to fix it in this week's episode. So let's talk about. Why SEO matters. I'm going to bet, you know, Search engine optimization. Short for SEO. Is the best way to get free organic traffic free organic meat equals free free traffic to your website or blog. As a small business owner, this is critical because without doing SEO on your website, Nobody's going to find it. Google's not going to trust you. They're not going to show it to people. They're just, you might as well not exist. If you have a website without search engine optimization done on it properly. You might as well not have a website because nobody's going to find it. So we want to make sure that people are finding you. So you're doing SEO. You're trying to figure out how to do it. You're doing things like listening to my podcast or attending my free classes, or maybe you've signed up for simple SEO content. So now you're really cooking. You know how it works, you're learning it all. So we really want to be able to control what the user experiences we want to be able to have the right page show up for the right key word. And when we're doing our SEO. We're very strategic. We choose a page. We choose a keyword for it. We do all of the things that we need to do to help Google understand what that page is about. Unfortunately. Sometimes Google will decide. Another page is actually about that key word and it will rank the other page instead of the one you want to have rank. Now, how do you even identify if this has happened? This is where it really helps to use an SEO keyword reporting tool so that you can look, you can keep track of the keywords that you're working on. You can see how they rank within the Google search results. You can. See which pages ranking, it really helps you to keep track of everything that's going on. The tools that will give you the rankings and the reports and things like that are paid, but they're really helpful to have, if you're putting a focus on your SEO program for your website and you should be. So it's a good thing to have a reporting tool. So sometimes Google shows a different URL than the one that you want. Maybe. It's a query that would be really well-served by this blog post that you've written. It's all about this particular keyword. But they're showing your homepage or worse, they're showing your websites about page or. You've got a key word that should lead to conversion and you have a product page on your website. That you want to rank, but what their ranking is like some obscure blog post that isn't going to really help you convert because when we're doing SEO and we're being strategic with it, we really want to think about the consumer's intent. And what they're looking for when they're searching with a specific word and we want to make sure that we're mapping it out strategically so that the word they're searching for is giving them the results that meet them, where they are right now. So we don't want somebody who's searching with a conversion word who's like ready to buy. We don't want them to land on a blog post because a blog post is not going to help them by. This second. If we sell the product on our website. So we want them to land on the page that aligns with the product so they can go ahead and buy it right now. Right. So sometimes these things happen. As you go through, you take a look at it. You see that this is happening. So just knowing it's happening. Is a start. The problem is you need to correct it because if you don't and people are ending up. On the wrong page on a regular basis. Your going to potentially lose out on sales. You're going to have a higher bounce rate, meaning people come to your site and leave and go to another. Site they're going to buy from your competitor. I'm. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is. If they can't easily find what they need on your website. They're not going to dig. People are inherently kind of lazy, especially when we're searching. We want instant gratification. We want to know. That, what we're looking for is there. So if you've got the wrong page ranking, it may be that you have a title tag or a meta description that is not engaging to them. They're not clicking, they're not coming through to the site because it's not the information they're looking for or. They may click, but they made bounce, bounce, meaning come to one page and leave quickly because it's not the information that they need. So, and it does happen. So it's important to watch, to make sure that you have control over where you want people to go and the way that you have control. And I'm using some air quotes here because we don't control anything. Google controls it. But the way we have a better chance of having control over the user experience is by doing SEO. So if you're in a situation like this in the wrong pages, ranking, how the heck do you fix it? You're going to need to work on two pages to fix it. You're going to need to optimize the page you want to rank. Meaning check your keyword research. Identify the keyword, make sure you know, this is the keyword you want to use. Then you're going to need to make sure your URL has it, if possible, if you need to change your URL, let's not worry about that right now, because that can cause additional issues with redirects and things like that. So, Don't worry about changing your, your URL. If this is already an existing post or an existing page. But if your URL has the keyword in it, That's a big gold star. Then you're going to want to update your title tags and your meta description. So your title tag is reminder. That's the first thing somebody's going to see in the search results above your URL. It's the first thing that's going to hopefully entice them to click through and come to your website. Your title tag needs to be approximately 60 characters. Um, 56, they say is ideal. I don't know why. I just know that I was taught 56 is the ideal number. So Google. It's only going to show up to 56 to 60 characters before it's going to truncate. So if you want control of the messaging, You need to have a maximum of 60 characters in your title tag that's what's going to show up above the URL. That's the very first thing your ideal customer is going to see that is going to entice them to potentially click and come through to your website. Then you have your meta-description, your meta-description shows up under the URL in the search results. So again, these are both things that your ideal customer is going to read to potentially. Come to your website. They're not going to see them once they click through to your website. This is in the code on the backend and it shows up in Google. You want to use your keyword in the meta-description your meta-description. You have a maximum of 160 characters that includes spaces. So make sure you're doing a real quick check, like in Google sheets or word or whatever program you're using to check your character count and make sure that you're under 160 characters, including spaces. Because again, Google will truncate your message if you go longer than that. So make sure you've got that you're in that in the best practices zone. If you want this to be easier for you. I grab my SEO content quick start guide. It is on the freebies page on the website@showmarketing.com forward slash freebies. Or make it super easy. DME, the word. SCO. On Insta. And the little chatbot there we'll help you and get you signed up and get it sent over to you. It's awesome. I can't believe I got it to work, but it's awesome. So the little chat bot will take care of you and get you the SEO content quick-start guide as well. So 60 characters in your title tag 160 characters in your meta-description. Those need to have whatever keyword you want this page to rank for. Then you also need to make sure you're using the keyword in the copy on this page so that it makes sense. It naturally sounds like that's what this page is about. Then you're going to want to use the keyword in your image file name. So whatever image you're putting on this page or images, go ahead and use your keyword in the image file name and use dashes. The ones that look like little minus signs. Those Google is going to read as a space and understand. Go ahead and put your keyword in your image text. That's going to be another good thing to use and to have it in there. And put it in your header tags. So those are the big font that separates out the sections on your page. Most website builders use an H one tag by default. They use your page name as your H one tag or your blog post name. This is great. As long as your keyword is in there. So generally, whatever your page is about your keyword is going to be in that title. You should be fine. If you have like a blog post in it's 3.3 steps, three, whatever. Your steps, one, two, and three. Those are gonna be H two tags because those are the sections of your page. And then if you're breaking step one, two or three down further. That's where you're going to use an H three tag. To support your subsections. So that's really what you need to do is just follow the process to optimize the page you want to rank for that keyword. Then you're not done yet. You need to de op. Optimize the page that is currently ranking. Because the page that is currently ranking, very likely uses the key word in some of these same elements. And in order to get it to not be the one that Google shows you need to change the optimization. So I want you to take a look at the page that is ranking. And determine what other key word you could use for this page. So I want you to choose a new keyword and then I want you to go through the same process. And remove the keyword that you're now going after the new page for. And I want you to edit this current page. Now, if you need to edit the URL, if it's in the URL, don't worry about doing that because the redirects and all of that can be difficult and can pose issues for SEO. So let's not worry about that today. But let's go ahead and make changes to the title tag. The meta-description the copy. The image file name, any of those elements, give them a new keyword, write new ones that follow best practices. And by optimizing one and D optimizing the other, you should in time be able to fix your ranking issue and get the right page to rank. And when the right page ranks. You should have better results because your ideal customer now is finding information that's relevant to their query. They're more likely to engage, to buy, to sign up whatever it is that you're hoping that that conversion is on that page. All right. If you have any questions about how you fix your issues. If the wrong page is ranking for a keyword, DM me on Instagram at etched marketing academy. Um, or leave a comment in the notes on YouTube for the video. And I will. Or respond back and we can chat about it. Thanks for being here. I'll see you next week.