Hi, and welcome back to the simple marketing and SEO podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Lindteigen. And just for a second, I've got to say it. Happy summer. I can't believe it's summer Memorial day was this week. I hope you had a great long holiday weekend. My kiddo got out of school on Thursday. So we're officially on summer break at the Lindteigen house. May was insane. It was so fun, but it was absolutely insane. My kiddo turned nine. My hubby had a birthday. The following week, my stepdaughter graduated from ASU. She's now a college grad. She's got her bachelor's degree. The little guy was in his musical and oh yeah. I traveled for a work conference last week. I was out of town. The last week of school. I got home the afternoon that school got out. It's been crazy, the little guy and I are taking the next two weeks off, we're going to relax and recover and recoup. And enjoy, and then he's going to start some summer camps and we're just going to have a really nice summer camp summer schedule with a couple of weeks of camp, a couple of weeks off, a couple of weeks of camp, a couple of weeks off. It's kind of hopefully fingers crossed. Best case scenario. Where I can focus on work and he can have some time to relax and also have some time, some fun time with friends. So let's jump right in. I just cannot believe it feels like everything has flown so fast. Here we are. So we're also. Just about at the beginning of Q3. But wait, you know, we're not, I can't even count. We're. We're still heading into the final month of Q2. We will start Q3 on July one. I swear. I know these things. Okay. Anyway. If you've been working on your SEO for a while, you've been trying to learn how to do it. Maybe you're one of my students you're in simple SEO content. If you're one of my students. If you have questions on this, like ask him the student group or go back to module five in the new updated version of the course, because module five is your ranking, your analytics, your reporting. It's got all the walkthroughs of how to do all of this. And you've got your templates there to work from. If you're not yet a student, well sign up and it'll be easier. But for now, Let's go through this and talk about it. So, how do you know if your SEO is working? How do you check your rankings? I got this question from a listener recently. It was like, well, this is a really good question. So let's talk about it. So. It can seem like you would want to just go into Google. And type in the keyword and see where your website shows up. But that's not what you want to do because Google has what they call personalized search results, which means you're going to see your website in a different position than someone who does not come to your website on a regular basis. It's likely going to show up higher for you than it would for me searching for it. So you can do. You can use an incognito browser window. So go to Chrome, go to those three dots on the far right. Um, and open an incognito browser window and then search the keyword and look for it. It's not the most efficient, nor is it the best way to do it, but. If you truly don't have the budget yet to work with an SEO reporting tool, it's probably the best that you can do. And so you will want to do it that way. If you have the budget to have an SEO, keyword research tool, reporting tool, et cetera. That's going to be the best way to do it and what I want you to do. When you're creating new content, you're creating a new blog post. You're putting it out there. Um, or you're updating a page. You're changing your optimization. I want you to take what we call a baseline report, and I want you to look at it. So if you're using a keyword ranking tool, go ahead and add that keyword to your ranking that day, because then we can see where you're at. Usually it'll update 24 hours or so it'll tell us what the keyword rank is. That's your baseline. That's where you started before you optimized for that particular keyword. That's where you ranked, maybe it's 10, maybe it's 82. Maybe it doesn't rank at all. But that gives you your baseline. Then I want you to look at it in your ranking reporting system. Once a month and I want you to see, generally I do all of my reporting at the beginning of the month for the prior month. So like right now, we're almost to June we're in the last week of may. Next week, I will do my reporting. Or not. I may do it the week of the 10th when the kid is in camp rather than next week when we're at home and off. But at. At any rate, I will do my reporting. Early in the month, looking back at last month. And what I want to look at is how is my keyword ranking? Has it gone up? Meaning has the number associated with my keyword gotten smaller because remember with SEO, with keywords, The smaller, the number the better. That means you're ranking higher on Google search traffic, Google search results. The other thing that I want to do is go over and go into my Google analytics account. Remember, you need to be using GA for now not universal analytics. If you have not transitioned to GA four, you need to do that because your old UA account is no longer tracking any thing. And you need to get set up in GA for so that you have data. But go over to Google. And what you can look at is to see whichever page is ranking for that keyword. So in your reporting system, it's going to show you a keyword. It's going to show you a reporting like a number, and then it's going to show you a page associated with that. What I want you to do is go over to Google analytics for, and take a look and see how much traffic is coming to that page. And I want you to take a look at your website, traffic overall in your organic traffic overall, because when you're doing SEO, You should start to see an increase in the organic traffic or the SEO traffic coming to your website and to those pages that are now ranking higher in the search results. So that's really all you've got to do. Easiest way to do this. My friend is just use an SEO keyword reporting tool. If you've signed up for something like Uber suggest, you've got your keyword research, you've got your link building data. You also will have a rank tracking option and you can put your keywords right there into rank tracking. Check it once a month. You do not need to check this every single day. You'll just drive yourself nuts. There can be some volatility in keyword ranking. You'll see things move up and move down. And, um, especially when the new algorithm updates come out, sometimes you'll go up. You'll go down. Don't drive yourself nuts. If you, if you look at it too often, it's going to be bad. Ideally look at it once a month. Don't make any big panic moves. If you notice it's gone down a few don't panic and move and change your optimization that day, like. Check it again in two weeks, has it leveled out? Did it come back up? What's going on also look and see. I have one client in particular where. There's a lot of volatility in a couple keywords that we go after. But it's also. The volatility is like, are they position one or position two? And they kind of, flip-flop pretty regularly with one of their core competitors. So we just kind of look at that and see, oh, okay, well they're ranking in position. Number one right now we're in number two next month. We'll probably be back there. Isn't really anything to change in that particular scenario, they just kind of seem to flip flop. But if somebody brand new is coming into, you know, position number one, and they came out of nowhere, then we want to look at that and kind of figure out. Where did they come from? Are they doing SEO? Is it good if you don't know how to figure all of that out, make sure you take simple SEO content with me because you're going to learn how to assess the SEO on your website. And my friend, you can use that to assess the SEO on somebody else's website. To determine, like once you have a good understanding of how SEO works, you can look at any website out there and get an understanding of what they're targeting and how they're doing it, and you know how good they are at SEO. And you can use that to help you determine, is there a concern or not? For you from this new competitor, who's come into your sphere. So what I want you to do for now? If you've not yet taken the SEO 1 0 1 class. Go ahead and take that. You can find that on the homepage etched marketing.com take SEO 1 0 1. Join me in simple SEO content. We are continuing to meet over the course of the summer. Yes, I am off some weeks, but we're still meeting. So it will be the first and third Tuesdays of each month, we will be meeting to go over our SEO content and I will be answering your questions there in the student group. So if you're not in there yet, What are you waiting for? Come on, come join me in class. Let me help you with this. You don't have to do this alone. The podcast is a great starting point, but the class is way better. Cause I can go further in detail and I can answer your very specific. Questions about your websites. All right. That is it. For this week. I will see you back here next week. Have a great day. Bye for now.