Hi there and welcome back to the Simple SEO Podcast. I am your host, Rachel Lentigen, and I'm so glad that you are here with me today. Today I want to give you five quick wins. Simple, easy things that you can do to help your website start showing up more often on Google and hopefully start getting more organic, that's the free traffic to your site, which should lead to more leads and more sales. So let's talk about this. What can you do? What can you look at to make a change today? So the first thing I want you to do is to look at your title tags and meta descriptions. If you're not sure where these are or how you change them or what they look like, what you can do is go to Google and just search your business name. Now when your listing shows up in the Google search results, you'll see your title tag and your meta description. The title tag should be the first one. first one by the URL, the meta description should be the second. If you're not sure what these are or what they look like, be sure to quickly get a copy of my Beginner's Guide to SEO. It's got pictures of it in there to make this easier. That's on the website etchedmarketing. com forward slash freebies. That link is in the description. So, you're going to want to look at your title tags and your meta descriptions. The first thing you're going to want to do is to look to see what do they look like in Google. So that's what we just talked about. You'll go check them out in Google. Now I want you to look and see do they use a keyword? Do they have the same keyword in each one? Does your message truncate, meaning does Google put a series of periods, dot, dot, dot, ellipses in there or does Google change the wording altogether? What you're going to want to do is go into your website and you're going to do this on the back end. So if you're in WordPress, you're probably using the Yoast SEO plugin. If you're not yet, that is the one that I recommend. Um, I know there are other options available. But Yoast is the one that I've worked with for years and years, and the free version of it is great. Um, if you're on Squarespace, you're going to do this in the marketing section. If you're on Kajabi or ShowIt, you can also make these changes. Go into whichever area it is that you can change your title, tags and your meta descriptions, and you're going to want to make sure that they follow best practices from an SEO standpoint. So that means you want to be sure. That your title tag is a maximum of 60 characters, including spaces, and that your metadescription is a maximum of 160 characters, also including spaces. You want to look to make sure that your title tag and metadescription use the same space. Same keyword. So you want to make sure you've got that. The next step you're going to want to do is to look at the title tags across your website. Do you have the same title tag or meta description on multiple pages? If so, you're going to want to make some edits. Do you have the same title tag or meta description on I just said that, didn't I? So it'd be the same title tag or meta description on multiple pages. You want to make sure you edit that because you want to have a unique one for each page. Are you using the same keyword in your title text or meta descriptions across multiple pages of your site? If you are, you're going to want to clean that up as well because Google's only going to show you a maximum of two times for any given keyword search. So if you want to have more chances to rank, then you need to have more. more keywords that you're targeting on your website or your blog. Are you using keywords that are super competitive that maybe if you actually search the keyword in Google using an incognito browser window, your site is not even showing up on page one. It might not even be on page two. It's possible you're like on page five, seven, ten. In that case, you're going to want to look for a different keyword because you're not going to rank for that keyword. If you're not sure how to figure all of that out, how to understand it, how to find the right keywords, I highly recommend that you join me in Simple SEO Content because then you can learn exactly how to do this. You can ask me questions, you know, in our student group and you can get a lot of help. So you're going to want to look at that. Look at your title tags and your meta descriptions. Make sure that you're targeting different keywords. Make sure you're targeting keywords that you have a good chance of ranking for. Then I want you to take another look at the content on your website. Like, what pages do you have on your website? What keywords are you targeting? Does it make sense? Do they align with what somebody would be searching for? Like, if I'm targeting a specific keyword on a page, is the information on that page what somebody would expect to see when they land on that page? You just want to make sure that from a Content or a keyword targeting strategy standpoint that you're really thinking about your consumer intent and you're sending people to the right page based on the keyword that you're using to optimize. So if there's anything that's a little confusing, you can clean that up. The other thing you might want to look at is if you have any old content, any old blog posts that you've had, they've been there for years, they still get traffic, they have links built to them, all of that, but it's not been. recently, I would take a look at doing a refresh and an update on that. It doesn't mean you have to change the keyword, but just look to make sure is that old blog post still relevant? Does it still have the right information? I do this once a year on my website and I take a look at everything and I go through analytics and I analyze where, which blog posts are getting the most traffic and I prioritize from that. standpoint, the ones getting the most traffic are the first ones that I work on. And I go through and I reread them and I look to see, is everything current, is there anything that I could add, is there anything I should change, I put a little note at the bottom that it was, you know, updated on such and such a date by Rachel so that a reader knows and so that Google knows, because I have some blog posts that I wrote back in 2017 and 2018 that are still ranking that are still driving great traffic to the website. And so that's one of those things where you want to make sure that you are still providing really good value and that it's relevant. Information you don't want to lose your rankings. You don't want to lose that traffic for a really good blog post So you do want to protect that by doing a refresh and taking a look at it now I do get a question once in a while What happens if when I'm going through this and I'm updating my SEO and I'm taking a look at my old blog posts And I see that I have one and it's driving a lot of traffic, but it's not really relevant to my business anymore So I had this situation and I made the decision to remove Several blog posts, one in particular was driving a ton of traffic, but the traffic was not relevant to the business because there was no product or service that it really could tie to. It ranked in position number one for, um, a non, like a very generic query that I did not truly expect that I would rank for. Um, And it drove a lot of traffic, but the problem was the people who came only read that one blog post because it was a blog post on how to nail your first Facebook Live. I wrote it back in like 2017 or 2018 when Facebook Live was still really new and people were trying to understand it. And I found it amazing that You know, seven years later, it was still driving a lot of traffic, but looking at that page and how it worked, yes, it was driving traffic and it was ranking really high, but it wasn't bringing in people who were interested in learning about SEO, it was bringing in people who were interested in learning about Facebook Live. And they weren't really engaging with other content, even though I had tried over the years. I tried to put an opt in on there that tied to SEO. I tried to link to other blog posts that might help them with their overall organic marketing foundation, all of that. They just were interested in Facebook Live. So if you have a situation like that, you go through and you look and it's like, Oh my gosh, this post gets so much traffic. But I don't have anything I can sell. I don't have anything related to it. It's not really super helpful for my customer today because maybe you've switched niches or you've adjusted over the years. It's okay to remove it. And I want you to hear me say that. It's okay to remove it. What I would look at is to look to see are there a bunch of links to that particular page, that particular blog post. You can do that by using a tool like Open Site Explorer. Just Google Open Site Explorer. And you can take a look at that and see how many links there are. If there are a lot of links that you really want to protect, it may be worth keeping. that particular post or it may be worth doing a redirect on it so that you don't lose that authority. You'd need to do a 301 permanent redirect. Your problem there is you're probably not going to have something that's super similar to it but you want to redirect it to the most similar option that you have on your blog. That's a little more advanced strategy, but if you have a bunch of links to protect on a blog post that you want to kill off, you need to protect those links or leave that blog post on there just because if you take away a blog post that's got a bunch of links, it can actually impact your overall website. domain authority, which can make it a little harder for you to rank for keywords. Now, if you have a situation like this and you'd really like to have me take a look at it with you and help you and guide you, just join me in class. You can find the free class on the website. Go through that. Register then through that link because there is a discount through the, um, the free class that you can get to on the website. And I want you to make sure you're a podcast listener. I want to make sure that you get that discounted enrollment option. There are also some great bonuses there for you. So make sure you listen to that. Register for class and then come in and ask those questions and I will be happy to help you through this because I know sometimes it can be a little stressful trying to decide what to do with an old blog and what do I save and what do I get rid of and all of that and I can help you with that. Alright, so if you are just quick recap some things you can do to start helping your SEO that is going to be the main thing let's focus on will be. Your title tags and your meta descriptions, making sure you have a unique one for every page. So if you have pages where you don't have them, go ahead and write them. If you have used the same keyword on all of them, go ahead and edit them. You want to use a different keyword on each one. If you are targeting keywords but you are not showing up for those keywords when you search in Google with an incognito browser window, you're probably going to want to adjust your keyword targeting because it's probably too competitive and you're probably not going to rank for that. Take a look at your content, see if there's any edits that you need to do, anything that you need to update, any content that's no longer really super relevant to your website. All of those things should start to help you out. update and help you or start to help your SEO program work just a little bit better. All right, if you have any questions, you can DM me on Instagram or join me in SimpleSEO content and then we can talk a whole lot more and get more involved. Like on Instagram, I can't really answer a whole lot of questions. Like I can give you a little bit of advice, but I can't really dig in with you the way that I can when you're one of my students. When you're one of my students, I can dig in with you and help you and review what's going on and really help guide your strategy. And that's where you're going to get the most results. That's going to be the easiest way possible. So if you're ready, join me in class. Otherwise, I will see you back here next week. Bye for now.