And welcome to the Simple SEO Podcast. Today, I want to talk about how easy it can be to learn SEO and to do it once you understand kind of what's involved. So have you ever felt overwhelmed by trying to learn SEO on your own, trying to figure out what it is, trying to just kind of wrap your head around it? It feels like it's really involved and it's, there's a lot and it's really super complicated. If so, I want you to know you're going to be okay. Like take a deep breath. You're here with me. You're going to learn. But what I also want you to understand is there really are only three parts of SEO. And once you understand that and you see how they fit together and what each part of it entails, I think it makes it a lot easier to understand, to learn, to implement, and to do the work on your website. So SEO boils down to three things. Technical, how can Google understand your website? Content or on page optimization. What words are we using and how are we optimizing it for Google to understand the information? And off page SEO or link building. How are we reviewed by other websites? How authoritative does Google think that our website is compared to someone else? All three, technical, on page and off page, play an important role from an SEO standpoint. They all are tied together and they all help us to increase the visibility for our business by working on them. So when I was at the agency, We always started with technical SEO because a website that cannot be crawled, meaning Google can't send Googlebot through and see what's on the pages because of different technical issues, is never going to rank or work well from an SEO perspective. So if we had big technical issues, Then all the work that we did from an SEO perspective was kind of wasted time and effort and money because these clients were paying a lot of money. So we always started with tech, which between you and me, my least favorite part. I don't enjoy tech SEO or I did not truly enjoy tech SEO a decade ago because it was complicated. It was confusing. It did make my brain hurt because I have a degree in journalism. I am not a programmer. I am not a coder. I understand enough HTML to break a website. And I'm not kidding. I can get it back and I can figure out what I did wrong. It's not my strength. It's not my forte. Words are my forte. So, the good news is, tech SEO is not at all like it was back then. It is so easy today compared to how it was 10 years ago. So you, as a small business owner, you don't have anything to worry about. Because the vast majority of what we need to do from a tech standpoint is handled by your website platform. Whether you're on WordPress, Squarespace, Kajabi, ShowIt, GoHighLevel, whoever you're using. In most cases, they're managing this. So from a technical perspective, we want to look at three things. How fast is our website so you can use the Google page speed insight test to check this and you want to look and see how fast is your website on mobile and how fast is your website on desktop you want your website to be speedy on both because Google likes a speedy site the reason Google likes a speedy site is because Google Google knows people are not going to sit around and wait for your website to load for them, especially in today's world where we are used to websites loading quickly. Back in the days of dial up, we were used to waiting for everything. Can you picture that voice in your head right now? We aren't dealing with that anymore. We're on wifi. We've got, you know, gigabyte service. everything is so fast. So if our website still loads like it's 1999, we're not going to get a lot of traffic. So we got to up our game. So go over to the Google PageSpeed Insight, put in your URL, and just kind of check and see Red, yellow, or green? Like how am I doing? You want to be green. You want it to say you're doing good. It's going to tell you if there's anything you need to fix. Most times what it's going to tell you is your image files are an issue. So that's the next thing we usually look at. If you have pictures on your website, which you do, we all do, if you don't you really need to add some. We want to make sure that they are minified or they are minimized. So we want to maintain the integrity of the photo. We want the composition to still show. We don't want it to pixelate. But we want the file size to be smaller. Those pictures on our website should be in KB, not A. MB so kilobytes not megabytes like small pictures. So if you're on WordPress You can use a plug in to do this for you If you have Photoshop you can save for web if you have a photographer who's given you your pictures make sure you're saving for web if you're out you're creating stuff on Canva and you're exporting it and by default Canva always offers you a PNG Switch that over to a JPEG because that's actually going to be a smaller file. The only time you really need a PNG is if you have a picture or an image with a clear background and you want it to be clear. Maybe you've got a cutout of yourself or you've got a cutout of your products or something like that. That's where you need a PNG. You don't need it for your other photos and that allows you to save a little bit of space as well. Um, So you can also use a tool. I use a tool called JPEG Mini. It's a minification tool. It just takes my photo that I have and it reduces the size of it so that I can upload it to the site because those big picture files, they take a long time to download and that's part of what really slows down our site. So that's the first two things you really want to look at. How fast does my site load? Is it my photos? The other thing that could impact your site load Time or your site speed is going to be who's hosting your site. Like, where are you paying for? And do you have a dedicated host? Because if you're on some of the cheaper hosting sites that don't give you your own host, then you may actually be like on a shared server and if they're getting a lot of traffic. it can slow your site down. So it's one of those situations where sometimes it pays to move to a different web hosting company where you have a dedicated server so you're not dealing with somebody else's traffic slowing you down. And I know in the very beginning it can feel like I don't want to spend a lot, I don't want to do that, but that's something that is important if you see that your site speed is an issue. Definitely check to make sure you're on your own server. You're not sharing traffic with someone else. The last thing that we want to look at from a technical SEO perspective is going to be to make sure that our website is what we call responsive. What that means, responsive design, it's been around at least 10, 12 years because I remember working on websites when we were designing mobile sites and desktop sites different and then Responsive started to become a thing. All that responsive means is that your website looks good. No matter what image, what device someone's on. So if they're on a phone, they're on a desktop, they're on a tablet, your website looks good and it makes sense and they can read it. We've It all at some point dealt with a terrible website on a mobile device where the website was not responsive. The website was only designed for a laptop and, or a desktop. And because of that, it was so hard to use. It was wonky. All of that. Google doesn't want those websites to be indexed high. They don't really want to send people to them. So you really want to make sure that yours looks good. Now the good news is. Most all of our website platforms and our templates that we use today are responsive by default. So you just want to make sure, take a look at it and see what does my website look like on each of these platforms. The other thing you can do, this is not necessarily tech SEO, it's just a good thing from a marketing standpoint. is to go in and look at your site and see if somebody is on that phone, they're on that tablet, they're on that desktop, what do they see without scrolling? Do they understand what your business does? Is your core promise, like for me, mine says, um, I help you get found on Google and get free traffic. Take the free class. Something to that effect. Right up at the top of the page. Because on a phone, that's about all they're going to see. And so you want to make sure that whatever you do, your statement, how you help someone, you want to make sure they can see that without scrolling when they first land on your website, whether they're on a phone, a tablet, or a desktop. That's really just a bonus marketing lesson for you. So the other thing, the tool that we can use here for For our technical SEO is Google search console. So if you do not yet have a Google search console account set up for your website, you will want to do that. Just literally go to Google and Google search console, and it'll walk you through how you set it up, claim your account, verify your domain, all of that. There's a lot of information in there. You don't have to look at everything. What I would have you start with is the indexation report just so that you understand if there is an indexation issue on your website. Meaning, are there pages that Google knows exist but they've chosen not to index? Or are there reasons that they can't index your content? Because that would be something that you want to make sure you look into. We want to make sure that they can index, read, and understand our content on our website. So that's really all you need to know about technical SEO. That's your very first part. The second stage, the second part of SEO is on page. And that's what we talk about a lot more here on this particular podcast. That's going to be the keywords that you choose, the content that you create, creating your SEO elements, your optimization, your title tags, your meta descriptions, how you Um, how you name your image files, your alt text, your header text, all of that. That's all going to come into play when we talk about on page SEO. It's literally the words on your website or blog and how we say things, what we write about, and then how we optimize it for Google so that what we're writing for our ideal customers is understood by Google. and shared with them. So on page SEO is really the core visibility for our website. So if you need help on what you do there, make sure you get the beginner's guide to SEO. It's going to walk you through what all of those parts are, how to format it, it's got the checklist, all of it. That's your guide to section two, which is on page SEO. That's my favorite. Probably not a surprise to you because I have a degree in journalism. I love to write. I love content strategy and figuring all of that out. That's the area I've always focused on in my career because it's the most fun. The third part of SEO is our link building or our off page SEO. Now this is one where you have to be very careful and you have to make sure you're playing by Google's rules. We don't want to cheat. We don't want to buy links. We don't want to listen to anybody who sends us an email saying. I can get you these links for this amount of money. I can get you this DA, none of that, because those are cheater tactics. They don't work. You don't want to get in trouble with Google. With link building, we have to really think about what links can we earn, what links would make sense for our business. Think about your website and the links that you build to it. Think about them like a neighborhood. They need to make sense, they need to be related, they need to tie together. Um, you don't want to have a website that's got spammy links built to it because that's going to potentially hurt you. You really need to be careful. You need to protect your domain. And you need to protect your authority within Google. Now how you can check this? this out, you can use a tool called MozBar. That is going to help you understand the domain authority of your website. Now domain authority come from Google. It comes from Moz, which is an SEO tool set that the professionals use. Domain authority is a score of 1 to 100. one being low, 100 being high. Every website has a domain authority. If you have a new site, a new business, you've not been around long, your domain authority is very likely under 10. If you've been around a few years, you've built some links, you've got some good content, people are referencing you, you've done some digital PR, you've had some podcast interviews, people are linking back, things like that, then you're probably in that 10 to 20 range. As you get further. Um, further into your entrepreneurial journey, you've done a lot more digital PR, you've earned a lot more links, then you're going to be in that 20 to 30 range. The big brands are going to be probably 40 and up. So as entrepreneurs, most of us probably are not going to go far beyond 30. I'm in the low 20s. I move over the years, I've fluctuated up and down. At one point I was in the low 30s and then it took a dive and now it's building back up. And domain authority does change sometimes. It's very dependent upon the number of links that you have to your site, the type of links, etc. You can't control it, but you can impact it by focusing on your partnerships and different ways to earn links to your website. Digital PR really is a big part of that. Doing guest blogging, um, or being quoted in articles, doing podcast interviews, etc. That really goes hand in hand with building our domain authority. You can use another Moz tool called Open Site Explorer. Just Google these, um, and that will show you like what links your website has. You can also use that to see what links your competitors websites have because sometimes somebody's is linking to them that could be linking to you. And so those are some things that you can look at. Now I teach you how to do all of this. the technical cleanup just to make sure we're good, all of the on page choosing the keywords, create what type of content to create, finding the content opportunities, batching the content to make it easier, optimizing it, and then building the links so that you can boost your authority with Google. You can increase your domain authority. The higher your domain authority, Generally, we see the better chance for you to rank for any given keyword. So we really do see a strong correlation even though domain authority is not a score that Google gives us. We do see a really strong correlation in most cases between domain authority and ranking ability. So I teach you about all of this in Simple SEO content. I really do hope that you will join me in that class. If you have questions, be sure you can DM me on Instagram. You can reply back to the email that you get each week. I'm happy to answer questions. I'd love to have you join me in there. I am going to be teaching a free class at the end of this month. I'm very excited. I've not released the official registration forms or anything like that yet. If you're on my email list, you will be the first to know. So be sure you're on the email list. And if you want to be on that, all you have to do is go request one of the freebies on my website, etchedmarketing. com forward slash freebies. You can take the SEO 101 class, or you can sign up for the beginner's guides. I have the beginner's guide to SEO, a beginner's guide to podcast SEO, and a beginner's guide to email list building. All three of those are available for you. They're there to help you sign up for one of those. You will then be on my email list and I'll make sure that you know about the free class where we're really going to look at what are some of the most common mistakes that people make when it comes to SEO so that you can understand what you need to do differently to get results. The really good news about SEO is you can turn things around. You can correct the mistakes or you can start doing SEO now if you've never done it before. for and you can start to see results. I have students who've had like 70 and 80 percent increases in traffic within the first year and that's like they went from and one that went from around 100 visits a month to like 800 visits a month. in less than a year. So you really can see a huge increase in your traffic if you understand what you're doing. And the easiest way to do this by far, my friend, is just to let me show you how to do it. So if you're ready, make sure you take SEO 101. That class, sign up for it because that class is your access into Simple SEO content at a discounted price. If you sign up for Simple SEO content directly through the link on the website, it is more expensive. I do want you, because you're here, you listen to the podcast, you're an insider. I want you to be able to get that inside deal. So make sure you sign up for the class. That'll give you access to the discount. You can watch the class, you can register there, it'll have the link, or you can just register as soon as you get the first email that says, here's your link, here's your discount code. All right. Thank you so much for being here today. I will see you back here next week. Bye for now.