Hi, and welcome back to the Simple SEO Podcast. I'm so glad that you're here with me today. I want to answer a question that I get all the time, and I'll bet you have wondered this, thought it, wanted to ask it yourself at some point, too. And that is, Can I really do SEO on my own? Like, can I really learn this and understand it and get it to work? Because it seems hard or time consuming or really super techy and I'm just not sure. So I want to assure you, first and foremost, yes you can. If you have someone to guide you and show you how to do it and explain it and answer your questions as they come up. If you're determined to Google and YouTube your way through it, you may truly find it to be frustrating and stressful. And you may truly struggle to, Get it to work for you. And I don't say that because I teach an SEO class. I say that because I've been in SEO for 15 years, and I know there is a ton of misinformation out there. There is so much bad information. And it's really hard to know what's good and what's bad. And I know there's a lot of it because I have my students ask me all the time, Hey, I heard X in a group. Hey, my business coach told me why I heard this. And nine times out of 10, what they're being told by the other people in their lives is incorrect. And many times what they're being told actually is going to hurt their chances to rank. And they're left wondering, well, what am I supposed to do? So that's when they come and they ask me and they say, Rachel, what am I supposed to do? I don't want to make a mistake. I've worked so hard on my SEO. My website is doing well. It's ranking. I'm getting traffic. But now my business coach is saying this, and I just want to, I try so hard not to say. And how much experience does your business coach have in SEO? Like, there are a lot of things I could give you advice on that I probably don't truly have enough experience with. And unfortunately, SEO is one of those things. Like, there are a lot of people out there who really don't have a lot of experience with it who are telling you how to do it and what to do. And so much of it is wrong. Like, okay, my friend, I'm going to go on a Slight little tangent real quick. Keyword density. Have you heard people tell you there is a perfect keyword density? You need to have a keyword density score. You need to have 2 percent keyword density, 3%, 5%, whatever. Most people who are teaching SEO are saying you need to have a specific keyword density score. However, that's just for her. Google has outright said, no, you don't. We don't have a perfect keyword density score. We don't want you to write for a specific keyword density. We want you to write for your ideal customer and you will naturally use your keyword in what you're writing and what you're doing because the content that you're creating is about the keyword. And that came straight from Danny Sullivan, who is the head of Search at Google, who was previously my editor at Search Engine Land. Danny's been in SEO forever. Prior to Danny, Matt Cutts was our Google go to. Basically, if Matt Cutts So if you're reading an article and you see something and it says it's from Danny Sullivan or he's been quoted, there's probably a really good chance you can count on whatever Danny said. If you see something and it's from Matt Cutts, Matt hasn't been with Google in gosh, probably seven or eight years, maybe longer than that. So you might want to double check that it's current, but. in the past, anything Matt said was good too. Anyway, there's my little tangent about keyword density scores because I'm tired of hearing about it. I got an email in my inbox this morning about this new tool that can help you verify your keyword density and I'm like, oh my gosh, you don't understand the rules as far as Google is concerned. This is part of why learning SEO on your own is So hard because you don't know, you're just learning. You don't know what you should or should not be doing. You don't know who to trust or who to listen to you. And so it's hard and it's frustrating. That's why I always say. The best thing, if it's in the budget, if you can make it work, is join me in simple SEO content. I cut through all the extra, all the fluff, all the junk that you really don't need, and I just teach you what you need to know to be able to succeed and be able to drive results. And driving results, in my mind, is we're getting traffic to your website, we're showing up higher on Google, And those people who are coming to your website are the right people because they're getting on your email list, they're buying your products, they're booking your services, all of that. We don't want to send a bunch of traffic to our website that is irrelevant to our business. That does us no good. I actually had that situation and It kind of killed me because I took off a blog post about almost a year ago. It was a great post, and it ranked so high. It ranked in position number one on Google. It got a lot of traffic every single month. But my business had evolved and changed over the 7 or 8 years since I wrote that post. And it was no longer relevant. The people who came and found me from that post, we're not going to engage with my current business because it was a post on how to nail your first Facebook Live. Well, I don't teach anything about doing Facebook Live anymore. I don't have resources for them. I used to have a Facebook Live guide to help you, like, feel comfortable and be ready and what you should do and what you should talk about. So I had a lot of people coming to my website from that particular post because they were finding it on Google. But it was no longer applicable to my business. And so I made a really hard decision and I removed the post from my blog. And so I lost a lot of traffic because of that, because that post ranked number one, it got a lot of traffic, but the traffic that I got. After I removed that was better traffic. They were more likely to engage. They were more likely to sign up for an email opt in. They were more likely to get something because it was more relevant to them. That Facebook live guide, that audience wasn't going to convert for SEO, content marketing, podcasting. Maybe they would go for podcasting, but I don't know. So that's what I want you to think about. What do you have? Who are you bringing to your website? What are we trying to do with the website when you're doing it on your own? You want to be very strategic. And that's part of what we talk about in Simple SEO content is being very strategic in our approach. I had another student who joined me. She had a pretty good understanding of SEO before she joined the course. She's been in about a year. She was getting some traffic. She originally asked me because it felt like her traffic was down and something was going wrong. And so we looked at it and it's like, well, you're ranking for these things, but do these apply to your business? And she said, no, not really. I'm like, okay, then why are we targeting these keywords? We need to switch it around and we need to target keywords that are gonna bring the right people to your business. So she worked on that and she said she found like at first, she, it kind of felt like she was throwing spaghetti against the wall, trying to figure out what she could rank for, where she could get traffic. But now after taking the course and being there and asking questions, and she's a star student, like she does everything she's supposed to do, she's found that she's able to be incredibly strategic and she knows before she starts writing her posts that she has a really good chance of ranking for this one. because of the fact she understands how keyword rankings happen, how Google determines who's going to rank. So she can look at it and she can pick a keyword and say, okay, I have a really good chance of ranking for this keyword, which is amazing. And that's one of the benefits of taking a class and learning how to do this. I've had blog posts that I've written that have ranked on page one of Google within like a week. If you know what you're doing and you're able to create content and Google understands your site and they know you and they trust you, you can rank really fast and you can start getting traffic quickly to your new content. But if you've got mistakes on your site and you don't even know it, You're going to struggle. And that's where I end up with people saying, I tried SEO before and it didn't work or even worse, I don't know if it worked because I don't understand the numbers in analytics. Have you ever thought that? Like, I don't even understand what the numbers mean in analytics. I log in there and I, all I see is a whole bunch of numbers and it's kind of overwhelming. And so I just close it out and go, hope it's good. I teach you what those numbers mean, and more importantly, which ones matter and which ones don't, so that you can look at it and be strategic. Hey, this type, this type blog post works really well for my audience. This type over here does not. Oh, look, this one is ranking really well and is driving a ton of traffic, Rachel's Facebook live guide. And it's the wrong traffic. I don't even offer something like that anymore. This is not gonna help me. So that's why I think it's really important to learn SEO from somebody like me, hopefully me, who has been in the business for a long time, who's seen everything. I have seen everything. I have tried to, I have worked on clients in every niche, every niche, I'm pretty sure, over the years. SEO will work for you. There's no niche that's too competitive. There's no niche that you can't do this in. I am in probably, realistically, the single most competitive niche from an SEO standpoint. I am targeting SEO. There is no harder niche than the one I'm in and yet I can find opportunities to rank on page one. I will probably never rank for what is SEO or how do you do SEO because the SEO tools create a ton of content. All the tool companies have been blogging for years and they have tons of content and they're machines, they're content powerhouses and they rank and that's okay. Because you know what? The person searching what is SEO probably isn't the one that is going to come in and take a class with me. The person who's searching SEO for solopreneurs or what are the numbers mean in Google Analytics? Or is my SEO working? That's more my person and those are more the type Queries that I go after. And that's what I want you to understand. Like when you take a class and you learn and you understand, you can be very strategic and you can have your content where people are looking. The other thing that I'm seeing is we have a lot of changes. I'm going to talk about this in the next couple of podcast episodes. We have a lot of changes with AI, and I'm getting a lot of questions about AI and AI search at the core of it. is having your website properly optimized. Following SEO best practices will help you have a better chance of being one of the websites that shows up in chat GPT or perplexity or the AI overviews and you can get traffic to your website from all of those places. We're really talking about brand visibility among different search engines in different areas. I have an entire bonus that I added just recently. On how to optimize and format your content for AI search engines and chatbots and all of that because this is brand new, it's evolving, and I wanted to be able to teach you how to do that as well. So what I want you to remember, you can do this on your own. You can learn, but the best way to do it is to take a class. Let me help you. Let me guide you through this. If you're ready to get started, what I want you to do is get the free, um, Beginner's Guide to SEO. It kind of walks you through, step by step, what it is, how it works. It'll get you started. And then take the SEO 101 class. That's going to help you kind of understand how, a little more about it. And then also how you get started. And you can make the choice, you know, do you want to hire someone or do you want to do it yourself? And I know. I know, I know, I know. Most people don't want to put the time into it. They say, I'm too busy. I'm already working on another class. I've already got something else going on. I need to focus on this. I just want to pay someone to do it. And I get it. Because there are times where I just want to pay someone to do it too. I don't want to be the one to create the social media graphic. Or I don't want to be the one to create, you know, whatever it is. And I'd rather just pay someone. But the bottom line is when you're hiring someone to do SEO, a good SEO strategist is expensive. A crummy SEO strategist is quite cheap. You don't want a crummy one. In SEO you really truly do get what you pay for. I do work one on one with people but it's like 5, 000 for me to optimize your website for you versus 1, 000 for me to teach you how to do it and answer your questions as you're working on it. So it's one of those things where You have to really decide, am I spending time or money? Because you're going to have to spend one of them to do this. But in exchange, you're going to show up higher on Google, you're going to get traffic to your website, you're going to build your email list, you're going to start building that passive income funnel that you want, you're going to get leads and clients and all of that through your website. If we can get it shown to more people, so it's really a good investment and it pays off quickly. If you hire a good SEO, it can take 12 to 24 months to really take hold and to start to see a lot of results. And they're probably anywhere from one to 2, 000 a month at minimum to have a consultant do the work for you. So you're looking at an investment of anywhere from 10 to 24, 000 before you start to see results. That's why I say the best thing you can do with your money as a small business owner is to learn how to do SEO. Just take the class. It will make it the fastest, easiest way possible within a budget amount that works for most of us as small business owners. I don't know about you. I don't have 25, 000 to spend on a consultant. I'm not comfortable spending that on a consultant right now when it's something I could learn how to do and have somebody guide me through it and answer my questions. Like That's a better use of my money and my time. The other thing that I see with people who hire out SEO is a lot of the ones, especially remember you get what you pay for. A lot of the ones who are targeting small business owners are not good. I said it. They're not. They're targeting you. They're giving you scare tactics. They're telling you that you have to use them. They're telling you, you know, junk like you're not listed in. audio search. You're not in voice search and you need to do this. You don't need to do anything special for voice search. It's all part of the same thing from SEO. You don't need to pay somebody to list you for that. I had a student reach out and ask me about that the other day. Is this real or am I getting scammed? You don't need to pay to have somebody do your Google My Business listing or Google Google Business Places now. It used to be Google My Business. You don't have to pay someone to insert, verify, and manage that. I've seen people give quotes that are like over a thousand dollars a month to manage Google Business Places listings to have you in the Google Maps directory. Do you know that you can verify that and manage it yourself in a matter of about 10 minutes for free? Like, you don't need to be up to that all the time anyway. Why would you pay somebody a thousand dollars a month? Because small business owners don't always know that what they're being sold on is not legitimate. It's not real. They're not getting really truly what they're paying for. So I try really hard to teach you because I want to protect you. I teach you what to ask, what to look for, what matters. When you have enough understanding of how to do SEO yourself, as your business starts to grow, then you can outsource it because then you are protected. You know how it works. You know what questions to ask to make sure you're getting what you pay for. I have a client that I've worked with for years. When they first came to me, Their website, they had a consultant, they were paying, they had been paying for two years, their consultant had never given them a report, had never reported on how things were going, what traffic were they getting, what was increasing, what was decreasing, what were their keyword rankings, etc. Anytime they asked about the report, the consultant said they were building them a dashboard so they'd be able to see it all themselves. Two years, no dashboard, not one single report. Do you know what was going on in that two years? That consultant was cashing the check, but I don't think they were doing any work. Because when I took over, it took me a long time to get access to Google Analytics. But once I finally did, they had a lot of excuses as to why they couldn't. And I finally said, you and I both know that this is not true. You need to give access to this. This is their account. You need to give it back to them. Funny enough, we got it back. Once I was able to go in, I was able to see that the entire time they had worked with this consultant, two years, two full years, their website traffic had gone down every single month. And then when I got in there and I started working on the website, it was because it was wrong. Their SEO was wrong. They had not followed best practices. They had not chosen the right keywords. They had not created content. They'd written one blog post. I truly to this day don't know what the person they were paying was doing. Now, you better believe that client understands exactly what questions to ask. And I told him, if in the future, you and I don't work together, I still want you to be protected. I don't want anything like that to ever happen to you again. So that's what I teach. That's why I teach and I help small business owners. I could have started an agency and gone after large clients. I had contacts at all sorts of big companies when I left, but I wanted to work with you. I wanted to be the one to help you and to teach you how to do these things in a way that will help your business grow. Rather than going and working with somebody who just has a huge budget, I didn't want to take an advantage of anymore. It drove me nuts when I would get calls from friends and family who were small business owners who were being scammed. They were getting these calls and told they needed to do these things and they were completely wrong. So just a little bit of my backstory. That's why I'm here and why I do this. So yes. You can 100 percent do SEO on your own. I just would like you to let me teach you how to do it. Let me protect you. Let me show you how to do it. Once you get a good basic understanding, you start to build your business out a bit. Then if you want to hand it off to somebody, you absolutely can. It's kind of nice to be able to hand stuff off when you're ready. I cannot, you know, I will not. Uh, lie about that. It's really nice to hand it off and know that it's done and it's done the right way. But let's get you to a point that you know it's done and it's done the right way. Let's get your site showing up more often on Google. Let's get you showing up in the AI Overviews and in ChatGPT and Perplexity and all the different places that we're going to be talking about. Mark your calendar now. I'm going to be teaching a live free class the week of the 28th. So the last week of the month. We're going to learn all about like the reasons that SEO hasn't worked up until this point the three most common mistakes Then what you do to correct it and then hopefully you'll join me in simple SEO content at that point in time if you're ready You can get signed up now. You just go to the website. Make sure you're on the email list. You can, uh, download the beginner's guide at etchedmarketing. com forward slash freebies. Take SEO 101. If you're ready for simple SEO content, you can go directly to etchedmarketing. com forward slash yes. That is the page that includes the 500 Discount on the course because you my friend are a VIP because you listen to this podcast. You're on the email list. You know what's going on and I want to make sure you get that discounted price when you sign up. I don't want you to have to pay the full price, which is the one that you get to if you click through the courses button on the website. So between you and me, that's a little savings just for you. All right. Thank you so much for being here. I will see you back here next week. Bye for now.