Hi, and welcome back to the podcast. I am Rachel Lind Tigen, your host, and I'm so excited to have you with me here today. So today I wanna kick us off 'cause we're in the new year. We're starting to think about what we're gonna do from a marketing standpoint, how we're gonna grow our businesses this year. And I keep seeing this question pop up, especially in the free training classes, and that is. Does SEO still matter? Do I need to be doing this now or with ai? Has SEO really been replaced? So let's talk about that. SEO search engine optimization, as you know, is how your content gets. Found by the right people online. So if you are creating content on your website or blog, then yes, SEO search engine optimization still matters. It matters because you want people to find the content that you are taking the time. Spending your energy and potentially some money to create. So if you want people to be able to find that content, then you need to optimize it for the search engines. Now with AI search becoming so popular, does that mean that traditional SEO does not matter? No, honestly, it doesn't because what we. Seeing in the research is that our traditional SEO efforts actually help us with AI search as well. Now, as you know, if you've listened to a few of the other episodes, there are some things that we wanna do specific for AI search. Things like, uh, making sure that we are. Formatting our content in a way that's easy to scan. Making sure we're using header tags, being conversational, answering questions, things like that. But our traditional SEO, making sure our website is easy to scan. It's easy to read. We have a good site structure. It loads fast. We have information that makes it easy for the crawlers to find and understand our content. All of that still matters. The other thing that I want you to understand. Is that SEO, if you understand how to do it the way that I teach, and you learn about keywords, that's what helps you actually make sure there is interest in the topic that you want to write about before you write. This is how we create content that our ideal customer is interested in. Wants to read, wants to listen to will find helpful is by really understanding how to use some of our SEO tools to find opportunities. The other thing that I try to keep you very focused on. Is not just creating content for the sake of creating content, but making sure that we're creating content that not only has an audience and is then optimized so that the right people can find that content. But beyond that, we wanna make sure it ties back to your business, to your products or services, so that you are. Able to generate revenue, because if you're creating content for the sake of creating content, that's great. You can be visible. You can potentially even get some traffic to your website. But if you're bringing the wrong people into your website, meaning you're creating content that's not going to really connect with your ideal listener, your ideal customer, then. Yes, you can be visible. Yes, you can get traffic. No, you will not generate leads and revenue. There's, it's a three part process. We need the visibility and the traffic. We need the right way to capture leads, and then we need a way to earn revenue through our website so it's not just one thing. What I want you to understand is SEO or search engine optimization really should be the foundation of everything that you're doing online because we can use our tools to find the right. Content ideas. This is why I focus so much on this inside my program and when working with clients one-on-one is it's really important to understand what the messaging is, how we need to connect with our ideal customers, how we help them, and how we bring them into our world. Whether they're searching Google, they're searching social media, they're searching locally, looking for, you know, something in Google Maps. They're listening to podcasts, whatever way they are searching, even if they're searching, using a voice search app. Like there's so many ways that people search for information today. Our job as entrepreneurs is to make sure that we are putting out the content, the information that they're searching for in a way that's easy for the search engines to understand it, to know who to share it with. So hopefully that makes sense right now. So what I wanna talk about now. Is what to focus on. You are like me. You're a busy entrepreneur. You don't have time to create a bunch of content. That's not going to move the needle for your business. So what you need to do is start thinking about your ideal customer. We always, always, always start with our ideal customer. They're the first person that we are focused on. So when you are thinking about what content to create, I want you to think about them. I want you to give them a name. Think about their demographics, their psychographics. What information do they need? What do you help them with? How can you tie all of this back together to your business? So you wanna think about that. You know that I recommend four content topic pillar areas. That way if we create that weekly content, which is what most people on the internet recommend for entrepreneurs, is weekly content, one unique piece of content each week. Then if we have. Four content topic areas or four pillars. We're touching on four different areas over the course of the month because not every customer is going to have the same question or the same need, but over the course of the month, we are going to get information that is helpful for them. We're basically putting a net out there and helping them to find their way to us so that we can sell to them. So what you're gonna do is choose those four topic areas. Remember those need to tie to your business. So let's walk through a couple examples. Let's say you're a realtor. My realtors usually do buyers, sellers. Sometimes they do like staging or they do investment or Airbnb, depending on what they focus on. Sometimes they do luxury, sometimes they focus on downsizing. Whatever it is. Whoever they work with or whoever they like working with the most. That's usually what we focus on within those extra areas. Now, let's say that, let's talk about my business for a minute. So, you know, I teach about search engine optimization. For your website, your blog, your podcast. I also work one-on-one with clients, helping them with their marketing strategy. I will be doing a group program. I've got it all planned out. I'm just trying to decide what I'm gonna launch it. But what we do there is we look at the marketing sales funnel. We look at how are your ads performing? How's your opt-in page performing? Is this what we need to work on? What do we do next? How do we increase this conversion rate? All the pieces of your marketing strategy, your sales funnel, all of that. So for me, I talk about traditional SEO. So Google, SEO, I talk about AI, search or chat, GPT, AI overviews, et cetera. I talk about marketing metrics, and then I generally also talk about podcasting over the course of the month. So each of those four areas ties directly back to an offer, but they're also four areas that you, my listener, are interested in. Now, you may not have a podcast. So you may not listen to the episodes about podcasting, but when I create a podcast episode titled Why Your Business Needs a Podcast, I'll tell you right now, it gets a lot of downloads because even if you don't yet have a podcast, you are more likely to listen to that one because you're like, okay, I trust Rachel. She usually knows what she's talking about. She's been doing this a long time and if she's telling me I need a podcast, I should probably listen to that and understand why she feels that way and what that opportunity is. And I tell you that that was a very popular one because from like Apple Podcast connect information and you know, I teach you to look at that if you have a podcast. That particular episode has a very high consumption rate. Over a hundred percent, which tells me people are listening to it multiple times. So that's what you kind of wanna think about is. What are you creating? What questions are you answering? What questions do they have? How do you help your ideal customer? And then how do you tie that back to your products or services so that your business can grow? Then what you're going to want to do is to focus on SEO keywords to begin with. Now, your keywords are going to help you understand how to title that blog post or that podcast episode, because what we see is sometimes if we title it one way versus another, it may be this. Same core concept, but if we title it slightly differently, there's more search demand or there's a better chance for us to rank for it. So I teach you how to do this in depth inside simple SEO content, or if we work together one-on-one, I will walk you through how to do this. In both cases, I look at the keywords with you, I help you, I, you know, refine them, give you ideas if you need to change something. I actually was just doing that with a, a student. This morning I was looking at her homepage and she had worked on it and she had her meta description, her title tag and everything, and I said, you know, I want you to re, you've done a great job, but I want you to rewrite your meta description and your title tag because they're not actually using your key word. The way that we should use it in there. So she did and she changed it and then she had another question. She was like, Hey, is this right? This is how many characters it is. It was 135 characters. And SEMrush tells me it should be a hundred to 135, and my platform tells me it should be 155 to 165. And did I do it right? So I looked at it again and said, yeah, you absolutely did. And again, it's just up to 160 characters. The reason there's 160 character cutoff there is because of truncation in the Google search results. So that's the type help that I'm able to give you. But what you wanna look at. Is keywords. What are people searching for? What information are they interested in? How are they searching? What words are they using? That's gonna be your core. That's gonna help you figure out what you're gonna write about. Then you're going to write a great blog post, and here you're not gonna count on SEO to do it for you. You're going to write for your customer, because your customer is the most important person in this equation. So you're gonna write for them. You're gonna tell them what you believe they need to know. You're going to answer their questions. If you're one of my students, you're going to use the content custom GPT that I created for you, that's gonna help you to outline this and help you make sure that you are addressing the right answers, the right questions, you're covering what needs to be covered. It'll help you brainstorm that. The other thing that you'll want to do is to look to see what are people asking in like the people also ask section on Google when you're looking at your keywords, because those words, those phrases can be incorporated into your blog post as well. You wanna make sure you're using clear header tags, so it's easy to understand. You want your paragraphs to be short and skimmable having white space between them. Now, white space originally was for. AI search. AI has updated, but at the reality is you still need whitespace to make it easier to read. You want to make this as easy as possible for your reader because if you have a blog post that is not broken up with whitespace does not have. Header tags, all of that is just one giant big block of text with no space between it. You are going to have people be overwhelmed and they're not gonna wanna read your content. So just between you and I, make sure you've got extra space between your paragraphs, you've got some white space, you're using header tags, all of that. You also wanna add internal links to help people understand more information about what's going on. You know, or if there's something else related. I had a question about this from a student on our call earlier this week. And he was trying to understand what to do with internal links and do I, you know, do I add 'em all the time? And so what you wanna do with internal links is add them where it makes sense. If you have a blog post that you're writing and you're like, you know what? I go in depth in this section, in this blog post over here. Go ahead and link to that blog post. If you have an opt-in that would make sense for your reader, go ahead and offer that opt-in and link to it. If you have a product or service page or you offer a free consult call, go ahead and link to that. Now, the other question I get sometimes is, should my link be a graphic? Should it be text? Should it be whatever? You can really work with that and do what you want. Test it out, see what works better for your audience. Um, generally speaking, I do put multiple. Image links within my blog posts because it's ideal to have an image every 150 to 300 words to kind of block break it up. So again, we're not looking at some big giant block of text, so that does help. And I do a lot of opt-in images there to break it up, but also to help grow the email list. So that's something that you can do as well. You also wanna make sure you are using those meta meta descriptions and title tags and that you are. Creating great content that's gonna help your audience. You're then making sure you're following SEO best practices and you're formatting for ai, SEO. Now, if you're not sure what either of those are or how to do it, go to the freebies tab on my website, etched marketing.com/freebies because I have free guides for you on ai, SEO and traditional SEO, as well as podcast, SEO. If you have a podcast, there's also a free class that I teach where you can join me. Generally it's live. You can join me. You can learn about how all of this is working for your business, what you can do to grow your business using your content and your optimization. The last thing I wanna talk about is creating content on a regular basis and making sure that it is evergreen, meaning it's content that can work for a long time. You don't necessarily want to create a ton of seasonal content or things that are only gonna be valid for a year or so because. When you're doing this and you're using SEO to help your content be found, you can actually. Have that content help grow your business for years. I have blog posts that I wrote back in 2017. It's now 2026. That's been nine years. They're still ranking, they're still showing up. Um, they're actually showing up in chat GPT now, which did not exist when chat GPT or when they were written. But now it does, and they're showing up in there. They're still generating leads for the business. So I want you to think about what could you write. That can help your ideal customer. That can hopefully work for years because that is part of the beauty of SEO. Now, you do need to go in, you need to update, you need to refresh all of that. So hopefully you found this very helpful. I. Do want you to understand it is still really important to your online marketing strategy that you continue to do SEO because you want to continue creating great content that's going to be able to connect with the right audience. You wanna format it for AI search, and you want to optimize it for your traditional Google SEO, but create that content. Make sure that it is. Profitable content. It's the type of content that a buyer is looking for rather than just a browser, because that's how you're gonna grow your business. Offer your opt-in within your blog post or within your podcast. Offer it naturally as a tool that can help people. That will also help you grow your email list and grow your business. Alright, that's it for today. I will see you back here next week if you have any questions, you know how to find me. Thanks. Bye for now.