Overwhelmed with SEO? Start here. SEO for beginners. Ep 151

If you're new to SEO or you've tried it but you're not sure you're doing it right, this week's episode will help. Learn what to do first if you're overwhelmed by the thought of doing SEO on your website. I'll walk you through how to get started and what to do first so you can start to rank higher on Google, get more traffic to your website, and maybe even increase your visibility on ChatGPT with SEO. 

Transcript

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Hi, and welcome back to the podcast. I'm so glad to have you here with me today. So today I want to address a question that I got recently from a new student, and it was somebody who said, I was so scared. I was so overwhelmed at the thought of SEO because. I bought into the hype. I believed what people told me that it was this super technical thing. It was complicated. It was gonna be hard to figure out. I didn't know that you were gonna teach it in a way that was so easy to understand. I wish I would've started sooner. And I thought, well, let's talk about that. So if you, my friend, are feeling like I'm a little scared, I'm a little overwhelmed, really, I'm not sure what to do or how to get started. I want you to start with your homepage. Let's just make this as easy and simple and straightforward as possible for you. If you've never done SEO before or you've tried to do it, but you're not really sure if it's working, let's focus just on that one page. Let's get you started there, and we'll go from there. We can always build that momentum once you've got the homepage done. So SEO Search Engine Optimization, as you know, it is a really powerful, effective marketing tool. It is a marketing strategy you can use. It really truly is about building the visibility for your website or your business online. It's about showing up on Google, in Google ai, and now in our AI search tools like Chat, GPT, and Perplexity with. Out it. You are not going to be visible. You are not going to be found by new people. You'll be found by the people who know who you are already. But if you really want your business to grow and scale, you need to be found by people who don't know who you are today. If you have a podcast, you can do a podcast. SEO. In order to help you be found by new people in the podcast app as well. I mean, the reality of the situation is if you want your business to grow, you need to be found by new people. This is what we do to be found by new people. So simple, straightforward, easy to understand. You don't need to do everything to your website to start seeing results. I actually have a student who has had an enormous. Gain in revenue for her business just tied to her homepage. Now, she has done additional SEO. Her whole site is optimized at this point, but her homepage alone is responsible for a 52% increase in her. Coaching revenue because she optimized her homepage. Using the right keywords is now ranking. Position number one is getting lots of traffic, lots of visibility, lots of leads, and ultimately lots of new paying customers because of her optimization, she's done just on the homepage. Like I said, she's got lots of pages that are working, but that homepage alone is tied to that significant increase in revenue in the last year. This is what is very possible for you if you do what I teach. So you're going to think about. Your a homepage. Now, sometimes we're in a situation where our niche is incredibly competitive, so it's very hard to find a keyword. That's what we would call non-brand, meaning a keyword that does not have our business name or our name in it where we can rank. Sometimes that is the case. So if you're in a case like that and you really can't find something, you're a realtor in. You know, a major metropolitan area, you're a Phoenix realtor, you're probably not gonna rank for Phoenix realtor. You're probably not gonna rank for homes for sale because it's very competitive. You are somebody like me who's in SEO. It's very hard to rank for SEO terms because everybody who is writing about SEO. Is an SEO and most of the tool platforms have very large, very active blogs with lots of visibility. So if I went after the word S-E-O-S-E-O coach, SEO expert, I probably wouldn't rank. So I have to go after other words that are adjacent that are helpful. Things like marketing Coach, I can rank for that, but I can't necessarily rank for SEO Expert, and that's okay. What I want you to look for is, is there a niche related word that you can rank for that is non brand? If there is perfect use that. If not, let's just go ahead and focus on your business. Name, your name, whatever you want to be known as, and use that as your keyword. If we can find that non-brand one, it will help us with some additional visibility, but we can't always find that. Now you're going to choose that keyword and you're gonna optimize your homepage. I want you to go through your copy on your homepage and make sure you've used your keyword, whether it's your business name, your brand, your name, or a non-brand keyword. I want you to make sure that you're using that keyword in your copy and in your headers on your homepage. And I know this may sound really simple and straightforward, but I'm including it because I've had clients in the past who thought they were doing what they were supposed to. Who had not actually ever used the keyword they wanted to rank for in the copy on the page. So I'm just gonna let you know to save you from potentially making that mistake. Use the keyword on your page. Then you're going to want to make sure you update your image file names on the page, so you're going to want to make sure you use your keyword in your image file names. If you have alt text as an option, go ahead and use that as well. You can put in the a DA descriptor information. You can also put in the keyword. I was trained to use your alt text just for SEO though today we are in a more inclusive society, so now we're using it. What it was originally intended for, which is like screen readers. So do that. But if you can incorporate your keyword in there, great. Then what I also want you to think about. Is if you are a local business, you service people in a specific area, then I want you to go ahead and use your local information, your local area. So for example, if I were focusing on my local market, I would potentially be optimizing for marketing coach. Tucson, Arizona. Now, the reality is I don't optimize for Tucson, Arizona because I work with people all over the country, actually all over the world. But when I first started my business many, many, many years ago, I did go after and target content marketing agency Phoenix, because my very first iteration of etched marketing nine years ago. Was as a content marketing agency, working with small business owners, creating their content and their strategy and all of that. And I did rank on page one in the top two or three positions, sometimes position one for content marketing agency, Phoenix. And it did work. I got leads, I got clients, I worked with local clients. Today, that's not what I'm doing, but if you are, let's say. You own a brick and mortar shop. You are a therapist in an area. You are a life coach who works with people online and in your local area. Make sure that you are optimizing for those local terms because what we're seeing, especially with the addition of chat, GPT search. We're seeing a lot of people like starting to figure out and they're going to chat GPT and they're kind of having the conversation of, Hey, what do I need? I need to look for help in this area. I had a, uh, Lisa, one of my students had this happen recently with a new client of hers. She's a therapist, and they had gone to chat GPT because they needed to find a specific type of therapy. But they weren't really sure what to search for. So once chat, GPT told them what to search for, then that person went to Google and they searched for that type therapy in their local area. Then because Lisa has listened to the podcast for a long time and took Simple SEO content and worked with me in the program, that will become the accelerator, she is really good at what she does. She has done everything, and so when that person went and searched. For that type of therapy office in their area. You better believe her website showed up. She got the lead, and because she's really good, she closed the lead and she then had the sale. That is why it's important if you service a local area to include that local information. In your optimization as well, having it on your page, and then make sure it's in your title tag, in your meta description, because those are gonna show up in the search results. And those are what is going to help someone decide whether or not they're going to click through and go to your page to even learn about you. So that's a really good spot. If you are overwhelmed, you're not sure what to do, you're trying to figure it out, just start with your homepage. Even if you've optimized your homepage in the past, I want you to go take a look at it and see, am I doing the things that Rachel's talking about in this training? Am I optimized for my local area? Did I look for a non-brand keyword? Do I have my brand name or my business name? Did I update my image file names? Do I have a good title tag? Do I have a good meta description? Do those. Follow Google Best practices, meaning that title tag is under 60 characters. That meta description is under 160. I'm willing to bet there's a really good chance that yours don't follow those guidelines because so many of them do not. So double check yours to make sure you're good to go. And then just take a look. Go to Google. Use an incognito browser window and type in that non-brand keyword or type in your name or your business image. Just see where you show up. That will help you start to see, oh, okay, I am visible. Go to chat GPT. Ask it to search. With no knowledge of you. Don't know. You. Do not know who I am. Pretend I'm someone else. And ask them for ask chat GPT for some information and see if it. Recommends you or talks about you as an option. In the future, we'll have better AI visibility reporting. Some of the reporting tools are working on it right now, but for today, we don't have it. So we have to kind of manually go look at it and do it. Also, make sure if you're using your SEO tools, you have a keyword ranking report. Program. Go ahead and add that non brand keyword. If you found one, go ahead and add that to your rank. Reporting your reporting tool so that you can see how you are doing. You wanna watch it like once a month. You don't need to look at it every day. You will drive yourself crazy'cause it moves up and down all the time. It can, but look at it once a month and just kinda see how it's going. Is it getting better? Are you ranking higher?'cause if you're ranking higher. You probably are more visible both on Google and Chat GPT. Alright, hopefully you found this really helpful. Get you started. If you're ready to work with me, you can always reach out and find out if there is a spot open in the elite CL coaching clients list. I do have a few spots that I work. I cannot tell you right now if there's an opening one or not, um, on the podcast because full transparency, I am batching this and I'm recording it ahead of time. So I don't know, like as of today, yeah, there is, but there may not be when you hear this one. So send me an email, reply back to my weekly email and ask or DM me on Instagram at Etched Marketing Academy. If you're hoping to take simple SEO content, mark your calendar. It will reopen for enrollment in January. It is. Running as an eight week cohort, so you cannot just join it at any point in time because what I found was the students who had more structure were the ones who had better results, and I want you to have the best results possible. So I changed that to benefit you in the long run. Alright, that's it for today. I will see you back here next week. Bye for now.