Why SEO Feels Hard When it Doesn't Have to Ep. 168

If you're trying to do SEO on your own and it feels hard or you are overwhelmed, let me help you understand how to make it easier. SEO can feel much harder to learn than it needs to be. Let me help you. 

Transcript

0:33

If SEO feels overwhelming. I want you to know it's not generally an SEO problem. It's actually an information problem, and once you start to understand that, it's going to feel so much easier to approach and do on your website. Hi, I am Rachel Lindteigen. I am so glad that you are back here with me today for the podcast. I want to talk about something that keeps popping up a lot on the free training classes. When I ask people kind of how they're doing, if they're trying it, most people. Who have gone through that free training class, say they're trying to do SEO, but they're not sure if what they're doing is working. They don't know how to figure it out. And honestly, they're feeling a little overwhelmed by the whole process. And so I wanna kind of talk about where that overwhelm comes from. And how we can make it easier for you, because if you've been around here for a while, you understand how critically important doing search engine optimization is for your website to help it be visible online. If you want to be generating leads from Google and Chat GPT and AI search, you know you've got to do SEO, but you may be afraid of it. You may not want to do it. You may be afraid to try. Or you may have been trying it on your own and really struggling with what to do. So let's talk about how that happens and why that happens, because I see the same couple things happen when it feels hard or it feels overwhelming. Generally, what people struggle with when it's feeling hard or it's feeling overwhelming, is that they're trying to learn from too many sources. They're trying to do this on their own. They're trying to DIY, it. And so they're Googling and they're YouTubing, and now they're asking chat, GPT, how do I do SEO on my website? What do I do? And the problem is there's conflicting information based on where you're getting that data from. So it ends up being hard to know what to trust, what's right, what's wrong, what's gonna hurt you. Because some of what's coming up, especially chat GPT right now, some of what's coming up is not good. It is. Actually old, outdated strategies that will get you into trouble with Google. I saw this recently. There was a discussion people were asking about something called cloaking. We haven't done cloaking as a professional SEO community in at least 15 years because it is what's considered black hat, which is a cheater tactic. However. Chat, GPT is trained on all the information that's out there, so chat, GPT doesn't know that this is not a good thing to do. What cloaking is, is let's say you have a white page and you want to have text for the search engines, but you don't want your people to see it. It would be white text on top of a white page so that it doesn't show up to the reader. That's actually not allowed as far as Google is concerned. That's been something considered bad or black hat. For years. Like I remember that that was bad back in 2012, so 14 years ago. So you wanna be very careful. That's what's hard when you're trying to learn. Like you're reading one article that says, oh my gosh, don't ever do this. And you're reading another one that says, this is the best SEO hack I've ever found. Or you're watching a TikTok video or something, and they're saying, do this chat. GPT taught me how to do this, and it's amazing. But you don't know because you don't have enough background. You don't know which is good, which is bad. So you end up doing the different things, getting yourself in trouble, not realizing that, oh, I probably shouldn't have done that. So that's the first thing I see is just like too many sources. The other thing is not being able to prioritize. So thinking that everything is equally important. This can be a big part of it is like. You get this alert or you hear this thing and it's like, oh, maybe I should try that. Maybe I should redo my website and I should put all this text that's the same color as my background on it. And so you start to do that. Not realizing it's not something you should do, but also you prioritize that over things that are actually gonna make a difference, like choosing keywords that you have a really good chance of ranking for, and using those in the places that Google's gonna look because you don't know what order to prioritize it in. SEO feels very overwhelming when you've got too much input and you don't know how to go through it and figure out and know what to do. The next thing that I see. And I'm seeing this honestly more with my students. They're getting questions because now they're in, they're very focused on it. They're learning, and they have me to answer their questions. So I'm getting a lot of questions from them about things like my, I got one recently. It was somebody who's on Wix and they're. Wix report told them they needed an emoticon on the website from an SEO standpoint. And I said, you know what? That's really not important from an SEO standpoint. It's good from a user standpoint. They can see it. It's the little picture, the little image that shows up in the Google search tab. It's not gonna impact your SEO, but sure, it's good to have, but it wasn't. She's like, this is gonna be a heavy lift. I've gotta hire somebody. I've gotta do this. I don't foc don't focus on it right now. Like it's not an important thing for you today. Prioritize these things instead. I had another one who was very concerned because the Google Search console report, which I don't teach them to use the Google search console report to do anything with keywords or any data like that. I teach them to use it to understand how the website is being crawled by Google, because that's really what we should be using search Console for. Search console used to be called Webmaster Tools. It was Google Webmaster Tools for years. That's really what it is. It's us understanding how does Google crawl our site? Can they find it, all of this. So she was going through and looking to see like where she was ranking, what information. I said, you know, honestly, you'd be better off. To use a keyword ranking tool here and only keep track of the keywords that are really relevant to your business that you're trying to focus on, versus trying to craft your strategy from search console because it was a keyword that was absolutely not related to her products or services. Yes, it was tangentially related to her business and she was getting a little bit of visibility on it from a blog post, but it was like. Position 87 or something. So it was page nine. Page 10, somewhere in there. It wasn't anything that was really gonna get her much traffic, so she was getting impressions, but no clicks. And it's like, that's fine. You don't wanna get clicks from that keyword because that keyword is not a keyword that customer is going to use. Like we walked through it, we talked about it, and I said, is there any way you can monetize this? Do you have a way that's gonna tie this to revenue? She's like, no, it doesn't make sense for my business. I said, that's why we don't use. Like, not in a mean way, but just that's why we don't use this to make our keyword decisions. It was, again, something she had learned in a different group. It was, you know, taught on a Google, uh, YouTube video or something like, this is this great keyword strategy hack and it's not. So that's another thing is to really understand what those tools are for and which ones to use. And just remember that your tools don't understand all the context of it. They're just reports telling you, Hey, you got a few impressions for this keyword. Cool. That's nothing that I'm ever gonna use on my website. So personally, between you and me, I barely ever look at the keyword information in my search console report because I was trained not to use it. So I was doing SEO back when Google Analytics actually had keyword level data, and so we knew exactly how many visits a website got from every single keyword that we were targeting. So that was much, much easier. Then they took that away and they said they were going to start to give us some tangential information from. Some tangential keyword information, insights and search console, but we decided it was only ever going to be used kind of. Just from a review standpoint, it was not going to be used to make directional or strategy choices because it was not the same type data that we were used to having. So as a professional community, most of us stuck with our keyword research tools, really choosing the keywords we wanna rank for and then following and seeing those rankings. Because what search console gives you, you should not be making your decisions based on completely. Sure, take a look at it, see how you're doing. But generally speaking, it's not going to be the information that you want long term. And the last thing I wanna talk about today is just kind of how do you figure out what helps, what works? How should you learn SEO if you want it to feel easier? What I want you to do is really find one trusted source. You're here, you're listening to this podcast. I have done SEO professionally for more than 15 years. Honestly, I'm to the point I'm tired of talking about keywords if we're being completely honest. I'm tired of it, but I also know that you need this information. You need this help. You need this guidance. So I am always going to give you the most current information. I'm going to explain why things work the way they work. When you work with me, either one-on-one or in the group program, I'm going to answer your question. So, if you've been trying to do this on your own, you're feeling overwhelmed, you're stressed, you're frustrated by it, do me a favor. And just come work with me. Whether it's in the group program or it's one-on-one, we can work together, I can help you. What we also wanna make sure you have not only one trusted source where you're get gathering your information from somebody to answer your questions as they come up. But you also need to have clear priorities. You need to understand what is going to make a difference for your website. So when you're one of my students, you receive an email from me every week for the first quarter that you're in the program. It says six month program. So for the first three months, you receive an email from me each week. That tells you exactly what to do on your website for SEO, and it says, you're gonna learn about this. Go over here and watch this video. Now you're gonna do this. Now if you have questions, you're gonna come ask me. So you've got all that information each week. I tell them, figure no more than an hour. But that keeps it very easy and simple. By the time you get to week 13, you will have optimized to your homepage, all your core pages on your website and started writing your first blog posts that will help drive additional traffic to your website. So within that first 12 to 13 weeks, your SEO will be done on your website and you will have started. Expanding your reach through that first blog post, that first month of blog posts or podcasts, depending on what your content form is. You all know I start with the blog post and I use that as my outline for the podcast episode. So they're going to be similar, but you're gonna get something slightly different in the podcast than you will in the blog post because it's written form versus um, spoken. So sometimes I share more anecdotes or things like that in here than maybe I do in the blog post. Either way, you are going to learn what to do. So the same thing for you. You're going to have your website pages optimized. I'm gonna teach you how to find the right keywords. Honestly, I'm gonna look at it with you and make sure you have the right keywords.'cause keywords are generally the number one question that I get from students when they're first trying to learn. This is, Rachel, do you mind looking at this? I wanna make sure I'm choosing the right one. And we load up chrome, my chrome browser with all my nerd SEO tools on it. I was. Tease that they're my nerd tools, but we load it up, we look at it, we do a screen share. We look at their website, we look at the competition. We look at the demand authority, we look at the keyword they're looking at. We think about the consumer intent when they're searching that keyword, all of that to make sure it really is truly the right one for them. Then they get to work and they do the work, and then I take a look at it and make sure they're ready to go. The other thing that I see, uh. It's just right there. Keywords. Most people when they're trying to do it on their own are choosing the wrong keywords. They're choosing keywords that they think are gonna be great, but they're either too big to rank for or they're not. The keywords that their ideal customer is using when they are searching for this specific type of information. Sometimes they're bringing traffic, but it's not converting. So that's a lot of what I teach'em. We look at. Where's your traffic coming from and which pages are getting traffic? Are we getting traffic to the right pages? Are we getting it to the wrong pages? Are we converting? We talk a lot about that. We talk about setting up our goal tracking so we can see where our leads coming from, because I really want you to feel. More than just learning SEO, you're learning to be a marketer. You're learning to market your business and really understand what works and what doesn't work for you, your audience, your offers, et cetera. Alright, I hope that you have found this really helpful because I know that sometimes trying to learn SEO can feel very overwhelming. It can feel very hard. It can feel very. Frustrating, and it does not have to be that way. I do hope if you're struggling with it, you're trying to do it on your own, but you're like, most of the people that I've surveyed, I've surveyed over 10,000 people now. Over 10,000 people have gone through the free training course. And of them 85, no, sorry, 99% say either they're brand new to SEO or they're trying to do it, but they're not sure how to do it. So most people who are out there, even those who are trying to do it, don't know how to figure out if it's working and if they're doing it right. So if you're in that that spot and you've been trying to do this on your own and you're not sure, you think it's working, but you're not quite sure. Why don't you join me in class? Like I said, it's a six month program. You can pay in full upfront, which gets you a 30 minute one-on-one session, just you and I, or you can do, there's just a monthly payment plan. It's 2 59 a month right now for six months, so you can just pay as we go. That way, you get the help and the support that you need to make sure that this is done right. All right. I wanna thank you so much for being here today. I will see you back here next week. Bye for now.