If SEO isn't working for you, let's find out why. Ep. 169

If you're trying to do SEO but aren't sure whether it's working or how to tell if it's working for your niche, this week's episode will help. Find out why SEO hasn't worked for you up until now and what to do instead so that it starts to work. 

Want to join the training class to figure out if what you're doing for SEO is working? Register here. I teach this one once a month. https://www.etchedmarketing.com/registration-doing-seo-right

Transcript

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If you've been trying to do SEO on your own for a while and you are either not sure if it's working or pretty sure it isn't working, this episode is definitely going to help you. So let's jump right in and kind of walk through why maybe it's not working, and more importantly, what to do to make sure that it does work for you. Hi, welcome back to the podcast. I am your host, Rachel Lindteigen, and I am so glad that you are here with me today. So this is another question that has come up, come up a lot during the free training class. And like I said, we've had over 10,000 people come through that free training class. This question comes up a lot and it's, I don't think SEO is working for me. Does it work for my niche? Can I do this? And I want you to know, yes, you can do this. Yes, it can work for your niche. And if you are not sure. If it's working for you, it just means we need to learn a little bit more so that you can begin to understand how you look at the results and how you figure out if what you're doing is right. The other question I get a lot is, I think I need a new website, or I'm pretty sure I just need to create, um, I need to migrate. I need a different platform. What platform do you recommend? Should I switch hosting companies? And if you've ever asked any of these questions. I want you to know that it's not your platform. It's not your hosting company, it's not your website. It's most likely, it's not even your niche. It's most likely that you just aren't doing something right. And so let's talk about that. I review websites from entrepreneurs just like you every week there. It's one of the things I do when, um, somebody is a new student, they join the program, I take a look at their websites and I go through and I look at. What they've been doing and what they've, um, kind of what they've been doing so that we really understand and can prioritize what they need to do. But what they've been doing very often, they've got some of it right, but not all of it. And so that's why it's not working. And so I can quickly go through and say, this page is good. This page is not, this page is good. This page is not, this keyword will work. This keyword will not, you don't have a keyword over here. So what I see often. Is that there's inconsistency. So maybe one or two of your pages on your website are optimized, but the rest of them are not. Maybe some have a title tag because your system, your platform, word, Squarespace, whatever, automatically gives the page a title tag. But it's still not optimized. You haven't chosen a keyword for it. It's just basically the name of the page and your website name. Most of them then don't have a meta description, or sometimes they have a meta description and it's way too long because some of our website platforms tell us the meta description should be up to 300 words or 300 characters, and that's not the case. Google is gonna truncate your meta description around 160 characters. So sometimes the meta description is too long, sometimes it doesn't exist. Sometimes the title tag and the meta description both use different keywords. We wanna make sure we're using the same keyword. Sometimes the content on the website page doesn't actually use the keyword that's in the title tag or the meta description. We wanna make sure the title tag, the meta description, the content, all of it has the same key word. The other thing that I see very often. Is that they're not choosing the right keywords, they're choosing keywords and they seem like they would be great, except they're probably too big and too competitive. And so your SEO is very likely not going to work if you are choosing keywords that your website is never going to have a chance of ranking for, and those are usually the really big keywords. They have lots of search volume. When you go to Google using an incognito browser window, you put those keywords in, you take a look and you're like. Oh my gosh. Okay. Yeah, these are not websites like me. You know, you're looking at Etsy, you're looking at Amazon, Nordstrom, you're looking at big brands, Zillow, realtor, et cetera. You are not gonna rank with that. It's not saying that anything wrong with you or your website, but you are just not as authoritative as those big sites are in Google's eyes. So you're not going to rank with them. What you're looking for is, are there other small sites similar to mine that are showing up? I teach a more in-depth way of doing this inside the paid program, but for now, that's a good starting point, is like. Am I choosing keywords that my site deserves? I've heard somebody refer to it as deserves to rank for, and you wanna think about that. It's not like what you think you deserve, but it's what Google thinks you deserve. It's what Google thinks is a good exam, is a good answer for that question from their customer, because remember, this searcher is still Google's customer. The other thing I see often, and this happens a lot, especially when we've had like our designer do the SEO for us on the website. So we buy a website design project and the designer says they'll throw in the, they'll do the SEO for you. They'll choose the keywords, they'll do all of. Very often what I see in these moments are websites that are not optimized the right way, and it's very unfortunate because now you've paid somebody to do it for you, but you're not getting traffic, you're not getting visibility, you're not generating leads because either they've chosen keywords you can't rank for, or a lot of them use the exact same keyword, exact same title tag, exact same meta description on every single page. That's going to actually limit your visibility and your reach because Google will only show your website two times for any given page. Sorry, any given keyword. So if you have five pages on your website and you've used the same keyword on all five pages, you only are gonna have a chance of two of those pages showing up because you are only targeting that one keyword. Whereas if you had different keywords on each of those five pages, you'd have five chances. And then if you follow along with what I teach from a blogging standpoint, really creating content that ties to your products and services and all of that. And you do that, you know, every month, whether you create one post, you create four posts, whatever cadence you can keep up with, then you have opportunities for 10, 15, 20, 30 pages. We, I just was working with a couple of my one-on-one clients recently on this, and we're optimizing, we're finding keywords and I'm talked to both of them this week and they both are seeing an increase in leads. Because they're more visible. They're ranking higher for the keywords that we're trying to target. One of'em told me she got four leads overnight. She was thrilled, like four leads in the last 24 hours. The other one has gotten more leads in the last month than she's had historically. So they're both starting to see it work. They're both seeing that there's more traffic coming in, more people are finding them. So we wanna make sure. That we're really targeting those correct keywords, those keywords that people are searching for that are tied to your products or services, and your website has a really good chance of ranking at the top of Google for, the other thing I want you to understand is like there has to be a connection between your content that you're creating and your products or services. You need to make sure that you're thinking about that. So like for me, for example. I teach about traditional SEO, which is what we're talking about here. I teach about ai, SEO or things like chat, GPT, perplexity, et cetera. I teach about podcasting and then I teach about marketing and metrics and some higher level, um, marketing topics. And the reason I do that is because. Simple. SEO content is the group program that addresses Google and ai, SEO. There is a podcasting program that addresses podcast growth and I work one-on-one with clients as a marketing strategist or a marketing consulting role role, really helping them figure out their funnels and their overall marketing strategy and really identifying the leaks within there. Business and helping them to figure out what to focus on next so that they can grow. So because of that, my content supports those four areas. That way people who come into my world who are finding information, they're finding me through chat, GPT, they're finding me through Google. They're coming into my world because they're interested in these topics. I have that direct ladder for them if they want to work with me. Those topics all feed into different programs. You want to do the same thing because you want to make sure you're bringing people into your ecosystem who are going to be interested in. What you offer, who are going to help you grow your business. Because if you have all sorts of willy-nilly topics and they don't tie back to your business, you're actually gonna hurt yourself in the long run, especially from an SEO standpoint. Because if somebody comes in, let's say you have a blog post on baking sourdough bread. I love to bake sourdough bread. It's super fun. I'm very good at it, but I don't blog about it because my blog. It's not about that, but if I created a blog post about baking sourdough bread and I optimized it because I know how to do that, and I got it to show up in Google and people came to my website to read that blog post all about baking sourdough bread. Great. Except now what are they gonna do? Because there's nothing else on my website about baking sourdough bread. So they're gonna leave. And when they leave and they don't come back, that tells Google, this site is not a good fit for this particular query. So then Google is less likely to show it to people in the future. So that's where we really wanna make sure that we're focusing on the right content, the right strategy, the right keywords. That's how we're going to figure out what's working and what's not working. The other thing I want you to understand is to make sure we're really looking at the correct data when making our determinations as to whether or not our SEO is working. So I teach you exactly how to do this in simple SEO content in the group program, or if we work together one-on-one. I teach you what all the metrics are, what matters, which ones we use, and where we pull that data from. Because sometimes if we're trying to make decisions from incorrect data, it can make it more difficult. So I shared a story about the student on last week's episode where we talked about the keyword that didn't make sense, and she was asking me, how do I write this? What do I do to use this keyword to create a blog post because I'm ranking and I wanna increase it. And it was like, this doesn't sound like something you'd normally be going after. Let's talk this through for a minute. Where are you getting this? I said, are we pulling data from Google Search Console? And she's like, yeah, that's, that's what I'm looking at. I'm like, okay, please stop. That's not where we wanna pull our keyword data. We wanna look for opportunities. Like sometimes it can be good, but in this particular situation, it was not a keyword that she could. Tie to anything. I was like, okay, let's walk through it. Do you have anything in your business that ties to this? She's like, no. Do you have anything here where it would make sense? Is this something that you would create for an opt-in? She's like, no. Do you really think with everything you know about how to do SEO and content strategy, do you really think this is a key word you should be trying to go after? And she looked at me and she went. No, and it was like, exactly, put this one away. It's not something that you need to go after. It's not something that you wanna try. So that's what we wanna think about is like, where are you getting the data that you're using? Where are you finding that information? The other thing is are you tracking your leads in your analytics platform? I know Google Analytics is the one most of us have used for years. I've actually switched and I've switched my students over to something called Clicky. I'll put an affiliate link in the show notes or in the description. So if you're curious, you can grab that. It is so much. Easier to use it is the one I teach both of them inside of simple SEO content. But at this point, anybody who's new, who's setting up analytics, I recommend clicky over, uh, Google Analytics just because GA has become more complicated. This latest version of it, and I've used GA for probably close to 20 years. I loved it. I taught it, but I've moved away from it in the last year or so, just because the GA four, GA four rollout is more complicated. It is harder for you to find the information that you need, but in clicky. It's all right there. We can set up the goal tracking as long as you set up the paid account. Like you can track the goals and so you can know immediately how many people joined your email list, how many people went to the cart for your product, how many people purchased, and we can click on it and see where that traffic came from. So you can start to understand like where your leads are coming from, which traffic channels are working. So that's a big part of what we, we teach and we look at in there. What I want you to know and understand is that. What you're doing is not broken. It's not that you are not trying hard enough. It's that you probably don't have the right strategy and you just need somebody to help you set the strategy and then like look at it and tell you, this is good, this is not, here's what you need to do. Here's, you know, let's try this instead. I do have a training class that I'm offering about once a month on. Is, am I doing SEO right? And it's a chance to come in and just look at how I audit websites from an SEO standpoint to determine what's right, what's wrong. You have a chance you can submit your site and have me look at it for you. If you decide this is very helpful and you'd like to work with me, then obviously we'll talk about, you know, how you can join. Simple. SEO content. If you would like to, if you know you wanna do this and you want help, just go ahead and get signed up. The link is in the description as well. And if you don't like group programs, I have several who just are like, I don't wanna work in a group. You know what? I do work one-on-one. I'm happy to talk to you about that. There's information on the website, on the marketing consulting page if you prefer one-on-one. You don't wanna have to be in a group. That is an option. It just depends what fits your budget the best. Alright, thank you so much for being here. I'll see you back here next week. Bye for now.