SEO Basics: 10 Tips for Overhauling Your Website's SEO
by Crystal Waddell on Aug 31, 2023
As a business owner, you might be wondering what SEO basics are and how to find and fix them on your website.
Overhauling your website's SEO can seem daunting, but with the right tips and tools, it can be done effectively.
In this blog post, I will give you 10 tips on how to overhaul your website's SEO and improve your online visibility.
Why I love search engine optimization
Ultimately, optimizing your site for search is like building roads to your website on the Internet. In general, business owners assume that starting a website or even a facebook page means that customers will soon follow.
Unfortunately, that's not how it works.
You have to optimize your site (on site SEO) and social media pages that point back to your website (offsite SEO) if you want to rank in organic search results.
What search engines understand
1. Do an SEO Audit:
Start with an SEO audit to identify technical errors and on-page SEO issues that need fixing. This will help you understand the current state of your website's SEO and areas that need improvement.
2. Keyword Research:
Conduct keyword research to identify relevant keywords and phrases that your target audience is searching for. Use these keywords to optimize your website's content and improve your search engine rankings.
3. Optimize Page Titles & Meta Descriptions:
Ensure that your page titles and meta descriptions are optimized with your target keywords and phrases. This will improve your click-through rate and boost your chances of ranking higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
4. Improve Page Load Speed:
A fast-loading website is essential for SEO. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to identify issues that are slowing down your website, and work with a web developer to fix them.
5. Use Header Tags:
Use header tags (H1, H2, H3) to structure your content and make it easier for search engines to understand. Use your target keywords in these header tags to improve your website's relevance for those keywords.
6. Internal Linking:
Internal linking helps search engines understand the structure of your website and how pages are related to each other. Use internal links to connect related pages together and improve your website's SEO.
7. Improve Mobile Responsiveness (aka, optimize for cell phones!):
With more people accessing websites through mobile devices, it's essential to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. Use tools like Google's Mobile-Friendly Test to identify issues and work with a web developer to fix them.
8. Use Schema Markup:
Schema markup helps search engines to understand the content on your website and display it in rich snippets. Use schema markup to mark up key information on your website, such as your business address and phone number.
9. Create High-Quality Content:
High-quality content is essential for SEO. Use your target keywords in your content, but ensure that it's written for your target audience and provides value. Use tools like SEMrush to identify content gaps and opportunities to create new content.
10. Build Quality Backlinks:
Backlinks are still one of the most critical ranking factors for SEO. Aim to build quality, relevant backlinks from other websites in your industry. Use tools like Ahrefs to identify opportunities to build backlinks.
Other search engines besides Google
With the introduction of Chat-GPT, the once impossible dethroning of Google actually seemed like a realistic possibility.
Combine this ai revolution with privacy initiatives that restrict internet information and other search engines are making moves to impede on Google's market share.
1. Google:
As the most popular search engine, Google holds the lion's share of the market with over 92% global usage share.
2. Bing:
Microsoft’s ai-powered search engine, Bing has a 3.9% global usage share and has grown 13% in 4 years.
3. Yahoo:
Once at the forefront of search engines, Yahoo’s current market usage is at 2%.
4. Baidu:
This Chinese-based search engine is the most popular in Asia and holds a 1.8% global usage share.
5. Yandex:
Russia’s top search engine has 0.9% global usage share and is growing its presence in Europe and Asia
6. DuckDuckGo:
A privacy-focused search engine that doesn't track user data or show personalized results, DDG has grown to a 0.7% global usage share since 2008 when it was founded.
The keyword research tool we use the most
By following these 10 tips, you can effectively overhaul your website's SEO and boost your online visibility. Remember that SEO is an ongoing process, and you will need to monitor your website's performance regularly and make ongoing improvements to your SEO strategy. With the right tools and knowledge, you can achieve your SEO goals and drive more traffic to your website.
If you're ready for even more SEO fun, tune into this episode of The Simple and Smart SEO Show Podcast as we dive deep into SEO basics!!
This transcript is machine generated and has not been edited for errors.
[00:00:00]
[00:00:00] Brittany Herzberg: Hello and welcome back. To the Simple and Smart SEO show. Crystal and I are here with a good friend of mine, Angie.
And I can say that she's a good friend of mine cuz Crystal just met her this morning.
I have been,
[00:00:10] Angie Colee: yeah.
[00:00:10] Brittany Herzberg: In Angie's world for a while. I have been on her show twice. She's freaking amazing. And the tables are turned today. We don't have any questions.
Angie's gonna be asking us questions. So say hi ladies.
[00:00:21] Angie Colee: Hi ladies.
[00:00:22] Crystal Waddell: Hello.
[00:00:24] Brittany Herzberg: One of you is gonna do that.
[00:00:25] Crystal Waddell: So Angie, what do you help people with right now? What problem does somebody have right now where you're like, oh, I solve that.
[00:00:31] Angie Colee: I'm able to help people see where they've got holes in the leaky bucket, right?
I think most problems with businesses come down to one of three things. They don't have a process, they don't have the right people, or they don't know how to talk to their people or they have a profit problem.
And so I often joke that I am a c3PO that can help you figure out the people, the profits, and the process.
And I have become, and I think it's because I'm a little bit a D H D and don't always read social cues very well. Like[00:01:00] my idea of reading a social cue is I have told a fun story that I think is incredible and I watch people's faces go, and I go, oh crap, I just said something not great.
What did I say? How do I backpedal this?
So I've had to do a lot of like examination of interpersonal dynamics, like non-verbal cues and studied things like that, and realized that like I made communication a lot harder than it has to be. And I think a lot of us do, especially in this age of communicating virtually.
And so I've come up with a lot of strategies to help you genuinely build a connection with someone, to have a hard conversation when you're disappointed with someone, to get clarity from clients or from colleagues and coworkers when you're struggling to get something done and you need somebody else to move before you can.
And what do you do if they don't move? Strategies like that.
So I really like to help people figure out those three aspects of their business. How can I communicate better? How can I introduce more revenue streams?
How can I systematize this to where it's heaven forbid [00:02:00] fun to run this business?
[00:02:02] Brittany Herzberg: I'm so excited for this.
[00:02:03] Crystal Waddell: Yeah. You have one question B,
[00:02:05] Brittany Herzberg: oh, that's fine.
Before she asks her questions, you gotta ask your question.
I do have one question. And I'll let Angie explain the angle of all the questions and stuff. So before we dive in and become the interviewees, Angie, how do you define, or what do you think of when you think of SEO and there are no dumb answers.
[00:02:21] Angie Colee: Yeah, like I know the technical definition, search engine optimization and all of that stuff, and it's probably because of the context around, how I cut my teeth in marketing and stuff like that.
But when I first entered marketing, it was in a group of some less than shady operators who were like, yes, this is the latest black hat strategy and gaming the system never felt good to me.
Plus there seemed to be a lot of technical mumbo jumbo and backend headers and stuff involved. This is Zelda.
And because I'm tech phobic. If I can't figure out this technology within five to 10 seconds, I'm frustrated and gonna burn it down.
So it's just always been something I've [00:03:00] avoided because I took the tack of, I don't write for spiders, for search engine crawlers.
I write for people. And if it's not good enough for the search engines to find me, then I'm just gonna cross my arms and go, screw you Google.
Which is not smart.
[00:03:14] Brittany Herzberg: That's all I got for you.
[00:03:16] Crystal Waddell: So what are you asking us about today? What should people expect? What's gonna happen?
[00:03:21] Angie Colee: Is that interpretation of SEO actually correct? Is there another way that I should be looking at this?
And a reason that I should not be like going? No, I'm scared to look at the back end of my stuff.
[00:03:33] Brittany Herzberg: You wanna take it first or you want me to take it first?
[00:03:35] Crystal Waddell: Sure. I can, take a stab at this one. I, again, be said, everybody's interpretation of what it means is, it's just that based on your experience, right?
How I would reposition it for people who are listening is that: as the world moves forward, people need to be able to find your business.
Lot, lots of times in the past, people, in olden days, people had shops on Main Street. People would walk by, then we [00:04:00] had the telephone Yellow pages.
People would go on the Yellow Pages and look for different businesses.
I love that my dad brought that one up. And now SEO just functions as that yellow page listing. And if you're not listed, if you don't have a strategy to make yourself, available to people, they're not gonna be able to find you.
That's where I come from with SEO and again, I like to say that you can be your own SEO superhero. This is not something that you have to have a lot of money or a huge business or just insider information that is, really tough to get, to be able to be successful with seo.
You just simply have to understand what keywords you wanna win, what you want people to, search for and find you so that you can sell them or help them, or whatever it is you're trying to do. So.
[00:04:50] Angie Colee: I think that's awesome.
[00:04:52] Crystal Waddell: Yeah.
[00:04:53] Angie Colee: Go ahead.
[00:04:54] Brittany Herzberg: I have a slightly different take on it because I feel like something that comes up a lot is being [00:05:00] intentional.
It's the value I have with it's come up in other guest interviews and if you're being intentional with who you help, how you help them and sharing that information.
One, you're gonna have an SEO strategy because you're gifted one, whether or not you intentionally create one, and that SEO strategy is probably gonna be at least like 80% of the way there because you're talking to your people.
In, at least in a way it may have jargon in there, and if it has jargon in there, that could be a bad, could be a good thing, just depends.
But you're gonna have an SEO strategy and it'll be most of the way there. So you've got something working for you, but having an understanding of SEO and what's going on and how you can up-level is just gonna make it be that much more better.
[00:05:40] Angie Colee: It's interesting, it sounds related to something I've said cuz you know, my skills in kind of communications and team management and process development and stuff like that, it is just naturally how I think, and I usually tell people, you have a process or a system, you just may not have it written down.
And so to me that sounds similar.
Like you have SEO on your site [00:06:00] already. You just probably don't have a strategy like the, they're already crawling.
They're already trying to find you, but you haven't figured out the right keywords maybe yet, or the I don't know. Frequency.
Something like that.
[00:06:11] Crystal Waddell: Yeah. Oh, go ahead b.
[00:06:13] Brittany Herzberg: I was just gonna say, the reason I know that, and the reason I talk about that is because I am self-taught with SEO.
And I did that because Crystal was talking about it. My boyfriend was talking about it, other people were talking about it. I was in Clubhouse with Crystal and like people were saying this word and I was like, dang it.
It sounds so scary and so expensive. Let me just see cuz I'm a Taurus. Let me just see if I could figure this thing out on my own.
So I did, and when I went diving, at that time, I only had my massage practice and I started figuring out okay, I'm ranking for these terms.
Do I want to continue ranking for these terms?
This is where I'm showing up. These are the things that people are searching for and how they're landing on my site.
Do I want to continue with that? Do I want to change? Do I want to go for this, go for that, add that, subtract that?
And then I learned how to go about that. But yeah, crystal had her hand up.
[00:06:57] Crystal Waddell: And SEO's so interesting. One of my friends, Whitney, who [00:07:00] listens to the podcast, she talks about how it's like a game. Like SEO really is like a game.
Once you start playing, you're like, Hey, and there's different ways that you can win, because first you find out about keywords and you're like, oh crap, I could align like words on the page and remove words like it, and put like the name of the thing instead of it.
And then when somebody's searching for that particular word, my page is gonna pop up. Oh, that's crazy. That's just like brain blowing stuff, right?
And so, you start there and then you realize, oh crap, this page is getting, getting indexed in Google and people are visiting it.
And I can actually put a link from this page to another page and get people to go see that other page, which is actually maybe a money page. And somebody might buy something from there. It's oh my gosh. Mind blown again.
So it's like you start discovering all of these ways that make winning easier.
I think it's at that point that it becomes [00:08:00] fun and less overwhelming because you're like, oh, there is a method to this madness that is SEO, and I can do it. I can do it for myself. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Or even if I pay somebody else to do it, I can understand what they're doing. I can have an expectation of what they should do so that our business can be more successful.
[00:08:21] Angie Colee: Yeah, I do love that, I do a lot of business coaching and that kind of drives me nuts about some folks.
I admit that I'm tech phobic, but I also want a basic understanding of it. So that I know how to do things or what should be happening, and I'm not exactly snowed over, so to speak.
it's interesting because you mentioned that it was like a game and I thought that was fascinating and I wrote down set it and forget it cuz I'm one of those that like, it, it pops into my head that optimization is a one-time thing.
It's an ongoing thing that kind of makes me feel overwhelmed.
[00:08:50] Brittany Herzberg: It doesn't have to be overwhelming and really hard. Okay. But I know Crystal has thoughts too.
[00:08:55] Crystal Waddell: Okay, Let's just talk about a tool that you could use called Ubersuggest.
[00:08:59] Angie Colee: Okay.
[00:08:59] Crystal Waddell: [00:09:00] Okay. So the best way to approach something like this is by actually running some sort of SEO audit tool on your website.
Because there's different types of seo, and so some types of SEO are going to be ongoing, On page SEO and like content optimization and that type of stuff.
But there's something called technical SEO that's really the foundation of all of your seo.
And that's something that, it's like painting your house, you're not going to be like, oh, I painted my house last week and now I need to repaint it because the paint fell off.
You know what I mean? It's unless it's really bad paint, it's not supposed to work that way. Yeah.
If you do it correctly, It's not something that you're gonna have to go back and revisit often you can set it and forget it.
But those types of technical things are, fixing broken links.
If you've got a link on a page that's leading to another page that does not exist anymore, you need to remove that link.
And then once you remove that link, you have now removed that error and you don't have to worry about it anymore. Yeah.
Another thing that comes up in SEO [00:10:00] audits as the top issue for every person that I've helped so far, is a low word count.
Like thin content on different pages. And I'm coming from a world of e-commerce, so this happens a lot like with product listings.
A lot of people are like, I can't write a 10,000 word blog post for a e-commerce product listing.
But really all you need is 300 words, and these words include everything that's on the page from your menu titles to the notes in the footer to the, the actual text that describes your product.
So all you need is 300 words per page and Google's gonna get off your back about you having thin content.
It looks as that page is someone's put some effort in here, so there's -
[00:10:42] Angie Colee: awesome.
[00:10:42] Crystal Waddell: Those are just a couple examples of technical issues that you can fix that then can take your page score from, maybe like a 50 or 60 on page SEO score to even a hundred.
I've gotten my clients to a hundred on their SEO page scores. To me, technical SEO O [00:11:00] is not something that we have to settle for a low score on, right?
We can own that, get it to a hundred, and then we can focus on the ongoing issues of, new blog posts and OnPage SEO o moving forward, but technical, s e o, you do it right the first time, you can set it and forget it, so go ahead b.
[00:11:17] Brittany Herzberg: And I like that. I'm really glad that you brought that up because that's just brilliant and those are easy fixes. They're low hanging fruit like we like to talk about.
For me, thinking about like on page SEO and things that are ongoing, the very easiest, like simplest thing that I like reminding clients of is that you're gonna continue helping clients or helping students or whatever it may be.
Customers, if you're an e-commerce business, you're going to continue, I hope, getting testimonials and reviews.
And guess what?
You can go and add those things to different pages.
Google and other search engines want to know where the party's at. They want to know who's staying on top of things, who actually seems to know what they're talking about and know what they're helping clients with.
And that minimal activity, it seems so [00:12:00] simple, but I've had that equal success for myself and my clients. I may not have time to go over and write a blog post 1, 2, 3, 4 times a month with my ambitious goal, which I have not hit this year.
But, and what I can do is go change my headline, make, maybe I'm like slightly shifting in my business and instead of helping, actually this is a perfect example.
Instead of just helping health and wellness providers, I'm saying service providers. So I can go and change that on my media page, on my homepage, on my about page and beyond.
So yeah, just think through what are those simple little things you can, changing button copy, making sure that you have the right link in there, just like Crystal was saying.
So yeah, there's some small things that you can do on a somewhat regular basis where Google and other search engines are gonna go, oh, okay. There's something happening over there. What is it?
[00:12:47] Angie Colee: Yeah, that's fascinating. I'm like, looking at my list of questions too. Okay. This is just how my brain works, so you're gonna have to roll with it.
I wrote keyword stuffing in articles and back links. Oh my, it's not really a question. It's true, but,[00:13:00] it's a lot of the words like the buzzwords that I hear floating around in this space.
And I wanna, I don't wanna ask you like what even is all of that, but maybe what even is all of that.
[00:13:10] Crystal Waddell: You, me to go first. Okay. So my short answer is get surfer seo. Surfer seo. If content is something that you wanna get serious about and not have a major headache over, it's a, it's an investment. It's 50 bucks a month or something like that.
But what surfer does for you is it does the keyword research.
And all of the work that you need to do in terms of understanding whether an article will rank for a specific keyword or a keyword topic cluster, it does all of that work for you.
It tells you how many words the article should be.
It tells you how many pictures the article should have to rank.
It tells you the other articles that are ranking for that particular keyword.
So you can go check 'em out, take a look at 'em. Because when you are attempting to rank for [00:14:00] a particular keyword, let's say, like for me, I wanted to rank for wooden letter. A's you know, I wanted to be the person that people go to get a wooden letter a. I need to go look at Google and see, what is already ranking for wooden letter A?
Is that the right keyword that I actually wanna win? And then if it is, what does everybody else have that they're already ranking for?
Surfer bundles this all up into a beautiful package where all of that research is done for you. And then As you should start writing your article, surfer will tell you, Hey, you need to use this particular word this many times so that you don't keyword stuff.
Here are some other keywords that you also need to use because this is what Google or other search engines are looking for when they are looking at an article that ranks for this particular word. So all of those aspects of research and like word count blah, blah, all this stuff, all of that is answered for you.
Now, multimedia is not something that surfer yet supports. But if you have a video, it always makes sense to put it in and link to [00:15:00] it, right?
But get surfer, it'll save you a lot of time and trouble.
It'll answer all of your questions and questions you didn't even know you had, you'll find answers to, and you'll be like, oh, this is so much easier than I thought.
[00:15:14] Brittany Herzberg: The other thing I was gonna add is that we love defining these terms, so you could ask us, or you could go check out the two episodes we have that are called Dictionary episodes, which I've already added the links that'll go in the show notes.
And as terms come up, as things come up, whether you hear us say them on the show or you hear it in like a networking event, or you see it online somewhere.
DM us or send us an email, something like that. Let us know.
And then we can add that to dictionary episode, part three, which we're currently collecting terms for.
So we love answering these things. We love sharing this information with people, and we definitely already have those two episodes.
So let us know what we can do for the third.
[00:15:53] Angie Colee: Awesome. All right. You talked about it a little bit earlier with the different tools, but like how do you figure out what it [00:16:00] is that gets people to find you?
Where do you even start with that? You want me to do it?
[00:16:06] Brittany Herzberg: I love recommending that you go talk to your people. Ask them when they first show up in your world. How did you find me? How did we meet? That's my new favorite way to ask that is like, how did we meet?
Some people will tell me, I searched for, oh gosh. Someone had a good one recently. I don't know, I'm just gonna make it up cuz I can't remember the term. But she said I searched in my podcast player, I think it was Apple Podcast for technical seo. And our show showed up and then she came to me and wanted to work together.
You can ask that, you could, maybe get a response like, oh, sent me your way. I love asking them like, what it is that they want my help to do. So what's their desire?
But I always love going to the source and asking my people, cuz they're gonna have, they're gonna have the non jargony way to tell you what it is they were looking for, and then you can please keep that organized.
I know it's hard, but just throw it in a Google Doc or throw it in a Google sheet or throw it [00:17:00] in a note. If you have a MacBook like I do, just keep track of it in a semi-organized fashion so that you can go back to that when you're trying to do keyword research or even when you're writing copy for whatever.
[00:17:10] Crystal Waddell: Yeah, I was gonna say from an SEO perspective, asking someone who may not know much about what you do is a good question because be said, the non jargony way of saying things is the SEO keyword that you're looking for.
Yeah.
And for example, I make giant photo collages and giant wooden letters over at collageandwood.com and, one of the things that I realized is that most people aren't searching collage letters, or something fancy like that.
They're searching for pictures on wood. Or specifically gifts for boyfriend or photo gifts for boyfriend or something like that.
So once you start looking for those keywords and you find something like that, again, it's gonna be like a light bulb goes off and you're gonna recognize it.
You're gonna [00:18:00] say, that's the thing that people call my thing.
And then once you type that in, you're gonna see a whole bunch of other words come up and phrases and different things, and you're like, oh my gosh, I never would've thought of calling it that, but it makes sense as you see people do that.
And then obviously there are tools available, like keywords everywhere.
It's 10 bucks for a hundred thousand searches, so it's gonna help you find related keywords. There's , Keyword surfer, , so those are like Google Chrome extensions that you can put in that help you find keywords related to what you're searching for. They'll show you how many times people are searching it and that type of information, which really helps you, as you create an SEO strategy for yourself.
[00:18:37] Brittany Herzberg: I totally forgot too, that I love using just Google.
If you just use Google and start to understand the results page and how to actually read the results page, this, it's mind blowing and it's free.
One thing that Crystal does a good job talking about a lot is search intent.
At the very least, type in whatever the key word or key phrase.
Is that you think it might be? Scroll down the page. An [00:19:00] easy example for me is when I had my massage practice open. It's not going anywhere. It's just not open at the moment. People, I had a course, an Instagram marketing course for massage therapists.
That's a very different search term and a place that I'm going to show up for my peers versus this person has a headache and wants it to go away and they're looking for a massage therapist.
So just take a peek down the page. Is this going to attract your peers? Is this going to attract your clients? Just think through is this actually where you want to show up? Is that where your people are going to be?
[00:19:31] Angie Colee: That's such a fascinating differentiation.
And I feel like that came up at a, at an event that I was at last week where this person was a copywriter and they were attracting more copywriters to their trainings than clients.
And we had a little bit of a discussion about, okay, there might be some overthinking here because we just gotta adjust the con, turn it on its side a little bit this way, and you'll be talking to clients instead of copywriters.
So that's fascinating to me. How. Interrelated, like the SEO strategy and the content strategy are. Yeah, and
[00:19:59] Crystal Waddell: just real [00:20:00] quick, on Instagram, I had this happen when I very first started my private Instagram account, when I wanted to start teaching people about seo, even though I didn't know it was SEO that I wanted to teach people about.
But as I started talking about content, again, who I, attracting social media managers and all sorts of other people in that world, The benefit of that. If you are an entrepreneur feeling a little lonely, and you're trying to make friends and build your network and that type of thing, that's a great way to build your network.
Yeah. Yes. Not the best way to find customers, but it's a great way to build your network. I definitely wanted to throw that caveat in there.
[00:20:35] Angie Colee: I love that too.
And I'm a big proponent of your network is a great place to find potential clients and customers.
Because, we covered that right before the show where you were like, this is not a sweary show.
Spoiler alert. My show is a sweary show.
It's like people that don't get along with my brand of, kick behinds, rant this, might get along with Britney and vice versa yeah. Awesome.
[00:20:56] Brittany Herzberg: Yeah. And you also have like referrals in there too. So even if you're [00:21:00] building your network and maybe you don't, I, there's a joke with all of my friends that I have too many business friends already and I don't need to make any more business friends.
However, there's some awesome people out there. Yes. So I just I like having awesome people around.
And guess what, it comes in handy when, like yesterday.
My very first client and a really good friend, I'm writing copy for her and she's okay, I had this web designer, but I don't know that I want this web designer for this new project.
Do you have anyone that works in WordPress? And I was like, hold on, let me consult my digital RO Rolodex.
And I found someone who had helped Nice, Leah, actually our podcast producer for the private podcast. And I was like, I know her work is good. She happens to be in the same state as this client, da.
Here you go.
[00:21:41] Angie Colee: Awesome. I love how that stuff works out too. Yeah. Yeah. There, there's room for all of us. Build that network. Kids.
Another question that I had, and this is I haven't, explored it on other search engines.
Chrome is my main bae there. But I've noticed this happening lately. There's a preponderance of crap [00:22:00] showing up as like the top recommended thing.
The, there's 50 sponsored ads before you get to the real results. And I can't, I wish I could remember the specific thing.
Oh, I was looking, it's gonna be so random. I was looking for, is there a reason why I hate cucumber? There is a reason for people that hate cilantro.
There's a specific genetic thing that makes people hate cilantro. And I was like, Everybody teases me for my hatred of cucumber, but I hate it.
I don't like the smell, I don't like the taste. It is, I like pickles but not cucumbers. And so I was just really curious about is there some sort of like genetic predisposition that means that certain people don't like this?
And the paragraph that it pulled, that featured result thing that it pulls out up front was very useful.
So I click into the article to go read it, and the rest of it was just unrelated garbage that I was like, Okay, I wanted to learn more about this, but the rest of this article doesn't speak to this at all.
Why is this the top result? I don't understand. I don't know what the [00:23:00] question is there, but I've noticed that,
[00:23:02] Crystal Waddell: yeah.
I can't explain it for everything, but the reason why it showed up as a top result is because it answered your question. It provided the solution or the answer to whatever it was that you typed into the search bar, and that essentially answered the question.
Yet, it didn't answer the follow up questions that you had that you're saying, I wanted to learn more, and that type of stuff.
Now, when you think about searching for information on the internet, And especially with the rise of AI generated content, you're gonna experience probably more of this in the future than you ever have because it's just gonna be a lot of very generic content created around these search queries.
Because what's the, what's behind all of it at the end?
It's ad dollars, it's revenue. People are trying to get the click so that they can show their ads on their and that's one of those things I've never enjoyed about reading blogs.
In the past anyway, like recipes, it's like good grief, just gimme the recipe.
I do not want all this other stuff.
Not to mention that [00:24:00] virus that you just gave me.... but I think that's just gonna be the challenge of the future is really finding the thing that is quality that, that continues to answer your question, but I think that's the reason why it showed up, because it answered your initial question, and that's about all it did.
[00:24:17] Angie Colee: Yeah. It did send me down an interesting rabbit hole where apparently, so I also hate melon, and apparently those two things are correlated.
Oh. Something about the watery content and the texture or something like that is just, there was a lot of that and I found that interesting and reassuring that I wasn't the only one.
Yeah. Yeah.
[00:24:35] Crystal Waddell: I, and I think it comes back to the, the idea that like, okay, if you have a follow up question, rather than maybe going into that article, especially if you click in an article and you're like, this is garbage. Just going back and then reentering your question, to get a better answer for that next question.
[00:24:50] Angie Colee: Yeah, that almost seems what's happening with ai. Cause I work with a lot of folks in marketing and copywriting that are paranoid about it and I keep saying I think the big flaw with [00:25:00] AI is still gonna be people. Yeah.
A whole bunch of people that think that they can outsource to AI are about to find out that they suck at giving feedback.
Yeah. And prompting. They do. Yeah.
[00:25:09] Brittany Herzberg: Yeah. And I've talked about this on the show before. I have several more than one client where the client has been given AI generated copy and there was not a person who went back to edit it or to look through it or proofread or whatever we wanna call it.
So it, it read like AI copywriting and it just makes me like giant face palm.
Could you please care for 10 minutes and just go back? Yeah. And make it like look a little bit prettier. That's just, that's all I'm asking for.
But I also think that there was an update last year with, Google for helpful content.
It was the helpful content update. We did a podcast on it. And really what that is all about is making sure that the content you put out is actually helping the people do the thing they wanna do. As a business owner, if you are gonna think about putting out content, Think through all the different things, all the different steps that someone is going [00:26:00] to be like, what are their lists of questions?
Use as your headlines, walk them through this process. Whatever it may be. Your 10 tips for whatever your process for this, your case study, whatever it may be.
Just make sure that it is helpful.
[00:26:11] Angie Colee: Love it. That's fantastic. What does it look like to do an SEO overhaul of a site? I know that's an abstract since so many sites are different. You got single pagers, you got 500 pagers and stuff like that.
But if I was thinking about doing an overhaul of my site, what does that even look like?
How does that start?
[00:26:31] Crystal Waddell: Oh, I love this question.
So I think the first thing that, we talked about earlier is just doing an SEO audit. Because you've gotta fix those technical details.
And that will also help give you an idea of what your site is already being known for.
The SEO strategy that you already created unbeknownst to you.
And so you can decide, okay, do I wanna stick with it or no? And then the other thing is, You can export a list of your pages from most SEO audits, [00:27:00] and I always say give every page a job.
So if you know what you want to be known for, and let's just say it's SEO copywriting. Or whatever, then that means that one page of your website, the slug, the piece after the backslash or slash whichever, you know, way you listen.
I it one of them. Yeah, you want it to say, something about SEO dash copywriter and then another related keyword for another page could be something like, SEO tips for copywriting or whatever, but you want all of these slugs, all of these URLs to point to that thing that you wanna be known for and give every page a job and give every page an opportunity to be found by someone who's looking for what you sell. And so then, so that's the first thing I would do is I'd run an SEO audit.
Number two is I would get, give every page a job. And then number [00:28:00] three, I would attack that thing with content, and I would find, okay, if I wanna be known for SEO o copywriter, I'm gonna put that into surfer and I'm gonna choose the top five to 10 articles or whatever that support this thing that I wanna be known for.
And I'm gonna write those articles and I'm gonna add links between the articles.
I'm gonna add links from the articles to my services, and I'm gonna show Google. I'm gonna train Google how to, crawl my site as they're looking for an s e o copywriter to recommend to someone searching for me. And so those are, that, those are the three steps that I would do SEO o audit, give every page a job, and then make a content plan that supports the site.
[00:28:46] Brittany Herzberg: I like your three, and my three are very similar. This is what I actually did with my website when I was going from massage therapy, a hundred percent on the website to copywriting a hundred percent on the website.
I updated my SEO titles and meta descriptions because [00:29:00] one thing that we find with the SEO audits a lot of times is there's either no SEO title and meta-description, or there are duplicate SEO titles and meta descriptions.
So if you find that you're not doing anything wrong, often what happens is I duplicated a services page or I duplicated a blog and it just copied over all that information.
But once you know the keywords that you wanna rank for and you have somewhat of a strategy and to Crystal's point what you, what job each page has.
If you can take this back to optimize those pages with an updated SEO title and meta-description, you can also then keep that in mind as you're rolling forward and you just know exactly what goes where and how to do it.
The other thing that I did was I updated my image titles.
This is a bit of a pain in the tush, but it's totally worth it because I now have images that rank in Google searches that get me found by people.
And my clients have actually seen this stuff and they're like, oh my gosh, you were over here in the images.
I'm like, I know. It's really cool.
So what you have to do is, and I actually have a freebie and I think Crystal has a freebie for econ people about what to do with [00:30:00] OnPage seo, but with titles for images, before you bring the image into your website, you want to up update the title there and then bring it into your website.
So I might have had I G 3 4 56, but I updated it to Brittany Herberg SEO Copywriter. And then I pulled the picture in.
And that's been working very well for me. And also don't forget the alt text there, not only for people who are visually impaired, like my friend Robbie, and I always like giving a shout out to Robbie.
But for just, and it's an SEO opportunity. It's a place that you can have keywords. And lastly, my third thing would be with the content. Definitely hit it with content, because that's gonna be, again, training Google, who you are, who you help, how you help them, what's the party that's happening over on your corner of the website.
So to recap, update the SEO titles and meta descriptions and then keep that in mind as you are moving forward. Update your image titles outside of your website. Pull those new images with the updated titles and alt text into your website, and [00:31:00] then hit it with content.
[00:31:01] Angie Colee: Awesome. This all sounds fascinating and, slightly bit overwhelming.
[00:31:06] Brittany Herzberg: One step at a time.
[00:31:07] Angie Colee: Yes. That's I always have to remind myself that because I think systems and steps and stuff like that, these projects balloon in my head fairly quickly.
Related to that, what's a quick win that I could do to get started today?
[00:31:19] Crystal Waddell: That's what I was gonna say. The quick win is technical SEO is running an audit. Yeah. And seeing what's going on your website.
Because if you have a broken link that you can fix today, just by removing the link, or the hyper, the color of the text and just saying this, just removing the link and making it all the same color, so it's just a paragraph or whatever.
That is a quick win. Because think about it this way.
If Google comes to your site and sees a bunch of broken links, they're gonna think this is a site that doesn't really pay attention to the user experience.
This is a site that doesn't really take itself very seriously and therefore [00:32:00] we're gonna take it less seriously.
And the more errors that they run into the lower your credibility drops. So in the SEO world, there's this concept of something called domain authority, and it's something that was created by Moz and domain authority is basically the score that even though it's not from Google, it's from Moz, but the score that Google or search engine would give you on a scale of zero to a hundred.
A good score for a small business website is about 15. A good score for a walmart.com or amazon.com, or even Google Search console is anywhere to 70, 80, 90. Okay.
So it's really difficult to get those really high scores if you're not a huge corporation, but technical SEO, fixing broken links, increasing the number of words on your page, making sure that every page has a title.
That it has a description.
Those are the things that show Google that, hey, someone knows what they're doing here. This is a legitimate domain [00:33:00] on the internet that we can confidently recommend to other people. So that's the low hanging fruit.
[00:33:06] Brittany Herzberg: I second that. Awesome.
And I would say to help you start thinking through like where you want to go and what you want to be ranking for, and what you want to show up for is to actually think through who are you? How are you helping people?
Who are your people? What do you wanna be known for? If you can think through those things that will help point you in the right direction to then do keyword research to then create an SEO strategy.
But definitely start with technical SEO and then think through okay, this is where I'm at.
Where do I wanna go?
[00:33:35] Angie Colee: Yeah, and that's also reassuring too because of course, like I'm an overachiever kind of slightly more type A than I'd like to admit to.
So you give me a score from one to a hundred and what am I gonna do?
I'm gonna aim for a hundred. Thank you.
So it's really reassuring to know that like most other small business, most other people that are playing in my area that are not at Walmart are hovering around 15.
Cool. I can aim for 15.
That seems a [00:34:00] lot less intimidating.
[00:34:01] Brittany Herzberg: It is. Yeah. And that was one of the thoughts that I had when we started learning about seo, it was like, yeah. Okay.
[00:34:06] Crystal Waddell: So now that you've heard us tell you what we know and what we think, why don't you create your own path? Tell us what you're going to do or what, in a perfect world, if you could, what is your path?
[00:34:20] Angie Colee: I think this is all super timely because I'm in the middle of pivoting. It's only slightly, but like repositioning my service offering from being about teaching marketing to being about teaching communications and so technical audit seems like the first step to go to fix the broken links.
I know for a fact I don't have titles and descriptions on most of my pages, cuz it's just never something I even thought about.
So yeah, those seem like good first steps and I was already in process of figuring out a pre-launch plan to help grow the email list and attract more of these people that were interested in solving these problems to me.
So it's all [00:35:00] super timely.
[00:35:01] Brittany Herzberg: I love that. That was a good question, crystal. Yeah. Thank you.
[00:35:04] Angie Colee: That's a little bit, I know. Put me on the spot, like a little bit of the gears burning, but it's happening. It's good. Yeah.
[00:35:10] Brittany Herzberg: We do want to, of course, point people toward you. So where can people go and find you on the interwebs?
[00:35:16] Angie Colee: It's permission to kick butt.com, but it's not butt, it's the other word. There you go.
And we'll have the link. Yeah.
[00:35:23] Brittany Herzberg: Yeah. I learned recently because Crystal told me that even if there's one sweary word on a podcast, like it marks the whole thing as explicit. Which I was like, what really? Yeah, the link will be down below.
[00:35:35] Angie Colee: Mine's got that designation, but I use a lot of, fun sweary words.
Sometimes f bombs just make the point that you need to make so eloquently so...
[00:35:45] Brittany Herzberg: they do. I agree. Yeah.
But definitely all of Angie's stuff is gonna be in the show notes. Go find her, go follow her.
She's got some really cool stuff coming out.
Some stuff I know about, some stuff I don't know that I know about, but it's gonna be awesome.
I will say one of the [00:36:00] coolest things that Chris, that I was gonna say, crystal. No, not you, that Angie has helped me. You've done other cool stuff, don't do the sad face that Angie has helped even me with, or I've seen it come up is, I'll take myself, for example, I get an email from someone and it is disappointing or it is frustrating.
I and my like touristy fiery self, which people are always surprised that I have inside me, and yet I definitely have it inside me is wants to pounce on it. So I'm like, Nope, we're gonna leave that unread. We're gonna walk over here. We're gonna think through what's actually happening and then we're gonna Voxer, Angie, because she helps me navigate.
I think there was like a specific time that you helped me navigate something, or maybe I shared it with you after and I was like, did I goof? Did I do a good job? And you're like, no, this was pretty cool, and next time da could happen. So yeah, she's amazing in those situations.
[00:36:48] Angie Colee: Hi. Thank you. I love helping people, that stuff.
So yes, definitely reach out to we, we can work on that. Yeah.
[00:36:56] Crystal Waddell: Awesome. Thank you guys for joining us today. We look forward to [00:37:00] hearing your thoughts and questions. And we'll see you next time on the Simple and Smart SEO Show Podcast.
[00:37:05] Brittany Herzberg: Bye
[00:37:06] Angie Colee: bye.
