SEO Simplified in 30 Minutes

SEO Simplified in 30 Minutes

So let's get right into it. We're going to cover a lot of material and the whole point of this is to not overwhelm. It's basically to point out the essential fundamentals of SEO, search engine optimization, for people who may consider themselves complete novices or even intermediate folks. So we're going to cover, like, 80% of what you should be doing in SEO and we're going to leave the complicated technical SEO, 20%, for another webinar. Let's get right into it.

First, why are we here? We're here to grow your revenue. 70% of people look up a business online to check out before they become a visitor. We want to make sure that you're showing up on page 1 of Google. What are we going to talk about? SEO fundamentals. We're going to talk about four words that will change your life.

We're going to talk about link building, and we're going to talk about what you should be doing now. You'll be hearing a lot about that as we go through here.

Let's start off with what I say is the problem with SEO, and it begins with the acronym, SEO, search engine optimization. We're really not opt Timmizing search engines. We're optimizing your website so that you show up. What you see here, the first page of search results for SEO easy, whatever that search is, and you see that those are organic listings, not paid. And our goal is to be on that page with whatever product or service that you sell.

So the four words that will change your life: They ask, you answer. You're going to hear me talk about that a lot because that is the essence of SEO. If you have a product or service that people are searching for and they have a question, they're typing into Google, what is such and such or where do I find a plumber or whatever, if you provide that product or service, then put up a piece of content in the way of a blog post on your website and then promote it throughout social media. That's really the fundamentals. Like, if you can just get into a rhythm of providing content based on the questions people ask, you're 80% of the way

there with SEO.

So how do we get on page 1 of Google? Keyword research, which is going to inform or guide you to what kind of content to publish. Publishing that content. Promoting via social media. And building trust. Building trust not only with the people who are coming to your website and learning about your business, but building trust

with Google. If Google sees you're putting up content on a regular basis and people are linking to it or sharing it, that helps in your ranking to page 1. So Google has this algorithm that has about 200 variables in it. They change it once a day, they're always tweaking it. Think about that, 200 variables in their algorithm. We know the top several, and I'll talk about those in a minute, but the main thing is that they want to see that people are linking to you and people are staying on your site and getting some good information.

So before we get into the three steps of keyword research, which is where we want to start, I want to send out this survey which will take 30 seconds for you to fill out. I'm going to give you 30 to 60 seconds to just answer these five questions, just so I get a pulse as to who is out there and what kind of questions might come up. .

And I'm looking at your questions that are coming in, and, you know, one of them I'm seeing over and over is about posting in social media. How does that help in terms of SEO? And I'm going to -- I'll jump ahead and answer that question first. I'll just let these answers come in and then we'll look at that a little later. So just

to answer that question about social posting, especially if you're posting on LinkedIn, the question is should I be posting on LinkedIn over my blog, here's the answer: Always put information and content in the way of a blog post and ideally add a video piece to that as well, and then promote it in social media. Now, social media posting doesn't necessarily help with SEO unless, and this is the kicker, people see a post or a link to one of your articles. And then they link to you. So it's those links that you get that are important for SEO, and you get those links by being active in social media. So the answer is, publish your content and then post on all of the major social media platforms. That means not only your LinkedIn page, but create a LinkedIn business page, create a Facebook business page, have a Google my business listing. And I'll review this all later, too. Have a Twitter account. Have an Instagram account. And post to all of those platforms regarding the new content that you just put up.

So in terms of keyword research, we want to find the keywords that are important, that you have a chance of showing up on page 1 for. We analyze that keyword list after we do this research, and I'll show you some tools to do that, and then you use those keywords. Again, you use them in your blog posts and in your social media

language as well.

So some of the tools, SEMrush is a great tee word research tool. I didn't want to start off with a paid tool initially. Do have some free ones, too, but SEMrush is one of the best out there, so it's worth playing around. You get results like this. Let's say you have a window cleaning product or service. You type in window cleaning and it's going to give you these results. It's going to show you how many monthly searchs, how many people are searching for this term every month. But importantly in this third column is the trend line which shows how popular that keyword is. So sometimes you'll see if it's on a downward trend, well, maybe I

don't want to write about that. Also, we look at keyword difficulty, and a lot of these keyword tools have a keyword difficulty ranking. From one to a hundred. So you want to pick keywords that are on the lower end of that scale.

So in this case, we see homemade window cleaner. So if you have a window cleaning service or a product, create content around homemade window cleaner as an example, because the keyword difficulty isn't terrible. Even better is window cleaning services. So this is just to give you an idea, when you look at

keyword research, you're looking at volume, the trend line, and the keyword difficulty. Then you pick 10 or 20 to start publishing content on.

Then the keyword research tools, this is fun, and it's called answerthepublic,.com, and I know you can't read these words because when you log in and play around with this, you're going to love it. It will give you the main -- it's kind of in a spoke, a wheel diagram here where you'll see the root word and then all of these offshoots related to the hows, whys, what, where, of that term. And by color coding or gradient it will show you which keywords are more popular or which ones you should focus on. So just go in to answerthepublic and you're going to love it. Another one you're going to love is LSIgraph.com. What are we doing again?

We're using these tools to find what are people searching for that's related to what I sell, whether it's a service or a product, and it will give you an idea as to what you should be publishing about. And then I'm going to talk about how you should tag your pages. In other words, putting meta tags on your page so that Google gets a signal. You're sending a signal to Google through these meta tags. We'll get to that in a minute.

Here's another from LSIgraph. This is just a window cleaner product. So in this case if you made a window cleaner product, all right, so people are searching for outdoor window cleaner, they're looking for homemade window cleaner with jet dry. Best window cleaner product. No-wipe window cleaner. So look, 720 people, the trend line is pretty strong, no-wipe window cleaner. Who would know that? Now you have a phrase to write content around because now when you have that phrase in your blog post and you have your meta tags that reference that keyword, phrase, Google is going to see, oh, let me put them on page one because not many other people are doing it. So that's just a way to kind of prioritize your content and the topics that you write about. So also under LSIgraph, we have -- this is for a window cleaning service company, so you'll see the searchs are a little different, the language is a little different. So this is, all right, I clean windows for residential and commercial. You get an idea as to how many people are searching. Well, you see a lot more people are searching residential than commercial. So if you serve both markets, start focusing on residential

services. You see this trend line. Is that because of COVID? Maybe because people are home and seeing the dirty windows and they're googling to find a house window cleaning service.

Another tool, Google trends. Everyone loves Google trends. Great, simple tool. In this case I entered in CBD. A very popular, hot product right now. People use CBD for all sorts of remedies, whether it's to help sleep, pain or anxiety. Whatever it is. And you can see a trend line that was really going up up until the beginning of

the year and then there's been sort of a leveling off. So this could kind of inform whether you want to write or start a business around CBD. Maybe if that trend line was just shooting up like a hockey stick, yeah, jump on board. Right now you have to really think, do I have the right product? What differentiates me? Before you go forward.

Other keyword research tools. Ubersuggest.

A free tool. Great. Keywordtool tool. Great. Keywordtool .io. The others cost between 50 and a hundred dollars a month, but depending on what you're doing, but MOZ, Spyfu, Ahrefs, might be the best on the market, a little pricey, around 125 a month. And also wordstream. Another keyword tool, and this is something you see every day when you're doing a search in Google. People also ask, when you do a search in Google, Google will show this box here, it says "People also ask." Look at this tool here. This is a popular phrase, and if people are asking these questions and it's related to your product or service, then certainly put up content around these terms here.

What else does Google give us? Auto suggest. You did a search, keyword research, Google will also suggest the other popular terms. Write them down, put up content around those if that's what your product or service is about.

A keyword gap analysis is a good idea for -- now, this is where you might want to hire an SEO person because what's going on here is you're running an audit of your competitor's websites, okay, and you're seeing what keywords they're ranking for that you're not ranking for. And then what you want to do is create content around those keywords. Okay? So, again, think about that. If I'm competing with somebody and they're ranking for all of these other keywords, which you can find in all of these tools I just showed you, especially those paid tools, like Ahrefs or SEMrush, you can look and see what keywords they're ranking for. If

you say, hey, I'm a competitor for them but I'm not ranking for any of these terms, I don't show up on page one or two for any of these terms, well, then you start creating content around those terms.

Other tools. I'm almost done with my list of tools here. If you have a wordpress site, you must have the SEO plug gin called Yoast. No-brainer. The Rolls-Royce of SEO plug gins. Get that installed in wordpress and it's a very simple three-box form fill. You put in your title, your meta title of post, the description of the post and then what the keyword is you're trying to focus on for that page. So Yoast is a fabulous tool. Something more technical is something called structured data markup and you'll find this at schema.org, anyway, too complicated for 90% of us to care about in this webinar today, but if you go to SchemaApp.com, they basically make it simple for you and it allows you to add an extra layer of signals or meta tags on your site which signal to Google what your site is about. It's just another way in addition to meta tags that you're

putting on your site.