Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Ep. 5: SEO Basics for Small Businesses
33 Plays1 year ago
This week Chloe and Darci walk listeners through the basics of SEO (search engine optimization) or how to ensure your business is discoverable through search.
For small businesses, every audience member matters and showing up in search results is a great way to generate organic traffic to your website.
But confusing algorithms and complicated tools can make SEO seem scary or overwhelming. Well, Chloe and Darci are here to show you it really doesn’t have to be.
If you’re a small business owner seeking a simple, intuitive approach to SEO, you won’t want to miss this episode!
Resources mentioned in this episode include:
Solarwinds Pingdom (page speed test)
TinyPNG (Image compression for web use)
Follow Brand Jam:
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/brandjampod/
Threads https://www.threads.net/@brandjampod
Website https://www.brandjampod.com
Follow Chloe at Chloe Arielle Design:
Website https://www.chloearielle.com/
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/chloearielle
Threads https://www.threads.net/@chloearielle
Follow Darci at Sweet Tooth Creative
Website https://sweettoothcreative.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Brand Jam
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to Brand Jam, the brand strategy podcast for colorful and compassionate brands. I'm Darcy, the candy-fueled copywriter behind Sweet Tooth Creative. And I'm Chloe, owner of Conscious Design Studio, Chloe Ariel Design. On the show, we'll be talking about what it's really like to build a brand from scratch when you're a business of one. And how to find what works for you so you can create a brand that grows with your business without burning
Embracing Business Diversity
00:00:25
Speaker
yourself out. At Brand Jam, we believe there's no one right way to be, and embracing our differences enhances the experience for everyone. So if you're a fan of bold flavored branding and are trying to do business better, come hang out. We're so glad you're here.
00:00:41
Speaker
We're trying to save you the mess of having to do
SEO Success for New Businesses
00:00:44
Speaker
it all at once. If you do it as you're building, it's a lot easier. Don't assume that because you're new, you can't rank. You absolutely can.
00:00:57
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Brand Jam, episode five. Today we're going to be talking about SEO, which stands for search engine optimization. Basically, will you show up if people are searching for what you offer? SEO is really great because so a lot of people are scared of SEO. They find it overwhelming and it can be when you get really deep into it or you use the hyper specific tools. There's a lot to it, but there's also a certain amount of ah SEO that can be instinctual. You can base your strategy just off of knowledge that you already have. And that's what we're going to be talking about today because I am not an SEO expert. um I have had some SEO success from this strategy of, you know, kind of intuitive ah SEO and just thinking about what the search engine wants rather than really getting into the nitty gritty of
00:01:53
Speaker
computers and analytics and all that, because this is something you can build in to your brand as you are building
SEO Simplification and Strategy
00:02:01
Speaker
it. This kind of basic intuitive strategy is what we're going to be talking about today. Yeah. And I'm also not an expert SEO. I know some things about it. I would not call myself an expert, but something about SEO is that it is kind of a long game. So it is something that you want to start including at the start, start building that history, I guess. Exactly. And just you know imperfect action and doing what you can and continuing to improve on that over time. But the things we're going to talk about today are things that you know you should be able to implement early on and that it's kind of a pain in the butt if you have to go back in and add later.
00:02:41
Speaker
So it is worth taking the time to make a little bit of an extra effort now as you build, rather than coming back in and trying to repair. So SEO can come into play on things like social media, but for the purposes of this episode, and when you're just starting off building a brand, we're really going to be talking about SEO in terms of your website. You know, how can we make it so that if people are looking for what you offer, They type a little query into Google and you show up on the first page. Like Chloe said, it's a long game strategy. It's not going to happen on the first day, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't spend some energy trying to make it happen. Yeah. If you just started your website, you might find that when you Google the exact name of your business, like it it's not even on the first page. And that usually takes a little bit of time to adjust. Um, and yeah, optimizing things will help that.
00:03:37
Speaker
Okay, so let's pretend I've just started my business. I've just started my website. What is the first thing that you would have me tackle for SEO? So the first thing I would look at would be to choose your keywords and you can use a keyword tool, but for the purposes of this exercise and for, you know, when you are just starting to build this into your strategy, keep it really simple. What do you offer, you know, or who are you trying to attract and and what are they searching for? Put yourself in your,
00:04:08
Speaker
ideal client's shoes, your audience's shoes. What are they looking for? What problems are they trying to solve? What questions are they asking Google? What services are they looking for? And what are the main terms in those Google queries? Whatever they are, pick a couple of terms and just you're going to want to keep those on hand and you're going to use them in a couple of different places, which we will get to. But that's kind of the, the start of your SEO strategy is what do you want to write for in the first place?
Crafting Effective SEO Elements
00:04:41
Speaker
Okay, so once we have our keywords figured out, what do we do with them, Darcy? So you're going to use them in a couple of different places. The first place is the page title. Now the page title is like go up to the top of your browser right now and look at the 18 million tabs. You probably have open if you're anything like me. me The words on that tab, that's your page title. You want to use your keywords in there, preferably first. A lot of people will tend to put their business name or website name first, but the search engine likes it better if you put the keyword first. So like, I think I'd have to look, I don't remember off the top of my head, but the page title for my website for the homepage says, copywriting and brand strategy.
00:05:30
Speaker
And then I have a separator and then it says sweet tooth creative. Interesting. And on Squarespace, they actually have, that's where I do my website design is with Squarespace. They have an option to do that separately too. So you could have a page title that appears like in the tab, and then you can also have a separate ah SEO page title that will show up on Google. Oh, interesting. Yeah, it just depends on how your, um, I mean, some will have like a website title and default to that. So it just depends, but in general, whatever platform you do use should show you a preview of what's going to show up where. And so whatever showing up in the tab or in the Google results or
00:06:12
Speaker
both, like mine, what I see in the tab is the same as what is going to show up in a Google search. When it decides that my page answers their query, it's going to say, copywriting and brand strategy, separator, sweet tooth, creative. And then below that, it's going to have like a little blur for the page. But basically that's the very first place you should be putting your keywords. Okay, but you don't want to cram 1000 keywords in there, right? Is there a? No, this is just your primary keyword for that page. No keyword stuffing. It is not a human, so you do still need to remember that it's a machine and see that information accordingly.
00:06:51
Speaker
But you don't want to overstuff. I think that it's always worth remembering that you don't want it to feel forced. Like mine says copywriting and brand strategy and then my business name. But if I was like copywriting and brand voice strategy for, you know, conscious of entrepreneurs, whatever, like trying to do too much in there, it's just too much. It's a little tab, especially if you're like me and you have 18 million of them open, the tabs get smaller. So prioritize. Put your main keyword for the page in the title. So your page title should be 30 to 60 characters, clear and descriptive. That's it. I say that's it. I do not mean that's the only place you're going to use it, but that's all you need to write that.
00:07:36
Speaker
Okay. What's the next then? What's the next place? Your meta description, which is the blurb that shows up on a search results page under your page title, you have more characters. It's 155, approximately give or take five. So usually that's one to two sentences, maybe three if they're really short. And that is going to be just kind of like an enticing summary of your page's content. Like what are they finding on that page? And you want to work your keywords in there, but again, you don't want to stuff it. It shouldn't feel forced. You're aiming for a clear, appealing description. So, and your keywords should fit into that naturally. Okay. So at this point with the description, is it a case of it's better to be clear than cute or do we want to use personality language, brand voice language in there or what is your recommendation?
00:08:32
Speaker
I mean, you always want clear to come before clever, but it's not that, like sometimes, like with, you know, alt text, sometimes it's really better to not have your brand voice in it. That's not the case here. You can have your brand voice in it. I think use your brand voice, but remember that people are scanning. When when they're reading this, they are scanning it. They're not fully hooked into your page yet. You are on one of many results. And so you do want to entice them and maybe stand out, but you don't, not at the risk of confusing them or overwhelming them. Makes sense. Okay. So we have our keywords, we have our our page title, our meta description. We're actually starting to build the website now. So where on the page specifically are we actually incorporating those keywords?
00:09:23
Speaker
Okay, so you do want to incorporate it throughout. um You don't want to stuff it like way back in the day you used to be able to hide like invisible keywords and fool the algorithm. It's not like that anymore. You still want it to fit in naturally and you do want it to be throughout the page. But the most important place to put your most important keyword would be in your H1 tag, which is usually going to be the title at the top of the page, but not always. Can you explain a little bit about H1 tags for design? Yeah. So from like a website design perspective, each time you're you're making decisions about your design, right? You're choosing your fonts you're going to use and you're assigning them a category. And those categories are usually
00:10:11
Speaker
they different forms of headings and paragraphs. So there would be h1 is like heading one that's usually the most important one, h2, h3 it goes on however many your platform lets you and then there's the same with paragraphs there's usually a p1, p2, p3 something like that. And so the way that this works on the back end in the code is that every time you assign again from the design perspective a style to those in the code it will show a tag which is like that the h1 or the p for paragraph and it will that tells them the the internet the algorithm all of the machines what kind of content that is
00:10:50
Speaker
Darcy, if you want to talk a little bit more about how that plays into SEO. So basically in terms of SEO, the heading tags help the algorithm understand how important different parts of the page are because the human brain can read the page and gather the full context, algorithm doesn't do it quite as well. And so it helps to give it some additional help by saying, hey, this is important. So I tagged it H1, this is the most important information on this page. You know, H2, these things are important too, but the most important place to have it is that H1 tag and then some of your H2 tags, because you should really only have one for SEO purposes, one H1 heading per page.
00:11:35
Speaker
Okay. So you mentioned it's best to have, you know, only one H1 heading per page, but how does that play out for the the rest of
Content Performance and Competitor Analysis
00:11:44
Speaker
it? Do you get penalized for longer or shorter? Is that a good thing? In general, longer. page length, higher word counts, do better in search because it just is more information. And the algorithm's like, hey, this has more information, so it's more helpful. But that's very, very basic. If you just have a wall of text on your page, it's not going to run for search.
00:12:09
Speaker
Um, so it is still important that you're making sure that it's clear, easy to read. It's actually helpful. It's not fluff, but yeah, my favorite way to, and this is how like I end up ranking first for certain terms to kind of figure out what the algorithm wants is to, to pick the keywords, pop them into Google and then go through every result on the, on the first page. Sometimes I'll go into the second page. Um, if it's a high competition. phrase but I go through the first 10 results or however I mean I think they stopped doing pages now so it just scrolls endlessly. Go through the first 10 to 20 results depending on how much competition there it feels like there is. Like if you see a bunch of recognizable names ranking for this term it's high competition. That's an easy way to know without using a tool. If
00:13:02
Speaker
You don't, if you see like smaller brand names that maybe you're you've never heard of before ranking for it, it's probably lower competition. But click on each of them, scan through it. I have a whole system where like I actually, I will go through each one and kind of do a basic outline of what they cover. if Like if it's a blog post or it's a services page or whatever, every section or point that they hit, I mark down. And then I go to the next one and I make sure that it has all those points. And if there's anything that's not on my list yet, I add it repeat for results three to 10.
00:13:39
Speaker
And by the end of it, you will have a list of all the points you need to cover to be better than everybody that's ranking right now. So that's my SEO hack. Wow. You've blown my mind. Wow. That's such, I'm going to do that. Uh, yeah. Wow. That's such a good idea. Yeah. I mean, I. You can use some fancy tools, but I'm just in favor of not. Yeah. And you could even go, well, one nerdy step further and look at the code and like, look at the, which just like search for their H one tags, which in my nerdy code brain, that is a very, very good point. It would not have occurred to me to do that. We need to.
00:14:24
Speaker
I think we might need to combine our SEO superpowers. I think we do. oh I'm like, I'm having ideas now. So yeah. Yeah. But yeah, if you make sure that be ultimately the search engine is designed to give them the most helpful page. So if you don't have great design, if it's hard to read and, or if the information is fluffy or or just non-existent, it's not going to return. But if you make sure you're putting value on that page, you're outlining it in the ways that we've talked about so that it's accessible, so that it's easy to process, easy to consume. And then you do these things where you pick keywords, use them in your title, use them in your meta description, sprinkle them throughout, making sure you hit that H1. And
00:15:17
Speaker
you make sure that your page outdoes the current 10 rankings. You will rank. So, I mean, you do not have to be a big household brand to rank. Yeah. Or have 10 years worth of blog posts. yeah Yeah. Which some people say. There is like, there is an authority aspect to it where the age of your website the amount of backlinks, which means um other people have a link to your site on theirs, whether they're sharing a blog post that you wrote or they link to you for some other reason. That all tells the algorithm that you're trustworthy and that doesn't matter.
00:15:57
Speaker
But I have ranked first against big names for a term like without any of that, with a ah site that was brand new, that had no backlinks. So in my opinion, as important as great as authority is, and it can really help you, and it's worth taking the time to pursue when you have it once you've got your brand launched. Don't assume that because you're new, you can't rank. You you absolutely can Yeah, that's really good to hear because I feel like I hear a lot that it's going to take years sometimes even, people say, for ranking to happen. but Yeah, the the only time that I would say that you like really might have to wait to see results, I mean, you will always see better results with time. But the only time that, like if you if you even if you check all the boxes that I mentioned that you might
00:16:51
Speaker
just have to wait is if you do have like a bad history on your site of like scammy backlinks something if you've I don't like basically black hat SEO which is kind of the tricky SEO the not actually giving it what it wants but hacking it then that could work against you but just because you're new just because you're a new brand or you just built your first website It doesn't mean you won't rank.
Optimizing Page Load and Mobile Experience
00:17:18
Speaker
And the final super important like thing to consider for SEO from the get-go is once you had built your site and launched it, is your load time, your page load time. um And this is kind of this is the first thing that someone coming from Search will bump into, but it's kind of the last thing you need to implement in terms of
00:17:44
Speaker
if you're just starting your site. But you want to make sure that your page loads quickly. The algorithm cares if your page loads quickly. And then on top of that, even if you get traffic from search and your page doesn't load quickly, you're going to lose that traffic before they you know even have a chance to really see your page because people are impatient. Yeah. So there are there are tools we'll drop a link in the show notes, but where you can test it, but in general, like I i say the five second rule. I can't remember if it's three or eight seconds. I say the five second rule because I like it. It's easy to remember. I mean, yeah, you think about when you're on someone's website, if it's taking forever to load, I mean, I usually assume it's my phone's problem, but if it's taking a long time, like I'm not, I'm probably not going to stick around for a super long time. So you just think about your own attention span and what that is.
00:18:42
Speaker
And mine is low. Exactly. There's plenty of options and people don't have to wait. So it's just it's super important that you make sure that you do have a decent load time. And and Chloe, you can probably speak to so the main things that affect that are more on the design side. So how do we have a fast load time? um I mean, one of the easiest ways to improve your load time is so Phones are crazy these days. They take really high quality photos, which is really nice, but they're also huge files. So you're going to want to edit those down in size a bit, either or both by cropping or literally changing the file size, which will put a link to places. you do I do it in Photoshop, but there are other places you can do it that are not Photoshop because you want the image size, I believe the optimal page. I mean, I'm sure this changes all the time.
00:19:34
Speaker
But you don't want your page to have more than I think two megabytes of storage or image storage at a time. So you want each image to definitely be under. one megabyte and smaller if you can. Now I, one thing I struggled with because load time, you know, as someone who's not a designer, I wasn't thinking about this at the time. And then I tested my load time and was like, okay, I got to go back and fix it, which is why we're telling you, but Chloe, maybe I needed you back then. Do I want to use, I ran into where like I was having a hard time getting the image quality I wanted without affecting my load time.
00:20:13
Speaker
So for that, you, you want to use JPEGs because PNGs are too heavy, don't you? Or do you want to use PNGs some, only if it's like a really big area or what? Yeah. I mean, I think as most things, it depends on the situation for most images, like your brand photos, things like that. You're probably going to go with the JPEG just because those do have a smaller. footprint, then PNGs are generally very high quality. Um, like you'll use PNGs for your Instagram posts and things like that, but JPEGs tend to save more compressed. On the other hand, if you are trying to upload or add a, like a cutout image with a transparent background.
00:20:59
Speaker
you're going to have to use a PNG. g So in that case, you would just crop it as close as you can or like make the size smaller. Generally, like for a website, if it's going to be a background image, usually at 1500 to 2000 pixels is good for it to reach across the whole page, like fill the page. And then all of your other images are going to be smaller than that. So sizing them down, I guess, accordingly. basically prioritize and use the heavier files as sparingly as possible, right? Yeah, pretty much. And if you're using things that are just like purely graphics, like an illustration or something from Canva, those tend to, they don't have as much information on the back end as a photograph does. They're much simpler. And so they take up a lot less space. So you can save those at larger sizes, not necessarily that you need to, but you
00:21:55
Speaker
can probably can, and it will still be only a couple kilobytes or something like that. It would be a pretty small file size. Got it. Any other tips for kind of load time and and the design side of SEO? Because I know mobile optimization plays a role, like the algorithm is going to check and make sure that they return a result that's going to work on different types of screens. So how do you factor that into your design? Because mobile optimization is my downfall. Yeah, be it's important. I mean, and especially if you are marketing on Instagram, people are clicking on your link through your link in bio. So it's a really important, sometimes more important for people have their website mobile optimized one way to check to see what your
00:22:46
Speaker
website is looking like. is There's an extension. I mean, it's just part of Chrome, if you use Chrome. And you can just go to View, and then to Developer, and then to Developer Tools. And it's going to pop up this scary code thing. But it's not scary. It's OK. And then and the may have changed it but on the upper left-hand corner of the box that pops up, there's a little tiny icon of like a computer and a phone. And then you can click that. And it will show you how your website looks on a mobile view. Yeah. And can't you in the dev tools in Chrome, can't you like select different phone models and stuff? Or am I misremembering that it's been a while since I've used it? I think you can. Yeah. And I think you can do like tablet views and things like that, because that is important. A lot of people view things and on their iPads. A lot of people have iPads instead of computers. And so you want to make sure basically as you're resizing.
00:23:44
Speaker
your browser window, you want to make sure that your website is responding accordingly and nothing is getting lost or cut off. Yeah. And it's a pain in the ass, but you should do it. yeah I say from experience. It is important though. Yeah. But I mean, and like I know I started, I started off with a Squarespace website. Now I have a WordPress website and both gave me options to like view as I was building for like, I think Squarespace only had desktop versus mobile, WordPress has mobile tablet and desktop. And they're helpful as like a basic guideline, but then I would find that in testing across like my friends devices.
00:24:28
Speaker
um my my designs didn't work. um And so that was when the DevTools in Google Chrome were really helpful to me. I could pick a couple of different sizes of devices and like instead of having to be like, okay, everybody, let's hold hands and I'll go to my website and see how it works. me um I could just check that on my own. And so that was really nice. It's, as I said, it's a pain, but it's important. We want everybody to be able to access your website and nothing. I'm not sure if there's anything worse than like spending so much time on a page on your website, launching it, thinking it's so beautiful. And then it comes up wonky on someone's screen where you get a message that they tried to go to your offer and they couldn't.
00:25:15
Speaker
Yeah, so it's, it's a pain but it's important. Yeah, it's another one of those things that's just do it as you go along after each page, do the mobile version or however, whatever platform you're using however that works. That's, that's what we're trying to save you the mess of having to do it all at once if you do it as you're as you're building. it's a lot easier yeah i definitely it was an afterthought for me on my first website i was clueless and just it didn't occur to me i it's like bluetooth i just thought that we were at a place with technology where it would just work right but apparently no.
00:25:52
Speaker
It's finicky. Something you can do though, if you have animations on your website, which animations also can add to loading time. A way to make that a little shorter is if you code it in versus uploading a video, but it still is going to add a little bit of time, but you can hide some elements on mobile versus desktop and kind of help yourself there. You know, I'm talking about coding things. Yeah, no, no, you lost me with the coding, but the hiding elements is helpful. Like I do, I had for a while, I had like this little slider element that just would not work for me on mobile.
00:26:31
Speaker
and i was like all right we're just it's just hidden on mobile and we had a backup there and it was not the optimal solution but it was the solution that worked at the time so that was good do not do if you are struggling with like learning the mobile ah how to adjust for mobile and stuff don't do what i did and just build an alternate website A mobile page? Yeah, I know you're going to be going, but this is literally what I did for my first, maybe my second website too. I was just like, here's the mobile section here. Like here's the hero section for my homepage for desktop. There's another version for a tablet and another version for that makes your website really heavy and really slow. Don't do that. Oh my gosh. So you had like three different ones. Hey, I learned the hard way so that okay our listeners don't have to.
00:27:21
Speaker
I mean, yeah, that's just so that's just so much. And makes your website slow. Don't do that.
SEO Best Practices Recap
00:27:27
Speaker
Yeah. Something I don't, I don't want to forget to touch on. We did talk about in the last episode a little bit is, but also has to do with SEO are the image file names of the images that you're uploading yes and also the alt text for those images. Yeah this is another good place to use your keywords and in the image file names or even in the alt text although I don't know if there's one is better than the other necessarily but one thing to keep in mind is that if you use like a stock photo of a person working on a laptop whatever
00:28:02
Speaker
that person can be whatever you want them to be. they can't You don't have to say person with a laptop, you can say small business owner with a laptop. If your if your clientele is small business owners, if they're smiling, they can be smiling because they use your services. People struggle to work their keywords into their image descriptions or their alt text, but because they miss that key that like You can create whatever story you want for these images. Ultimately, that's why you're using them. You're using them to to tell that story to your audience.
00:28:38
Speaker
So it's okay to not just stick to, this is a person holding an item wearing this colored shirt. You can say, this is a person getting help with this from a specialized service provider in this category, whatever, like specific to your business. So, and that is gonna also give you a little bit of an ah SEO boost. And you can do the same with the descriptive descriptive image file names as well. Yeah, I would say I usually do that part in the descriptive image file name and stick to more cut and dry in the alt text, but i I'm not sure that it makes a difference depending on what you do. Yeah.
00:29:19
Speaker
and And one thing that kind of goes back to the accessibility thing, when you are naming your file names, you want to make sure that you're either using camel or title case, or you have dashes between your words. So it's not just like a jumble of words altogether in lowercase, because it's harder for machines algorithms to pick out the individual words out of the stream. And also, harder for screen readers, for people who need those and for other people as well. So yeah, as with everything, you know, imperfect action, just do what you can and keep trying to improve. Pick your keywords, ah even if you keep it simple and it's just the service you provide and make sure you're working that into your H1, your page title, your meta description and throughout your copy. And ultimately just make sure that the page
00:30:12
Speaker
is informative and helpful and valuable. And like I said, and go see what the algorithm thinks is informative and helpful and valuable for those terms and emulate it. Don't copy it, emulate it, and then one up it. You got this.
00:30:31
Speaker
That's it for this episode of Brand Jam. Check out the show notes for links to the resources we talked about. If this episode hit the spot, be sure to subscribe and leave us a review. It helps Brand Jam reach more listeners, so we really appreciate it. Thanks so much for joining us. We'll see you next time.