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Episode 64: 5 SEO Fixes to Make on Your Website
156 Plays5 years ago
Somehow, in nearly 60 episodes, we haven't chatted about SEO. Mostly because I find it is easier to share on a blog post or video tutorial, because of the visual element it provides. Regardless, we are chatting all about Search Engine Optimization on today's episode. Specifically, Vanessa and I are discussing 5 quick SEO fixes that you can make today on your website. There is a guide in the show notes that is associated with this episode. I highly recommend checking it out for a more streamlined look at what we are discussing. Make sure to also check out the other resources mentioned in this episode.
For the show notes, go to https://daveyandkrista.com/btb-episode-64
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Transcript
Why are location-based SEO keywords crucial for wedding service providers?
00:00:05
Speaker
One thing I want to highlight since we brought in Pinterest into this, that typically for a wedding service provider, the number one search term for a location, and of course location is important because you're not going to shoot a wedding in Canada if you live in Dallas, is Dallas Wedding venue. Actually, it's the number one place people start and then Dallas Wedding photographer.
How can creative service businesses leverage SEO?
00:00:28
Speaker
Welcome to the Brands at Book Show, where we help creative service-based businesses build their brands and find more clients. I'm your host, Davy Jones. Somehow, in nearly 60 episodes, we haven't chatted about search engine optimization. This is in part because I find it easier to share about SEO in a blog post or video tutorial where there's a visual aspect to the content. But regardless, today's topic is all search engine optimization.
Where can listeners find more detailed SEO guidance?
00:00:57
Speaker
Specifically, Vanessa joins me for a conversation on five SEO fixes that you can implement on your website today. And there's a guide in the show notes that's associated with this episode, and I highly recommend checking that out for a more streamlined look at the content we cover. Before we get to the episode, I have a request. If you've enjoyed the Brands at Book podcast, would you just take a minute to rate and review the podcast on iTunes? Doing so will help this podcast get more visibility, and it mean a lot to me.
How can listeners contribute to future podcast episodes?
00:01:22
Speaker
Be sure to check out the show notes at DavianCrista.com for the resources we mentioned during the episode. And like I said, we want to hear from you. Tell us what you would like us to chat about on the Brands That Book Podcast. Feel free to reach out on any of our channels, whether it be email, Facebook, Instagram, or the blog. Now, onto the episode.
00:01:43
Speaker
All right, Vanessa, welcome back to the Brands at
What are Vanessa's top five quick SEO fixes?
00:01:46
Speaker
Book Show. Vanessa is a regular co-host now of the Brands at Book Show, and we are chatting today about five quick SEO fixes that you can make on your website for fast results. And there is a corresponding guide on our website that if you go to the show notes, you can download this, and it's going to go into a little bit more detail, maybe some things that we can't cover on the podcast, only because you can't see it, right? So SEO in a lot of ways is very visual.
00:02:13
Speaker
And so you can access different tutorials and things like that from this guide. But welcome back, Vanessa. Hey, I'm so excited to be here. I love chatting about SEO. I feel very kind of novice at understanding it. So today's going to be a little bit more the Professor Davey time and like learning about what he's seen across all the different accounts that he is optimized with SEO.
What can Pinterest teach us about SEO?
00:02:33
Speaker
Well, whether you know it or not, and I think you know it, you know more about SEO than maybe you think or give yourself credit for because I find that Pinterest of all the social media platforms shares more in common with search than maybe something like Instagram. So I know that you know pretty much everything that we're going to cover today.
00:02:51
Speaker
I do know what we're covering today, but it does make me want to go through and fix a few things on my website. So we'll get to that. I'll let you guys know which one kind of throws me through a little bit. Okay. All
Why are quick SEO fixes important?
00:03:01
Speaker
right. Well, I'm excited to dig in. So I want to talk a little bit about why I chose these items though.
00:03:06
Speaker
Okay, so these are five of what feels like 1000 different things I could talk about when it comes to search engine optimization. And I think one of the reasons that we were 60 episodes, about 60 episodes in to this podcast, and we have not done an SEO episode yet. And I think
00:03:24
Speaker
because there's just so much that we could talk about. So it's like, where do we even get started? So the reason that I came up with this guide is because these are things that I think anybody, regardless of their technical know-how, could implement. And they're relatively quick to implement. And the last criteria is that they can make an impact on your search visibility. And so when I say search visibility, I mean,
00:03:51
Speaker
whether you're visible in Google or Bing, not that anybody's using anything other than Google. So I'm going to use search engines in Google interchangeably because the truth of the matter is most people are using Google. So that's why I picked these five elements. They're all what we call on-page optimization tips. And what that means is there are optimizations that can be done to your website.
00:04:19
Speaker
And that's different than off-page optimization. Off-page optimization would be building links that point back to your website. And off-page optimization is a little bit harder to control than on-page optimization. So that's why I focus on these on-page optimization tips.
00:04:36
Speaker
Yeah, there's so many different components to SEO that we can't control. So I love and I've read through the guide, guys, and it's really clear and specific. I love that you really can take control. Some of these are one and done, you can just do once and then move forward. And I think you can work them into your workflow as you're creating a blog post, you kind of just get into the habit of doing these things every
How does keyword research enhance SEO strategies?
00:04:55
Speaker
time. And you will see, I mean, just get Google Analytics on our website, you will see your traffic grow just by implementing these things. Yeah, absolutely. So where should we start?
00:05:06
Speaker
Okay. We need to start with keyword research because I think a lot of people think keyword research is really obvious. Like let's talk about being a service provider, wedding photographer in Dallas, Texas. So you think your main keywords are going to be wedding photographer, but is that really enough to get people to your website?
00:05:25
Speaker
No, I mean, so I think that people are going to intuitively understand at least where they should start with keyword research. But I don't think that's a substitution for doing keyword research. And I want to emphasize that a lot of time what we assume is often just not the case. All right, like, I think just in general, humans are bad at assumptions.
00:05:44
Speaker
especially when we've been in it for a long time. So even the way that we talk about our business, sometimes there ends up being a disconnect with what actually connects with other people. And all that to say that there are just so many different examples I could give of
00:06:02
Speaker
where I thought oh of course this is going to be this person's primary keyword and it turns out that people actually aren't searching for that or aren't searching that for that as much they are a different key term. So there's a lot to talk about when it comes to keyword research but the first point I want to make is that it's important to do it.
00:06:20
Speaker
where you can complete some keyword research for free, there's a great tool called Uber suggest. Alright, spelled like Uber, the car service, U-B-E-R, suggest.io. And that will bring you to a free keyword research tool. And it also does other things that are helpful as well. For right now, we're just going to talk about keyword research.
00:06:38
Speaker
When you're doing keyword research, you want to start with whatever that keyword that sort of intuitively you think people are searching for when they're looking for a service like yours. For instance, if you're a wedding photographer in Dallas, then people probably will find out are searching Dallas Wedding Photographer.
00:06:58
Speaker
All right? So that's the first place that you want to start. Now, once you throw that into Ubersuggest, you're going to see a bunch of different information in return. So when you hit enter, one of those things is going to be search volume. And so basically, the amount of people that are searching for that term in a given timeframe.
What role do venue-based keywords play in SEO?
00:07:16
Speaker
And what you'll notice is that there's different variations of that term that may be searched more or less than what you typed in, okay? So what I'm trying to pay attention to is the search volume of that term, and then I want to look at the related searches because it's going to give me variations of that search that may be searched for more. Does that make sense?
00:07:37
Speaker
Yeah, one thing I want to highlight since we brought in Pinterest into this, that typically for a wedding service provider, the number one search term for a location, and of course, location is important because you're not going to shoot a wedding in Canada if you live in Dallas, is Dallas wedding venue. Actually, it's the number one place people start and then Dallas wedding photographer. So, I wonder too if people think
00:08:00
Speaker
starting with photographer but really the venue the place that you're actually shooting the wedding can be a way to get people back onto your website yeah absolutely and we should talk more about that in a minute because i think that's a great way or a great example of maybe targeting a search that isn't related specifically to what you do but it's related to your industry where you might be able to get in front of people even earlier in the process so again just going back to that example is a photographer people are most likely booking their venue first so if you can start ranking for
00:08:30
Speaker
searches related to different venues in your area that you want to work, you could potentially get in front of people before they're even starting to look for a photographer. But one of the examples that I want to share about keyword research and why it's important to do is I was working with a client who's out in California and I asked for their city and where they shot or the area that it served and I just assumed that that, again, the highest searched keyword would be their city wedding photographer.
00:08:59
Speaker
All right, so an apple sweating photographer, Dallas wedding photographer along those lines. But it turns out that in their area in California, people are more likely to search by county instead of by city. And that's just something that I would never known had I not done the keyword research first.
00:09:17
Speaker
Keyword research is important to do just to confirm or not confirm what you think people are searching for is actually what they are searching for. You're going to use that keyword research throughout these different tasks.
How can keyword research be organized effectively?
00:09:30
Speaker
Make sense? Yeah. If you're using those keywords throughout different tasks,
00:09:35
Speaker
Where do you put them? What do you like to do to keep them in a keyword bank? What would you call it? No, that's great. I would just keyword list. Usually, I recommend that people do this in Excel. But I think people make this more complicated than it has to be because SEO sounds like it's technical and maybe you read a tutorial online that gives you this really complicated method of doing keyword research.
00:09:56
Speaker
but i think you know for most of us it suffices just to open up a google sheet or whatever you use for you know excel whatever it is and then keep a list of those keywords i would group them by by variation and so what i mean is if you type in annapolis maryland wedding photographer you're gonna find you know ten different variations of that
00:10:15
Speaker
term that might have search volume and so keeping those in a group and then you know when you move on and you're maybe it's Washington DC wedding photographer that's also an area that you want to target keeping those in a group but highlighting the search volume for each of those keywords as well okay and then after that you can also create another column which will eventually use which is identifying the page that you want to rank for that search term.
00:10:42
Speaker
one on every single one. That's an important point. You want to make sure that you don't have a ton of different pages targeting the exact same key term. The reason being is then Google has to figure out which one of these is most relevant. A page can rank for a bunch of different related searches. Again, if you have a list of Annapolis wedding photographer related keywords,
00:11:10
Speaker
One page could rank for a bunch of those different keywords, but in general, you don't want to have a dozen pages optimized for the key term Annapolis Maryland wedding photographer.
00:11:20
Speaker
This is where I feel like Pinterest is a little bit different because I think, and everybody's Pinterest results, I mean, I guess Google are as well. You can't go incognito on Pinterest. You can see multiple images that might actually be the same URL, whereas I feel like Google, they're not going to give the love to all one place because I feel like they don't believe the user would find that very helpful.
00:11:42
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's right. I think in general too, you're just splitting your efforts among multiple pages. So having at least a cornerstone piece that really targets that specific search, it's not that you can only write about a given topic once.
00:11:58
Speaker
For instance, the homepage of our wedding photography website ranked for an Apple's wedding photographer or an Apple's Maryland wedding photographer related searches to that. I think it still does. You can check, you can go to Google and search it and see. But point being is that I probably wouldn't want to have other pages on my website that are targeting specifically that search.
00:12:21
Speaker
Okay, like I don't want to split my efforts there. So yeah, I would agree that's probably one way or one area that Pinterest and Google are different. Yeah. And I mean, that that allows you so I wonder the way that you go about that. So if I were going to go on uber suggest and kind of see how different pages of my website and blog rank,
00:12:39
Speaker
I wonder, the one that's closest to the first page, I'd really want to protect for that keyword and maybe other ones that are on page five or whatever. If I wanted to go and optimize them, maybe try to get them under a related one so they don't bump out or overcompete with the one that's already ranking.
00:12:55
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. There's a number of different ways to do this. For instance, if you're a wedding photographer, you might shoot multiple weddings at the same wedding venue. Obviously, those blog posts are going to use similar keywords across each of those blog posts.
00:13:13
Speaker
And that's why that's where like category and tag pages or a cornerstone venue page comes in handy by putting all of those, you know, so what one thing we did for and we're jumping ahead, we're jumping out of these five tips. All right, this always happens, Vanessa. But this is why this is why it's important to have a written portion of the episode. So that's why we've gotten the habit of doing that. So again, refer back to the guide if you want maybe a little bit more of a streamlined approach to some of these things. But
00:13:38
Speaker
That's why something like a category or tag page is so important. We had tags for the venues that we shot at. If we shot at the Chesapeake Bay Beach Club, we shot there a bunch of times while we were shooting, we had a tag for Chesapeake Bay Beach Club that we could apply to that blog post and all of those blog posts would be aggregated on a tag page called Chesapeake Bay Beach Club Weddings.
00:14:01
Speaker
Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, totally makes sense. Yeah, those tags and category pages can rank within Google for searches relevant to them. Okay, I'm going to bring us back on the track with the guide if you want even more details about keywords. Okay, so quick fix number one, tell us about updating title and meta tags, what they are and how we can do that.
Why update title and meta tags for SEO?
00:14:24
Speaker
Yeah, so we've all come across, I mean, titles are exactly what they sound like. Whenever you go to a given page, it has
00:14:30
Speaker
a title. Now this is obvious for blog posts where the title is going to be at the top of the blog post, but each page can have a title as well. And so if you have tabs open, if you hover over the tab, it will often give you the title of the page that you're on. One thing that we've noticed though, is that titles are some, especially on the primary pages of your website,
00:14:49
Speaker
which is really where you want to update your titles. Oftentimes, people who are using a template or even when a designer has designed their website, they'll have sort of placeholder names in there or very generic names. So, home, about, galleries, services.
00:15:06
Speaker
You want to make sure that you go in there and you give those pages a more specific title. So your homepage should indicate a little bit about what you do. So for our Davy and Krista homepage, I can't remember exactly what it is, but it's going to be something like brand and website designer for creatives. And then there's going to be some sort of separator, and then it's going to say Davy and Krista.
00:15:30
Speaker
For our wedding photography website, it used to say Annapolis, Maryland wedding photographer or family and wedding photographer, and then a separator, Krista A. Jones photography. What goes there? Well, those primary keywords that we're trying to target. Again, in the wedding website, it was Annapolis, Maryland wedding photography. For David and Krista, it's brand and custom website design. Good?
00:15:55
Speaker
Good, I need to go check mine because I think this might be the one area that I haven't, I don't know, can't remember. And so a lot of people keep them as like homepage, you know, like home or whatever, which is not it's not the end of the world. I mean, it's not good for search visibility, for sure. But like when even when you share it to Facebook, like when you share your homepage of Facebook,
00:16:11
Speaker
that title is going to show up in the thumbnail. If it just says home, it doesn't really indicate what your page is about. That's another reason why you want to pay attention to this. Here's what I should have led with. I really buried the lead here. The lead is this.
00:16:28
Speaker
It's still one of the most important, optimizing your titles is still one of the most important on-page optimization factors. And for the last handful of clients, when I went through and optimized their page titles, beyond doing anything else, that alone caused a jump within relevant search or for relevant searches. So I'm talking for people who have gone from unranked to ranked. And so unranked typically means a result 50 plus.
00:16:56
Speaker
Okay? And so in the first week, so that generally means from going from position 50 plus to below 50. And in that, in the specific case, I'm thinking of in the first week, she jumped from 50 plus to somewhere in the 40s. All right? And then the next week, she was in the 20s for some searches in the 30s. And there's typically about 10 results per page. So if you're
00:17:18
Speaker
in position 23 generally means that you're on the second page. Makes sense? I guess that would technically be the third page. This is something you do once. You don't have to update those every time you write something. I mean, this is like those titles can be done once. Yeah, absolutely. And so page titles are just super important, but it's really important to make sure that you're doing the keyword research ahead of time, right? Like, I want to make sure that if I'm optimizing a page for Dallas wedding photographer, that I know that people are actually searching Dallas wedding photographer,
00:17:46
Speaker
If in my keyword research, I find that people use the plural more often, even if I'm not a team, I'd probably put Dallas wedding photographers dash whatever my brand name is. So in Birmingham, and I only use that as an example because I know a couple of photographers down there, I noticed that people will generally search with the state abbreviation. So it'll be Birmingham AL wedding photographer. So my Birmingham friends are going to be like, stop sharing that because now everybody there is going to be changing.
00:18:16
Speaker
So a page title is super important. Meta descriptions are a little bit different. Meta descriptions are important. They're not necessarily a ranking factor, but they can influence a ranking factor. A meta description is that description that shows up under the title in the Google search results. Again, there's diagrams of all of this in the guide. The meta description is important because a good meta description can increase the likelihood that somebody clicks on your results. So it can increase what's called the click-through rate, which in turn
00:18:46
Speaker
can improve your rank for a given result. Now, something tricky about both page titles and meta descriptions, this will be my last point unless you have questions about this one. Google will occasionally pull its own meta description. For instance, you might go in and type what you think is a well-crafted meta description for a page and then when people search for that page or when that page appears in the search results, Google's pulled other text from that page.
00:19:10
Speaker
That's because Google's decided that this other text is more relevant than your meta description. I don't think that's ultimately a bad thing, right? Because I don't know if you've noticed this in searches, but oftentimes the word that you actually searched for is in bold in the meta description, right? And so that's why it's important to include keywords in your meta description. Remember, this is like a normal human sentence. Generally, meta description is going to be somewhere in the ballpark of 150 characters, although this is something I think, again,
00:19:38
Speaker
Nailing down Google is hard because I definitely today even saw a meta description that looked like it was closer to 300 characters.
00:19:46
Speaker
Yeah, that is interesting because on Yoast, I always feel like it has to be so short. And I'm like, I cannot effectively communicate it in that little amount of characters. I generally don't go for the green dot. I just choose the meta description that I think is going to be best, even if it's a little bit longer than what Yoast says it should. Because it's not like Yoast is reporting to Google. It's not like Google's looking at the Yoast plugin and saying, oh, this result has all green dots. And so we're going to rank this one.
00:20:14
Speaker
It's more helpful for you. I don't get caught up in the whole green indicator thing on Yoast, although it is a helpful tool. I do want to say that Pinterest does pull meta descriptions and they're helpful in addition to your pin descriptions because hopefully you're using those great keywords. If you've claimed your domain on Pinterest with your website,
00:20:34
Speaker
it can read those as well and help rank you for search. So might as well do them for both SEO and Pinterest. And I will admit, just in case people go to our website looking for an example, since we relaunched our website, so we change platforms, there's another episode about this earlier on. If you want to learn more about that, we have not paid much attention to our meta descriptions. So they are all sorts of jacked up right now. The blogs are correct.
00:20:58
Speaker
Yeah, blog posts are good. Everything else though, especially the product ones, which are really some of the ones that we should pay attention to the most, we have not made time to go fix yet. So I apologize if you're looking for a good example from us. But if you want a good example, you can go to a site that we have previously optimized, KristaAJones.com. Again, this is our wedding photography website from back in the day. That's a pretty good example. And then download the guide.
00:21:23
Speaker
Okay, so quick fix number two, heading tags. Yes. What are they? What's the guideline
How do heading tags impact SEO?
00:21:30
Speaker
here? This is so interesting to me because so many people get confused by heading tags, but we've all used them because we've all written at least one paper for school at some at some point, right? Right. I mean, like we've all used headings to separate ideas in a paper. We've all seen headings used in a book.
00:21:47
Speaker
They might separate chapters or they might separate sections of a chapter. Those are all headings. If we've written in Google Docs before or in WordPress or in Microsoft, if we highlight a piece of text, we can go up. It usually says like normal text or something. And if we select that dropdown, we'll see an option to apply different kinds of headings. But headings are really just a way to separate ideas on a page. And there's different kinds of headings. And they range in general from heading one, each ones,
00:22:17
Speaker
through each sixes. No one, I mean, at least I'm not really aware of anybody who uses H4 through sixes all that much. And show it, for instance, you can only select from H1, 2, or 3. But the point being, and as you might have already guessed, an H1 is for your big idea
00:22:36
Speaker
Alright, your h1 even generally your h1 should be the same as your page title. Alright, so whatever your page title is, you want that in a heading one somewhere on the page. Okay.
00:22:51
Speaker
This can be for any page. This doesn't not just blog posts. Oftentimes, designs, like we add headings as a design element, not realizing that they also help search engines understand the content on the page. We should only use one H1 per page.
00:23:09
Speaker
After that, we can use as many H2s and 3s as we want, but we want to make sure they're nested correctly. We have one H1, then we can use an H2, then we can use another H2, then we could use an H3, and then we can pop back out to using the H2. But you want to make sure they're all nested correctly when you're using them. I've seen more stuff lately about people using more than one H1
00:23:33
Speaker
on a page i think best practice is still having just one h one on each page no it will not or i don't think it will hurt you if you have more than h one one h one but i think it's best practice just to have one smart that doesn't sound that complicated and again like you just want to have a doing it you just remember every time.
00:23:54
Speaker
Okay, quick fix number three could be my favorite and probably for very visually based businesses.
What is the relevance of alt tags in SEO?
00:24:00
Speaker
And that is about using alt tags for SEO. Why is it your favorite? Well, first of all, there's a big misconception about Pinterest. I will say the reason why I like it is me personally, because I, I do both video, which is actually not even on the quick fix, but also I do images and pin images. Those often rank really well for me, the actual pin images from Google and people click over from there.
00:24:24
Speaker
And isn't the alt text used by Pinterest? Okay, so Pinterest has an order in which they pull the pin description. The first one that they should be pulling is a special piece of code called pin description, but a lot of people don't use it because it's just not built in. There is a plugin you can use. So then it will default to alt. But the reason why I don't prefer it, and this is the controversy, is that Davey would tell you alt tags are designed. So alt tags are basically like assigning text to an image.
00:24:53
Speaker
for visual impairment, for people who can't see. So blind people can know what the image is about. So if you optimize an alt tag for Pinterest, it's going to be, in my recommendation, three to five sentences long with some hashtags. That is an optimized for somebody who is visually impaired. So in my business, I really like to prioritize both playing nice with Google and Pinterest and having a separate Pinterest description that is not the alt text.
00:25:19
Speaker
That is super interesting. The first time I'm hearing about any sort of pin description, this is why we've hired you to manage our Pinterest. And you've basically just gone over this. I mean, what alt text is, it was designed for people who are visually impaired and can't see the image and so the screen reader that they're using will read the alt text.
00:25:38
Speaker
is generally just a sentence, maybe two sentences long. It should be unique to every image. It often isn't unique to every image. I say that it often isn't, I mean, wedding photographers, and it's not laziness. It's just simply that oftentimes if you're blogging 50 images, it can be time consuming, a little bit tedious to give each image its own alt text. I would recommend at least batching images, so all the detail shots get one
00:26:04
Speaker
get the same alt text, all the bride and groom shots get the same alt text and so on. I think that's a great middle ground, but it can use keywords. And again, we're referring back to our keyword research. And I should have mentioned in the heading tag one, what keywords do you use in the H2s and H3s? That's a great opportunity to use variations of that primary keyword. So going back to the example we were using earlier, Dallas wedding photographer might be the primary keyword for that area and that business.
00:26:31
Speaker
But maybe you notice that, I don't know, there's other variations like Dallas, Texas wedding photographer or wedding photographers in Dallas, Texas, or, or any of the suburbs really, any of the suburbs in Dallas, Texas, those might be great areas to use the other variations.
00:26:49
Speaker
I think a better example of using those other variations in heading tags would be in a blog post. In a lot of our blog posts at Dave and Krista, you can see this done where I might be the headline or the main piece of the cornerstone piece might be the super simple guide to pricing for photographers. That might be pricing for photographers, that might be the keyword that I want to target. Well, there's all sorts of other related searches that people might be searching. For instance, it might be how to create a pricing guide.
00:27:18
Speaker
you know and so that might be one of my subheadings of my article okay and so that would be the key word I use in that in like maybe a heading two for that blog post does that make sense yeah no it totally makes sense and I think that
00:27:32
Speaker
In all of these things, you just do, you want to vary the keywords. That's why you do the key research in the beginning. You're not basically just using the same three long tail keywords, which is just, we didn't add that in there. It's using three keywords or more together. So it's important to vary and use what other people might be using, especially for location. I feel like there could be a big emphasis on that because a lot of times people are in suburbs of major cities.
00:27:54
Speaker
DC is a great example. There's like a million ways to describe DC and the surrounding Virginia and Maryland area. So with those, you have a lot of room to utilize different keywords. Yeah. And that's another thing you'll find in the guide that I won't backtrack too much here, but long tail keywords versus broad keywords and so on and so forth. Like if you're a photographer,
00:28:15
Speaker
You're probably not targeting the keyword photographer because you're going to be competing with Wikipedia. Good luck ranking on the first page for the search photographer, but you probably want to rank for if you're a film wedding photographer in Dallas.
00:28:29
Speaker
you know, film body photographer in Dallas, right? That would be much more reasonable to rank for. And it would probably get you in front of people who are more able, you know, willing and able to purchase your services, they're probably in a in a buying position, right? Like if someone just searches photographer in Google, you know, maybe they're writing a research paper on photographer, I don't know, but it'd be like, you know, you want to make sure that you qualify people through the keywords that you're trying to target.
00:28:53
Speaker
You have a good example, actually, I heard you talk about, which was pizza. If you just search pizza, it could tell you what a pizza is. But really, people are searching for pizza delivery in my area. So it's different. You want to make sure you're utilizing those keywords so that you can get someone to order a pizza.
00:29:09
Speaker
Yeah, so that example is a little bit different and it just goes back to the intentionality of the searcher. And so Google is much better at understanding why people are searching for something. So if you Google pizza, chances are local pizza places are showing up in that search, right? Like it's not going to give you the Wikipedia page on pizza. It might towards the bottom, I don't know. I haven't gone that far because whenever I search pizza, I'm generally trying to order a pizza, right?
00:29:34
Speaker
In that case, for sure, Google is going to give you specific local results.
How to optimize URLs for better SEO?
00:29:41
Speaker
Quick fix number four is your URL. Does URL stand for anything? I'm just curious. Does it actually mean anything? It does. I cannot remember off the top of my head, which is embarrassing for a URL.
00:30:00
Speaker
Okay, so that is the quick fix number four, though. And this one is just a gimme. I feel like if we're doing all these other fixes, you could make this one easily optimized as well. But you need to tell us what we need to do. Universal Resource Locator. All right, that's what URL stands for. I would have never known. So everybody out there, now you know, next time you're at a dinner party and you don't want to impress anybody, you can share that.
00:30:26
Speaker
So talking about optimizing URLs, again, going back to your keyword research, you can use those keywords in your URLs. You want to make sure that you remove unnecessary words like and, or, or at, or as, a lot of your prepositions, just get rid of them. In general, I would say that shorter URLs are preferred over a longer
00:30:45
Speaker
URLs, so there's no reason to stuff a thousand keywords in a given URL. I always, the general rule for me is that if WordPress, when I'm putting in the slug, and that's that end of the URL, so davianchrista.com forward slash whatever the post name is there. If WordPress gives me the ellipsis, that basically is an indication to me, all right, maybe my URL is a little bit too long.
00:31:08
Speaker
So, focus on the most important keywords in your URL and then remove any unnecessary words like those stop and prepositions that I was just talking about.
00:31:18
Speaker
Would this be a good place to put in like the new names if it's a specific blog post on an actual venue? Yeah, absolutely. You just want to keep in mind too, like if you have one of the things that we actually have a template for this, it's called our venue page template, but it basically allows people to create cornerstone content around given venues. So if you have a cornerstone page on a venue, then you want to make sure that your slug varies a little bit different from that cornerstone page. I mean, Google or Squarespace or show it or whatever, when it lets you create a duplicate
00:31:48
Speaker
URL like they won't let you use a URL that's already in use so you don't run any risk of that right but in general going back to your point about long tail keywords like if there's another distinguishing factor of that wedding in addition to the venue you want to use that as well.
00:32:06
Speaker
Okay. Whereas like if I had a page on my website and I was trying to rank it for a specific venue, I would just call it that venue, maybe with weddings appended to the end of it. Again, I would go back to my keyword research to figure out exactly what my URL would be.
00:32:21
Speaker
The words in your URL should be separated by hyphens. Again, most content management systems aren't going to let you include spaces to begin with, but you can. You certainly don't want it to give it its default URL, which is oftentimes just a series of random letters and numbers.
00:32:41
Speaker
I mean, you're losing the opportunity to just define storage that much better. Yeah. That's basically all there is to URLs. There's not much to dive into there. Shall we move on? Yes. Speaking of pizza, can I deliver you the last quick tip? Yes. Okay.
Why incorporate internal links into your website?
00:33:01
Speaker
Adding internal links, tell me what that's about and how we can do that. Yeah, so oftentimes when people talk about SEO, I think we give a lot of attention to building external links. All right, so two kinds of links, internal links, external links. External links are links from other websites.
00:33:17
Speaker
linking back to pages on your website. For instance, we've written a couple of blog posts that include you and so we've linked to your website. That for you is an example of an external link. You're welcome. No, I'm just kidding. An example of an internal link is a link from maybe you write a blog post on scheduling pins and in it
00:33:40
Speaker
You mentioned Tailwind and you have a blog post about Tailwind as well. And so you link to that blog post about Tailwind. All right, so that's an example of an internal link. Now, both kinds of links are important. External links are important, just as like friends recommendations are kind of important. So going back to our, because pizza's on the mind, going back to our sample of pizza, if I go to you, or if we're all hanging out, us and a group of friends, and maybe you're up here in Annapolis,
00:34:08
Speaker
and you ask the group, hey, where's a good place to get a great slice of pizza? And all of us tell you the exact same restaurant, you're going to think, well, that pizza place must be good, because all of these people think it's good. External links to your website kind of carry that same sort of reputation, or they pass on that same sort of authority that a good friend's word would. Does that make sense?
00:34:31
Speaker
Yeah, but that's an example of off-page optimization, correct? Yes, and I only bring that up because I think a lot of times when you hear about SEO, we often talk about external links, okay? But internal links are pretty much just as important. I would say, I don't know if they're as important, but as from an on-page optimization standpoint, they are important because the more links that a given page has on your website, from other pages on your website, the more important that page must be.
00:35:00
Speaker
I mean, if we think about it just intuitively, the pages in our top level navigation, so our homepage, about page, so on and so forth, they technically have links back to them from every other page on our website. Because the pages in our top level navigation, we can access on any given page on our website. So those pages are generally going to be weighed more authoritatively than maybe some short blog posts that we wrote about a very specific subject.
00:35:26
Speaker
From a user perspective, and we didn't bring up bounce rate, but for someone, if you put those internal links within your website and someone clicks over to another page, that's gonna improve your Google, that tells Google this was a page worth staying on. Pinterest as well, they can tell bounce rate. But from a user perspective, you might have actually clarified something or taken someone even further into what they were looking for. So for me, it seems like a triple win for all that to have this internal link.
00:35:53
Speaker
Yeah, I would say it's a win on some so many different levels, you know, first and foremost, probably what's most important is for user experience. Again, if I'm reading about scheduling pins, and you also have a blog post about tailwind, I mean, it just makes sense for me to click into that and learn more about
00:36:09
Speaker
how I can automate scheduling pins. And so for a user experience standpoint, that's awesome. But if I landed on that blog post from Google, Google can understand then how many pages that I visited on your website. And so now it knows that I've not only found maybe the content I was looking for, but I found more content that I was interested in. So these user experience metrics are a good indication to Google that the content that they're serving is quality or not.
00:36:37
Speaker
I think it's a win from that standpoint, also just indicating what content is most important. For instance, going back to my example on pricing, we've written a number of different blog posts about pricing, but we have one long blog post that captures a lot of that content.
00:36:53
Speaker
So one way that I can indicate that that's the most important piece of content is in all of those other blog posts about pricing, I can link to the super simple guide to pricing for photographers. And that's the pricing piece that we would consider our cornerstone or quote, air quote, cornerstone piece on pricing. Does that make sense?
00:37:12
Speaker
Yeah, no. Same thing with like, again, if you've shot at the same venue over and over and over again, you'll probably want to create a category or a tag for that venue page. And then you can even link from that blog to maybe a cornerstone page that you have on venues or on that venue.
00:37:30
Speaker
All good examples of how to use internal links, I would say that on your homepage. Again, one thing that you can do to kind of share authority or pass on authority from one page to another is share your most important pages from your homepage. That's why you don't want to link to unnecessary places on your homepage. I'm not a big fan of linking to your latest blog posts.
00:37:51
Speaker
on your homepage because your latest blog post might not necessarily be your highest converting blog post. And so I think it makes more sense to choose three strong blog posts or three strong pages that are high converting that you want to pass authority on from your homepage to. Of course, for instance, like the Till website, so we did a podcast episode on Facebook ads and I'd mentioned the launch of the Till Agency right now.
00:38:14
Speaker
the latest blog posts populate on the homepage, you know, so like these aren't like hard and fast rules. And if you do it that way, it's not like, oh, no one's ever going to find you online or anything like that. So those are our five tips. And again, we've gone a bit over a bit over the goal time. You can always listen to us on double speed. That's right. Double speed. I listen to all my podcast episodes, anything that I listen to, I listen to on double speed. So you can do that.
00:38:40
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I've had fun. I think it's been really clarifying. And these are all really doable things that you do once or twice, like as you're writing content, you're going to have down. Yes. And a few places to learn more. One, I very much encourage you if you're interested in implementing these things, download the guide. It's laid out in a very linear way. So go there, download the guide. It's in the show notes. That's number one.
00:39:01
Speaker
Number two, if you're interested in more of a training on SEO, you can access that. I think it's on any page of our website. There's a top bar. You can register for that training. You can watch it whenever it's convenient for you. That's a solid training. And then we also do have a course on SEO as well. And we're getting ready to roll out sort of a
00:39:22
Speaker
I don't know how I should phrase it. Because once I phrase it this way, I can never take it back. That is how it is with podcasts. But it's sort of a SEO-like course. For those of you who are just interested in sort of the nitty-gritty, optimizing your blog posts, this course would be for you. So you can stay tuned for that. If you download the guide, you'll definitely get information about that whenever that is ready. So those are the places that you can learn more. Awesome. All right.
00:39:49
Speaker
We can get started on SEO today. Sounds like it. That's right. That's right. All right. See you, Vanessa. Thanks. Thanks for tuning into the Brands That Book Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing and leaving a review in iTunes. For show notes and other resources, head on over to devianchrista.com.
00:40:16
Speaker
you