SEO. Search Engine Optimization. It makes many of us want to put our head in the sand and pretend it doesn’t exist, am I right? I’m guilty of having done that for years until I realized it’s not as scary as we’ve made it out to be and there are some major benefits that can come from some simple implementation on your end. So today I want to break it down and demystify this topic for all of you – because it’s time to put some strategy behind our search engine results.
Search Engine Optimization basically means the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine. SEO can be a really complex topic to cover (especially on a podcast!) so my goal today is breaking it down to the basics, tell you where best to invest your time, and prove to you that it’s not so scary so you take action and get started. In my experience, even starting out small with a simple strategy can make a big impact on the traffic that is coming to your website…. Because what good is a website if no one knows it exists?
Let me give it to ya straight: this blog post is only the outline of this show. To get the full impact of this show, I recommend reading along with this blog and writing down all the specific details to maximize your SEO journey
If you hit play on this episode, my guess is you already know you need to be doing this – so let’s not ignore it anymore – ok? Here are some guiding principles and places to get started.
Breaking down the verbiage: Keywords
Keywords are the words you’ll be identifying as ones that you think your audience will be searching for and that you want Google to show your content in their search results. Don’t overcomplicate this. So many of the strategies needed for SEO are probably already things you are doing in your business in other places and can simply be tweaked and executed and your keyword strategy is a great example of this. You won’t be starting from ground zero on this. (To hear all of my best tips for picking keywords, tune into the episode!)
Pro tip: Start with 5 or so main buckets of topics you talk about on your blog and create a spreadsheet with these as your columns. Next start brainstorming a list for each area with as many thematic words around each bucket you can think of. Insert any hashtags around each topic you’re currently using that are general and make sense for a keyword. Then take these words and search them in google or the Pinterest search bar. I like using these two places because of the guided search feature on these sites. Guided search means it will take the word you searched for and tell you what other similar words other people are searching for and this is a great way to expand your keyword list.
You should have a pretty solid list at this point and we’re not done yet. Next, I want you to look anywhere your target audience is talking about the topics and pull keywords from things they are saying. Examples of places you could look would be comments on your blog posts, common questions they ask, survey results and comments on social media postings. Check out reviews on Amazon for books on the topic. What are people saying about it? What questions do they have? What do they love about your topic?
At this point, your list has been solidified. Keep this master keyword list handy and refer to it anytime you’re writing content for your site. You want to infuse as many of these words where you are writing on your website whether it’s a page on your website or a blog post. You’ll also be identifying a “focus keyword” or words for each page or post on your site which means the main word that best represents the content.
SEO Title
Next up is what’s called the SEO title. Now, this is different than the post title or page name. Let me walk through an example to help best illustrate this. Naming each blog post is a critical step because this is what’s going to determine if someone is going to click through and read the content. Now, a clickable title like “5 Emotions Every Girl Boss Experiences” might be different than one we would write for SEO purposes. Let’s say the keyword we’ve identified for this post is “successful women entrepreneurs” because the post is about what women go through running successful businesses. The SEO title allows you to name the post with SEO in mind while also naming it creatively so people click through and read.
So the title of the blog post is “5 Emotions Every Girl Boss Experiences” and the SEO Title is “Successful Women Entrepreneurs on the Goal Digger Podcast”. The blog post title is what is shown publicly to your audience and the SEO title is what search engines use to determine what the content is about.
Slug
The next SEO terminology to cover is what’s called a slug. This is what the actual link will look like so for example, these shownotes are clearly found at www.jennakutcherblog.com/seo . That /SEO is what’s known as the slug. SEO best practices state that the slug should be short and contain your focus keyword if possible.
Meta description
This description is what will be shown as the first few lines of text under the title when your content shows up in search results. Think about when you google something, you’ll see about 8 or so post titles that Google believes the best match your search text along with 2 lines of text below it to help you determine if it’s what you’re looking for. This is the meta description and if you haven’t been writing meta descriptions, Google will automatically just grab the first few lines of text on the page. This is an opportunity to write click-worthy meta descriptions because it’s not enough to just show up in Google results, you also need to get people to see your content and click through!
Alt-text:
A final definition to cover before we can get into the good stuff is “alt text”. This is the text that is tied to an image. This is text that explains what the image is and it’s important because it can be used by search engines in addition to the text in your post or site content to figure out what you’re writing about.
This is also the text that is carried through when someone pins your image to Pinterest which gives us a little bit more control in terms of making sure our images have high-quality descriptions there.
Let’s look at an example. Going back to my long-tail keyword example above of “Milwaukee Spring Wedding Photography” – let’s say there is an image of a couple at the art museum. My Alt text in this example could be “Milwaukee Spring wedding photography at the Milwaukee Art Museum by Jenna Kutcher.” This alt text both uses our focus keyword which is helpful for search engine optimization purposes AND provides more context for what this actual image is about and gives me credit for the image so that when it’s pinned, people will know who it belongs to.
How these all fit together
Now that we’ve got a basic understanding of what some of these words mean, let’s talk about how and where they are used. If you’re starting from scratch and want to know where to begin, my best tip is to download the SEO by Yoast plugin if you’re a WordPress user. Once the plug-in is activated on your site you’ll see an area at the bottom of the post that says “SEO by Yoast” and here you’ll be able to easily enter a focused keyword, meta description, SEO title and slug to optimize each post. That cheat sheet we’ve got for you to download in the show notes is a screenshot of this plug-in filled in for one of my posts.
My favorite part is that the plugin will also grade the post for you from a search engine optimization standpoint and offer suggestions to make improvements and also tell you what you did right. This is such a great way to learn SEO best practices while jumping in and getting started with search engine optimization right away.
Tips to incorporate SEO into your workflow
This wouldn’t be a goal digger podcast episode without me giving you tangible ways to incorporate this teaching into your day to day workflow. Here’s some things that have worked for us:
Batch work
A lot of the critical thinking that goes into optimizing content for your site for SEO purposes is going to payoff in other places as well so we like to batch this type of work together to save time and energy.
An example of this would be writing the alt text with Pinterest in mind. Pinterest, also a search engine – will see your content as valuable if the pin description matches the words found on the post it’s linked to. For this reason, we write the alt text as our pin description when optimizing the post and then pin at that same time.
Similarly, you might start with keywords that would be great hashtags on Instagram. Writing your Instagram post that’s going to link to the blog post makes sense to complete at the same time. In general, when you’re writing content for your business, think about all the places it’s going to be promoted and write that all at the same time.
Start with your focus keyword first
It can be tempting to write a post and THEN figure out what your focus keyword and titles are going to be. We’ve found it’s so much easier if we do this the other way around. Come up with a clickable title and strong keywords for your audience and create content around those. This will save you time and energy trying to force a keyword or strong title later and I believe this will make your content stronger as well.
Keep track of what’s working (and what’s not)
Since this blog post is already getting quite long, I am going to limit how much I type about this, but if you tune into the episode you will learn everything you need to know about google analytics and your blog. I get it, learning “one more thing” can feel exhausting, but this is crucial. In the episode, I teach you what exactly you need to be looking for in your google analytics, what numbers are “good”, which are “bad”, and how this can transform your business. Seriously, this segment of the episode is GOLD, and I don’t want you to miss out.
Keep It Simple! Here are 3 Steps To Live By
1. Start a keyword spreadsheet
2. Download the SEO by Yoast plug-in and take a stab at optimizing old posts to get the hang of the process
3. Install Google Analytics to help direct and refine your strategy going forward
Focus on People, not just search engine optimization
The one thing I want you to take away from this episode is the importance of focusing on people and not search engines. It’s easy when you dive into the world of SEO to feel overwhelmed and like you need to follow a crazy-long list of strategies and rules that leave you feeling deflated and questioning if you’re wasting your time (or heck, if you’re even doing it right.) This is what held me back for years, because it simply felt overwhelming.
But if you refocus your WHY, it will help you stay focused on the right stuff: focus on people not just on search engines. When building out your search engine optimization strategy, it can be tempting to get really technical in your strategy in an attempt to have your pages and posts rank better. My philosophy is that if we build our content with people in mind, it will do well for search engines as well. If we truly think about our ideal clients, what their pains are, how we provide a solution, and what they are likely searching for, we can truly create a system that helps you reach the RIGHT people (which to me is more important than landing at the top of google for the wrong things.)
At the end of the day search engine optimization is ALL about proving to search engines that your site and content is the best so that it will serve it up when your audience is looking for solutions to problems you can help them with. In summary, Create epic content serving your audience and the search engine optimization will follow.
Need a little nudge?
Grab my SEO Cheatsheet Here!
Here’s some additional reading materials:
The 5 Google Analytics Numbers you need to know in your business
How to 5x your traffic using Pinterest
Google SEO Starter Guide
Thanks Jenna! I have only just started my website and blog and this kind of information is so valuable to me. I am a long time listener of your podcast and love how you inspire and fire me up. Thanks again
What an outstanding episode. Seriously. You really do know how to lay it out in a way that makes sense. Thank you.
This episode was the best! I already printed everything, including the cheat sheet. The information provided here is so helpful and, in my case, needed. ¡Muchas gracias!
I already saved the episode.
Thanks Jenna! Loving this episode!
A really helpful inspiring workshop episode …thanks Jenna! SEO made almost easy. admittedly its still not something I’m passionate abou,t but after this podcast, its not nearly as scary!
love the cheat sheet too!
This could not have come at a more perfect time! SEO has been something I will “deal with” later and now is the time. A million thanks for explaining it a way that non-tech bosses can take and implement. You just plain rock!
Love, love, llllooovvveee this article. LISTEN TO THE PODCAST TOO – it is so helpful. People pay moula to get this information and you are sharing for free. Thank you so much. I feel grateful for your help and belief in me!
This was such a well thought out podcast – provided a wealth of information and made SEO not as overwhelming as I originally thought it was. Thank you very much Jenna! Denise
Super informative and helpful, thanks a ton for your work!
I listened to this 3 times.
So grateful, thank you
You know what i do too ?
I look at semrush (on the free version) and i look at key words from others blogs on my topics, not big blogs but normal blogs, and I try to write posts on the topics wich are working for them. And it works. A lot… 😉
Thank you for sharing this! I have been expanding in this area not only for my blog, but also my new job as a social media/digital coordinator. I thought this was a great introductory! I don’t have the Business Plan with WordPress yet, so I am unable to use plug-ins, but I have been wondering about Yost. I’m glad to hear good things on it! Thanks again!
Enjoyed your podcast Jenna. Well done. Soooo so helpful!
Thank you for sharing your incredible knowledge with us!! You have an amazing way of establishing trust with us, your listeners. I am in the throws of starting a blog and a small business and I can’t thank you enough for motivating me, educating me and inspiring me! By the way… I heard you talk about how you love to use safe products on your skin! Have you heard of Beautycounter? Oh my gosh! It is amazing! If you would like any samples, let me know! I’m on Instagram at eat_sleep_thrive_repeat. Love you girl!!
Great podcast! Thank you so much for the tips! I am still a bit confused on the blog post title vs the SEO title. In Yoast all I see is the SEO title area…. I figured that WAS the blog post title. Where can I name the blog post title?
So the blog post title is at the top where you would always normally put your title. Then you can create a different title in the SEO by yoast under the SEO title. This way, from an SEO standpoint you can strategically name your post without compromising the title everyone will see it as listed on your blog.
Love this podcast! The SEO information was so helpful for me. I am just starting out and it can all get so overwhelming. You explained everything so well! Thank you!
SO valuable! Absolutely loved the tangible steps in this podcast episode!
Though, I am dying to get my hands on your SEO cheat sheet and for the life of me, I can’t get it to download. I enter my information and then click submit and the “submitting…” just keeps loading! I’ve tried googling it, opening it in a separate page, incognito, everything! Anyone else having trouble with this and can help me out?
Hey Tia, just email my team at support@jennakutcher.com and they’ll get it over to you!
Thanks Jenna! For a person just getting started into the blogging world (2 weeks) You broke down SEO in a way for me to understand.
What a FANTASTIC post, Jenna! I’ve been blogging for almost two years and you broke SEO down so easily for me! Some I’ve done, but I think I need to go back to my old posts to make sure I hit all the points. Question, I checked my Yoast plugin and don’t see the “SEO title” area you’re talking about. Could this be because it’s included when you sign up for the premium package?
Subscribed to your newsletter because I LOVE The value you are giving!
She Sweats Diamonds
[…] is optimised for SEO, and you can also work on this on an ongoing basis as well. I really like this article for explaining some of the main SEO terms you’ll come across such as keywords, meta descriptions […]
[…] Digger Podcast – Episode 177 – Guide to […]
[…] https://jennakutcherblog.com/seo/ […]
[…] If you prefer listening, Jenna Kutcher has an SEO podcast here. […]
Interesting. This looks super cool. I’ll be back to read more!
Hey, Brian! Thanks for reading!
[…] example, if I write “Check out Jenna Kutcher’s blog and podcast for a detailed look at SEO”, it creates a backlink to that blog, boosting its SEO ranking. (Bonus […]
[…] example, if I write “Check out Jenna Kutcher’s blog and podcast for a detailed look at SEO”, it creates a backlink to that blog, boosting its SEO ranking. (Bonus […]
Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge about website promotion! I will definitely use your tips to promote my website.
Jenna,
This is an excellent podcast and blog. To be honest I had never listened to a podcast or read a blog prior to 2 weeks ago. And I was a formerly in public relations/journalism. I see now I’ll need to dust off my writing and marketing skills to promote my new website. I’m somewhat excited to be using some skills I tucked away now for a topic I’m passionate about!
Thank you so much for these tips! I am an Marketing and Advertising Intern with Operation Not Alone (operationnotalone.net) a nonprofit that works to support active duty military members and our nation’s veterans. These tips and tricks really helped inspire me and gave me insight to exciting projects. Thanks again!
Thank you so much Jenna for the great tips! Even though I have worked with SEO for my job, I have never had to dot it from scratch, which can be challenging. Your tips made me have a clear image from where to start.
[…] Episode 177: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to SEO […]