How to Grow Your Online Traffic by Optimizing Your Website with SEO

Hey, and welcome back today is part two of the secrets of optimizing your website to increase your traffic and leads. I’m so excited because today we’re going to talk about SEO basics. We’re going to talk about why the words on your website matter and even the words you can’t see those, what we call keyword phrases, and why things need to be unique and relevant. So today is going to be such a packed episode, you’re definitely gonna want to take notes, so grab a pen and paper.

Okay, here we go. We are going to dig into the second part of the secrets of optimizing your website. And like I said, grab your pen and paper because you’re going to want to take notes. Now doing this via a podcast. With audio. Obviously, I’m not going to go as deep as I will in a video format because there’s just a lot to cover in some of you may have different website or blogging posts or platforms. I’m sure some of you are on WordPress. Some of you might be using show it with WordPress. Some of you might be on Squarespace, or let’s see where else you might have an empty shop. There’s all sorts of things you might have. I’m primarily going to focus on WordPress sites that could be WordPress with show it. And Squarespace as well, I will I will just touch on that as well. But those are sort for me kind of the core two that I want to talk about. But all of these principles all these tactics apply to any website, you know, like content management, hosting, or platform that you’re on like a WordPress, yes, it might be in a different spot, it might take you a little bit more to find it. But it is something that you can do. You can make these changes or improvements to your website to really step up how your website’s getting found in search, and eventually so that it can help the right people find you you know about and learn about your services and products. So let’s dive in. We’re going to cover four parts today,

we’re basically going to be talking about setting up your website. So it’s the SEO basics. Okay, so we’re going to look at why your page title and description and your meta. It’s your Meta Title and Description why it matters, where you can find what you currently have and how to change it. Number two, we’re going to talk about your page and post URLs or names. Number three, we’re going to talk about keyword phrases over just keywords. Right, so a little bit longer, you know, multiple words together as a keyword phrase. And then we’re going to talk about things like images that sometimes get overlooked, and why each of things these things matter. The words on your site matter, but the things you can see, and you don’t see as a visitor, so it’s kind of like the guts or the roots of your entire website. And when we set these things up properly, and we understand these tactics, we can apply these same strategies over and over and over whether it’s for the site and the business we’re currently working on or if we have a future site As we roll out or future business, so that’s what’s so exciting about these principles. I was literally helping people with some of this 15 plus years ago. And yes, some of the things change, as we all know how rhythms are constantly changing. But these evergreen tactics are so similar to what they’ve been. So the great news is, is yes, algorithms change. But what you want to do to optimize your website, it’s similar. And of course, there’s improvements. And there’s new recommendations that come out regularly. But this will give you a good baseline or a good framework to start with. So let’s dive in. And I do want to mention the last episode, that we I’m sorry, the episode we the part one episode of this, if you didn’t listen to it, I really encourage you to listen to it, because I’m talking about how can we have a tech and growth mindset so that you’re ready to hear these other episodes and not feel, you know, like, I have no idea what Chris is talking about, oh, my gosh, I have so much to learn, that might be true. But it’s baby steps, you know, rolling in to talk about four high level things today. And here’s the other great news. If you join my facebook community, I will be over the next month posting videos about these different episodes. So if you’re a visual learner, which many of us are I am, then those videos if you’re, you know, in my community, and right, it’s a free community. So as you have to do is click the link at the bottom of one of these episodes in there’s a link straight to joining the community. But those videos will be invaluable, but only people that are in my community or people that are on my email list. And I’ll be sharing with them as well will get this content. So definitely jump over there, join my community. And then, like I said, I’ll be sharing videos to really dig in a little bit more for you. So let’s get started. First things first. Alright. So as I mentioned, the first thing that you can do to improve your website to get more search traffic and also get the right people that are looking for what you offer is to improve our titles and descriptions. And I’m not so much talking about the title you put on the page. Like it’s my it’s your homepage, because you’re not going to necessarily have that as a super long URL. But we’re talking more about the meta title and description. Okay, and why does this matter? Well, search engines need it to be specific, searchable, relevant and unique. Why is that? If all of your website pages had the same title and description, as far as Google was concerned, they wouldn’t know what page is relevant for matching that with the user that searching for something. So you might think, Well, why can’t my about page just say about, you know, Kristin Fitch? Well, because no one’s most people aren’t searching that they’re searching for what you do or how you can help someone. So that’s why we need to go into our platform, our content management systems, and we need to actually manually create our meta title and description or improve what’s already being added there. Okay, so what am I talking about? Well, basically, there’s two ways that you can see what Google’s part currently pulling up for you for your website, for each of your pages. And this is such a simple strategy that so many people still don’t know. So two choices here to know what your current meta title, your current title and description are, as far as search is concerned, like like Google, and Bing, and those kinds of things. All right, what you’re going to do is you’re either going to go to google.com. And in the search bar at the top, you’re going to type in site, si te colon, and then your domain name.com or.co, or whatever it might be, and then hit enter. What will come up is all of the pages that are associated or part of your website. And what you’re going to do is you’re going to print that off, print off all the pages, so whether your site’s three pages long, or 25 pages, or whatever, just print off, you know, at least the first 20 You know, those will be your core, your core pages. And when you print those off, what you’re going to do is you’re going to look for what it has as the title, that’s the thing that’s more bolded it might be in blue at the top and then below it is a little description. What I like to do is I like to take my paper and I like to write what I want, how I want to improve it, right I want to put what it should become. And as an example, if I wanted to have my homepage, talk not so much just about home for Kristin fitch.com. That’s not really going to help me get searched or get found. So I’m going to have something more like website optimization coach or SEO coach or on line growth coach, right. So in other words, I’m going to put that kind of information and then how I help people related to the area I’m working in. Okay, so that’s what we’re talking about. But just print that off. Because like I said, in the video, I’ll get deeper into this. But it’s, it’s important that you start here. Another amazing tool, if you want to have a more hands on place to work on this is called Mango tools.com/free-s, eo dash tools, forward slash, SC RP dash simulator. Now what that tool lets you do is it actually lets you put in a page, and it will pull up what the title and description are for you currently. And then you can kind of work there on that page with what you’d want to be the title and description. So that’s another way that you can find out what you currently have. Here’s the good news. Even if you’re like, oh my gosh, okay, I can get this far, I can print the page, that title description for all my pages, you’re probably thinking, I’m so overwhelmed. I have no idea where to edit this on my website. I’m gonna give you a couple examples. But once again, once you have gotten this far, there’s people that can help you, you can post a comp a question in my community, and I’m happy to try to answer based on your platform, you know where that information might be where you’re going to end it. But so here’s the deal. Once you have your page title, description, and you make sure it’s unique, it has searchable words in it that people that you’re working with are looking for, and it’s relevant to the content of that single page. Okay, then what you’re going to do is you’re going to go into where you edit your website, the back end, if you will, or the dashboard, it’s sometimes called. And if you’re in WordPress, there is a plugin, if you’re not using it, that’s great. But there’s others called Yoast SEO, in that puts on every page or post of your website, it puts an area where it’s super specific, it’s an SEO tool, and it tells you what the title is or what it’s going to pull in the description and you’re able to edit in there. And it gives you a color green, yellow or red, I think as to if you’re hitting some of the requirements, like the length of it in that sort of thing. So that’s super helpful. But on in WordPress, if you have that plug in or you can install the plugin, Yoast SEO, then on each page, in each descriptive I’m sorry, in post, you can actually edit that title and description for each page and then make that that change that save.

If you are using Squarespace, they do it a little bit differently. They have it under marketing. So they’re SEO titles, right? That’s what they call them search engine optimization titles. It’s under marketing for you if you’re a Squarespace user, okay. And it would be you know, the same thing that you’d still edit it for the page that you’re trying to improve. The other great news is you don’t have to do this all at one time. Go edit your homepage, maybe go edit one of your main pages about your services. Or maybe you have a really long post about how you help people. Go edit those. And you know, as you have time to work on this, you can then check off those and then add or improve these other ones. All right. So that’s the first thing is we want to look at what our page title description is now that Google, you know, the search engines show up for us. And we want to improve those so that we’re more likely to get found in search. So that mango tools I told you about, that’s what we call a SERP simulator, and SERP is search engine results page. So in other words, how does your title and description so show up on the search engine results page? And just to make a point, Google is really the only search engine you really need to worry about, even 20 years ago, or, you know, yeah, over 20 years ago, Google was, you know, ping of the search engines. And it still is I think the share is it’s something over 60% Just for Google as far as search traffic. So that’s one that matters. If you do well on Google, you’re going to be fine and the other search engines, so don’t worry so much like well, what if what if it shows something different in one of the other search engines like DuckDuckGo or Bing? Don’t worry so much about that. Okay, number two. So number one is, what is your current title and description for each of your web pages? When you go to google.com and search, then you want to improve that title and description so that you’ll rank better in your in the search. Number two is what do you currently have for your page in posts as the URL the name right so if i Like done a webpage on your website, what shows up in that, that URL bar at the top? All right. And what you don’t want is you don’t want to say something like article 25, or like the date in the month without a specific name right of the page. You also don’t want it to be short, in a lot of cases, especially if it’s a article or a blog post. You don’t want something like website tips, and only have fat, if it’s something more specific. So an example would be as you want it to be multiple words, with the underscores in between the words, because for search that matters, it needs to be able to read it as specific words. So an example would be how to optimize your website for SEO. Right? So that would let the search engines find my page. And as long as I have content on that page that’s relevant. And it ranks well, meaning that it has enough content that it that Google decides my page should show up in a higher search than maybe someone else’s page that maybe doesn’t have a lot of information. So there’s multiple prompts here. But what matters is your posts right to your articles or blog, blog posts need to have really specific and a little bit longer URL, so that Google is going to give you credit for having that name, and that it’s searchable, you know, so what you wouldn’t want is blog post 2020, SEO all together, that’s not really going to benefit you. And so if you make these changes, then that will help you also get found in search. And I would also point out, the more content you have on the page, right with information that’s relevant, though, to that title. And to that search, what someone might be searching is obviously going to benefit you. So you can’t just have a page title. And then you have no content or very little content, it’s you’re still not going to rank for that.

We’re going to talk about this another day in another series. But everyone should have at some point, several long format blog posts or articles on whatever your core business focuses are, that we call these. Well, it’s long form content, but we also call them pillar posts, P I ll a our pillar posts, because this is something where let’s say you were doing a guide, let’s say I was doing a guide on optimizing your website for SEO. There’s so many people that have done articles on that. They’re really long, right? And so, and there’s ranges, I’ll talk about this later. But it’s something like between 20 504,000 words, right is an example of a pillar post. So they’re not short blog posts are long, they have a lot of information for people. And they’re formatted very specifically to try to really boost Google recommending that page to people if it’s matching what they’re searching for. That’s not something you have to do today. I’m honestly, just as I’m rebranding, I still have those on my list to do in July. So I haven’t even done mine yet. For this current my Kristin fitch.com site. So once again, that’s not something you have to do now, but I did want you to be aware of it, because those are the other sorts of things that will help you rank. Okay. So number one is, you need to know what your meta title and description is. And then we want to improve those number two so far was, what is your page and post URLs or names? Do they have underscores or dashes so that the specific words can be searched? And did they have enough relevant words so that Google’s gonna give you more credit for that, that post or that page? Number three, keyword phrases over keywords? Okay. Words matter? Well, here’s the thing, if we just put in what we think, but it’s not what people are searching for, then we’re never going to increase in our ranking. And then we’re not going to ever get more traffic. And so for instance, let’s say you have a, let’s say you do cooking recipes. And let’s say that you have a recipe that’s seafood gumbo. Well, that’s great, but there’s, I’m sure there’s many many, many, many people that have a seafood gumbo recipe. So that’s great. You can definitely have that. But if you can get it a little bit longer, you know a couple more words that are part of yours. Then when someone searches maybe it’s a spicy seafood gumbo recipe, maybe it’s Louisiana seafood, spicy seafood recipe or something. But then you’re gonna get more targeted traffic and you’re not trying to compete with the people that are ranking for the most popular word. Another example might be if you put in what’s a example here, maybe you put in you know, maybe you’re an author and you put in a different a certain type of genre of books. Well, there There’s 1000s, and or maybe millions of people in that genre most likely. So it’s just it’s not specific enough. So a keyword phrase just means it’s multiple words that are a little longer. Or sometimes we say like a longtail. Instead of just like baby clothes, right? That’s super broad and big. And it’s unlikely unless you’re a big content website that you’re going to rank for that, at least on the first few pages, at least. Alright, so keyword phrases, there’s lots of ways you can do keyword research to see what should you be, what words or keyword phrases should you be using, you know, on your page and in your content, you can either go to In Search Google Keyword Planner, and then within their advertising suite, they have an area where you can put in keyword ideas, and then it will pull up for you different suggested ideas, and then how much search traffic it’s getting. That’s one way and it’s free. It’s really not the end all be all. Google also has a Search Console. And then they have a Google Trends where you can look up what’s trending as far as popularity and traffic as well. There are others with their paid sites you can do I think, like a free trial, but then it’s it’s you pay for it. One is a href keywords explorer. It’s an amazing tool. And but I think it might be like $100 a month. So some of these tools seem pricey, but they’re very powerful. And so once you’re getting serious about trying to grow your traffic, it’s something you could consider, but it has so many amazing tools on this a href keywords Explorer. And I will link to these when I do my post on this. But once again, there’s lots of ways to find out what words are, you know people are searching for. In other words, you don’t want a keyword that no one’s practically searching for. Okay. But you also don’t want to be

just that basic keyword where everybody it’s too vague. So you’re never going to show up. That’s why that keyword phrase is somewhere that you want to shoot for, you want to shoot for that. Okay. All right. So number four is, and it’s often overlooked. You need to care how your images are tagged and how your images are if they’re going to show up in Google. So here’s what’s happened to a lot of people. They never change their image name. And it might be like image, oh, oh, six, two, dot jpg. And then they don’t do anything when they upload the image to their website to help that image get found in Google search, or Google images. So the first thing is I like to rename my image name so that it’s specific to the photo, right? It’s related to what my page and what my photo is about. And then you can, you should put in a little description in your alternate or alt text. So when you upload your photo, there should be a little area that shows like caption or alt text, you can fill those in. Because remember, Google, even though now with AI, they can sort of categorize images, for the most part in search, it’s still through those words, words that are associated with your images that are going to help you get found in the Google image search. So why wouldn’t you do this? It’s something that once you start doing it, it’s no big thing. But for so that’s one thing is moving forward, you can do this. But then you can also go back through your website, just page by page, unless you have 1000s of photos, this shouldn’t really take long to go into edit your photo and then make those changes. If nothing else, they’ll definitely put in your alt text, even if you don’t change your image name. And like a city can also add a caption, if it fits your website, some websites, it looks good and other websites, it just makes it messes it up aesthetically. So you can decide that based on where the image is that. Okay, so the highlight here with all of this is your website will rank higher, you’ll get more traffic over time. If your words if you every place that you can put in relevant words you do. But two things I want to note, one, I’m not talking about keyword stuffing. So meaning you don’t want a page that just has tons and tons and tons of keywords but no actual usable content, no, you know, guide or useful tips for somebody, you want it to be a page that somebody would come to and they don’t just leave or bounce that they would actually get value in using, okay, that’s the key is create content or information about what you do that will be relevant to the person searching. Otherwise, they’re just going to leave your site and it doesn’t matter if you’ve got more traffic they’re going to they’re not going to be a match for who you’re looking to work with. The second thing is, as I mentioned, you need to just everything needs to be unique and searchable, relevant and specific to that page or to that image. That way Google can match the searcher know the person looking for something with the best possible pages, all right, that’s what matters. So let’s review. One, you want to know what your search engine page title description shows up as now. And then over time you want to improve that to, you want to make sure that how your page and post URLs are showing up? Do they have a separation between the words and doesn’t have enough words? So Google knows what your page is about? Number three is, are you using keyword phrases over too big of keywords that you’re just never going to place for? Unless you’re spending a lot of money? Or you’re a huge, huge content site that’s been around forever? And then are you going actively looking for what keywords you should be using? And then also asking your audience? What are they searching? What are they doing, you know, and ask them for specific feedback. And then number four is images. Don’t forget about images and video on the way that we tag things the way that we talk about them right in their title, their alternate text that matters, and it’s super important. One last tip, I’ll tell you, it, this is going to be covered in a future series,

I’m sorry, a future episode of this series. But when we also post content to YouTube, you know, or other places like that. And we make sure to use the tags, we give it a good title and description. And then you know, we get with Kingo back to our website, we get tons of kudos, we get tons of, you know, credit, if you will, from Google, when we’re linked back from these bigger places. And so that’s another way to drive traffic, and then Pinterest as well, which we’re going to talk about both YouTube and Pinterest in the future and a future episode. But that is huge. And it’s amazing. But you will get traffic from Pinterest, especially if you put pins there that makes sense. And they go back to your website to a specific piece of content. And it’s it’s kind of evergreen. So once you create it and you pin it on occasion, people keep finding it because Pinterest is a visual search engine, if you will write for ideas and inspiration. So that’s it. That’s everything for today. And I would just tell you, I know it’s a lot of information we covered today. But really, let’s just think with it, think about this as getting your feet wet, start getting introduced to that. If you can write a word, a sentence, you can make all these changes, or you can get someone to help you with these changes. But if you don’t know about these things, then you don’t even know to ask for the help that you would need to make these improvements. Like I said, remember, this is kind of like, much like a tree, your the things I just talked to you about. It’s like your routes, right? If most of this is behind the scenes, things that you might not see, if you just look at someone’s website, you know, from a visual perspective. But these are the things that will matter so that Google and the other search engines can match you up better with users you’re trying to or visitors you’re trying to find. And I just hope that you will embrace the fact that this is new information and learning that’s growth, right? We are talking about techy things and I know that can be a little bit daunting, it can be overwhelming for a lot of people. Just remember I’m here for you, I want to support and encourage you as you grow your business in a simple way. It’s simple, because as you learn these skills, you can keep reapplying them, you can keep using them, you know, unlike social where everything’s always changing your your website, your email, you know, the things that we’re gonna talk about building a community, those are things that you’re you are in control of. And if you learn them, even if you then hire it out, you’ll understand what’s behind these concepts and these strategies. So I’m so excited for you. I can’t wait to see the growth that’s about to happen for you in the coming months. And I do want to share a little excerpt from you from the book chasing vines by Beth Moore because as I thought about the website and the roots of this, this core stuff i i thought of her book and I wanted to share just a little bit of that book with you. Okay, so in her book, she talks about a plant expert, if you will, and I thought this was really interesting. So here’s what she says. British author Jamie Goode has an insatiable passion for the fruit of the vine. He holds a PhD in Plant Biology, bringing expertise alongside his years of experience to the banqueting table. Best of all, he writes about grapes with a sense of familiarity. Like he knows them personally. And here’s what is said they’re making the vines struggle generally, generally result in better quality grapes. It’s a bit like people play someone in a near perfect environment, giving them every comfort and all they could ever want to satisfy their physical needs, and it could have rather disastrous consequences for the personality and physique. If you take a great fine and make it make its physical work quirements for water nutrients easily accessible, then somewhat counter intuitively, you will give you poor grapes. And she says, Good goes on to say that good soil gives a great final choice. And given the choice, it will opt for the easy way instead of going to the trouble of bearing fruit. Oh my gosh, that’s so good. But basically she’s saying, give the grapevine a favorable environment and it will choose to take the vegetative route. That is it will put its energies into making leaves and shoots. Effectively, it is saying, this is a fine spot, I’m going to make myself a home here. It won’t be too bothered about making grapes, but make things difficult for the vine by restricting water supply, making nutrients scarce, pruning it hard and crowding it with close neighbors, and it will take the hump, it will sense that this is not the ideal place to be a great fine. Instead of devoting itself to growing big and sprawling, it will focus its effort on reproducing itself sexually, which provide means making grapes. But I think that that’s so good. And she says In other words, as long as a great plant is feeling comfortable and unchallenged, she will leave lethally leaf, she will award leaves, leaves and leaves upon leaves to her sweet natured host,

she will bear reasonably leaves in her happy hearts content. Eventually, she’ll become so thick with leaves that the hungry passerby will observe there’s an area cluster to eat. So I think that’s much like, you know, maybe your work ahead on optimizing your website on getting more traffic on growing are leads through your website and through growing a community. No one said there isn’t going to be growing pains, or that it’s going to be super easy for you to work through these steps and maybe to get frustrated a little bit. But I promise if you put in the work. And I’m going to hold your hand along the way, if you put in the work though, these results are going to pay off the website, I started with my mom that I co founded in 2008 ZigBee zoom.com. I haven’t been regularly working in that business for some time. Although I do plan on getting back two more hours on that. We still Yes, the traffic has gone down a lot because we aren’t adding more content. And we’re not really spending time there. So compared to what it was, it’s much lower, but we still get, you know, a tons of traffic and even just from Pinterest on old pins. So there’s no new content, we’re just other people are repeating our content mostly think we get 30,000 referrals from Pinterest on average a month. But that’s work we did years ago and it’s still showing up. It’s still working. So I promise learning these tactics, learning these strategies and then applying them and as you get better tweaking and improving these things. It will bear fruit for you and your business, I promise and also being part of a vibrant, encouraging community of people that are there to help you grow and learn and be lifted up. So I hope you’ll join us on our Facebook group.