269 – SEO: The Answer to Attracting Sales Online with Meg Casebolt of Love at First Search

Gift biz unwrapped episode 269 Ways of setting up your website

so that Google and YouTube and Pinterest pay more attention to

you. Attention gifters bakers,

crafters, and makers pursuing your dream can be fun.

Whether you have an established business or looking to start one.

Now you are in the right place.

This is gift to biz unwrapped,

helping you turn your skill into a flourishing business.

Join us for an episode,

packed full of invaluable guidance,

resources, and the support you need to grow.

Your gift biz.

Here is your host gift biz gal,

Sue moon Heights,

midair, Sue,

and thanks for hanging out with me here today.

We just completed a four part series highlighting business owners who

have changed,

how they've been doing business to fit the times.

If you haven't listened already,

I encourage you to do so.

It's just the first four episodes before this.

They put things in place to attract new customers that they'll

continue to use as we open back up again.

Isn't it interesting how,

when we're forced to do something different,

it can become the best thing ever before we move on

one quick announcement.

I've heard from a number of you asking how to get

into maker's MBA.

I've been mentioning it more and more in the Facebook group

gift biz breeze,

and also here in the podcast.

And I guess that's,

what's been prompting the questions.

So this program is originally created for a brand new business

dreamer going from concept to profitable business,

through a proven step by step strategy.

But I'm listening to you because the truth is even when

you have a business up and running,

things can get messy and important.

Foundational elements think websites and email marketing can be forgotten or

never set up in the first place.

And I get it.

You're busy.

So I've created a new option for you.

If you're an established business listener,

who's been in business for two years or more,

it's called maker's MBA accelerator.

And what it does is fast tracks you to the specific

area of your business that you know,

needs attention,

but you just haven't had the time to focus on it.

If this sounds like something you'd be interested in,

please head over to gift biz,

unwrapped.com forward slash makers MBA there,

you'll see a link for established businesses,

click there,

and you'll see a form where I'm asking you a couple

of questions and then you can be in maker's MBA accelerator

quickly from there,

speaking of foundational elements put in place.

Here's one that I know a lot of you,

me included.

I'm raising my hand here,

have pushed aside until later,

and you know what happens then it gets forgotten.

And the result is we're losing out on a lot of

potential sales and sales that can come with zero effort.

Once you have everything set up properly,

I'm talking of course about SEO search engine optimization agreed.

Even the word sound intimidating,

but today we're going to hear what it can do for

your website and sales and specifically what you need to do

to put it in place.

And it ends up that it's not that difficult today.

I am so excited to introduce you to Meg.

Casebolt the owner of love.

At first search Meg has been helping female business owners create

beautiful search,

friendly websites and strategic content for the past six years.

She's your no BS bestie who makes it super easy for

your dream customers to find and adore you online.

This results in effortless web traffic,

consistent customers,

soaring, profit,

and so much more free time.

And sanity,

Meg knows her clients have incredible messages to spread and she

wants to help them get seen by new audiences,

Meg, welcome to the gift biz unwrapped podcast.

Thank you so much for having me here.

See why I'm so excited to be here with you and

share some of the wonders of Google with your audience.

And we all want that and need that.

The whole idea of SEO has been a topic that's been

coming up a lot lately.

And so figuring out some of the behind the scenes of

how that works,

I know already peaks my listeners interest.

So thank you so much for being here.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think especially,

you know,

And so we're kind of at the reopening beginnings of the

pandemic here in the States as we're recording.

So SEO has been top of mind for a lot of

people who suddenly don't necessarily have those in person connections or

even wholesale relationships happening right now.

And being able to sell direct to consumer and be found

by those people is really essential right now.

And I think that's the way that the economy is heading

to. So SEO is so,

so important,

even more so than ever So true.

And the other thing that I'm hearing a lot from my

folks is,

you know,

well, I've put up a website,

but I'm not getting any sales.

So we're going to be talking specifically to that in a

minute. But before we do make,

I have this traditional question I have to ask you because

all of us here listening are creators.

And so this is a little bit of a different way

to get to know you.

And that is by way of a motivational candle.

So if I were to say,

describe a candle that most resonates with you,

what color and quote would be on your candle.

I have to confess that I really struggled with this question

because I'm such a tactical person that if you ask me,

how do I make my website do X,

Y, Z,

I can give you a tutorial,

but if you ask me something a little bit more aesthetic

or esoteric,

I'm like,

Oh my God,

what candle have I I'm stretching you outside of your natural?

Yes. You're stretching me into a creative though instead of into

a technical space.

So I think the color would be Navy blue,

something nice and soothing.

And the motivational quote that I came up with is actually

one that I have on my wall in my office.

It's a quote by Maya Angelou,

which is do the best you can until,

you know,

better than when you know,

better do better.

Love it.

And that's so applies to the topic today.

That's why it's the office,

because the ways of updating your website,

it's amazing to put up your website and then you have

to iteratively make it better all the time.

Because the more you get to know the people that you're

trying to serve,

the more you can carve your website to be meeting their

needs. Absolutely.

And it's so important for us all,

to remember that growing businesses,

setting them up,

first of all,

and then growing your business is an evolution.

So a lot of people have gotten their website up just

to the point that you're saying,

but I think we have to make sure that they understand,

like don't beat yourself up either.

You're going to learn as you go.

And that's why that quote is so great too,

because I think Meg,

if I'm going to be honest with you,

a lot of us are starting with zero understanding.

Well, we did not get degrees in web design,

right? Like if you are building an eCommerce business,

the thing that you should be focusing on is creating things

that people want to buy from you.

And then the marketing side of things is a totally different

beast that has a very different skillset and trying to not

just figure out what do people want to buy?

How do I do that?

You know,

you got into this to be a creator.

You didn't get into this to learn how to build a

website or do your branding,

or do the copywriting business side of running a business is

very different than the creative side.

Absolutely. Totally agree with you.

How did you get into this?

Give us a little bit of your back journey here.

Sure. So I started in nonprofit communications right out of college,

which I just got,

this is may.

So I just had the time hop,

pop up and say like you were in college 12 years

ago. And I was like,

Oh God,

it's been so long.

Although I'm sure there are people in the audience who are

like 12 years ago,

she's a baby.

That would be me.

Time's all relative.

So I started my first job in nonprofit communications must actually

be longer ago than that.

I spent eight years working in nonprofits.

And when you work in nonprofits,

you kind of have to wear a lot of hats.

So I was designing their websites.

I was working on their copywriting.

I was doing graphic design for annual reports and donor mailings

and all the different ways that you can communicate with people.

I was creating social media accounts for them,

just like any kind of marketing.

I had my hand in it as a way to raise

contributions for places.

A lot of us have heard of places like big brothers,

big sisters or partners in health.

You know,

I worked for some really amazing nonprofit companies.

And then I fell in love,

moved to a new town.

Didn't know anybody got a job I didn't love and got

pregnant, got married,

got pregnant and looked at the cost of what my income

was and then looked at the cost of what my childcare

was going to be and thought,

Hmm, those numbers don't necessarily add up.

At which point I took those skills that I had from

the nonprofit sector and from being in marketing positions all over.

And I started to apply them to a side hustle.

At first,

I started just with invitations to people,

to my own wedding first and then to other people's weddings

and then baby showers,

and then moved into,

I had a law firm that I worked with that hired

me to do all of their designs for nonprofit sponsorships.

And I was like,

Oh, this is a fun way to tie in the nonprofit

piece that I'd been working on.

And then over time I started to get more and more

into web design and brought myself into that world.

I became a junior designer for a friend of mine who

was building websites.

And so she started to send smaller projects right in my

way. And it kind of took off from there.

And I started specializing in building websites and designing and doing

the copywriting and helping small businesses and entrepreneurs to get themselves

online. And as I was building those websites,

I was billing out pretty substantial client invoices,

and people would have these beautiful websites at the end of

our time that I delivered those websites.

And they'd say,

okay, but yeah,

but where's the traffic,

where are the new leads coming from?

I was like,

Oh, that wasn't in the scope of services.

The scope was here's your brand and here's your logo and

here's their website and here's your colors.

And here's all these things that work for you.

And it looks beautiful.

We didn't necessarily talk about how to generate more leads with

your website.

So I started really doing the research and figuring out what

are the things that I,

as a designer can do to help my clients have better

results with the deliverables that I gave them.

And I learned more and more about SEO,

which is what I now do.

Almost exclusively.

It's all search engine optimization.

It's ways of setting up your website so that Google and

YouTube and Pinterest pay more attention to you.

Those are the big three in the SEO world.

And I reached out to some of my friends who are

also graphic designers and web designers.

And I said,

how do you guys balance keeping up with the trends that

are happening in design and all of the different plugins and

the styles,

and are we doing parallax this year,

or are we doing something else?

And also make sure that those sites are optimized for search.

And my friends who are designers said,

like, we don't really know how to balance that.

It really is two full time jobs and trying to be

great at both of them is really hard.

And then one of them paused and said,

wait, are you getting good at SEO?

Do you just want me to hire you for SEO from

here on out?

And I said,

yes. And that was how things changed.

And so you said,

right at the beginning,

all of our websites are evolutions,

but I think to an extent,

our businesses and the service offerings that we provide,

the products that we're selling,

those are all evolutions too.

And it comes back to this idea of when you know,

better do better,

right? Like the more that you learn,

the more you can evolve and the more you can serve

an audience better,

but you have to put those first steps in place and

just see what doors open to you along the way.

Oh my gosh.

I love your story for several reasons.

First off you are a practitioner of what you now teach.

Like you've been through the experience that a lot of your

customers would have been through too,

especially that point where you're stopped and you've got your website

up and you're thinking you're done,

that's it?

Because no one told you that there's another layer.

It's a whole different thing.

When you're talking about SEO and ranking your pages and all

that. And I liken it to a mistake that I made

early on too,

which was on the social media side,

thinking that someone who does my social media posts,

cause at one point I hired that out would also do

ads. That's also a place where there's a split now.

Yes. A lot of people who do social media will also

add on and say that they can help you with your

ads. But I do feel like it's a specialty too.

Absolutely. And I think the same is true for Google.

If people like me who are trying to get you to

show up in those free rankings,

have a very different skill set than people who are running

ads for you to show up on Google or YouTube or

another one of those platforms.

That's a different goal with the different pace and a different

approach to everything.

And you can be a generalist in digital marketing,

or you can go deep into one of the silos.

But I think it's really hard to find one person who's

good at everything.

Yes. Totally agree with you.

Well, let's start out because I would even bet that most

people are exactly where you described.

They've got a website up now,

so they knew they needed to do that.

They've checked it off the list and it's not performing.

So let's start with why is search engine optimization important?

Oh gosh.

I mean it's might be obvious,

but I want to just start there.

So we're all on the same page For sure.

So I would say search engine optimization is important because it

can consistently bring new people into your world without you necessarily

needing to be on top of your lead generation process all

the time.

So if you don't have Google consistently sending leads to you,

you either have to be out networking and going to conferences

and handing out business cards or developing wholesale relationships to get

other people to sell for you or driving traffic to social

media. But a lot of times social media doesn't necessarily want

to take people off their platforms to go to someone else's

website, unless you're paying them to send that traffic there.

So that can either be incredibly time consuming or incredibly expensive.

So the alternative that I have specialized in is search engine

optimization, which is find ways to make your website the best

answer to the questions that people are asking on Google or

Bing or Yahoo or YouTube or whatever that looks like,

make your brand,

the answer.

And by positioning yourself as the answer,

then you get those clicks without necessarily needing to invest your

resources of time or money.

You can just become the expert.

Okay. But going in the mind of our listeners,

but Meg,

I have my website it's up,

so what's wrong.

So a lot of times when people have their website,

the problem is not necessarily that your website is bad.

It's that it's not aligned with the things that people are

searching for.

Well, let me clarify that a little bit more.

If you're selling a very specific product like Sue,

give me an example of what people would be selling in

your audience.

Like a very specific type of business,

Let's say handmade soaps.

Ooh. I love that.

Let's say that you're selling handmade soaps and you have this

beautiful website that has the cuts of what all this stuff

look like.

And it has a detailed overview of every step that you

go through when your soap making process.

But it doesn't explain how each of the soaps solves a

problem for that audience.

So maybe you say this soap can help you with moisturizing

and this soap can help with fine lines and wrinkles.

And this soap can help with really sensitive skin.

So people with psoriasis or eczema might be good to use

this soap.

And now your soap is not just something pretty that sits

on the back of the sink.

It's a solution that people are looking for because they have

psoriasis. I have various specific soaps that I do and don't

use because of the products that are in them and the

ways that they're formulated.

So to an extent I can just go look for,

okay, I know that these products upset my skin and some

of them don't,

but also if somebody says this lotion is excellent for psoriasis,

I think,

Oh, Hey,

that's the one that I'm going to try.

Then I'm looking for specific products that solve my skincare issues.

Okay. So what you're saying is,

and this comes through whatever the wording is on the website,

I'm thinking,

right? So we need to be putting on our website sentences

that talk to the benefits and solutions that the product provides,

not just talking about the product and maybe its features Exactly.

Yeah. Features and benefits.

So that's a great way to think of it.

So, and it doesn't necessarily have to be this so helps

you with this particular skin condition.

It can be,

this is vegan soap.

That's cruelty free that doesn't use fail lights or parabins right.

There are ways that you can set yourself apart.

But if you just say,

I make X soap,

then it is going to get lost in the competition of

all the other artisan handcrafted soaps.

But if you can specifically say,

I make a soap that has this unique value to it.

And I know that people are looking for it.

Are you doing that by the way of the product elements

that you're talking about?

Because someone might then be searching for soap,

for example,

that has parafin or coconut oil or whatever it is.

So are you saying that in the definitions or the descriptions

of your product and then maybe individual products,

Google is finding those words,

those keywords That's one place that it's looking.

Sure. So your product description is a piece of content that

you are creating that Google can index.

So it will send these like the calm crawler bots that

go through and they look at the HTML of your website

and they copy down exactly.

What's on your website.

And when somebody looks for a term that is on your

website will match you up in that way.

So your product description is one of those pieces of content

that Google looks at,

right? The product title is even more important than the product

description. So trying to be clear about what is the benefit

of this product for my audience,

what makes this product different?

So we're creative people,

right? So we want all fun,

cute, fancy names for our products.

Yes you do.

Are you suggesting that that isn't helpful for search Please?

Don't I know,

I feel like a dream killer a lot when I talk

about how to be clear with your content.

So if you have a bar of soap that is the

color of the ocean,

and you want to call it the seaside soap collection.

Great. But also make it clear the seaside soap collection,

colon, and then explain what the features are over the benefits

are The calming effect or something that is descriptive to the

result. Exactly.

Because if I am looking for a particular type of soap

or a particular type of product,

I don't know what your name is.

I can not look for something that I don't know what

exists. So instead of thinking of trying to be clever,

think about trying to be clear and to align yourself with

things that people are already looking for.

I can just hear people going,

Oh, but we need the truth.

Like we need to work with reality,

right? Yeah.

And that doesn't mean that if you don't have a fun

name, you don't put it in the description somewhere also.

Exactly. You can still be cute.

You can still be fun in your branding.

It doesn't mean that you have to write like a robot.

It means that you have to be clear about what your

products are solving.

Okay, perfect.

So we need to be looking at our product titles and

product descriptions.

You said those are 2.2

places, Two of many places.

And then the main portions of your website,

if you're a soap maker,

where are you a soap maker,

maybe you want to specially localize and say,

I'm a soap maker in Boulder,

Colorado. And here are the local fairs that you can find

me at in Boulder.

And you know,

right now,

not so many,

but you can say,

and I provide delivery to people within this area.

So that's a huge part of SEO is being able to

show up in local search for a specific area.

And then also using the spaces around your website.

So the headlines of your home page or your about page,

or very specifically in those places,

this is what makes me different.

This is what I do.

This is who I serve.

This is how my products are different than other products on

the market.

This is how I solve your problems.

Again. Giving results,

oriented wording,

I'm thinking.

Yes. So I've been generally talking about results oriented,

uh, but what I want to say even more specifically than

that is that you can go and take a look at

all the things that people are looking for.

Google actually aggregates all of the search terms that people are

doing every day,

every month,

every year,

they share that with people,

they actually share it that way people will spend money on

Google ads.

So that way they know how much of a return on

investment they'll get on their ad spend.

But other websites around the internet have taken that information from

Google and said,

Hey, 500 people this month are looking for body lotion with

argan oil.

And then you can say,

Oh, I use Hargan oil in my body lotion.

That's what I should put in there and call it maybe

hydrating body lotion featuring argan oil,

right? So it doesn't necessarily have to,

and I'm looking at body lotion on my desk to make

that kind of example,

but being really specific,

it doesn't necessarily have to be what are the exact features

and benefits,

but what are the search terms that people are actually looking

for? Google is telling you what the demand is.

And now you come over to your website and say,

I am the supply.

I am the place where you can get the thing that

you need.

Okay. And so where can we go to find all these

search terms?

Yep. The place that I like to start is a site

called Uber,

suggest U B E R S U G G E S

T. It's a free keyword research tool where you can go

type in something as generic as skincare or soap.

And you can see,

Oh, hundreds of thousands of people search for soap.

But when I talk about vegan soap or goat,

milk soap,

or a specific product,

or what exactly are the things that people are looking for

and how many people are looking for them and how competitive

are those search terms.

So they have all sorts of metrics.

I have a bunch of trainings all over my website about

this. How about how you can figure out what are reasonable

keywords for you to pursue.

And when I say keywords,

I mean,

any query that somebody goes to Google and searches for is

called a keyword.

And so kind of like how tagging is,

or the hashtags are in social media and they always say,

go more finite.

Don't try to get into this big population of millions of

people, because you're probably never going to be seen.

Does that also apply here?

Nailed it.

I love that correlation and example.

Yes. You to say,

I want to be found for soap.

Then you're competing against dial and ivory.

And I don't even know any other stuff,

but like the big names,

it's going to take a lot of work for you to

develop a reputation among those folks.

But if you can specialize,

if you can own the specific unique value that you have

within your marketplace,

whether that's the audience that you serve,

whether that's the ingredients that you use,

whether that's the location where you are,

if you can find a way to be specific,

then you're much more likely to show up in those search

results than if you try to go after the big guys,

Are you loving this?

As much as I am.

We have new ideas for product names.

We have new ideas for descriptions that will attract new business

to us and keywords.

And that's what we're going to continue talking about right after

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Should We be continuing to focus on a certain set of

keywords or is it better to have lots of variety within

the website of all different types of keywords?

I would say go for kind of a silo of keywords.

So I would say to assign one keyword to every page

or product on your website,

only one,

one to three related supporting keywords.

So if you have multiple products with the same ingredients,

then it can be kind of hard to come up with

different ways to make that relevant.

But look at it from some different angles and say,

this is my collection that all have olive oil in it.

And this is my collection that has this ingredient.

And this is my collection for this skin condition.

And for those people who are not necessarily in the skincare

line, because that was the example that Sue gave me.

These are gift baskets for condolences,

and these are gift baskets for weddings.

And these are gifts for these opportunities that people are celebrating

and then go into the key words and say,

okay, but are people looking for gifts for condolences?

Or are they looking for gifts for loss or for remembrance

gifts? Like what are the actual words that people are using

and align your categories and your product listings and any related

blog posts,

get those words in there.

Because if you're talking about condolences gifts and other people are

saying, Oh,

no, those are remembrance gifts.

Then you're not going to show for a membranous gifts.

Cause you're not putting the words that people are looking for

into the places that Google is looking for them.

Sounds like a spreadsheet might be in order listing all of

your products,

then what the main category is.

And then going in and doing a little bit of research

on the secondary,

like the more specific category.

Yes. And I think this is one of the hardest things

for eCommerce businesses is trying to come up with a unique

way to talk about all your products,

not to just copy and paste.

This is the product description,

but finding a unique positioning angle for similar things,

it'd be really hard.

Okay. So we definitely shouldn't just be doing the same keywords

throughout the entire site.

You should have like main keywords that kind of trickled down

through the entire site,

but not trying to get every page on the site to

rank for the same keyword,

because then you're just going to be competing against yourself.

Oh, good point.

Okay. And then when you're talking about putting these keywords on

your site,

you're talking about integrating it into the copy and then also

something behind the scenes.

Probably. Yes.

So there's kind of two places to think about getting your

keywords. And like you just said,

so you nailed it.

The first is on your page.

So making sure that it's in your product descriptions on your

homepage, copy in your footer text,

wherever the titles of your products.

If you write blog posts or create videos about your products,

make sure that the keywords go into the blog post titles

or all tags is so important for eCommerce businesses.

If you have images on your site,

Google cannot view those images.

It cannot watch your videos.

It cannot listen to your audio.

So what you need to do is tell Google what's in

that image.

And the way to do that is to edit it and

put in what's called an alt tag or alt text in

the HTML related to that image where you say,

this is a picture of a gift basket for a funeral.

So you actually say a sentence like that.

You can make it into a sentence.

It should be words.

It shouldn't be dashes in between,

but maybe you just make it something like floral gift basket

for funeral condolences.

And then you can put your brand name into the Altecs

too. Think of it this way.

There are people who have visual disabilities or impairments that set

the browsers to not show images.

They just have this all text show up instead.

So how would you describe what is in that image to

somebody who cannot see it?

Okay. That's important because I think a lot of people,

if they're doing alt tags at all,

won't necessarily do the description of the picture.

They're doing something that has to do with their services maybe.

And it's okay to also include your services.

You could have an alt text that says something like floral

gift basket and funeral arrangement.

And then you could say delivery available within 20 miles of

Boulder, Colorado,

and have the name of your business there.

You can put that into an Alltech.

You can put that much in there.

Yeah. Ooh.

Didn't know that.

I think about it also this way,

that all texts are what Google image search pulls from.

So if somebody is looking for a funeral gift basket,

I don't know,

I'm stuck on this one and they want to see those

flowers show up in the search results.

What would be the things that you would want people to

show up in a Google image search for that?

What are the terms they would be looking for?

That's such a good description.

Okay. I got sidetracked talking about all texts that's okay.

But it makes so much sense.

So, okay.

Keep going.

Okay. So I was saying that there are two places on

your website.

It's important to think about getting these keywords into place.

The first is actually on your website and the second are

the places on your website that you update.

That will actually be the parts that show up in the

search engine results.

So if you don't specify specifically what you want,

the words on the search engine results to be,

it will take the headline from your post or the name

of the page.

And it will take the first 150 characters of the post.

And it will just put those up by default on the

search engine results for that page.

But for many of us,

that's not necessarily the thing that somebody would click for.

So you can be specific about what you want to show

up in those SEO titles and descriptions.

If you're using Shopify,

it shows up right on every page,

every product listing,

same with woo commerce.

You, every time you go into a product listing,

if you're using WordPress and move commerce,

you can download the Yoast plugin and it will have a

space underneath each of those products.

Each of those pages,

each of those posts that says here's what the SEO title

should be.

And it'll tell you when you're getting close to that 67

character limit,

it'll tell you how long your meta-description should be.

Let me explain what those two pieces are.

So the SEO title is the part that shows up in

Google search in blue text,

which is telling Google,

this is what this page is about.

And so you want to get a searchable keyword into that

title tag.

You want it to say something like gift baskets,

Boulder, Colorado,

or delivery area or whatever that is.

But if people are searching for gift baskets,

Boulder, Colorado,

you want that to show up in the SEO title on

that page or product.

And then beneath that,

then the black text that we see in Google search results

is the description it's sometimes called the SEO description.

It's sometimes called the meta-description.

It's usually about 150 characters.

You don't necessarily have to get the keyword in here.

This is the space where you want to invite people to

come over to your site.

This is the space where you can say there's nine other

results showing up in this page,

but here's why you should click through to my page.

So you can say something here,

like we've been delivering gift baskets around Boulder for 25 years

for all sorts of special occasions,

come over and contact us now.

So giving people an invitation to your website in that description.

So could you that same Wording for multiple products or should

you be changing it out for each product?

You can,

the meta-description,

isn't quite as important.

If you can change it even just a little bit,

then Google won't see it as duplicate content.

But if you come up with something that works as a

meta description and you don't have a ton of time,

you can just kind of template it and adjust it.

I would recommend trying to write something a little different for

each one if possible.

But I also know that a lot of eCommerce businesses have

like hundreds of products and it sucks to have to come

up with something different for each one.

So do the best you can with what you have,

Right? I mean,

even if you're talking about colors or sense or sizes,

or I think there's all different types of options there.

Okay. So let me summarize where we are right now.

So the places to be looking are,

I said that we said this already,

but we're gonna start from the top product title,

product descriptions,

the main portions of your website,

like about pages,

making sure you're putting in your geography,

which is going to lead to a question I have in

a second.

But then also by product,

you're looking at all tags for photos and then your SEO

title and then the description.

Yes. So those are all places like if any of you

and Meg confirm that I'm right here,

but I just want to bring out my thought here.

If any of you are at the point where your website

is up,

you haven't really done anything else.

This is where you can go in and start making adjustments

right away.

So, and it's just a matter of taking some time and

maybe you take things step by step product.

Maybe you do two products a day or three products a

day, something like that.

So it's not over cumbersome.

But so question here,

a lot of people are online only.

Yeah. They're going to their local craft shows and displaying and

getting local business as well.

But they want online sales from all over the country because

we can,

right. How does any of this change then if you're looking

at getting national customers,

I don't think it has to be an either or I

think you can say I'm here in Rochester,

New York,

but I can ship anywhere.

And the people who are here in Rochester,

New York with me,

I can do curbside delivery.

Now, normally I'd say we can meet up and I've bought

from local artisans and gone to their homes and pick them

up to save us on shipping fees.

So you can do that.

But I think also when people see where you are,

even if they're buying from you online and you're shipping it

to them,

I think that there's a certain level of trust that happens

with I'm a real person in a real place with a

shop somewhere.

And here's where you can buy it locally.

And here's how you can buy it online.

I'm a member of this community.

I think it's still important to have there.

If that's part of your business model,

if you do sell things locally or online,

it can't hurt to say that.

Okay. Perfect.

All right.

So let's talk just a little bit about Yoast.

I've used it in the past.

It's been so great,

but just as another tool for people to be aware of.

Okay. So the thing about Yoast or any plugins,

all in one SEO,

plugin or page bath or something like that,

there's a lot of SEO plugins out there and they're good,

but think of them as checklists,

not as rules.

So Yoast does not know what is on your page.

It does not know what the keyword is that you're putting

in there as your focus keyword.

It doesn't know how competitive it is.

It doesn't know if people are actually looking for it.

It's just saying,

okay, you told me that this is your keyword and here

are the 10 places you should put it.

It's asking you to follow a checklist.

It is not the strategic partner thinking it is.

I had a blog post many years ago.

I wrote before I was doing any SEO.

That was like,

you know,

should you use WordPress or Squarespace for your website?

Well, it's like,

do you prefer Legos or cramps?

Because I was making the point that like with WordPress,

you have a lot more opportunities to change things the way

that you want to.

So it would be like buying Legos and you can build

anything you want.

And then I optimize that post for Legos,

which is not at all the search term that it should

be ranking for.

Right. It almost was like,

Oh yeah,

you haven't used the term Legos before and you used it

in your title and you used it in your body text.

So yeah,

this is great green light,

but it wasn't actually going to help me get traffic from

the people that I wanted to be found by.

It wasn't a good keyword,

even though I had the green light.

Yeah. You know,

and it also corrects your wording.

Like if it doesn't like how you've said something,

I would always get caught with,

you have three sentences that start with the same word,

things like that.

I'm like,

seriously. And then what Yoast also does,

I'm talking to our listeners because I know,

you know this Meg,

but is it is it gives you color rankings,

like red is like,

this is so not good.

And then orange and then green.

And I'll be darned.

There were some like,

and I'm thinking,

especially like podcasts notes,

the show notes pages,

there was not a thing I could do to make it

turn green.

So some of them I've just had to let stay orange,

Let him slide,

use it as a reminder,

but it's not actually going to make any difference.

Cause I couldn't even figure out what I'm listening to their

rules. I'm making the changes.

And finally I'm like,

okay, forget it.

Also something to be noted here is that there are a

lot of different ways that Google can look at a keyword,

which is to say Yoast,

when you say this is a post about SEO for eCommerce

businesses, right?

And you put in that focus keyword that says SEO for

eCommerce businesses is what the show notes of this page is

going to be on.

Right. But if somebody looks up e-commerce SEO,

Google would show the rank for that.

But Yoast would be like,

Nope, not close enough.

Right? So it's not that the exact phrase that we're talking

about has to appear in the exact order everywhere that I

just listed for you,

no related keywords will be fine or a different order of

the same keywords would be fine.

You know,

if I say SEO for eCommerce businesses,

and you say SEO for gift businesses,

this would still rank for that.

This would still show up for that.

So you don't have to be pedantic about,

this is the exact phrase.

It's more like this is the concept trying to get into

all of these places that we've listed out.

Okay. Perfect.

Couple more questions for you.

I have other ideas too,

so go for it.

So, Oh,

okay. Just a couple of questions.

Well, I'll save one of them for last,

but one thing that I know or I've heard,

so verify this for us is once you put products up,

let's say you're a business and your product line is set

and you're not changing by season very often.

Let's just say,

I've heard in the past that Google likes websites that keep

having changes or enhancements to them or additions to them versus

a stagnant site.

Is that true?

Yes. Okay.

This is tough.

So here's,

you know,

sometimes people will say,

how can I continue to create something new when my product

line is done?

Or I don't know what else to say.

And I think this is where content comes into the mix,

which is to say,

if you have a product that solves a problem that people

have, you can write a blog post about how your product

solves that problem.

So if you have a line of skincare that is all

about anti-aging,

you can write in your product descriptions that this product will

help with fine lines.

And this product will help with wrinkles and this product will

help with moisturizing.

But then maybe you want to create supplementary content that says,

what are some vitamins that can help you decrease your fine

lines and wrinkles,

or what are nutritional choices you can make to make your

skin look younger.

And you're drawing people into your site then that are interested

in the outcome that your products give them.

Even if you're not specifically saying at the end of the

post and Hey,

buy this product,

right? You need to,

if you want to continue to create content beyond just your

product listings,

you can create content.

That would be interesting to those people and lead them to

the fact that you sell products that serve their needs.

That isn't specifically just,

here's a list of my ingredients and here's some of the

benefits. But more than that,

it's like for that,

that soap that helps with my psoriasis.

Here's some information about psoriasis and here's some different treatment options

that you might consider.

And here's why you should stay away from these food groups.

And also,

Hey, we have this lotion that would be really good for

you, right?

You're not just caring about selling your products,

but you're caring about the problem that your products are supporting.

So good Meg,

because you're leading with giving and this is another way to

attract people over to your site.

And if they're over to your site and they're looking at

the article,

they're going to see probably a shop now tab on the

top or however your website is.

And so they'll automatically understand that you also have products.

Exactly. And it doesn't even have to be as unclear as,

okay, now you're on my page.

Hey, look,

I have a shop section.

You can make the call to action.

Go look at this product,

come check out this listing.

You can link directly to the correlation of,

I wrote this because I sell this.

So it doesn't have to just be,

Oh, well I got them to my site and they'll figure

how to buy from me once they get there.

No, there needs to be a call to action on every

piece of content or every page of your site that says,

come over and shop now.

Or if you have this problem,

let me explain what the problem is.

And here,

this product is the solution that I've created for you.

And I would suggest that so many makers don't do this.

You separate yourself in this way.

Also you're the specialist.

You're teaching people,

you're educating them.

If they're interested and I'm thinking this can also be content

for email newsletters.

So it doesn't just have to sit one place.

Yes. And if you have a jewelry line and so you

aren't necessarily solving world hunger here,

but you have something that's really incredibly beautiful.

Think of all of the reasons why people would buy that.

And maybe you do a mother's day.

Roundup posts of here are 10 unusual things.

You can get your mom for mother's day and include two

of your products with eight other products on that list.

So sometimes it can be curated content in that way.

And people are always looking for unusual or unique mother's day

gifts and they see your product in a list of other

amazing products.

Maybe you want to support some of your local makers in

this way too,

but creating content that displays what you are trying to sell

as part of the answer to that question.

Love it.

Okay. We're going to fast forward.

You have more things to tell us.

Oh, no.

It was mostly mad.

Actually. I wanted to talk.

That's all good.

Okay, wonderful.

So how do we know if this is working,

we go in and we do some adjustments,

et cetera.

Is there a place that we can go or somehow we

can understand whether we're getting more traffic to our site or

it's working,

obviously we'd know if we're getting more sales.

Yes. But is there another way before that actually happens,

that we can see?

Yes. So many of you probably also have Google analytics installed

on your website.

If you don't,

you can go over to google.com/analytics,

and there'll be a tutorial there to help you take the

tracking code and put it on your website.

And the way that will help you is that it will

take a look at every single user who comes to your

website and tell you how long they spent on the page,

where they came from.

Did they buy anything?

This is also very,

very important for my e-commerce people.

Please go in and click the box in the settings that

turns on enhanced.

E-commerce tracking.

If you do nothing else from this podcast interview,

please go and turn on the enhanced eCommerce tracking.

Because what that will do is it will directly pull the

information about your sales into the Google analytics dashboard so that

when people buy from you,

you'll be able to reverse engineer that sale and say,

Oh, 60% of my sales came from referral traffic.

And 20% came from Instagram and 20% came from organic search.

Those are the places I should be spending that time,

not on LinkedIn or whatever that looks like for you by

being able to work backwards and figure out where your sales

are coming from with your enhanced eCommerce tracking,

that will make it so much easier for you to come

up with a marketing.

That is so good.

So I'm going to admit that I'm one who hasn't been

really good with SEO.

I bought into,

you know,

how there was that challenge a while ago?

Like SEO doesn't matter anymore.

It used to be important.

You forget about keywords.

I kind of feel like since I didn't want to put

in the work,

I just bought it until maybe a year and a half

ago. Okay.

It's really easy to ask her Jada SEO because it is

so freaking overwhelming.

Well, but you make it sound so much more simple,

honestly, but then I connected with you and you did an

audit of my site.

One of my sites,

not both of them.

We might have to get to the other ones on that,

but you did an audit of my site,

which was really helpful to see what I was doing.

Right. Which was maybe a little and where I could use

improvement. So I'd love for you just to share.

I'm not trying to push Meg's audit on anybody,

but just like what types of things are you finding are

the weakest points when you're doing some of these audits and

maybe explain what your audits all about also.

So I would say that the biggest problems that I see

are things that we've already talked about a little bit Sue,

which are not creating content in a way that aligns with

the things that people are searching for.

And then when you do get people to your site,

not telling them to buy things from you or getting them

onto your email list,

those are the two calls to action that can be everywhere

on your website.

So either driving them to a page on a product listing

or a specific collection,

or getting them to sign up for your email list.

So you can keep in touch with them,

getting people to your website is the first step of a

longer marketing process.

Okay, perfect.

Got that.

And I'm going to suggest to everybody that you go through

now that you've heard all of this,

you go through with a pen and paper and write down

everything we've talked about to this point.

Cause a lot of this,

you can do yourself right now.

So talk a little bit more about your audit and then

the other services you provide.

Sure. So I provide a quick audit where I will take

a look at your website.

I'll be able to give you three to five things that

you can work on right away.

Sometimes this also involves a little bit of keyword research where

I say to you,

Hey, people are looking for this,

not this.

And I'll show you the free tools that I'm using for

you to be able to do that kind of work yourself.

Sometimes you just specially when you're getting started,

you just want someone to take your hand and walk you

through the first couple of things that you can do that

day. I also have an bunch of free trainings.

I run free challenges twice a year,

and I have a starter kit on my website.

So if you go to love it,

first certs.com/start,

you can download my SEO starter kit and that we'll share

a bunch of resources that I have all about everything SEO.

So if you want to get started with content planning and

keyword research,

I have a course about that.

If you want to make sure that your site is secure

and it's running quickly and loading quickly,

and it's mobile friendly,

I have a course about that.

If you want to learn better how to read your Google

analytics and use another tool from Google called Google search console

to figure out the exact keywords that you are showing up

for in search.

I have a course about that.

So these are all things that I kind of break up

into bite size,

actionable steps to not just let SEO be some overwhelming thing

on your,

to do list that you just keep pushing off until next

week, next month,

next year,

Which equates to never.

Yeah. Wonderful.

And give his listeners,

you know,

on the show page,

I'll have all the links to everything that Meg already referenced

as well as all of her social media sites.

Meg, thank you so much.

This has been incredibly helpful and it makes me even feel

like SEO is more doable.

I've learned so much,

even though I've already been talking with you,

sometimes you have to hear these things a couple of times,

I think.

Yeah, but you've given us an incredible gift because I think

a lot of people can go back right now after listening

to this and make some adjustments that are really going to

help them out.

Thank you so much.

I really appreciate you being here today.

Thank you so much for the opportunity.

I really enjoyed talking with you so much,

Sue. Thank you.

Okay. Assignment time.

Consider, blocking off time in your calendar to get started on

upgrading your SEO because you,

and I know if it doesn't get scheduled,

it will never happen.

Start with making sure your Google analytics are set up and

that enhanced email tracking is turned on.

Then relisten to this show.

If you need to with pen and paper in hand and

decide what you want to work on first,

maybe it's reviewing the names of your products and the wording

of your descriptions or the photo alt text or keywords.

Take one thing or one product at a time and then

advance to the next.

It will be so worth it.

When you see your website,

traffic increase and you only have to do this major overhaul

once because now you know how to do this correctly.

When you add new products or blog posts to your site

in the future,

completely worth it.

Okay. Next week we're entering into the first of two episodes

all about you,

your business.

Yes, but mostly you,

that's all you're getting from me for now though,

tune in next Monday to find out what I'm talking about

and until then make it a great week and be safe.

And well,

I want to make sure you're familiar with my free Facebook

group called gift is breeze.

It's a place where we all gather and our community to

support each other.

Got a really fun post in there.

That's my favorite of the week.

I have to say where I invite all of you to

share what you're doing to show pictures of your product,

to show what you're working on for the week to get

reaction from other people and just for fun,

because we all get to see the products that everybody in

the community is making my favorite post every single week,

without doubt.

Wait, what,

aren't you part of the group already,

if not make sure to jump over to Facebook and search

for the group gift biz breeze don't delay.