21: 4 Simple Steps to Get your Website on the Front Page of Google

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Welcome to the Course Creators MBA Podcast. I'm your host Destiny Kopp and in this podcast we're covering actionable tips to grow your online course business. But before we begin, I want to let you know that this episode is sponsored by my free mini course Course in a Box, which is your plug and play system with templates and videos to get your online course created. You can grab your free course in the box by going to destinycop.com and I will make sure that this link is in the show Notes and today we are talking about four simple steps to get your website on the front page of Google. And my special guest here with me today is Meliss McGraw. She is a 20 year veteran of the fashion and consumer goods industry. She has written content and analyzed and reviewed SEO tactics for over 100,000 items that are currently sold on Amazon today. And as an adjunct professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, she has her finger on the pulse of SEO trends and practices for for creative businesses. And Melissa, as one college professor to another, welcome to the podcast. I'm so happy to be chatting with you today.

Thanks Destiny. I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, thank you. But before we begin and jump into our topic, could you tell us a little bit more about you and your journey?

Yes, sure. I started, well, I started in e Commerce about 10 years ago and as you mentioned, I was a veteran of the fashion industry for over 20 years in New York City and fell into the world of E commerce in I.

Guess now it's been 10 years.

2009, the recession was going on, it hit the fashion industry very, very hard. I wound up being out of a job as well as many of my friends, colleagues, clients. We are all looking for work and all competing for the same job. So I knew something had to. I knew that the world of E commerce was, I mean the sky was the limit and it really hadn't hit the fashion industry just yet. But I wanted to learn more about it. So I went back to school. I got my master's in digital marketing from NYU and an opportunity with Amazon just kind of fell in my lap. And though it wasn't in the fashion industry, I knew obviously I didn't realize what Amazon was going to be today, that it is today, but I knew there was tremendous opportunity working with them and working with SEO, learning more about that topic, which I went to school for. So it was a perfect opportunity for me to have that transition. I'm so glad it happened because as you mentioned, I've written over 100,000 product listings for SEO for products that are listed on Amazon today. So know a little thing or two about SEO. And I'm also working with private clients in both service based businesses and product based businesses getting their sites found online. It's really important. There's over, I think, 1.9 million websites out there now and there's a lot of competition. So you have to do whatever you can do to get your site found online. And that's where I come in. I can help you or I can teach you how to do it yourself.

So you know, I bet you when you were going to find work and something that fell in your lap, the Amazon, you had absolutely no idea that they were going to be as big as they are today. And aren't they one of the biggest competitors of Google? Don't they kind of feel like they're competing against each other to some extent?

Yes, absolutely. Yes.

So we have course creators that are listening to this podcast and they're probably thinking, as I have thought in the past and to some extent think this today too is I have my website out there. It's been out there for a few years, but it's not on the first page of Google or their front page or right at the beginning when people are searching on terms of is it really obtainable, do you think, for small business owners like us to get our website or our blog topics or podcast topics up there so people can actually see them when they're searching?

Yes, it is obtainable. There is some work involved because let's face it, I'm probably one of them 75% of people searching Google, and I'll just use Google as reference because it's 93% of search now. They're not going past the first page of Google. So you have to do everything that you can do to get on that first page. Because people aren't going past the first page. They're not, or they're not even. I'm going to be honest, they're not even going past the first five results on the first page if they're not seeing what they're looking for. They're doing what we call a query refinement. They're putting something else into Google to find what they're looking for. So I tell my clients, the first step of getting found on Google is thinking about what you want to be known for when someone searches for your site, for your services on Google.

Okay, so, so let's break this down a little bit more. So what are some of the first steps that we need to. That would be easy for us as course creators? What are some of the first steps that we need to do to maybe revise our website or if we're writing a blog post that we need to be thinking about to get our website up there on that first page or even the first three or four listings that you mentioned?

Absolutely. I think, as I mentioned, the first step is really thinking about what you want to be known for. And is that even in your site anywhere? Is it in your content? Is it in your blog post titles? Is it in your images? And I'll explain a little bit more how to do that. And that's what we call keyword research. Those are words or a series of phrases that you want to be known for when someone types into Google to find your business. And I'm going to say over 90% of clients that I've worked with, what they want to be known for, it's nowhere in their website at all. I had one client, she said, Melissa, I want to rank for my name. But I said to her, your name's nowhere on your site. Your first name might be on your about page, but not your full name. So no one's going to find you searching for your full name because it's nowhere on your site. So little things like that, you have to kind of retrain your brain, so to speak. You also have to think, for example, SEO in my world, if my own website, SEO is a broad term. There's a lot of competition, a lot of sites that might be ranking for SEO. You almost want, I hate to say it, even Dumb it down a little bit. How would I get my website found on Google? Very, very specific search term. So you want to have different variations of these search terms throughout your website and again, retraining your brain to say, well, how would people really search for my services or my website?

So what do you think is the easiest way to find those keywords or figure out what exactly do you need to even put on your website?

You can start putting in, for example, if you offer courses for Photoshop, I'm just going to use that as an example. You can just type that into Google without even hitting the return key or the enter button. On your keyboard or your laptop, you'll see a series of, of various keywords or phrases that pop up. Those are alternative keywords to what you just put in. That's what people are also searching. So those are just some ideas of keywords that people are searching for on Google. It's completely free. You can utilize them in your website if you were to put the same query and hit return. If you go down, scroll down to the end of the results page, you'll see also similar searches or related searches to what you just typed into Google. Those are also keywords that you can use in your website because people are searching for those specifically. There's a lot of free keyword tools out there now that you can utilize just to get some ideas of variation keywords that you can put into your website. And, and if you just Google free keyword tools, you can kind of play around with each one of them. Some of them are free for a certain amount of data that it gives back to you.

What is your favorite one?

I happen to use Semrush. It's a paid version, but there is. You can utilize a free version of that. I love that software. I'm going to say there's one out there. It's very basic. It's. And I did not name it and I apologize. Hopefully it's keyword shitter. But you just put in your keyword and it just, it's a brain dump of all of the keywords that are associated with that keyword. Very, very basic website, but it's great information. Google has also keywords everywhere that can just go right into your browser. There's a lot of keywords tools out there. Again, apologize for the name, but that's.

That'S what, you know, it's what it's called. So we, let's just say we've done our research. We know what search terms people are using for what we want to be known for. Right. You know, obviously me, I want to be known for online courses on, you know, helping people with marketing their online course, that sort of thing. So I have all these keywords. What do I do on my website to make sure they're found? Obviously I need to put them somewhere. Is there anything in particular that I need to keep in mind?

You want to make sure that these keywords are utilized throughout your site. Whether if you have a blog component, for example, the blog titles, the images on your site or on your blog or often, and I've done this in the past, you upload images to your website and it's named image123jpg. Or you utilize a free stock photo site and it's called unsplash 12345 PNG file. Okay. That doesn't really help you in search whatsoever. I'm sure you don't want to be known for image123jpg. And here's a chance to put in the keywords that you want to get known for and what you want your services or your site found for just in the title name of your images. So if it's, I'm going to just use Photoshop courses and I'll. For example, you can even add a location element to it. For example, if you want to be you're in New York City, you could put photoshop courses nyc.jpg and that helps find your images in image search. Because Google doesn't know that's an image of a cute puppy that you have on your website. You have to tell Google what that is. So most entrepreneurs skip this step when they're uploading images into their media library. No matter if they're using WordPress, Squarespace, Shopify, no matter what, it's changing those images really, really important. And if you are using WordPress, especially using the Alt text field in the media library, if you go into the media library and you'll see a field called Alt Text, Shopify has it as well. You can add additional keywords or phrases into that field and that also helps in image search.

Okay, perfect. So let's just say that I have my keywords, they're on my site, I have them in Alt text in my images. Will Google automatically know that my website exists, or is there something else I need to do to make sure that they know it's there?

Well, there is a free tool from Google and to answer your question, Google sometimes knows that your site exists because if it's seen, it's getting a lot of traffic. Or what we call backlinks, other sites linking to yours. It's sharing your content. It may, what we call, index that page or take a snapshot of that page, the data that's on that page. So if someone is searching for something on Google, it will match your site. The algorithm, all that, all that stuff. I'm gonna get too techy on it, but that's what it does. So Google doesn't necessarily know that you launched your site last week or you had a launch party for it. You have to tell Google what pages, what posts exist. And there is a free tool called Google Search Console that you can sign up for and verify your website with. Now, it's an easy process. Some feel it's a little too techy. I help clients sign up for it, et cetera. And what I do is submit each page and post to Google to make sure it's indexed, etc. But that's something that you can do on your own each time that you have a blog post or you're submitting your homepage about page, etc. To Google just to make sure it will know about your site. And that's a great free tool.

Okay, well, that is very interesting. I was aware of it. But I guess the question that I have, based on what you just said, whenever I launch a new blog post, do I need to go to that search console and let them know that it's there?

Yes, absolutely. Sometimes just based on the size of your site and Google knowing about your site, it could crawl your site or your post the next day. It just really depends. So I always suggest just submitting it.

See, I learn something new every day.

That's great.

So you mentioned backlinks in your conversation there. Can you tell us a little bit more about those and why they're important?

It's a really important piece of the SEO strategy. And Google likes to see backlinks to your website, people sharing your content. They might have really loved this blog post that you wrote about and are linking back to your site, et cetera. Now, it doesn't mean the more backlinks you have, the more credible you are. They're looking at the valuable links itself, not just having links from any site that doesn't make sense. That's really a big no no in Google's eyes now. And your site can be penalized for that. So you want to make sure if, for example, you're starting your backlink strategy, you could be guest posting on other sites and making sure they're linking back to your site. That starts this backlink process. And as Google sees that you have more backlinks, it's giving you more credibility or what we call domain authority. So it can start say, okay, hey, people, really, really loving this content. I'm going to start referring the site more in search engine results. So it starts that credibility and gaining trust with Google and also relevance. Very, very important piece of the SEO puzzle.

Okay, thank you. So let's just say we've done all the basics. We know what keywords people are using, we're using. We have them on the our website. We have gone to the Google search console. They know we're here. What are some other things we should start doing to build our SEO strategy to get on that first page of Google?

Google also takes a look at site speed. I don't think anyone has ever said I love a slow website. And Google doesn't say that either, that's for sure. So you want to make sure your website speed and sometimes that's due to the host that you're using. It could be all those images that you uploaded. I've done it before, they were like 10,000 kilobytes. There are huge files. I had no idea what I was doing. Make sure they're compressed. So it really doesn't slow down your website. So there's a free tool out there. It's called Pingdom P I n G D O M. If you just. I think it's pingdom.tools.com or tools.pingdom.com can't remember which which way it goes.

We'll include the link in the show notes.

Great. You can put in your URL and then just hit analyze and it will give you a grade for your website. It'll tell you the site speed. It'll also show you some of the images that you uploaded and the size of the files. So you can immediately see which files might be the culprit of slowing your site down. It might give you some techie data that maybe you could pass on to your web developer if there's anything that they can do to really improve the site's performance and speed. But it's a great free tool that I suggest everyone check out. You can check out your competitor sites too as well, see what's going on there. But it's again a great free tool that you can see how your site's doing.

I think I'm going to go check on that as soon as we're done with our conversation. Melissa, any last minute tips that you have for the course creators on the who are listening to this podcast today.

It's all about when you're creating a course, what benefits are you going to provide with your course? Why would people need your course? And that's has to be written in your sales page, your website, wherever you're promoting your course. Really, really important for it to be found on Google. And that's obviously if you have an evergreen course and you want people just to come and sign up for it, it's really, really important to think about the different types of keywords, what people would be searching for for that specific topic. And as long as you have that in your titles, your content, your images, I think it will definitely increase your chances of getting found on Google.

Perfect. Melissa, how can people find you?

You can head over to my website thecreative potential.com I offer. It's called SEO my site now service if you want. It's a done for you optimization service where I go in and what I just discussed here. I handle all the back end techie stuff for you if you don't have time to do it. I have many clients and Melissa se makes me ill. I don't want to do it at all. I just want someone to do it for me. It's one of those things that usually falls at the bottom of everyone's to do list but they know they need to do it. So I help clients out with that. You can find that on my website. There's also a free SEO session. If you want to talk a little bit more about your SEO with me. You can hop on a call with me and we can discuss maybe how we could work together in the future. So you can head over to thecreativepotential.com I'm also on Instagram. The creative potential. Same with Pinterest. The creative potential. Thank you. And Twitter, the creative potential as well.

We'll make sure that that is in the show notes so people can reach you.

Great. Thank you so much.

Thanks. Thanks Melissa. And thanks so much for joining us today. Course creators. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Would love for you to rate and review the podcast on itunes or your favorite podcast platform. Have a great rest of your day. Bye for now.