#172: Eight Simple SEO Tweaks That Boosted Matt Olpinski’s Website Ranking on Google

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia.

Hey there.

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast. I am your host Ed Gandia, and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. You can find detailed show notes for this episode@b2b launcher.com, episode 172. Those notes include a summary of our discussion, as well as links to resources we mentioned during the show. Search engine Optimization, or SEO, is a field that has a horrible reputation. For years, SEO companies scammed their clients with big promises of boosting their search engine rankings, only to fall short or just fail altogether. And yet the information on the subject continues to be confusing, contradictory in many cases, and frankly misleading in quite a few cases, which leads website owners to do silly things that simply won't move the needle or in some cases actually hurt their rankings. But that hasn't stopped businesses and freelance professionals from obsessing over their SEO. Writers often ask me how they can improve their rankings on Google or We had Heather Lloyd Martin on the show.

A few years ago to talk about SEO.

She gave us some great, great advice.

And I encourage you to check out that episode.

This time, however, I wanted to bring in a different kind of practitioner. I wanted to talk to someone who doesn't do SEO for a living. Nothing wrong with that. But instead I wanted to talk to someone who is a freelance professional who instead has had success optimizing his own website by making some simple tweaks. And that way you could have a different perspective on this important subject. My guest is Matt Olpinski. He is a freelance UX designer based in New York. Matt does a lot of website development work and has an impressive list of clients. And in this interview he explains how he's been able to boost his search engine rankings like crazy with some simple adjustments. So let me share some of his own results because this is something we didn't actually get into during the interview, but we actually discuss right after we we stop recording. So some of the things that he mentioned. First, he ranks number two on Google for searches like Freelance UX Designer or Freelance UX Designer New York and actually double checked this myself and it's very true. Now if you want to check it, here's what you'll find when you do these searches. The first few are actually informational websites or some of these kind of job.

Boards and so forth but right after.

That, he is actually the first person.

That I noticed doing some of these.

Searches, who came in, who showed up in the results, who was an actual practitioner, as opposed to just kind of.

Like an information article.

For example, he's never paid for advertising stuff.

And then the third Bucket's kind of mobile app design. Those are the three things that people have most commonly contacted me for and everything else. Like, you know, hey, can you install this pre made WordPress template and customize it for me? You know, all that kind of stuff, I kind of pushed to the side and said, I'm not gonna do that anymore.

Yeah, that's. I think it's smart. Stay focused. I know you're a big believer in having clients come to you, right? Attracting prospects, attracting clients. And you, you like to talk about how that's, that's really important. Can you maybe explain kind of like why you feel strongly about client attraction as opposed to just knocking on doors all the time?

Yes. So that is probably as I've been freelancing full time and kind of writing advice for people and having conversations with people. That's probably the number one question I get asked is how do I find more freelance clients? And my response is always, you're asking the wrong question. So people typically ask, how can I find more clients? And what I think they should be asking instead is how can I help more clients be finding me? And I think this is true for my business. I think this is true for most businesses, I'm assuming your own as well, where if you want to build a healthy, sustainable business of any kind, whether it's freelancing a company of one or a huge business, you can't rely on, you know, constant outbound, you know, cold lead generation. I think you have, at some point there has to be some clients coming to you. And that's sort of the position I try to help people get in sooner than later because it is a process that can take a little bit of time. You know, if you start freelancing and you throw a website up, you can't just expect people to just start finding you, you know, the next day. So it does take a little bit of effort and a little bit of time. So the earlier that you can start doing that and focusing on that, the better off I think you'll be long term.

No, I think that's absolutely smart. One of the things that I do a lot with my clients is depending on where they are, we might start with some heavy kind of outbound strategies just because we need to make Something happen really quickly, but that's not sustainable. I agree. I mean especially the pace that they may have to go on early, early on. So I think that's. Yeah, at some point you do have to transition, otherwise you can exhaust your. You bring up websites and I know we're going to be talking about websites and SEO. I'm going to ask you this question because I do have a lot of people in my tribe who for one reason or another still don't have a website. In some cases they may not feel they have a website. But how important is it to have a website if you are a freelance professional man?

I think it's one of the most important things that you can have. And I think that in the last couple years, platforms like WordPress and Wix and Squarespace and a number of other ones that have popped up, they kind of make it a no brainer. Right? You don't have to go out and hire a freelance designer or developer or an agency or anything like that. You can do it yourself. It doesn't have to be written from scratch, it doesn't have to be custom, it can be a theme. Clients don't really care and probably won't even know any better whether they're looking at a custom site or premade template. What they do care about is the content on that website and how much they think you can help your business by looking at that website. So that is, yeah, I would say it's really kind of a non negotiable thing and you're really missing out on a huge number of people who potentially would want to work with you. By not having a website, you're really limiting your visibility. So I'd say there's really no reason that I can think of why you wouldn't have one.

I agree. It's never been easier. I see this question kind of little bit with newbies who are launching. They might be experienced but they're going solo for the first time. And also with established people who maybe started like 20 years ago and they feel that all their business is word of mouth. So what do I even need a website? But you're absolutely right, you're leaving a lot of opportunities on the table. You're just not even coming close to that. Without that presence.

I want to get a little more.

Granular because I'd like to focus a lot of our conversation on SEO, search engine optimization. I find that this is a topic that creates a lot of confusion. I also believe there's a ton of misinformation out there. On the topic, how important is it to optimize your website today? And along with that, is this still something that we can impact, or has Google gotten so sophisticated that there's just really not much we can do to move that needle?

Yeah, great stuff. There's a lot going on there. Let me kind of pick it apart a little bit. So you're right. The whole topic of SEO, I think, has become very polluted by, you know, primarily by businesses, at least from my perspective, by businesses that claim to, you know, pay us lots and lots of money. We'll get you ranking on the first page of Google and there's all these buzzwords that kind of get thrown around. And if you're not really familiar with the marketing and advertising world, it just sounds like nonsense. It sounds like they're just asking for a lot of money. You really don't know what you're getting. You don't understand it. So I think when people hear the term SEO now, their initial reaction, their gut instinct is just an immediate turn off. They don't even want to hear any more about it. They're like, oh, that's some marketing jargon. It doesn't mean anything. It's not helpful. And the reality is a little bit different. It's actually very important. And I think that you can optimize, you should optimize for SEO. And it's not as difficult as people think. It's not this crazy world where you need necessarily a professional to do this. I think there's some really basic fundamental things that all of us can do to make our websites appear more in front of the right people more frequently. Pretty easily. We'll get into more of that, you know, as we continue to talk about this stuff.

So that hasn't changed. I mean, five, 10 years ago, definitely important. But even as sophisticated as Google's gotten, and knowing where there's relevance and where people are trying to cheat the system, you're saying, hey, that's still something you need to focus on and pay attention to because you can impact how optimized your website is.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that you can. I think it's even because Google has gotten smarter. I think that it's easier in some ways to optimize your SEO. So I think where the problem comes in is it's the amount of, it's the volume of content that's on the Internet now compared to 10 years ago. Right. It's not necessarily Google's algorithm. In fact, Google's algorithm's gotten better because it did away with it places, I think it. I don't know if it minimized the keyword ranking factor down to like almost zero or it got rid of it completely. I'm not sure which one it was. But basically what was going on a couple years ago was that people were just throwing in tons of keywords that didn't necessarily have anything to do with what the content was on their website, just to rank higher. And Google saw that and they were like, all right, well, that's kind of silly. Let's not do that anymore. So they got rid of that, and now that's not a factor that really affects your website's ranking at all. So I think that things like that have actually helped and not hurt. So, yeah, you can absolutely move the needle. And I think it's not as hard as people think to move that needle.

Let's talk about some of those factors. The factors that affect SEO and page rankings today. What would you say are the biggest ones? And again, I like to think in terms of 80, 20, which many times it's like, you know, 595 or 1090. But the few things that are worth paying attention to because they're going to make the biggest difference. And not only do I want to know what you feel these are, but also to what degree could they potentially impact your rankings?

Sure, yeah, I have a short list. There's like seven or eight things. I'll just kind of highlight them really quick. So one is the page titles. This is, this is my number one for a couple reasons, I can talk about it in more detail. So page titles, that is not necessarily the title that you see on your website. That's the title that you see in the browser tab. That's what shows up in Google search results. So that page title for each of the pages on your site, that title is very important. What's in that title is very important. And I can get into the anatomy of what I think should be there based on some of the success that I've had. The second thing is your page headings, and that is actually what you see on the website itself. So when you go to the homepage, maybe there's a title right in the middle, the About Page, services page. Same thing. Those headings matter. Those H1 tags in the HTML code, that's a big factor. Page descriptions, this is also something that you can change. The meta description on each page is important. So what a lot of people end up doing is either not writing one at all or they write one for the whole website and they Include the same description on every page. But if you can just do. If you can just write a unique description for each page, that'll make a difference in your rankings. The Next one is URLs or slugs they call them, and that's just the actual URL. It's like my website.com services about contact, if you're writing an article. Website content management systems like WordPress, when you type in, you start a blog post, right? If you have a blog, you start your blog post and you type in the blog title and it automatically creates that URL for you. And it's really long and it's basically the entire title of the blog, of the blog post with a bunch of dashes in it. So if you go in and actually shorten that. So I think brevity, if you can keep that short, just the actual important words, it's easier for humans to remember, it's easier for Google to index. It's less noise. So URLs are definitely a big ranking factor. The next thing is page links. Just having good page links, linking between your own pages, linking out to other relevant sites, backlinking from other sites. If you can get your website on some other site somehow, that would be helpful as well. So the more websites that are out there that know about your website, that's going to help improve your SEO as well. Probably one of the biggest factors is fresh content. So that's a problem with a lot of, I think freelance websites is that they just have a hard time. How do I make fresh content if it's just a portfolio site, right? Like, how do I put fresh content on there? I'm not writing a blog. That can be difficult. And the way that I sort of accidentally stumbled upon that was as a designer. I pretty much redesigned my website every year. Not because I necessarily wanted to, but because I learned. I was learning so much so fast as a designer that I'd look back a year later at my old website and I was like, man, what was I thinking? I can do that better. I just redid it and relaunched it and rewrote it, rewrote the content and kind of, you know, I'd learn a little bit more about what clients want and then I'd rewrite my services page and stuff. So I think just always kind of going in there and tinkering and tweaking your site is a good thing. You don't always have to rewrite it from scratch, but just those new pages, that fresh content, Google will recrawl your website and that'll help you rank higher. Proper HTML code is big. If you are doing a custom site, having valid, structured, good looking HTML code is going to be very important. It's going to make it easier for Google to index. If you're using a website builder like Wix or Squarespace or anything like that, you can probably safely assume that the code is pretty good. So I wouldn't worry about that too much. And then the domain, the last one is the domain age. So that's why, that's another reason why I tell people to do this sooner than later. Because you can certainly do cold outreach and direct marketing and stuff like that in the beginning. You can leverage your network, reach out to family and friends, things like that. I'm all in favor of that, but at the same time, I think if you can start with a website and get it up online sooner than later, the length of the domain age is certainly a factor as well. I don't think it's such a big factor that your website won't rank at all unless it's been around for 10 years. But it's definitely something that you want to consider. So I'd say do that sooner than later.

Yeah. So website that's been around for 12, 15 years, that just shows that you're. Everything else being equal, you're kind of established, you know, this is not a fly by night thing though, that, that makes perfect sense. I had a couple of follow up questions and some of the things you mentioned when the first one you mentioned was page title. With that one, are you referring then to the, to the meta tag? The, the title tag?

Yes.

Okay, so that would be the title tag and then the headings would be the H1 headings, which was the second one you mentioned. Okay, all right. So you know, 10 years ago like the big, the buzzword was keywords and you mentioned how that's kind of gone down. So what, what factor, how does that, how do keywords factor in or do they factor in? How does Google know, you know, what is this website about itself and what the different pages are about? Does it just use page titles or are there other ways that I can kind of help Google identify who needs to. Who this website would be relevant for?

Gosh, you know, I wish I had a little bit of a better answer to that just for everyone listening. I'm certainly not an SEO expert. I sort of stumbled onto some degree of SEO success or my website's ranking very highly and I've sort of been trying to reverse engineer that ever since it happened. So I think a lot of what you're saying it comes down, down to. I've kind of boiled it down to these seven or eight things. You know, the fresh content, the descriptions, those page descriptions I mentioned, those meta tag descriptions, having a unique one for each page. There was a. There was a specific point in time when I saw a major shift. So I had. It was 2000, it was the end of 2014, I believe. So I had my. I put my website up for the first time. I'll tell you just a little bit of a story that I think will help shed some light on this. So I had my website up, and when I started college in 2008, it was a really basic portfolio site. I pretty much redesigned it and relaunched it like I said, every year up until 2014. In 2014, I did something different. I did a couple things different. One, I started to think from the perspective of my ideal client. So I said, you know what? I took a look at my website and one day this kind of light bulb just went off. I was like, you know what? I. This is really all about me. And if I was a client looking at this, I probably wouldn't like it very much. So I rebuilt the whole site, writing the content and designing the site specifically for my ideal client. And when I did that, I rebuilt it on WordPress. And I started to. For no other reason other than I'm a little ocd, I just started to go in and make sure that, okay, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to put the effort into making this website. Let me just make sure that the titles are really good, the headings are really good, the descriptions are unique to each page. I had no idea how that would affect my SEO rankings or. I wasn't even thinking about SEO when I did it. I just kind of wanted to do it. But immediately after relaunching my site like that, I started to see a difference. And that's when I started to get more leads from my website. I started to get a lot more traffic to my website. I started to get contacted by people who weren't necessarily even looking for web design help. They were just other freelancers or they were people looking to, you know, ask me questions or have me on a podcast or something like this. So that was like the clear. The clear turning point in my kind of freelancing career where I just adjusted these things. And I think if other people just pay attention to these things, I think that's probably the biggest problem is people just don't even bother paying attention to this stuff. I think if you just pay attention to it, you'll be ahead of time, you'll be way ahead of most of the competition.

I like that because these are very simple things. I think you've given us a list many times. When I see these things I'm like, ugh, this sounds like a nightmare, you know, but these are fairly simple things. Of course you took it a couple of notches up because you have the capability to kind of rebuild your site and all that. But for the everyday person, these are things that we can do. I'm curious about because I'm sure you hear this all the time too, right?

A friend or colleague says, man, I'm.

Ranking like number three in Google for I don't know, high tech copywriter in Miami or something like that.

I'm curious, I know Google started changing.

Things where search results became a little bit more personalized. Is that really still important? I mean, is that still kind of a valid thing or is that kind of like a what I would call maybe a vanity result? You know, hey, I'm ranking really high.

For so and so.

No, so I don't, I don't think that it's necessarily, you know, kind of vandy results. So you're, I think you're kind of touching on one main major point that I really wanted to make sure got across in our conversations today. So when I'm writing these page titles that I talked about, you mentioned the specific search like Freelance copywriter Miami or something like that. When clients are searching for freelancers, what I've found in my experience and my kind of success with my web traffic is that they're searching for three things. When they actually type words into Google search, they're typing three main components. So the first one is the task that they want completed. It's UI design, UX design, website redesign, copywriting, something. That's the task. The second thing is a geographic location. So New York or you know, la, or it might be a city, it could be a country, it's more likely a city. Typically clients like working with people from their area or at least that's what they'll start out searching for. And the third thing is the type of person they need. Am I looking for a freelancer? Am I looking for an agency? Am I looking for a company? Those are all synonymous to us. But the person who's doing the search, they type one of those words in as their preference. So the way that kind of turns out in the search is they'll type in Something like Freelance UX Designer New York or Freelance UI Designer NY or UI Designer NY or something like that. Freelance Copywriter New York or whatever it might be. Those tend to be the most common search phrases that I found that clients use. So what I've done on my own website is all my page titles, it's page name. Matt Lipinski UIUX Designer New York on every page. And the only difference is that the very first thing is the unique page name. Right. So if it's services, it's services. MATT LPINSKI UI UX Design and in Google that means a lot. That has a lot of weight in Google. Google knows exactly what is on this page and it can rank that more highly. So I hope that answers that question a little bit.

Oh absolutely. Yeah, yeah, it really does. A follow up question to that though, that's not considered kind of keyword stuffing. Having the same huge component of that page title and only changing what that page is about like services are about. So that sounds like it's kosher to do that.

It has been for me. I don't see why not. Because you're not loading the page title up with stuff that's irrelevant. The entire website is still my website. So it's my name, it's what I do and it's where I am. So those three things are common to every page no matter what. So actually it's done. I think again, I'm not an expert at this, but in my experience that's worked very, very well.

Yeah, I would add, I think for writers there's one more element that if it were me, I would go ahead and add. So you mentioned the task they want completed, so the deliverable geographic location, type of person they need. And I would add target market because if your focus, if your specialty is, I don't know, the health IT market, that's who you typically work with. Man, I know if I were a marketing director in a health IT company and I was looking for somebody with that kind of experience, that would definitely make my search absolutely for sure.

That's fantastic advice. I would definitely say the more specific you can get with this if you really know exactly who you want to work with. I think that's one reason why I didn't do that is because I haven't really 100% figured out the exact type of person that I only want to work with them. But if you, if you are figuring that out and you have that niche down, by all means do that. I think that's great.

So let's, let's Talk a little bit about copy, and I'm not sure how much you have here or if you have some suggestions, but, you know, for those who were maybe going down this path and said, you know, might as well just go ahead and rewrite my copy. From a search standpoint, do you have any tips or suggestions for writing web copy that will resonate with our ideal clients and help us get found online? Right. Kind of striking the right balance between SEO, but making sure that the copy speaks to our ideal client.

Yeah. So I realize that I'm speaking primarily to an audience of copywriters, and I myself have certainly not been trained in copywriting, so I don't want to necessarily give copywriting tips. But what I think I have learned is that something I think a lot of freelancers struggle with, and I struggled with myself, is that I think what we just need to do more of is try to see things from the perspective of the client rather than our own perspective as freelancers. Whether you're a designer, copywriter, marketer, or developer, it doesn't matter. We always try to. It's our natural instinct to just write kind of from our perspective. It's very difficult to change your perspective and see, how is the client actually looking at my website? What are they thinking? You know, they're probably. They have, like, a really busy day. You know, there's all these. There's all these things. If you start, like, actually shifting your perspective a bit, I think that is where I found some success in writing my copy. I think that's why, you know, the copy on my website seems to resonate well with clients, is because I'm actually talking to them in a way that they kind of want to be talked to or expecting to be talked to, or it's at least refreshing for them to see it that way. So I think as. As far as the impact on Google and SEO results, I mean, like I said, consistency, let's go with that. I think consistency is probably one of the biggest things across my website. My blog is about freelancing. I'm not saying people need to go out and start blogging, but my blog is about freelancing. I mentioned that I'm a freelancer. I mentioned that I'm available for freelancing. I have freelance services that I offer. So there's, you know, I wouldn't get too bogged down, like, my. My actual services page on my website. I don't really know if I mentioned freelancing specifically that word in there. Right. It's. It's in my page. Titles, you know, my blog content, you know, boosts that up as well, I think. So there's enough of it, you know, you want to. You want it to be natural, too. You don't want to. If you start going down this rabbit hole where, like, you're. You're kind of forcing these words into your paragraphs and pages. I don't know if that's necessary. I wouldn't start there. At least I'd start with some of these more basic things that we talked about and then, you know, see how that does over the course of a couple months and kind of adjust from there.

Well, and I think if you take the advice that you gave us earlier, I think that that's maybe like a good guide as well. Tasks they want completed, geographic location, type of person. And then, of course, I have target markets. That could be a great guide, because that search that they're going to make basically distills their need, doesn't it? Yep, exactly. So I think I'm with you 100% on that. I'm curious because as we start kind of wrapping up, one thing that I see happen frequently is when a writer has just overhauled their website or they've changed domain names because they're pivoting into a new target market where they've gone from being on Squarespace to maybe same domain, but now they're going to WordPress. And there's always that question of, like, you know, man, I've had, like, pretty good SEO juice. Like, prospects find me, you know, frequently by doing Google searches. I'm afraid of making the switch because I feel like, you know, this might, like, end that.

Any thoughts on that?

Do you think that still happens? And if so, is it something to really worry about?

Yeah, that's a good question. It can happen, I think. And that's something that clients, when I work with clients, they're worried about that too. Right. Well, if we overhaul my website, what happens to all my search results? How do we kind of keep that intact? So I think some of the basic things you can do if you're pivoting or transitioning is try to keep as many of those URLs, those page slugs, the same as you can, or at the very least redirect them to some new page on your website. So you want to kind of keep some level of symmetry there, unless you really need to change something. But beyond that, I wouldn't be too afraid to overhaul it because chances are, if you're pivoting, like you mentioned, and you're switching Domain names and that stuff, Chances are it's going to be an improvement. You're not doing that to make anything worse. So you're probably getting more specific with who you're targeting. Your content's probably better. Your domain name is hopefully better. You can have multiple domains pointing to the same site. I have that on my site right now. It hasn't seemed to affect anything at all. And something that I, you know, kind of a little personal experience from my end is that, you know, last year I had a services page on my site that wasn't really very informative. And I kind of had this decision, right, okay, I can. Should I make these new pages on my site? Should I redo my services page? Should I redo my contact form and kind of focus on just these three things? That was a big shift because clients, that's the number one page they want to go to, is my work and my services. So updating that was a little scary, but it ended up working out really well. And I am not 100% sure if I'm getting more or less traffic to those specific pages right now. But what I do know is that the people who have been contacting me have been much better clients recently because my services pages are better. So I think I wouldn't worry too much about that. If you need to make improvements to your site, go make improvements to your site. And I wouldn't worry about it too much. Unless you have phenomenal SEO right now and you really don't want to mess that up.

Yeah, I think that's great. What I'm hearing, Matt. Of course, we're just speculating here. Is that. Going back to original question that I had about Google and how sophisticated sophisticated it's gotten, is that if you're doing the right thing, there's a good probability that it's going to help you, not hurt you. Where maybe 10, 15 years ago, maybe that wasn't true. At least that's. That's what I'm seeing from listening to you reading articles and just kind of staying on top of what's going on there in the SEO world, that if you're, if you're kind of like, you know, doing the right things and being a good guy or good gal, that's now going to serve you as opposed to before, where maybe it could hurt you.

Yep. Yeah, I think that's accurate for sure.

Yeah. Cool, man. I know you have an ebook available for purchase on the topic of getting more clients from your website.

As a freelancer, tell us a little.

Bit about that, yeah.

On my site I have a handful of resources available for freelancers, but this one specifically is essentially everything we talked about today in a lot more detail. It's a 50 page PDF booklet that goes into a lot of detail into all these things and tells a little bit of, give some examples through a little bit of storytelling, kind of what worked for me and why it worked and kind of like my reverse engineering process, what I figured out along the way. It's obviously got the main stuff that we talked about today in it and it just goes into more granular detail on what can you actually do. My whole goal with that book was to be super actionable. When people ask these questions like, how can I rank higher on Google? How can I get clients actually finding me? It goes through the whole process of how I figured all that out. From having your own website to defining the purpose of your website, writing copy for your ideal clients, optimizing your SEO, displaying your best work, designing for your ideal client, staying consistent across social media, examining the competition. It just kind of runs the whole gamut of this whole, the whole perspective of everything we talked about today. And a little bit more.

That's awesome. Where can we learn more about it?

So if you go to my site, it's matt olpinski.com under the Products tab, Products section. It's called the ultimate guide to getting more clients from your website. And the whole focus is on having clients come to you rather than having to put yourself in a situation where you're constantly chasing after them.

Absolutely. Cool. So we'll make sure to link to that in the show notes. And of course, that was my last question. Where can learn more about you and your business? And you know, so that's, that's the website. Matt, thank you so much, man. You know what I really appreciate about what you shared here. This is like real, this is real stuff. You know, sometimes when you talk to SEO experts, and I'm not pointing fingers at anybody specifically, but when you, when.

You listen to them, when you read.

Their stuff, it's like they're living in a different world. And I wanted to talk to a real person and even more important, really another freelancer who's done things that have really, really helped them on their website. So I appreciate you being so open with these ideas and sharing what's worked for you.

Yeah, of course, like I said, I'm by no means an SEO expert, but these are some of the tips and tricks that have kind of worked for me and I hope that they will help others along the way as well.

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