MBA1750 Q&A Wednesday: How do I get started with SEO?

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Hey oh. Welcome to the 100 RMBA show where business is pleasure every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my partner back in 2014 and today's episode is Q and A Wednesday. If you have a question you want to ask, ask go ahead and email me over at omar00mba.net Today's question is from Chet and he asks how do I get started with SEO? I know the importance of search engine optimization, but I haven't got around to actually doing anything with my website so it can be found on Google. My site's been around for about six months and I've published several blog posts, but I'm not really sure what I should do to optimize my site for search engines. What are the first steps you'd recommend I take? Thanks for the help Chet. Great question Chet. And Chet is on the money. Search engine optimization is now more important than ever. Making sure people can find your website, your services, your blog posts, when they search for your keywords is one of the best ways to get reoccurring customers coming to your website. You want to rank as high as possible on the first page so you're top of mind for all customers that search your keywords. If you had to ask me, I think search engine optimization is probably one of the best ways to invest in your marketing. If there's one thing you would have to do, or I would recommend you do before any other marketing, it would be SEO. So in today's lesson, I'm going to walk you through how to get started. What are some steps you can take to start optimizing your site? Let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Let's get started with a bit of search Engine Optimization 101. The whole point of SEO is to make it easy for search engines, primarily Google, the most dominant search engine, to find you and your website. When I say website, I'm talking about all the pages on your site, all the blog posts. Now, if you're new to your market, if you're new in your business, most people aren't going to search and find you by name. You're not a household name yet, but you want people to find you by the keywords they search for. So for example, let's say you're a yoga instructor. You want people to find your website when they type things like yoga poses for a bad back or yoga for beginners. Every industry has popular keywords, the most frequently searched keywords in your marketplace. So let's go with a yoga example. In the yoga world, there are the top 100 keywords that people type into Google, searching for things related to yoga. You want to make sure your website shows up when anybody searches for these keywords. And you want to make sure you show up as high as possible in the Google rankings. They say the top three positions on on the first page are gold. Really, most of all, the traffic go to those first three rankings. But if you're just getting started, your job really is to try to just at least get on the first page. Okay, so what is step number one? Step number one is that you need a keyword research tool. There's a lot of keyword research tools out there. Let me start with a free one. There's Google Keyword Planner. They keep changing the name, but if you just Google Google keyword tool, you'll find it. And this one's free. It's a little bit complicated. The UI is not so fantastic. So if you have a budget for it, I recommend two tools that you can use. You could choose either one. One is Ahrefs, that's a hrefs. The other one is serpstat. We've used both of these tools for keyword planning. Both work just as good as each other. It's just all a matter of preference of what you like. These are paid tools and you pay monthly to get access to it. I believe serpset is a little bit less expensive than Ahrefs. So if you're on a budget, maybe surfset is the way to go. Now, what do these tools do? Well, these tools allow you to find out how much traffic every keyword gets. It also allows you to know which keywords you should be looking for in your market. So if in the yoga instruction market, I can write yoga classes and I can see all the keywords that relate to that market. I can also see what keywords am I ranking for for my website. And even more importantly, I can see what keywords do my competitors rank for. So your first step in Getting started with SEO is to make a list of your top 100 keywords you want to go after. What are the hundred keywords that you want to show up on the first page? When somebody searches for those, you can literally just write them down in a Google Sheet. 100 keywords, okay. And then once you have those hundred keywords, you can now work on trying to get visibility on all of them. So you can't do 101 shots. So what you could do is break it up into 10 every week. So in 10 weeks, you'll be done with this project. So now you know the keywords are looking for. What do you need to do? Well, obviously you're not going to just magically show up for these keywords. You need to have content on your website that match these keywords, that mention these keywords, that go into depth in a lot of these keywords.

So.

So this is a really good way for you to start planning your content, your blog posts, even the pages on your website that describe your features and your services. So one place to start is to go on your website and look at all the pages that you have. Start with your pages and see which pages can you rank for these keywords. You can mention these keywords on those pages. That makes sense. That actually is congruent that a reader would Read that on the page and say, okay, that makes sense, not just forced. Then you do the same for your blog post. What blog posts have you published that you may have not included these keywords that you can. This is literally changing the copy on your site to reflect these keywords. And of course, you need to make sure it makes sense that it actually is a good fit. Google is very sophisticated, and if you try to force it in what's called keyword stuffing, you're going to get slapped on Google and it's going to be a detrimental effect on your site ranking. So don't try to force it. If it makes sense, do it. If it doesn't, don't. After you've done that, take a look at the keywords that you have on your list. What are some blog posts that you can write around these keywords? These could be your next blog post that you publish in the next week. Two, three. You get the point. Now, what we just did, modifying our pages and blog posts, this is called on site SEO, and it's kind of the first step you need to do. But now you can go into what's called the metadata. You want to be able to help Google find your pages with these keywords. So what we like to do and what we like to recommend is every page, every blog post, you should be trying to go for one keyword for that page or blog post. That's the focus. You're really trying to achieve mastery over that keyword on that page or blog. This is where another tool comes in. If you're on WordPress, which most people are, we recommend the tool called Yoast. And they have a premium and they have a free version. The free version is totally fine, but the premium one is really good. And I actually recommend the premium to people because it's well worth the money. If you're not on WordPress, there's got to be something that's similar to what I'm talking about here that allows you to optimize your pages and your metadata in your website builder. But going back to Yoast, what Yoast does is that you can just plug in the keyword you're trying to master the ones you're trying to go for on that page. So say, for example, Yoga for Beginners, I'm putting that keyword, and then it will recommend what I should do to make sure that happens. So maybe change the title of the blog post, maybe change the actual URL to include that keyword. Yoga for Beginners. Even the description of the page, the metadata, the Description of the page, you know that information that you see, the little snippet that you see on Google when you search and you find a site, it will give you a little description. You can change that and Yoast will allow you to do that and you can include the keyword in there. It will also give you some recommendations about how many times you should mention the keyword in your posts. The point is, is that it lets you optimize. It easily, shows you, hey, these are the things that I recommend you do. And it kind of scores you on how well this is optimized. This is where I recommend you begin. This is really gonna help you get found because you're being intentional about what keywords you're looking to target. So it's basically a lot of inventory, you're doing a lot of cleanup, a lot of optimization you're doing on your site right now. But moving forward, you're gonna keep on doing this with your blog posts. You're gon blog posts for the keywords you haven't mastered yet. And you're going to keep using your keyword tool and search tool like Ahrefs or serpstat to find out how you're doing. Are you moving up in the rankings for your keywords? Are you getting more traffic? Are there new keywords that are emerging that you should be trying to master, trying to rank for? This is a good place to start. I don't want to overwhelm everybody who's listening, but if you do this, this is about 80% of SEO.

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It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico. Alright, one more tip. When it comes to SEO, when you write your blog posts, at the end of the day you're going to be targeting a keyword, but you have to write great content. It has to be helpful, it has to be useful. It has to be something that people want to share. Don't be afraid to go all in and to write a full guide. Some of our blog posts are full guides that are over 8,000 words long. They're like ebooks really, but they're very popular and they get a lot of traffic because they are really in depth now. Google really loves rich content. It loves it when you go in depth. It loves it when it's not just some Cheap blog post where you're just writing it for SEO sake. They can recognize that. It's incredible how sophisticated Google has become. So if you're thinking about just chucking out a 300, 400 word blog post just to serve that keyword, you're better served to write that blog post in depth. A little bit long form. It doesn't have to be 8,000 words, but you know, it's okay to go 2,3000 words. We found that less is more. And I say less, I mean less frequency. I can publish a blog post once a month, but it's really an epic, epic blog post that people share because they love it so much versus writing a blog post every week and it doesn't have as much power. I also recommend that you do go really epic and really all in on those hard to get keywords, the highly competitive keywords. Because if you want to stand out, you're going to have to do something above and beyond the others. Your competition. There you have it. That's today's lesson. Today's answer to today's Q and A. Wednesday's question from Chet. Thanks so much for asking that question, Chet. If you have a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over@omar mba.net. i'll make sure to answer right here on Q and A Wednesday. If you have two minutes, go ahead and leave us a rating and review on whatever app you use to listen to podcasts. Whether it's Spotify or Stitcher Radio or Apple podcasts or Himalaya. We're on every single platform. Let us know what you think and we'll keep on pumping out the episodes. Thanks so much for listening. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. In all the businesses I've built, the number one source of traffic for us has been SEO, has been via organic search. And it's because we've invested so much in our content, in our search engine optimization, optimizing the site, making sure it's fast so that it loads quickly. And Google prefers that it's a long term investment. You may not see results instantly, but you will as the weeks roll around. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take.

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