Episode 216: What you may not know about SEO
The more knowledge you can have, the better your experience is going to be whether you do SEO yourself or whether you outsource. In today's episode, Fiona talks about what you may not know about SEO and so much more. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
On-page SEO
Off-page SEO
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
So off-page SEO is really all the stuff that is building brand awareness, credibility, moving people again, from that stage of like knowing about you, to trusting you and maybe even not knowing about you, like as it can also work in awareness. I mean the off-page SEO can really work at all parts of the buyer cycle. The off-page SEO is really about kind of having other people, other brands, other sites, and linking to your stuff.
Hello and welcome to episode 216 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast and the last podcast episode for the financial year here in Australia. If you're listening in real-time, there's always a kind of new financial year, a fresh start all of that happening as of the 1st of July, 2022. But if you are tuning in from all over the other places of the world, which people are, cuz we see their downloads and it's so exciting. Welcome. I hope that maybe you just feel a fresh start because it's the second half of the year. And particularly if you're in the Northern hemisphere, you are already in your beautiful, beautiful summer. So I hope you are lapping that up. And I hope that most places are relatively outside of lockdowns these days.
You're getting out, you're experiencing things you're going and supporting small business owners like cafes and restaurants and festivals and all the things that couldn't happen for so long, welcome to today's episode. So today is a coaching episode and I'm gonna be diving into a factor of the majority of small businesses. I would say most small businesses, even if you're a brick-and-mortar stores will need this. So what is it? Well, you'll have to just stick around before I get stuck into that. I want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which I record this podcast. And that is the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. And as a small business owner, I pledge to work in ways that really do aid in true equality for our first nations people and for all people. So let's get stuck into today's coaching episode.
So today I wanted to talk about SEO and I have talked about this in other episodes, SEO search engine optimization is a huge part of many misses, particularly with those that are online. But it's also just as important if you're a brick and mortar store, I mean, people need to be able to find you and locate what it is that you sell, whether it's a product or a service, even just find you through your brand name. I know it can be such a thing where you think, well, of course, people can find me, but a lot of businesses have very common words in their brand name, like My Daily Business Coach. And so it can be harder sometimes for that search and optimization to actually work.
So there is so much about SEO that people will know, there is so much, they don't know. I kind of wanted to focus on two areas that people, I think they're definitely aware of, but the other area that I don't think as many people are aware of when it comes to SEO and that's really on-page SEO and off-page SEO. And so I'll talk about kind of what those things are in a minute. But if you are new to SEO, you may not even realize kind of what it is. And it is changing all the time. I mean search engines are changing the way that people use them. The internet is changing different tablets, right now I've got an iWatch. I don't even know if you call it that and Apple Watch. And I have to say that even having the Apple Watch, which at the moment I would definitely not recommend getting, because I thought it was actually gonna transform all this stuff, the world hasn't caught up to the watch yet.
So what you'll find is that a lot of your apps that you're used to using that, I thought I would be able to just access don't have a watch version yet. So they've been optimized for websites optimized for tablets, iPads, optimized for phones, but they have not been even considered for the watch screen, which is tiny. And so I've said to a couple of people, they're like, “how have you found the Apple Watch?” And I'm like, “It's fine. It just is a really expensive watch.” I definitely like it. It does come in handy. Like if I'm out shopping, I can just record things. You can just pay with your watch. But definitely, the technology has gone faster than a lot of apps and companies and everything else out there. And I guess as people more and more people have them, the demand will go up and people will expect that apps work on a watch as well.
But the reason I'm saying that is that all the time technology is changing, and the way we use technology is changing. And so SEO, which is search engine optimization, the way that people search and the kind of results that they're getting when they search is changing. I even know with myself, I started using a Ecosia, which is ECOSIA as a search engine, probably a year ago. It's hard to tell what is a year or a month in COVID times, don't you think? But I started using it because obviously, Google has a lot of things that they're not doing. They also do a lot of amazing things, but I started using it because I thought a Ecosia actually gives back to the planet every time you do a search, it does things like planting trees and trying to give back.
And so I thought I would use it. I actually think that a Ecosia is maybe owned a little bit. I should look this up, but I feel like Microsoft is somehow associated with it. But anyway, what I've found though is that I use a kosher most of the time, but sometimes I'll have to go to Google because the search results are just not there or I'll go to do something that I'm like, “I am sure that there would be more results than this and particularly with images” and then I'll use a Google search and there'll be like a million more. So just bear that in mind. But oSEO is really making sure that kind of you rank well, whether you are ranking n Google, which is still number one by far also another massive search engine that people forget about is YouTube.
I think it's the second most used search engine. You can find anything these days on YouTube, which is incredible, but you've got Google, I think it has like 90% market share. And then you've got a whole bunch of other ones, like at Ecosia, which I think would be a tiny market share. You've got Bing, you've got Yahoo and all the other big search engines, but search engine optimization or SEO is really about making sure that you rank well, and that you're ideally at the top near the top of a kind of page one of search engine results pages. So search engine results pages are often just called SERPS. And that is kind of when someone searches for your business or the products or services that you make, that they are finding you. Search engine optimization whilst it's not often linked in this way, you also wanna think about that when you are putting posts up on social media.
I mean, people use social media as a search engine these days as well. So while we can think of search engines as just Google, you should think of other search engines that your users might be using. So Pinterest is also a search engine. People think of it as a social media platform. It is really not. It's not necessarily, it's not making you be social in any way. It is a search engine. And so if you're pinning things, you wanna be using the right keywords, Google, likewise, if you're putting things on YouTube, it's this huge search engine that you're using the right information in your caption underneath your video, that you're using the right keywords, that all these sorts of things. So search engine optimization is it's really about creating content or links, or things on your website that people can find easily.
And, that is helping your audience really find you online. And so what is less well known? And I guess what I wanted to get into today is really that SEO can kind of be divided into two camps. You've got on-page SEO and off-page SEO. And if you are listening to this right now and thinking, “You know what, Fiona, I don't really need to know all of this.” I don't have an eCommerce brand or, I'm a service-based provider. You still need to know it because, like I said, a huge amount of people search online. And I think it's like 90% of people will research online before they buy anything. So even if you have a brick and mortar store and you're like, people come into our shop or I'm a hairdresser or whatever, they will still search and research what they need, even if they then go and buy it in a traditional brick and mortar store.
Likewise, they are searching for service products all the time. And I think it's around 80 or 90% will use Google then that's I think the second biggest one is Bing. Well, the second biggest search engine, in general, is YouTube. But in the terms of like search stuff like Google or Ecosia, Bing, Yahoo, I think it's Bing. And then it's Yahoo and then a whole bunch of others, but basically, 80 to 90% of all website traffic starts with a search. So it is really important regardless of what kind of business you have. So I've often said this before, not having an optimized website is really like sending out a birthday invite without including the address. So you're kind of like, you've done all this work and you're like, “My website's so beautiful”, but no one can find it.
And then no one turns up to your birthday party and you feel like a loser. So you are not a loser if no one turns up by the way. But if you haven't given them the right information, it's harder for them to find you. So that's kind of where that kind of analogy that I've made up comes from. I hope it makes sense. So, like I said, you've got on-page SEO and then you've got off-page SEO. And so on-page is really the one that you hear the most about. And that is the one that, if you've done any kind of marketing work or looking at SEO, you will have found certain tips and tactics around largely its on-page SEO. And so that is things like making sure that you've tagged your photos, that you've got metadata, that you've got the right H ones, which is heading one, which is the main heading, or you should just have one H one per page of a page.
So say I might have a page on business coaching. And so I might have the heading one might just literally be business coaching for small business, or it might be business coaching packages for small business, or it could be, why do you need a business coach? And so if somebody searches for that, what Google is doing or any of these places are doing, and of course, they don't tell you exactly what they're doing and they're always changing things, but they are basically looking at all the code behind the scenes and they are taking million milliseconds to figure out which websites they should show. So if you are putting in information on your website and making it very clear with just like one H one, one heading what this page is about, and you also have really clear URLs that also the website address is easy to understand.
It's more likely that that's gonna get picked up as Fiona was searching for this. This website says that we'll link them and see, and over time there'll be other things that contribute to your ranking. So how long do people stay on a page, which can tell you two things, it can tell you that it's really confusing. They can't find the information, or it can tell you that they're engaged things like, how many times they're flipping between pages on your website, and how many pages do they visit when they're there? That also is telling search engines, that certain things like this are quality websites because people are on there for a while and they're going to different things. It could also be telling them the opposite that people can't find what they're looking for. Then there's a whole bunch of things like bounce rate.
So how quickly people literally bounce off your website. So you'll see quite high on a landing page where someone has said something on social media and then people come to a landing page and it's completely different. Or it's not the promise that they were promised on that ad on social media, for example, or it's too hard to find the information once they get there. So search engine optimization for on-page SEO is all about these sorts of things. It's tagged. I mean, they are always changing things and there isn't like, this is exactly it, but there are things that can help you. And so it can help you with your own business as well. Just like things like file naming. If you name a photo, 351ZX .JPEG, that's pretty hard for you to find again, versus if you'd named that, mothers hyphen day, hyphen bags, for example.
And so then if you're uploading that with the right file name, it's also telling these search engines, what else is on that page? And so you've gotta imagine that they are literally looking at a whole bunch of information codes, how long people have been there, all sorts of data to figure out whether your website or particular pages on your website are worth sending somebody to. So that's kind of the on-page SEO, like adding in descriptions and meta tags, title tags, also, even with your content using subheadings using, especially if you're writing a lot of blog, content, chunking things, putting bullet points, making it really easy for people to read and understand making it also easy for search engines to literally read and understand as well. I think it's something like 43%, or maybe it's higher than that now.
But 43% of people skim content, they don't read it. They literally read the heading. They might read a couple of the first words. Then they read any bullet points and then they read the bottom. Like we are becoming less and less able to have attention, that said a while ago, there was this talk that Google was also supporting longer-length content. And so for a while there, you saw a lot of blogs being like 2000 words, because Google saw that as like a lot of content that could help somebody. If they were putting in a search term. Now you'll see things like snippets. So what Google will often do now, which is also really, I mean, they're constantly changing the game for everyone. And this is probably three years old now, but when people search for something, they will often just show the answer while you are still on the Google search page, as opposed to directing you to a website, they will take that answer from somebody's website and they'll have the link below and you can click, but often, if you put in like, what's the capital of Australia, they will show you information that says the capital of Australia.
They might show you the maps. They might show you a whole bunch of things about a city or Canberra, but you are not necessarily even then getting that traffic to your site. So again, there are a whole lot of things that need to be done on-page SEO. So on your site that can help you get that traffic from search engine results pages or SERPS to your site. So that's on-page SEO and it can be so many things. I mean, making sure your URLs are easily read, just keep in mind the on-page SEO. Obviously, you've got keywords and things that you're trying to achieve, but just make it natural, make it human. The more human it is, the more chance it's gonna get seen way back in the day. Like I have been in marketing for a long time and way back, when the internet first started, it was very much just like, this is the keyword, throw it in 500 times and you'll get seen because it just saw it like, that has the keyword.
80% of the content is the keyword. And then it became, that you would actually get reprimanded by these search engines for kind of stuffing your content with these words. So unnatural. And so just be as natural as possible also while we're on the topic of, on-page SEO. One thing to keep in mind is duplication. So if you are a business that has, I don't know, say you sell the same towel in like 40 different colors. You may wanna change up a little bit of the product detail page. So the description, so maybe your pages are literally the exact same page. And so you might just change up a couple of sentences, for example, “The lime green is inspired by my lime tree in the back of my house”. And so changing things up because then it's not gonna seen as a duplication.
I mean, product detail pages might be slightly different, but I know, for example, I was working with a client and they had warehouses all over the country. And so they had the same information on every single warehouse page, regardless of where it was, except the address was different. And so what would happen is that that could be flagged as duplication so that it could be flagged by these search engines, as an example of you trying to game the system. So to kind of use the same words, use the same stuff, and have like five pages that are the same. So that it's this it's almost if you think about like gambling, it's a higher ratio of you using those keywords. So somebody searches for them and then it's like, oh, well they've got five pages all about that. So they started to punish people for duplication as well.
So just keep that in mind for on-page SEO, if you have 10 pages on your website, that basically say the same thing, just change it up with a couple of sentences or some other stuff that might help. So that's on-page SEO and I could go on and on and on about that. And also I'm not an SEO expert. I think I know a decent amount about SEO because of literally working online for so long. And obviously, SEO is a part of your marketing. It's a part of getting people from awareness to research in that buyer cycle. That first stage also gets people to go from evaluation to purchase and remarketing to them and all sorts of things, but that hopefully gives you enough to kind of start on in terms of the on-page SEO. Now, the other part of that, which I think is very much less talked about and less known is the off-page SEO.
So off-page SEO is really all the stuff that is building brand awareness, credibility, moving people again, from that stage of like knowing about you, to trusting you and maybe even not knowing about you, like as it can also work in awareness. I mean, the off-page SEO can really work at all parts of the buyer cycle, but the off-page SEO is really about kind of having other people, other brands, other sites linking to your stuff. So if you imagine, for example, every website out there has a bit of ranking. And so some of the top websites are the sites that are trusted by these search engines. So these might be universities or big media organizations. I mean, some should not be trusted. But a search engine, I guess, perspective. So say for instance ABC, ABC is the big radio media company here in Australia.
So if you are on a radio show on ABC and they have the transcript on their website and you ask, I'd love it. Could you please make sure that you link back to my website, that website, because it's trusted, it's almost like they're sprinkling some fairy dust on you and you are like, “That's a bit more credibility for my website now.” But what used to happen is that people would build all these fake sites and you would have a huge amount of them in different countries that would then link to you. And so it was like backlinks.
And so it was sort of seen that the more backlinks you have, the better you are off-page SEO, the better the SEO in general, that doesn't work anymore. Because people don't like gaming the system again, it was all fake, but there are companies. So like when I'm saying like institutions or places that are trusted or bigger brands or whatever. And so if you're ever doing any kind of like interviews with them, if you're on their blog or whatever else, make sure that they're linking to you. And if you update your website or you update your URL, you can go back to them and be like, “Hey, thank you so much again for having me a couple of years ago, we have actually had a brand change. We changed the URL. I would love it so much. If you're able to update this.”
Now, some companies may be like, that's fine. It doesn't take us long. Other companies might be like, you know what? That's really annoying for us in which case you'd wanna have redirects, but sorry, I can hear all these cockatoos going over my house right now. Dunno if that's being recorded. So with off-page, you also can have, obviously you can have links from interviews or any kind of media that you've done, but you can also have, podcast links, Wikipedia, affiliate links, shared videos, or other kinds of rich content that is linking to you. So again, if you are, if YouTube is one of your channels, then make sure that the caption really has enough links back to you. And that you're utilizing these different places to drive SEO by linking back to you because that is going to help kind of build your SEO cred in a way it could be also things like Google my Business, another kind of free tool from Google.
There are a whole bunch of ways that you can increase your SEO, not on your website. So offline. Media, PR, influences like there are so many other places that sometimes we never tap into to drive traffic to our site and to help build that credibility that, oh, this site has like incredible backlinks. And a lot of them are coming from really credible sources. So therefore we are seeing this as a decent site to send people to. So there are a couple of other things that I thought I would share in today's chat about SEO. So you've got your on-page, you've got your off-page and then there's this concept of the SEO pyramid. Now. I'm not sure exactly who came up with this first. It's been around for a long time. And obviously, it changes a little bit over time, but really the fundamentals are the same.
So if you imagine a pyramid, if you like a triangle, if you think about that in your mind and at the bottom, like the heaviest part is really quality content. And so it's really about creating content. That's actually like useful and generally answers a question and the content doesn't have to be a blog. It could be a video, it could be a podcast, could be other stuff or a concern, it answers a question or a concern that your target audience has. And so you wanna kind of firstly think about like, how is your, your website ranking already? What kind of content are people using? What kind of search terms are they using to find you? And then can you create content around that? Now, this is not a content episode, all about content pillars or content strategy or all the other things.
But if you just think about the base of that triangle, if you are writing notes, literally just write quality content, cuz that's where things sort of start. Then you've got keywords. So if you imagine this sort of triangle is divided into like four or five pieces, the bottom section is quality content above that you've got keywords. And so keywords are super important. You have to think about understanding which keywords resonate most with your target audience. You wanna understand what people are actually searching for quite often, they're asking questions. Could you create content that answers a question you wanna review your content to ensure that these keywords are actually being incorporated into what it is that you are writing into separate pages into your image text, your metadata, your H ones, your headings, your descriptions, making sure that that content is there again naturally not in some sort of stuffing way where like every second word is a business coach.
It has to be a natural way. And if you are finding it hard to be, to think about this and put keywords, just look at the keywords and start talking out loud and even you might wanna record yourself or use Voice to text so that you can naturally use these words. Like I'm not gonna say Fiona Killackey is a business coach who lives in Melbourne as a business coach. She loves business coaching with her clients who come to her for business coaching. Like it's not naturally how I would talk. I don't mention business coaching five times in two sentences. So even if that is a keyword, you wanna be using things naturally. So you've gotta think about your keywords. There are a whole bunch of tools that can help you find those keywords. There is an Ubersuggest, I think Neil Patel bought that.
So if you just go to neilpatel.com or Ubersuggest like Uber, like the taxis, you might find it keyword.io. There are Google keywords. I mean, there are so many keyword planners out there that you can have a look, you can have a look at how often things are being searched for. You can actually look at particular areas in the world. I was looking for a client the other day in the US for Chinese Zodiac and looking at like, how much you'd pay for Google AdWords or things like that. So there are so many planners out there, but it's important to look at your keywords. And that's again, not just for Google, but for Pinterest, for YouTube, for all sorts of other things that you might be using, then you've got link building and that's really kind of it's on-page, but also off-page.
And that's really ensuring that you are on the on-page, you're including internal links. So when we do a podcast episode, we might say, as we've talked about before in episode, blah, blah, blah, and we'll link to that page on our website, when you are linking doing internal links, always open in a new window. It really frustrates me that most website builders still default that if you put a link, it just opens and suddenly somebody's completely off your website. So if you are putting links in your internal links into content, make sure that they are opening in a new window, but these could also be external links. So you might be out doing some outreach. We get this all that time. I reckon every single day, I'm not even kidding. We will get an email that says something like, “Hi team, My Daily Business Coach, we love your podcast.”
And we saw that you recently did a podcast show notes on SEO. For example, I'm an SEO consultant and I have a really great free checklist that people can come. I was wondering if you might link to it from your site or, “Hey, we run this kind of software company and you mentioned, time trackers. We would love it. If you could just include us in the blog that you've already got, where you've listed out, 10-time trackers.” And so sometimes we say yes, sometimes we say no, but good on people for having a go. Because if you've got something that you think is really relevant to somebody else, so maybe someone sells like newborn clothes and you sell something for people to take to the hospital when they are literally about to have a baby, or maybe you sell like the content around that like educational content around that.
So you might contact them and be like, Hey, on your newborn or zero, like the smallest size or premature baby clothes. I'd love it If you could link to this article, that's all about, how to stop the overwhelm when you are in the hospital room or, something else or like a checklist for what to pack or whatever. And so that's an example of link building. So you've got at the bottom of the triangle quality content, then you've got keywords, then you've got link building and they're the top it's really social. So really get social and share the stuff and kind of get this earned activity happening through social platforms. It could be social media, but it could also be face-to-face. It could be you're referring people to something on your website. It could be like I said, reaching out, but really it's about positive earned activity on social media platforms or other platforms that are engaging people to go off that platform to your site, to your landing page, to your product detail page, to whatever it is.
So the SEO pyramid is a really good thing to think about. And then there's a whole bunch of kind of like SEO starter questions that you might want to consider. And so we'll actually have this link as a download on our website. So if you want to find these SEO start questions, you can find them at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/216 as this is episode 216. But on there, we have started questions for OnPage SEO and off-page SEO. We have a bunch of questions, but I'll just run through a couple of them. So with, on-page SEO, a starter question is which keywords am I trying to target? Now, even if you go and work with an SEO agency, it's important to kind of have a go at looking through this off-page. It could be like, what are some sites I could approach to link to my current content or my current website?
And having a look like what are some sites that you could use, or you could contact because you've got this great information or maybe you've got these great videos or you've got something else that's really good. So as I said, you can download those at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/216 if you wanna get started on these. And I just think that it's really important. The more knowledge you can have, the better your experience is going to be whether you do SEO yourself or whether you outsource this to an agency or a freelancer. So yeah, that is it for today's kind of coaching episode on SEO, really like what is the difference between on-page and off-page, but also, what's in the SEO pyramid, what are some things to be interested in or really concerned about when you're looking at your SEO.
And of course, there are so many tools that can help you with this. There are so many, Backlink Checker, and Ahrefs. Neil Patel is a great source of information. There are just so many things out there. We couldn't list them all. There's another, another great one actually is answer the public, which I've done a podcast episode on that is Podcast Episode 39 way back from October 2020. But you can find that episode will link to it in this show notes as well. Or you can literally just go back to, I think it was 20th of October, 2020, we put that episode out and you'll be able to find that also, if you're searching on apple, we'll just have episode 39, but you can also find it at mydailybusinesscoach.com/Podcast/39. If you wanted to go into answer the public, that's just one of many tools that can help you with your SEO.
So that is it for today's coaching episode. If you wanna go into the podcast, show notes, and download the starter questions, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com/Podcast/216. And if you wanted to get into this stuff in more detail with regard to your marketing, how does this all fit into it? The marketing course, Marketing for your Small Business is always available. You can find it at marketingforyoursmallbusiness.com. There's a really easy SEO URL to remember, marketingforyoursmallbusiness.com. And you can find that there, you can sign up to it. You can go at your own pace. And then twice a year, we open up the Marketing for your Small Business Course and coaching program. And if you already own the course, it is like super cheap to upgrade and do the nine-week live coaching program with me. So thank you so much for listening to this. If you found this useful in any way, maybe you didn't know anything about off-page SEO, please leave a review. It just really helps us get found by other small business owners and maybe they really need to know this information right now. So sharing is caring. Thank you so much. I'll see you next time. Bye.
Thanks for listening to the My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you wanna get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram @mydailybusinesscoach.
