The Captain Coder Podcast

8 Steps to Improve Your SEO Now

June 07, 2022 Marisa VanSkiver, Captain Coder Season 2 Episode 5
The Captain Coder Podcast
8 Steps to Improve Your SEO Now
Show Notes Transcript

Your ideal customer lives on Google. In fact, that’s where they’re at when they’re the most ready to buy. The most ready to sign up for a discovery call or even a service directly.

How do you capture the attention of your dream customers when they’re on Google searching for someone to help them? You know you’d be the perfect fit, but how do you even get your foot in that SEO door?

In today’s episode, we’re going to learn 8 easy steps you can take to improve your SEO now. SEO is a long-term process, but you can optimize your website to not only perform better on Google, but to capture the attention of those who are searching for answers on Google.

Mentioned Resources

Your ideal customer. They live on Google. In fact, that's where they're at. When they're most ready to buy the most, ready to sign up for a discovery call or even directly for a service. Now, how do you capture the attention of your dream customers? When they're on Google, searching for someone to help them, you know, that you would be the perfect fit, but how do you even get your foot in that SEO door? In today's episode, we're going to learn eight easy steps you can take to improve your SEO. Now full disclosure, SEO is a long term process, but you can optimize your website to not only perform better on Google, but to capture the attention of those who are searching for answers on Google and really it's all about those potential customers. You're listening to the captain coder podcast each week. I take you through actionable strategies that can help you grow your online business. I'm your host, Mauricea vans, skyr, AKA captain coder. Now, before we dive into how to improve your SEO, I wanna take just a minute and remind you why this is important. Now you might be thinking, but Hey, I really don't get any clients from my website. Well, yes, you might be getting the majority of your clients from social media now, but SEO is king. You can publish content on your website and have it still working for you years down the road, if you do it correctly. And remember what I said at the top of the episode, your ideal customer is the hottest lead. When they're on Google, they're actively looking for an answer to their problem. This is exactly where you wanna be found by them. But I promise I'd take just a minute. So let's talk about what you can do to improve your SEO. Now, now the number one thing, the first thing that I would tell you before you do any of the rest of this, go sign up for a Google search console account. Google search console is a free service that they provide to help you make sure that the information Google has for your website is accurate. Now, if you have never taken five minutes to submit your website, to Google through Google search console, it's possible that what the information they have is out of date, isn't accurate, or if your website is newer, that they don't really have anything for you at all. Now we're gonna talk about a free tool. If you have a WordPress website to make this really easy to use later in the show notes, but for right now, I want you to go stop. What you're doing. Sign up for a Google search console account. Again is 100% free and take just a few minutes to poke around and add your website to your account. Now what you would need to do, you need to first submit what's called an XML site map. Now the great thing is, is the tool we're gonna talk about later in the episode creates this site map for you easily. You don't have to do anything. If you have a Squarespace or a Wix website or one of those other platform builders, you're going to need to Google and find, okay, where is my XML site map for Squarespace? Where is my XML site map for Wix? Honestly, I kind of remember, but I'm not even gonna look it up because I don't think that you should be on those platforms. Wow, I am so bougie, but here's the thing. It changes all the time. So make sure that you go find your XNL site map depending on what platform you use. However, if you use WordPress stick around, because towards the end of the episode, we're gonna dive into a free plugin that will create this site map for you easily and keep it more accurate. Now, the great thing about Google search console, not only can you submit your information to Google directly, but when it has a site map to crawl, Google is going to go back and update that information a lot more frequently. And if you do a couple of the other things that we talk about today is going to be a lot easier for Google to get that information, to keep it accurate and up to date. And it really just forms the bedrock of your foundation. Plus, the great thing is, is you can use Google search console to see what you're being found for what people are clicking on and what people are reacting to. So it can help inform your fir future content strategies. We can get a hundred percent of the weeds with Google search console, but I'm just gonna circle back and tell you to go get your account and add your website URL to it. That's all you need to do right now is get the account and then add your XML site map to it. Now, number two, you want to encourage people to actually click on your search result when they're on Google and you do this by using what's called MEIT and descriptions now to encourage people to actually click. I want you to think for just a second, or if you're at a computer, if you don't happen to be walking the dog, or if you wanna pull out your phone and do a really quick Google search, you'll see the first line of a search result has titles. Those are called meta titles. And that's what somebody knows that page is about. Whether it's a title of an article, the title of a page, but it gives you just a generic idea. Okay? This is what this search result is about. Now, below that you have, what's called a meta description. And with those meta descriptions, you want to give people just a little bit about the page and a reason to click. You may not even notice when you're doing your own Google searches that you're reading these really quickly and making a key decision whether or not to click based on that description. I bet you will. However, realize that you're doing that now. Now a really quick, easy way to encourage more clicks. So improve. What's called your CTR. Your click through rate from Google is to improve your meta titles and your meta descriptions. Now, with each of these titles, you need to go above and beyond the generic home pipe, your business name, or about dash your business name that tells nobody nothing. I know that was a double negative. I'm not going back. When you think about what people are looking for when they get somewhere and what you want them to discover that answer with on your website, that should be your meta title, my own meta titles. And I'm completely rewriting my website right now. So it's not a great example, but I talk now about how I build custom WordPress websites, because I thought that's what I wanted people discover me for. However, I'm changing up my business a bit. But when you think about what people are looking for your services that are an answer to their problems, you have to think about why they would click on your website versus one of your competitors. So give them something within that meta title, to explain that you understand their problem, that you have a solution to that problem, that you have a service. That's a solution to that problem. Something that tells them, Hey, I see you and I understand you. And then, then the meta description, you need to have it be a very quick, easy to read. You only have like 160 characters of meta descriptions. So you have next to no space, but you have to have this be a really quick, easy explanation of what's what they can discover on the page and then give them a call to action. Tell them to come, find out more, tell them to contact you, do something. To encourage them to click and discover what you have to offer. You'll be amazed at how easy it is once you get in the vein of writing these to write a whole bunch of them. Now I know that WICS and Squarespace. They do have built in tools to write your meta titles and descriptions. They both call it something slightly different. I wanna say on Wix, it's in your SEO tools, I think same kind of thing for Squarespace and then award press again, stay tuned to the end of the episode, cuz I have a tool that'll make this really simple for you as well. Okay? Now that you have a Google search console account and you started writing your meta titles and descriptions, maybe they're not in your website yet, but you've started writing them. Now I want you to think about how you can link all your pages together. Now, what I mean is actually having internal links throughout your website, not just in your navigation, not just in buttons, but in text contextual text links where you can pass SEO juice, which is a terrible term, but I don't know what else to call it, um, around your website. So you're going to have certain pages on your website that get the most search results that get the most authority from Google and a really quick and easy way to pass around that SEO authority is by linking those high value pages to other pages that need a boost in your website. But then you can also link blog articles for instance, that you've written back to your main pages and give them a little bit of a boost. You have to think about how someone would be actually navigating through your website. The nice thing about internal links is yes, they can provide you SEO value, but it's a lot more about user experience. If you're writing a nice blog article about something that has anything to do with say your main service offering, there is no reason for you to not link to your main service offering page within that blog article, same thing. If you have a high value post that gets a ton of traffic, you might want to link to it from somewhere on your services page and encourage people to go back, to look at it and then link from smaller pages, smaller blog posts within that high traffic blog post. Now you can use Google search console to kind of help you find these pages that are getting the most traffic or your Google analytics account. Now you should have some kind of analytics on your website to show you which pages get the most traffic. So keep that in mind that these, some of these decisions you have to make based on data, but even if you have no data, I want you to comb through your website, read the copy, look at places where you know that it would help be beneficial for someone to go to another page, another service, a blog post and say, okay, do I really wanna take them from this spot to that resource? And then the number one thing here is to never, never add the blog text or sorry, the, the link text that is click here and link that that says nothing. Not only is that a big accessibility? No, no, because the links get read by screen readers and other resources. It is also an SEO. No, no, because it tells Google zero zip NA nine, nothing about what they can expect on that next page. So instead when you're linking two pages within your website and you're adding links, contextual text internal links to your website, make sure that you're highlighting text and linking text that says exactly what they can expect. So on my website, I might link text that says something like custom WordPress websites and link people to my WordPress website page. I might link something like how to improve your SEO and link them to this very blog article and podcast episode. I might have a place in my website that I talk about, um, building value and connecting with your ideal customer. And I wanna link, you know, connecting with your ideal customer maybe to episode four that we did last week. So think about what you're actually linking that text. It should say something about what they can expect if they click that text, just know that you almost never wanna use the text. Learn here, learn more, click here, anything like that. Now your buttons might be like learn more, which are still my least favorite buttons ever, but especially contextual text links where you wanna make sure that you're very descriptive of what they're going to get if they click. Woo. Okay. That was, that was a little bit technical. I'm gonna get a little bit more technical and I'm I'm, I'm really sorry. That's just how SEO does. So let's just take a quick breath and that's not because I have asthma and I needed to, to do that. So let's talk number four. Now you wanna use key phrases and key words that you want to target in your headlines. Now I can get really in the weeds and talk to about your headline sizes and everything and the formatting and everything that goes into this. It is not a simple process until you can see it visually. And then it's like, oh yeah, that's super simple. But the first thing I want you to make sure that you do whenever you're using a headline throughout your website, make sure that you have a relevant keyword or key phrase worked into that headline. Now here's why one, obviously Google gives more authority to the value of those keywords when they're on headlines, because it looks at it and says, Hey, this is super important. This is like a main thing that they do. Wow. I really enjoy this. This is something that's really valuable. So that's what Google says, but it's also really important to your customers. Now we talked last week in episode five, which I'll link in today's show notes in case you need to get there. We talked about using your ideal customers language to get their attention and to keep their attention. Now, we also talked about how their language and how they describe things is what they're actually searching for. So your ideal customer's lingo, not your technical jargon. Those should be your target key phrases and keywords and key words that you're trying to get traffic for. Anyway. So when you're using their terminology, their language, how they talk about their problems in their, in your headlines and it's big, bold, and really easy for them to see that is an incredibly important part of the process that makes it possible for them. That makes it possible for your customer to see that you can help them. It's really easy and eye opening and it helps to reiterate that you can solve their problem. It also allows people to scan the page and find what they need by skimming without having to read every single word on the page. Because, um, honestly, no one, no one's gonna read every single line, a copy that you write ever, which is really hard for me, who really likes verbose writing to come to terms with. So now we have our Google search console. We are encouraging clicks from Google, with meta titles and descriptions where it started internal linking and we're using our key phrases and key and headlines. So what's next? Well, number five, we wanna optimize our images for search. Now, when I talk about optimizing our images for search, some of this is before you even upload the image, but you can still get value out of this by using what's called an alt tag. Now for me, this is almost as important for SEO and for your search value as it is for accessibility. So one of the cool things about digital accessibility is that a lot of what we do to make our websites more accessible, actually benefits our SEO. I want you to think about this for just two seconds. There is not a human being going through your website that works at Google and deciding how you rate. They use AI. They use a robot to look through things and how that robot is scanning. Your website is very similar to how someone who has to use a screen reader is going through your website. And part of that is the images they can't actually visually see the images and neither can Google. So if you don't give them an alternative way to know what's in that image, it provides no value to them. But if you do, it can be a huge boost for your SEO. So to make images searchable by Google and accessible, it's a two step process before you ever upload that image to your website, double check what the file name is. No one has any clue what, oh 1, 3 25 JPEG means, but if you're uploading an image of yourself and you put Jane dash Smith dot Smith JPEG, suddenly we know that that's a picture of Jane Smith. Now the important thing to note there is between words. You wanna use a dash when you use no dashes and you scrunch all of those words together, there's no way for Google or for somebody using a screen reader to decipher where those words stop. And if you've ever done this with your Siri on your iPhone, you know that it will just try to make it up so, and make it easier on your customers and on Google and use dashes in between individual words. And then your all tag, your alternative tag should be descriptive of what's in the image. So sample all tags for say a headshot might be a Jane Smith headshot on a gray background. You just wanna have a very quick, easy description. Now here's the thing. You can include keywords and key phrases in your alternative tags, if you want to. And that can give you a further SEO boost, but you should only do this when it makes sense. So there are definitely images on my website that are coded like Marisa vans, skyr web developer, a hundred percent, because that makes sense, but you wanna make sure that you're not getting crazy and keyword stuffing and that the alternative tag is still descriptive of what's in the image. Now WordPress makes this super easy. When you upload a picture, it gives you an alternative text box where you can add a description and it even tells you add a description of this picture square space. I believe asks you what the, to change the file name. That's what they show as the L text. It's very strange. And WICS actually gives you a place where it will ask you what's in this image. So you have to kind of dig for it on a couple of the platforms, but it is possible to add alt tags to images on most of them. Just make sure that before you upload them to your website, you've changed the file name to be something that's actually descriptive. Whew. Okay. So we're getting away from the technical a little bit, and we're gonna talk about the thing that nobody, nobody likes to hear. One of the best things you can do to improve your SEO is to create unique content consistently. That pretty much means blogging. And if you're screaming at the phone, no, I'm really sorry. Look, here's the thing. None of my clients like this answer, which is one reason why I provide done for you blogging SEO, blogging as a service because none of my clients want to do this. Nobody likes to write well, I do. I actually really love to write. That's why, that's why I do it. But very few of my clients like to write blogs and they don't wanna do the keyword research. They don't wanna think about everything, right? But here's the thing. It is one of the best ways to get original content onto your website. That is Google friendly, that provides answers for unique pieces of your services and allows you to focus on one keyword or key frames. That's within the realm of what you're trying to, what you're trying to actually be found for. Now, the other great, valuable thing about blogging is that it also makes Google happy with something called the freshness factor. So part of your SEO ranking is how recent content is that is on your website because Google thinks that if your content is more recent, it's going to be more relevant. Now that doesn't mean that you're not going to get a blog article as a Google search result. That's five or six years old. If it's still relevant, it will still show that result. But how it looks at your whole website, if you put up a website six years ago and you haven't touched it since, and you've put no content on there, you've not changed anything in six years, Google looks at that as something that's been more or less abandoned. And honestly your customer does too. If you don't make tweaks and changes and show that you're still around, it kind of makes you look like you've gone out of business. So blogging is one of the best ways to get around the freshness factor without the need to like go change your website, copy all the time. Cuz that's, that's just not valuable for anybody. So blogging is honestly the best answer for this. It is not anybody's favorite answer, but when you create it on a consistent schedule too, and by that, I mean once a month, once a week and publish those articles at the same time, whether you're doing on a monthly or a weekly basis, it makes it a big deal because then Google understands, Hey, I know that Jane releases a blog about every Monday. So on Tuesday, I'm gonna go through and I'm going to look for that new blog and the tool we're gonna talk about here in just a minute, that actually helps tell Google that you have new content as well. So blogging is really good for the freshness factor for keyword density and just honestly, to get found for those keywords that you want. But it's also good for your customers. It allows you to provide consistent value. That's not as salesy and bring them into your sphere. It's a much colder approach. They're not necessarily gonna go straight to your services, but when they do get there, they are on your website. And maybe they're gonna start looking around. And plus, if you've done some internal links from your blog articles to your main services page, and maybe have a call to action at the end of a blog article to, you know, I don't know, schedule a discovery call. It is a great way to get people into your sales funnel. It's also a great way to do lead captures and a bunch of other things. So unique content consistently on your website, meaning blogging is one of the best things that you can start today to help improve your SEO. Okay? I maybe should have put this further up in the list, but it's a little technical too. You want to use, what's called an SSL certificate. Now most hosting platforms are giving these away as part of your host services, WIC Squarespace. But if you host with, if you have a WordPress website, depending on where your host depends on whether or not you have to pay extra for this. Now my favorite web host to P engine, which I will link to in today's show notes, they offer an SSL for free. As part of your hosting package go daddy. Some of the others charge anywhere from 60 to a hundred dollars a year for you to have this, which there's, there's really no need for them to charge. They just, it's just a way for them to make easy money. So what an SSL certificate does is it protects your website. It adds a layer of privacy and it adds a layer of security. Google started not, I'm trying to think of the best way to put this. They didn't like force you to have an SSL a few years ago, but they definitely started recommending it a few years ago. Now it plays into your SEO rankings because it tells Google that you care about your customers services and that you're protecting their information, which is a big deal. Google wants to protect their customers. They don't wanna send people to websites that are places that they're gonna get hacked. They're gonna get their information stolen, So an SSL certificate is key for you to build trust, not only with Google, but your customer. Now, when you look at the top of your browser, whether on a phone or in on a desktop, a laptop, you'll see that little lock icon when that's an got an SSL and it's working correctly, the little lock icon is closed and it's happy, but Google actually has experimented over times with showing people that, Hey, this is not a secure website. So that is a trust factor. That is not only important for Google, but it's important for your user experience too. Now, if you have questions about SSL certificates, because it is a little bit more technical, feel free to DM me at captain coder on Instagram, I'm happy to chat about it. Okay. So the last thing that we wanna talk about today and the thing I've been teasing about this entire episode, how to make this all really simple on your WordPress website, use Yoast, SEO, this plugin, which offers a free version, does a lot of the things and makes it so much easier to control your SEO on your website and it's user friendly. So even if you do nothing else with Yost, it gives you the ability to set your site map and have that and send it onto the Google search console. It creates your site map for you. You can even control what pages, what posts, um, anything that you don't wanna show on your site map. Yoast gives you that control. Then you can use Yoast to add your meta titles and your meta descriptions to every page. And the cool thing about Yoast is that it will show you, Hey, this MEIT is too long. This meta description is too long. It'll give you an indication, green or red or orange, kind of an old red, orange color, um, whether or not it fits in with what they recommend and what's SEO standards. So Yost is great, especially for those that are newbies to SEO and they need that little bit of help. But if you're writing blog articles and you have a target keyword or key phrase, or even for your website pages, you can plug that into your Yost SEO box and it will help you and give you a frowny face when it's not SEO optimized and a happy face when it is. And it'll provide you feedback on what you can do to improve it. I actually use my Yost SEO plugin every single time I write a blog article every single time I'm writing copy for my website, because it just helps keep me honest. Now there are premium features that you can use if you wanna delve deep into it, but the free version will get you far and you can install that on any WordPress website. Whew. Okay. So that was a longer episode today, but we ain't delved into a lot of things that you can do literally today to go and improve your SEO. Now, obviously it's gonna take you some time to do the blogging. It's gonna take you some time to maybe add some internal links, but these are all steps that you can start working on right now to ensure that your website is found by Google. So to recap, those eight steps were using Google search console, encouraging clicks from Google, with meta titles and descriptions that will help improve your click through rate. You wanna add internal page links throughout your website, use key phrases and keywords in your headlines, optimize your images for search and accessibility, create unique content consistently, and then have enforce an SSL certificate. If your host doesn't provide that, you might need to do a little bit of digging into that and then use Yoast SEO on your WordPress website. So all eight of these things are things that you can go start working on now and help you get and attract the customers that are already on Google that are already looking for that solution and are your dream customer, let them know that you exist, that you're here to help them. And SEO is like the number one way to reach them. Thank you all for tuning in to our show this week to catch more captain coder, you can subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now, if you have any questions or you wanna learn more about digital marketing and how it can help grow your online business, follow us. On. Instagram@captaincoderorvisitusonlineatcapcoder.com. Can't All again next week.