Unlocking organic traffic: Storytelling, SEO, and content that ranks

Introduction

Episode Transcript

Simon: 0:03

With so much content being produced every day, driving organic traffic for your website can really feel like an uphill battle. Whether you're a small business owner or a content creator, attracting organic traffic is crucial for the success of your online presence. It's not just about having great content though. It's about telling a compelling story that's optimized for search engines and valuable to readers. In this episode, we delve into the world of SEO. We'll explain how content, technology, and story work together to captivate your audience, improve your search engine rankings, and ultimately drive more organic traffic to your website. So let's embark on the adventure and uncover the organic traffic that your website deserves. Hi there and welcome to the Authentic Marketing Podcast in association with Demodia, where we give you actionable advice and help you create marketing that works. I'm your host, Simon Harvey, and I'm joined by my co host, Daniel Kleber. Hi there, Daniel.

Daniel: 1:06

Hello, Simon. Hello,

Simon: 1:08

listeners. Welcome again, Daniel. I see you've made it another week with no injuries, so that's good to know, good to see.

Daniel: 1:14

Yes, I'm surviving. For those of you that don't know, I broke my hand the other week while skydiving. Things have been somewhat difficult to do at the worksite, so I spent some time doing some research to find out what will help my hand heal as fast as

Simon: 1:28

possible. That sounds like an interesting thing to fill your day with. You find anything interesting that's gonna help at all, or is it just one of those things that you're gonna have to wait and see how long it takes to fix? I know you're trying to get it done as quick as possible.

Daniel: 1:40

Yeah, it was interesting. Among other things, I found out that the body needs a lot of calcium to build bone structures. Okay, makes sense. Yeah, so I've been making sure I include plenty of milk, cheese, and greens in my diet. I didn't know this, but did you know that eggs contain a lot of calcium

Simon: 2:00

too? No, no, I didn't. I thought they were more protein rather than calcium specifically in eggs. Yeah,

Daniel: 2:07

well, eggs do have a lot of protein, but that is in the egg white or in the yolk. The calcium isn't contained in there. It is contained in the egg shell itself.

Simon: 2:18

Oh, that I knew, but you're not telling me that you eat the shells, though. You don't consume those as well. What do you do? You mix them all up together in a blender or something like that? That's got to be pretty crunchy and horrible, hasn't it?

Daniel: 2:30

Well, it's actually not that bad. I eat two whole eggs with the shell and I'm amazed how easily this can be digested. Oh

Simon: 2:38

god, that really does sound revolting. You sure your body's able to digest those shells as well? I can't imagine what they're going to come out the other end

Daniel: 2:45

like. Um, you know, Google is my friend, Simon. I researched everything and yes, studies of the National Health Institute have shown that Eggshells can not only be digested, but also strengthen the bone structures in our bodies.

Simon: 3:01

Yeah, that's interesting. Good to know. Whatever Google says it must be. I mean, where are you going to be without them these days? Who knows?

Daniel: 3:09

I don't know to be honest, but What did people use to gather information before Google came on the

Simon: 3:15

market? What did we used to use before Google came on the market? Now you're asking. I mean, you don't remember those times, say, um, you know, we used to have to go to libraries. There were these things called libraries, and they have lots of books inside them. You know, outside of that, I guess, if we were looking around for other information, your sort of stuff with your bones, definitely you'd get that from a library. But if you wanted to find like a doctor's or you wanted to find a company to help out with something, then yeah, you'd either have something bookmarked already in your browser, or you're going to use the yellow pages, you know, some sort of business directory where you can go and search for your problem. You come across that one before, yellow pages, or is that too old for you, Daniel? Um

Daniel: 3:55

Yeah, yeah, it's called differently where I grew up, but I know what you mean. Yeah, it's also yellow in Austria or Switzerland Mm hmm, and I don't want to imagine how much more work the research required back then took me about half an hour to gather all The information I needed in order to find out if I could digest an eggshell or not

Simon: 4:19

Things people search for.

Daniel: 4:22

But if Google didn't exist, I would have to invest so much more time to get the same information, you know? Going to a library, finding a book about nutrition that also covers eggs, then borrow it, and so on.

Simon: 4:36

No, it's true. It's what it used to have to do

Daniel: 4:38

and it would have taken me half a day approximately

Simon: 4:43

Yeah, you're right And it just shows how valuable things like Google have been and that how much they've changed the world over the recent years and you made Everything so much more available basically in there. Definitely. Yeah, the other thing that I think it really shows is How important it is to rank well in Google. Everybody starts their searches there. Everybody looks for everything on Google. And if you're not ranking well within Google and you're trying to sell a product or a service, then it's like you don't exist, basically. And that's what we're going to talk about today. And that's what we want to help you with today. You know, you've set up a great website. We optimized it now and we've got it launched, but we don't want to keep paying continually for people to come to the website, you know, that's expensive. It's not a sustainable option. So what we need to do is something called. search engine optimization, SEO, and there's tools that people are using nowadays to help them do that sort of stuff. So that's what we're going to be here to talk to you about today, how to actually get found and how to use Google. You know, you've set up a great website out there, you've optimized it, and now you want to get found. You don't want to be continually using adverts and having to pay for stuff like that to get found, because it's not a scalable option. You need people to be able to hunt for you and find you through there. You know, tools like Google is the way that people find solutions to their problem these days. And if your company doesn't rank well within there, people just won't know about you. People won't come to your website. Yes, that is

Daniel: 6:12

absolutely true. If you take my recent research, for example, if I Google for something and it. doesn't appear on the first page. I try to search differently by changing my wording or the keywords that I'm searching for. I actually rarely go to the second page that Google or any other search engine offers. Again, this shows how important it is for a company to be displayed on the first page when certain keywords are being used.

Simon: 6:37

So I can hear some of you listeners out there now asking, how do I optimize my website and how do I use these search engines? It's definitely something that's on the tip of all our tongues. It's a question that we're all asking and, you know, any small business owner that set up their own website wants to know that. So we talked about paid advertising last week, but now we want to know how we can get some free organic traffic and the magic phrase here is SEO or search engine optimization as it's otherwise known. So from your perspective, Daniel, how do people go about optimizing their website for SEO and for being found on Google?

Daniel: 7:16

Well, you can either pay to rank well in search engines like Google or you can do some manual work to reach the same goal. The first step is to do keyword research. You need to identify relevant keywords and phrases that your target audience is searching for. You then need to use these keywords in your website content, including page titles, headings, meta descriptions, and throughout the body of your text.

Simon: 7:42

Yeah, keyword research here is going to be essential because search engines use those phrases and the related ideas within your pages in order to know how to rank you and what other sorts of things to put in search results along with you. So. Keyword research is absolutely essential as a sort of a starting point here, and personally, I use tools like Google Keyword Planner, for example, in there, or there's tools like SEMrush. Those definitely are some of the fantastic ones that we use personally here, but then there's many others, you know, you can use things like Ahrefs or the Moz Keyword Explorer. There's many, many tools out there that you can use. What these tools do for you is they're going to provide some really good insights into things that are important, such as search volume. So, you know, the number of people that are actually searching for a particular term each month. And that's key. You don't want to have something that your page is optimized for that nobody's looking for, for example. Other things that they're going to tell you is how much competition there is, for example, for that term. Because again, you want to try and look for something that people are looking for that nobody else is actually writing about, or very few other people are writing about. The more people that you're competing with, the less likely and the harder it is going to be to get up to the top of there. And the more higher, or the more links you're going to need to your post, or the more relevant your site is going to need to be in order to actually get those top rankings. So, there are a couple of the key things that you could look for in there. The other thing that it's good for is giving you just other relevant keyword ideas. So, alternative phrases, alternative ways that you can look at that. You just need to basically give it a few seed keyword tools, and then these tools will build or generate you a broader set of keyword ideas that you can use. So, yeah, they really are a great help, I find.

Daniel: 9:28

Actually, I was playing around with ChatGPT the other day and I also found that you can get some interesting ideas from that too. Oh, interesting.

Simon: 9:36

Yeah, yeah. You

Daniel: 9:37

just have to ask it to create you a list of keywords that you can use to create a search engine optimized blog about whatever your theme

Simon: 9:44

is. That's actually a really good idea. I never thought of using something like ChatGPT. But, um, yeah, I guess it's got all the information in there and it's got a lot of context. So it'd probably be a great place to start.

Daniel: 9:54

Definitely is. Another thing on the technical side is that you need to make sure that your website is mobile friendly and responsive. These days, search engines are prioritizing mobile friendly websites in their rankings. And when I'm talking with customers, I always advise them that they can improve their website's loading speed by using smaller image sizes, minifying their CSS and JavaScript files, and checking that assets are being correctly cached. We often see that fast loading websites rank higher in search results as they provide a better user experience. Yeah,

Simon: 10:28

definitely. Page speeds are really important these days. You're right. Um, you know, so not only does it help you to get ranked higher in Google, but it's also a key part of the user experience. And Google knows that, which is why it ranks them higher. You know, nobody wants to navigate through a website that takes ages to load. And that's particularly true when you're looking at mobile. So it's really key from that speed perspective to think about whether or not people are looking at your website from a desktop device, or whether they're coming to it from a mobile device. And it's good to know that Google will actually optimize based on the mobile view, or rank you based on the mobile view of your website. So it does have a mobile first approach in there. So again, there's a couple of key tools that you can use to help you with this. Google provides what it calls its search console tool, and that's a really good tool for helping you to analyze some of the most important KPIs when it comes to focusing on SEO, you know, it's going to allow you to monitor and optimize and troubleshoot some of your performance issues that are out there. It's going to help you to know which pages are indexed, what some of the keywords are that people are searching for, et cetera. The other tool that Google provides is its Page Speed Insights tool. And what that's going to do, you give it a URL to a specific page inside there, and that will then analyze that page and tell you whether there's anything that's stopping the page from loading quickly. So it'll pull out things, for example, like large images, um, that might be causing things that are problematic, or JavaScript or something like that that's blocking it. So those definitely are two key tools that I think you should be making use of when you're trying to go through and do a little bit of this optimization with your website. Both of them are pretty easy to set up. I mean, if you've got a Google account, you can just log straight into them. The search console does require that you've actually registered your websites first. So you need to go through and do a simple bit of DNS verification in order to confirm that you actually own the website before it will give you the statistics associated with that. But it's not something that's too difficult to do. There's probably a whole load of other more detailed things that we could go through here. But in general, I think that the key message we want to get across is that paying attention to the technical aspects of SEO is really as important as paying attention to things like the keywords that we mentioned earlier. Those two bits need to come together, making sure that you've got the right optimizations on the technical side, making sure you've got the right keywords and making sure you've got those keywords mentioned in the right places in your content and consistently through your content. If you're

Daniel: 13:03

one of the listeners that. doesn't have these technical skills, I definitely recommend using a tool like HubSpot. It makes your life so much easier and automates most of the processes we've mentioned.

Simon: 13:24

When it comes to getting traffic to your website, SEO is definitely one of the more complex areas. But I think there's a few bits of essential advice that I took away from the conversation there with Daniel. The first of those is to do your research. Uh, so by that, I mean if you're creating pages and content that no one's actually looking for, then you're already fighting an uphill battle. You know the problem that you're solving, so use those words and you copy. It's more likely that you're going to find people if you talk about their problem. That's the thing that they're going to be searching for answers to. The other important point that Daniel made was not to forget the technology side either. It's easy to overlook these sort of elements particularly if you're not an HTML geek. Using tools like HubSpot really really can help out and then there's other plugins that you can use with things like WordPress that'll help you to simplify the task and to make sure you get the technical elements of SEO correct. If you're not sure about doing this yourself and you want someone to help you set up and optimize your website, then of course you can always hire an authentic engagement coach. Just go to wantauthentic. com to hire a coach that will show you how to increase the effectiveness of your website and give you an easier way to grow your business. So, we're at the point in the show again, where I like to give you a set of concrete actions that you can take to help improve your website and drive business through your sales pipeline. Today, I want to send you to the Google Page Insights tool that I mentioned earlier. That's a free tool that's available for everybody to use, and you can use it and plug it into your website. It provides you with some of the most actionable search related information that you're going to find out there and will really help you to understand what's going on behind your website and grow the traffic to the site. If you did your homework that I asked you last week, then by now you're going to have a Google account set up. So you just want to log in to Google using that. And then go into the Google search engine and search for Google Search Console. So three words, Google Search Console, and if you've done it right, it's likely going to be the first result that you get back in there. Click on that link and log into there. So what you're going to be presented with, if this is the first time that you've used the tool, is a blank page. And the first thing you need to do is to add a new property. So at this point, Google's going to ask you to enter in the URL of your home page or the website that you want to audit in there. So type that in, and then it will ask you to confirm that. So you'll have to change or update some DNS settings or do some other ways. You know, you might need a little bit of technical support from your IT specialist in this last part, but ultimately it's only going to take you a few minutes and the results that you're going to get are definitely worthwhile the effort. Once you've created your property, you might need to wait for a few days. What Google's doing now is actually going and looking at the index data, crawling through your website and just checking what he's got in there. So while it does that first pass on the data, you'll have to wait for a bit, unfortunately, but you'll find it does come back with some amazing information. So it's worthwhile doing. Once it does come back, you'll find a couple of key areas that I definitely recommend that you go and review. Firstly, I suggest you go and take a look into the performance tab. So on the left hand side in that bar there, click on performance. In there, you're going to find some fantastic insights into the way people are finding your site. So it's going to tell you things like the keywords that, um, your site is ranking for, uh, it's also going to tell you the terms that people are actually searching for and when you appear in the search results list. And it'll actually also tell you which keywords appear and when people selected you or when people clicked on your link in the search results there. So you'll find often inside here that you're going to pick up on keywords that you didn't even realise you were ranking for or you hadn't actually particularly optimised your site for, but they're the things that are bringing in the traffic. So it's well worth having a look through that. The second tab that I suggest you taking a look at is the pages tab again on the left there. In there, you're going to find information about Google's crawl statistics. So, this is the page that you go to if you want to find out if there's any technical issues that are stopping your site from being crawled correctly. This is the place which will show you if you've set up something wrong in, for example, the robots. txt files or any of these other technical things that mean that Google's not able to actually index your site. So it's going to be useful to see if you search for something, for example, and you don't find yourself appearing anywhere on the Google search results, you can check in here and see if that page is in the index and if it's not then you can find out why it's not and do something about it. So there's a couple of tools there that you can use, a couple of things that you can go and do there within the Google Page Insights tools. So I think with this information at your fingertips Now you're going to have the power to create highly optimized pages that are going to perform among the best in your niche. So that's all for today's episode of the Authentic Marketing Podcast. Thanks for listening as always and don't forget to bookmark the podcast and follow us on LinkedIn. We love to hear what you want to know and how we're helping your business succeed. I'll see you again next time.