Today, we’re going to talk to Rebekah Read about Search Engine Optimization or SEO. It’s basically how we can get more people to find us online
Rebekah’s mom is a therapist with people who have Parkinson’s Disease. When she was 4 years old, she was put in violin lessons and was told she was not allowed to quit, so she did it until she was 18. She continued to play in a worship band after college. After graduating with a Marketing Degree, she went as a missionary in Honduras. When she went back to America, she was not so fulfilled in the corporate world. She became an entrepreneur trying different things in social media and web design and eventually SEO. She’s the type who will learn something just to save money, so she learned SEO since she didn’t want to pay for Facebook Ads.
With this podcast, I have a blog created for it. My goal is that when people search for something, they will come across me and what I do. Musicians have songs about all kinds of different subjects. They are not really focused on how they can draw in the right people with the content that they have.
As per Rebekah, the most important thing and the first step is knowing what your end goal is. The second step is to find keywords related to that topic. Next are go-to resources such as Ubersuggest, Moz, or even Google Keywords where you can input that keyword and see how popular is it. If so, that might not be the best keyword. When you find a keyword, you can create a blog around it.
To come up with keywords, you can think of something specific. For example, “country music” will be too broad. Make sure to narrow it down to something like “country music for summer weddings”. If you want to be identified with an artist, for example, you can write a blog about being similar to that particular artist.
Rebekah like Ubersuggest since it is the most user-friendly. The tools will give you an SD rating which is for “SEO Difficulty”. It needs to be between 15 to 35. If it’s lower than 15, it’s too easy. If it’s higher than 35, there’s just too much competition. She usually takes a maximum of 5 longtail keywords. You can use it even for your meta description. You need to avoid keyword stuffing. That is considered Blackhat. It used to be popular but you need to avoid that because Google doesn’t like that. You need to type like how you talk even in your meta description. Google is smart so as long as you get the keywords in your blog, you will start ranking.
The thing Rebekah checks on Google Analytics is how long people also stay on the blog. Checking Google Search Console is also good. The other thing that is really effective is creating a Google My Business listing. It would be great to have reviews. Those are the three Google tools she suggests looking into.
A few tips she gives for people to stay on your site is focusing on the user journey. Evaluate your website to see if it’s user-friendly. You need to have a call to action on each page.
Another thing Rebekah does is share her blog on five platforms. This makes sure her credibility is established. Make sure the link opens in another tab to make sure people stay on your website. You can also submit for guest posts for other websites.
She also tries to find questions that people are interested in getting answers for. If you also have a YouTube video, make sure the keywords are in the description. Make sure to build the return of visitors to your website as well.
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