Meredith's Husband: 0:42

Hey, this is Meredith husband, I've got some SEO advice for you. But I'm gonna keep it really simple so that you can understand it. So make sense. And most importantly, so you can actually use you want to talk about SEO myth number 37?

Meredith: 1:03

Yes, I knew we were on 37, which is crazy that you did as well. Yeah. That's pretty remarkable.

Meredith's Husband: 1:10

just made that up. There are probably more myths. I just thought it sounded cool. This isn't this is more of an SEO myth. At this SEO myth, is extremely, I would say it's 100%. Pervasive like everybody thinks this. Okay. And that is, and that is SEO success is determined by where your keywords are ranking.

Meredith: 1:34

If you're, if you're if your words are ranking Yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 1:37

Are your keywords number one, are they on page one? Are they on page five? Are they number one, or number three, or number six? On page one? So how do you how do you how do you determine how do you decide if your SEO is working? Is it successful?

Meredith: 1:51

If you're on page one, wrong?

Meredith's Husband: 1:55

That's what everybody thinks. Yeah. Yes. The success of your SEO is how many leads you are getting from your organic traffic, really not where one particular keyword is ranking. Now, everybody, every single client I've ever had probably has come to me and said, We want to be on page one for keyword XYZ. And that's okay. That's a meaningless goal. That's like having a vanity license plate.

Meredith: 2:23

Which a lot of people

Meredith's Husband: 2:26

Yeah, true if you want to do it, but it's not is that how is that helping you? It's boosting your ego. That's what that's what having a keyword on page one makes

Meredith: 2:34

people laugh. I do know a guy in LA whose license plate literally is IMDB. Me. So you always are like who? Oh,

Meredith's Husband: 2:44

Jesus Christ. It's sort of clever. Because it's a little misleading. And then you got to think about it. And then you're like, Oh, I get it. Yeah. Do you want to tell me just in case? Our listeners don't know what IMDb is?

Meredith: 3:01

Oh, it's international Movie Database.

Meredith's Husband: 3:03

Yeah, it's where all the actors have their basically their I'd say their portfolios, their resumes all their real all their all their credits, all their credits, right.

Meredith: 3:11

It's it's, it's it's credits. It's like,

Meredith's Husband: 3:14

whenever you want to, yeah, if you ever want to look up an actor or director, writer or producer, anything that they've done, you go on IMDb. But see,

Meredith: 3:22

of course, include everything it thinks it does. But it usually well. Yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 3:28

Most of it. Yeah. Because I thought it was going to be I am something like DB me. I was at first I was like, Who is? dB? Me?

Meredith: 3:39

He's an actor. Yeah. It's a Los Angeles license plate.

Meredith's Husband: 3:45

You want to talk some more about SEO? Okay. All right. So what was I talking about? Oh, yeah. vanity plates. Here's

Meredith: 3:52

how I used to be an actor who's gonna talk about me.

Meredith's Husband: 3:55

You can, too. Having it's having a keyword on page one is kind of like having a vanity license plate. Yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't actually, in itself, it means nothing. So

Meredith: 4:08

I mean, people, you may need a new may need a new a simile.

Meredith's Husband: 4:16

Well, here are two. So to illustrate my point, here's two hypothetical situations. Okay. Okay. Let's say situation. Number one, you get your your keyword, whatever you want your keyword to be, it's on page one. And you get, say, 10,000 visitors per month. Right? Boom, huge success, right? You're on page one. Lots of visitors. But nobody, nobody's contact you. You're not getting any leads from it. It's not, for whatever reason, exactly. It's not a huge success. Being on page one is meaningless, right? If your objective is to, you know, run your business and build your business. Here's the other hypothetical is your you that keyword is not on page one. Yeah, but your organic traffic is delivering, say 50 visitors a month? Yeah. And three people contact you, you get three leads from those three visits, which of those two situations with you? Right, so here's what happens. Almost every I don't say every one but lots of times. A successful SEO campaign looks like your keyword, whatever keyword you want moves up, maybe it moves on to page one, maybe it doesn't, but your overall organic traffic increases and you get more leads and you get more business you make more money. more revenue from your organic traffic. Well, that's more

Meredith: 5:37

appropriately it's actual, like meaningful, real

Meredith's Husband: 5:41

leads real? Yes, yes. Yeah,

Meredith: 5:43

for sure. For sure. Yes.

Meredith's Husband: 5:46

So you can see that. And so everybody thinks this. And the problem is that people measure their success, they pick a keyword, they think, whatever their most important keyword is going to be. And I'm just going to how I'm going to gauge whether I'm whether what I'm doing is working or not in terms of SEO, where's that keyword? Is it on page one, then what then Then what I'm doing is working, it's great. If it's not on page one, then what I'm doing is not working. That's not how

Meredith: 6:10

you even come from? Why do we all think this way? Why? Why? Well, SEO,

Meredith's Husband: 6:14

because the SEO is for a long time. I mean, the first objective is to improve rankings. And a long and years ago, that was possible, like you could pick a single keyword. And we're like, we want to push that single keyword to page one with any that sort of thing was possible. And also, and also, to be honest, the SEO industry is a lot to blame for this, I think, because people come to SEOs, and they say, I want to get on page one. And what do SEOs say?

Meredith: 6:43

No, I can do that. Just give me a million dollars. Oh, yeah, we

Meredith's Husband: 6:47

can do that. And they even used to, like guarantee, things like that. So really, we should be educating people. But to be honest, we would never get hired if we, if we said, I mean, now I don't I actually I used to do this myself, you know, I would say I would kind of get around it. I would never say I'm going to get that keyword on page one. But I would be kind of vague and what we would what we would be trying to do knowing that you know what, six months from now they're going to be getting more business organically. They're going to be happy, even if that keyword is not on page one that happens most of the time. One second, I have a cramp. Okay. So what what should you do instead, if you're not going to bet, because you do want to, you know, have some way to measure your progress and know if what you're doing is working. So what metrics should you look at to be your rankings? Well, if you get it from Google, you want to look at the number of conversions. In Google Analytics, that's your that's your holy grail, the number of conversions, the number of goal completions or conversions. Sometimes it's most people just call it conversions. inside Google Analytics, sometimes they call it goal completions. What that means is somebody fills out your website form, right? Oh, that's, that's, that's a conversion. That's as far as your website can bring new new business to you. If people it brings you new people contacting you saying I want to hire you, that's all your website can do. It brings a horse to water. That's true. And you have to make a drink? Yeah,

Meredith: 8:19

you have to teach it how to do so make the drink. Delicious.

Meredith's Husband: 8:24

So from there, you want to you want to think well, how can we improve this? Because that's like I said, that's your ultimate goal is to get more conversions. There's only and we've talked about this before, there's only two ways to get more conversions from your website. You either get more people to visit it. Yeah. Or you increase the conversion rate. Remember what the conversion rate is? Well, conversion rate we had an episode about that's when people get to your website, you got to answer three questions really quickly. What is this place? What am I supposed to do here? What's the decision you need to you need to reduce the friction when new people get to your site between where they are and what you want them to do? So, you know, you things need to be super clear, super easy. The other thing, of course, is then getting traffic. And that's kind of more the traditional thing of SEO, if you're ranking higher, you're going to assume that you're going to be getting more traffic. Yeah. Now, a very to me, I think a very good goal. For a good first goal. If you're just starting SEO, a good goal, no matter how much traffic you're already getting, or how many conversions you're already getting. I think a good first goal is often I want to double my number of conversions. Yeah, you should read that is roughly equivalent to doubling your business. And that's a pretty good goal, I think no matter where you're starting. Okay, so if you want to double the number of conversions, you either got to increase traffic, increase the number of people to your site and or increase the conversion rate the best is when you do both, right. So, to me, I think one of the easiest ways to like let's say we want to double our conversions, if you increase your traffic by 50%. Yeah. And increase your conversion rate by 30%. That's roughly going that's going to be very, very close to doubling the number of conversions. Now that sounds pretty possible, right? Yeah, you can do stuff that like in the next day or two that will help improve that conversion rate, maybe you won't hit 30% improvement in that conversion rate. But that's not like let's say you have a 1% conversion rate, and you want to go to a 1.3% conversion rate. That's Not terribly difficult. increasing traffic by 50% is a lot to me anyway. easier and less intimidating than needing to double your traffic. I see what you're saying. And then from there, once you've done that, then think about doubling your traffic. Okay, that's what I would do. Typically, a corporate clients, a lot of times they're gonna sit we want 100% growth year over year. Wow, that's their objective. Yeah, fair enough. But the first step, if you can, if you're gonna

Meredith: 11:03

work question is, how do we do either?

Meredith's Husband: 11:06

Well, hold on, if if you're going to

Meredith: 11:10

stop my car because I was in traffic?

Meredith's Husband: 11:12

I don't remember it, I'll say. So don't get stuck on a single keyword if you're tracking your rankings, which I do recommend tracking your ranking. So you can know where you're right. That is one of the first indicators that you're going in the right direction, so that you're going to get more traffic so you can get more conversions. Knowing where you're ranking is good. But don't pick a single keyword and watch that one keyword. Instead, watch your average ranking SEMrush most keyword trackers are going to do this What What's your average way, average ranking rank the average ranking. So if you're tracking 10 keywords, you're going to have an average rank, it'll probably be like 50, or 60, or 90, or 180. But it's not going to be one, two, or three, unless all of your keywords are ranked one, two, or three. So there's always going to be some fluctuation and your average ranking you want you want to see that number climb. It's like, what's the saying a rising tide? Care, no, a rising tide lifts all ships or something like that. Yeah, same thing with keywords, if you if you're, if you're, if you're optimizing your site, and you're on the right path, and you're doing good work, all your keywords are going to move up a little higher, that's gonna mean you're gonna get more traffic, more conversions. The other is another metric that SEMrush and a lot of keyword tracking tools where you will use in that visibility. And that's how it's also a percentage. I'm not exactly sure how they calculate that number. But it's very similar to your average ranking, you're obviously going to want to what's the difference? The visibility, I think, I think what they do if, if you have like, say, one of your keywords is ranked number one, that's 100% visibility. If somebody does that search, it's 100%. And they look at the organic listings, they're gonna see your site, if you're ranked number five, your visibility is maybe 30%, or 40%. It's not somebody might not look all the way down that page. If your visit if your keyword is on page two, the visibility is 00. See, so nobody's gonna see that. So the visibility is such as somehow it's a little there's a little more involved in that formula. But it's also a good metric to use. It's very similar to the average ranking,

Meredith: 13:23

as Google ever thought about making the font smaller, so more things will show up.

Meredith's Husband: 13:32

No, because you can scroll. You can if you're not you can do most people don't know this, you can change your settings in Google. And you can have, you can have 20 listings on the first page or 100 listings on the first page. The default is 10. But you can change that. Oh, interesting. Yeah, you click on there, there should be if you're in Google, especially if you're logged in, there'll be a little gear icon in near the upper right. If you click on that, something, there'll be some sort of settings or something and you can change, you can turn your safe browsing on or off. They now have dark mode. Google has dark mode, dark mode. Dark Mode is you know, a dark mode is it's like phones have dark mode. Like instead of looking at that dark web, no.

Meredith: 14:17

People want to go on

Meredith's Husband: 14:19

anyway. Okay, I think we got a call rap on this one. Okay. Okay, so don't focus on a single keyword. Look at your average ranking are your visibility. And remember, your goal is conversions. Your goal is not just seeing your website at page on page one of Google how many

Meredith: 14:36

keywords should we have? Who doesn't listen to podcasts?

Meredith's Husband: 14:45

Let's cover that one in a different episode. Bye, thank you. I hope that helped. I hope that helped your website. I hope that helped your business. I hope that helped give you a little bit of confidence that SEO was not this convoluted, cryptic, crazy thing that nobody can understand. If you did like it and you found it helpful. Please share it with a couple of your colleagues. Tell them what you like or more importantly, tell me what you liked. Let me know interview. leave a review on Apple. Tell me what parts you like. And I'll try to do more of those parts. And again, thanks for listening