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 thought we would talk about everything today? Oh, good. Talking about everything, everywhere all at once.

Meredith: 1:05

Oh, once that was my next question. It was such a good few. Yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 1:10

Now the purpose of what I mean by everything, if you were going to start your own, say you didn't have a wonderful husband with an amazing podcast, I'd be so sad. And he took care of your SEO and you are doing it on your own. And you just got your website. Now you're ready. You're starting from scratch? Do you know what you what you would do first? No, no. Idea. Yeah. And I realized that you probably not alone, like because we talked about a lot of individual little things here. And these episodes, but I've never really talked about the process, like where all those things fit. All those things? Are they go somewhere into the process? Yeah. And there is a process that you want to do in order. But we've I've never talked about that

Meredith: 1:56

directly? I don't think so. I don't know. I don't listen to this one.

Meredith's Husband: 2:00

Yes, I know.

Meredith: 2:04

thing, not even a podcast or a thing.

Meredith's Husband: 2:08

So one of the reasons you want to do these things kind of in order, is if you ever,

Meredith: 2:14

as a few reasons. Oh, I didn't even know you had to do it in order.

Meredith's Husband: 2:17

Yeah, I mean, you don't have to, like it's not like a lot of people don't do it an order. But if you if you don't, there's some downsides. Like Like, number one, if you ever so this happens, actually, quite often, we get a call from a potential new client or something they say we have, we're not getting any leads. We don't know why we need your help. Okay, so my first question is, do you have Google Analytics installed the Google Search Console? And if the answer is no, that's pretty much the end of the phone call, like, so they didn't do the first step. Right. They didn't do it?

Meredith: 2:50

How would they even know how to how would you? How do you know?

Meredith's Husband: 2:53

Well, they haven't, they haven't heard this exact episode coming up. So once this is released, everybody will know.

Meredith: 3:00

Everyone will know, everybody.

Meredith's Husband: 3:04

So that's one thing that happens. And of course, we can, you know, of course, we can still work with them. But we kind of have to go back and start from scratch. Whereas if they had done things more in order, they could have said, Yeah, we did this and this and this, and we're having this problem, it could be a very quick fix.

Meredith: 3:22

Like, they had no idea where to start. I think most people don't even know where to start. Yeah. Or they start with massively over flowing keywords on images.

Meredith's Husband: 3:35

Or they just pick things at random. I get the impression people hear advice, and they think, oh, that's I need to go do that. And they go do that.

Meredith: 3:41

And then sit and wait, then they don't know what's Yeah, refresh, and refresh.

Meredith's Husband: 3:46

There's also the another reason why you kind of want to do things in order is if you, I guess it's similar to the first reason, but if you are going through the process, and you get stuck on some heart, then you can call somebody, kind of like me, there's other people doing the same thing. Not like me, but they're, they're trying to be you can call that person up and be, hey, I'm stuck doing XYZ, and they'll be like, Oh, we can help with that. Like, I can step right in and help Step right up, step right in. So there are five major, I would call them phases. Okay, I'd say five steps, but there are steps within the phases come kind of Yeah. So and you will see as I'm just going to walk through these very quickly, and then dig a little deeper into them. But as I go through them, you'll see oh, that's kind of applicable to what I was just saying how to do some things. So number one is setup. You want to get your essentially like your toolbox. Ready, your Google Analytics, your Google Search Console. Yeah, it would be. It would be like, there's actually there's, there's, I have so many analogies I could use here.

Meredith: 5:02

It'd be like typically sell play. Yes. Is that okay?

Meredith's Husband: 5:05

Can you tell them? We're doing a podcast

Meredith: 5:06

myself. We're doing a podcast.

Meredith's Husband: 5:09

Thank you, buddy. Good boy. So if you imagine taking your car to a mechanic, is he going to be able to fix it without any issues? He or they? They're going to need tools, right? Yeah. Likewise, as a photographer, you when you take photos, do you ever do you ever look at those photos before you give them to your client? Yes, yes. So imagine imagine Mark trying To Market Your website, and not getting the feedback of what's happening, what the result is, and just kind of trying to plow forward. That would be kind of like when there's no feedback, literally, it would be like you taking a photo and not looking at it and just handing the card to your clients and being like, there they are. Yeah, so the setup, the setup is important. And the setup is important, because like I said, if you skip that step, and then you have an issue later on, and you try and diagnose that issue, it's near impossible if you didn't do the setup.

Meredith: 6:07

Okay. So where do you go? And how do you set up? And how do you know? Well, that's it,

Meredith's Husband: 6:10

we've, we've, we've done all these all the details we've done in other episodes, so I'm not gonna I'm not going to cover this specifics. But setup is going to be you're going to set up your Google Analytics, your Google Search Console, your Google business profile. It's like your Google. It's literally like your Google toolbox.

Meredith: 6:29

And you have said how to do each of those things I have in previous podcasts I have. Good.

Meredith's Husband: 6:37

Okay. So the second thing that you want to do once you are are setup, you have your your toolbox,

Meredith: 6:44

you have three those are the three essentials. Those are the

Meredith's Husband: 6:47

three essentials. Yeah, you need those tools in your Trifecta

Meredith: 6:51

Yes. Of beginning and establishing a good foundation for your business.

Meredith's Husband: 6:57

And if you're even if you're starting from scratch, you might think like, Hey, I don't have any traffic anyway, why does it matter if I don't have Analytics installed? Or I you know, if I'm starting from scratch, they won't bring me any traffic? Correct. But you like once you if you wait till later to install analytics, it doesn't like retro actively Yeah, get information, you will then have no information to work with. So as you are as you put work and time into doing stuff, you want to know that analytics is there capturing the results. So you can kind of get an idea of hey, was this worth it? Was that worth? Right? Right? Can I fix what right? What needs improvement? The fish? It's the setup. You got to have that setup? Yeah. It's not sexy, but you gotta do setup

Meredith: 7:42

can be sexy. We've just

Meredith's Husband: 7:45

made it I'll probably cut that.

Meredith: 7:53

Who knows? For the sake of it listener.

Meredith's Husband: 7:57

Okay, so the second step is your website. So this is probably what everybody thinks SEO is this second step is, you've probably heard of it referred to as on site SEO. This is all your meta tags, and your title tags and your image tags and fixing all that stuff and doing your linking all that stuff. That's just your second step. And what that does, is that it's I think, I may have described this as like fixing or plugging the holes in the bottom of a boat before you set sail. Sounds

Meredith: 8:28

familiar?

Meredith's Husband: 8:29

So imagine, if you set sail on a big voyage somewhere and you realize when you're 100 miles from the shore that you got holes in the bottom of your boat?

Meredith: 8:39

I don't think you'd get 100 miles from this. Yeah,

Meredith's Husband: 8:41

well, they'd have to be small holes, I guess. But

Meredith: 8:45

those are things you want to do. Check. Make sure before you set sail,

Meredith's Husband: 8:48

this is like getting a tune up before you go on a trip for your car. It's like, yeah, it's it's not set up. But it's getting things tuned up and ready. Making sure your site is healthy.

Meredith: 9:00

It's kind of like packing for an event or a trip. You want to write a list, make a list, check everything, make sure you have the right things that you're going for your trip, so you don't

Meredith's Husband: 9:10

kind of Yes, yeah. Okay. think oh, man,

Meredith: 9:13

do you know what? I thought we were going to Antarctica, but it's Florida.

Meredith's Husband: 9:19

There is a there is a there would be a sort of checklist involved, indeed. And in this portion. Yes. So that's the that's the that's the purpose. Because if you if you don't do this, and then you go in, like just like the step before, if you go ahead and you keep working. And you had skipped this step, it's really going to hold back your results. And so you could you don't want to put a lot of time and effort into something. If you're like have already shot yourself in the foot, so to speak. No, you want to get to a hospital. Now you want to avoid shooting yourself. Oh, right. Ideally, yes. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So three. The third step is links. So we've I've talked many, many times about link building heartthrob. Yes. So in building links, there are some things you want to do as a local business owner, some types of links. There are some standard practice types of links that you should build, and that's this phase. Okay. That's going to be like remember, we talked about white spark and getting your local citations and things like that? Looking at competitor websites? Yes. So some standard link building, right links are massively important. Remember, Google bumps you like they are the single most important thing in how Google determines their rankings. Right? Okay, so number four. Once you have once you've done the setup, you fix your on site SEO, you've done your your basic, your foundational link building. That was number three. Number four. Now you want to focus on content. So this is building your, what do we call it? Blog? Yes. And what is it really? It is resource a resort? Yeah. You want to create resourceful content? Yeah, you are. I was surprised that

Meredith: 11:07

surprised? Everyone else listening is like the

Meredith's Husband: 11:12

marathon? Yeah. Didn't you? Weren't you listening last episode? No. This is where you kind of want to find, find your voice, you know, find a way to put good content and this content, you know, it's going to live on your blog, or on your website. But hopefully, you're gonna split it up and repurpose it and use it for social media everywhere.

Meredith: 11:35

I had the best idea for a blog last night,

Meredith's Husband: 11:38

and then use fell asleep. Yep. Yep. Yeah. There's lots of blogs. Lof.

Meredith: 11:43

Oh, there's so many. So many brilliant blog.

Meredith's Husband: 11:48

And if you could just go through Dreamland and pick up everybody else's ideas that they didn't remember,

Meredith: 11:52

man, that'd be pretty overwhelming. It'd be a very thick soup.

Meredith's Husband: 11:57

Yeah. Okay, and then number five, yes, number five is like rhythm like maintenance. Once you've done all this stuff, you know, you don't want to, you don't want to go, you don't need to do the setup twice, you don't need to do the onsite twice, you don't need to do the link building twice, you don't need to go through this process. But once you get to step five, you want to have a sort of rhythm where you're like, Okay, every once a month, I just checked my on site score, you know, once a month, or once every six months, or once you know, pick, you got to pick a rhythm here, it would

Meredith: 12:28

be good to maybe set up a reminder in your calendar.

Meredith's Husband: 12:33

Yeah. Or if you're using SEMrush SEMrush, you can just set it say, hey, run this every week and send me an email. So it'll do so you just see your score. So if something happens and your score drops, you'll get an email. That's the easy part. The the more focused effort would be on the on the content here. So once you figure out what type of content you want to create, then how often are you going to do it? Right. And that doesn't need. Like I've said it doesn't, you know, doesn't need to be every day doesn't need to be every other day, you can find your own rhythm

Meredith: 13:06

done. It fits all forms in various ways.

Meredith's Husband: 13:09

Exactly. It varies from industry to industry, it varies from company to company, from person to person, it varies on what you are producing, like, depending Are you writing short little articles, well, then you don't want to do one every other month, probably you'd want to do more often. If you're doing a podcast, you might do that every week. Yeah, so that's fun. So you're going to number five is the one that lasts forever. Unfortunately, not unfortunately.

Meredith: 13:34

You do the 1234. Boom, you've got your foundation, you got your moon boots on, you are ready. And now it is focusing on five and refining and continuing

Meredith's Husband: 13:46

to maintaining. And continuing. Yes, continuing. Yeah.

Meredith: 13:51

Okay, that's good. So we want to get to five. Yes. And we wonder then then we need to get comfortable with living comfortably inside of five. Yeah. And make it the best we can make five

Meredith's Husband: 14:03

beat until I invent number six.

Meredith: 14:05

Okay, I have faith in you. I think it could happen. Well, I

Meredith's Husband: 14:09

hope that puts into perspective, a lot of the other things

Meredith: 14:13

that we've talked about my tour ties, it probably does. Yeah, we should all prioritize. And so

Meredith's Husband: 14:21

see, call you if you were to call me up and say hey, Meredith husband. Yeah. I'm stuck on number four, I would know. Okay, super. I know you I know you've done one, I know what I need to look at to help you with number four. Or if you said I'm on number two, I would know what I need to know where to look, it'd be it could be very quick. I've had I've had clients call and say, Yeah, you know, we've, we created the website, we did it, you know, $20,000 in ADS. We're not doing any of this. And I'm like, Well, did you do you know, steps one and two? Well, no, we just wanted to get it running. Right? I go in, and I check in that. So they don't they don't have any way to diagnose or flag problems. So we had to start from scratch. Do you know what they did? Their contact, their contact form, was sending the leads to an old email address that nobody was checking, oh, my God now and they built the website and spent like 20 $30,000 on ads before they figured this out. If they had done step one and two that would have been flagged on like the second day,

Meredith: 15:23

no kidding, or the first week or something. You know, it's a shame that we hadn't created this podcast then. Yeah, I'm gonna send this to them. Send this to them, and you need to send this to all Your friends who are asking about SEO.

Meredith's Husband: 15:38

Spread the Love and spread shit. I was gonna say shed some light, you can shed light. You don't shed the love? Hopefully not. Um, I almost got very tongue tied there and said something very different.

Meredith: 15:49

I don't even shut that. Okay, I hope that was helpful. Was that helpful? That was helpful to me. Oh, good. Is it helpful to you or listener? In your car, in your room, in your desk, walking your dogs? I'd like to know where people listen to this podcast. Like how they listen to it. I would hope I wouldn't hope but I would. I would think it would be at your desk so you can write everything down. But

Meredith's Husband: 16:18

people don't listen. Don't listen. I

Meredith: 16:20

think that'd be an interesting question to pose. Where are people when they listen?

Meredith's Husband: 16:25

Or do you listen? Yeah, yeah. Tell me let me know. I'm on Instagram. Mary's husband. Next time. I'll see you next time. Okay, 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.