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 if you are serious about SEO, yes. And you want to make SEO work, yes,

Meredith: 1:04

you want a hat?

Meredith's Husband: 1:06

You can you can use it. Yeah, you can get an SEO hat. You're also going to need a tool to use. Yes, you can't really do SEO just on your own without any tools. Yeah, I mean, you can. But that's nobody does that anymore. We used to do that. You would need to spend a lot of time learning about SEO first. Yeah, don't we don't want to do that.

Meredith: 1:26

No, no waste time. So

Meredith's Husband: 1:29

we need a tool. The problem is that tools cost money. The better tools cost more money, there are cheap tools. And sometimes they're valuable for what they cost. And sometimes they're not. Now, I've always talked about sem Rush is my favorite tool. Yes. And it's the tool, that's the tool that SEO professionals use just hands down. It costs like 100 bucks a month for the most basic level. However, one of the reasons I like it is because it has has two things as a free trial, you can use the you can use all the features for a week for free. Yeah. And then you can downgrade your plan to a free permanent plan. Now, then you don't get all the pro features. But it's still pretty good. And it's free, you get all the pro features now. So what I'm going to talk about today is how you can use the free trial, you can use the Pro features for the week and get all the information you need. Export that information, keep that information, then downgrade to the free plan, you kind of get the best of both the best of both worlds for less to kind of get the best of both worlds. Okay, so I actually have a I have a blog about this. It's actually a very popular blog that kind of walks through this process. That's what gave me the idea to do the podcast. I will link to the blog, if you are interested, if you're in this position that you are looking for a tool. And you are not already using a tool. Yeah, you don't want to pay for a tool. You can check out the blog, it'll walk you through this process, but I'm gonna kind of highlight what you do. Okay, today. Okay. Yeah. So the first thing that you do is you sign up for a free trial. And you can just go to sem rush and you just start doing and they'll prompt you for a free trial.

Meredith: 3:18

Now, is it is it is it there's a free trial, but then there's also a free,

Meredith's Husband: 3:23

there is a free Yeah, if you sign up, it'll, there will be an option and it changes from time to time. But there's usually two different options, you can do the free trial in which you will need to enter your credit card. It won't be charged for a week. Okay. The other option is you can skip this free trial and just go straight to the free plan. You don't want to do that, because then you don't get the Pro features. You want to use the Pro features for the week. Yeah. Okay. So you want to click, click the trial, the verbiage sometimes changes, but usually it's like skip Free Trial or something like that. You don't want to skip the free trial, use the free trial trial, you sign up. And right away. Once you log in your screen is going to look like a mess was going to be tools all over the place. And one of the complaints that I hear a lot about sem Rush is that it's not very user friendly. There's a lot of stuff there. Now, in this first week, I suggest there's only four tools that you want to use. And there's like a dozen to choose from, you can get rid of those others. Okay. Every tool has like a little box around it has a little X on it, you can click the X seeing just get rid of it. So your screen will be simplified. Which ones do we keep? So you want to keep your retinas down? Yeah, you want to keep the Position Tracker. You want to keep the Site Audit Tool. Yeah. You want to keep the content analyzer. Yeah. And you want to keep the backlink audit. Okay, those are the four you want to keep the other CC get rid of all the others. The others are good, and you might want to use them in the future. But I can't imagine using them inside this free week. They're a little more advanced. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Meredith: 5:05

There's enough going on in our lives.

Meredith's Husband: 5:07

Yeah, tell me about it. So you can keep those four set them up. They each have a little, it's very simple to do and pick there's a little box and each one's or a button that says set up, you click the Setup, enter your domain, and it just does that automatically. Pretty much. It's pretty basic. These are all pretty basic. The one exception that you need to do a little bit more is the Position Tracker, Position Tracker. Yeah, so what this is going to do, it's going to track a track the keywords that you want to monitor and where you are ranked. Okay. And now this is important, because a lot of people do here is they just go to Google, and they do a search and they see where their website is. That's not a good idea. That is not a good idea, you're never going to get accurate results, you really want to use some sort of tool to measure your write your rankings, otherwise, it's SEMrush is yeah, that's what SEMrush is exactly. So the first thing that you want to do is set up your Position Tracker, now it's going to prompt you, it's going to ask you to put in a keyword. Okay, at least one. What I do here is I just put in your brand name. Okay? Once you have that keyword, and that's all you need to do, right? In this first step, you don't need to put in any other keywords, because you're going to do keyword research for the rest of the week, or at least some at some point during the week, and then put those keywords into the Position Tracker. But first, you need to set it up so fast. And then those other three tools I mentioned, the content analyzer, the Site Audit, and the backlink audit, you can just set those up, they really only need your domain name, just let them run, they may take a few minutes, they may take several hours, I usually just set it up and then go work on something else and come back hours later or the next day or whatever. Once that's done, then in that blog, which I'll link below, then you can just export those, put them into a Google Sheet. Which I have a template, you can also use it on that blog. Oh, include the template? Yes. Oh, it's there. It's in the blog. If you go visit the blog, you can get access to the template. Oh, great. So then once you have that information, now you have the next roughly week to use the keyword research tool. It's called the keyword magic tool. Magic. Yeah. Magic. We've talked about how to do keyword research before and what you want to look for

Meredith: 7:23

when you believe in magic, I believe. So the magic keyword tool?

Meredith's Husband: 7:30

Yes. So then just find your keywords and keyword research for photographers for local businesses, is it's usually not that difficult. It's not that involved. So it should be it'll be pretty straightforward. Okay, as you as you figure out which keywords you want to track, it's very simple to do just put a little checkmark in the checkbox next to the keyword. And then there's an option that where you can just move that to your Position Tracker. Now, when you downgrade to a free plan, right at the end of plan, you have to do it before you want to cancel before again, that process is in the blog. Yeah, that's I walked through the process of exactly what read the blog. So when you downgrade to a free plan, you're going to be limited to 10 keywords, you're only going to be able to track 10 keywords. So I suggest it's not many. But for a local photographer, it probably is. It's probably okay. It's a good place to start. It is a good place to start. Yeah, this and this is tracking 10 keywords this way, is a whole lot better than most other methods. This is pretty good. And the and the SEMrush tracking is very accurate. Believe it or not tracking rankings in Google is a very difficult thing to do for tools to do, because Google doesn't want anyone else doing it, that Google doesn't want tools constantly scraping results, because that eats up Google's resources. Every time a tool goes to check rankings, Google has to do some work to generate those rankings. So there used to be hundreds and hundreds of tools doing this. And Google took steps to make this more difficult. SEMrush is one of the our sites probably the best tool in terms of accuracy. Okay? Now, if you see a result, like let's say you put your keywords into SEMrush. And it says, Hey, you're ranking at number 17, you may go to Google and do the same search, and you may or may not see your website at number 17. Chances are pretty good. You will not. That's okay. That's okay. Yeah, that's fine. And that's, that's expected, because everybody is going to get different results. Right? When you do a search on Google, there's dozens of factors that go into the results that you see, including where you are the computer, your history, all sorts of things that don't even know about Google doesn't even make it public. But they say there's a whole bunch of I wouldn't doubt it. So when SEMrush does this, it's as close as we can get to a totally objective ranking. Okay, there's no search history. It's, it's the best you can do really. Okay. Great. And what you want to do, in addition to that, don't really focus so much on like, the number 17. You want to watch the trends. Okay. So from one month to the next is go from 17 to 15 to 14 to 11 Or does it go from 17 to 28? To 54? Like that's the kind of thing that you want to watch. Okay.

Meredith: 10:23

And then is that are there ways to keep it going? upwards rather than downwards?

Meredith's Husband: 10:28

Oh, yeah, that's that's where you're going to use the tool for the tool. That's what you export all this in from So you can have stuff to do, it's going to tell you the things that are wrong with your site that you can make better,

Meredith: 10:39

etc. It's very nice for free podcast.

Meredith's Husband: 10:43

And it's free. Yes, that's SEMrush is a super tool. And if you put effort into SEO, I would imagine at some point, it's going to be worth 100 bucks, it's going to be worth a lot more than 100 bucks. But when you're beginning, I get it. 100 bucks is 100 bucks, even when I was stuck under bucks. Yeah. Even when I was starting as an SEO agency, I couldn't afford the 100 bucks for my own website. So this is what I did. I took a free trial. Yeah, Knack. Yeah. It's a secret. It is. It is a legitimate secret for you. Listener. Yeah, a lot of times. That's one thing that gets me a lot of times like people say, Oh, the secret to this, the secret to that. And it's not really a secret. It's just kind of this is

Meredith: 11:29

a nice hack.

Meredith's Husband: 11:30

This is a hack. Yeah. That's like hacks. I am hack or whole hacks. Hacks. Okay. Does that make sense? Yes, yeah. Well, thank you. And if you are already using a tool, you could still try this. If you're using a tool other than SEMrush, you could try this. Let's free. See, if you like it better or worse. If you already using so much, maybe you've already are using a free SEMrush plan. You can just use another email address and try this method. Get that get that

Meredith: 12:01

question. Yeah. Even if they already have the same card on file.

Meredith's Husband: 12:04

Yeah, that should be no problem. Because it's going to be associated with your email, you can use a single card to pay for plenty of different accounts. Yeah, you will need to use a new email, go through the setup process. Again, we can all get

Meredith: 12:16

a new email. Yeah. Thank you very much. Oh, or

Meredith's Husband: 12:20

what? Or if you really, really don't want to get a second email, you could always then just cancel your account completely. Although I

Meredith: 12:28

take away all of your information.

Meredith's Husband: 12:30

Yeah, but it's a free plan. Anyway, you're gonna the whole point of going back and doing the free trial is to get the Pro features where you're gonna get more information. I would recommend just if you can, using a second email, just use your wife's email or something. Excellent. All right. Meredith is giving me the wrap it up. This is I am signal. So I hope that helps go check out the blog. If you're interested in this, check out the blog.

Meredith: 12:57

Link is in the second show notes, show notes. Thank you. Thank you. See you next week.

Meredith's Husband: 13:05

If you're finding these episodes helpful, I created something that I think you're going to find even more helpful. It explains the SEO process similar to these episodes in a way that I hope is new for you, but it also puts them in order so that you know what to do first and second and third through the entire SEO process. And I hope saves you a lot of time by giving you an actionable step by step plan. It's called the SEO roadmap, and you can find it at Meritus husband.com/roadmap.