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 Do you have healthy SEO habits? No. Healthy SEO habits,

Meredith: 1:02

really fast, healthy habits healthy SEO habit to healthy SEO habit

Meredith's Husband: 1:06

sounded like you just said Fuck the SEO habit. All right, so healthy SEO habits are important, I think because a lot of people don't have them. And a lot of the advice you see online is all like, hey, the quick fix the little shortcut, the blazing SEO secrets, it's going to change your life in 10 minutes. Yeah. And I don't think that's a good way to approach SEO. Because SEO is not 100 yard dash, there's no secret. There's no little one thing you're gonna do. I've said this many times, I think on this podcast. Yes. There's no secret your guest. Yeah, people listen to we have a podcast. Yeah, most people do the one thing and then they go look and check the rankings and see if it worked. And if not on page one, or like, oh, that didn't work. Yeah. That's a habit. That's a bad habit. That's a SEO bad habit that people get into a good habit. Or actually there's there's a few categories when I was thinking, so talk about, you know, kind of what those habits are today. Okay. And then the next few episodes, I'll dive in a little deeper about how what each one means that's a nice ACC, because I would say on a monthly schedule, or, you know, on an ongoing doesn't have to be monthly, but on an ongoing sort of schedule, there are a few categories of things that you want to be thinking about, okay? They're not daily routines. No, I'm not going to ask you to wake up and think about SEO every 15 minutes before you brush your teeth. Okay, unless you would like to. But the categories of things that you want to kind of returned to on a periodic basis. Number one, that your website health, this is your tech stuff, your on site SEO stuff, when you run a sem rush audit, or our website audit and tells you your title tags are too long, or you duplicate a description tags. It's that sort of thing.

Meredith: 2:57

Yeah. Should we be wearing a stethoscope? When we're doing if

Meredith's Husband: 3:01

you'd like? Yeah, I should come up with some schwag that being item number one. Stethoscope stethoscope? Yeah. SEO stethoscope, your dad can hook me up with some. Yeah. Anyway, you want you always you gotta maintain a healthy website, or if you need to get it healthy in the first place. But once you do, if it's not going to stay healthy on its own, especially if you're adding anything, creating blogs, doing anything at all that score is gonna drop even if you're not doing anything. If your site something on a platform like WordPress, or Squarespace or any of these, there's a good chance that little tiny technical things are gonna happen that eventually you want to clean them up.

Meredith: 3:41

Yeah, I would think so. We don't want any dust lint.

Meredith's Husband: 3:46

So that's area number one. area number two is measure. Have you ever heard the saying, Yeah, we we treasure or we measure what we treasure. Now measure what you treasure. So if something is valuable to you valuable to you, you want to keep an eye on it. You want to know how it's doing?

Meredith: 4:03

Okay? It's never measured any treasure?

Meredith's Husband: 4:07

Well, you have some Do you have some sort of metric in your business? That you that you monitor? You don't know? Is there is? Is there anything? You don't know what your clients are doing? You don't know when their birthdays are when they shoot? Do you don't

Meredith: 4:22

know when they shoot? I should have a birthday. That's that's when I'm I'm still working on the dubsado.

Meredith's Husband: 4:27

So from 17 hats. So my point is, you know, like some families shoot, you know that they shoot. And you fall Yeah, right. Or they shoot in? Okay, well, that's something that you is valuable to you. And so you know that you do measure that even though you don't have a

Meredith: 4:44

measuring stick, right? You don't

Meredith's Husband: 4:47

like write it down, although maybe you should. Maybe I should. Yeah. But that's something that you you measure without even knowing that you have an idea of what's going right. I see what you're saying. I see what you're saying. Same thing with your website, although there are some specific tips that I won't get into but measurement, measurement is number two, and that lips that leads to area number three, which is the quality the quality of your site,

Meredith: 5:12

right? Area 51.

Meredith's Husband: 5:14

We do not well do we have an area five which maybe we can do like a 5.1 Yeah, I think but the quality quality of your site same thing is the quality of your of your photos and your products and the things that you deliver. You always want to be improving those you don't create it and beat If that's good enough, forever, I'm never going to sell a different product. Or I'm never going to try to learn to take different types of photos,

Meredith: 5:41

always every year, go to the Expos touch the things, smell them hug them.

Meredith's Husband: 5:46

Right. So that's area number three. And I'll give you some tips on exactly what you can do. They're excellent.

Meredith: 5:53

Oh, this is the overview. This is the overview. Thank you. Okay, great.

Meredith's Husband: 5:56

area number four is linking. We've talked many, many, many, many times about how important links are

Meredith: 6:03

yes, we have even I understand that. Now.

Meredith's Husband: 6:06

Do you know, do you want to ask what a link is? No, I

Meredith: 6:08

do not.

Meredith's Husband: 6:11

Know, linking is something that you should always have kind of in the back of your mind. Yeah, because it's not a natural thing. And a lot of times in your daily work or your day to day, you may come across linking opportunities, and never spot them. So you just know, because you're not thinking of them. You want to be aware, because it's a lot easier to reach out and maybe get those links in the moment than it is to four months from now being Oh, I should reconnect with that person who I haven't spoken with or emailed in five months and ask him for a link like that's harder. That's much harder. So just having links on the back of your mind. And this is, like I've said many times, this is super important. If you just did only one of these areas. You should probably be this because Google is built on links. Yeah, Google runs on links. Yeah. And area number five is your content. Oh, yes. And so this is kind of similar to number four. And that you you kind of want to have this in the back of your mind so that you can be open to ideas for content when you see them. Right. That's a whole lot easier than sitting down and thinking oh, now I have to come up with ideas to blog. It's a lot easier. If your

Meredith: 7:22

blog yet. Yeah, you do. Oh, I do. Yeah. Okay.

Meredith's Husband: 7:27

We'll get into that. Like, that'll be one of the next things we cover in the upcoming weeks. But this is a lot easier to do again, in the moment with when you're dealing with a client and you say, Oh, hey, clients often have this issue, or you're speaking with a client and something comes up, you're like, oh, yeah, lots of my clients asked this question. Right, then it's easier to think Oh, eight that I could do some sort of resource. Something on my blog. Yeah. And we'll get into later, the methodology you can use that you don't have to sit down and think about writing 18 paragraphs?

Meredith: 7:58

Maybe there is an idea bank? Where you Yeah, kind of, Hey, come on. Now. If you have a marriage, you

Meredith's Husband: 8:07

have some sort of note taking app, I would, you know, have a have a page where you keep your Yeah, maybe it maybe you should take a note and the note should be consolidate your notes.

Meredith: 8:19

It is that's one of the things I have. Okay, so

Meredith's Husband: 8:23

I'm going to talk just a little bit about each of these. And then like I said, in the following week, we'll we'll dive a little deeper. Oh, okay. In the following weeks, I think we can actually do one above this. Just flush

Meredith: 8:35

it out. flush it out.

Meredith's Husband: 8:36

Right. flush it out. Not flush it out your blood cast. That's what

Meredith: 8:40

toxins.

Meredith's Husband: 8:42

Are you listening to me? Didn't make fun of me. You said blog cast. Yeah. And you didn't make fun. When When did you say blog cat? I've said it like three times now? A blog cast? I said, Yeah, put it in your blog cast. So I repeated it. Now we've been talking about it for like three minutes now.

Meredith: 9:00

No, no, I was looking okay.

Meredith's Husband: 9:03

Okay. Okay. area number one, the tech stuff. Okay, tech, just yet, tech, technical. So this is why I like sem rush in particular. But any SEO Audit Tool, you can, will do something like this, but sem rush even on the free plan. It when you run your you set up your website audit, there's a little checkbox, when you create it, say send me a weekly update. So that if your score ever drops, if anything goes wrong, it's going to come right to your inbox. And I think literally the subject of the message is something like, Hey, your website score is decreased. And so you don't need to like immediately sit down and fix it. It's not that urgent, but that's something that, you know, oh, hey, in the next month, I want to check out and see what's going on it, put a pin in it.

Meredith: 9:47

And more on on it, you know,

Meredith's Husband: 9:49

and these are these will be things like like I said, even if you're not doing major changes to your website, if you add a page, you're there's a good chance you're gonna end up with some duplicated titles or meta descriptions. This happens even my biggest clients, they create new pages, or they start they create a new page by copying an existing page. And then they forget to update the SEO titles and the descriptions of the unit with duplicate issues. So this happens at all levels. Don't feel bad if that happens. That's largely the tech just keeping your SEO, technical score high. Number two is measurement. So measure. So this is using things like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and SEM rush if you'd like also, but it's fairly basic. You don't need really dive into it. I know people probably freak out a little bit when I say you got to look at Google Analytics or Google Search Console. It's a couple easy pieces of information like, yeah, people coming into your website, what are the landing pages? And are those landing pages engaging people are people leaving right away? Like, that's a good monthly check. And that will lead us to improvement in area three, which I'll get to in just a second. But also, with the measurement, like a quick look at Google Search Console, you can see hey, what keywords do I have sort of lingering on page two? And where are they going? What what blog content is ranking pretty well, which I could now move on to area three, improve a little bit, and maybe push them off of up from page two on to page one where you would actually get some traffic? Okay, where did I?

Meredith: 11:22

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So you have a you have a blog post that's getting traffic?

Meredith's Husband: 11:27

And well, it's it might be, let's say, you look at Google Search Console. And by the way, it the SEO dashboard, which I use, I created and use myself, I'll link it below, it pulls this information out really quickly and easily. So it's easy to spot. I'll link that below. But one of the things I often look for for all my clients, including my own site and your site is what keywords are ranking on page two? And what pages so if it's a blog page, say we have a blog page that's ranking on page two. I find that by measurement, area two, but then in the next step quality, I think, Oh, how can I improve that a little bit? It's on page two. You can add some content, you can add more links to it from other pages on your website and add to blog posts. Absolutely, absolutely. Sure.

Meredith: 12:16

You've said that a billion times.

Meredith's Husband: 12:19

In fact, it's a really good practice, especially when you see a blog post that's like, performing pretty well. Like it's up on page three or page two. Yeah, yeah, you want to improve that? Don't write another blog post like it thinking that it's going to do better, because then you're going to see both of those. Yes, you're going to cannibalize your rank. It's

Meredith: 12:39

like having two Academy Award nominations. Yeah, you'll

Meredith's Husband: 12:43

never win. Cancel yourself out.

Meredith: 12:45

If I had a nickel.

Meredith's Husband: 12:47

Yeah, always look, look to your best performing blogs and improve them. Yeah, that's what's

Meredith: 12:53

so would it be better to look to the, the well performing blog blogs, and improve them, or the least

Meredith's Husband: 13:01

improve the ones that are performing? Well, almost always, I, if you have blogs that, in fact, if you have blogs that are not performing? Well, you're gonna want to think about can you get rid of them? Can you combine them? Can you redirect them somewhere else?

Meredith: 13:15

But we can't delete them? Because then that we're gonna have a link messed up somewhere, right? Someone was listening, that's impressive. Actually, no.

Meredith's Husband: 13:25

Yeah, then you would need to create a redirect. But that's something where the things that are not performing well, you want to get rid of their like dead branches on a tree, you want to cut them off and cut them off, and

Meredith: 13:36

healthy handling.

Meredith's Husband: 13:37

So that covers kind of the area of improvement. Okay, area number four and building healthy SEO habits. Link Building. So just thinking about

Meredith: 13:48

links, thinking about linking, links are not sinking, right, while we're winking. You could

Meredith's Husband: 13:56

do all those things, if you want. Links are like gold, and SEO, they're so valuable. So anything you can do to kind of keep them in your mind, like when you're working when you take a new project and shoot a new family? Keep in mind, is there somehow I could get a link here? Is there something I could do or when you more so than shooting your clients in your day to day stuff? Like you are going to volunteer tomorrow? Right? I would say I'm pretty well trained and SEO habits. How is there some way we can get a link of that? Right? Yeah, yeah.

Meredith: 14:34

Okay. That kind of defeats the purpose of volunteering. Because you're giving, you know, like you are,

Meredith's Husband: 14:43

but there's no, yeah, but there's no, you know, there's no, you don't have to, like punish yourself in order to volunteer. Like, if there's some way you can benefit. And it doesn't cost them anything, you know, you're volunteering. And if they, you know, you know, if you were to say, Oh, hey, I'm taking these photos for you, can you give me a linked photo credit? And they say, No, fine, you know, that's going to happen, probably the majority of the time you won't get a link. But sometimes they'll be like, yeah, sure, no problem. That's great for you. It's great for me, too. And then area number five is content content. And this is similar, I would say, it will help immensely if you can just sort of keep that in the back of your mind. So when things happen, and you're like, Oh, hey, like I said earlier, all my clients ask about XYZ I should put a list on my website on XYZ issues, right? Or something that you just see, you know, if you're walking around the neighborhood, oh, you know what my clients would really liked that, put it on your blog. You know, things like that being aware is like doing that sort of thing coming up with blog ideas a whole lot easier than sitting down with a cup of coffee and being like, Okay, I kind of forced myself to come up with blog ideas. Yeah. Yeah. Alright, so those are the those are the areas and kind of rough introduction. And like I said, over the next few weeks, we'll dive in deeper, deep dive on like exactly how to do this stuff,

Meredith: 16:16

because there's so many different kinds of fish,

Meredith's Husband: 16:18

lots of fishes in a deep dive. Bye bye, everybody.

Meredith: 16:22

Bye bye.

Meredith's Husband: 16:24

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.