Meredith's Husband: 0:33

Hey, this is Meredith's husband. I've got some SEO advice for you, but I'm going to keep it really simple, so that you can understand it, so it makes sense, and most importantly, so you can actually use it. On last week's episode. Hopefully you were convinced that you can make blog improvements by working on your existing blog and not having to sit down and create new blogs from scratch. Absolutely. Hopefully you're sold on that idea. But what does it mean to make improvements to a blog that's not like that's not obvious in itself, right, correct? If I were to say, take your best blog and make it better, right? Would you know what to do?

Meredith: 1:22

Well, I would just think, make it clearer.

Meredith's Husband: 1:25

So that's one thing to do. Yeah, certainly. Sometimes just making it longer. Sometimes you just need more words, like really, often thought the opposite. Well, in your case, that's probably usually the case. But a lot of times you can expand on some things, right? Why use one word when you can use 12? Yeah, sort of. I had a client once, and they had a competitor that they had a blog that was doing really well, and that competitor's blog kept showing up in those Featured Snippets. Do you know what those are? Oh, yeah, yeah. Like, the Yeah, like, like, you know, people ask this, and then you get a little snippet from your your blog put right into Google. And it was getting a lot of traffic for this competitor. And it was also, it was, it was a nice, resourceful guide. It was useful to people. But what this competitor did, evidently, he was also getting a lot of business from it, because literally, as the months and years went by, we could watch that competitor just build that blog, make it longer and longer and better and more stuff and more stuff and more stuff. It got to be like 7000 words or something that all kinds of resources really in depth. And this guy went, he was a he had a law firm. He went from being a solo lawyer, I think would be some assistance, or something, you know, to he had a team of like six or seven other lawyers,

Meredith: 2:43

holy smokes.

Meredith's Husband: 2:44

And I'm gonna say a lot of it was due to this blog. Wow, I don't know, but that's the possibility of, it's my perception. That's what I thought from looking at the at his blog and how much time he put into constantly redoing it, revamp, not redoing it, but improving it. So how can we do something like this? And remember, in in creating a blog, our goal is still to make a resource. Our goal is to get something that Google likes, and we will measure that by the number of impressions. We talked about impressions last week. We want to build our impressions. And

Meredith: 3:16

can we just, just if somebody didn't hear last week's last

Meredith's Husband: 3:20

impression is, an impression is every time one of your pages is displayed in Google. Okay, now that could be, that could be on the first page. It could it could also be on like the fifth page. Now, people don't go and visit the fifth page, but Google is still tracking that search, and your website came up in position number 45 Google knows that, so Okay, so we want to build it that is an impression, even if you're not showing so we want to build impressions because we want to build something that Google likes. So that's our metric for measuring success here. Don't get in the mindset of thinking I need to create a blog that's going to build my business. Which was my example, unfortunately, but get into the mindset of, I want to build a blog that's going to get more impressions. It's going to be more visible, more people are going to see it. Google's going to like it more. That's the objective. Gotcha. So now, how do you do that? Yes, there's a few different ways. It's probably an infinite number of ways, but there's a few that are will really get you on the right track. Okay, number one is, just look at it as a user. Like, don't just go to that blog and try this is kind of difficult, because it's like looking at your own website. It's like, yes, exactly. It's like looking at your own website. It's sometimes very hard to have an objective opinion about something you created. Correct? But just look at it as a user, and don't think, how do I make this better? Think, what do my users need? Right? What does somebody need? Who's on the other end of this? What do they need?

Meredith: 4:50

Right? How can I help provide even better resources? Yes,

Meredith's Husband: 4:54

that's how you would start. Now, if it if nothing is obvious at that point, then what you can do is you can go to Google and see what other websites rank above yours for for that keyword. So you know, last week, we also talked about the keywords and finding the certain keywords. So you know what keywords. If you listen to last week's episode, you'd know what keywords are leading to this blog, so just go to Google, type in those keywords and see what blogs come up above yours. Okay, look at what they're doing now be careful here, because this is also dangerous, because you get stuck in this mindset of you got to do what your competitors are doing, right, right? A lot. People, myself included, have the tendency to look at competitors and then see something they're doing and think, oh, I need to do that. Yeah, this is just to kind of give you ideas. Okay, don't look at competitors and say, I need to do that, and I need to do that, and I need to that, because then you're going to end up just doing what they did right, and you're not you're not making it better, you're just copying them. Google's not going to alter you're not going to jump above them in the rankings just by doing what they're doing. So but I do encourage you to at least look at them and see. Hopefully, this will jog your creative juices and give you some ideas. Okay, another thing you can do is ask a friend, ask a for a colleague, say to someone, Hey, you are a and then describe the person who you would want to be reading this blog. You're a mother with three kids who doesn't have enough time to go pick them up from school. Yeah, do anything. That's who you are. How would you make this blog better? Or, you know, I would say, how could this blog be more helpful? What would be more helpful? Yeah? And see what. How

Meredith: 6:32

could this help you more?

Meredith's Husband: 6:34

Yeah, put it in your words. You want advice. You know what you say. Okay. So another question I often get when you are trying to make your blogs better, should I replace the images? What should I replace? Oh, that's a good question. So there is a potential downside when you replace images, because you could be taking something out of those images could be indexed in Google, and people could be seeing them in search results. You don't know this, and there's no way to easily figure this out, right? So if you replace an image, there's a danger of losing that visibility, right? There's no real upside to creating a new image in its place. So there's a potential downside, no real potential upside to replacing images. I would only replace images if those existing images are outdated, if they no longer represent your work, or if there is simply, of like an event last year and you want to update it with the most recent event, something like that. If there's a reason to do it, then yes. If there's no obvious reason, then I would say, probably don't do it. Yeah, you're looking to update the text, the words on the page. Now, if you want to add images, super, yeah, if you want to, if you want to add a video, super, if you want to add things, great. But mainly we're looking at the text. Now, I also get the question, should I update the published date. Oh, yeah, the kind of general rule of thumb, I would say it's my general rule of thumb. The general rule of thumb, if you update more than, say, 20% of the text, or you add that much text, then update the published date, something else that happens is a lot of people have blog posts that are that they might redo each year, right? The top 10 things to do in 2020, you know, whatever. Yeah. In that case, what I would recommend is not doing a new blog, just revising that blog and then changing the headline of the blog. Don't change the URL. Never change the URLs when you're updating blogs, but change the headline to include the current year, and then update the publish date. Okay. So if you're changing the the headline in that case to anything that makes reference to the year, yes, then update the publish date. Any, any reference to the year in the blog at all, I would say, update the publish date, okay? Otherwise, it's just, did you update 5% of the text? Then probably not. If you updated 30% then yes, I would do it.

Meredith: 9:04

Okay, anything above 20, yeah, roughly, roughly, yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 9:09

And just, you know, also, you can just kind of ask yourself, is there enough new information here, a new concept here that it seems like a new post if it does, then update the publish date, okay, and also don't update the publish date more than once per year. Oh, yeah, I would say, don't do that. You don't want to look to Google like your update like you're trying to update all your blog posts multiple times, multiple times, multiple times per year. Okay, so that should get you on the right track. That's good. Thank you. Yeah, just remember that you are making this a resource, yeah, so at the at the end, are you making it better for users, right? That's our objective. Excellent. Thank

Unknown: 9:52

you. And

Meredith's Husband: 9:53

next week, we will talk about new blog posts and how you can take the information we covered this episode and last episode to get ideas for new topics. Thank

Meredith: 10:03

you. Hey. Thank you so much for listening. We really hope that you find this helpful and useful, and if you do what you could do for us as a thanks would be to drum roll, please, yes. Leave a review. Yes, everybody says it, I know, but it really does make a difference. Take three seconds, leave as many stars. Say something really nice about what you like, about the podcast, and maybe why other people would like it. It would mean the world to us, especially Maya. Spend that better. I'm going to try one where I'm not going to be charming. I'm.