Meredith's husband 0:00

Today is the SEO refresh . Oh , what does that mean ? I get the question a lot oh , we haven't done SEO , or I haven't done SEO for six months or a year or two years . How do I do a refresh ? I'm going to dedicate a month or two months , or three months , or a week or a day or whatever .

Meredith 0:14

So what should I do ?

Meredith's husband 0:15

It's kind of a question .

Meredith 0:16

I get oh , kind of like a jumpstart .

Meredith's husband 0:20

No , like you know , you did SEO . Let's say you have done some SEO in the past but , you haven't done . Imagine that situation , baby . I can't If you had done some SEO in the past and then something happened and you didn't do SEO for a while , and now we need to get back into SEO .

Meredith 0:38

Get back into the groove .

Meredith's husband 0:40

That's the SEO refresh , get back to the . Seo gym . I don't necessarily recommend this method of SEO . It's better , you'll get better results if you develop some sort of monthly routine or habit and your growth is more steady . However , you know what happens . Life happens .

Meredith 1:00

Life .

Meredith's husband 1:02

And so that's not a possibility . The monthly routine is not a possibility .

Meredith 1:06

It's not always . It's not always , this is true .

Meredith's husband 1:09

So this is better than nothing . Doing an SEO refresh , maybe doing SEO once a year for a week or a month ?

Meredith 1:15

Yeah , see , that's Buster Marcel .

Meredith's husband 1:18

Marcel agrees .

Meredith 1:19

He's got his Greek .

Meredith's husband 1:24

If that's what's possible .

Meredith 1:24

I want to tell you how to do it , oh okay . The best way to do it , if we're going to do it .

Meredith's husband 1:27

If this is what you got , I want you to do it right .

Meredith 1:33

A little exercise is better than zero exercise . That's correct . That's correct .

Meredith's husband 1:36

And I do have old clients , like just recently I had an old client , an old consulting client , come back and want to do essentially an SEO refresh . Not an old client in their age , but a former client . So this is kind of what I do for them . This is what I would do . So there's five steps , five things that are going to be helpful in this situation . I'm going to go through them .

Meredith 1:58

Please do .

Meredith's husband 1:59

Are you ready ?

Meredith 2:00

I am .

Meredith's husband 2:01

Okay , number one is Google Search Console . If you don't have Google Search Console , you should . If you're doing an SEO refresh , you should have Google Search Console . So this is the first thing I do . If I get a new consultant client , the first place I go is Google Search Console . I look at their performance . What is their visibility like in Google , and by visibility I mean what are their impressions ?

Meredith 2:24

What are their impressions ? What are their impressions ? Yeah , hello , I'm a clown Sorry . Can I do one more ?

Meredith's husband 2:33

No , thank you . Okay , what keywords are getting impressions ? What pages are getting impressions ?

Meredith 2:39

And how do you know that ?

Meredith's husband 2:41

You just go to performance . I've talked about Google search console before , so maybe I'll try to find an episode where I do that and I will link it below .

Meredith 2:49

Perfect For all those that are just tuning in for the first time , right , hi ?

Meredith's husband 2:54

So you look to see what keywords are doing okay , what pages are doing okay . One method , a trick that I like to use when doing this , is when you look at the Google Search Console performance graph , there are some filters at the top . I choose filters and I say queries excluding your brand name or your personal name , because I don't . It's not really important to me in doing SEO to know how many people are already searching for you by name . That's not like . Hopefully , you're going to appear top if somebody searches for Nerdist Dinner Photography , so I like to exclude those searches so that the information I'm getting is more representative of generic keywords Children's photography , brooklyn , new York , family photography , things like that .

Meredith's husband 3:42

I want to make note of which blogs are getting the most traffic directly from Google . Okay , and right now I just want to make note of that . Yeah , and I want to make note of . You can drill down . It's very easy to drill down in Google Search Console . When you see a popular blog , you click it . It's just going to give you information for that page . Then you look to see what are the keywords leading into that page by just clicking on the tab called queries .

Meredith 4:10

It'll tell you what keywords . Yeah , drill down . What is that ?

Meredith's husband 4:14

Drill down is when you're if you're looking at a report , you're looking at a website and let's say there's a piece of information that seems interesting to you , you click on it and more information is available by you're drilling down into that information by clicking on it Okay . You've never heard the term drilling down . Drill down , okay , it's like a dropdown menu .

Meredith 4:35

No , I figured it . Yeah , I mean I do , yeah , but it's just okay .

Meredith's husband 4:41

Okay , so you've got your most popular blogs and the keywords for those blogs . And then you want to look at just overall trend , and Google Search Console will give you the last 16 months . That's where I like to start . Before that , it doesn't maintain information past 16 months .

Meredith 4:59

Okay , but I just want to look for trends .

Meredith's husband 5:01

Then you drill down , then you drill down , got it .

Meredith 5:05

Okay .

Meredith's husband 5:06

If you see any and what I'm really doing here is just checking to see if there's any really alarming changes , right Like , sometimes , somebody changed their website platform and they forgot to do something , and you will see very clearly when that happened , and so you know , okay , something happened when I was doing that , what was it ? And then you can go back and undo it . So that's what I'm really looking for .

Meredith 5:32

Ideally .

Meredith's husband 5:32

I want to look to see you know hope to see an upward trend in the number of impressions . And remember there is an option to look at average ranking . Do not use that option unless you are looking at just a single keyword . Never use the average ranking for multiple keywords because it's going to be misleading , Because usually what happens is , as you optimize your white , your white . My white , I don't know , I don't know what that means as you optimize your website .

Meredith 5:59

I guess white is very , very short for website White .

Meredith's husband 6:04

As you optimize your website , hopefully more keywords are going to be gaining visibility . So in the beginning of this , if you're looking at this chart , that shows your average ranking over time . If you have just a few keywords in the beginning and then you start to add more keywords as time progresses , the keywords that you add are going to begin with lesser ranking . Progresses , the keywords that you add are going to begin with lesser ranking . So your average keyword ranking will be going down over time , which is going to look like something bad is happening when in actuality , something good is happening and more keywords are gaining visibility . So don't look at average ranking for multiple keywords no .

Meredith's husband 6:40

Okay , so the second step , the second thing you want to look at , also in Google Search Console , is the sitemap page .

Meredith 6:47

Sitemap page .

Meredith's husband 6:48

This is where you submit your sitemap to Google Search Console . You must submit , must . I'm going to get a T-shirt that says you must submit , and then , in small letters , your sitemap . I'm going to be so popular .

Meredith 7:04

You already are .

Meredith's husband 7:06

But what we're looking for here is we want to see are there any problems ? Are our pages not getting indexed ? Are they not getting into the Google search engine because of some issue ? And this is where you're going to find that out Exactly . So the navigation or the link that you want to click on in the left-hand side of Google Search Console , I believe , is called Pages , and when you click on that it's underneath the option called Indexing . So underneath Indexing , click on Pages . It will show you two boxes one in green , the pages that are indexed . It'll show you a number and it'll show you a box in gray pages not indexed . So inevitably you're going to have box in gray pages not indexed . So inevitably you're going to have some pages that are not indexed . You're going to have category pages , tag pages , author pages , login , et cetera .

Meredith's husband 7:55

It's normal to have some of those . What you want to look for is are your main pages not being indexed , your main website pages or your blog pages ? If your category pages and your tag pages are not indexed , that's fine . You also want to check do you have any old subdomains ? I see this a lot .

Meredith's husband 8:15

It's like people used to have an old blog and it's on blogmeritazinnerphotographycom . Anything , that's the you know the www . Yeah , that's technically a subdomainotographycom . Anything , that's the you know the www . Yeah , that's technically a subdomain . Okay , yeah , I knew I would lose you there . Anything before your main domain name yeah .

Meredith's husband 8:35

So clientsmeritusinterphotography , yeah . Blogmeritusinterphotography yeah . Something elsemeritusinterphotography Cute fish yes , those are subdomains and if a lot of times I see people they have their blog set up that way at some point and then they just kind of forget about it and it just lingers on , If that's the case , if you have a blog or any other subdomain there that you don't want in Google , it'll appear here and this would hopefully indicate that you should go get rid of it delete it If it's no longer active .

Meredith's husband 9:07

it's not doing you any good . It might be doing you harm , so you want to get rid of it . That's basically what I'm checking for there .

Meredith 9:12

Oh yeah .

Meredith's husband 9:13

How many of your pages are indexed and do you have any old stuff out there ?

Meredith 9:16

Yeah , if the old stuff is out there .

Meredith's husband 9:19

Kill it , no , show it the door . Okay , number three a SEMrush audit . So what we did by going to Google Search Console is we went to see hey , is Google telling us about any problems ?

Meredith 9:36

That's step number one Step .

Meredith's husband 9:38

number two is we go use an external tool to tell us about problems . Now there's going to be some overlap . If SEMrush is telling you about a problem , it may also be reported in Google Search Console as a problem . If it's in Google Search Console , it's of the utmost importance . Those are the things you want to take .

Meredith 9:53

Okay , then you do SEMrush , yeah , then you do SEMrush , you do an audit . Yeah , how do you do the audit ?

Meredith's husband 10:00

The site audit tool .

Meredith 10:02

Yes .

Meredith's husband 10:02

So you you , if you have a SEMrush account , you can do this with a free account . You Begin a project yes Enter your domain name yes , my domain and then , once you have a project inside that project , you use the site audit tool . It's very easy to do . It's a couple of clicks and it just starts going . It's going to come back and tell you if you have one of roughly 100 different types of errors on your site .

Meredith 10:25

Oh boy .

Meredith's husband 10:26

And these are sometimes important , sometimes less important , sometimes not important at all , but it's going to really tell you pretty much everything You're looking , what you're looking for or what I look for .

Meredith 10:38

You need to do that for a personality , sorry .

Meredith's husband 10:40

I can tell you what's working and what's not working . I can tell you exactly where .

Meredith 10:45

Where all the wonderful perfections , endless joys .

Meredith's husband 10:50

So if you are doing an SEO refresh , presumably you have done this at some point . So , in coming back to this , you want to see if your score has fallen . The site audit is going to give you a score . If it has fallen and it inevitably does if you're blogging at all , if you're active at all on your website , your score will decrease over time . Hopefully not sharply , but you want to see . Is it still above a 92 ? And we want to check for a couple errors that are common when you're just maintaining a website and doing blogging , et cetera . The issues that you might see are things with the title tags they might be duplicate , they might be too long , maybe they're missing .

Meredith 11:30

Yes .

Meredith's husband 11:31

Those are the issues you'd want to look for and the meta descriptions . Meta descriptions also might be duplicate , might be missing , might be too long . You want to fix those . The other thing that I would look for and it's not technically an error in the site audit tool in SEMrush , so it won't lower your score . It's actually in the notices . When you run a site audit , there's going to be three categories of issues errors , warnings and notices . Wow , wow , you just have a 100% glazed look over your face .

Meredith 12:05

Well , I'm trying to differentiate .

Meredith's husband 12:08

I'm pretending you're focusing .

Meredith 12:10

No , I am , this is my focused face .

Meredith's husband 12:13

Okay .

Meredith 12:14

It's my focus , Like okay , let's differentiate between those three .

Meredith's husband 12:18

Yeah , so in the notices section are things that are not going to be lowering your score , things that are usually not a problem , but that , hey , you should be aware of . That's why it's called a notice . Something in that category which I don't think should be in that category I think it should be a warning is permanent redirects . If you have permanent redirects , you want to resolve that issue .

Meredith 12:42

Absolutely . And what are permanent redirects ?

Meredith's husband 12:45

Redirects are and again , this happens to any site almost that has any sort of activity is you have a link somewhere on your website from one page to another page ? Yes , and then something happens that page changes , or it changes URLs , or you take that page down , or something like that , and then your link gets redirected , but you don't change the link . So what happens is that link is still there , it goes to that page , which is now gone , and then there is a redirect , a permanent redirect , which then sends users to the correct page . Now , for users , this doesn't really matter . It slows down the site a little bit , but it's not . It's not a huge deal .

Meredith 13:27

However , google does not like this because it's all these people just pointing to something and there's nothing there , and they're just waiting on the street corner and pointing to nothing .

Meredith's husband 13:37

If you try to , you know . Imagine what the Google bot does all day long is it just follows links and sends information back to the main Google ? Office and outer space or something I don't know . So if so , if all that Googlebot is doing is crawling links every day , probably trillions or whatever is bigger than trillions numbers of links every single day , and if everybody did this had to redirect , you're doubling the amount of work that they need to do .

Meredith 14:04

So exhausting , so that's why you don't want that .

Meredith's husband 14:06

Googlebot , that Googlebot yeah .

Meredith 14:09

You need to go fund me for that poor Googlebot . Give it a vacation .

Meredith's husband 14:13

So those are the things that I would . Those are the typical issues that I would find .

Meredith 14:18

Yes .

Meredith's husband 14:19

When doing a sort of SEO refresh , okay .

Meredith 14:21

So step number four , four .

Meredith's husband 14:23

Blogs . So remember I mentioned . When you're in the Google search console , make note of your blogs that are most popular .

Meredith 14:31

Yes .

Meredith's husband 14:31

Now we want to go look at those and consider how can we make them better . They're already doing well . We want to try to get more out of them . How ?

Meredith 14:38

do ? We do that .

Meredith's husband 14:40

I'll get to that in just a second , but this is how this is . A really good kind of rule to keep in mind when doing SEO , I think , is to go with what's working . To keep in mind when doing SEO , I think , is to go with what's working . If something is doing well , you can make it do better , faster and easier than you can take something that is not doing well and make it do better .

Meredith's husband 15:00

This is true , okay , so that's the goal here is we take our good blogs , we want to strengthen them more and then expand . So how do we do this ? The first thing you do is you just go look at it as a user . Now remember , you know what keywords are leading into this blog , so you know what people have searched for when they arrive on this page . So put yourself in their shoes . Does it make sense ?

Meredith 15:20

Is it helpful . There's a ruby that was me in their shoes .

Meredith's husband 15:23

Sure , okay , then yes , the second thing you want to do is for any of your popular blogs that are getting visibility , getting traffic from Google , you want to link those pages to your money pages , your service pages , oh , and I mean , put a link in the first paragraph of text that links to the most appropriate service page , so the most appropriate service that you offer .

Meredith 15:51

Yeah .

Meredith's husband 15:53

Most relevant to that blog entry . So if you blogged about Penny the pig , you remember shooting Penny the pig and you blogged about it , so that would be most appropriate to your pet photography page Right .

Meredith's husband 16:03

So somewhere in that first paragraph just a simple text link . Don't make it a button , don't make it an image . The link's in your navigation . That's not what I'm talking about . Somewhere in the first paragraph , maybe two paragraphs you want to link to your pet photography page somehow . It's up to you how you want to do that . Not a bad idea if you want a link to that also further in the blog , but definitely don't do it more than twice .

Meredith 16:25

Once is really all that's necessary . Yeah , you said a paper link .

Meredith's husband 16:29

No , did I say a paper link ?

Meredith 16:31

You said a something link .

Meredith's husband 16:33

A second link .

Meredith 16:34

No , before that . Not a button , not a thing you don't . A text link . A text link .

Meredith's husband 16:41

Okay , just regular text and then try to mention pet photography somewhere in that blog and then link those words pet photography to your pet photography page .

Meredith 16:50

Got it , thank you .

Meredith's husband 16:52

Then you want to think about how can you expand . Is there a blog , a related blog , that you could do ? That would be more closely related to your pet photography page .

Meredith 17:01

That you could create .

Meredith's husband 17:02

Yes , yes , okay , yes , because you have some . Whatever that blog was about in your case it was Penny the Pig- Penny the Pig . And you have your pet photography page . Is there some something in the middle , some sort of concept in the middle of those two ?

Meredith 17:16

The Brooklyn Fire Department .

Meredith's husband 17:18

Right , but in the middle I mean .

Meredith 17:20

Would it be that ? How about this one ? So it was through a second photographing Penny the pig . When another person brought their pig , george , I photographed them and then they hired me because they run a school for autistic kids and needed photos .

Meredith's husband 17:42

That is a great example , right ? Not all of it , but the first part where you mentioned somebody saw your blog and they came with their own pet pig .

Meredith 17:52

Wait , somebody saw my photos .

Meredith's husband 17:54

Somebody saw your photos and they came to the fire station , right yeah , and they owned a pig they had their own pig . So that pig was their pet . Yeah , so now we're starting to talk about pets Rather than Penny the pig at the fire station . We're starting to talk about pets . You see how we've kind of bridged the gap between pet photography and Penny the pig .

Meredith 18:11

Yeah , and so because we already have some authority around the search for Penny the pig , whichly is going to be probably small no , at least she was on Sarah Silverman Penny the Fire Pig is now huge .

Meredith's husband 18:26

No wonder somebody saw your photo then .

Meredith 18:27

Yeah .

Meredith's husband 18:29

Remember because we found this . We identified this blog because it's a popular one , yes , in Google Search Console , meaning Google is giving it some authority . Google likes it for lack of a better word Because it's Penny the Pig . We want to give Google or we want to create more stuff that Google likes . So we know Google likes our website for Penny the Pig . Let's branch out a little bit .

Meredith's husband 18:51

And that's going to help us go with what's working rather than fighting to get something new ranked See what I mean . And we're going to sort of transition or hopefully redirect some of that authority to your pet photography page . That's the idea here , okay .

Meredith 19:06

Now it's making sense and the eyes are more clear .

Meredith's husband 19:11

Number five Number five is your CTA , and this is something I think you should probably do like quarterly is just revisit your CTA .

Meredith 19:20

This is something .

Meredith's husband 19:24

Yes , test it out . I can't tell you . You're not going to know beforehand what works best . There's no way you can know what will work best beforehand . So test some things out . Change the text in your cta button for a week or a month and see if it makes any difference . I know this can be a little stressful cause . A little stressful cause , a little anxiety , trying to think oh , what's going to work ? Is this right ? There's no perfect CTA text .

Meredith 19:46

Right , it's not trying harder , it's trying different .

Meredith's husband 19:51

Yeah , good , I just did this for a client and it stressed me out when I was doing it because I don't know what's going to work . But this is a new client and the first month that we started working she had a conversion rate of 0.96% . So less than 1% of the people visiting her site actually contacted her , contacted her business . The second month , just with working with the CTA and some navigation , making some improvements , we moved it up to a 1.57% .

Meredith 20:23

Wow .

Meredith's husband 20:24

Wow , the next month it was at a 2.75% .

Meredith 20:29

That is improvement , and last month it was 3.76% .

Meredith's husband 20:35

Wow , okay , she quadrupled the amount of business her website is getting in four months without getting any new traffic . Now , those are not typical results .

Meredith 20:46

That's impressive . Okay , it does work . Yeah , I thought that was impressive . Thank you for sharing to all our listeners .

Meredith's husband 20:53

And so next week we're going to talk about how you can hire Meredith's husband .

Meredith 21:02

To drill down . We're going to talk about how you can hire Meredith's husband To drill down .

Meredith's husband 21:03

We're going to drill down . We're going to do some major drilling down .

Meredith 21:06

Wow , for dinner we can hire Meredith's husband for dinner .

Meredith's husband 21:13

You're the only person I make dinner for .

Meredith 21:14

Oh , I feel so special and lucky oh that was a good one . And that's with my left hand .

Meredith's husband 21:22

Oh .

Meredith 21:23

I think I snapped .

Meredith's husband 21:26

Oh , people are going to love this . That's not going to be it , thank you , thank you .