Meredith's Husband: 0:24

All right. So we're going to talk today about how to measure your progress, okay, in SEO, but also just kind of, with your website in general. Okay, because I think this is. I think it's pretty frustrating for a lot of people not knowing kind of what they are. If they're, what they're doing is the right thing to be doing, if they're making any progress. If they're doing the wrong thing, yeah, and what happens almost all the time is people in order to see, hey, am I making progress? They go and they go to Google and they type in their keywords and they see where their website is. Right. That's a really, really bad way to do that. Right. There's a number of reasons for that. There's several reasons why it's bad.

Meredith's Husband: 1:03

I don't want to get into all of it. I will mention, though, one of the biggest problems with this. When you go to Google and you do a search for your keywords and you look to see if your website is there, you're going to see your competitors, obviously, yeah, and you're going to this going to seem. Even if it's not the case, it's going to seem like you have certain competitors who are always there. They're all over the place. Yeah, that is a mistake. It's a mistake. Yes, it's a mistake, yes, it's an illusion. Let's say it's an illusion because I've seen this happen dozens, if not hundreds of times and the competitors who you think are always there, always at the top, they're not Really. Yeah, I don't. I mean, you see them occasionally and your mind kind of fills in the gaps, and I've had clients do this and they say, oh, this competitor is always at the top and I said this one, and they said, yeah, that one, well, that one just switched, like yesterday. So it's like an illusion. It's kind of like your insecurities oh, somebody else is doing it better, somebody else is doing it right. Well, somebody is always doing it better and that's why you shouldn't compare yourself to others. That's what I'm saying. People do this when they check their rankings like this. I think this happens a lot with social media too. I think this is the biggest problem with social media is people compare because you only get a glimpse of the 1% or the 0.1% of somebody's life that they want to share. Oh, yes, and it's manicured and it's curated. Yes, people also tend to do this with their websites, I think, especially when you are creating a website, when you're designing a website, and you go out and you look oh, what am I supposed to do with my website? And you go out and you look at your competitors yeah, me too, I do this all the time. I look at competitors, I'm like, and what happens is you build up a never ending list in your head of all the things that you need to do because other people are doing that or those things, and your objective really is to should be, especially in marketing, when your business is to differentiate yourself, right, not to look at others and be just like them. Oh yeah, definitely.

Meredith's Husband: 3:04

So that is, I hopefully have convinced you a bad way to sort of try to measure your progress. Yes, now what I want you to do is do you remember the rule of 1% gains? Yes, yes, yes. Remember the story I told about the bicycle coach and the British cycling team? I was just saying it the other day in my swim lesson, oh yeah, mm-hmm. And how that team went from being like a not even a mediocre team, like a really kind of bottom tier cycling team on the world stage, and by implementing what a new coach brought to that team was like 1% gains.

Meredith's Husband: 3:41

We want to improve every single thing we do by 1%, right, 1%. And if we do that, we can go from being a bottom tier cycling team to running the world. Who has? Who have never won a championship, never won a tour de France, I don't think ever won a gold medal in the Olympics. We can become a championship team if we just focus on improving everything we do by 1%. Now is it 1% per day? 1% trial like 1% by? Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, I mean, I don't think that they measure it that carefully. I think the point is we need to take every single thing we do and how can we just make it a little bit better?

Meredith's Husband: 4:18

Now, I think that this kind of lends itself to a method that you can use to improve your website also and your SEO. Yes, what I mean is, instead of comparing yourself to others, other websites, or looking at Google seeing who's ranked higher yes, instead of doing that, compare your website to your website yesterday. Is your website better than it was yesterday? Even if just a tiny little bit, you're on the right track. If you can just keep that frame of mind, that's a lot more digestible, and I've tried to do this myself recently with some of the things I'm working on. I feel better about myself and, according to that rule of 1% gains, if you keep doing that, you're going to end up someday with a kick-ass website yes, right. And kick-ass SEO yeah, and a kick-ass life Do that in all of life.

Meredith's Husband: 5:08

So what I should do, rather than just give you some grand ideas, is probably give you some practical knowledge about what, specifically in regards to your website, could you do. How could you do that? Yes, right, yes, yes. I think the biggest rule of thumb is you can always make your website easier to use and understand for people visiting. Yes, okay, you can always make it easier. I've learned this through by building courses like I can always make them easier, always be simpler, always be more helpful.

Meredith's Husband: 5:41

So, specifically, what can you? What would? What things would you look at Specifically? I would say look at your navigation. Is your website navigation clear, intuitive, easily accessible? And by easily accessible, what I mean would be no or limited use of dropdowns. Don't have your most important pages inside a dropdown, because, why? Because users have to take an extra click just in order to see that they exist Right, and therefore so does Google, and, and Google knows so it's good for SEO. Also, ai bots AI crawlers are not good at dropdown menus. So for AI again, take your important pages. Take them outside of dropdown menus. That's good to know. That in itself is worth the price of admission.

Meredith's Husband: 6:29

Put your I would say your least important pages in a dropdown If you are going to use it, because often we need to use dropdowns. We don't have unlimited space to create our navigation, so something needs to go in a dropdown. Make it like your blog or your FAQ or your about page. Wait, isn't about page? Super important it is, but not for SEO. Not for SEO, oh, interesting, okay. So remember, for your website, people are coming there to hire you. You have a service that you are promoting. Yes, nobody. I mean some people might be out there looking for you specifically. No, by name. They are. In those cases that search is so specific there is very little competition for it, so they will find the about page. But when you're talking about, oh, I'm a children's photographer in Brooklyn, your about page is not important for that. Got it, okay, thank you. So use that as a kind of metric for which pages are. When I say important, I mean your service pages, your money pages, your conversion pages, thank you.

Meredith's Husband: 7:34

So another thing you can do for your site to continually make it easier for users is your headings, so the headings of your page and your subheadings. But specifically, imagine if somebody were to land on a page not necessarily your homepage so your heading has to explain where they are, what they're looking at. The subheadings need to explain basically the outline of that page and ideally would answer the questions that people might have what is it, what's the service, what's the price? Maybe a little bit about you, some samples of your work, etc. Work, et cetera. That helps a user understand what is on a page if they land there and they just glance down at the subheadings, which is the way people consume a website, also very good for AI optimization. So headings and subheadings, in that order, and the rest of your content.

Meredith's Husband: 8:27

I would say simpler is better, simple language it's. I love being sort of like tongue-in-cheek and using humor, but with your website copy, guess what? Ai doesn't understand that. If you're being cheeky it probably does, but it works a whole lot better in Google as well, to be kind of factual. Also, your CTAs, your call to actions, yes, as simple as possible. Make them really simple. Simple, easy to do, specific. Don't make people guess as to what the next step is. Make it very clear and make them consistent, okay.

Meredith's Husband: 9:07

Okay, there's a few things that you can focus on. You're not going to focus on those things every single day, but if you can revisit your website with those things in mind, your website is going to get better and better and better. Yeah, that makes sense, thank you. So compare to yesterday, don't compare to others. Next week, we're going to talk more about AI optimization. Yes, a-i-o and G-E GEO people are starting to call it yes, and a lot of the things I just mentioned. Like I said, they are going to be good. They are good. Help getting your site picked up and cited as sources in AI. I can't wait for that. That'll be next week. Okay, looking forward to it. Thank you for this one.