The SEO Misconception

Meredith's husband 0:33

Gonna talk about a misconception today. About SEO. No, and not a not a myth, a misconception. It's not really a myth.

Meredith 0:40

No, that's a Muppet joke. Muppet movie joke.

Meredith's husband 0:44

And that is that SEO is like this technical uh thing. It's like this technical beast. Yes. Yes. Yeah, that's really not true. That's not the case. Really? Yeah. I mean, we've talked about that before, but like specifically, I just did something, I did a I recorded a slash short lesson for some group about uh kind of on the along these lines.

Meredith 1:06

Yeah.

Meredith's husband 1:07

And I'm gonna play that in a second. It's only five minutes. It's five minutes long. But that is what the SEO industry wants you to think. That SEO is technical, that you need to be some sort of technical genius to be able to do SEO. Yes. That's that's literally what the industry has, you know, promoted. Yes. I was just writing my own bio, I think for that little lesson that I'm gonna share with you. I was writing my own bio, and the byline

Introducing Good Enough SEO

Meredith's husband 1:30

is like Meredith's husband loves Meredith. No, the headline is Meredith's husband, and then the byline, this that is the I don't know what the byline is, but the little tiny tiny line of text right after it says Meredith's husband. I usually say something like, you know, SEO consultant since 2002 or something.

Meredith 1:48

Yeah.

Meredith's husband 1:49

And what I wanted to do for this one is instead of that, say part of the problem since 2002.

Meredith 1:58

But you haven't been part of the problem. That's the whole thing. You've never been like the gross guy. You've been the one that.

Meredith's husband 2:05

Yeah, I try to shed light. Anyway, that's what we're doing. That's what I'm gonna do here. Some light.

Meredith 2:11

Shed some light.

Meredith's husband 2:13

So this video that I'm gonna share, I call it good enough SEO.

Meredith 2:16

Okay.

Meredith's husband 2:17

Oh, I like that. Your SEO just needs to be good enough. It does not need to be technically perfect. Google, and when you'll I'll explain this in the video, but Google is not going out there and looking for technically perfect websites so they can send their own users there.

Meredith 2:31

Okay.

Meredith's husband 2:32

So you don't need to be technically perfect. What you usually need is like a translation of SEO of SEO things. What do they mean? And what like what do you actually what are you supposed to do with them?

Meredith 2:41

Right.

Meredith's husband 2:42

Okay, so enjoy this lesson. After the lesson, I'm gonna share something that I just created called the SEMrush Challenge.

Meredith 2:51

Oh.

Meredith's husband 2:51

And you know I've been working on this for several weeks and pulling my hair out.

Meredith 2:56

Yes.

Meredith's husband 2:57

All right, let's talk about a uh myth that I hear often. Actually, I don't hear it often. People don't come to me and ask me about this, but this is something that I see that seems to be the people believe. And that is that SEO is very technical. You gotta have a like technical expertise to be able to do SEO well.

Lesson: Platforms Handle The Tech

Meredith's husband 3:14

And that is really not the case. And there's two, there's a bunch of reasons for that that I could explain, but there's really two main ones. The first is that, yeah, it used to be true, like years ago, just putting up a website was you had to be very uh technically proficient. It was not an easy thing to do. Then WordPress came along, sites like Squarespace and Wix and all these other things, and the need to be a technical whiz in order to create a website has largely gone away. You can put up a uh website with like pretty much no technical experience in a couple days. And these platforms that do this, Squarespace, Wix, PixieSet, they take care of a lot of the technical stuff, obviously. But that also means that they take care of a lot of the technical stuff that you would need to do for SEO. Like they make sure that your website is fast and that it's going to adjust for mobile devices. It takes care of all that stuff. Now, a downside of that is that it takes care of it for you, so you can't do it. You don't have the access you would need. And so because you don't have the access, you can't do quite as much as you would be able to do if your website was completely built from custom or on WordPress. WordPress is a little more flexible in that regard than is like Squarespace. But even Squarespace is pretty good. So in that respect, you don't need to be a technical genius. And the second reason, imagine if you were Google. So I do this a lot. This is really my whole approach to SEO. Imagine if you were Google. What is your what is your objective? Let's think this through. You're Google, you have customers. People come to Google, they're looking for something. Let's call those people your customers. What is your job? What you want to do is you want to get your customers to the information they want as quickly and easily as possible. You want

Think Like Google

Meredith's husband 5:02

your customers to be happy so they keep coming back and they keep doing more searches. That's Google's entire if Google doesn't make that happen, Google has a big problem. So, what does it mean to send your customers to a website where those customers are going to be happy? Does it mean you need to send those customers to a website that is technically perfect? No. No, no. You are not, as Google, you are not going out and looking for websites that are technically perfect in order to send your customers to. You're looking for websites that have a good user experience and have good content and are trusted authorities. That's where you want to send your customers. Just because a website, if it is technically perfect, it might not be useful to somebody. In fact, if a coder builds a website from scratch and it is technically perfect, there's a pretty good chance in it's not going to be that great for customers. I've worked with a lot of coders and they are insanely good at a lot of things, and my entire profession wouldn't even be possible without them. But they're often also not the best in terms of like creating user-friendly experiences for people who go to visit those websites. That's what a designer is all about, or more of a strategist like myself. So in this respect also, you your website doesn't need to be perfect, doesn't need to be 100 out of 100. And these platforms that do these things, what most of us are building websites, either on WordPress or Squarespace or Wix or one of these platforms, they're going to do the technical heavy lifting for us. What you and I need to do as owners of these websites is put, is make sure that we're we're giving Google's customers what they want. We're creating a good user experience for people who come and visit our website. That's what Google wants. And if you can do that and your website is just good enough, meaning it's reasonably fast, pages aren't broken, images aren't broken, links aren't broken, it displays on different devices, desktop, mobile, tablet, et cetera, that's going to be good enough. Google just doesn't want to send people to sites where things are where there are problems, where things are broken, where it's really slow, et cetera. If you basically get an A in that

What “Good Enough” Looks Like

Meredith's husband 7:09

in your score of your website, if you're 90 or higher, you're good. You don't need to worry about being a 99. Okay, so hopefully this clarifies, hopefully this alleviates some you know anxiety that you need to have a technically perfect website. It just needs to be good enough. And then you need to create something that visitors are going to appreciate. Okay. I hope this helps.

Meredith 7:29

That's a great video.

Meredith's husband 7:31

What'd you think? Yeah, you like it.

Meredith 7:32

I loved it.

Meredith's husband 7:33

So the SEMrush challenge is just aimed at getting you the good enough SEO, how you use a free trial on SEMrush to get your website essentially an A from Google.

Meredith 7:43

Excellent.

Meredith's husband 7:43

Specifically, I go through setting up a trial on SEMrush, using the free trial to get your good enough SEO. There's some QA, and then how to downgrade your free trial at the end of the week because the SUMRush free trial is a week long. If you don't want to continue paying for it, then how do you downgrade to a lesser featured but permanent free plan?

Meredith 8:03

Will it also maintain the results, or do you need to have a paid SUMRush account?

Meredith's husband 8:10

The free SUMRush permanent account will do kind of like a maintenance plan. It will audit your site once per month, whereas a paid SUMRush account, well, you can do it anytime. You can do it 50 times a week if you want. The free SUMRush account forever will run a website audit once per month and send you the results so you can kind of monitor your A status.

Meredith 8:31

Okay.

Meredith's husband 8:32

I will link to that below.