Meredith's Husband | SEO for People Who Don't Like SEO
SEO for people who don't like SEO. I run an SEO agency. My wife Meredith is a family photographer. Our podcast explains how I got Meredith's website to the top of Google and answers questions from photographers about SEO and website marketing.
Does it ever feel like you used to get plenty of leads from Google, but they've dried up?
The cause is rarely one mistake, which is exactly why it takes longer to fix than most people expect.
A long decline in leads usually comes from small issues stacking up over time, so the first thing to change is your expectations.
Timestamps [0:00] Introduction [1:08] What declining impressions in Google Search Console show [1:42] Why feeling that SEO doesn’t work points to expectations [2:42] Why changing your mindset comes first [2:59] When a CEO’s expectations can end a project [3:49] Step one: stop checking your rankings [4:38] Step two: trust the process [5:42] Why recovery takes about a year [7:06] The first step: improve your conversion rate [7:58] How the first two weeks of the mentoring program cover this
Chances are pretty good that you have the wrong expectations from SEO. I'm going to talk today about why that is and what you can do about it. Two things that I think you can do, probably the first step that I think you want to take if you're in this situation. Now, not everybody has poor expectations. Maybe you don't, but this is a conversation that I hear quite often. It goes something like this. You know, I used to have good SEO and something happened and now I don't. I used to get a bunch of leads from Google and I don't anymore. And then that's usually followed by can I sit down with you for an afternoon and we can figure out why?
And so usually what I do at that point is I look at this person or this company's Google Search Console to see what has been happening to their impressions in the recent history. And most often what I find is declining impressions over six, 12, 16 months, an extended period. You can't go back any longer, any further ago than 16 months in Google Search Console. So that's the longest time frame we can look at. And a lot of times this is kind of maybe surprising to the person who is asking me for help, but at the same time, they know that they've been getting fewer leads, so they're not totally surprised. But it's that trend that is usually indicative of something. It's not a single event. You didn't do one thing wrong and it screwed your SEO over. Now, if you haven't looked or you don't have Google Search Console, one way that you could tell if you if you have this problem is if you just feel like your SEO is not working, if you just feel like, well, you've tried SEO and it doesn't work, and that's a pretty good sign that probably you have the wrong expectations. If you're doing, if you're trying to do SEO and you're thinking that something is going to happen, and if those expectations are unrealistic, then that thing is not going to happen by definition. You're obviously going to get frustrated by that. I mean, that's what anybody would do. The good news is that this is actually a very fixable situation. In fact, you don't even really have to do anything. You just want to change your expectations, change your mindset. If you can change your expectations, you will naturally change what
you are trying to do or what you expect to do. And so what you keep doing, if you change what you are doing, you're going to change the outcome. And this is just initially, this is just a frame of mind. Now, if you don't make that shift, if you don't change your mindset, you're pretty much eternally doomed. Okay. And I know that sounds dramatic, but it's really true. I've had clients, I've had active clients where I start working with them or getting really great results. And, you know, the CEO who I don't sit down, I don't have a chance to speak with, not always. I that's this is why I I really want to be able to sit down with the CEO at some point. Because I've had situations where the CEO has one set of expectations. And no matter what I say to the rest of his or her team, I can't change the CEO's expectations. And I have walked away from projects that were doing really, really well because I knew at that point it's kind of a lost cause. There's no way you can overcome the wrong mindset. So I have two things that you can do that will help you change your mindset. And then an action you can take on top of that, your
first step. But step number one, you gotta stop looking at your rankings. I know it's natural to want to go to Google and do a search and see where your website is ranked, but that is not the way to determine if your SEO is doing well. It is bound to fail. It is bound to be misleading. There is no other way. It cannot be helpful. If you are doing this, and like I I've had clients that do this, if you are doing this, I hate to say this, but you are a lost cause. I will not work with you if anybody comes to me with for any amount of money and says, I'm gonna keep checking rankings in Google every day to see where we're ranked. I will not take that project. I know that sounds harsh. I hate to be so dramatic, but it is, it's very true. You have to get out of the habit of doing that. So that's step one.
Step number two is then you have to trust the process. So I've talked on this podcast a lot about how SEO is like building a brick house. Now, you're gonna lay down a lot of bricks before it starts to look like a house. And during that time, you need to trust the process. If you go put two bricks on the ground, say that doesn't look like a house and stop working, okay, you're never gonna build a house. Maybe a better example at some point in our lives, I think most of us have wanted to get in better shape. Okay. So we might think, okay, I'm gonna start eating better and or I'm gonna start exercising. Maybe we have been sitting on the couch eating junk food for two years. And I'm talking about myself here, I'm not pointing any fingers, but we start going to the gym and eating better, and we do that, we begin on Monday, and on Wednesday we look in the mirror and we think, well, that didn't work. I might as well go back to eating junk food. I've done that one too. And my point is that if you have had unhealthy habits for two years, don't expect to completely reverse that trend
in two days. The same thing is true for SEO. If you have declining traffic over six, 12, 16 months, we cannot sit down in an afternoon and fix the problem. That type of decline in rankings, that trend, is usually the result of issue on top of issue on top of issue. I don't want to say mistakes, because it's not necessarily something you have done wrong, but it is one thing on top of another, on top of another, on top of another, and it compounds. And that's why you see a gradual decline. If you were to have like a very sudden drop-off in traffic, that would be something that maybe, yeah, we could sit down in an afternoon and figure out what happened and undo it. But if you're looking at declining leads for a year, kind of general rule of thumb is think about a year to recover. Now, you can reverse that trend in the shorter term and start to increase the number of leads, but you're probably not going to get back to the number where you were a year ago in the first week or the first month. That's going to take not exactly a year, but somewhere in that sort of time frame. Now, I understand that you don't want to wait a year to start getting more business from your website. Who does? I don't either. So the first step, if you're in this situation, even if you're not in this situation and you're just starting SEO, this is a really good first step.
Look at your website and whatever traffic you are currently getting, whatever number of people are visiting your website every month, work on your conversion rate. That means getting more leads from those people. This you can do in a short amount of time. Theoretically, if you make a change to improve your conversion rate, you start getting more leads from your traffic the instant that change goes live. You just got to figure out what those changes you want to make are first. Okay, so that's the first thing you want to actually do in addition or after changing your mindset. And this is actually the first two weeks of the mentoring program. Week one is all about changing your mindset, setting goals, having the right expectations, and a way to measure progress as you do work along the way. And then week number two is all about improving your conversion rate and getting as many leads as you can from whatever
number of people are already visiting your website. All right. Now I've talked about both of these things on the podcast, probably many times each. If you want to piece together that information, that should be very helpful. If you want to get on the wait list for the next mentoring program, I'll put the link to that below. That is coming up, that's beginning right after the holidays. Okay. I hope it helps.
