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.
Meredith's Husband | SEO for People Who Don't Like SEO
What I'd Do If My Traffic Was Declining
•A professional photographer and her SEO husband•Episode 216
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6:48
What if your website traffic is going down, and how do you start fixing it?
Chasing bigger keywords feels like the obvious fix, but those are the ones you are least likely to win.
As search starts to look more like an AI conversation, a small audience asking very specific questions is worth more than a big one that never needed what you offer.
Answering very specific questions
Measuring with the Generative AI report in Search Console
A clean technical SEO foundation
You will leave knowing which questions to answer first, how to tell what is working, and what to fix so nothing technical holds you back.
[0:00] Introduction [0:48] Answer very specific questions [1:20] Why narrow beats broad [2:20] Less competition for specific questions [3:14] A smaller audience that converts better [3:44] Measuring with Search Console [4:20] What the Generative AI report can't show [5:00] Choosing your next questions [5:41] Getting the technical basics right [5:58] Wrap up
So if I were starting over from scratch, everything, new website, new SEO, all that, or I felt like I needed a restart, like my traffic is declining, or I've I notice I've been getting fewer leads, uh, or my impressions have been flat. Uh, I would do three things.
Number one, I would answer very specific questions. And that's because AI is blending into, as I'm sure you've noticed, is blending into search, and this will continue to happen. Now, this doesn't mean that Google is gonna go anywhere or that SEO is dead, but it's just that AI is going to sort of take over the traditional way we use Google. So Google is going to increasingly become like an AI conversation, kind of like Chat GPT. Now, the reason I would answer very specific questions, in my opinion, narrow beats broad. That has that's nothing new. I'll use my my own site as an example. So my topic is SEO. So you might think, you know, the first thing that comes to mind, okay, my keywords would be how to do SEO, but that that's not it. That's very that's an example of something that's very broad. I don't want to answer that question. I want to target people who I already know want to know how to do SEO. For example, people asking a question like, how do I fix the duplicate title tag issue in SEMrush? Okay. And this is something I've been doing, that exact type of question. I've been doing that for a number of years for SEO, and it's been working fantastically well. And that's the type of search that I see now uh surfacing more in AI search results. My the my content that is being surfaced, it's the same content that was doing well for SEO, but it very much is those specific questions. Now, I target those for a couple different reasons. Number one, like I said, I know that those the people asking that question, I know they want to do SEO. They're trying to do SEO. So I don't have to, you know, I don't have to, I know that already. I don't need to target that. Uh, I don't need to target that topic, let's say. Number two, there's going to be less competition. Way fewer people are going to be competing for that question than the question, how do I do SEO? If I did this, if I tried to target the phrase, how do I do SEO? I'd be competing with monster websites that I could never outrank. And by answering a more specific question, what I offer, my product, is a better match. Like when you think about it, lots of people could be asking, how do you do SEO? Many, many fewer people are going to be asking, how do I fix the duplicate title tag issue in Sumrush? But those people, that's my audience. I have a much better
chance of converting those people than I do the bigger audience. The downside of targeting niche terms like this, of course, is there's a smaller audience. You're gonna get you're gonna get less visibility, but the visibility with whom you want visibility is going to be higher, i.e., your conversion rate's gonna be higher. Okay, so how do you choose what questions to ask? Well, you can begin with the questions that you're you know your clients already ask. And then from there, that brings me to number two.
How do we measure? How do we know what's working? Okay, so when we do this, you're gonna go to Google Search Console, surprise, and underneath the performance tab, there is something that's relatively new called generative AI. And this will tell you how your content, how your pages are appearing in AI searches. Okay, now when you want to see that generative AI report, it's gonna be hidden underneath a dropdown. So if you just look at the screen, you won't see it. You where it says, you'll see this on the left, it says performance, and then there is a little caret indicating there's a dropdown. Hit that carrot, and then underneath it, that generative AI report is gonna be
listed. There is a limit to this, okay, in that you're only gonna get information from Google. You are not gonna get information how people are searching in Chat GPT or Cloud. But this is an issue that SEOs have dealt with for years. You know, there's also other search engines, Bing and Yahoo and their duck duck goats. In the ancient SEO history, there were tons of search engines. Now, they don't have tools like Google Search Console. I don't expect that they are going to. They might, who knows? But right now, Google is all we have. So what we do is we assume however people are using Google AI, they're using Chat GPT and Claude to ask similar questions. Okay. So we look at what of our content, what questions that we are answering, which of those are getting the most visibility. Okay. And we use those results to help us choose the next questions. So you don't need to uh, you know, have a year's worth of planned questions to answer. Just start with a few, start with a handful. You'll see which ones are more popular. And then once you see that, it'll become obvious the types of questions that you should be answering. You could ask, and then from there, sub-questions, like you could have a very uh or a broader question that's getting visibility. So then what follow-up questions? Start answering those. Okay, so that's how you choose your initial questions and then follow-up questions, how you essentially measure what's
working. Now, number three, your basic SEO. You got to make sure you have a solid SEO foundation. Make sure there's nothing technically happening on your website that's holding you back. And if you've never done this, there absolutely will be things for you to fix through no fault of your own. That's just the way websites are.
Okay. So to wrap up, number one, answer those narrow questions. Number two, monitor your impressions. And number three, keep it clean. Okay, if you want to see what it means to keep it clean, your technical SEO, you can check out the outline of my mentoring program below. I will link to that just so you can see at a broad level what that means. Okay. I hope it helps.
