Meredith's Husband  0:00  
Hey,

this is Meredith's husband. I've got some SEO advice for you, but I'm going to keep it really simple, so that you can understand it, so it makes sense, and most importantly, so you can actually use it. Oh, hello, everybody.

Meredith  0:25  
Hello, hello, hello, Happy

Meredith's Husband  0:29  
New Year.

Meredith  0:30  
Oh, yeah, in case, in New Year,

Meredith's Husband  0:34  
if you are listening to this, it is the very beginning of 2022 Yes.

Meredith  0:39  
Thank you for joining us. Yeah, thank you.

Meredith's Husband  0:42  
Let's hope this is a good one.

Meredith  0:44  
Yes, let us hope,

Meredith's Husband  0:47  
yeah. It seems, it seems, that we've been the last several years in a row. We kind of always begin the same. Let's hope this one is better than last one. Yeah.

Meredith  0:55  
Well, you got to, you know, somebody just recently said, if you have low expectations. You're pretty happy,

Meredith's Husband  1:03  
yeah, yeah, I actually, I heard a quote. I don't know who it was initially, it was like, Winston Churchill or somebody big, but somebody else was, you know, quoting him, and was like, the the man or the person who thinks he can succeed and the person who thinks they can't succeed are both right, yeah, which I liked.

Meredith  1:25  
That's great. That's great. That's similar to every dog owner thinks their dog is the best, and none of them are wrong.

Meredith's Husband  1:37  
Yeah, true. I knew. I knew we were going to turn that into a quote about dogs. I knew

Meredith  1:47  
it has to go to dogs or elephants or ducks, pigs. In any case, what is on the menu for today?

Meredith's Husband  1:59  
Well, I've been talking to a few photographers recently. I've connected with some of you. Oh, have you? And I kind of have have noticed what I think is the a common obstacle in people dealing for people for small business owners like photographers and solopreneurs, the common obstacles and challenges for for SEO, or at least one of them, a big one. And I don't think this is any surprise, really. I think we've kind of touched on this before, but it seems like it's just the intimidating aspect of it. It just seems like an overwhelming, never ending thing. Yeah, it's

Meredith  2:39  
like, oh, is this kind of murky, looming, heavy cloud of and

Meredith's Husband  2:50  
it's a big unknown, yeah,

Meredith  2:52  
oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because, I think it's because, particularly, at least as a photographer, we see results. We take the photo and we see it. It's there, right? It's, it's a known and and the SEO, I feel like you know you're, you're almost playing Dart the donkey, and you, it's 3d and you're wearing virtual glasses, and the donkey could be below you, for all you know.

Meredith's Husband  3:23  
And you're really just a computer algorithm. You're not even alive. You're bringing a jar. Yeah, yeah.

Meredith  3:28  
And the computer algorithm itself is confusing, like, what is so

Meredith's Husband  3:33  
and it's and, and photography is instant. I mean, now it is. You take a photo and you look at it, you see, did I get it or did I not get it? Yeah? Yeah. So SEO, yeah. SEO is not like that, like that at all, and it's not on you. I used to get the question a lot, not so much anymore, but a lot like, how long does seo take? So a new client would start, like, years ago, when I was working with really small companies. And the first question, okay, how long does it take? Right my response. I mean, I don't actually remember how I responded. I probably gave some range of months or something. I

Meredith  4:06  
think he said, like, six months, yeah,

Meredith's Husband  4:09  
but it's, you know, I think that was kind of to placate the person asking, because the real, the real answer is, like, it it totally have some patience first, right? To me, it's kind of like asking, Well, how long does it take to get in shape? Well, how, what kind of shape are you in right now? Are you going to work out every day? Are you going to have a trainer? How is are you going to work out for one month and then stop? Or, you know, there's so many things that there's so many things that go into it, and it's not, and it's not, it's also not something that you get in shape and then you're done, right? It's like, in four months, and then I'm all set, like, set for life, yeah. So it's so yeah. Number one, have some patient you're going to need patience. If you don't have patience, if you expect fast results and you expect. Do SEO and be done with it. You're going, it's going to be very challenging and frustrating. And

Meredith  5:06  
I think that's because, also we as a society, everything is like, I need a car. There it is. I need bananas. There it is. Yeah, I need a flight. It's all so instant. So that's very much. I think it goes against the forward motion of, okay, I work and I get it, it's work, and I get a treat,

Meredith's Husband  5:26  
right? Yeah, there's a there's a lot of this in our society right now. And that's probably could do 10 episodes on that alone, but, but anyway, and I think in terms of your expectations, what is SEO going to be like? It's probably not going to be like. What you think, right? Because a lot of people think, oh, I need to get this keyword to number one. Oh, it's not on number one. SEO didn't work,

Meredith  5:53  
right? It's kind of like when people think, Oh, if only I had this, then I'd be happy, then I'd be set. And none of that is true. There's no magic bullet

Meredith's Husband  6:07  
that's that's also true, or pill or button. There's lots of magic pills. But I'm not, I don't have any. Yeah, both. It's not SEO is, I would encourage people to stop thinking about SEO in terms of like having one keyword on at number one or on the first page. SEO is improving the business you get organically through search, through search engines. It might be the one keyword that you thought it very often will not be interesting. And, yeah, there's a lot of different, you know, there's, there's different things within SEO. It's not just about I rank number four for that keyword, you know, it's, there's more to it than that. And it's kind of like, I think, if, in terms of of rankings, when you are looking at a particular keyword, and we do track keyword rankings on average, just to get a sense of, you know, momentum and movement. But even when you're looking at a particular keyword, it's you're not gonna go from having a keyword on page 10 or page five or page 30 to being ranked number one, right? That just doesn't happen. Yeah, the way I think about that is that's like running a race, like, let's say you're running a mile race, which is, I think, like four laps around the track. So imagine if you are, after like two laps, you're, you know, say there's 50 people running, and you're at number 40. You can't just do something and all of a sudden, be the leader, right? You gotta, you gotta pass 40 other people. You can't do that instantly. You're going,

Meredith  7:48  
Yeah, it's like, if you're making a pie and you have all the ingredients, it's not a pie yet. You have to cook it. And that takes time, yes, and sometimes you can burn

Meredith's Husband  7:59  
it or under just, just FYI. Everything we discuss is going to be translated into an anecdote about food or pets.

Meredith  8:11  
Welcome to my world.

Meredith's Husband  8:13  
Pretty much. I could say pretty much anything. The response could be, you mean, like a pie or like ice cream?

Unknown Speaker  8:22  
I Yes, actually

Meredith's Husband  8:24  
somebody was listening to another podcast, and they were doing the exact same thing. They're talking about pies there, yeah, and I actually stopped at some point, because I'm like, Okay, it's like five minutes. Now you're talking about pies. Let's talk about something else. But anyway, back to my race analogy, or your pie analogy. Yes, you don't you just because you go out and you buy the ingredients for a pie doesn't mean you have a pie Exactly. There are several steps involved. Now, in the in the racing analogy, I kind of like it, because it's you, you know, sometimes you can pass a handful of people all at once. You could go like, let's say you're, you're making progress, and then there's a group of, like, 10 runners, and you pass them by, and you've, you've, kind of, that's a, you know, you don't go from last to first instantly, but you sometimes you can make progress more than just one at a time. That's a lot like individual rankings, because I, I sense a lot of people also think they're going to do something to their website, and they're going to check Google tomorrow, and they're going to be number one. It's they're going to be number one, right? Boom, done. Rarely does that happen. That used to happen many years ago, and that was a lot of fun, but doesn't happen anymore. So I think, I think what might be helpful is to kind of walk through what the process is, kind of high level the steps that are involved, yeah, there none of them are like rocket science, right? But there is a process and just understanding what each one is that helps people understand. Be like, oh, okay, I see, I see

Meredith  9:54  
anything to make clear, the Merc would be great.

Meredith's Husband  9:59  
Okay, so. So I just have to go learn what those steps are. No, I'm just Just kidding. There are about, I like, I group it into about five sections, categories, and within there, there are, you know, individual steps, but these are, but these categories basically include everything that you'll encounter on an SEO journey. So number one is set up and go buy the pie crust. And so the the first step is to do some initial setup and like, basic research. So figure out what am I working with? Here are people. Is anybody? I mean, I'm always surprised at how little people know about their website, how it's performing. Before this, before they talk to me, you got to know what's happening. Are you getting any visit? Are you getting visitors from Facebook or from Google or from Yelp, are those people contacting you? How are they just, are they coming to your site for two seconds and then leaving? Do they stay for, you know, so without this stuff, you don't have any sort of measuring. You gotta, you gotta benchmark. You gotta say, this is my starting point. And then you gotta set up some tools. And those tools are going to help you make improvements, but the very first step is just to set that up, get them set up, connected to your website, so that you have them. And then in future steps, you're going to come back and then use those. But that's just kind of number one. It doesn't take a lot of time, but it's kind of crucial. Yeah. And then the next step is what I call quick wins, some easy fixes, the low hanging fruit. When you do when you do that step one, inevitably, you're going to uncover something. You're like, Oh, I could fix that. You're going to see something that's happening somewhere, right? And you'll be like, Oh, I can change that, right now, right? This happens to me with every single client always. I mean, I just, I'm working now with a client that's like a huge, huge company. They're a software they're a tech company. And one of the first things we realized is one of their single biggest keywords, delivering the most amount of traffic, leads to a blank page. Oh, your website, they didn't know this. Like, yeah, so there's, there's, there's, very often things, you're like, oh, wow, I can, I can fix this very quickly. Yeah, it's going to, and it's going to affect my bottom line. Something like that is like, somebody's coming to my website and I'm in something is wrong, and so they can't even make any progress. You fix that, and, like, instantly, as soon as you fix that, those people, all of a sudden, might start contacting you or buying, you know, so it's, we've talked about that before, that's that, like, that's a would fall into a conversion issue. Got it. But there are other issues also. Like, one of the first steps is doing, you know, brand SEO, so people who are looking for you or your company by name go to Google and do that search, right? How are they getting to you? I had another client just very recently. They did that and they followed one of the links in their website. It wasn't working, like and it wasn't even working, wow, and though, and again, those are the people who are actively looking for you. They already know about you. For some reason, they're gold, yeah? So there are almost always some very quick wins like that. And it's nice to do those first, right? Because you can, you know, seeing progress early on your confidence,

Meredith  13:39  
it helps everything, yeah,

Meredith's Husband  13:44  
and also that can help your bottom line. And if you already see are receiving more money as a result of your efforts, it just makes everything win, win, win, win. So after you do those two things, is what we call on site SEO. There are two parts of SEO. This is the on site SEO. This is what people typically think about when they hear about SEO, meta tags, image, alt tags, title, all that sort of stuff. And there's, there's, there's kind of two parts to this. Number one is just fixing technical errors, fixing problems. And you just need a tool for this. You don't need to learn all this stuff. Is that SEMrush? That's SEMrush, hey, yeah, yeah. You don't need to know. I mean, there are, there are 100 plus issues in SEMrush. I know a lot about, pretty much all of them. You're not going to need to know that much. You're going to need to know which ones you have, which might be a handful. Might be a dozen. It's not going to be all of them. So you don't need to worry about knowing. You know, I've been in SEO 20 years. It's not going to take you 20 years to learn what you need to know, thank goodness. So you figure out what your issues are, and then you've you find the solution. You can go to the blog, the SEO to coded blog, it'll tell you how to fix those issues. That's the technical ask. Effect of onsite SEO once you do that, and you said, if you, if you're using SEMrush, it'll send you a weekly report. So if new borrowers pop up, it's just going to send it to you. Then you just got to fix them. So that's your, that's your technical SEO. And then the other part

Meredith  15:13  
seemed like breadcrumbs, fix this, fix this, fix this, lead to this, lead to that, and then keeps you going to the pie, more

Meredith's Husband  15:21  
food, yes,

and that. So once you have those technical things done, then it's then your onsite SEO is a matter of just making it better. So your title tags are there and your image alt tags are there. Everything is there and present. It's working, as it should. Now you can tweak it to make it better. How? Again, SEMrush has tools for that. You look at how you know they're my titles. Can I make them shorter? Can I make them more effective? Can I get my keywords nearer the beginning? You know, stuff like that, right? And again, SEMrush has a tool like, I think it's called, like, SEO ideas or something. It's, it's like things like, hey, think, you know, look, considering this page, if you want to optimize it for this group of keywords, think about things like this, and it'll give you a list of things to think about. And some you will do, and some you might think, no, that's not right. I don't want to do that. Yeah, that's more of like an ongoing process. It's not ongoing. You don't have to do it every week. Once it's done, it's pretty much done. But as your site grows and changes, you add new pages, add blogs, you'll have to kind of establish a rhythm in how often you come back and do that sort of stuff.

Meredith  16:34  
Interesting.

Meredith's Husband  16:37  
Then you're going to want to think about your off site SEO, that's the links. That's the links we've been talking about, right? This is the part of SEO that is ongoing. And that doesn't mean, like, same thing. You don't have to work on it every day or every week, but you want to establish a sort of rhythm. Like, how often can you, you know, write, do a blog entry or create a resource for your users, right? How often can you check your analytics and see what's working and how often can you look at your competitors to see what's working for them? There's no right or wrong answer in terms of the of how often you do this,

Meredith  17:12  
right? This seems more. This to me, seems the harder part, because it's not just I do this and it's done, this is more, it's some more work involved, time involved, thought.

Meredith's Husband  17:25  
There's more thought involved, yeah, because you have to think critically. Yeah. And I think for me, and I think probably for a lot of other people as well, that that is the difficult part, because you gotta, you gotta eliminate distractions for a little while and and give something some quality thought, yeah, which

Meredith  17:44  
is hard. Now, it's hard. I

Meredith's Husband  17:45  
know, I

Meredith  17:46  
know, or can be challenging.

Meredith's Husband  17:48  
It is challenging. Yes, it's definitely challenging. But I want to, I want you to keep one thing in mind, when you're doing this, you're not competing. So you're you have, there's other websites that you're competing against for rankings and search engines and traffic. There's only so many people using Google, so people are competing to get those users attention. When you do that, when you're competing, you're not competing against people like me. You're not competing against people who have been doing SEO for years. You're competing against other photographers, right? And to be honest, in terms of SEO, that's a low bar, right? Obviously, nothing against photographers, but you're a photographer, you're not an SEO person, which

Meredith  18:28  
is one of the reasons for this podcast, yeah, to help you, you're

Meredith's Husband  18:33  
not expected to be an SEO whiz, like when I optimized your site years ago, the first time around, yeah, it went to like, number one all over the country in like, two months. I was blown away at how easy. You know, people

Meredith  18:44  
are going to be listening to this, and they'll check out my site, and they're like, she's not that great, but people are looking at it,

Meredith's Husband  18:52  
well, the optimization is, is fine, and we actually have a new site coming up, so I can't I think it's going to look a little better. But, yeah, it was very easy. And SEO in general is not it gets more and more challenging over time. So more photographers are doing it. It's going it is harder than it was then. Yes, but also, I don't think many. There are some, but I don't think there are many photographers who are hiring SEO pros. There are some,

Meredith  19:21  
I'm sure those who can afford it, you have to, then you have to be doing really well. Yes, afford Yes. And SEO, most people starting out, no way, yeah, of

Meredith's Husband  19:31  
course. And if you hire, like, if you're going to hire an SEO professional, it's gonna, it's an absolute minimum of 500 a month, if you want, oh yeah, sort of quality. And that's going to be like the lowest quality now that is, I think when I when I look at your competitors, I think there was one in particular, a chill somebody in Brooklyn, I think he had a studio or something, yeah, yeah. He ranked really well. And I could tell. All just by looking at his stuff, that he was hiring an SEO company, but I could tell it was also a very low quality SEO company, but it was still working. Yeah,

Meredith  20:07  
better than now is a low quality SEO better than a no quality SEO. Well,

Meredith's Husband  20:13  
usually Yes, as you're getting, like, totally scammed or doing something wrong, seems common, yeah? Yeah. Well, I don't, I don't know how common that is anymore. Oh

Meredith  20:24  
yeah, I guess back in the day, you're right, yeah, back in the day, they were just so scammy.

Meredith's Husband  20:28  
Oh, you could easily get scammed. Like 90% of the SEOs were worse scamming people still.

Meredith  20:34  
I even just got another email from what we were talking about on previous podcasts, saying, hey, all you have to do is post this badge on your site, yeah? And really pushing the badge on the site and be one of the top 10 in New York, right?

Meredith's Husband  20:49  
Those are scammers, yeah, man. But keep that in mind that you don't have to be like, you don't have to be like a ninja SEO black belt that you know to to improve your traffic,

Meredith  21:01  
right? It would be great, though, to be a ninja, Black Belt being a

Meredith's Husband  21:06  
ninja, you know, I was, I saw a documentary not John ago. There's one ninja remaining in the world, like an actual ninja. Being a ninja is actually a thing. There really is, like, a ninja. I mean, there's not a single school of ninjas, but, like, it is a thing, and it's just died out over the years because, you know, it's obviously taught from one generation to the next. It's not something like you go to ninja school love with their little backpacks. Yeah, oh, it's super fast. They interviewed the guy. It was super fascinating. Anyway, I digress. Yeah, how would miss piggy say that? Yeah. So, what were we saying?

Meredith  21:55  
I have no idea, something about like a ninja to be via ninja, yeah,

Meredith's Husband  22:01  
you know. And again, this is, I think, a common misconception about SEO, like it's either you're crushing it or you're not it. That's not the case. Remember, you start the race in the back and you're moving up. While you're moving up, you can get some great clients along the way. And it's, yeah, it's just it's not something that you're going to do once and be done. So the fifth, what I consider to be the fifth category, is not so much a set of tasks, but it is. It is, I

Meredith  22:30  
know that was nice

Meredith's Husband  22:32  
establishing a rhythm of what you can do realistically, you know you're not going to be able to do, write a, you know, blog entry every day and do SEO every day. What can you do realistically? Right? Like, if you're, if you're trying to get in shape, what's realistic? Are you going to go to the gym three times, seven days a week? Like, yeah, no, no, you're not going to do that. What's realistic? So that's, I mean, for me personally, that's one of the challenges about exercising, getting the shape like, what can I do? What am I what is gonna get me motivated to go work out? I got to find something that I like to do. So SEO is not that, not that different, not that you're gonna find some portion of SEO like you love to do, although you might, who knows. Yeah,

Meredith  23:21  
I like the cleaning out of the SEMrush done.

Meredith's Husband  23:24  
It's nice. It's nice to see errors disappear. When you run SEMrush and you go change, and then you click rerun scan, and it comes back and it's gone, and your score is higher. You're like, yeah, that'd be great

Meredith  23:35  
if you can do that in every aspect of your life, right? Oh, that'd be fabulous.

Meredith's Husband  23:40  
But then the SEO, the ongoing SEO, the blog where is not as finite, like you run blog entry and yeah, you might see it raise in rankings and some traffic come in. But it's not like a a one and done type of either you win or lose. It's much more, much more gray area. So So establishing what parts of SEO Do you like? What do you enjoy? Because if there's, if there's a part that you do like, you're going to be much more successful in that area. So sure. So then establishing your objectives, your goals, rhythms, that sort of thing, I think, is something that needs to be done in its own right. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Makes sense. So have some patience. You if, if you did not have somebody taking care of your SEO for you, yes, would you? Would that? Would that? Would that make you? Yes, of course. Would that make you feel better? Would that make you, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it makes, hopefully, it's, you know, it makes it seem a little more digestible. Yes,

Meredith  24:38  
listener, if you think this is helping you, if you think this is digestible, because after all, this is for you, this podcast is for you. So let us know if this is helpful to you, because we're hoping it is,

Meredith's Husband  24:52  
yeah, and in the upcoming months, we'll dive more into these individual aspects of how. Things are done. Oh, good. So that's kind of it. That's, that's kind of it, yeah, that's kind of it. There's nothing like there's, there's no aspect of SEO that I did that I didn't just cover basically, and pretty much anything I can think of in SEO that you'll need to do will fit into one of those things. So you kind of have, that's the high level. It's the 30,000 view, I guess is that what they say 30 30,000 foot. View,

Meredith  25:25  
no idea. There's no animals or food involved, so yeah, doesn't go in my brain or goes in and just floats right out.

Meredith's Husband  25:33  
Maybe you're maybe this is like, we just walk through the cereal aisle and you see all the cereals. And now you can go back and go, this is the one I

Meredith  25:46  
want with the elephant on the cover. Anyway,

Meredith's Husband  25:49  
I hope that gives you a little more confidence and and puts your mind at ease a little bit. Yeah, it's not, it's you know thing. And try to think of it as a process, like you're getting your website in shape right, almost literally, thank

Meredith  26:02  
you for listening to another episode of my husband. Meredith her husband. I hope you enjoyed it. We are so appreciative. So appreciative. Thank you.

Meredith's Husband  26:15  
Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you soon.

Meredith  26:20  
Hey, thank you so much for listening. We really hope that you find this helpful and useful, and if you do what you could do for us as a thanks would be to drum roll, please, yes. Leave a review. Yes, everybody says it, I know, but it really does make a difference. Take three seconds, leave as many stars say something really nice about what you like, about the podcast, and maybe why other people would like it. It would mean the world to us, especially my husband, that better. All right, I'm gonna try one where I'm not gonna be charming. I.

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