Meredith's Husband: 0:42

Hey, this is Meredith husband. I've got some SEO advice for you. But I'm gonna keep it really simple so that you can understand it. So make sense. And most importantly, so you can actually use

Meredith: 0:58

Can you hear me now? Can you hear me? No,

Meredith's Husband: 1:00

no. Did you do that on purpose?

Meredith: 1:04

No, no, I promise. I promise. I promise I promise.

Meredith's Husband: 1:10

Episode like 500. Could you?

Meredith: 1:14

Wow, that's awesome. Because you are starting with us just starting. Yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 1:21

Well, I don't swear I'd like to start the way I do things. Oh,

Meredith: 1:27

okay. Mister man.

Meredith's Husband: 1:29

Welcome to the show.

Meredith: 1:31

Welcome to the show, everybody. Thank you so much for coming back. That's so nice to have you again. And we look forward to incorporating more of your ideas and needs. Thank you.

Meredith's Husband: 1:46

I just I just realized that's the first time I have referred to it as a show.

Meredith: 1:50

It is a show now. It's kind of a show.

Meredith's Husband: 1:57

We're gonna talk about SEO. Okay, excellent. I

Meredith: 2:01

look forward to it.

Meredith's Husband: 2:02

We do have this week. Yes. Well, first, first, let me tell you what we're going to talk about. Okay. I know that I have before, I have talked about links and the importance of links and how you need to get links and how Google relies on links and all this stuff. And I haven't said anything about how you actually build links. Right? Right. So we're gonna get into a little this week, how you actually start to do that. Oh, nice. Alright, so that's what I want to talk about. But we do have a question this week. Yeah, we do have a question. Hang on. Let's, let's do the question. Okay. And then I'll get into my link rant. Oh, oh, okay. Okay.

Meredith: 2:41

I'm looking forward to that. It's not a red catch. Can it be a wrap? No, it's okay. All right. So question this week is, I'm questioning the structure of my site in regards to SEO and usability. I have different types of photography I offer I EG, newborn family, maternity, each on different pages with portfolio pricing and FAQ. It's more of that way over time. And I'd like a second opinion on whether this structure is simply making things more difficult.

Meredith's Husband: 3:19

Okay. It's good question. I'm not I'm not gonna talk about the SEO side of things. And well, we might do a visual review for usability separately, but for SEO,

Meredith: 3:32

review for usability, is that what we did for Carmen?

Meredith's Husband: 3:36

Exactly? So for usability, you want to make things simple as how does the user engage with with your website? Okay, how do you make it easy? The SEO is how do you how are you going to get users there in the first place? Right, right. And it's all kind of it's all it's all kind of the same thing. Because, like I've mentioned before, Google wants to send their, their users to websites that are good, and the websites have good usability. So in pleasing Google, you want to make sure you have good usability. So it's all kind of under the SEO umbrella. In terms of day to day tasks. And what we're doing, we often think about SEO is getting people to the site, right first in the first place.

Meredith: 4:17

Thank you.

Meredith's Husband: 4:18

So let's, let's talk about the SEO side of that. Yeah, this can become an issue. If you have, let's say you're a wedding photographer, and you wanted to also sell wedding destination, vacation packages. Okay. Yeah, those are two very different things like you're not you're not going to have one website that ranks well for for both of those probably. So the alternative would be to have two different websites. Now if you're talking about wedding photography, and engagement, photography, and maybe Family and Children photography, those things are all photography, they're all pretty closely related. So on his own No, that's that's not necessarily going to be a problem. Now if you have let's say you have eight say you're a photographer and you technically have eight different items of how you are news flash so so for you so you have let's take your site as an example. So you are what types of photography Do you would you say that you offer?

Meredith: 5:23

kids and family, pets and events celebrations? I used to want to say childhood because I really love that but nobody really uses that. Nobody.

Meredith's Husband: 5:36

So you got to you got to think about how people are searching when you name your name your products. So in

Meredith: 5:42

categories, specialties, when you name your products,

Meredith's Husband: 5:47

when you name your services, yeah, so yeah. Back on Track, sorry. So in you. So in that case, you might want to think about the structure of your site. And for SEO purposes, how do these different types of photography fit underneath each other? How are they kind of nested? So if you think about your website, you know, think of think if you were to graph it on a piece of paper, and, you know, the

Meredith: 6:12

kind of like a food chain

Meredith's Husband: 6:13

the food triangles? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So see you

Meredith: 6:17

doing all the time there are all these papers everywhere. Yeah, food chains.

Meredith's Husband: 6:22

Yeah, they're not food chains. Well, they're,

Meredith: 6:27

like family trees.

Meredith's Husband: 6:29

Exactly, it would look like a family tree. But vertically instead of side to side, I guess you could do a side to side but vertically, so you have the homepage at the top. Underneath that you might have children's photography, pet photography, event photography, underneath event photography, you might have birthday party photography, and engagement party for different types of event photography, but you'd want to have it underneath engagement photography, and that starts to build up your authority for you being passionate photography.

Meredith: 7:00

Yeah. But the engagement photography would be under wedding photography.

Meredith's Husband: 7:05

Well, I'm talking about just your website here. Okay, so to using your site's example, let's,

Meredith: 7:11

let's say that all over again, because that made no sense.

Meredith's Husband: 7:15

Okay, so let's say you have under underneath your, your homepage, you have your types of photography, if you get children and families got pets. Yeah. And you've got events? Yes. So under, so let's But technically, you might you offer like birthday party photography, and you might order you know, I don't know, some other type of event photography, you would want to put those event, those types of event photography underneath the event photography page. All right. Does that make sense because that is going to start to build authority for Google for your for the term event photography. So Google will look at that family tree. And they'll say, Oh, look at all the stuff that she has underneath event photography, she must put a considerable amount of effort or content towards event photography. So that starts to build up your authority. So think about how you could nest these things, your different types of photography underneath each other. If that's possible, it might be that they just are not. And then once you once you have thought about that, think about doing things like underneath, let's say your event photography, you have a prices page for just event photography, you have a FAQ for just your events, you have testimonials for just your events, the more content that you can put around just your events, the better that you'll rank for this. Oh, okay. And do that. And you would do the same thing. If you have, you know, say underneath family, you have children and pets, and maternity and newborn and all right. So think about that. Otherwise, it really shouldn't be a problem. Those Those things are all pretty closely related. They're all photography. Okay, which is most important. Yeah. Thank you. So I hope that helped. Yeah. Everybody. So the thing that I wanted to talk about is I wanted to give you some advice about how you can actually start building links, because I know I've mentioned how important Yeah,

Meredith: 9:13

yeah. And I've no idea what they like, oh, yeah, please keep

Meredith's Husband: 9:19

it yeah, this is yeah, and I'll always talk about links, because they're just so important. And I'll probably always throw out, you know, different types of analogies and stuff, just to help it make sense conceptually, because intuitively, this doesn't make sense. I get that.

Meredith: 9:34

Right. I can understand, you know, like, Spider Man, you want to connect to somebody else and get power from all that stuff. And but I don't know, really like how you get to link. I've even asked people like, oh, yeah, you know, sure, just link me. And I'm just hope that they know what it means. That's what I've been told what

Meredith's Husband: 10:00

Well, think about I mean, think about you know, if you just think about the the internet, yes, I'm going to try to explain this. A different I'll probably continue to explain this in different ways. Because once this makes sense, conceptually, it's going to open it'll free up your thinking a lot, because it's not difficult, but it's not something that's kind of unnatural, you're gonna know just naturally. So think like, think about the internet. The internet works because it's a bunch of computers connected to each other. That's literally what the internet is. That's all it is. If those computers were not connected to each other, there'd be no internet. Well, websites are the same way. They're just, they're their files. that are placed on that network of machines that are connected. So what would the internet be? If if you if there were no links? If there were no connections between websites? How would you use it? Right?

Meredith: 10:44

It would be like throwing up paper in the

Meredith's Husband: 10:46

air. Yeah, the only way you could ever get to a website would be you'd know the actual name of the website and you type it in. Yeah, maybe that's how you get. That's how you get to Google. But then from there, I bet that you're always just clicking on links, right? It starts starts from Google. But everything is just links. So without, without linking, there's no internet. So the more links that you have, it's just the better it's going to be, the more visibility you're going to have the more

Meredith: 11:15

tools through which people can find you.

Meredith's Husband: 11:19

Kind of, but really, the importance of building links is so that Google sees all these links, because you want to rank well in Google. And if Google looks at your site, and it sees that you've got 50,000 other websites linking to yours, Google is gonna see like, wow, that's that must be a good site. Right? If you have one website, linking to yours, Google's going to be like, That's proud. That doesn't look good. It doesn't look like a good website. Another way you could think about it is SEO is basically answering two questions for Google. What's your website about? And how good is it? Oh, wow. So okay, so what's your website about that's pretty easy for you to do. Those are the words you put on your page. It's how you explain your website on the actual website. How good is it, Google determines by is our other websites linking to it. So it's all just like, it's like, I think in the in the one of the first episodes, we talked about the popularity contest and getting votes from other websites. So that's this, that's what it is. So you want to show to Google? Look, everybody thinks that I have that they liked my website, lots of people link to it, not because you're actually going to get a lot of traffic from those individual links. Now, you might, but and you might not, that's not necessarily the goal of building links for SEO purposes. Okay. So now that all said, so the goal is, the goal is to build things. Now, there are different types of links also. So one thing that you I'm sure you've probably already done, you're going to make sure that all of your own social media profiles and platforms and your LinkedIn all link back to your website, website. Yeah. Right. So you, so you control those links. So definitely do that. That's probably you're probably done that already. Yeah, that's one thing I have. Yeah. Beyond that, you're gonna have to start to look to to other websites to link to yours. Now, even within there, there's lots of different ways that sites can link to you got your websites like Yelp, and City Search and Yellow Pages and things like that, then you've got sites like media sites, like the New York Times or timeout in New York, or things like that, those would be much more difficult to get, right. So one of the first things that you want to do is you want to start to grab those, what are the local links, the local citations? Because I don't know if when you when you do a search, you know how Google often, especially if it's any sort of local search? There's a map. So you get a few listings, usually ads, then you get a map, and there's three listings underneath that map? Yes, the local pack? And one factor that goes into pack local pack? Yeah.

Meredith: 14:06

One, you're gonna

Meredith's Husband: 14:08

just local pack? It's, I don't know why they call it the local pack. It's just the three? Well, it's three, it's the pack of three websites that are in that local module with the map section. Okay. So that's the local pack. So you want to get in there? Because that's pretty good. How do you get nice? Yeah. So one factor there. I mean, there's, there's there's multiple factors, but one is, Google is going to look to see that your website is listed in all the local business directories in that area. So if you're a local business, as a photographer, I assume you definitely are. You need to go through and you need to show Google Yes, I am in all the local directories. So think it's Think of it like the old yellow pages, if you're in the yellow pages, you're in the yellow pages, the super yellow pages, the yellow book, will checks all these things and they and they're like, Yeah, this person this business seems legit. Their addresses the same, right? Their business name is the same, their phone numbers the same, it's all same. It's all got business hours, this looks like a legit business. So that's step number one to getting into that local pack. So you need to do you need to build these local, what we call it local citations. I don't know why they call them citations. So just curious, frightening. It's SEO jargon. I don't know why they come up with all these fancy words. So there are different ways you can do that. You can do it manually, you can go around and there's hundreds of these local types of directories. Especially for like bigger cities. You can go around and do this manually, which is an absolute nightmare.

Meredith: 15:46

Oh, okay.

Meredith's Husband: 15:47

I'll even take questions takes four ever takes so long it takes, because for every every one of these sites like say like Yelp. Yeah, and Yelp is probably the most well known one. But there's a whole bunch of others. For everyone. You got to set up an account, set up a profile, get your business verified, do all these steps for every single one multi, you know, it takes months and months and months and months, and you're never gonna do it. Right. So

Meredith: 16:14

if you do any activity on Yelp, they start calling you like 25 times an

Meredith's Husband: 16:19

hour. Yeah. yelps Yeah, they're there. Their business model is different than most of these sites. But so anyway, there are services that have popped up to help you get these listings. Oh, you may have heard of Yext. Yext is probably one of the oldest and one of the most well known ones. And so what you

Meredith: 16:38

like like an X but with a Y,

Meredith's Husband: 16:40

correct? Yes. You have a sweatshirt at home that says the x dot, right? You've ever seen it?

Meredith: 16:45

Oh, I've never just looking at your face. Maybe? Oh,

Meredith's Husband: 16:50

I have a funny story about Your ex. Maybe I'll save that for later. Anyway. So what yex does is you go to Yext, you set up an account on Yext, you fill in your all your business information, and then it goes out and it claims all these local listings for you. I think it claims like 50 or 60 of them, and you just pay Yext one time you just set up one account. I'll get to that. Okay, what I have done for years, and they charge per business, I think it's like five or $600 a year. Okay. And it's so it's, um, so it's a monthly subscription. Right? You pay annually, so I don't know why they call it monthly, really, but and so that's what I've done for all my clients. Now, the only the only problem with that is number one, you're kind of tied into your paying that forever. Okay, like and when you stop, your business listings may disappear off a VA was my next question. Yes, yeah. So you got to keep paying monthly. And so, you know, I went, I set that up for my client. That's why I did it for years. And that was really the only option that I knew of, but, you know, kind of nagging feeling is that's not really the best way to do it. Like they're, you know, anyway, what has popped up in the in the last few years are our services that will do that. But they will set up account for you and they will give you ownership and they will just charge time, and they and they will give everything to you. Really that's that's the ideal. That's what I would think you want to do. You know, some of these services are a lot more expensive, right? But there are a couple that are not. Oh, there's one called Whitesburg which I highly, highly recommend. It's called White Spark, white Spark,

Meredith: 18:36

white Spark, like you the sparkles you have noticed

Meredith's Husband: 18:42

a spark, but just one spark, spark plug. Oh, okay. Or sparkles. Man talk would be spark plug and female talk with be spike O's. Singular. Yes. So what they do,

Meredith: 18:59

we're gonna get comments being like now I can say sparkplug, which is true.

Meredith's Husband: 19:06

Okay, so let's, let's forget all of that. Let's just call it white spark. I'll put Whitesburg in the resources section of Mary's husband.com. Okay, no. And they'll it'll link to everything. There are some some of their services, they have a bunch of different services go to their website, you'll see they get a bunch of different packages. There are some you don't need. There's some there's one or two in particular, I highly recommend. And I'll explain that in the resource section. Okay. If I will say just right now, if your business has ever have if you've changed address, right, you've changed your phone number. If you've done things like that, you're going to need a little bit extra, because then you're gonna have, you're gonna have duplicate listings, and your your information may not match. And so that can actually that can be harming your ranking, right. So you need to make sure that you clean those up.

Meredith: 19:56

Right. Would this be for example, if you move your business to a different state? Would this be a good way to do that cleanly where you can?

Meredith's Husband: 20:08

Yes, okay. Yes, it would. What happens more often is that you just move to a new office, businesses will move in office, they'll move down the street or to a different neighborhood or whatever. And that and that, you know, cleaning that up on the all across the web. Yeah, can can be tricky, and it's important. So what Whitesburg does is they're a Canadian company. They're really very cheap. I think the package that they You probably need to get it's like, it's probably three 350 or $360. one time fee, one time, one time. So it's cheaper than a single year of Yeah, yeah, you get all you get pretty much all the same listings. And then you get ownership. And then see one of the benefits of Yext is that you can go in and just update your information, it will update across all of these platforms within 24 hours. That's that's one benefit. But but with Whitesburg in particular, if you have an update, they will do it for like half price. Oh, so if you do this, actually, I don't know what the discount is. But it's it's a substantial discount off the normal price. So if you pay to do this once, and then let's say two years from now you move and you change your address, you just go back to Whitesburg and you say I have a new address, and they will do everything for like half price, they'll clean up all your because they will, they will still have access, the access that they created for you. So well, you you can also go in and you can manually change all these. But like I said, If you value your time at all, it's not worth it. Right? Right. Right. Okay, cool. So that's what that's what I do now for my clients. I you know, when we do this, I no longer do Yext, I feel like that's kind of a waste of money. I set this up, I get all their listings, I, you know, I, there's a pretty good markup on this. To be honest, if I pay 150 bucks for client listings or something, or 350, I would type exit to the client. Because it's because it's really very, very valuable, and they have it forever. So that's what you need to do. And their support is really good. Once you sign up for this, they will get back to you. And and kind of walk you through the process. It takes some time. Because like I said, this, this if you were to do this on your own, this will take a long time, but still take it's still takes them time. But they the reason they can do it so cheaply, I think is because they have set up a process, you know, sort of production line, if you will,

Meredith: 22:37

yeah, well, this is what they specialize.

Meredith's Husband: 22:40

And so they'll read, they'll reach out, it'll take some time, but they'll walk you through it, and then you just need to eat to wait. Cool.

Meredith: 22:48

That's great. Yeah. And that's about and that's, that's the links that you were talking

Meredith's Husband: 22:53

about. It's not all late. That's all late. That is that is one of the first things you want to do. Okay, when you start building links, okay? It's not it's not very difficult. It's kind of the foundation of your link building. It's, I guess it's step number two, after you make sure your own profiles and your own accounts link back to your website. There's any link you can control. do that via social media. Yeah, LinkedIn, whatever it is. link back to your own site when you can from from any other property you own. Then you want to branch out and you want to lay this foundation if you'd like. Yeah, we're in all the yellow pages available.

Meredith: 23:31

Right. Awesome. That's very helpful.

Meredith's Husband: 23:33

Thank you. Yeah. Then we'll we'll get into the additional types of of link building. Yeah. Great. Thank you. You're welcome.

Meredith: 23:42

All right. See you at dinner. Okay. Thank you.

Meredith's Husband: 23:55

Okay, I hope that helped. I hope that helped your website. I hope that helped your business. I hope that helped give you a little bit of confidence that SEO is not this convoluted, cryptic, crazy thing that nobody can understand. If you did like it and you found it helpful. Please share it with a couple of your colleagues. Tell them what you like. Or more importantly, tell me what you liked. Let me know interview. leave a review on Apple. Tell me what parts you like. And I'll try to do more of those parts. Again. Thanks for listening.