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 and now, now you are unmuted every single episode like this, can you hear me now?

Meredith: 1:09

There is, there is a button that you can click in your zoom settings that allows people to be muted. Yeah,

Meredith's Husband: 1:20

that's something I do. Oh,

Meredith: 1:21

it's something you do. This is the first time I can tell you something.

Meredith's Husband: 1:29

Well, nevermind, I'm gonna keep doing that.

Meredith: 1:31

And I noticed that I can only see you and not me, right.

Meredith's Husband: 1:37

You can see it. What do you see my screen?

Meredith: 1:38

Hopefully you see your screen and I see you. Oh, yeah,

Meredith's Husband: 1:42

I can see you. Oh, okay. You don't see yourself.

Meredith: 1:46

Hang on. Now. All of a sudden, I'm seeing Lightroom hang up. Let me close. All this stuff. Hey, no.

Meredith's Husband: 1:52

Doing that also, because I think also the first 30 seconds of each episode has been you fixing your hair, and doesn't really matter.

Meredith: 2:01

Oh, no, I see me. Okay. Yeah, there's a reason why. Okay. How are you? I'm good. Thank you. How are you doing?

Meredith's Husband: 2:11

I'm pretty good.

Meredith: 2:12

I do have to just tell you that buster. Our older dog loves this little corner with all the electrical equipment.

Meredith's Husband: 2:21

Yeah. And boards, ports, the power cords

Meredith: 2:24

and cords. I don't know why it's this little den. And

Meredith's Husband: 2:28

I think it's probably because it's warm. It's probably one

Meredith: 2:30

dorm and it's dark. And he pretended that he wasn't in there.

Meredith's Husband: 2:34

Oh, really? Yeah. Because to do that.

Meredith: 2:37

He got in there. And Marcel was trying to play with him. And then I kept calling for him. And he would not come out.

Meredith's Husband: 2:47

Interesting. Our older dog who is just not the he's the greatest dog in the world, but he's not so he's not the brightest dog in the world. I feel like he's getting a little bit smarter with his old age.

Meredith: 2:58

I kind of think so. Yeah, he was hiding. He was literally hiding. He was literally hiding.

Meredith's Husband: 3:04

That's cool. Good idea. Bus

Meredith: 3:06

bus smart boy. Other than that, yeah, I'm well, I'm now throwing our puppies favorite toy. An empty rope

Meredith's Husband: 3:14

basket. Yeah, the thing that contains his toys is his favorite toy. Much like when you buy a new toy for your dog and you unwrap it. Or you play with the wrapper?

Meredith: 3:25

Yeah, yes, the toy. Or baby. That's all they care about. So what's on the schedule?

Meredith's Husband: 3:31

You like? You know, I was, I was thinking earlier. And I know it's always I've been under the assumption and I guess tell me if I'm wrong. Actually, you know what? Nevermind. Don't tell me if I'm wrong. Just Just tell me I'm right. Whatever I say next. Just confirm. Please. No, no. So the bottom line for photographers and really this is just from my experiences owning my own business. You want to you want to make more money, right? You want to the bottom line is you want to make more money. Yeah, whatever that means. If it means you're going to have more freedom or travel more, you know, whatever it is. You want to have more money.

Meredith: 4:09

That's your ticket for Amsterdam on Scott's cheap. Oh, yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 4:13

Flights today. Yeah, that's on our on our list. Yeah. So what are Yeah, but whatever you're going to do with that money. That's your deeper, you know, concern. That's, that's, that's your true objective in life, but right for a lot of us. First, you need to get some money together. Yeah. So you would agree that's in photography. Okay. Yeah, that reminds me of so. So there's something that one of my friends also, a former photographer, told me once, and I find myself reminding myself of this every day. I don't know. I don't know if I've mentioned it in a previous episode or not. But he said something to me one day, we're just drinking coffee. And he was like, you know, if you want something in life you've never had, you're gonna have to do something you've never done. And I don't know why. But that hit me like a ton of bricks. And I was like, Yeah, of course. That's that's like, Duh, who I mean, of course. And yeah.

Meredith: 5:06

Imagine though being hit by a ton of bricks. Like you would not think anything can be done. But I understand that the reference,

Meredith's Husband: 5:15

yes. But just it was like a slap in the face. It was it was a joke.

Meredith: 5:20

I just want you to be alive with the anecdote, okay.

Meredith's Husband: 5:24

Because yes, I mean, that's, you know, of course, that's true. But how many of us expect Oh, this is what I want, and then just kind of wait for it to magically happen and we keep the Doing the same thing? Yeah. You know, a lot I think a lot of us do.

Meredith: 5:37

Yeah, yeah. You kind of just hope for the fairy princess to show up like Cinderella, and like, oh, here is your pot of gold.

Meredith's Husband: 5:43

Yeah. And that is, to me, that's kind of, you know, improving your business one, you know, for a lot of photographers, I assume the way to do that is going to be to get more clients, if especially if you're an independent photographer. And, you know, your your website, is one way to do that online is one way to do that. It's not the only way you can do other things. If you have a vision. And it's, you know, you see how you can build your business, and it doesn't involve your website, or SEO or the internet. That's great. I mean, do it. But SEO is a way to do that. Yeah. Now, you don't, like I said, you don't have to do SEO, it's up to you. If you do decide that, it's something you want to do. And I do recommend it, because it's a way to, to literally like, you can get clients in your sleep. Like for me that for me, that's that's another business objective is I want, I want to be able to go to sleep, and know that when I wake up, my business is worth more than it was when I went to sleep. Nice. And so I see, you know, you set up systems that can do that. Google never sleeps. So Google is always going. So it's one way to do that. That's the way I look at it. But if you're gonna do SEO, you're gonna need to do something different. This is true. Or if you want to just be like, man, like, Yeah,

Unknown: 7:01

that's right.

Meredith's Husband: 7:07

Wonder if can we get to like a little clip of Danny have a really distinctive laugh?

Meredith: 7:14

Oh, that's good. That's good.

Meredith's Husband: 7:16

So so. So I want to if you want to do SEO, if you want to, or improve your SEO, I want to help you do that. If SEO is not for you, then this is not for you.

Meredith: 7:28

That I'd recommend smartlace Yeah, great podcast,

Meredith's Husband: 7:32

for kicks. So when you want to, let's say you want to double your your business, okay, just as a as a, as a whole number, just for example.

Meredith: 7:40

And this isn't just exclusive of say, raising your prices, you know, I that's another way to make I just, that's another way to make more money is raise your prices,

Meredith's Husband: 7:50

let's say more and better. Because for a lot of us, if we just raise our prices all over, you know, well, not all some of our friends would be like, Okay, that's too much. So you gotta, there's a combination of things there. But so as an example, let's just say you want to double your business, through your website. So you want to double your your your income, there's a cup, there's two, there's two ways actually, there's three ways you can do that. You can get more people to visit your website, you can get more of the people visiting your website to contact you. Or the third way, which is the best way is to do some combination of the first two weeks. Yeah. So last episode, or I guess the episode before last, we talked about a little bit. And we used Carmen site as an example. How to get more of the people who are contact? Or how to get more people who are who are already visiting your site to contact you. Yeah. And that to be honest, is of those two methods. That's the easier and faster way to do it. Because doubling your the the number of people who get to your website, unless you're going from like one to two people per month, doubling the number of people to your website is the more challenging way to do it. Yeah. And it will take longer. Right, right, right. So last episode, or the episode, when we talked about Carmen site, we talked about how to how to quickly change your site, because you can make changes to your site in a few minutes. And if you were to say, let's say you had 1000 or so you had 100 visitors per month, coming to your website, and let's say you have a, you know, one of those 100 contacts you that's a that's a that's a 1% conversion rate. That's not you know, that's not bad. It's not great. It's it's kind of average, probably a little lower than average. But let's say, you know, one way to double your business is go from one person contacting you to two. Yeah, you know, that's not a terribly difficult thing to do, to be honest. And you've doubled your business. To get 100 more visitors to your website each month isn't you can't do that overnight. Unless you launch something viral on social media or something. But even then, that might be traffic that doesn't convert at all. So

Meredith: 9:58

yeah, we're just getting traffic that will convert we want people who are actually interested in what we do, and live where we are

Meredith's Husband: 10:07

correct. Yeah. Because of people who are probably going to give us money. So this, so

Meredith: 10:13

in return for extraordinary local cash. Yeah. Now, that's a different experience.

Meredith's Husband: 10:22

So So last time, we looked at how to make those types of changes. This week, I want to get into like, what can you start to do with SEO to double the visitors to your site so so that we get both of those methods? going at the same time, because that's the that's the ideal. Yeah. So what I'm going to do, and again, this is we're looking right now at Carmen site. Thank you very much, Carmen for letting us use you as an example. Carmen done him. So now I'm looking at sem rush. It's an SEO tool, sem rush. And I bet that sem R U. S. h.com. If you go to Meritus, husband.com. And scroll down, I'll put it, there's a new section called the resources. I will put it in there, because I'm going to talk about SEMrush a lot. It'll explain what it is and how you can use it for free actually

Meredith: 11:49

sounded like you said, I'm going to talk about martial law. For some Yeah, that's next week. Well, yeah. down to a dark dark side. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you. Don't forget to tip your waiters. Okay. Okay. So back to SEMrush. Myself, know, you can share your thoughts. Thank you.

Meredith's Husband: 12:19

So this is a tool that pro SEOs use, I use this myself all the time, every day. The your most professional SEOs are going to use this tool unless they're at like enterprise level, and they're using it and they have like 10s of 1000s of dollars a month to spend, you're probably not in that situation. So this is a great tool. It's also something you can use for free. Like I said, Look, scroll down to the resources section, it'll show you how you can get one of these accounts set up use it for free. But one of the first things that you're going to do, whether you're on Squarespace or WordPress, is do what they call a Site Audit. And that's what we're looking at here. And when you do a Site Audit, it's going to look, it's going to scan through your website, and it's going to find all the SEO errors and whoa, things that even might be SEO her so this

Meredith: 13:04

screen right now. And that's walling it Yeah, so

Meredith's Husband: 13:07

it looks there's a lot of there's a lot of numbers here. Yeah, there's a couple numbers that are important, and some that are not important. And there's more if you scroll down, there's more and more. But what is most important, is this web, this site health score. Yeah, this tells like you just cuz your overall SEO score for your site. And Carmen site is at 85%, which is that's not bad on us. Yeah, I mean, to be honest, when I start with a client site, most of the time, it's in the 70s, maybe 8085, is not bad. And the goal with this is you want to get this to 90 to a 92. If you're at 92 Or better, that means you're in the top 10% of all websites. Whoa, in terms of your overall website health.

Meredith: 13:55

So random, it's 92. Is that just I don't know what it is with that?

Meredith's Husband: 14:00

No, that's statistics. I trust these guys. Whatever. Yeah. And so if you're on a 92, that's like having an A and so if you have an a Google says you you have an a, you know, is there a huge difference between having a 92 and a 95. Not really, it's still in a, like, you know, you're not gonna get extra credit with with Google and this site is superduper. Healthy like that. So that's where you want to get and that's on site SEO. Like that's the objective. Now, the other numbers on this page that are important, you'll see there are three big numbers in red, orange, and blue. That errors, those are the usually the more important ones. Yeah, the warnings, which are, they might be important, they might not. And then the notice is typically the notices are not bringing your score down. They're just things that you might want to be aware of that maybe you want to fix. But the first thing that you want to do is if you have your free SEMrush account, and you've run this audit is look at this page, and we're on the Site Audit page and scroll down and it's going to tell you your top issues. Oh, wow. So these

Meredith: 15:06

three anybody know, I feel like wait a second, can anybody useless but literally can anybody Yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 15:13

And you can do this on anybody's site. Also, wow, you just need to put in their domain name. And you can see what their SEO is like, wow. But anyway, these three issues are the biggest detractors from this ad from this score up here. So what you need to do is you just need to basically run this audit, it takes it depending on how big your site is extinct couple minutes, it could take 2030 minutes, but you just sit there and wait, it does it on its own. You don't even have to keep the browser open, it'll do it on its own. And when it comes back, it's gonna give you a score, you just want to look at these top three issues. And these are the things that you're going to want to fix when you fix them and rerun the audit. And your audit will run automatically each week. It will tell you your next three things. And I can tell you right now with a score of 85. If Carmen were to go and fix these things, yeah, her score would probably be at 90 Or better, I would think and then when there's three new things, do the same thing. And then And after, I would say probably two rounds, she's going to be at a 92

Meredith: 16:16

or better. So this is what you could do with my website. Yeah, this is this is SEO

Meredith's Husband: 16:21

like, you know, don't tell my clients, you know, this is it. I, some people pay me a lot of money. And this is how I start. This is what I do it again. I do. Yeah. Okay. Now, you probably won't know how to, you know, what is, uh, you know, one page returned to four xx status code is the number one problem. Probably don't know what that you're not gonna you're not going to understand a lot of this language. This is this is a 404 page. I'll translate that for you. And hey, Brian. Yeah. But I have a so I wanted to show you something. I have a blog. You do? I do. Yeah. And I just I launched it not too long ago. But if you go, Yes, I will. I will put it in the resources. This is a new block. This is kind of something I launched during COVID, when we had a lot of time to contemplate and try new things. So I'll put this link in the resources section below. But but this is this is what it looks like. Oh, and it is all it is. Yeah. So you're working on this? Yeah. All it is, is it's like, How about right now it's about 100 different articles. And they are all aimed at how to use this SEMrush tool. So this top issue here returned 4x X status code over here, go to go to the blog, and go for x x, just type in 4x X, stat status code, do a search. Here it is. So here's that article. Hey, so you can click on that. And it will it's a little tutorial video on how to fix that problem. So cute on on WordPress sites. I haven't done Squarespace yet. Squarespace will, that'll be coming. But this is how you'll fix it. I'll log into an example of a WordPress site. Just go step by step by step. So you can just do that it's free. Right? Remember, remember, last week, I was talking about what we were talking about blogging, or talking about? Whoa, yeah. Blogging, you shouldn't think about blogging in terms of resources, instead of blog articles. Right? Right. This is a set of resources. This is resources. I'm literally giving away stuff that I do professionally. It's just online. And like I said, I launched this not too long ago. I mean, I thought of it not too long ago, I did those videos.

Meredith: 18:41

I launched this is when you say I need to make some videos. Can you please be quiet?

Meredith's Husband: 18:46

Yes. So for the last for several months. I've been screaming at Meredith every time she says something loudly. I'm making a video. These are those videos.

Meredith: 18:56

You weren't that loud. I was the loud one. Yeah. Okay,

Meredith's Husband: 19:01

so I want to show it. So I want to show you that as an example. This for me for my business. These are the resources I could provide. And I want to show you what's happened since I launched this. So I'm gonna log into Google Analytics very quickly. And so what you see here is the home screen of Google Analytics. Whenever I look at Google Analytics, I like to begin under the acquisition tab, under the all traffic tab, and I look at channels, and that tells me where my traffic is coming from. So this is what that looks like. Again, this is going to be a bit confusing, because all

Meredith: 19:36

of a sudden, I feel like I'm in the Star Wars enterprise. Trust me. Control Panels.

Meredith's Husband: 19:42

I'll fix that. So now I've adjusted the date. So that we're looking at the the the lifespan of this website. Then I'm gonna go through and I'm gonna look at organic search traffic. So that's,

Meredith: 19:55

are we are people being able to see the video? Yeah, okay.

Meredith's Husband: 19:58

There's a video. Yeah, check it out. Check. They do not see you. Good. Yeah, check the show notes.

Meredith: 20:05

I'm not as cute today.

Meredith's Husband: 20:07

Oh, please. You're always cute.

Meredith: 20:10

That's what I've married you. Sorry. So aggressive.

Meredith's Husband: 20:14

So and so now. So this is still crazy looking. Now this is the organic traffic, kind of like shark teeth to this blog I just showed you. And that's the daily traffic. daily traffic is very erratic. Weekends are low. So this is a mess. So what I like to do is I like to look week by week. Oh, there you go. Now look. Oh, wow. So I've done nothing with this website except just publish this blog and look at my traffic. Well,

Meredith: 20:43

how are people finding you if you're not doing anything?

Meredith's Husband: 20:46

Well, I did. I did some preliminary steps of like submitting a sitemap to Google doing that sort of stuff. But I've done nothing to actively have this. I haven't done any link building and no email, no social media, no, nothing. Wow. But I am publishing a blog, a resources resources for people. And I did this because I know that people are out there using SEMrush. And they're looking at these errors that we see here. And they're going to Google. And they're saying, How do I fix this? So my blog is providing an answer. It's just purely a resource. Wow. And now I'm getting traffic. More importantly, more importantly than the traffic, however, though, I bet and I hadn't checked this, but I bet people are linking to this, because it's helpful. And so the ranking of this site is going to increase. Just watch. I mean, it already is, but it's gonna keep going. That's pretty awesome. Yeah.

Meredith: 21:46

How do you make money on this?

Meredith's Husband: 21:48

Oh, I don't think we're not gonna make money. Okay, good. No, it's just all for the good. Yeah. Yes, no, there is there's, I have multiple ways where I can monetize this. I don't know which method is going to be the most lucrative, or which I'm going to focus my most the, you know, the most effort on. But first, first thing first is gonna get a little bit of traffic, right. And the building blocks. One, one thing you want to avoid if you're building a blog. Yes. So right now people are finding this. They're using it. I hope they're liking it. I hope they're linking to it. If I made all these blogs about like, hey, hire me to do this, hire me to do that. Click here to buy this. Download my course. Give me money here. Give me money there. Guess what? Nobody's gonna link to that. No. People don't like that. They don't they don't like to be sold.

Meredith: 22:38

It's like the same thing of everybody. It seems. Hey, free webinar, free webinars. Yes. And then like two thirds through Hey, can we talk about money? Oh, here's a great and then it's always selling so and it's the same thing over and over and you just

Meredith's Husband: 22:53

get right. I take a slightly different approach and that you get attention by by just helping people. Yeah. And you feel good. Yeah, helping people. Feels nice. Yeah, it does make you feel good.

Meredith: 23:07

I told you that whenever I do the anagram or whatever they are, and I keep thinking I am a warrior or I am a rebel. It's always I am a helper, no matter what does. I do really do like helping? I mean that I that's part of what I eat, or you help people capture this time in a beautiful way.

Meredith's Husband: 23:30

Okay, that's another thing. That's another thing, like during COVID. Like we had a lot of time to contemplate and reflect. And, and I was thinking back because we had I had no workforce for several months. Did anybody? Yeah, I think I think so. I hear from other from people from colleagues. And I heard from one yesterday, and she said, How's How's New York? And I said, you know, it is what it is? And she said, Yeah, I she's on the West Coast. And she also has clients all over, oh, she has clients all over the country. She's in social media. And she said, I lost every single one of my New York clients, and I haven't heard from them since. So I think it's been harder on New York business.

Meredith: 24:13

You know, yeah, possibly. Yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 24:15

Anyway, so one of the one of the things I was reflecting on is, you know, the last my last 10 years in business, and the things I liked, and I didn't like, and how I can shift my business moving forward. And I remember a couple, a couple things stood out in my memory. I remember, one time I did a, what we call a strategy, a digital marketing strategy for for an agency for for a bigger international brand. So it was a decent sized project. And I put a lot of time into it. Made a made a, I got compensated very well for my time hourly on that. And at the end of it, we've I presented to the to the agency into the and they loved it. And they said, Okay, this is great. To be honest, right now, you know, we're kind of in a transition, or they find a very polite way of telling me, they are not going to use it. Oh, they basically just had some marketing budget that they needed to spend. Oh, my

Meredith: 25:12

gosh. Well, that happened. They spent it with you.

Meredith's Husband: 25:17

Yeah. No, I mean, I enjoyed the work, you know, no complaints, I'll take their money to do something I enjoy, you know, just no problem. But that's the way businesses are, they have their marketing budget for the year. And then they approached the end of the year, if they haven't used up that budget, the next year, their budgets probably going to be reduced. So they want to use up their budget. So that was what happened here. And again, you know, I like doing the work, so I'm happy to do it. But at the same time that was kind of like that. It was a crappy feeling. You know? Yeah, I did what I did something I enjoy. I made good money doing it. But it's not. It wasn't like filling. Yeah, this is just going on a shelf somewhere. It just felt kind of crappy. And then on the other end of the spectrum, there was a not not even a client, a friend of yours once actually, who was doing something. She had an animal rescue website. Yeah, yeah, it was yeah, getting off the ground. And you asked me if I would speak with her. And I and I did. And I think she decided she wanted to do some sort of paid engagement, but it wasn't she had no money. So I think I ended up spending a day like she came into the office, I spent an afternoon with her, I spent some time researching, I think I charged her a total of like,$250 or something, which which means that my own time it was like, probably less than minimum wage. Yeah. But I remember seeing her so excited about the things that we were talking about. And it she when she left, she was so excited about doing a bunch of new things. I had made no money doing it. But that was one of the best memories of of my business. So you so one of the worst? Members? Yes, I made a buttload of money. On the other end, I made pretty much no money. That was the good experience. And the buttload of money was bad. It was so yeah, helping people feels good. It really does. I agree. So on that on that note, yeah.

Meredith: 27:15

This is very helpful.

Meredith's Husband: 27:16

I think. So I hope that's helpful.

Meredith: 27:19

I think that was really

Meredith's Husband: 27:19

Oh, you know, next week, we'll we'll take a different approach. And we'll look at how else we can do SEO. By the way, once if you sign up for your free SEMrush account. Yes. Shout out to Carmen here. Yeah. When you do your site audit? Yeah. Like I said, her score is not too bad. But we know that she's really not terribly happy with her rankings. Yeah, this is why she's not ranking Permin. You need some links, you need to buy in, don't don't buy links, you need to you need to build some backlinks. So we'll talk about that next week. Awesome. Because this is the reason why she is is not ranking. I can tell you right now

Meredith: 27:55

credible that you can actually see it. That's what blows my mind.

Meredith's Husband: 27:59

Yeah. And it's Yeah, I mean, I did no work to get this. I literally cut and pasted the name of her domain, like didn't end up here. And I let it go. And I come back. 20 minutes later, I can be like, Oh, her on sites good. She needs some she needs links. That's why she's not ranking. Oh, no, it's not.

Meredith: 28:15

It's nothing to do with oh, she didn't, you know, put the green light on the red light. And the back. Yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 28:23

Yeah. Let's see, SEO is not that it's not that difficult to be honest. It's just told that it is. Oh, there's so much industry jargon and lingo and to be honest ways as an SEO person, it kind of helps me sell clients if they don't understand what I'm talking about, and I can provide a solution. If they know it's not that hard, then guess what? They're not gonna hire me. So Right. So

Meredith: 28:49

yeah, I think it Yeah, it just, it all makes a whole lot more sense. And also, because I'm visual, just to see that. And I think a lot I mean, all photographers are pretty visual people. Yeah. But that that this is easier to understand. For a Nimrod like me. Yeah. Rather than all the noise that I just Yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 29:10

Becomes exhausting. And that's why if you remember when we were on my blog, it's the SEO decoded library. That's what I call it. Cuz it because it's, I want to, it's not that hard. You can demystify this stuff and break it down to really like common sense. type of rules. Yeah.

Meredith: 29:26

And it's digestible. That's what I like is that it's digestible. Yeah. Yeah, it's not overwhelming and so many things when I think I need help, and I clicked on it. Ah, but this is very helpful. What a good job you did.

Meredith's Husband: 29:42

Excellent. All right.

Meredith: 29:43

I'll see you at dinner.

Meredith's Husband: 29:44

Okay, bye. Bye. Love you. Bye, love you. 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 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. And again, thanks for listening.