Meredith's Husband: 0:33

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. Ah, just a quick note up front here, if you're just launching a website, or your site has very little to no website traffic, the tips in this episode won't be useful in terms of looking at your Google Analytics. They might be useful in terms of building your site and knowing the end objective, but you won't be able to take the specific instructions in terms of Google Analytics and go look at your traffic. If you do have traffic to your website, this should be very helpful. Hello

Meredith: 1:22

friend. Welcome back to the podcast. I am Meredith,

Meredith's Husband: 1:27

and I'm Meredith's husband, and we're going to talk today about SEO, specifically about Google Analytics, and how you can take something from Google Analytics, just one little piece of information, take it over to your site and improve your website's conversion, and hopefully get some more leads, clients, customers, whatever you whatever you get from your website, hopefully you're going to get a little bit more. Sounds great. I thought so. I can really only go by judging like how popular the different topics are by, you know, looking at the number of downloads, and my guess is, people will appreciate knowing what to do with analytics, because, number one, it's kind of confusing. Yeah, it's a big, yeah, big, huge, ocean of information. But if there is, if you are listening to this and there's something that you want to hear more about, let me know. Go let us know on on Instagram, at this husband, yeah, please. Okay, so to do this, you're obviously going to need Google Analytics installed. So if you don't have Google Analytics, I'll put a link in the in the show notes below, of how you can do that, both on WordPress and if you're running a Squarespace site,

Meredith: 2:36

is it also work for Wix? And, yeah,

Meredith's Husband: 2:40

I mean, there are, I mean, there are tons of potential website hosting platforms out there, and it works for all of them. Well, analytics, yes, there is going to be some way to integrate analytics with any legitimate hosting. Wordpress is by far the most popular hosting for photographers and small business owners. I think Squarespace is probably the second most popular Wix and the others are different. If you're running a site on Wix or Weebly or one of these others, you can just go to Google and do a search for Google Analytics Wix. Okay, hopefully there should be an article right in their blog, a resource on their blog. Yes, that tells exactly how to do that. And hopefully it's very it usually is very easy. It's usually easier on Squarespace and Wix and those things than it is on WordPress. But even on WordPress, it's not, it's not difficult. Yes, so I'm gonna share my screen with you, so kind of see, oh, boy, what I'm talking about.

Meredith: 3:35

I need to put on my glasses back then. Okay, so

Meredith's Husband: 3:38

once you log in to Google Analytics, whatever screen you're looking at, there should be some navigation along the left hand side of the page. In that navigation, there should be a link acquisition. I'm going to click on acquisition, and then that'll open up a dropdown, then click on all traffic, and then click on channels. And this is going to be the screen that you'll want to start with, by the way, this is the page where I always start. When I look at analytics on any This is my starting page. I go straight here all the time. But once you are here, you will see a couple things. In the main portion of the page, you'll see your traffic chart. It'll probably be the last seven days, or 30 days, or whatever dates you're looking at. And then you will see at the bottom a table of data, and that will be, if you're looking at all traffic. There's going to be a few different options here. One of them is going to be organic traffic. So we all we want to look at here is organic traffic, because we want to know how people are getting to our site from Google. So click on organic search, then you will see it'll say keywords, but the keywords are not provided. So you'll probably see something that says, not provided, not set. You might see your own brand name, because often the keywords that Google will provide are is anything related to your brand. So if, if you were looking at this on your site, it might say, like, not provided, you know, a big number of users, not set a smaller number of users, and then it might have like, Meredith's inner Meredith's inner photography. So it will give you your branded keywords. It will not provide the generic keywords, like children's photographer in Brooklyn, if somebody uses that search to find you in Google. Google's not going to tell you that, at least not here, so that information is not available. But that's okay, because that's not what we need today. Okay, so once we are looking at just the organic traffic, there is a few links just beneath the traffic chart. And the text will say primary dimension. And then there'll be a few links. They'll say keyword source, landing page, and other I want you to click on landing page, because we want to know what pages are people actually coming to from Google to visit our site. Okay, what's their what's their landing what are the first page they see? Now this is going to be the data we want, but likely you are looking at probably the last seven days or 30 days or something. So go up to the top right, and there will, there will be a drop a date, drop down, and just select something like the last three months. Okay, when I'm doing this, I typically do the last three months. It's not terribly important. If you have a newer site, or you have a you really don't have much traffic at all, then you can open it up to six months or even longer. But I don't want to go too long in the into the past, because I want to get an accurate idea of what's kind of happening currently. I don't want to look at a year ago, because I'm going to use this to make some some tweaks to my current site. So I want to look at reasonably recent history. So I think the last three months is a good option. And then you can adjust the there's a selection where you can select for the traffic chart, day, week or month. This doesn't really matter. I often look at week, but

Meredith: 6:51

they look like cats. What looks like cats if you go back today, or whatever it was before, yeah, see looks like cats. Cats.

Meredith's Husband: 7:01

Yeah, I don't see that, but I totally trust you. If Yeah, what Meredith is talking about is, when you look at the traffic, the daily traffic, it's going to be a very jagged line. Weekends are usually the low points. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday are the high points. So the traffic, the daily traffic, is going to look like, I think it looks more like shark teeth, which I think you've I think you pointed out before, yeah, it's very jagged. It looks crazy. It looks chaotic. So

Meredith: 7:29

it also looks like, what are those things called? That they in caves, men and men and guides. Do you see if you do it opposite? So the white is the white, right, right. Okay. Do you see it backwards?

Meredith's Husband: 7:42

Meredith, an artist. She has seen things. She's seen cats and cavemen inside cave.

Meredith: 7:48

Cave drippings. What do they call stagnite

Meredith's Husband: 7:52

stalactites? That's what

Meredith: 7:54

they look like. Do you see? So it's the white stalactites, and you're looking down into the blue is the stalagmites? Oh, maybe. Or just the cave that you look through, the white stalagmites. Or,

Meredith's Husband: 8:06

Yes, wow, this is super deep. Regardless if you're looking at daily traffic, it's going to be jagged and looks chaotic, and is, you know, we want to eliminate anything in all chaos. We want to eliminate and we want, yeah, so that's why I look at the weekly if you look at the weekly view, it's going to be a whole lot smoother. And yes, elects for days. For example, you can't compare your website traffic on a Sunday to a Wednesday. Most likely. You can certainly compare this week to last week. It involves, you know, both of those have a Sunday, they both have a Monday, they both have a Tuesday, etc. So that's why I like to at least look at weekly. It just looks more palatable. There's no stalagmites or stalactites,

Meredith: 8:50

no this looks like a wave, clean wave like,

Meredith's Husband: 8:54

yeah, it's a it's a hilly horizon. Okay, so this is the stuff that we want to be looking at. So now in this table, if you scroll down a little bit, you will see a bunch of landing pages. These will be the landing pages in order of the most popular to the least. Oh, okay. Now if you see just a dash here with nothing, that's your homepage. Very often that will be your most popular page or one of the most popular pages. Sometimes it's not. Very often, I have clients who they have a blog page that's way more popular than their homepage right now, Meredith and I are looking at my own blog, okay? And we see it's all my most popular blog pages. How to fix the issue. Pages have a low text to HTML ratio, and then duplicate h1 and then site map, and then hreflang. So I have all like my home page is like my 30th or 40th most popular page. Wow. This, by the way, is was created completely to be a resource blog. So this is intentional. So this is what happens when you, if you can create a blog that is truly a resource, people are going to come into that blog through your individual resources, not not your homepage. That's that. That's kind of what we're looking at. So the next step. So I want you to look at the first page that is not your homepage. Okay, that might be the most popular page. Your homepage might be above it, if you don't have any, if there is nothing other than your homepage, then let then use your homepage. But then we're going to go to this page. We're going to go visit that page. We're. What are we going to pack? What are we

Meredith: 10:36

going to pack when we go visit it? Oh,

Meredith's Husband: 10:38

I don't know. It's a short trip. We don't need to pack anything. Wow. So now that you're looking at this page, try to imagine looking at this page as a user for the first time, which I know is tricky, as the website owner, you probably labored, or perhaps labored over the content to put on this page. You know all about your business. You know what your visitors are supposed to do. You know all of this. So it's try to take that knowledge and just put it on the shelf and look at this page as if you have no you've never seen this before. You have no idea what this is, and I want you to answer three questions. Okay? One, as a user, what am I looking at? Two, what am I supposed to do? Three, what decision do I need to make? That's the kind of the process that a user is going to go through when they open up a new page or a new site for the first time. If a user doesn't know what they're looking at in the first they've said two seconds in the past, I think it's probably more like two tenths of a second, one second. If a user doesn't know immediately what they're looking at, they're frustrated a little bit. Now, you do not want somebody coming to your business for the first time. You don't want their very first impression to be frustration. No, now they're not going to consciously, you know, bank that and say, oh, this person made me frustrated. They might not even realize it, but in that first fraction of a second, if they don't know what they're looking at, they're a tiny bit frustrated, right? So if that's the case, you need to fix that. That's usually nine times out of 10 going to be the headline, the words in the headline, the biggest text on the page, usually at the top of the page. This is all also usually your h1 heading. You got to convey very quickly and very simply what people are looking now, ideally, that would also include your keywords, because if people are coming to this page through Google, they most likely or not, you know, most likely, it's very possible that they did a search for the exact heading that they're now looking in this so in my blog, that is true. Somebody did a search for, you know how to fix or SEMrush issues, pages that have a low text to HTML ratio, and now on the on this page, it my heading is fix capital letters pages have a low text HTML issue, super simple. Then there's a video right beneath it with a play button that answers the second question, What am I supposed to do? Right? So once somebody realizes I'm in the Okay, this, this is what I'm looking at. What am I supposed to do here as a user? What am I? Am I supposed to just read all this text. In this case, there's a big play button. I watched the video is probably the number one. If you don't have a big visual element like that, like a play button, you want to think of action words, headings, text in bold, something that says, you know, read this, watch this. Click here, click here, click here, would be the call to action that's next. But before people that's going to be the decision that people need to make. But before people get to a decision, before they get to your call to action, they need to know what is there, something they're supposed to do. Now, a lot of websites don't really have this. It's just a bunch of text to read. Maybe some images. If that is your page, I want you to think about how you can make it more clear what a user is supposed to do. Maybe that's a subheading. Maybe underneath your heading where it says, you know. So in my case, the heading is fix. Pages have a low text to HTML ratio. Suppose I didn't have a big play button on a video there, maybe a subheading could be read the following to learn how to fix this right, something like that, something so that a user says, Okay, I know where I am. I know what I'm supposed to do. I know the objective of the content of this page. So

Meredith: 14:28

the more hand holding big sign pointing, the better.

Meredith's Husband: 14:33

Yes, guiding, yes. I've said before, you need to treat your visitors like dummies, not because they are dummies, right, but because people don't want to think, at least not right. Now we're surfing. When people are surfing the web, it's not like I, I really want to think about XYZ, so I'll, I'll, uh, I'll go online and surf the web. That doesn't happen, right, at least usually. So the third, number three, the third point to think about. After you've thought, What am I looking at? What am I supposed to do as a user? What decision do I need to make? That is your call to action. So on my particular blog, I actually don't this is just a resource page. There is no particular call to action aside from you can go and look at our other most popular guides. These other most popular guides that I have, by the way, lead to affiliate programs. So I'm guiding the person to what I want them to do. Right as. The website owner. You know, of course, they can, they can do they can do other things. They can go anywhere else in the site. But what I would like them to do, that's the call to action down here at the bottom, they can click on our latest guides. And these, the content on these, I call them the latest guides. They're not actually the latest guides, but those are going to guide them towards a path where I can monetize this site a little bit, but that's what I would prefer. That's why this blog is here. That's why I created this. So

Meredith: 16:00

for photographers, can you give an example of Yes,

Meredith's Husband: 16:04

of what the call to action would be? Yeah, yes. So you're back

Meredith: 16:08

to us, the photographers. Interesting about your site, but as photographers, we also want to know for us, right? Folks,

Meredith's Husband: 16:18

right? So you probably have a button that says, contact us, right? Contact me, or book a session, or schedule a call, or whatever. That's your call to action. Now, if you have a I've and we've talked about this before in the past, too. If you have a call to action that is like, contact us or contact me for contact that, you need to make that better. You need to make your call to action as specific as possible, as to what is going to happen next. If the user clicks that button, if it says, contact us as a user, just, you know, on a very primal level, do I click that button and then you pick up the phone and we're talking? No. Click contact us. Is, is what send you an email? Is it? Schedule a zoom? Is it? Is it? Whatever? Be specific, okay, so that somebody knows exactly what's going to happen and why, and perhaps, you know, you could say, schedule a zoom. That's more specific than contact us. But for what purpose is also important. Usually,

Meredith: 17:24

I would think, though you when you have a contact contact us, you just click and figure out where it's gonna you kind of, you're packed for the ride, right? You know, like, oh, where's this gonna take me? What's the best way

Meredith's Husband: 17:39

is that? Is that the feeling that you want people to have when navigating your site is, oh, let's just see what happens. Probably not, right? You want your call to action to be specific. You also want it to sound valuable. You want people to say, Yeah, I want that. That's what I want.

Meredith: 17:58

Help me make this happen. Click

Meredith's Husband: 18:00

Contact Us is and nobody goes online. It was saying, thinking to themselves, I want to click a Contact Us button, right? What do they want? What do they want when they're on your site? And this is, this is good, because I know you want, you want. You want to think about what people want. So what do they want to book a session? Do they want

Meredith: 18:21

to probably want more information. Yeah, if

Meredith's Husband: 18:26

they're on a page. So remember, people are coming to this page. This is their first experience with your you're looking at this as a user for the first time. So do they want more information? Yeah, if they if, if the biggest call to action on any particular page is for somebody just to get more information, then yeah, have a button that says, learn more about me or something. Yeah, that's a call to action. Yeah, for sure, for sure. That's not your ultimate call to action. And if this is a blog, to be honest, the call to action should not be, contact me if it's a blog. People are coming in and they're just getting acquainted. They're not, you know, they didn't find you because they were looking for a wedding photographer. They're coming to you for probably a very specific search. So the next the call to action from those pages should be, yeah, learn more about me or or check out my work or something like

Meredith: 19:15

that. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Meredith's Husband: 19:18

makes sense, yeah? So on your homepage, if you're looking at your homepage and not a blog page, that's probably different that then the call to action is going to be something like, let's chat about a session or whatever, whatever it is, you know, let's schedule of a 15 minute chat,

Meredith: 19:36

yeah, and take it to the next level.

Meredith's Husband: 19:39

Yes,

Meredith: 19:41

not let's get it on.

Meredith's Husband: 19:44

Let's get it on. No, not that. No, no, we just watched a show. What is it? What did they say on opposite day?

Meredith: 19:53

Yeah, 1015, the greatest show on the planet is

Meredith's Husband: 19:57

pretty funny. You could say, Yeah, by that approach, you could say you could make your contact button don't click here on opposite day. I think you're probably the only one who thought that was funny.

Meredith: 20:13

You're just confused. Yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 20:15

So okay, so once you've done those three things, I want you to go ahead and try to improve those elements on your page. Okay, once you have done that on this page, your most popular page, go back to Google Analytics, go to the next most popular page and do the same thing. Now you may find. And this is usually the case that as you go down those popular landing pages, that there's going to be 1234, maybe more popular landing pages, then there'll be some sort of big drop off, and there'll be some much less popular landing pages, those ones, I would say, don't worry about just try to go through the ones that are the most popular. Okay? And it will usually be, should be pretty obvious what those are. And if you're just starting a site, or you have almost no traffic at all, well then this isn't going to work for you to be

Meredith: 21:07

I'm glad we wasted here the past 20 minutes of

Meredith's Husband: 21:13

your time. Yeah. Sorry

Meredith: 21:18

if that's if that's the case, you bookmark this for when you have had more time, and then come back to it, because it will be necessary. We are

Meredith's Husband: 21:27

going to do an episode very soon, and depending on when you listen to this, it may already be released of what you need to do if you're just beginning, that's a great idea. If you have no traffic at all, that's a great idea. So what I'm gonna do, actually, is I'll go back and I'll put a note in the beginning of this episode, hey, if you have no traffic at all, yes, go listen to a different episode first. Yes,

Meredith: 21:49

I think that that's kind. Thank you so much for listening. We hope that this was helpful, and we hope you are well, yeah. I

Meredith's Husband: 21:57

hope this was helpful. I hope it helped give you a little bit of confidence. I hope that it helped your your bottom line, ideally, what this is going to do is you will get a higher conversion rate so you don't have to worry about getting more traffic to your website. In order to get more leads, this will help get more leads from the people who are already reaching your website, yes, if it helped, let us know on Instagram, if it didn't, try another episode. Thank you, thanks.

Meredith: 22:24

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 drumroll please, yes. Leave a review. Yes, everybody says that. 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'm.