Last week, CEO/Founder of Prebuilt Sites and The BBS Agency, Vincent Wondra, hosted our very first Prebuilt Power Hour on 10 Simple SEO Tricks You Can Use Right Now To Rank Higher on Google.
In this Prebuilt Power Hour, we look at how to rank higher on Google. In the first part of this training, Vince shares 3 free tools that you should be using to find keywords and determine what to write about on your blog based on keyword research and search volume. In the second part of this video, we give actionable tips on how to optimize every blog post that you write on your website using these free tools and SEO best practices so your content actually ranks higher on Google. Watch the video below to catch the full Prebuilt Power Hour free training, or keep reading below for the full transcription.
Vincent Wondra, Founder/CEO of Prebuilt Sites and The BBS Agency
Vince has been building websites since the mid-90s, and has quite the roster of successful client work. Most of his team and clients have been with him for over 5 years, and will continue to work with him for years to come. His knowledge and expertise about running a successful online business is truly unmatched. You don’t want to miss the lessons you will learn from him, as well as our guests.
On the 4th Thursday of every month at 12pm central, join us for Prebuilt Power Hour, where Vince and other industry leaders teach you everything there is to know about building a website and running a successful online business. These power hours are free to attend and the wealth of knowledge that you will gain is invaluable, so be sure to mark these on your calendar and tune in! Members will be able to submit questions ahead of time, and all other questions will be answered live on the air. You don’t want to miss these free trainings!
Speaker: Vincent Wondra
Hello, everybody, my name is Vincent to Wondra. I am the founder of Prebuilt Sites. Thank you for attending the first-ever Prebuilt Power Hour. We’ve started this as a monthly session; we may increase the frequency of it depending on what people are looking for. But the Prebuilt Power Hour is for any of the Prebuilt Sites members to freely ask questions, we’re going to answer them live on the air. And for anybody who’s interested in a Prebuilt Site to attend the meetings, learn a little bit about us and what we do, learn about some of the questions, follow along as we answer the questions live. And if we have time, at the end of the session, we’ll be taking questions.
If you do have any questions or comments during the meeting, if you look at the bottom of the Zoom meeting, there is a chat option. You can type questions directly into there as we go through things. Now, I will warn you, you might be called upon if you have a really good question. I’ll try to answer it live on the air if we have time, and I might have you turn on your video check because we all want to be friends here. If you don’t have your camera on and you want to be part of the community and participate, feel free to turn your camera on so we can see each other. It’s one of the joys of the internet. No matter where we are all located, we could still be face to face with the joy of the internet and video chatting.
Today, we are going to be looking at something that everybody who has a website always wants to know. I’ve been building websites since the mid-90s, through the browser wars through all the changes in technologies, the introduction of mobile devices today, and everybody after they have a question or after they get a website, they always want to know how do I show up on Google? How do I rank on Google? Because everybody wants their website to get found online.
Now, one of the best ways to do it is through blogging on your website. Now everybody’s like, “Oh, man, I don’t want to blog. I got to create this content. I got to write it.” Yeah, it is what it is, but every blog post that you write on your website to share your expertise, and share your knowledge is one more way Google will find you. And if you can commit to writing one blog post a week, at the end of the year, you have 52 new ways for Google to find you on the website. The other advantage (and we will talk about this as we go through our steps) is it also positions you in the online world in the eyes of Google and other search engines. It starts positioning you as an expert and authoritative subject matter, expert and understanding your subject matter very, very well. And if you are perceived by the search engines as having authoritative content, your stuff will rank higher.
But one of the things that people always want to know is what do I write about? How do I know how to write content that is going to rank in Google? And there are some amazing free tools. So, that’s what we’re going to look at today. We’re going to look at two parts.
We’re going to look at number one, how do you know what you should be writing about? And it doesn’t matter what your subject matter is. If you are, say, for example, a health coach, you’re going to want to write about things that you’re going to be coaching people about. In our case, if you are a website developer, we want to be writing and sharing knowledge about internet websites. If you are a car mechanic, you want to be sharing information about how to do auto repairs, or maybe recalls that are going on or things that people need to be aware of. As long as it’s the subject matter related to whatever you are selling or whatever is on your site. So, I’m going to do some screen sharing real quick. Let me know when you can see my screen, you should be looking at Google. Believe it or not, a lot of people default, and they come up here and they type in the address bar whatever they’re searching for. That will not work for this technique. We’re actually going to leverage Google’s autocomplete functionality.
If you notice, as I start typing the word “car” in Google it auto-populates a bunch of options.
Google’s autocomplete, believe it or not, is based on a predictive algorithm.
And based upon you what start typing, Google is looking at their huge database system and going for what this person is starting to type. What are the most common queries that other people are searching for?
So, a good example is, we have a lot of clients who are professional writers, they are writing for other people’s blogs, they are medical writers, they are writing for the hospital intranets, helping them write and convert their information so it can all be positioned online. So, if you are a professional writer, you probably want to write content that’s going to rank high. And if you understand that, you probably want to write articles about that. So, if I start my search query with “how do I write content that …” You can see it auto populate. Write … Content … Oh, now we can see a bunch of autocompletes.
How to write content for my website? How do I write content for a brochure? These are all really common phrases that people are typing into Google, and you can take advantage of this by writing an article that matches with the subject line, with the title, that matches exactly what the search queries are. So, I will write content that converts … I start to write an article about content that converts or content that sells, content that ranks. If I want to sell what … And when I say convert, this is writing content that gets people to do something.
So, if you’re a professional writer who is writing for people’s websites, you want to write content that uses emotion to motivate people. Add urgency, relevancy, clarity. But you can get all this information from Google’s autocompletes, and it will tell you kind of what you should maybe consider writing about.
Because the higher in this autocomplete that a search query shows up as with the autocomplete is going to be based upon how often people are searching for those terms. And you want to give people what they want, particularly when you’re starting out. A lot of people when they’re starting on blogging, particularly in a very niche (however you want to pronounce it) industry, they write very specific content that might not have a lot of search queries, which is good to occasionally intermix that stuff into your blog.
But when you are particularly just starting out, you want to go for the low-hanging fruit, you want to write content that a lot of people are searching for, related to what you do to rank your site faster, and immediately start getting results. Those obscure or less popular searches or topics that you might want to write about are equally as important to set yourself up as an expert, but you also want to make sure you’re mixing in some of the more popular content that everybody’s searching for. So, Google auto-convert, or the autocomplete is free tool number one.
A lot of people don’t realize that this autocomplete … like if I have to rent a house, I can see a bunch of options. So, say I’m a realtor person, I can write articles about how to rent a house with bad credit, or first time, or is this college student or all these. What if you wrote articles, and these were the subjects and the titles of those posts, and you had good posts with it? Chances are they would rank and start getting traffic quicker than something that’s more obscure.
The second tool is another amazing tool by Google called Google Trends. This is particularly a useful tool when you are trying to decide upon the phrasing of a keyword. One of the key things, when you’re writing your blog posts, is to figure out what keyword or keyword phrase you want your article to rank for.
So, for example, and I know we have some health and wellness coaches who are on this call, and we’ve built a lot of health and wellness coaches’ websites, let’s say you specialize in helping people go on the Keto diet (it’s a very popular diet these days) and you want to maybe write a blog post about a Keto recipe, well, that’s where Google Trends comes into play because you can look at a bunch of information regarding that.
So, we’re going to put in “Keto recipe” as a search term, and it’s going to show us over the past 12 months, recently, going back years. But you can change these metrics. You can set to different geographical areas where you want to target. Now, most people on this call, I’m guessing you probably have United States based customers, so leave this as United States. I recommend leave this as 12. You can narrow your search into particular queries.
So, for example, if you’re searching for Keto Recipes, and your beauty and fitness, you might want to narrow this down, but if you’re writing a Keto recipe book, you might want to change this so it’s looking at other keto recipe books in comparison. But for the most part, I just recommend leaving at all categories. And then under web search, if you notice in Google, when you use a do a Google search (I’m just going to quick run a search here) you can also search by video by news by shopping by images. That’s what these options are. If you want to see how popular things are in there, or if you want to see if you’re going to do video, you can also use Google Trends to determine how popular those terms are on YouTube.
Now, let’s go look at … we’re going to go back to the web and we’re going to go I want to write an article about Keto Recipes, but I’m not sure what I want to write on. So, we’ve got Keto recipe to show. By the way, this is just on a scale of zero to 100. The closer to 100, the most popular it is. If you will notice, January, these spikes because it’s New Year’s, and New Year’s resolutions, people are going to get into shape and they’re going to try a new diet, and so you get a spike around January 1. And then people realize dieting is hard and they go back to their ways. That’s just the trend.
But now, let’s look at what type of Keto recipe are people interested in? So, I’m going to throw in several different other terms. We’re going to go Keto steak (I’m pretty sure all steak is Keto) Keto pizza, and we’re going to go Keto bread.
Now, by looking at these different terms, I can see how popular they are. So, I could do an article about Keto steak, but if you look at the numbers, it’s really low, not many people care about Keto Steak because let’s be honest, Keto, it’s solid protein if you’re not adding much to it, your steak is already Keto. But Keto pizza, a lot of people are interested in Keto pizza because pizza is delicious, and you can see how popular that is.
And then the other option we added was Keto bread, and you can see there’s a lot of search interest for Keto bread. So,if this was me, and I was looking for what type of Keto recipe to put on my website, I would start with Keto bread because this has a lot of search interest, and it’s trending in the direction you want it to go.
And for those who are older like me, we have Keto now, and we used to also have the Atkins diet. We’re going to compare the Atkins diet to the Keto diet, and we can see what is the most popular. I know Keto is going to be more. We can just use this as an example. So, if you are talking about stuff, yes, a lot of what’s in the Keto diet used to be called the Atkins diet. If you look, it’s not even close, always refer to it as the Keto diet because that is what get is getting the traffic. I hope this makes sense.
One of the other things that I do recommend, scroll down as you’re doing these searches. You will see other suggestions down here number one. You can see if there is different phrasing that people use in different parts of the country. Now, I’m from Wisconsin, we call a drinking fountain, we call it a bubbler. That’s just what we call it. And you can see the differences in where it’s popular and where it isn’t. We’re also going to call it drinking fountain of bubbler waterfall faucet.
So, you can use this and go, and you can see how popular stuff is, where are its regions. You can see related queries to whatever terms those are. These can give you suggestions as to what you should be writing on. So, Google Trends, it’s a great way, particularly if you’re just looking for what’s the best way to phrase something that you could phrase in multiple different ways. Google will tell you what’s popular, and also the order of the words matters.
And I didn’t touch on this before with the autocomplete as well. The order words show up in a search query, and on the page of the content you’re writing makes a difference. There is a difference between trying to thank Christmas decorations and decorating for Christmas. To Google those, to us as humans, those are kind of the same thing. If it were to Google and search engines and algorithms, it varies depending upon the order you put those words into play. And you may have noticed this when just searching on Google, if you change the order of the words, your search queries change.
So, as you’re going through Google Trends, and you’re like, “I’m not sure how I” or you’re writing your blog post, and you’re like, “I’m not sure how I should phrase something”, come over to Google Trends and type in all the different ways you can think to phrase it, and then I recommend picking the one that has the most interest over time. You’ll be helping your blog posts rank higher.
Also, if you’re just curious about all sorts of things that are going on in the world, Google Trends is just kind of a fun thing to go explore because you can see … Here’s a good example. More people are looking for American football, and then just football depending on geographical areas. You can look at how many people were searching for different things.
You can see, Ukraine, since the end of the year, there’s been a lot more people looking for stuff about the Ukraine. You can come down here to recently trending and see what people are searching about. For example, China is having some cases with the bird flu coming up. You’re seeing more and more searches, so this tells you what people are getting more and more interested in.
And a good SEO tactic is to write about what’s trending because you’re getting ahead of the curve, and you may be able to have articles that are ranking higher before there’s a lot of competition. So, that is tip number two, Google Trends.
The third one is going to require you set up an account. Google Keyword Planner is free, it is also another Google tool. Let me share my screen. And for this one, you need to go to ads.google.com. I need to sign back in, I think I’m signed out. We’re going to go here.
Now, this is the Google ad platform. If you’re going to run ads on Google search, this is the exact same tool you use. How to run ads on Google search is outside the scope by far of what we’ll be able to do in these power hours. I will hopefully be working on an advanced course, which we will have available for people through Prebuilt Sites on how to run your own ads.
For right now, we’re just going to look at the free keyword tool, and you can sign up for Google ads for free, it doesn’t cost you anything. After you sign into it, you’ll be able to get to the keyword research tool. So, I’m going to sign in. I have access to multiple accounts.
You’re going to come here under tools and settings, and you’re going to come here to the keyword planner, and you can click on discover new keywords. So, you’re going to start with keywords based upon what you offer. So, we’re going to go with the Keto pizza as an example. Now, you can use this tool if you don’t have a website yet or if you’re writing on somebody else’s website.
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I do recommend, enter the site of whatever you are writing your content for here because what it will do is it’ll look at the content of your site to see if it matches against what you’ve put in for your keyword, and make sure the subject matter and what you’re writing about match up and give you better keyword suggestions.
However, in this case because we’re just throwing out Keto as an example, we’re just going to start with the keywords, we’re not going to put the website stuff and I’m going to click get results. Now, I can broaden my search and add in a bunch of other terms. And what Google is going to do is spit out different keyword and keyword phrases. And notice the order is important. Because there is a difference between Keto pizza crust, and low carb pizza crust, and almond pizza crust, or pizza crust Keto, which I’m sure is way down here, just depending on how people type those words in.
Here’s what you can really pay attention to, what are the average monthly searches? Because this tells you how often people are googling for those exact keywords. So, if I was going to write, say, a recipe blog post on Keto pizza, I would want to include in the subject or in the title, the words Keto pizza in that order, but the same amount of search queries for say, chicken crust pizza. 10,000 to 200,000 people a month. And if you look, it’s had a real big boost lately. The monthly search volume over the latest month of the previous year, this search query has increased 900%. So, this is something that’s probably trending.
So, if I was reading this and analyzing this, I’d be like, “Okay, well, I was going to write about a Keto pizza recipe, but maybe I should do an article about a chicken crust pizza recipe because it’s got a lot of monthly searches for it and it’s trending.” This is a good base.
Now, look at this one, Keto pizza base. And a Keto pizza base is kind of the exact same as a crust, but because they use the word base instead of crust, it’s gotten very few monthly searches. And over the last three months, that search volume has dropped by 90%. So, this tells you, hey, don’t call it a base, call it a crust.
Same thing if you look at pizza crust versus Keto pizza dough. I don’t even know if that’s going to … here we go Keto pizza dough. So, if I call it Keto pizza dough, 1k to 10k websites, versus crust, 10 times the amount of search volume. So, this tells me I need to call it crust and not base. I need the words in the subject or in the title of my blog post to include Keto pizza crust, and any time I refer to it in the article, I should be writing it as Keto pizza crust. Don’t interchange it with base, just call it Keto pizza crust.
So, these are the three free tools provided by Google that can be used by anybody to figure out what you should be writing about based upon your content, what words you should be using in your content, and how to phrase stuff, as well as give you an idea about how popular this stuff is so you’re writing about things and phrases that people are actually going to search for.
Any questions about that stuff? If you want to drop it into the chat session, let me know. If not, we’re going to continue on to part two, which is now you’ve done the research, how do you write and optimize your blog post so it’s going to actually rank? I’m going to stop from screen sharing because some of the stuff I don’t have the screen share on.
Number one, this is the biggest one for absolutely anybody who wants to get organic search traffic to your website, and by organic search traffic. Somebody is going to Google and typing in whatever you want to rank for. The number one most important thing is to have content on your website related to that keyword phrase. If you don’t have content on your website related to that keyword phrase, Google is not going to rank you for it, and it’s that simple. But writing the blog post in the pages is the intimidating part. A lot of people know they need to do it and they’re like, “I don’t know. I’m not comfortable.” The most important thing is to get started.
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It doesn’t matter if your blog post is 100% perfect or amazing. Share your expertise and get started because the more often you do it, the easier it gets, and you will refine your messaging and you will find your voice. And I recommend talk about what you know, share your expertise, little tips tricks.
Here on Prebuilt Sites, we share a lot of articles that we find that are useful. We’re on the web, and we add our commentary at the top telling you what is the important part of it that we think you should get away from it, or we share information and blog posts on how to do stuff. We tried to anytime we create a new how-to video or something, it’s going to be part of a blog post. This particular Prebuilt Power Hour, we’re going to convert this into a blog post that you’re going see published within this next week. It’s going to be in our blog, it’s going to have the video embedded into it, we’re going to have copy underneath reflecting on what we talked about in this video. But in order to rank for it, you need to write about it and have content on your website.
Start, that is the most important step of any journey is that first step. To do that, start.
Another question people ask related is how long should the article be? 300 words is the bare minimum if you want to rank. Longer is better, but if you said everything that you need to say in 325 words, then publish it with 325 words.
The second thing, and this is a Google rule, but it’s just also a good user experience, the second thing is pictures. Every blog post, and every page of your website in general needs at least one picture. Honestly, it is a ranking metric that Google looks for, they have this thing called schema, it’s in the code of your website that tells Google that this is a page that they should index. And one of the things in that schema that it is always looking for is an image related to that page.
Now, a question we always get is where do I get pictures from? So, you can get your pictures two ways. Well, three ways, but the third way is dangerous. The first one is stock photos. You can go and buy stock photos from a lot of places. They’re typically about 10 bucks a pop. Shutterstock is a really good one. The one we primarily use is called 123 RF, I-stock photos, Adobe photos, there’s a ton of them out there. You can use those, but you have to pay for them.
The second one is your own pictures. If you take a picture with your smartphone, or a camera, if you still have a camera, you can use those as much as you want, they’re free of charge because it only took your time to take that picture and upload it to your website. Not everybody’s comfortable on camera. It doesn’t have to be pictures of you necessarily, though I do recommend people who have their own company, be the face of your company, have your picture out there because you’re who people are doing business with.
One of the things though if you take your own picture, and you’re going to upload it because you need to upload it to your computer first. After you pull it off your smartphone, and you get it on your computer, rename that image. By default, your image will have a generic, randomly generated title like Samsung 1-2-3-4-5-6. Google looks at the title of those images, and it doesn’t know what Samsung 1-2-3-4-5-6 is. But if I would have renamed that something like picture of a delicious Keto pizza crust, Google knows what those words are and what those mean, and Google looks at the title of the image on your blog posts and compares it to the copy to see if the image relates, and if it relates, great, it gives everything a slight boost.
One other thing I do recommend with images, before we talk about the third one, is your images should be resized for the web. Now, if you have a prebuilt site, and you take a high-definition picture with your smartphone, you upload it to your computer and you upload it to your website. We have things built into our websites that will automatically optimize your images for you. It won’t rename the image for you, you have to do that, but it will optimize your image so it’s not so large in file size.
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Smartphones today are incredibly good, I can set my settings to the biggest HD settings I have, download a picture that’s 12,000 pixels by 6000 pixels, super beautiful and gorgeous, but 12,000 pixels by 6000 pixels, look at that image full size, it’s going to be huge, it’s going to be 25 megabytes, which if you just take that image and put that image on your website, if you don’t have automatic image optimization, that web page is going to load incredibly slow.
Non-optimized images are the number one cause of slowness on websites. That’s why at Prebuilt Sites we have something built in that will resize those images and make them small in file size, also bring them down from the 6000 pixels to about 2000 pixels, which should fit on anybody’s monitor and keep your website loading fast. If you don’t have automatic image optimization, talk to your webmasters, maybe they can help you out. Or if you want our help, please reach out to us at Prebuilt Sites and we can help with the image optimization.
The third place to get images is also probably the most risky, and that is looking for public free image sharing places online. There are a lot of them out there. I’m not a fan of them because some of them have actually stock photos that are from somebody else’s site like from Shutterstock or something, and they’re passing them off as free. Or people are using Google’s image search, finding images through that, grabbing those images, pretending it’s theirs, putting them on the website, or putting them on these free sites. If you have an image on your site, and you don’t have a license for it, or if it’s not owned by you, it’s only a matter of time before you get a nasty gram from a lawyer with a cease and desist saying, “You’re using this image, you don’t have rights to it, we’re going to fight. You have to pay us this money for it.”
So, don’t just grab images off the web. There are some free image sites, but what I always say is follow the money. The only free image sites that are great are what are call a freemium service. And a freemium service where … I think iStock photo and Shutterstock have them, I know Adobe does, where you can go get some free stock images from them, they have ads to their paid service all over the place, and it sort of saying “Hey, we’ll give you all these generic free images. But if you want the good stuff, you have to pay us for them.” And that is they give away the free but they really want you to get to the premium. And that’s part of their sales process to get you used to their system, and they’re making money when you upgrade to the premium site.
If you go to a free image site, ask yourself, how do these guys make money? And if you can’t figure out how they’re making money and paying for the bandwidth and the server, where they’re getting the images from, if there’s not a next tear up where people are paying for it, it’s probably a scammy site, don’t take the images from them. Best use your own images, buy stock photos, and you never have to worry about it again.
The next tip, and we talked a little bit about this before is work the keywords that you just did all that research for into the title of the post, into the image titles, into any headings you have on the page, and into the body copy, but don’t do what’s called keyword stuffing. If you’ve been around as long as I’ve been, I’ve been on web pages where people did a technique called keyword stuffing, where you could tell like every other word was just like Keto pizza, Keto pizza crust. I’m using that as an example. “Hey, click here to … Here in this recipe, we’re going to talk about how to create a Keto pizza crust. With a Keto pizza crust you start with blank, and then for the Keto pizza crust you …” You just see that keyword and that phrase repeated throughout the entire webpage. That’s overkill. That technique doesn’t work with Google anymore. It used to which is why you saw it. Google got smart of it. So, incorporate those keywords and those keyword phrases into your copy, but do it naturally. Don’t stuff it all over the place but work it in occasionally just organically.
The next tip I have, and I call it secondary SEO. I’m going to do a little bit of screen sharing again.
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I’m going to go back to this Google AdWords.
So, Keto pizza crust 10k to 100k monthly searches. Chicken pizza crust also has a lot of searches. Keto pizza crust recipe, so just adding the word recipe at the end, doesn’t have as many searches, but it has a lot of them. This is a way you can optimize your stuff twice. If you have the words Keto pizza crust on your article, it’s going to rank and it might show up on one of these 10k to 100k searches. But if you add the word recipe at the end, it doesn’t mean those monthly searches have dropped to the 1k to 10k range because Google looks at the string of characters. So, it views hey, they have the phrase in this order, Keto pizza crust on their website, and maybe you’ve decided to add Keto pizza crust recipe as well. It views this as your website potentially ranking for both of these phrases.
Now, in the title of your blog posts, put in exactly what you want, like Keto pizza crust, or Keto pizza crust recipe. But if you have both phrases, like some places, you call it Keto pizza crust, but in the opening paragraph, you’re like, “Hey, we have this delicious Keto pizza crust recipe” your website is actually ranking for both terms.
And so, you can look at the suggested keywords and go, can I work in any of these other phrases naturally into my article? And you help your article rank not only for your primary keyword, but potentially for some of those alternative ones. Again, don’t keyword stuff, people don’t like keyword stuff, Google doesn’t like keyword stuffing. But if you can work this stuff in, you’ve just increased your chances.
The next step, and this is something that people forget, it’s when you are writing blog posts on your website, link to your own pages on your website, when you are writing a blog post, (I’m going to pull up a prebuilt site) it’s going to open up, this is what it’s like writing a blog post. I’m just going to put in example, blog posts. I have started my blog post, and we’re just going talk about delicious Keto pizza crust recipe. This text editor section here is where you write your blog post. What you should do, I’m just going to grab some placeholder text real quick. So, you need to make sure you link to the other content on your website. So, we’ve written a bunch text, our Keto pizza crust recipe is on the site.
But maybe I mentioned in my blog post, hey, while you’re working on this delicious Keto pizza crust recipe, and if it’s a recipe about Keto pizza, maybe you want to direct people to or you reference, say, some low carb cheese or low-fat cheese and you have an article about that. You want to pick whatever words you have that mention that other thing which you talk about on your website. Highlight it, create a link to that article. If you have a WordPress site, which I hope you do, you can just start typing and it will start to auto-populate and pull up the list of all your other blog posts on the site, making it easy to create that link to your own article. And this is something people forget.
Or when you talk about something on your services page. So, you wellness coaches, if you’re writing an article about how people can live better, maybe it’s fitness, maybe nutrition, and you mentioned, hey, if you want help with this, we can help you by running a discovery session and get this started. You would want that to link to whatever page you have that discovery form on. Make sure you were doing those internal links because part of SEO is helping Google understand what your page or your blog post is about, how that page connects to the other pages of your website.
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And if you have more of those internal links, number one, it makes it easy for people to navigate around your site, but it helps Google understand how things on your website are related to each other, which the better understanding Google has of the quality of the content you have and how it relates to each other, the more you’re going to rise up in the search engine rankings.
Which leads me to my next type of link that you should not ignore, which are called External links. These are links to off-site resources that are good ways to build up your authority. So, for example, this Keto pizza recipe crust, many people don’t know what Keto is, and you know, have a great blog article explaining what keto is and it’s on somebody else’s site, you can go ahead and link to that. And again, it’s linking the exact same way. You pick the word or the words you want to link externally, click on the edit insert link, and put that in.
So, I’m just going to use Google as an example. You go to https, you go to .com come and apply. Now, I’ve linked to that resource. The best way I can equate off-site links is think about when you were back in high school or college, and you were forced to write a research paper, and you had to do all the annotations at the bottom of either your post, or you had to do the annotations at the end of your article, or at the end of your report, and there was this page where it showed where all your sources were and everything else. Well, hyperlinks have for the most part replaced that. So, if you are referencing something, link to it, always linked to it. And it has some added benefits.
Number one, just like adding internal links helps Google understand how all the pages of your site are related to each other. Those External links helps Google understand how you are related to your pages and articles are related to the rest of the internet as a whole. And if you for those external links are linking to other high authority sites, Google views those external links as you might know what you’re talking about because you were only linking to high authority sites. So, for example, webmd.com with your health writer … webmd.com is considered a very high authority site so if you link to an article at webmd.com, Google’s algorithm looks at your article and goes, hey, you reference this high authority site, maybe expertise recognized expertise. As opposed to if you link to something that is of low value, say, for example, you link to a message board, left a comment on a message board, that doesn’t rank high. The link to somebody’s Facebook posts, that doesn’t rank high and those will actually hurt your rankings because you are linking to low authority resources.
And now, the final one, if you’ve been keeping track, this is tip number 10. And we talked a little bit about your expertise and your trustworthiness and stuff. This is all something called Google’s EAT … and link to this article, which I wish I had written because it’s a really good article. It’s been around for a while and it is one of the things Google uses. They say it’s not a ranking metric, but it really is.
EAT stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google wants to serve up high-quality results in its search results. People don’t turn to Google and search engines to read information that doesn’t apply to them or is from people who are not experts, or don’t have any authority.
So, this article and we’re just going to glance through what is EAT. It’s the expertise, the authoritativeness, it’s the trustworthiness, Expertise: How knowledgeable are you about the subject matter? If you’re a health coach, this is where your blog really comes into play. Share your knowledge about what you do. If your focus is on mental health, write articles about mental health. If it’s about physical health, write articles about physical health. Spiritual health, same thing, write articles about that because every one of those articles helps Google understand that you are knowledgeable about that subject matter. The authoritativeness kind of builds with the expertise. The more articles that you have sharing your expertise, the more authoritative you must be because you keep writing about something that you are knowledgeable about.
And the authoritativeness comes into play with the linkings that you’re doing on your website between all your other high authority articles, and the links to the external resources that you are linking to. Also, this is where the authoritativeness really comes into play, is if other sites start linking to your articles. And as you write content, and as you start getting more and more organic traffic, people will start linking to your articles as sources of information for their own writings, as well as you might get reached out to by an off-site SEO company going, “Hey, I loved your article, could you link back to my article?” And you might get those requests, and in those cases, you can often ask them, “Hey, can you link back to me as well?”
Then trustworthiness, this is where a lot of the onsite SEO comes into play, and the technical SEO. How trustworthy is this website? Do you have an SSL certificate? Is your website fully patched? Is it secure? Is there any malware on your website? Are you selling scammy products or not? Things like that. And at Prebuilt Sites, we take care of all that security and all that stuff for you. Because if your site has malware on it, Google doesn’t want you to show up in search engines. If your site and your domain is accused of sending a lot of spam, Google doesn’t want you to show up in search engines. If your website doesn’t have an SSL certificate, which is that little lock icon like you see here, it’s additional security on the server, Google doesn’t want you to show up in search engines.
So, you want to be an expert, you want to be authoritative by having a lot of articles about whatever it is that you sell, or do. And you want to be trustworthy by keeping things safe, secure, and keeping people comfortable.
We are nearing the end of what we’re going to talk about during the Prebuilt Power Hour, but I’m going to share one final thing, and this is something that we build into every single prebuilt site, and it’s a tool called Yoast. Because there are a lot of things that we talked about, for example, how to optimize your article, your pictures, your keywords in various places, the internal links between your pages, links to external resources. It’s a lot to remember. But there are tools that are available for you that we build into our sites. And if you don’t have one of our sites, if you have a WordPress site, this tool is available for free to you, and it’s called Yoast.
And we’re going to look at it just real quickly as to what Yoast does. Now, if you are new or you don’t know what Yoast is, (hang on, I got to move my toolbars so I can get to it) here you go, this is Yoast, SEO for everybody. And they have some premium solutions like the local SEO news and stuff. But they’re Yoast SEO for WordPress, that is the name of their free plugin, we build it into every site we’ve ever built. And if you have a WordPress site and you don’t have it, you can get this installed.
What Yoast does is it lets you type in what you want to rank for. So, I want to rank for Keto pizza crust, as soon as I save my draft it analyzes the content and it tells me how I’m doing based upon Google’s best practices. So, I can look at this and I come down here under SEO. And as you notice, I got the red frowny face. I’m not doing too good. And it shows me I don’t have any outbound links. It’s one of those things we’ve talked about. I’m not linking to somebody off my domain. I don’t have any images on my site. I don’t have any links to internal pages. I haven’t put the key phrase Keto pizza crust in the first paragraph. I haven’t done the meta description and this is what you can type here. Notice, once I start typing it, this is that descriptive text that shows up in Google searches. I can write a short description to get people to hopefully click on the search results. It’s called your meta description. I could be like get great tasting Keto pizza crust recipe today. So, that’s what’s going to show up in Google Search.
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And now, I’m getting a green because I have the key phrase in the meta description. It tells me, as I talked before about, you should have at least 300 words, I’m getting dinged because I only have 32 words. So, you can use Yoast as a reminder and a tool for when you get done writing your blog post as just kind of a checklist. And you just go through these and do what it takes to optimize that on-page post. Now, one thing I do, and if you do really well, this will be all green, if you’re kind of in the middle of the road, he will turn to a straight mouth, kind of like … and he’ll be orange.
And sometimes orange is fine. If you’ve optimized the post as much as you can, you’ve said what you want to say, and for example, maybe it’s only 280 words, you didn’t get to 300 words, that’s okay. Don’t optimize everything to get all green on here. Optimize as much as you can so it’s readable to human beings and we like it. Sometimes if you only focus on getting this all green, you go back and you read the article, I’m going I don’t like the way it’s written anymore because you optimized for the bots. This is just a suggestion. Now, this is a very high-level overview of Yoast.
If you are with us at Prebuilt Sites, after you sign up for us, you get access into the vault. And the vault will walk you through number one, the things we need from you to get your website started, but you also get access to a bunch of free tutorials. And for example, in the basic SEO and website analytics section, we have four video tutorials on how to use Yoast, and walk you through how to use this tool.
And if you want to know about Google Analytics, for example, we have videos on how to understand Google’s Analytics as well. But in this case, we’re talking about on-site SEO. You can follow these videos, they’re very easy to follow along. They’re typically fairly short. This one is only two minutes and 59 seconds, and it will give you the primer on how to use Yoast. We recommend Yoast to be used by everybody. And once you get in the habit of using it to do, you’re on-site, and on-page SEO, you find it takes only about five to 10 minutes, and then your post is optimized. And if you take your site and a competitor’s site, you both write the exact same content, the exact same article, but you take the time to use Yoast to apply Google’s best practices, you will rank higher, because you’ve done what Google wants to make their job easier, and the exact duplicate article that was not optimized will likely not rank any higher.
All right, that is what I wanted to cover with everybody. Today for some free basic SEO tips. Does anybody have any questions about what we’ve talked about? Do you want to learn anything about your website in general, about the internet in general, online marketing, SEO? Have any questions about prebuilt? I’m going to open up the floor to anybody if anybody has any questions. Like I said, the Jeopardy music is going. But if nobody else has any questions, I’m going to be closing out the Prebuilt Power Hour. Oh, I got it from Megan.
“How do I monitor my SEO strategy to see if it’s working overtime?” That’s actually a really good question. There are two primary places we recommend checking. There are a bunch more, but we’re going to look at two of them. I’m going to move my monitor with this screen. So, Megan is asking, how do I know if my SEO strategy is working overtime?
Pull up Google Analytics, which if you have Prebuilt sites, we will add in Google Analytics on your site, you will have access into it. We’re also going to look at another free tool by Google called Google Search Console. I’m going to click sign in. I have access to plenty of sites, I’m going to pull up one of my properties, and I’m going to pull it back actually a personal website of mine.
55:07
I run a website where I post fishing blogs and information about fishing tournaments because I’m a huge fisherman. This is just kind of a passion project. I haven’t done much SEO on this site whatsoever. So, we’re going to use this as an example of honestly, unfortunately, what most business websites look like because they aren’t following these practices. And I’m also going to pull it up in Google Analytics, give me a moment, I got to sign in to the right account and I got to pull up the right website. And it’s still loading.
If you have Google Analytics, now, one of the caveats I’m going to say is I’m on Universal Analytics, there is a new version, Google Analytics that they’re forcing everybody moved to so things will be slightly different. But Google Analytics and Google Search Console are like two sides of the same coin. Google Analytics tells you what people do once they get to the website, and a little bit of where they came from. Google Search Console tells you how people find you through Google.
So, let’s look at this first. In Google Search Console, you will open up and it’ll always look like this. Not only does Google Search Console tell you how people find you on Google, but it’s also a little bit of a health check from a search engine standpoint. If there are errors and problems, it will show you and it will tell you so you can use this to know if you need to adjust some stuff.
Now, let’s go ahead and click on the performance tab because this is the important part. I’m going to go ahead and change the date range to the last 16 months. Google Search Console only stores your data for 16 months. I can look at the total number of clicks. The total number of clicks are how many people found me in search and clicked through me to come back to my website. Total number of impressions are how many times I showed up in Google search. I can enable click CTR, which stands for click-through rate, which means 2.5% of the time that I showed up in search engines, the site showed up in search engines, someone clicked on something. And this is average position. The lower the number here, the better. You want to be as close to one of one as possible because that means your average position for your site no matter what it ranks for. Every website, we do get a lot of traffic or not, you rank for lots of terms. You might just be showing up on pages 50 or 70, or 80. The way you read this average position is my average position is the 23rd page, third result.
Now, Fishnetics, I have a lot more time to spend on this during the winter months than I do during the summer months, and one of the things this site is known for is this is where people go to find and learn about ice fishing tournaments, which is why I have a big spike December through the rest of ice fishing season last year. And if you look at this year, weather starts turning cold, people start searching for all those ice fishing tournaments and I get a really big spike. And then it comes down a little bit as the ice melts. And if you notice, this is an opportunity for me. I’m showing up for a lot of impressions since the ice has melted, but I’m not getting as many clicks. And this is a fault of my own because I haven’t posted open water summer fishing tournaments yet. So, I’m actually missing out on an opportunity here, I got to get stuff up higher.
Now, is your SEO strategy working? This is the part underneath that really helps. These are your queries. These are the queries that people use to type into search. These are the keywords people are using find your website and your website showing up in Google. And I always like to enable average position as well for this search because coming down here it tells me stuff.
Number one, my website rank is on the first … I got this on the first page of Google by doing research with Google Trends to figure out … so I live in Wisconsin, people early in the ice fishing season want to know how fast lakes are making ice so they know if it’s safe to go ice fishing or not.
1:00:00
So, I have on my website a blog post with an ice-making chart that shows if the temperatures are this much, here’s how fast the ice is going to grow on your website. I’m on page one of Google for this term, no matter where you go in the United States because I did the research, and Google Trends is an ice-making chart, an ice growth chart, an ice thickness chart.
Now, if you notice, I rank for all those terms, ice growth chart, ice-making chart, ice thickness chart. I originally was going to call it an ice thickness chart, but if you notice, I show up on page 11.2 for that. But ice making, I’m the first result. If there’s no decimal at it, you own that position. And I also show up on the first page third result down for the ice growth chart.
So, you can use this to get an understanding how people are finding now if you’re a business and you’re just starting out, chances are the majority of these top queries are going to incorporate your company’s name. That’s okay, if you’re just starting out. But ideally, you don’t want to only rank for your company’s name, you want to rank for other search engine metrics.
So, what I recommend when you start an SEO strategy is you come out here, you expand it to at least the first 100 search results, you start looking at the last 28 days at a time, you start going by month, a month, a month, and you look to see if these top queries are changing. Are they changing from your company name to the words and the keyword phrases you want to rank for? Because if your top 20 are being dominated by your company name, your articles are not ranking and doing what they should. You want to start seeing more of those organic search results for other things. That’s Google Search Console. That’s as far as specific keywords go.
The second part, which honestly, overall, a lot of people get focused too much on those individual keywords. Inside of Google Analytics, if you come down here under acquisition, all traffic, and click on channels, this will tell you how people are finding … I’m going to make this a whole lot bigger. We’re going to go back an entire year. And I recommend always changing this from daily because people get hung up on the individual daily spikes to either week or month. Because then you see a much nicer- looking chart.
And you want to then click on organic search. This is if you have a long-term SEO strategy. You should see, no matter how people are finding you, you should see your organic traffic slowly getting better. Because the more keywords you rank for, the more articles you write, the more ways people see you, you should be gradually getting more and more organic traffic, something like this. This is bigger than focusing on an individual keyword and your individual position. Sometimes ranking for one particular article or keyword is very tough. It’s very competitive. But if you write a lot of articles about what you want to rank for, this number comes up. Because at the end of the day, if you are a health and wellness coach, you don’t want to just rank. For people looking for a health and wellness coach, you want to probably also rank for the problems that you solve, be it long-term pain, or health, or family health, or mental health or whatever. And all those individual conditions that are related to it, you want to rank for all that stuff as well. And if you are constantly writing blog posts, and you’re constantly writing new content and you are optimizing it over the long term, you will see this number increase.
SEO is a marathon; it is not a sprint. If you need immediate traffic to your website, social media and paid advertising is two ways to do it. And paid advertising is the only way to guarantee traffic to your website. SEO will have long-term benefits and that’s one of the greatest benefits of writing blog posts on your website. A big mistake we see people make is they say they have something to say, they posted on their Facebook page or their Instagram. Depending on what you say, or things happen, that company could get bought out. Instagram, somebody complains about you to Instagram or Facebook and they can have your posts removed, and then you just lost everything that you just wrote.
1:05:15
Or the company folds or they are under federal investigation or whatever. If it’s your website, you can write whatever you want, and say whatever you want. And so you write that blog post on your website, then you share that blog post to your social media accounts, you share that to your Instagram, you share it to your Facebook, you share it to your Twitter, you share it to whatever you want, that way, if people want to read that whole article, or whatever you wrote, they have to come back to your website, and you just did a little bit of work to drive content back to your website, take that article, share it and make your website the final destination for all that stuff because that helps your overall online visibility.
The more traffic you drive to your website, the greater chances somebody’s going to number one, read that whole article, which increases that time-on-page, which is a metric Google looks at, and also increases the chance they will share that article on social media. If you take 300 words that would have been a Facebook post, and that Facebook post gets shared, you just drove people back … over shared it, you drove people back to your Facebook page. But if you wrote an article and shared that article, and that article gets shared, people will also go back to your Facebook page, which is where it originally was, and they will all be coming back to your website because they want to read the entire article, which then helps you as well.
Are there any other questions before we wrap things up? We’re a little bit over our hour, but I can stick around for a second if we have any more questions. All right, if not, I’m going to thank everybody for attending the first-ever Prebuilt Power Hour. We are going to be getting this video formatted, edited, a transcript of it, and we’re going to get it posted on our blog. Hopefully by the end of the week. The transcript may be falling shortly after that. And if you have any other questions in the meanwhile, or you have any subjects that you would like us to address in the next Prebuilt Power Hour, it is available on our calendar.
I’m more than happy to answer any questions you have whatsoever about the web. I’ve been doing this a long time; you have things that come up like is this a scam or not? I’ll let you know. We’ve actually shared some blog posts this last year about some common online scams, for example. And we’ve had actually some lawyers reach out to us and thank us for sharing the information because they didn’t know what their customers were asking.
So, thank you, everybody. I hope you have a fantastic rest of the week. And depending on where you are in the country, I really hope spring shows up soon. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m really tired of 40-degree weather and 20 mile an hour winds. Thank you, everybody.
Thanks so much to those who joined! Be sure to catch the next Prebuilt Power Hour on Thursday May 26th at 10am PST/11am MST/12pm CST/1pm EST.
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