SEO + Blogs: A Love Story

Ever wondered how SEO really works & why everyone says you should be blogging? The short version: you must include SEO in blogs and you must write blogs for SEO. But there’s more to it than that… In today’s special Valentine’s Day episode, I’m peeling back the curtain on the epic love story between blogging & search engine optimization. You’ll learn how to turn Google into your personal business matchmaker, avoid 1 major SEO mistake, & master blogging best practices. Let’s get to it!

With this episode you’ll be able to:

• Learn why blogs & SEO are a match made in marketing heaven.
• Uncover the biggest mistake bloggers are making in 2024.
• Discover blogging best practices for service providers.

Mentioned Resources:
Threads blog
Jan. Recap Blog
Brain.fm
How to Blog w/ SEO
Who & How to Interview email course
Case Study Training Program

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Transcript

0:13

Hello and welcome back to the Basic Bee Podcast. I am just so touched and honored and grateful that you're here still. It's really nice to create something and to know that people are continuing to comment new people and OGs, I mean even though this thing only launched a few weeks ago, it just means a lot. So I'm really glad that you're here. Whether you are watching this on video or listening to this on your favorite podcast player. which by the way, it would really help me reach more people like you, more business owners like you. If you would at least follow the show, subscribe if you're on YouTube. And if you rate it or leave a review, that's just like super extra brownie points. I really appreciate it. Also want to mention, because I want you to take advantage of this, in the footer or somewhere in the show notes, there is a submit a question or ask a question form. Don't forget that because I am going to figure out exactly what it's going to look like, but I'm going to answer those questions on upcoming podcast episodes. So I don't want you to miss that opportunity to ask a question and get your question answered, whether it's about SEO or storytelling or social proof. And that could be testimonials or case studies. So I just want you to know that. Okay. Now for today, being that it's Valentine's Day. I wanted to do something kind of cutesy because it's just how I am. Like I think I've been trying to figure out why this is the way it is for me, like why I am this way. And I think it has to do with me being a Libra rising. Like I just need things to be cutesy, including podcast topics and titles and pages and all of that. So today we're going to be talking about SEO and blogs, a love story. Because they love each other and they support each other and they care for each other and they really need each other. I think I might be taking this a little too far, but we constantly hear people talking about SEO and blogs and blogs and SEO and everywhere you turn around, it's like, is blogging still a thing? Yes, blogging is still a thing. Do you really need SEO in your blog? Yeah, you kind of do. Like it's there. You have the spots. You have the opportunities. I've mentioned this before and I'm going to keep harping on it. That SEO is basically extra credit when you're a business owner. So why not just go ahead and be really intentional with the words that you're using and being really strategic with where you are putting those words and the type of marketing that you're doing and marketing plan that you have. So yes, SEO and blogs, they go together like peanut butter and jelly, or if you're allergic to peanut butter, they go together. You know what, they go together like peanut butter and chocolate, but again, that has peanut butter. I'm just gonna move along. So... SEO and blogs work so well together because in order to improve your SEO ranking and your just SEO statistics all around, you need to be putting out content, long form content. Blogs really being like the main thing. Of course you have YouTube with videos and that's like the second largest search engine and that's another great place and that's another obviously like typically long form content spot. But SEO really needs that content, that long lasting content to be out there to be informing the search engine so that search engines can then inform the humans and put these things, these articles and blogs in the search results. And in order to work well, blogs need to have SEO in there. It needs to be part of the strategy. So it's this whole, I don't think the picture that's coming to mind is like the chicken and the egg. But I really don't think that's the, but it feels circular. You know what it kind of feels like is, what it's reminding me of is there's a picture where a snake is in a circle and the snake is eating its tail. That's what it makes me think of. But SEO needs blogs, blogs needs SEO. So it really is truly a love story and a partnership that is just like of epic organic marketing proportions. So. If we get into, let me get into some of this other stuff for you. Let me define SEO because I have done this before in podcasts, but I don't really think I've done this before with this podcast. So SEO in case you don't know. And in case I just been talking above your head this whole time, I'm very sorry, but SEO stands for search engine optimization. And the way that I like to explain it to people is that SEO is how you show up as the answer to a Google's question. So someone is over there click clackety away over on their keyboard on Google or Bing or whatever search engine, even on a podcast player, hello, that might be how you ended up here. People are typing in questions and they want answers. So you maybe were very brilliant and put together a blog and your blog is now that answer. That is how SEO truly works. It actually worked pretty well for me to use that example. the last phone call I had with my grandma who was 90 and she was curious about what my work is and what I do for people. I was like, well, you know how you'll go to Google, you'll be on your phone, you'll be on the computer and you have a question and you type something in there and then a whole bunch of options show up. She's like, yeah, I help people be those options that show up. So if my 90 year old grandmother can grasp that. you got this. Like that is what SEO is and that is what it does when you place certain keywords in strategic places throughout your blog and throughout your blogs plural. Because this isn't like a one and done type thing, my friend. Like we're going to get so I'm going to get so carried away on this. It's not a one and done thing. SEO works for individual blogs, but it also works for your whole blog strategy. All right, let me get into some other stuff for you. So again, Just to reiterate, your goal is to include SEO in your blogs and to write blogs for your SEO. Okay, I'm probably going to say that a few times, obviously. So that is what SEO is. Search engine optimization. And it's you could do it either way. You could start out with an SEO strategy in mind and then craft a blog. Or maybe you're hearing me talk about this stuff and you're like, I have a whole bunch of blogs, but I have not put SEO into them. You can go back and optimize them. And I think I have a few things that I'm going to share with you where it is about going back and optimizing them. So that is SEO. That is your crash course in SEO. Now is your crash course in blogs. So I wanted to share, I want to share with you what I remember about like the early days of blogging, if you will. I really remember. If I think about blogging. And I think about like the OG blogs, like the ones that were like there and you were like, oh, that's what a blog is. I remember photographers who were documenting. So I actually wanted to be a photographer before I became a copywriter, before I became a massage therapist. I was signed up for a photography class at a community college. The class was canceled due to lack of enrollment, but I still had a camera and I still had the books that I bought, including Canon T2i for Dummies. Yes, your girl had that. So we're gonna come back to that. But I was so interested in becoming a photographer and I found Jasmine Starr, I found Cole Gorman of Blessed Photography, and he ended up taking some of my, actually my very first headshots as a massage therapist, but also some family photos for us. But I and Tamara Lackey, and then I met her at her coffee shop in Chapel Hill and I freaked out silently, quietly to myself because I didn't wanna make a scene. But I remember these photographers. and their blogs. Why? I remember reading the stories. It wasn't just the pictures. The pictures of course were gorgeous and they pulled me in and I wanted to understand like, oh the rule of thirds and golden hour light and this and that. Like of course I wanted to know that. But the story really pulled me in. The blogs were there. The words needed to be there in order to get to the search engine. I could have, I'm probably going to like talk over your head for a hot second, but I could have just found their images. on through a search. So I don't know if you've ever noticed this before. This is total tangent time over here, but if you go and you do a search on Google, you have that option for all. You have, I think you even have like shopping and videos and all that kind of stuff now, but there is an images tab. If you click to that, you can actually just have a search full of images, and that is how some people like to search. So yes, photographers could have had that happen. People... you know, cook, home cooks who were sharing their recipes back in the day and now often have their images ranking for these keywords. So what is my point here? My point is that I remember the first bloggers, the early bloggers that I was paying attention to being photographers or having recipes where I wanted to learn how to cook something. So I was looking at these two different types of blogs and I told you I was going to circle back to this camera situation and the Canon T2i Dummies book, I started a blog. I think it was called Girl Meets Camera. I believe it's still out there. It's a WordPress site. So when my class was canceled, I had seen again, I had been following these other photographers, these legit photographers, and I had been seeing their work and I had been looking at their blogs. I absolutely loved it and I challenged myself. I think it was a full year and I'm pretty sure I went the full year. I was like, I have this camera, I want to know how to use it, I have this book, I love going out on little adventures, let me just take myself out on some adventures and create a blog. So I did. My goal, my task for myself, my challenge was every single day I was going to go out and take pictures and then that was going to be my blog for the day. And I remember doing it. I think I also was like a brand new iPhone owner. So I remember saying like, oh, this phone was this phone. This picture was taken on my iPhone. This one was taken with my Canon T2i. And I felt so fancy saying that. So I very much remember doing that. And it was good. It was a good practice, not only for my photography skills, which did improve. And I'm actually really proud of them. I was like a big fan of macro photography. And if you don't know what that is, like. If you have a dog, you like zoom in on their nose, you zoom in on their paws. Like that was me. And yes, I have pictures of Jack's paw and his nose and my cat Moonlight as well. So that was what I really loved. And I liked being able to, I didn't really care if people were reading the blog at that point because it was just for personal documentation sort of. And I was like, oh, maybe, maybe someone will like want to meet up and like go take pictures together or maybe someone will like have pointers for me. Maybe I'll meet friends and I do actually think that ended up gaining me a few friends. It was fun though and it was a challenge and I stuck to it and I loved writing. I've always loved writing and it really helped me improve my writing. So that was really amazing. But that was for personal just for funsies. For business, I need it to be very different. So I had the massage practice and now I'm doing copywriting. So now I really need to be strategic with. making sure I'm putting out content that is going to draw in the right people. I want people to be finding me who are service providers, who are business owners, who are, can relate to this entrepreneur journey. It's cool if they are solopreneurs and they're wearing all of the hats, you know, if they're another copywriter just like me and they're like, I'm doing all of the things. What do I need to know about marketing? How can I bring in SEO into my world? What do I do about testimonials? Oh my gosh, I don't feel like the strongest storyteller. How can I leave that? I want my blog to be a resource for them. So that is my goal. So that is the type of content that I want to be putting out and I am. So that's why business owners really should be considering a blog and, and. I said this on another podcast. I like repeating myself because that means that the message is going to land at some point. If you are considering having a blog, you need to do that on your website. Medium and sub stack do not need your SEO juice. Your website needs your SEO juice. Okay? Capiche? So that is what we are going to do. You're going to be writing a blog for your website, not for medium, not for sub stack, not for whatever else there is. I don't even know because I'm just like, it's not important. your website, you, your business, that is where the blog needs to be because we want traffic coming to you. You're writing this stuff, you're putting in the time and effort and energy and possibly money. So I want you to be getting rewarded for it. If you're putting it over on Medium, you're not necessarily getting rewarded for it. I don't know how all this stuff works, but you just need to put it on your site. Just trust me. Okay. I will jump off my soapbox. So by blogging, you'll remember possibly that I've talked about this three step approach to SEO So you've got any kind of errors with SEO issues or SEO errors that you want to address those. You also then want to be publishing blogs. And then the third thing is getting backlinks. So by publishing blogs, you're tackling one of those really critical pillars of pieces of the triangle situation, if you will, of your SEO. You're putting out that content. Search engines are like, oh, cool. This is what you do. Sweet. Oh, hey, look, this person is looking for this thing. Oh, this would be the perfect blog to put in front of them. and then it does that and the more humans interact with that and search engines see that people hang out on there. So the time spent on that blog is quite large. They're like hanging out over there and maybe they're bouncing between different blog posts. That indicates to search engines, oh, this person is trustworthy. People like what they have to say like, okay, cool, we want to send, we want to send more people here and that's how you improve your ranking. Also back to backlinks. business owner or another blogger sees your blog and they want to then link to you, that is also going to give you SEO juice and that is going to improve your ranking and help you get more eyes on that blog and therefore your business and your services and help you make money. So those are just two, those are just two of the things that you can do. I don't want to overwhelm you with all the things, but that is just some of the ways that blogs are supporting your SEO, practically speaking. So before we... exit here. I want to give you a few best practices for blogs and for blogging with and for SEO. This first one is the biggest, it usually just generates the biggest sigh of relief from business owners who don't love blogging or who feel like they have to put, you know, set aside so much time to blog. All right, so you ready? Okay, okay. If you're sitting down, I'm proud, I'm proud, I'm happy for you. When you're blogging... Just aim for 500 words, a 500 word minimum. Yeah, you've heard other people talking about 2,000 words and 3,000 word blogs, and sure that's good, but also really what you need to be doing with your blogs, especially since Google came out with their helpful content update, is you need to be helping people. If you can do that in 500 words, amazing. If you can get a blog out a week, one blog per week with 500 words, Great! The more content you put out, the more search engines are going to be able to be like, oh, again, oh, this is what you do. Oh, this person is looking for that. Check that out! And then Google gets to become like this like magical matchmaker online. But you have to be putting out the content. It can't do anything if you're not putting out the content or even going back and optimizing your existing blog content. So aim for 500 words. I did that. Of course, I am me and I just like got stuck in this zone and I was so happy and I just like kept writing. So I aimed for 500 word blog the other day and I think it ended up like around 1100 words. But just aim for 500. If you write more, cool. If 500 is sufficient, amazing. But let that be enough, my friend. Let that be enough because it is. The other thing that you want to do with your blogs, especially when you're blogging with SEO in mind. There's something called EEAT. And these are the four things that you ideally really want to have in each of your blogs, because this really separates you from the AI-generated content that's out there in the world. Because no, AI is not going anywhere. But neither are humans. Like, we're still here. We're still writing things. We still have these things that I'm going to list for you. So EEAT, just make sure these four elements are in your blogs, and you'll be good to go. It stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. If you can weave in your story, if you can talk about the results you got for clients, if you can sprinkle in testimonials, all of those things are gonna play very nicely with the keywords and therefore help get more of that, you know, warm to hot traffic, those right fit clients, those right eyeballs on your blog. And it's going to really hit home for those people. That's where we see more of those conversions happening. And conversions don't just mean, that doesn't just indicate money. That could be a podcast listener. That could be someone sending you a referral. You never know who's looking at your blog. They might have, you know, maybe their kid has signed up for a course and like this thing that you wrote helps them understand that topic better. I don't know, that was not a good example, but you never know. You never know. who's reading your blog. You never know who's stumbling onto your website. So the goal is always just like, be clear, be concise, show your personality, but really let someone know who you help, how you help them, and like what you're really known for. And that is really encompassed in that E-E-A-T, I don't know the word to use there. E-E-A-T, acronym? We're gonna go with acronym. If I'm wrong, don't come at me. A couple other things. There are different types of blogs. I have a very short list in front of my eyes for you so that I can read that off. List, you can create a list of, you know, maybe, actually I did do this and I'll link it. There was a thread, a threads thread, a thread on threads. There was a thread on threads that was talking about like naming a podcast. I ended up turning that into a blog on my website. I gave all those people backlinks. You're welcome. It was fun. Like I love. I love spreading the word. I love generating connections. Like, it was fun. It was a really fun project for me to go and do that. It's a list of podcasts. I don't listen to all of them. I don't know all of these people. But it was a fun thing to do after people connected on this thread. So I was like, this was really cool. Let me just put this together in a blog. And I want to say that did come in around 500 words. So you might have a list blog. You might put case studies on your blog. Please put case studies on your blog. Please, it will help your business, it will help you, it will help your clients. It's just, they're just amazing. So put case studies on there. You might have a how-to blog. You might have resources. Maybe I would go and write an entire blog about how to use the SEO basics checklist. And then the call to action would be, hey, download the SEO basics checklist. You might have a recap blog. And I have an excellent example of this because my podcast producer, Leah Bryant, gave me this idea. I think it was in her Facebook group, I believe, and she talked about like, oh hey, you could put out like a recap of all the podcasts you did in January. I am so going to be doing this for the rest of the year. It was the easiest thing to generate. And now that I did that once, I can go through February and be like adding to this blog. And then once the end of February, once March rolls around, I can just make it go live. So I'm going to link that. I'm very proud of that one. It was really fun. But any kind of like recap, or even if it's just like... recap of your life or maybe you've been out of public view for a little bit and if you want to share any of that with people it could be a recap it could be a recap of a launch you did it could be anything recap it recap is the is the overarching theme of that one and of course you could just be optimizing an existing blog if there was no seo strategy in place for it is an amazing opportunity to go back and like fiddle with it and create that seo strategy for that blog and the lifespan, the impact it's going to have on that blog and that lifespan of that blog, it's just incredible. So I can't overstate that enough. You can create a blog one of two ways. You can either have an idea and do the SER research to support that idea and then draft the blog and publish it. Or if you don't have a blog idea and you're like, I don't even know what to write about. Go do some keyword research and as you're doing your keyword research, you will notice different blog ideas. I do this for my clients and I, there is not a single time I have gone through and done keyword research and I have not come, come out the other side with like at least five blog ideas. Look at that. People also ask section, look at the bottom, what used to be the bottom of the page. Google now has this infinite scroll. They caught on to what we do. They caught on to the fact that we go and scroll TikTok and scroll Instagram. And they're like, oh, we could do that for search results pages. And so they did. But still, at the bottom, you'll see these bubbles, these gray bubbles, again, what used to be the bottom of page one. And it will have that keyword phrased differently. Often, there are questions that people are looking for. So that's another place to catch it, catch ideas. You could also just see what other titles of other blog posts are popping up. you will get inspired. There are some really cool ways to get inspired. And I'm not saying go take the exact same title and write the exact same article. You don't want to do that. If the title overlaps a good bit, totally fine. If you are writing the identical article, that's not fine, but you can get inspiration from looking at headlines and all that kind of stuff. And then the last best practice that I have listed is that once you publish the blog, it's live, it's out there on the internet, you think. you need to go and index that blog page blog post. I got tongue tied there. My brain didn't know what it wanted to say. You want to index that blog on Google Search Console. So if that sounds like a bunch of gibberish, I can't remember if I already have this tutorial out or not. But the good news is this is one of those things that sounds really complicated, but is actually really simple that I walk you through in the 10 day email course that I have all about. how to write blogs with SEO. That is going live, like we're starting on February 19th. So it's coming up soon. There's gonna be spots like we're pretty much not capped. So come join us. You're going to get all kinds of things. You're gonna get templates and resources and video trainings. I'm actually gonna redo quite a lot, if not all of the video trainings this go around because I was noticing the audio quality wasn't quite so awesome. So I'm gonna be doing that. And... This includes a live Zoom call with me, Q&A session slash hot seat coaching at the end. So the whole goal is that you go through this process, you go through the email course and you come out the other side either by taking what I've shown you and optimizing an existing blog or cranking out a brand new blog from scratch. You can do either one. So this is totally doable. It's only 10 days. Everything when you get the email in your inbox, it says in the subject line how long the task is going to take Most of the days are 10 to 15 minutes max There are obviously you're writing a blog. There are a few days. I think there's only two days or it's 30 minutes That I recommend you carve out And I have a fun new resource to throw in there because I've been using this brain.fm That's like brain by neural beats kind of thing. It is helping me to be super productive So I'm going to make sure that's over there. Yes, it's an affiliate link. You could go just type in brain.fm if you want to. It is amazing. I think if you do it from their website, you get two weeks, maybe two weeks, one week, one or two weeks of a free trial. If you use this affiliate link that I have, you get a month free trial. I don't care what you do. It is amazing. I love it. Go get it somehow. And you don't even have to be in the course to do that. I know that there's a link down in the footer in the show notes of this episode. So, and in all of the episodes, I have it in the footer. But it's quite incredible to help you just like stay in that like creative flow and just write a really incredible blog or do keyword research and then go back and optimize your blog because now you have an SEO strategy. So I really hope this was helpful. I hope you can see how SEO supports blogs and blogging supports SEO and you can just see their symbiotic relationship. Symbiotic, symbiotic, however you want to say it. I don't care. They're amazing. They love each other. Like I said, this is a love story. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you have any questions, you can of course come find me on Instagram, say hi. I'm over on LinkedIn as well. You can submit a question, like I mentioned, that again, that should be somewhere in the footer in the show notes description or in the video description, wherever you are. And if you can't find it, just come say hi on Instagram and I will make sure that you get that link. But again, thank you so much for being here. I really hope this was helpful and I'll see you next time.