Next-Level SEO Strategies w/ Laura Jawad

Admittedly, I’m not the best at keeping up with all of the changes in the SEO world as they unfold. In just the last year, there have been Google updates, AI has taken off, & so much more. My happy place is in supporting CEO’s as they solidify their SEO basics, which is why I’m so grateful to have SEO pros like Laura Jawad around me! Laura joins me to share how generative AI is reshaping the SEO landscape, what we need to be paying attention to with user engagement, the importance of a robust digital ecosystem, & where to go once you’ve taken care of those SEO basics on your site. You’re not gonna want to miss this jam-packed conversation!

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Transcript

0:05

Welcome back to the Basic Bee Podcast. I'm thrilled to have you here and I'm joined by my friend Laura Jawad. And we're going to be talking about SEO beyond just keywords and backlinks. So obviously that's important, that's foundational. But then what do you do after that? That's what we're going to get into. Before I bring her on. Here is a quick intro for you. As an SEO strategist for female service providers and female founded small businesses, Laura Jawad helps entrepreneurs attract more clients through the power of their websites. Laura built two successful businesses through SEO, demonstrating firsthand the transformative power of well executed SEO in competitive markets. Armed with a PhD and a deep passion for helping women owned businesses thrive, Laura is the go to expert if you're ready to make your website the hardest working member of your marketing team. When Laura isn't creating SEO magic, you can find her working out in her basement gym, crocheting amigurumi, or reading books to her kiddos. Laura. Hi, friend. Hey. Thanks so much for having me. I'm so happy to see your face again. I know. I was thinking this morning that it's been probably about a year since we've been like face to face on a video call. Yeah. Like, I don't think we do it unless we're recording a podcast, which is silly. We kind of don't. But we have Voxer. We always have Voxer. Yeah. Thank God for Voxer. Yeah. All right, I'm going to ask you the question I ask everyone and then we'll get into this, like, expanded SEO conversation. You ready? All right. Which do you believe is the most important for sales? SEO, storytelling or social proof? I think that things work together in synergy. Right. I think you need well rounded marketing. I mean, storytelling can exist without SEO. Right. I think SEO requires storytelling and social proof. That's a good way to think of it. So I'm going to say SEO because I think it encompasses all of the things. That's my answer. I love your answer. And I'm not surprised at all because you're an SEO strategist. Yeah. Well, I think the other two are really important as well. And that's why I'm like, I don't think that you can do SEO without these other things. Like, they're all important. Yeah. And what happens if you pick all three is that you get a gold star. Because I feel like there's no right answer. But that's my favorite answer. And that's obviously why I talk about all three on the podcast. Yeah. So why don't you catch us up with everything that has transpired with SEO in the last little bit of time? Because I feel like you're more tapped into that because I am so over here with the basics and helping my clients get that set up. So take us on the little journey that SEO has taken over the last few years. Yeah, SEO foundations are always going to be foundational. And so when I say SEO foundations, I'm talking about the keywords and content, which I know is where, you know, you really thrive. Backlinks and tech. Right, those things are always going to be foundational. But you know, essentially with like the influx of all the low quality AI generated content that has flooded Google's index, like with the rise of large language models, ChatGPT, et cetera, they're really working hard to come up with new ways to serve content that is written by human, expert, authoritative authors that deserve to be writing the content and to serve content that is truly useful to the searchers. You know, I think we sometimes lose sight of the fact that when we're doing SEO, we're really thinking about like the searcher behind the click. That's Google's goal, right, Is to provide the searcher with what they want. So they've been trying to come up with better ways to basically wade through all this low quality content. They can't index and process it all. And we'll go through some of the things that they are trying and it's been hit or miss, right? It hasn't all hit, but there are, for example, eat, which some of your listeners might have heard of. It's not an official ranking factor. It's not even a set of signals. It's basically guidelines they give their human quality raters to evaluate content. And it stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Right. They're trying to promote content that exemplifies those characteristics. And on the tech side, they're trying to align their algorithms to serve up content that their human raters view as having high eat. They are implementing updates to their algorithm. A lot of folks might be familiar with the helpful content update that got issued in September 2023 that was actually pretty brutal for a lot of small businesses and small websites. And so a lot of your listeners like may have been impacted, I was impacted from strongly by that. A lot of folks may have been impacted by that, but they're definitely promoting more and more content that is produced by larger brands. So brand reputation is becoming more important as they're trying to again, ensure that they're promoting content by real people, like, they trust brands. And then also looking at user engagement signals, you know, and trying to determine, like, how content is helpful. They're looking at more and more user engagement signals, how people behave once they're on the website. So it's not just enough to get the traffic, but then what's the traffic doing on the website? I think I've brought up the helpful content update, but just meaning, are you actually writing something that someone is finding useful once they get to it? And then like, you're saying, beyond that, what's the user doing? Are they sticking around on your website? Are they signing up for something or are they dipping out after that? Yeah, so let's go with that for a little bit. What other user engagement signs did I maybe miss over? Or are we seeing matter a little bit more right now? Yeah, I mean, there's an obvious one which is like click through rate from the serps, right? Like, that's the first user engagement signal. But then Google is tracking, as best they can, how long people are actually spending on the site, how far down the page they're scrolling, whether they're clicking to continue their journey through the site. They're not tracking conversion in the sense of like, are they buying something? Or they don't know what the buttons do, but they're looking to see if people are active on the page once they get there, or are they just like hopping over and going, no, and going back to the search engine results and looking for a better result? If you think about your own behavior when you do a search, you probably do end up doing that, because maybe it's a hit or miss when you land on an article. Maybe it didn't quite answer your question. Maybe you had to go to a second or possibly even a third thing to figure out whatever you wanted to figure out. I'm thinking specifically last night I was looking up, like, cooking instructions for Brussels sprouts because I totally didn't budget my time properly, so I couldn't put them in the oven like I normally do. So I'm like, all right, what do I have to do on the stovetop? Is this even possible? So I looked up a few different recipes just to figure out which one I wanted to do and which ones I had the ingredients for and all of that kind of stuff. So it could be something as innocent in air quotes as a search like that, or it could be. I'm wanting to learn more about SEO. I go to this article, it's maybe too jargony for me and I don't understand it. So then I have to go over to this one. Still kind of jargony. So just even like start noticing what your own behavior is as you're doing a search, clicking over to something and then what are you doing beyond that? And then too, I want to mention I like using hotjar for a heat map. Do you use anything like that? I have hotjar installed on my website. I haven't done a lot with it. I think that's definitely like a next level tool to evaluate engagement on your site and to fine tune engagement on your site. So I think like once you are getting some traffic, once you feel good about, you know, that top layer of SEO, I think then going and looking at some of these more analytical tools is a great step. It's probably not people's like first line because I find people still need like buttons above the fold. Right? Yeah. So there's some stuff that we can look at even before we start getting that fancy to just evaluate like how likely is it that someone is going to stay on page convert before we get to that point. But I love the idea of hotjar. I'm excited to like further my Hot Jar journey. I'm just collecting data now. Yeah, it's cool to go in even if you're still kind of like newer to SEO. But you want to understand even some of the stuff that we're talking about, like user engagement and just to see what your users are doing right now. That's a really fun tool and it's free. I'll make sure the link is below. But it's a cool thing to look at from your side of the website. Just like monitoring and being aware of your own search engagement can be how you can almost put yourself in the shoes of the person who might end up on your website. You might want to explain just what it does. People might not know what hotjar does. Yeah. So hotjar, it's a heat map. It can show you what user behavior is on your website. So like Laura was mentioning, how far down are people scrolling? It'll show you that. It'll show what buttons they're clicking on, if any buttons are cold so like no one's clicking on them or which ones are really hot. Like there's a lot of clicks happening on that button. Um, so that's one thing you get to see. You also get to see are people like we were talking about jumping on your website, looking at the top, jumping away. Are they on different blogs and they're actually hanging out on the blogs, watching the video, maybe reading everything, clicking over to another blog. Like what is their behavior on your website? And you get to see that with this really cool color coded map. And you can watch videos, right? You can watch videos of individual users. Feels a little bit creepy, but it's kind of cool. Yeah. Oh, I'm here for it. I love it. It's pretty neat. You also mentioned brand recognition being really important. Yeah. So let's go there. Like what are you seeing? What can you tell us about that? So there was this article that came out, it was in the last year. I don't know if you saw this. I think HelloFresh was the publisher. But they analyzed like the top 10 search results for like 200,000 searches and found they were overwhelmingly owned by the same 16 companies. I mean they own probably hundreds of brands, but those brands dominate search results overwhelmingly. Well, like I'm not going to go head to head with like Healthline. I think we can learn some stuff from that. And so some of the things that Google looks at with respect to brand are one, branded searches. So how many people are searching for your name or your brand directly or your branded products? That's a huge signal to Google about your brand. You know, second is like a multi platform presence. Like do you have socials? Are you active on socials or are you active on YouTube? Are you active, you know, your podcast? But like are you active in other places other than your website? Because real people, real brands are active in places other than their website. Right? It's reviews on your website or on third party review sites, media mentions, your appearances as a guest on podcasts. It's essentially your online ecosystem. Right. And the broader that is, the more consistent that is, the more you're going to look like a real brand. I feel like I've kind of done this backwards because I did do a lot of the podcast guesting, I did do a lot of being on my own podcast, making sure I had an online footprint. And then I was like, oh yeah, I need to make sure that my website SEO is good. So I almost feel like I did this in the complete reverse order. Yeah, obviously I encourage people to start with the website because when I think of an online ecosystem, like the website is the hub. To me, it's like a hub and spoke model. Right. The website is the hub. And then all these other platforms extend from the website and you should have links from your website to the other properties in your ecosystem. And you should always be referring back to your website and asking people for links back to your website. Not necessarily the other. The other properties in your ecosystem. Right. So to build that as an example, when I go on a podcast, I would want someone linking to my website for sure. And then if they do Instagram or the podcast, that's just kind of a bonus. But I really want them linking to my website. Yeah, that's what you're meaning by, like, other properties. Yeah. And if I was you, I would be asking your guests to link to the show notes on your website as opposed to linking to the Apple Podcast player directly. Yeah. You know, I have like a media page on my website, and when I link to this episode, I'll link to your website. And I always do that as a courtesy. That's the place where you want to be driving traffic. Yeah. And that definitely helps make you look like a really great podcast guest, too. And that's one thing. That's why I make sure that I blog about every single podcast episode, because I want to share that link where I have the audio embedded, and eventually I'll have videos embedded there too. But I want that to be the piece that's ranking, not the Apple Podcast link, not the Spotify link. Yeah. And you have your subscribe links there. Like, everything is there. So if someone gets to that and they want to listen to in their Apple Podcast player, if someone took the trouble to click over to your website, they can take the trouble to, like, make one more click over to the Apple Podcast player. It's so beneficial for your SEO. It's almost like we want to route people to our website first. Like, go to the website and then go check out these other things. Yeah. It should be the hub. Something that. It's like a little pet peeve of mine is when I listen to, like, PR experts talking about how, like, all these PR opportunities are, like, great for your SEO and it's the only thing they ever say about SEO. And I'm like, it's great for your SEO if you have an optimized website. If you don't have an optimized website, those links aren't going to do anything for your website SEO. Yeah, it's like lipstick on a pig. In order for these things to really help your website, your website has to be, well, optimized in the first place. And so then we can full circle this conversation back to those SEO fundamentals. Those have to be in place. And then you can work on all this branding. You can make sure your user engagement is in check. And that will really Take the extra bit. I was at Mozcon earlier this year, which was so cool, and I heard a terrific talk. I wish I could remember the details. My short term memory is like in the pits. I think this is perimenopause, but just to acknowledge that I'm talking about someone else's work here, but they had a great infographic looking at what it takes to get indexed, really to show up in like the top 20 to 50 Google results, what it takes to then get the 10 to 20 and what it takes to get in the top 10. And essentially it's that like those fundamentals will get you into the index. That is the minimum technical expectation for your website that Google requires to index you. Your keywords and content will get you into like that top 20 to 50, maybe like 11 to 50. But in order to get into that top 10 spots, especially in competitive markets like that, branding has got to be in place like that user engagement's got to be on point. Right. That's kind of the icing on the cake at this point. And I thought it was just such a neat visual of how the fundamentals and the updates of the last year or so really play together. Yeah, they do work well. I mean, definitely don't do what I did unless you're already in it and then just know that there's hope. But don't go out and do all the other stuff first. Start with your website first. Yeah, for me, I felt like in a very weird way that going and being a podcast guest was an easier lift at that time and visibility was a big play for me, but. And I still should have had that on my website first. So learn from what I did. Do what I say, not what I have done. Yeah. And definitely make sure you're running everyone through your website. So, like, one example of something that I like to do where I don't see everyone doing this is your Instagram link in bio. Make sure that's going to your website. Build that page on your website. Don't do bitly and link tree and all these things. Sure they look cute, they sound fancy, whatever, but it's a much better visibility play, marketing play, SEO play to have that on your website. And you can do stuff in a really nice, neat, clean, cute way. You know what? So I have my own link in bio on my website. Right. Like, to me, I just like making my own stuff. So that was always no brainer for me, but it was like a head scratcher to me. Like why it was like better for SEO. It's a no follow link. Like, the link itself doesn't carry a lot of authority, but understanding now that with the new update in the last year in particular, Google's actually tracking clicks to your website from other places, especially in Chrome. Right. This is all this stuff that, like, came out in the Google trial, but Google is tracking clicks to your website no matter where they come from, even if they don't come from Google. So it makes sense to me now that it's just like, any clicks that you can drive to your website are going to increase those engagement signals, thereby increase your SEO. I think until those systems were in play, it wasn't clear to me, like, how, like, using your own custom link page, like, helped your SEO, but with, like, the. The newer algorithm changes, it makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah, that does help. Probably click in a lot of people's brains. For me, it was really like, I wanted the page to look how I wanted it to look, and I wanted to be able to, like, go in easily and at the drop of a hat, like, oh, this launches over. This one is beginning. So I want to make sure that this is here. I just felt like I could do more with it on my website. And I knew that internal links were really important too. So for me, that was like, something that just naturally worked in my head. But that's good to hear that it's a little bit easier to follow now of, like, why it's important. And I always feel like Google and all the search engines really want to see that. I think of it like, there's a party happening on your website and there's all these different indicators, like people spending time clicking through, hanging out, referring to you, all these things. And so Google just wants to know where the party is. So by you continuously having something happening over there, whether it's backlinks or whatever, then you're sending out the balloons that everyone knows where to go. Yeah, I mean, I like to say, like, your website has to be a destination. I think you're saying it in just, like, another way, but, like, exactly. You need to create a website that is a destination and you need to drive people over there. And Google's paying attention to all of that. And so that's where, you know, a lot of the keywords and content comes in, but also the PR or the branding. Like, how can you drive clicks over to your website? Yeah, I love that. All right, let's go chat about generative AI, which is not my favorite thing to talk about. So what can you help us glean from everything that's been happening in the space with SEO and with AI. I mean, AI is like such a big topic, right? Like, are we talking about ChatGPT? Are we talking about AI overviews? Like, let's stick with like ChatGPT. And just specifically I get a lot of questions from people about blogs and writing blogs with ChatGPT. So let's go there and explore that for a little bit. Yeah. So one, a lot of the updates in the last year are driven by the influx of low quality, mass produced content produced by these models. So the effect that they've had on SEO on the search algorithms is enormous. Right. They've been driving a lot of change for the individual user and we've covered some of that already for the individual user. So Google doesn't have an official stance on AI, right? Google says, we don't care how your content is produced as long as it is helpful for users. So that is the official stance. I think there's a lot of people. Well, first of all, Anyone who's using ChatGPT to produce content at scale, that's just not going to work. It's not helpful content. Right? You have to keep in mind that anything written purely by ChatGPT has already been written about before. Because ChatGPT doesn't come up with new ideas. It's really good at regurgitating new ideas. I use ChatGPT like I am always in ChatGPT. I freaking love ChatGPT. And I use it as literally as a language model. So I use it to get over my writer's block. And so I'll say, I want to write a blog post, like specifically about this stuff. Organize it for me and it'll help me organize an outline. And then I'll say, okay, in this section, like, here are the points that I want to cover. Give me a draft and it'll give me a draft. Like it's a predictive language model. If you say, write me a sentence about xyz, it'll write you a sentence about xyz. And sometimes like having it do that. Getting something on the page is so helpful for me. Like, it's still my ideas, but I used the language model to write the sentence. I didn't use the language model to generate the ideas. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, totally. And I think that in that case, like, I'm producing content that one, I'm heavily editing after it comes out, so it's not going to sound like a robot wrote it. But two, it's also my ideas and so when Google's evaluating content, like they're looking for information gain, they're looking to see if anything original is being produced by this piece of content. And so if you're using ChatGPT to organize your ideas, your own ideas, then like you'll pass that test. Right. And if you edit it so it doesn't sound like a robot wrote it, you don't use all the like stupid words that like ChatGPT uses all the time, like delve and treasure, trove and boost, ensure. I mean I have a whole list actually that I've fed it and I say never use these words. It's in my universal instructions for ChatGPT. Oh, smart. But I think it can be really useful. I think if you are using it to just say like, write me a blog post about the benefits of massage and you go and put that on your website, you're not going to get any traction from that. It's not going to be helpful. Again, like back to the thing that they want and it doesn't with the eit, like it's not putting your spin on it at all. Yeah. If you are writing on a topic that is sort of like not the most original topic, but is something that your people would find helpful. So let's say like you still want to write a piece about like the health benefits of massage, then you need to, once you get that content from ChatGPT, you need to infuse it with the eat, you need to include stories from your practice. You need to talk about your own experience. Right. Like you've got to infuse it with touches that make it yours and like provide a perspective that I can't offer. So I think ChatGPT, it's like any tool, it can be like wielded well and it can also just be like an absolute dumpster fire. So yeah, it's really like how you're using the tool. I don't think anyone should be using it to just write their blog. And like no posting that stuff to their blog. It's never going to hit. It's not good. And it's also like your name is still on that. So Google is therefore thinking that you're the ding dong using like delve all the time. Like it's not actually putting your spin, your thoughts, your experience on that. And that's the part that really makes the blog sing. That's what gets you seen as the authority and that's what gets people coming to you. And there's your storytelling element. Right? Yeah. So I Mean, I don't think every blog post necessarily needs a story, but it either needs a story or it needs your perspective, your interpretation. It's gotta go through the filter of you. It cannot just be like, I think the era of writing encyclopedic content to rank on Google is over. Yeah. And I'm mourning that because I love writing dry encyclopedic content. I know some people, that's their jam. I mean, my background is academics. Right. This is how I was like trained to write that way. It's not going to hit. It's not, it's not engaging. It doesn't exude like the experience or expertise. It takes more. So let's say I am a solopreneur who is hearing you and me talk about all this stuff and I'm shaking in my boots. What advice do you have for them? Like, what starting point might you offer them? Let's say that they already have good on page SEO, that their foundations are very solid. What could they do? Now? If their foundations are already solid, then I would say the next thing to do is pick your next platform. And by platform, that could be a social media, LinkedIn, Instagram, whatever. But it could also be consistent podcast guesting. You just have to find another way to get your name out there. And I think it's beautiful actually, because it's like the synergy of SEO and PR and branding and it's got so much wonderful short term ROI because you get that immediate exposure to a new audience. Right. But you're also driving clicks to your website in the near term and you have that long term for the backlink. Plus you're networking with like a podcast host. It's awesome. So I think that if your website is solid, the next thing that you should be doing is investing in your primary and you're sort of multiplatform and you don't have to do them all at once, but like pick something that you can start doing at some consistent interval. Yeah. And if you're listening to this and you're like, I don't even know where to go, I'm going to make sure to link Latisha's episode because she goes into the different channels that are available to us. So maybe that'll get your wheels turning even beyond what we've talked about in here. Yeah. There's more than one way to SEO. Right. And here's what I want the takeaway to be is that like Google is increasingly rewarding people for the work they're doing off of their website. So once your website is in shape, you have to go find like another place to stake your flag and like, start expanding your digital ecosystem. I love that. And doing it intentionally, not just like, I'm going to throw something out on Instagram, I'm going to go post on LinkedIn. Well, that's what I'm saying. Pick one platform to start with, right? And start doing it consistently and well. And as you have capacity, you can grow it or repurpose it, but like, just pick another place where you can be showing up. I love that. This has been really helpful and I think it definitely does give someone like, okay, here's thing one, shore up your foundations. Here's thing two, pick one platform and just go all in with that. Don't make it so complicated where you are throwing spaghetti at the wall of social media. Like, pick one thing. Could be social, could be podcast, could be YouTube, could be whatever. And just really like hone in your SEO on that platform. Where can all of our friends come find you? Because I know they're going to be like, I want more. Tell me more. Yeah, well, of course you can find me on my website, right? Like that's where I would prefer that you go find me and we'll share some links below. Specifically, I'd love to share a resource with your community, if that's okay. So I'm offering my SEO Simplified Keyword research guide. And so that's a four step framework for choosing SEO keywords for your website. Because again, like, the user engagement, the branding, like, it's all super sexy, but like, if foundations aren't there, then none of it matters. So, like, start with your keywords and content. So I'll share a link for SEO Simplified, which will take you to my website and then you can also find me on Instagram, also on LinkedIn. I love it. Thank you so much for joining me and having this conversation and helping us all catch up on all the SEO stuff. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me. Of course. All right, I'll catch you next time.