SEO Best Practice #1: Give It Time ⏰

Feeling like your SEO just isn’t working? You’re not alone, and it’s likely NOT because you’re doing it wrong.

SEO takes time, strategy, & a plan that actually supports your business goals (not just a random list of keywords).

In this episode, I’m breaking down the top SEO mistake I see business owners making, like constantly changing URL slugs or ghosting your blog—and what to do instead.

If you’re ready for leads to come to you—without dancing & pointing on social—this episode is your roadmap.

LINKS:

→ Join the SEO & Grow 🌱 Waitlist

→ Get Done-For-You Website SEO

→ Tutorial: Submit a Page to GSC for Indexing (jump to the 2-min mark)

→ Play along on Threads

Supercharge your podcast with SEO! Easily increase podcast downloads AND website traffic with trainings & tools created by SEO expert, Brittany Herzberg!

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Find B on: Instagram, YouTube, Threads, LinkedIn

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(*affiliate links included, which means I might make a lil money when you click. I only recommend people, products, & programs I use & ❤️)

🎉 This podcast is brought to you in partnership w/ ...

Transcript

0:00

Welcome back, you brave business owner you, to the Basic Bee Podcast. I'm your host, Brittany Herzberg, the SEO strategist you can count on to show you exactly how SEO can easily bring in new leads without chasing people around the gram. I can't believe I'm saying this, but we're halfway through SEO Foundations, which is my mentorship program. As of today, we're having our week three call, and week six is going to be here before we even know it. Oh, let me tell you about this goof I made with our itinerary. So week one and two were all about keywords. Some of you even joined us for those weeks and it was so, so good to have you. Week three was supposed to be about content, but Miss Period Brain over here accidentally switched it up and we're diving into links today. But it's for the best. The questions I've got coming in are gold. We'll pick up content next week, week four, and then round out the mentorship with week five all about errors and week six, which we're diving into metrics. And then I'll have a tiny break before my next program begins. Yep, I've decided I want to focus on teaching, mentoring and coaching in 2025. I love it. Last week, even when I got off the zoom call with everyone, Dee, my boyfriend looked at me and said, you really love this, don't you? And I swear I almost cried. Helping people get it just does something to my soul. So that being said, once the mentorship wraps, I'll be preparing for the next round of SEO and Grow, which is my group coaching program. But I'm changing it up majorly from last time. I'll do a whole episode on it. But here's the high level for right now. It's still a three month program. It's still for established entrepreneurs who are ready to have new hot leads coming in from Google. But I've reimagined it to be a one to one support needs done for you meets group coaching and I'm restructuring it in this way. Phase one is going to be all about understanding SEO, so you have a clear overview of how SEO works, what the words even mean, and what you need to do for SEO to support you. Then we'll move into phase two, which is where most of our time is going to actually be spent implementing SEO. So you have my support and guidance, my eyes on your work, and I know that you're actually plugging in an SEO strategy that will support you. You've heard me talk about it. But how exactly does social Proof support SEO? Well, your clients are kind of freaking brilliant because when they share what it's like to work with you or what they were able to achieve or accomplish with your help, they use words that other people are searching for. For real. They'll say things like I walk away with practical tips to apply SEO to my own business or all online business owners need to know about your SEO course or Britney helps me understand SEO in a real and tangible way. You know what's coming next, right? I need your help to get the basic Bee podcast, reaching more of the right ear holes. When you follow, rate, review and share the show, that helps me help more entrepreneurs discover and lean into the magic of SEO. As a little extra incentive to write a review once a month, I'll be selecting one podcast reviewer to receive a free mini SEO audit. You'll help me get discovered and I'll do the same for you. Check the description for more info. And lastly, we'll get into phase three maintaining SEO and doing things like actually tracking metrics, making marketing decisions based on said metrics, and creating a content plan so you actually get into blogging and all of the benefits that come with it. Pretty amazing, right? If you're intrigued, I highly, highly recommend you go add yourself to the waitlist right now. The link is in the show notes, but you can also type in brittanyherzberg.com/SEO group coaching-waitlist. Yes, I know that is long, but I have several waitlists, so this is what we're doing. All right, let's get into the main point of today's episode, which actually has to do with some of the things I'm seeing from my SEO students and clients. What I'm seeing is that they're not giving their SEO time. SEO has a love affair with time. It takes time to figure out your who, your how and what that I mention and talk about ad nauseam. It takes time to do keyword research and create an SEO strategy from those words. And then it takes time for your SEO to actually go into effect and start getting your website more visible and bringing in those warm to hot leads. Sometimes you'll get lucky and things will take off really fast and you'll have your traffic explode. But most of the time it takes some time. So mentally prepare yourself for that version of things. And if you get the super fast acting lucky version of things, then celebrate that happy surprise. When it comes to not giving their SEO time, there are three trends I'm seeing right now. I'll share each and a little bit about why that's not helpful, as well as what to do instead. Kicking it off at Number one Changing URL slugs a lot in a short amount of time. What this does is it confuses the robots. This is especially not a good thing to do if you have given these links to your website or a blog post or your services page to other people. For example, maybe you've shared it on social media, maybe you've shared it in a podcast appearance. So what to do instead? I often will advise my clients to leave their quote unquote old URL slugs alone and not change them. Mind you, I'm all up in their website's business, so I'm weighing a lot of the factors before coming to that conclusion. So this might not be the best option for you. If you do decide to change your URL slug, do it once, do it thoughtfully, and then make sure you do something called a 301 redirect. And if you aren't sure how to do that or what that even is, go to Google and you're going to type in 301 redirect. 4. This is where you fill in the blank. You're going to say whatever your website host is. So that could be Kajabi, Squarespace, WordPress, you name it. Thing 2 Getting restless that SEO isn't working when they're actually not doing anything to help it along. Things like fixing errors, building backlinks, or creating content AKA blogs. What this does is provides a negative user experience for anyone coming to your site. It also doesn't make Google or other search engines want to show your website in search results. What to do Instead, Google wants to know that there's a party happening on your site. The easiest thing you can do is blog at least once a month. You can kick that up to once a week if you have the time and space and support and desire to do so. You know I have a lot of clients and students that talk about this. If you're someone who's adamant that you do not want to blog, think about other things you can do on your website, like finding and fixing SEO errors. Those could be things like broken links or updating SEO titles or meta descriptions. It could even be for a services page or your homepage or maybe a blog post. Just remember that after making any changes to do something called resubmit those page to Google Search Console for indexing. It's really simple and you can Google that as well. And I might even have a tutorial I can share If I do, I'll link it below. And finally, thing three making lots of changes and panicking about what the metrics are saying now. Like a lower domain authority, which you can think of domain authority as like your overall SEO score for your website. What this does is drives you absolutely nuts. It does nothing good for your SEO. So what to do instead? I wouldn't worry too much about those metrics for about three to six months. I want things to stabilize, I want the changes to take effect, and I want you to give yourself a chance to get those better SEO practices in place. This is all new after all. It's going to take some time. This is one of those times where that slingshot analogy comes in handy. You have to pull back in order to spring forward. Let yourself and your site pull back, meaning settle in with those new SEO steps, let them take effect, let your nervous system get familiar with this new pace of content creation, this new way of marketing your business, and then watch as things spring forward and continue to pay off for you well into the future. What happens when you give SEO time? Well, Dee has over 16,000 people visiting his website each month because he focused on publishing one to two blogs per month for the last four years. S has people spending over five minutes on her blog posts when 51 seconds is considered good. And M has people visiting her website from her podcast and she can tell because there is a specific code that they are using. Good things come to those who are patient and persistent and who play the long game. If you find yourself nodding along as I've shared the information today, maybe possibly cowering a little bit, maybe know that there are support options out there for you. In my world. The obvious option to learn and implement SEO in a fast acting and sustainable way is inside SEO and Grow. That's the three month group coaching program I mentioned earlier. I'll have a link below so you can add your name to the waitlist and do that quickly because very, very soon I'll be emailing the waitlist with a super special exclusive bonus opportunity. You're not locked into signing up if you join the waitlist, but you are giving yourself the opportunity to get a really powerful bonus if by the time you're listening to this episode, the wait list is gone. Totally cool. We'd still love to have you. And there are going to be some epic bonuses included in the regular program as well. If you're more of a done for you type of person. Sweet. I'd recommend you sign up for my website SEO Optimization service. I'll have that linked below as well. The biggest difference between SEO and Grow and the service option is that I'm doing the work for you. With the service option, you don't need to learn or understand things. I'm doing it all and handing it over in a cute little organized Google Doc. Your people are out here searching for you right now. With SEO, you're making sure you're showing up when and where they're searching. If you're doubting whether or not people are searching for you, I want you to go follow me on threads. My handle over there is BrittanyHerzberg. For the next few weeks at least, I'll have a post that I'm sharing twice a week where I ask you to share with me 1 what you think people are not possibly searching for. I've done this a couple of times already with some folks and it's been so amazing to watch the aha moments happen online in real time. What happens is I do a little research and share my work like we have to used to do with math homework so you can see what my conclusion is and how I got there. Thanks for tuning in and until next time, I'm cheering you on on your SEO journey.