Your 2026 Lead Gen Strategy: 5 Diff Ways to Get Found by SEO

[Ep 135] I love a fresh start, a clean slate, & I’m a huge fan of the start of a new year. If that’s not your vibe—still love ya! And…

I’ve got a great episode that’s perfect for the new year, or really anytime you’re looking for what to do next with SEO.

→ 5 things you can do with SEO to help you get found online in 2026.

There’s a little bit of everything in here—quick tasks, a little more time consuming tasks, things for podcasts and blogs and websites.

Tune in, take notes, & be sure to check out the blog post linked below for the full list of resources I mention ⤵️

→ Get the full show notes here: https://brittanyherzberg.com/blog/2026-lead-gen-strategy-to-get-found-online-with-seo

👉 DM Brittany on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brittany_herzberg/

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Transcript

Brittany Herzberg:

Hello and welcome back to the Basic Bee Podcast. I am your host and favorite SEO coach, Brittany Hartzberg. And Happy freaking New Year. I would scream, except it's kind of late when I'm recording this. I love a fresh start, a clean slate, and I'm a huge fan of the start of the new year. If that is not your vibe, I still love you. You might want to skip ahead a little bit in the episode, though. I've got a great topic ahead for you. Five different things you can do with SEO to help you get found online in 2026. 

Okay, fresh start lovers. You're still with me, right? There is just something about the start of a new year that feels like wiping a whiteboard, or dare I say a chalkboard clean. Yes, I am proudly of an age where my childhood included clapping chalkboard erasers together outside to get all the dust off, just to be able to take it back inside and make it all dirty all over again. Yeah, I did that. That's a whole thing. Okay, let's get into these. Let's get into these five things, shall we? 

First up, you want to get clear on your who, how, and what. And I swear, just doing this gives people so much more clarity on their business that they run, where they want to take it and where they've been missing the mark. Just answering these questions and having those answers in the back of your mind, it allows you to start thinking of things differently. Information totally funnels in, decisions are made differently, and it's just the coolest thing to witness and experience. Cecily even talked about this in her case study interview. And so did Michelle, actually. And you'll even hear this from Erin soon, too. She's also going to mention this. But in case you're not familiar or in case you've spaced out previously, when I've been talking about this, the who, how, and what, those are the big three questions. So it's who do you help, how do you help them, and what do you want to be known for? Another way to think of that last one is what do you want to get found for? So when someone is typing in SEO for entrepreneurs, I want to be that person that shows up. When someone is looking for an SEO coach, I want to be the person that shows up. So those are some of the answers. And then that then leads into the keywords that I find that I can use for blog posts and podcast episodes and my main website pages, all that good stuff. So I strongly encourage you, even right now, maybe pause this episode, take 10 or 15 minutes, put it on the timer. You've got that ability on your iPhone. And give yourself 10 or 15 minutes really to just free write whatever those answers are. So again, the questions who do you help, how do you help them? And what do you want to be known for? Another way to say that is what do you want to get found for? Really, truly sit with that. It's going to be confronting. There's a whole episode that I have on that. I'll make sure it's linked below where I was speaking to that. But as challenging as it can feel like, it is a door that just opens up your next level. So sit with that, my friend. 

Second thing you can do, zhuzh your headlines. I want you to go back and listen to that episode, that very recent episode about heading hierarchy. It's like such a game changer once you realize that your headings aren't just for looking cute, they're actually for organizing information too. You can do this for your main website pages and or your blog posts. And this is really, really important because the robots need you, your headline game, to be on point. And for the love of everything, I better not see a website page with more than one H1 after how many times we've talked about this, I say that in jest, but also seriously. So you know, go look into your headlines. 

Third thing you can do is give your images SEO friendly titles. @ the very least, do that, I beg of you. There is a whole three step process that you could do, but at the very least you want to be making sure that your titles are on point. Especially if you are a frequent podcast guest or you have your own podcast or you give presentations or I don't know, you post on social media or you're a photographer or you're a product based business owner. I mean, do we see how many things image optimization touches? I just, I really want that to land because images are everywhere and they can be an asset that's out there working for you. If you have a title with keywords logged into that image. This is something that I've seen work really fast. One entrepreneur can, for example, came to one of my workshops, updated several of her image titles painstakingly was a word that she used when she followed up with me. And she had one image start showing up in the top couple rows of the images tab and then she made a sale of that very item all within just a few weeks of that workshop. So this stuff can work fast. It is a pain in the tush to do it. I'm not gonna lie. But if you can at least go and optimize one image, at least the image title for every page of your website. Like think about your main website pages. So your homepage, your about page, your services pages, however many of Those you have, 1, 2, 3, 10, your main blog post page, your main podcast page, your freebie page. Like, go to those main pages and at least ensure that one image on all of those main pages has an SEO friendly title. And then sit back and watch stuff happen. Because it will. Like I said, it can happen really quickly. 

Fourth thing you can do is optimize your podcast. If you're not optimizing your podcast for SEO, no shame. Just get your tushy in gear. Because podcast SEO, you think image optimization works fast. Podcast SEO works wicked fast. Like in a matter of days kind of fast, you could take the tiniest action steps and see big results really quick. I've seen clients, for example, increase their downloads by 40% by changing one thing. And also I've seen them fill up their memberships because they're finally attracting the right and ready listeners. So this stuff works quickly. You can optimize your show as a whole. Some things that you could look at for your show would be your show title, your cover art. I mean, again, going back to the image optimization, you could retitle your cover art, title, image title. I know that this is a thing that buzzsprout at least offers is you can add keywords for the show as a whole. And I love buzzsprout. I mean, they do such a great job with having these tags sections and saying that you can add keywords and then also, like, things work. It's pretty magical when we look at things from an individual episode standpoint. You could look at optimizing the titles, you could look at adding tags. And this is even something that you can do if you're not hosting on buzzsprout. All you're going to want to do is at the very bottom of that episode description, you just add like a dashy line and then you write the keywords down there, keep it to about 250 characters. That's what I like to do. And you just add that at the bottom. You've probably saw people do that. I think they really did it in 2025 with captions on Instagram where they were just kind of dropping keywords at the bottom of a caption. But that's not super necessary. I've actually seen it help with podcast SEO. So that is your fourth option. 

And then your Fifth and final option is the biggest one. It is to take steps to update your website SEO strategy, maybe even mark this on your calendar for when you're going to have a fresh new SEO strategy on your website. I mean, personally, April or May seems like a really good time to me, especially if you've got SEO and grow on your 2026 bingo card. So, you know, just saying, put that on your calendar. Here's a little bit of a process you could walk through. A really good starting point is to use the detailed SEO Chrome extension. I'll have the link below, but you can also just type that in to Chrome. You can use that to snoop on your own website and to see what your SEO titles and your meta descriptions currently are. You will see angry redbubbles for a variety of reasons. Things might be too long, they might be too short, or they may even be missing. But this gives you an idea of how critical this new strategy is. From there you could start listing out, let's say five to seven pages, main pages like home services, about, even freebies, blog and podcast pages. So list those out. Like I said, five to seven pages. And then you'll also want to locate on the back end of your website where you're going to make these updates. So on the back end of Squarespace I believe it says, I believe it says SEO title and and SEO Description and it's in a tab on the left that says SEO. But go in the back end of your website if you can't easily find it, whatever your website host is like. One of my clients was in Arketa, so I told her to Google Arketa SEO Description or Arketa Meta description and it'll tell you usually there's some kind of blog post from that website host where it'll say go here, click there. This is where you update this. And once you've gathered keywords, created the SEO strategies for each page, again, a first focus could be those SEO titles and meta descriptions. Then you can easily plug them in on the back end of your website and tell Google the really good news. 

It does NOT take my clients months to start getting found online. I have found that it happens on average in about four to six weeks, which is pretty wild because industry standards is about three to six months. That's it. Those are the five different things that you could take action on. So you can start showing up as the answer to a Googled question or a question honestly typed in any search bar, Spotify, Instagram, Bing, you name it. I would love to know which of these tasks you'll be taking action on. As a refresher, you have the big three questions your who, how and what. You've got headlines, you've got images, podcasts, or the really big one, your website DM me on Instagram, or use the text button below to share that with me. And a quick note for you if you're wanting to up your blog or podcast game this year, stay tuned for a very special two part workshop that's happening in January and It's less than $30. I'll make sure that the link is below when everything is live. And there will probably be an emoji, so just look for that until next time. I'm over here cheering you on on your SEO journey. Happy 2026!