Brittany Herzberg:
Hello and welcome to the Basic Bee Podcast. I'm your host and favorite SEO coach, Brittany Herzberg. I am having such a good day today. I've actually been having a pretty tough time mentally recently, but I've had some great conversations today and I've been adding in more things like EFT yoga and more playful things like watercolor painting and reading. Oh my gosh, the reading. I have been binging so many romantasy books. The three that I recently read, Ballad of Falling Dragons, which is book two if you read when the Moon Hatched. I think that's my favorite. I think this is like my favorite duo ever. And it's not going to be a duo. There's going to be another book. And then there was the Thorn Queen, which has Bridgerton vibes with magic. And this is another book too, that was also very good. And now I'm on one called the Rights of the Starling, which is another book too. That one, the first one was I think, like the Shield of Sparrows if I remember correctly. But it's so good. Ballad of Falling Dragons and then the Rights of the Starling are both like amazing book twos where they I think are a little bit better than even book one. It's crazy. If you are a reader, please let me know what you're reading. It's not like my TBR list is getting any shorter, so let's just keep giving a girl options, shall we? And now let's get into the SEO things, the stuff you're actually here for. Today I'm sharing my take on the question, how can you optimize your blog posts for SEO without losing soul? This came about because I recently saw several people sharing that SEO sucks the soul out of blog posts. That's like a quote that I kept seeing, especially on threads, but that ain't how it should be. So here is my response. Because if you feel like the soul of your blog post is lacking or is being stripped when you go to add SEO, it's happening because you're most likely not coming in with a clear vision. You especially need to come in with the vision, the point of the post, the target keyword. If you are using AI, like especially, especially always. But like definitely if you're using AI. And on that note, I really wouldn't look to AI to give you legit SEO elements. Not like you can just like copy paste it without looking at it. And not SEO feedback either. The amount of times I'm like this is crap. When even I use AI tools for myself, or if I'm looking at stuff that a client has cranked out using an AI tool, it's just not giving the best stuff. If you're going to use it to give you things like SEO titles or meta descriptions, just pinky promise me that you're going to go look at them, apply what you know to be best practices, which I'm going to share some in a bit, in case you're new here. And don't just assume that it's doing things the right way, because it is very, very, very, very, very likely not. You know, things. You've got to come in with that main point, with the main goal of this post or whatever it is, the main message that you want to get across to people you may or may not have noticed. But I even do that with these podcast episodes where at the very beginning I'm telling you, like, hey, this is what we're going to be talking about. I am so clear on what it is that I'm giving you. And I'm doing the same thing in blog posts. And that's also what you need to be doing in blog posts. Okay? Another reason people feel like the soul is getting sucked out of their blogs is because they forget that they are still shocker writing for humans. People who are looking for people. SEO is not the whole of everything. It's the cherry on top. It's the magic fairy dust that you are sprinkling over your website and your content so that it goes out to market for you. It it is not a reason or an excuse for you to just let yourself start to sound robotic. That ain't it. That's a fast track to forgettable land, and we are not trying to have you go back to that. Okay? So instead you need to share your opinions, your hot takes, tips you share with clients, advice that you're giving them all the time. What you've seen actually work for your clients, share their success stories, share your success stories, link to clients or show the work if you can. Like, if you're a website designer or something like that, flaunt it. We are not going to go quietly into that good night. We are bringing you toward the spotlight. Let's get into a little bit of the strategy. So what does optimizing a blog for SEO actually require? You must have a clear point that you're making in the post. I think I established that. But just for the sake of reiterating it, that point should be tied to your business or your offers in some way. So I have gone through and I have optimized some off the wall blog posts that you're like you're writing about that and this is your business. One of the ones that I thought was actually quite brilliant and is doing really well for one client is they broke down how the lyrics of a Taylor Swift song, like how it was relating to mental health. And this was for a therapy practice and it's working really well. They're getting visits to their site, people are hanging out on the blog, they're going and clicking around on the website. I think they're probably even filling out the inquiry forms. I would have to go check the data to like triple confirm that. But even the fact that they're hanging out on the website is gold. But you really need to remember to tie that point that you're making in your blog post to your business, to your offers and you should be leading them to another place on your website, whether that's to another blog post. If you have a podcast, you could send them over there. If you are talking about an offer, send them to the offer, any of that kind of stuff. If you have a case study about someone, send them to the case study. We want people to be hanging out on your website for quite a while. That is a really good indicator for SEO. So again, your website's going to be recommended in traditional search as well as AI searches, because the bots can tell that people are hanging out on your site, which means, hey, they like what you're doing and they're hanging out with you. So anyway, it's a good indicator. And with just that, you're like 90% of the way there without even thinking about keywords, without even knowing SEO best practices, you're like 90% of the way there. I should also mention that you can apply any of the things I'm talking about right now or what I'm going to be sharing in a second to existing or new blog posts. With existing blog posts, there's going to be a little bit more of like checking things, making some changes, possibly needing to do like two steps to change something instead of one. It's much easier obviously to just implement SEO with a new blog post, a fresh blog post, but it is not impossible. If you have something that exists already, you can optimize it for SEO. Let me just go ahead and get specifically into what you can do to optimize an existing blog post. So I actually talked about this in depth in my blogging workshop, which I will link for you. But this is one of the like mini lessons that I created for that training that I'm pulling out for you. You're welcome. I'm kidding. So this quick workflow is something that you can use for optimizing an existing post. Starting off with reading the post, I know, kind of annoying. You could throw this into cloud or chat and say, hey, what is the main point of this thing? But I really want you to discern this yourself. So go in and read through it and just ask yourself, what is the main point of this post? Does this still apply for my vision and for my offers? And this must be a yes in order to proceed. If it doesn't apply. If you don't feel like it is going to help you with any of your new offers or current offers or your vision that you're working toward now, just let it be. Most likely it's fine if you just let it be. If the answer is yes, then you can move on to step two, which is to bring the copy from your website page into a Google Doc. If you don't already have it there. That is step one. You're going to take a look at the word count. If the word count is less than 500, you want to consider if there are any additional questions that you could answer. So or even any like client stories, client successes, client testimonial quotes, any of that kind of stuff that you can add in. Make a note of any of those things I just mentioned and ideally add them in where they fit in the post and you could just add a little note in your Google Doc. You could leave a comment to yourself. You could create a, you know, a headline just to hold space there. Then you're going to go and review a long list of stuff to ensure that the SEO strategy is complete, it's clear, and that it's following best practices. So you're going to make sure that you have a target keyword that you have looked at. If you've been listening for a while, you know KeySearch is my favorite keyword research tool. Even if you grab it, use the discount code. I'll have everything below and just have it for a month. Even that's enough. You can go and like batch a whole bunch of stuff. Then you're going to make sure that that target keyword is in several different places. You you want it to be in your URL slug. Ideally, you want the URL slug to be written with pythons. You don't want any of those underscores or periods or spaces or anything like that. It has to have the dashes because that's how the robots understand like word, word word word. We don't want them getting confused. They're already just like simple creatures. We just need to help them. The SEO title is another place that you want that target keyword. Your SEO title should be 40 to 60 characters and then your meta description, you want that to be 140 to 155 characters. This is usually kind of getting like a high level overview of what's going on in the blog post. Intriguing them. Like we really want this to be bringing them into the blog post. And yes, I have answered this question a lot this week. SEO titles and meta descriptions can get written by Google or by whatever you're searching on. However, that is not a reason to leave them blank. If anything, that is just reaffirming that you really need to have information there because that information is what the robots are taking into account when they are rewriting stuff. I don't know why they do it, they just do it. But like fill it in because we need to give them the accurate information. You also want to have keyword rich image titles. So we're talking blog posts. If you have I do this a lot. If you have screenshots, you want to have a keyword rich image title. You definitely want to have appropriate alt text for things, whether that's a screenshot or if it's a lifestyle image, or if you've featured a client testimonial quote and you have a headshot for them. All of these things are things that you can give keyword rich image titles to and appropriate alt text. A note on alt text is that it's first and foremost for accessibility. Keywords are just a nice to have a nice to insert. But you first and foremost want to make sure that anyone who would be coming to your blog post and who's using something called a screen reader, that they have the information there that helps them feel a part of this blog post and like they're not missing out on any information. Okay, I'll get off my soapbox. The last thing that you want to make sure has your target keyword is your H1 heading. And remember there's one and only one and it ideally has a target keyword in there. From there you can go back through and start making changes. You can add copy, modify copy in the blog post. You can modify the SEO strategy if you need to, or just add one if there wasn't one to begin with. And then you can start making those changes to the post on your actual website host. Once all of that's done, it's saved, it's published. Then you're going to submit the URL slug to Google Search Console so that it can log like, okay, changes have been made to this page. So it's going to have the accurate copy, it's going to have the accurate SEO strategy. And then ideally you're going to take this blog post no matter when you publish it, it's new, it's fresh, it's got stuff on it. Promote it in at least one other place. Threads, Instagram, Pinterest, your email list. Get the word out. SEO is going to be there for you, but get the word out just a little bit. One other thing I didn't mention was internal linking. That is something that you can do. So link from this blog post to another page on your website. Also great if you can link from another page on your website to this new blog post. So that is another thing that you want to remember. Now what should you do now that I've given you all this information? If you have optimized your core website pages, like your homepage about page services pages for SEO, then you should grab the blogging workshop because I share so much more about how you can optimize every little thing about your blog post. I go in depth on the image optimization, we talk about linking, we talk about everything that I shared, we go in depth with it. However, if you have not optimized your core website pages for SEO, you need to start there. You can either save a spot for the next SEO sprint, the link is going to be below, or you can snag one of two done for you spots that are available for a summer special for $3,000. I'm going to have the links below. If you are wanting to learn how to do SEO, SEO Sprint is going to be your jam. If you're like, oh my gosh, I know I need to have this done, but I do not want to learn one more thing done for you. SEO is going to be your jam. Just imagine with me for a second. Wouldn't it be lovely to have leads coming in by people literally just searching for what you do on Google? My clients have this happening within four to six weeks of implementing SEO. Which means that if you get this locked in on your website during the summer, when the busy fall season hits, these leads will already be coming into your world and being warmed up to buy from you. But I get it. SEO feels scary and it's sometimes the last thing that people put on their list. But if you have found yourself saying, I am so sick of relying on social media like a million times. This is your sign DM me on Instagram SEO sneak peek or text the show link below and I'll send you a personal SEO audit of what your website is currently doing and not doing for you. And I'll show you how SEO can completely flip that on its head. And yes, before you ask, the audit is free. I just really like talking with people in the DMs. Okay, you totally got this. Get your website set up for SEO, then go on to creating blogs that are optimized and that can bring in those aligned leads for you. All right? You got this. When in doubt, remember, I'm over here cheering you on on your SEO journey.
