Complete Transcript: SEO Simplified

Hello and welcome to the Smart affiliate marketing podcast.

In this episode, we’re going to look at SEO, which can appear to be a daunting subject for many people.
However, I’m going to break it down into bite size chunks and let you decide which of the strategies suit your business and which ones you want to implement.

OK, let’s get straight into simplifying search engine optimisation.

Here are the seven areas we’re going to look at for SEO success.

1. Number one is your goals. What you want to achieve by doing this.
2. Number two will be keywords, which are the basis of your SEO success.
3. We’ll look at on-page SEO so helping your website speak to Google.
4. Step Number four is content marketing where you’re creating quality content for both Google and humans.
5. Step five is your off-page SEO, which includes building links and leveraging social media.
6. Step six is your metrics, so looking at what’s happening in the background and
7. Step seven is to test, tweak, optimise and improve your results.

Let’s get into the first step, which is your goals.

So, your goals should be – What do you want to achieve by doing SEO on your website and by increasing your traffic, what outcomes are you actually looking for?

It’s all very well having more traffic, but you need to turn that traffic into sales and income.

One of the first steps in establishing your goals is to understand what your business sells, what value it provides and who your potential customers actually are.

You could refer back to Episode seven of this podcast called “How to Build Your Customer Avatar”.

Or you could simply list out how you imagine a potential customer to be.
For example, what does he or she look like?
What does he or she want?
What are their pain points?
What are their unique characteristics and needs?
And how does the product you’re promoting, service or address their needs?

Having understood the products you’re promoting and the ideal customers, you can then establish your marketing goals, and they need to be definable goals or actions for people to complete when they visit your website.

For example, it could be an opt-in to your email list. It could be the sale of a product. It could be a phone call or enquiry, or it could simply be to just increase traffic to your website, which will in turn lead to revenue through clicking your existing links and buying the products on your site.

Once you’ve established your goals, we can then move on to look at keywords.

Keywords are going to be the foundation of your SEO strategies.

So this is a very important and fundamental step in the SEO process.

There are loads and loads of keyword tools out there. For the sake of this podcast. I’m going to keep it simple, and I’m going to recommend you use the Google keyword planner. You will need a Google AdWords account for this, but you don’t actually have to be spending money within your AdWords account in order to access this feature.

The first step really is to brainstorm your keywords.

So perhaps type your main keyword into the keyword planner and see what results Google gives you.

This should throw up a lot of potential keywords for you, and you should put these into lists. You can generally download the results into excel and then organise them accordingly.

Other ways to find keywords are to brainstorm ideas and just think what people looking for your product would type into Google.

Think about their pain points, the customer avatar and brainstorm ideas of what they might type into Google to look for your kind of product.

There are some other tricks you can use, such as Google suggest or autocomplete, so you could type a keyword into Google and see what phrases it recommends as you type those keywords in.

You could also enter your keyword and then scroll down to related searches, and you will see some more keywords that Google recommends as related to your main keyword.

Another way to find keywords is go to a website called “Answer the Public” and see what questions and searches people are doing in relation to your niche.

You could use AI and other keyword tools to find more keywords. And if you have Google analytics already in your website, you could look to see what you’re currently ranking for and then use these and related keywords to improve your results.

You can also reverse engineer competitors sites, so if you type in your keyword, see which sites are ranking for that keyword. Then there’s a Google chrome extension called Woo rank spelt W double O

RANK. That’s a Google chrome extension called Woo Rank, which will analyse the tags that your competitors are using. And you can use these tags as your tags and keywords.

Some other free keyword tools you can use, aside from the Google keyword planner, you can use Bing Webmaster tools, Twin word ideas where a free account is available and there’s a site called Wordstream, which is also free.

Another lesser known site is “Keywords everywhere” where you can have just a free account for basic research.

OK, once you’ve done all of these steps, you should have a massive list of potential keywords for your website.

What we want to do now is identify some main keyword groups because we’re not necessarily going to build a page for every single keyword.

What we will do is identify main keywords and then use the related keywords on the same page whilst trying to rank for the main keyword.

So, ideally, you’ll be looking for between three and seven main keywords, which are the keywords that you’d most like to rank for, and you can have those as headers on your keyword worksheet and then below each one you would have a list of related keywords. And the related keywords you would intermix into your page content to help you rank for the main keyword.

For example, if you had a Web page and you were trying to optimise it for “dog grooming”, there may be another keyword, such as “Why is dog grooming important” and whilst you’d be trying to rank for the dog grooming keyword by having the keyword as perhaps a header of a section of why is dog grooming important, that will help you rank for the initial keyword of dog grooming.

So what you should do next is make a list of, say, 3 to 7 keywords.

Now, depending on your business, it could be more – unlikely it would be less, but it may just be one or two. Make a list of your main keywords with lists of relevant keywords below them, and this small number of keywords are going to be the main keywords that you’re initially going to try and rank for. And by intermixing the relevant keywords into the content, you could actually rank for those keywords as well as a by-product of doing this exercise.

So the final outcome for this exercise should be a list of probably between three and seven keywords, and then we can move on to the next step, which is step three, your on-page SEO.

So having identified the main keywords, we’re going to build a page on your site for each main keyword and your main keyword, together with a list of the keywords relevant to that main keyword, they can be used within your page in a strategic fashion.

Now, back in the old days of SEO, back when I started, keyword stuffing used to be a thing, so you would just take the main keyword and you would try and repeat that keyword on the page as many times as you possibly could in order to try and rank. And it did work for a while. But Google got wise to this, and they now penalise keyword stuffing.

So a more strategic way to do this is to have your main keyword, which you’re going to use a certain amount of times. But you don’t stuff the keyword so much that Google penalise you.

What you do instead is you use a number of relevant keywords, which keep telling Google that look, this page is relevant to this subject and by continually having lots of relevant keywords but not overstuffing the page with them individually, Google are more likely to rank you for this page and not penalise you for stuffing keywords.

So your main keyword, in addition to the relevant keywords for that keyword, can be used as page tags, in your HTML tags, in the page title in the meta description. And you can also use them as anchor text when creating backlinks, which will come onto in your off-page SEO.

Hopefully, you’re starting to see by now why the keyword research is so important, because without that, you don’t really have a starting point to do your on page SEO.

So the plan for Step three is to build out your site with one page for each of your main keywords, using the main keyword and relevant keywords to build this page out within the content, the tags and any back links that you ultimately build to this page.

The second part of your on-page SEO is the actual overall website structure, and again, your keyword list is very important in doing this.

So, the overall structure of your site, you should obviously include the normal pages, such as Home, contact page, the legal stuff, your terms and conditions, cookie policies, all that good stuff. Those should all be there as given, and I’m not going to go into those in this podcast for the sake of brevity.

But basically each of your main keywords, let’s say you’ve got five, for example. You should build a page around each, and these are going to be what we call your “SEO landing pages”. So these are the pages you want people to come for if they type in those keywords.

Other things you can do on your site is to have a keyword heavy footer. Now, if you’re using WordPress, you can create footers that will show up on every single page, and ideally, these will have anchor text links to your landing pages.

So for each of your five landing pages, there will be a hyperlink in the footer of each page, which tells Google and visitors that you’ve got a page about this subject.

Another part of website structure is to have a blog. Now, these are almost essential for your SEO because it tells the search engines that you’re regularly updating your site. It also gives you an opportunity to go for more long tail keywords by creating blog posts around all of your relevant keywords.

And it can provide great opportunities for internal link building, promoting products and providing value to your visitors.

Another great tip for your website structure is to have one-click hyperlinks to your five SEO landing pages. Now I’m using the number five as just an average. It could be more or less.

So, you have anchor text links on your home page to each of your five landing pages, and this tells Google what the rest of your site is about.

Because Google does give priority to data which is on the home page, and this will help the search engines understand what your site is about.

Another part of website structure is being mobile friendly, so make sure that your site shows up OK on mobile devices. Hopefully, the platform you’re using, such as WordPress, will already be optimised for this. But it’s worth checking on a device to make sure your website shows up correctly.

And the last tip I’m going to give you on website structure is to join Google and Bing Webmaster tools and implement what you learn there on your website.

If you have WordPress, you can get plugins to have Google Webmaster tools and metrics in the back of your website. This will be invaluable when we get on to the final step of this podcast, which is the testing, tweaking, improving and optimising your results.

And without having the data that Google Analytics provides, it’s going to be extremely hard to do that. So it’s quite essential to get Google Webmaster tools and analytics into the back end of your website.

As I said, with WordPress, there are plugins for this or you simply get your Webmaster to implement this for you.

OK, let’s move on to Step four now, which is content marketing for SEO purposes.

Content marketing is something that you can do on your website and off-page as well, so you can put content out on blogs on other websites, perhaps on social media, on YouTube, video sites and all sorts of platforms.

In Section three, we looked at the content you put on your website, such as your Web pages and your blog, but it’s very good to get content out elsewhere as well onto other blogs, websites, social medias and so on, to drive people to your website to create back links and to increase your visitors.

Your blog will also be a big part of your content SEO strategy, because any content you create for other sites can be used on your blog as well.

Any videos you create for YouTube, you can place on your blog and you can also use images to help create content and use your keywords within those images to further enhance your SEO results.

So there are a number of ways you can create content and there are a number of places you can place this content once you’ve created it.

Word of warning: this can become overwhelming. You can think Oh my God, there is so much I can do but stop there. What I suggest is you just start with one thing. You get one process running and as you go up the learning curve, you will speed up and your content creation will become faster and faster. And then you can start adding more strategies as you go along.

To begin. I would suggest your content strategy focuses on your website. Get all of the Web pages up together that we’ve discussed in the previous part and then regularly add in terms of blog posts, perhaps one, two or three a week, depending on your business and how much time you can allow.

Other great ways of content marketing are creating videos.

Now, this may seem daunting, but with AI and other tools, you don’t actually have to show yourself on these videos if you don’t want to.

But ideally, you’ll be creating videos with great content, good images and messages that resonate with your target audience so they will click any links that you provide and hopefully come back and visit your website and make purchases from you.

But the content has to be good. It has to be well structured, well written, SEO friendly and designed mainly for humans but also with Google and other search engines in mind.

Another great way for content is to create press releases, which you can put on your website as well as distributing to press release agencies.

This gives you content for your site as well as some great backlinks.

Just to go back to blog posts and web pages, one often asked question is, How many words should they be? How big should these pages be? And I would say there is probably a minimum of around 400 words for each page or blog post.

However, the answer to what is the optimum is what does it take to answer or satisfy the needs of the person who searched for that keyword?

For example, you could have a page with many thousands of words if it’s quite a broad subject. But what I would suggest is, if you have such a page, you should make it easy to navigate. You can do this by placing links to each section at the top of the page.

These links not only help people navigate the page, but they’re also great in terms of SEO because it helps Google understand what the page is all about by having all of these links at the top of the page.

If you want to see an example of this, if you go to Smart affiliate Podcast.com/cpa hyphen marketing hyphen online forward slash, this will give you an example of how I use quick links to help visitors easily navigate the page and to tell Google what the page is all about.

Now bear in mind that actual page has over 6000 words on it, and I think if I didn’t have those links at the top, it would be very hard for people to find what they’re looking for and they would quite possibly give up and leave the page.

So it also gives good value to the visitor and helps them find the information they’re looking for.

If you already have a website and you have Web pages built around these keywords, you could perhaps look at re-jigging them or rewriting them altogether, because you wouldn’t want two pages on the same subject necessarily, which would make it confusing for visitors and the search engine.

You would want one page, which is highly optimised for the visitor and the search engines, offering great value, great content and giving the customer what they’re looking for when they visit your site.

In terms of the blog, what can you put on there?

Well, you have a list of keywords and relevant keywords.

In an ideal world, you would have one blog post for each of those keywords and that blog post or each blog post would be highly optimised for that keyword. And don’t get overwhelmed.

Say you have a list of 200 keywords.

Well, if you do one blog post a week for four years, there’s your 200 keywords. So a blog is something you build over time. And the more time and effort you put in, the more kudos Google will give you and the more traffic you should get in the long run.

If you have a WordPress site, I would recommend a search engine optimisation plugin such as Yoast or you could Google “Alternatives to Yoast” and see which one suits your needs the best.

Hopefully by now you have an idea of what sort of content you want to use in your content marketing strategy.

Ideally, you have your Web pages, your blog posts. The next best thing I would suggest you can do is have an active YouTube channel, and then you can move on to sites such as Pinterest, your social media, LinkedIn, perhaps, and one at a time build out these platforms and attract more visitors through these platforms.

But don’t try to do it all at once because you will simply become overwhelmed. And that could lead to you giving up altogether, which is obviously not the purpose of this podcast.

So just do things one at a time and add as time allows, once you’ve had a handle on these content marketing strategies, your website is up and running, you’ve got your main landing pages ready.

Now is a good time to start with your off-page SEO, which is mainly to do with Link building. Now, Link building is a whole subject within itself.

We’re just going to look at some quick and simple methods here. And if there’s enough demand, I could do a deeper dive into link building and a separate podcast. Uh, if you would like such a thing, then go to the smart affiliate podcast.com and get in touch with me via the contact page.

In terms of link building back in the early days. Uh, perhaps the early two thousands, when I got started, it was all about number of back links, and, uh, there were various strategies used to get as many back links as you can up, but they were very spammy. And ultimately, Google caught up with us all and penalised sites which had these massive amounts of spammy back links.

So quantity isn’t such an issue now. Quality, I would suggest, is far more important. So using the anchor text relevant to your site and having back links from sites which have good authority and rank within Google is more important than having perhaps 2000 links from very poor quality blogs, which are basically set up as link farms.

And you know, you could go to fiver.com and get, uh, 1000 back links for $10 for example. Don’t do that. If anything, all you’re going to attract is a penalty from Google, and you’re wasting your time and money, and it’s actually detrimental to your success. And I think you’d be better off with no back links than getting a lot of spammy ones.

So quality back links on relevant websites using anchor text to your relevant pages and don’t use the same anchor text over and over, swap them out, use the relevant keywords, not just the main landing page keywords.

Press releases are also a good form of obtaining back links as well as posts on social media sites, video sites, LinkedIn and so on.

As I said, Link building can be a very deep subject in itself, and we’ve just touched on the peripherals during this podcast for the sake of brevity.

So let’s move now on to section six, which is your metrics.

So this is measuring the traffic and the results that you’re getting from your SEO efforts, and this you can do largely by having the Google Analytics in the background of your site, so you know the amount of traffic you’re getting, where it’s coming from, which keywords they’re finding you for, and you can see how much your traffic is improving as a result of your SEO strategies.

So you could create your own list of key performance indicators or KPI’s, and perhaps once a month you log into your site and see what your analytics are. See how many how much traffic you’re getting overall, perhaps, and see how much you’re getting for each of your main keywords.

You need to decide which Kpi’s are important for you and your business, and then look at your results and adjust your strategy accordingly, and this takes us neatly into step number seven which is testing, tweaking and optimising and thereby improving your SEO results.

So basically, the SEO process is a case of implementing what you’ve learned so far, looking at your metrics as they occur each month and then adjusting your strategies accordingly.

So, for example, if you find your ranking for perhaps four out of five of your keywords, you could spend some time further trying to optimise for the fifth one or say, for example, you get to position 10 for one of your main keywords, you could work harder on that keyword in terms of backlinks to that page to try and help it up the rankings a bit further.

Another thing Google looks for when they’re deciding if they should rank you or not is your bounce rate. So, that is – do people stay on your page for a good length of time, or do they bounce off?

So this highlights the importance of having very good quality content that your target audience are actually looking for and something that’s going to resonate with them and make them want to stay on the page and read more.

This will help keep your bounce rate down, and it will help keep Google friendly towards you, and keep them ranking your page within the search results.

The bottom line with Google is they want to give the visitor what the visitor is looking for. So therefore, your goal should be the same. And if you’re finding you have a high bounce rate, you need to improve your content.

Make sure your content has good headers, doesn’t have massive blocks of text which are overwhelming to look at and people won’t read them.

Lots of images help break up the text. Lots of sub headers, lots of paragraph breaks.

If you look at my website, the smart affiliate Podcast.com, that’s WWW dot smart affiliate Podcast.com and just look at the way I use text and keep it broken up as much as possible, which stops the visitor being overwhelmed by a large block of text that would just seem too onerous to actually read through. And that should improve your bounce rates and keep you friendly towards the search engines.

OK, we’ve covered a lot in this podcast. We have only touched briefly on some of these subjects. If there’s anything you’d like to learn more about, drop me a message through my contact page on WWW dot smart affiliate podcast.com, and I’ll be happy to oblige.

In the meantime, you can start implementing the strategies you feel are most relevant for your business, and there are lots of tools and resources online to help you.

And if you head over to my site Smart affiliate Podcast.com, you can find lots of pages with tools, resources and links to many sites that can help you with the implementation of your SEO strategies.

I hope you found this episode useful. It is an outline. Head over to my site for more information and I’ll see you next time. Goodbye