This podcast is brought to you by the profitable blogger society, a mentorship program that gives bloggers direction for increasing their income and growing their brand to thrive together dot blog slash Pb S to learn more and enroll today. Welcome to the Thrive Podcast. I'm Brie. Pare your host and blogging coach here to help you take your brand to the next level. At thrive, we're dedicated to bringing bloggers and influencers, tactics, strategies, and behind the scenes info from the best in the business. We know that you have a big vision for your brand and life. And we're here to support you with blogging and social media tutorials, workshops, a community and of course, this podcast, just head to thrive together dot blog for all the latest tools. If you're ready to grow your brand and looking for education and encouragement, then you've come to the right place. Now let's get ready to thrive. Hey blogging babes. Welcome back to another episode. Today's episode is actually one that we aired back in February of 2023. I wanted to bring this one back to the podcast because I was looking through our stats over in the backend of our podcast. And this episode is our number one episode that you guys have loved and listened to. And the topic is SEO. And it is all about creating an SEO plan for your blog. So whether you have listened to this episode or not, I think this is one that is fantastic to really listen to year after year, and just give yourself a refresh, remind yourself of what you should be doing for SEO. And also just to remind yourself that, hey, Seo was a long game, put in the effort it's going to pay off, it's gonna work, I promise, we just had somebody inside of shift, tell us that she's been going back through and updating old blog posts, and has been seeing a 20 to 30% increase in traffic to those blog posts. So if going back through and updating your SEO is something that you need to do, let that be a sign that that is a brilliant idea. And you should definitely do it. So enjoy this episode for your SEO plan for bloggers, a replay of episode 180. So today we're talking about SEO strategy. So I'm giving you guys some quick advice here. And I'm also going to tell you at the end, one more episode that you can go and listen to to get even more SEO advice. This is a great place to start or just to freshen up your SEO, knowledge and skills. So let's go ahead and dive right into it. So first of all, basics basics, what is SEO, SEO stands for search engine optimization. And it is basically what Google searches your blog for in order to send people results. So search engine optimization is you optimizing things on your website, in order for Google to find it so that way when somebody goes into a search engine, whether it's Google or whether it's something else, I can't even think of what other ones off the top of my head because I only use Google. But when they go there to search for something like a delicious homemade yellow cake recipe. The goal is that your blog post is the one that pops up in the top results, especially on that first page, right. And so in order for us to make that happen, we have to do SEO, we have to enable Search Engine Optimization tactics on our website. So why does this matter? Well, like I said, it will enable other people to find your blog whenever they're searching for something. But not only that, the possibilities are endless when you are able to increase your page use so you can increase your income through ads through brands, affiliates, or strict shell selling your own products. There's there's so many ways that you can make money when you have a lot of pageviews. This also allows you to really rely on your own brand growth and not having to rely on social media or even brands for your income. And I know that you know a lot of the pain points that I hear consistently are frustrations with social media, frustrations with algorithms, frustrations with brands not wanting to pay or not wanting to pay what you're worth. This allows you to kind of say You know what, that's okay if this brand doesn't want Pay me that whatever, because I have these other sources of revenue streams, because I have worked my tail off. And I have incredible pageviews. Because when you have really good pageviews, the goal is to get on platforms like media vine, or adthrive, which are companies that will you will partner with to have them run ads on your website that can generate a lot of really good passive income. And I say passive income, because when you're implementing correct seo keywords on your site, and you're starting to rank organically and drive traffic consistently to your blog, it's because of blog posts that you have written in the past, it may not necessarily be the one that you have to write next week, although the goal is of course, that that one will also drive traffic to your website. But that is what I mean by passive income. If you stopped writing new blog posts for a month, if you have been implementing correct SEO for a year, and you've been consistently at 50,000 pageviews, a month for six months, the likelihood of that dipping is kind of low, it may dip because of different seasons. But you're gonna stay pretty consistent, because you've already proven to Google that, hey, people want to see my site because of these reasons. And it's going to try to keep sending you traffic, right. So that's how it can kind of be a passive income source for you, especially through ads, right. You can also implement affiliate links and partner with different things for your site, you can sell your own products, especially like digital products on your website, where if you have your funnels and everything set up correctly on your site, it can all generate money for you. So that's what I say when the possibilities are endless. If you have really good pageviews. And if you are going to ask me, if I were to start a brand from scratch today, what would I focus on? It would be pays us. And I can tell you that I'm actually doing that I'm starting a new brand with our friend, we're testing out a new brand, and we're going in on it's gonna be like a lifestyle brand. And we're prioritizing our growth based on SEO. That is, you know, not just something that I spit out, because that's what bloggers do is Oh, yeah, SEO? No, it's because of these things that I just talked about. So that's why it matters. Now, what is the keyword? Right? So you heard me talk about that. So a key word, or a key phrase, you'll hear that as well, is the words or phrases that tell Google what your blog post is about. And so there's different places that you're going to want to put these keywords, which I'll get to in a minute. But it's really finding those key words that you can rank for. So like I said, if you were doing a homemade yellow cake mix, and you want it to be showing up at the top, you would have to figure out what are those keywords that people search for in order to find your blog post. So it could be as simple as homemade yellow cake mix, or homemade yellow cake for sure. But you want to figure out what are those key words? Or let's say that you're writing a blog post on five different ways to get your baby to sleep? Okay, so you're going to go and figure out what are those key words that people are searching for. So that way, when they put it into Google, my blog post is going to come up at the top right. So there's different things that we do it based on where you put your keywords, is what matters and also choosing the right keywords in order to rank. So we can't just, you know, think off the top of our head here, we do actually have to use some tools and some strategy when it comes to picking these keywords. It is something that you have to learn. I'm going to walk you through kind of the basics. But I will say it's not that complicated. It's really sound more daunting than it is but for some reason it's like scary in your brain, which it has been for me for a while. It's really not but the thing was, SEO is it is not an overnight thing. Now I've talked about this in past episodes how blogging is a journey is not a sprint, it's not even a marathon or past marathon, it is a journey. It is something that takes a long time. SEO is one of those things, but it is one of those things that are going to be worth it because if any of those things I mentioned the beginning sound appealing, passive income, making money from ads, selling your own products, anything like that sounds appealing and sounds like yeah, I would love to make money while I sleep or while I go on vacation. Then you want to invest your time into SEO and be patient with it.
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If you're ready to get started, which I think you are head to thrive together dot blog slash PBS to learn more and enroll today. Because blogging babes something happens when you decide to just go for it. We can't wait to support you and help you grow thrive together dot blog slash P B S. So in order to find keywords, there are some tools that I want you to go and check out. My current favorite is key search. And I'm going to link or I did a tutorial on this to just break it down super easily, which you guys have already given me so much amazing feedback on and said that like, This just made SEO so easy for you, I'm so glad because keysearch is what made it SEO makes sense in my brain and made me feel like okay, I know what I'm doing. And I know this is going to work. And so I wanted to just create a very short and quick YouTube video showing you how I do it and how it works. And it's amazing plus keysearch is awesome. And they've given us a coupon code to give you guys so I'm going to link that tutorial in the show notes for you. It's my current favorite tool, I recommend you go and watch that and check it out. The other one that I have used before. And I'm listening to first that are more affordable. So quiche keysearch is awesome. It's pretty affordable. With our coupon code, I think you get it for about $13 A month or even cheaper if you pay for the year in full. And then the other one is Keywords Everywhere. It is a browser extension that you can add, and you buy credits for it. It's also extremely affordable, then there are more premium tools as you get a little bit further along and want to make more of an investment. Those ones kind of the top in the game are SEMrush and Moz. And we'll link to all four of those including the tutorial and the coupon code for key search in the just podcast notes for you guys. Once you go and you find those keywords, and you figure out and before I even go into like where to put the keywords, the thing that you want to find, no matter what tool you use, is you want to find things that people are searching for, but have a low competition with them. And so all of these keyword tools are going to give you kind of a ranking. I like key search because the color codes thing. So I know that if it is in the green, that means I can most likely rank for it. And so I don't like to use any keywords that are not green. And I like to use the lower end of the green. And you'll see what I mean when you go and check it out. But I don't want to use anything that has a high difficulty. So that is what takes a little bit of digging when it comes to keywords. And so what I recommend, and what I like to do is just set aside an hour or two to do your keyword research for a few different blog posts or even just to sit down with some topic ideas and to give yourself blog posts and the keywords that you're going to use for them when you do end up writing them. Because when you're looking for keywords, you do kind of want to go down a little bit of rabbit hole, because sometimes you'll get lucky. And sometimes the first idea that you throw in there and see, okay, what I rank for this key phrase, sometimes you'll get lucky. And it's like yes, absolutely use that one for sure. Great. Other times, and more likely what's going to happen is it's going to be like, like that's a great one. But also there's like a million searches for it. And it is like a difficulty rating of 79. And so you just don't want to use it because you're going to be competing with something like the Food Network, right? You're not going to win. And so it's going to be kind of a bit of going down a rabbit hole is what I call it, of like going down different trails and being like, Okay, what if I did it like this? Or what if I tried to rank for it in this way, or maybe this is give me a different blog post idea, maybe I need to approach my strategy from this blog for this blog post from a different angle. So that's kind of what you want to do. And I go into that a bit more in that key Search tutorial, where I show you guys kind of and I go down a couple rabbit holes to give you guys some examples. So you can actually visualize what I'm talking about as well. So that's kind of my caveat for keywords is just making sure that it's something that you can really rank for don't choose things that have a high difficulty expecially if you are newer to blogging the last thing I'm going to go over with you guys is okay, cool. I did all this work. Now Bree, where do I put my keywords, there's multiple places that you want to put them, you want to put them in your title. And what I want to say here and something that I've learned recently is it doesn't have to necessarily be in your blog post title that people actually see on your blog. So let's say you want to rank for a certain keyword of like, yellow cake mix, we're just gonna go with that one, even though I already can tell you that one's overpopulated in your acapella rank for it. That's where my brain is right now yellow cake mix. So you would want to try to use if you cannot use for some reason that in the title, maybe you have like a different, more catchy title. That's like the best cake mix for birthdays ever, I don't know. But you still need that keyword to be in your quote unquote, title. If you are using something like WordPress, if you're not in, you know, the equivalent to Yoast for SiteGround or anything else, use that. But it can be in your Yoast title instead. Little kind of a trick there. Where I do also recommend you put it though is in your URL. So in like the actual www.my blog slash yellow cake recipe, you know, you want to in that URL, the other place that you'll want to do it. So I'm kind of giving you a list here. And again, everything's in the show notes is in your meta description, which if you have Yoast it's also there, it makes it easy for you to put it, I'm not sure where you put it. Otherwise, you want to put it in like your h1. So you'll actually set a h1 and habit try to have it there. You could also do it in an h2, which is recommended. And then of course, kind of using it throughout your content as you can, putting it as the alt text and any images that you use. So whenever you click on the image, you know, there's that little box that you can fill out for alt text, you want to put it there. And then the last thing is like looking at internal linking. So this is kind of it is related to this specific keyword, but it's also related to others. So this is kind of a strategy in general for SEO. So if you reference something in your blog post that you talked about in another blog post, you want to link that blog post. So this helps with not only getting people to kind of bounce around on your site, but it'll also show that oh, hey, maybe this blog is becoming an expert in something. Okay. So maybe in your yellow cake mix recipe, you reference, okay, and if you love this, but you're really wanting a chocolate recipe, then I've got the best chocolate cake recipe for you right here. And you link to your chocolate cake recipe. And that chocolate cake recipe you also used keywords that you know you're going to rank for. Okay, stick with me. Now, Google has also seen, Hey, she's got great keywords, and provides the answer to the question about chocolate cake recipes. And not only that, but it's in another blog post of her. So now, there's like two blog posts from this one website on chocolate cake recipes. And that's going to help Google kind of boost you up a little bit in the rankings. Isn't that really cool? So that's why you really want to optimize your internal linking. and think it through in your strategy, whenever you're planning out your blog posts, such as like, okay, maybe I'm gonna do a series of cake mixes cake mix recipes, and I can kind of make sure they're all keyworded really great to stand alone by themselves. But also, hey, I can link them and all of these other ones as well, and kind of boost my SEO in that way. It's pretty cool, right? SEO is really something I'm getting into even more even though I've been doing this for years and years and years, I'm just getting more and more excited about it. I just liked the idea of having something that I can control and something that's not relying on social media. So if you want even more strategy on this, you know, listen to episode 114 with our SEO gal, Danielle gagnant, who is an SEO expert, love, love, love her. And you can get even more strategy on SEO and advice from her over there. Otherwise,
we're going to link all of this very detailed for you guys in our show notes because I covered a lot mentioned that key Search tutorial mentioned the coupon code told you kind of where to put all the things give you all the tools so detailed show notes for you guys as always at thrive together dot blog slash podcast. And that's it for installment two of our action plan series. And of course I will see you guys back here next Thursday for a brand new episode. Thanks so much for listening. You can find all of the notes from today's podcast at thrive together dot blog slash podcast. Make sure you connect with us over on Instagram at thrive together blog and join our Facebook community to get supported by like minded bloggers and influencers just search Thrive blogger community on Facebook. And if you're loving this podcast Be sure to share it with a friend. Hit that subscribe button and leave us review so even more bloggers can get the support they need to grow. Until next time, keep thriving.
