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.