Can Businesses Get Growth from Organic Traffic with SEO? And What's Changing with SEO in the Era of AI

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Our guest today is Lauren.

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She is an organic content and SEO strategist.

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Welcome to the show.

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Thank you so much, Eric.

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I'm excited to be here.

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Before we jump in to talking about the wonderful world of organic content and SEO, which I am deeply passionate about, why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

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Absolutely.

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As you said, I am an SEO consultant.

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I help other solopreneurs grow their reach through organic search, and that's primarily by making friends with my good pal, uncle Google.

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So you'll hear me refer to him as a he, because he's the kind of uncle you want to be invited to the Thanksgiving table with.

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He's very generous and I think we have this notion that he's so scary, but he's really not, and I got started in this with my first business.

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I had an ACT and SAT prep company and I built asynchronous online courses for students so that busy high school students could just get in this space, because it feels so technical and so disjointed, especially for heart-centered entrepreneurs, and I want to make it like link all the pieces together and show people how they can build robust businesses really profitably and also grow their email list as they're doing it, like it's a means to many ends.

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Grow their email list as they're doing it.

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It's a means to many ends, and so I want to help folks really see that it's not going to add to their to-do list, but also to me.

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Seo is self-care for solopreneurs because it actually takes tasks off your to-do list.

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If that sounds like something that you could benefit from then stick around, because I've got all sorts of tips.

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Awesome.

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Now, before we continue with the episode, if I ask you a question, will you answer me honestly?

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Oh boy, All right.

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Sure, when you were young, based on your previous business, did you get a really good score on your SAT ACT.

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I did okay.

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I was not the strongest, I didn't get perfect scores.

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So, yeah, I did very well and I did end up getting perfect scores when I tested as an adult, as I was teaching it, which as it should be.

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If you're teaching it, you should be able to get perfect scores.

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There's a really fun micro story I have.

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Here is one tech company I worked for.

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The founder wanted to hire really smart people out of college, but all colleges have different degrees and different levels of academic standards, so he made all of the hiring managers, including me, ask every candidate for their SAT and ACT scores, in addition to transcripts, because that was the only standardized way to know how smart people really were.

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And this was very unnerving for a lot of people.

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A lot of people were very self-conscious about this, and the really funny part about this was that very few companies actually did this.

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In fact, one of the few other companies that historically has done it is Google, and they got so much pressure for it that they stopped asking.

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But I actually and this is almost 10 years ago.

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This shows how old I am but 10 years ago I was actually interviewed by I think it was the New York Times who wrote a story about this Was it appropriate to ask people their SAT or ACT scores?

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And they talked about Google and I told them our logic behind it and I was like it's just one data point, it's not the deciding factor.

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Yes, but it was like a fun thing, a fun tie to your journey that you're on with Google, between those two things.

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I love that, but my favorite thing was teaching my students how to get money out of their test scores, because that's the piece that a lot of people didn't teach.

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I helped many students get five and six-figure scholarships, and it's a means that serves many ends.

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I really value putting my time and effort into things that can pay me many different ways, and so it worked with the ACT and SAT.

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It works with SEO, too, so it's a really I have a trend in my business.

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It's a good analogy, yeah, yeah.

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So tell us a story about some of the best marketing results you've got from doing SEO.

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We're ready to be inspired.

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Yeah.

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So I think the first time I clued in to how powerful this was when I had my daughter and overnight my life changed as it does when you have kiddos and I knew I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, but I also love business, and so I wasn't going to give up my business, and I also didn't want to give up being with my kid, and I had worked my tail off over time to build up traffic on my site, even though I didn't know that's what I was doing at the time.

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Right, I had just enough information to be really dangerous, and so I podcasted, I played in all these different mediums, I was blogging.

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I had really robust pages on my website.

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When my daughter was born, I flipped the switch to working a four-hour work week, like that brass ring that folks look to and work towards, and I remember being so sunk in those early days of motherhood and that when my first three months passed and I was like, oh, I'm going to get back to work after three months, I was able to take six months and, to be fair, I am not the main breadwinner in my family.

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However, I was still had a profitable company and when I looked back, when I felt up to the task of tearing my eyes away from her cute and chubby cheeks for long enough to like actually do more than just send emails.

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I realized that the business was running itself and the reason it was that my website was driving 16,000 new users via organic search a month and it did that for almost two whole years and I didn't create much new content.

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Front facing, I did basic maintenance and I sent emails and I was able to have this robust and profitable company.

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Mother, my daughter move our family thousands of miles north from Southern California to Seattle and have a second kid.

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Weather, a pandemic.

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There's so much life that happened and I think before I always felt like the exchange had to be my business in exchange for my life, and this was the first time I ever really felt like I had that.

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I'm using air quotes there, because what is that?

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Even I had this sense of like control and I wasn't constantly chasing.

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For the first time I was in the driver's seat and it was because I had a really great co-pilot, and that was Google.

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It's interesting saying that you got 16,000 visitors a month, because I know a lot of tech companies with a fair amount of employees that first of all, they were hesitant to even look at what their traffic was, and it definitely wasn't above 10,000 a month, and when they did start to look at it, they struggled to get it there month.

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And when they did start to look at it, they struggled to get it there.

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I do think people should look at the number of visitors their website has per month and how many are organic and how many are paid, and I do think that it's an activity metric that matters as a forward indicator of if you have any momentum in your business.

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So how did you get those 16,000 visitors a month?

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So I will say I was really lucky, worked with a stupendous website designer who, when we were deciding what pages to include on the site, she was like I did some quick and dirty keyword research and do you know that nobody else is putting ACT and SAT test dates on a single page on their websites?

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And I was like what she said?

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Yeah, and I think to your point.

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You have to remember I was playing against the big guys.

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It was me and hi, it was just me.

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My dad did my books, my mom did my shipping, everything else content creation, curriculum development, sales, podcasting.

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I edited my own show.

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Every inch of this business was me, except the website build at first.

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And she pointed to the fact that the Kaplans, the Princeton Reviews, the Revolution Preps they didn't have this page on their site and so people were searching ACT and SAT test dates and nothing was coming back.

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So people were searching ACT and SAT test dates and nothing was coming back.

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That page was like the single biggest driver of traffic on my site and continues to be today, even though I've sold the company.

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I can still see because I have sneaky tools.

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That is the page that when you keep that one updated year over year.

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You don't change the URL.

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You're able to garner a lot of traffic to a singular page.

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If you optimize it for conversion.

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You can bring people onto your website, onto your email list.

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So, even though things that were a direct play towards the transactional query were harder to rank for, something that was purely informational was able to actually feed me.

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At the end of the day, that was, I think the biggest thing was to find that evergreen content, or even that annual content that you can put on an evergreen URL and turn the content on the page but keep the URL standardized and static.

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That's like the biggest win that we had.

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But the other thing that I did was think about those informational queries beyond just the test dates, so the questions around what is a good SAT score, and thinking about the human user on the other side of that.

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Is that someone coming to me before they test, trying to benchmark a test that they took a practice test and they're like, oh no, I'm freaking out, this is terrible.

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Or is it someone who just got their scores back and they're trying to figure out if they need to test again?

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How can we facilitate that conversation?

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And then also say, by the way, there's money in your test score?

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Are you benchmarking this against scholarships?

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Are you seeing how it's going to pay you?

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And bringing that sort of extra thread and showing them that they didn't know what they didn't know and that I was the person to trust with that conversation.

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So those were the primary things that I did, and I did it over time.

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It was the kind of thing that it didn't happen overnight and I did have a podcast that was bringing live content to the site.

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But really thinking about what people search before they need me and how could I answer the question in a way that indicated that I was the person to trust.

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So I think it's a really interesting insight.

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You found a couple very critical things that people were searching for and when I've run both organic and massive paid Mm-hmm, that really matter and understanding those uncomplicates things greatly, because you really don't need to do some massive thing, go long tail across thousands of keywords.

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You can.

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That's a strategy, but there's a lot of people who are very successful by just focusing on a few of the key insights that are not as competitive Like you found.

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No one else was doing the ACT dates right.

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That's a very interesting insight that allowed you to win and I think if people can just find a couple of those insights for their business, they can have a massive impact right.

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Absolutely, and I do think too, there's this sense that the more we pay, the more we're going to get out of our SEO experts.

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And the reality is that the human side, who you serve, how you serve them, it's not just traffic, right, it's not that's a human being in need of some sort of need.

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It might even be something fun.

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I work with a lot of Disney travel agents, and what hotel to stay in at Disney World is a great query to know that person hasn't booked yet.

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They're in that like seeking mindset and they are ready for a break.

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And if you as a travel agent could be like, listen, I'm going to tell you my favorites.

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But also if you want me to just book the whole thing for you, I totally can and it's no extra charge to you, thinking about that person who is pouring in this time and really serving them well, even through your written content.

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It's a mistake and a miss that I think even a lot of SEO experts make, because they're serving in wide variety of niches and they don't understand the customer base.

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And this is where I really love SEO to be more collaborative with my clients or with folks who go through my course, even just to understand how to quarterback it.

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Well, because there's a lot of snake oil salesmen out there, and it's not about traffic, it's about conversion.

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It's about bringing people in, welcoming them in a way that is warm and makes them feel comfortable and like they're going to be taken care of.

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And maybe it's because I started working with people's kids that I realized that exchange of trust was so valuable, and it was something that I really wanted to honor and be careful with.

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Even though I was leveraging strategies, marketing strategies that could just be data.

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I want to see the heart behind it too.

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It could just be data.

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I want to see the heart behind it too.

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Yeah, I think some of the SEO programs out there, some of the info marketing programs, start to get to feel very transactional, perhaps a bit kitschy in terms of just it's like a trick or it's like very transactional.

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I think there is the human sort of component of it.

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It's really real, repeatable.

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Success comes from figuring out these insights, like you're saying, of what are people really searching for when they're going to buy your product or service and how can you tap into that in a competitive way and how can you rank on it?

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So where do you think?

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How do you think things are evolving with AI, google and SEO?

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I like a human touch and, for all the reasons I just stated, you can't see the threads if AI just chucks up some keywords and you're like cool, use those.

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So I think, from the keyword research standpoint, we want to think about AI as maybe a tool in our tool belt, but not necessarily something we're wholly reliant upon, right?

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We still want the human touch and, frankly, I can tell when I'm reading AI generated content.

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I think most people can.

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They're like this sounds robotic.

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Now that might change in the future.

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But I think, from the keyword research and the content creation, if you're using AI as an assistant, I like that approach right.

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Some people have like executive function issues.

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It gets in the way of their writing cohesive and coherent pieces Great.

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Have AI generate a structure for a post, but then make sure you go in and put your own spin on it.

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And if that can help you with the organization and allow you to create better content that serves others, wonderful, that's a great use of it.

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When we look down the line as to geo, right.

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So AI, the generative AI, search and what's going to happen, I think a lot of people are not going to like it.

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I know I personally won't like it, and there are two reasons.

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One is more like ethical considerations.

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Ai generated searches take four to five times the resources.

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So when we talk about the carbon footprint of that and just pure server space required to generate AI searches, there's going to be a lead time right, it's not going to happen tomorrow.

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But also it's not like going to the deli counter and being like I want the turkey and I'll get some sliced mortadella right, it's not going to be that.

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It's going to be the charcuterie plate.

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They're going to present it to you and be like here are the meats and there will be, from what I've seen, and these are all, of course, we're supposing here and it could change as Google gets feedback we're going to have like footnotes of here's some data and it's going to be like a source and the source is a link, so one in brackets, and that'll be hyperlinked and you can go to the source.

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That's what it seems like it's leaning towards.

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It's very visual and so I think I don't want the summary.

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I guess it depends.

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Am I there just for information?

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That is, just at the movie times, please?

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I don't care where I get that information, but when I want to know what somebody thinks it matters to me who shared it, and so certain queries I think are better served by blog posts or articles written by folks who want to share their opinion, and I think those kinds of searches are going to be harder to sift through in AI.

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I think it depends.

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It depends and I'm hoping that there will be like an eco-friendly search option where we can go back to the old way and it'll be less resource heavy and we'll be able to get what we have now, because I like the Google algorithm, like it vets people for us and I don't think we will lose that credibility with Gen AI.

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But I also worry.

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I worry about what I call the beige-ification of information.

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I don't want it all to just flow to the middle and just all look the same.

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I want to hear disparate voices and when you think about what's happening politically and with algorithms on social and how we have these echo chambers, I'm hoping AI can help us do better on that front.

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And I'm not sure, based on what I've seen as the projection of what it's going to look like, that we're going to get that based on those projections, but they're projections, so it's hard to say.

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So a couple of interesting things is I'm older than Google, in fact I'm older than the internet, so I used to have to call movie phone to get the movie time.

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It's really not that strange than the internet, so I used to have to call movie phone to get the movie time.

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It's really not that strange to me that we wouldn't have to look at Google for them.

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There could be another way to get them.

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But that silliness aside, I think ever since Google launched, I definitely thought, taking a historical perspective, around 2000, when it launched, I'm like sure it was better than Yahoo, which was just a massive page of blinking banner ads which was terrible, so it was better than that Do you remember, ask Jeeves, I remember.

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Ask Jeeves and LookSmart and AltaVista and none of the others.

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So I think Google was better because of the simplistic, clean interface on the main screen where you could just search.

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But the thing I didn't like about it that I never thought that what Google has had for the last 20 years has really been the end answer is you type in a search phrase and it gives you like okay, this is the first page of a million results, and then they're trying to relevance rank things at the top and sometimes it's good and sometimes it's not, and sometimes you just go through a lot of links before you find what you're really looking for.

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So I never thought it was like wow, this is the be all end all solution.

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But it was definitely better than what we had, and so it's not that surprising to me that some people might think for some use cases not all, like you're saying, but some that asking ChatGPT or one of the other AM models might be a better way to get to an answer faster than searching through all the links in Google, although the thing used to be any question you have, google is the answer, just Google it.

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But there is no way to say as, like a verb, chagy, pt it.

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This doesn't really roll off the tongue, it doesn't?

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Some people are like maybe you could say just Jeep it.

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I'm like, no, that doesn't do it for me.

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No, no jeeping.

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No, there's no jeeping, so we're going to have to come up.

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They're going to have to come up with something better for that for sure, if they want to win.

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But I think you're right.

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It's not catchy all seriousness aside, I think the I think the thing is that there are still big issues with accuracy, but I think open AI is going to build a search engine, so it is going to be competitive.

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Bing is actually evolving.

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I never thought Bing would come back from the dead.

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That's something I never thought would happen, so all bets are off of what could happen.

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I guess the question right now is and how Google is making changes to the logarithm for organic search to compete with AI?

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Is there short-term impacts that are happening because of the changes that Google is doing to the logarithms for people who have been doing white hat SEO and have been doing the right organic things?

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Are any of those sites getting penalized?

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Do you think there's any short-term impacts there?

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Oh, I'm seeing it on my site right now.

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Yeah, I've gotten hit in the last the helpful content update that went live in March.

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I definitely have gone down.

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Oddly enough, my clients haven't, which I'm like.

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You know what I'll take the hit.

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It's fine, and I think this is where you hear differentiating reports about what matters, and I think it's the kind of thing where if you're doing white hat stuff, then you don't really have to worry.

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Even though my traffic is taking a hit in the short term, I'm not concerned.

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I'm going to keep churning my content out.

00:22:16.316 --> 00:22:41.703
The only difference, the only update that I am going to start to weave in and go back and start to put more in are outbound links, because with AI, one of the things that they're saying is that you need a broader base of knowledge, like more credibility comes from quoting other sources and linking out appropriately and that sort of thing.

00:22:41.703 --> 00:22:53.795
So I am going to make a concerted effort to do that more, especially because a lot of what I share is based on what I'm learning elsewhere, and I do try and give credit if I can remember where I learned stuff.

00:22:53.795 --> 00:23:01.221
But when you're reading articles all the time, sometimes you're writing the aggregate six months after you learned a topic or what have you.

00:23:01.221 --> 00:23:05.554
I think that is a move that is something everybody should be doing.

00:23:05.554 --> 00:23:16.134
It just makes for stronger writing, frankly, and when it comes to your EEAT, that also informs that the more you share, the higher your expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

00:23:16.535 --> 00:23:22.911
Yeah, I think that when we see these hits in the micro, it's good to step back and go.

00:23:22.911 --> 00:23:24.811
Is there anything I should be doing differently?

00:23:24.811 --> 00:23:29.155
But I think the arc of Google algorithm updates bends.

00:23:29.155 --> 00:23:31.037
You're creating good content.

00:23:31.037 --> 00:23:54.401
So things like having them opt into an email and move to a thank you page, so they hit two pages and then you send them a welcome email with a link back to your site, something maybe relevant that they might want to see.

00:23:54.401 --> 00:24:09.584
So maybe they get three visits in that first five minutes of interaction that sort of thing for the right fit person, but again, always doing it with permission, marketing at the fore and taking care of folks at the fore.

00:24:09.584 --> 00:24:24.269
So I think, as long as you're elevating your best practices and leveraging them throughout, I think you can trust that over time it'll course correct that over time it'll course correct.

00:24:24.549 --> 00:24:53.978
So some of the strategies that I've used and other people in B2B marketing I know that I've used for SEO, For example, you create over time, with sweat and tears, thousands of really high quality blog posts that are handwritten, not AI generated, and you optimize them for quality content and you optimize them also to focus on certain keywords so that you can get ranked for those.

00:24:53.978 --> 00:25:12.233
I worked for one company where we did that and we actually had a team of freelancers that helped and we were putting out for years five blog posts a week that were like 2000 words and after a couple of years we were getting like a quarter million visitors a month to our blog.

00:25:12.233 --> 00:25:20.998
It was actually the main source of leads for free trials for the software product we had, because it really drove people in.

00:25:21.739 --> 00:25:29.902
So my question is with the helpful content update, is the dream of doing things like that dead or do you think it'll still continue like you're saying?

00:25:31.211 --> 00:25:32.374
I don't think it's dead.

00:25:32.374 --> 00:25:33.797
I think these updates.

00:25:33.797 --> 00:25:44.550
I wish Google was more transparent, because and I understand why they're not right Like they say, this is what matters now, and then everybody finds a blackout way to do it and you just go.

00:25:44.550 --> 00:25:48.337
This is why we can't have nice things the bad actors.

00:25:48.337 --> 00:26:04.413
So I think if you are elevating quality over quantity as a solopreneur as someone who works with solopreneurs, I think that's the hardest thing is to get people moving at all, because they're like if I do one thing, it doesn't matter.

00:26:04.794 --> 00:26:15.414
No, if you write really quality content that speaks to folks, then not only can Google find it, but you can use it in like email replies, you can use it as the basis for your email marketing.

00:26:15.414 --> 00:26:18.905
Like you can chunk it up and distribute it over social.

00:26:18.905 --> 00:26:20.230
It's not lost.

00:26:20.230 --> 00:26:26.282
But I think we really have to be thinking about quality over quantity.

00:26:26.282 --> 00:26:34.952
So I think it's about doing enough to serve and to meet a need and that can be informed by a keyword research process.

00:26:34.952 --> 00:26:38.662
You can see where the gaps are in your own content that you offer.

00:26:38.662 --> 00:26:44.355
I think it's a great opportunity to reach out and collaborate with others and try to get backlinks that way.

00:26:44.916 --> 00:26:48.840
But I do feel like less is more.

00:26:48.840 --> 00:27:07.998
I think, with the ubiquity of AI and the fact that we can churn out a million reasonable question mark posts at the drop of a hat reasonable Question mark post at the drop of a hat why are we doing it?

00:27:07.998 --> 00:27:08.901
I think we have to start asking why more?

00:27:08.901 --> 00:27:14.517
And I think if you're publishing five posts because that's what you were supposed to do is that enough, is that too much?

00:27:14.517 --> 00:27:22.942
And reassessing through the lens of who you're serving and how many people you want to connect with and how you serve that person.

00:27:22.942 --> 00:27:31.443
That's, I think, going to become the more important factor, even with algorithms and whatnot at play.

00:27:34.310 --> 00:27:44.224
So the SEO formulas have always been very complex and there's a lot more to it than just the content.

00:27:44.224 --> 00:27:51.923
There's things like page load times and there's the number of people who link to your site.

00:27:51.923 --> 00:27:55.115
There's a lot of other things other than the content itself.

00:27:55.115 --> 00:28:10.598
So all of those good things, like having a lot of people linking to your site that are quality sites, like getting those links and having fast page load time just to give two examples out of the many things it seems like there's still enough things.

00:28:10.598 --> 00:28:19.198
If you're doing all of those right things you're saying, with the overall changes in time, the dream is still possible, right?

00:28:19.910 --> 00:28:35.340
I do think so, and I think, when I look at SEO best practices, I look at the timeless ones and, yes, your site must look good on a tiny phone screen because, hi, we all have computers in our pockets and a lot of your people are going to find you that way.

00:28:35.340 --> 00:28:40.678
Leveraging your headers appropriately, having clear URL structure.

00:28:40.678 --> 00:28:58.316
I always think about holding two threads when I'm writing content and holding it for the bots and holding one for humans, and, whenever possible, if I have to make a choice along those lines, I always elevate the human component, because behavior metrics ultimately feed Google.

00:28:58.316 --> 00:29:09.702
I think the biggest miss one, though, that I see is internal linking on your own website and making sure you're connecting the different posts that you have using quality anchor text.

00:29:09.702 --> 00:29:17.423
That one I've seen more people grow their traffic by going to their best post and being like.

00:29:17.423 --> 00:29:31.414
I'm going to revamp this to elevate the other ones that are here, because that, plus then submitting your URLs to Google, which takes two seconds, go to Google search console after you write everything and submit, and be like Google.

00:29:31.414 --> 00:29:34.663
Please crawl my site, just raise your hand, it's fine, they'll find you.

00:29:35.170 --> 00:29:46.898
But 96.5% of webpages on the internet get zero traffic from Google, according to a 2023 traffic study by Ahrefs, if you're getting more than 10 on any page, you are in the top.

00:29:46.898 --> 00:29:47.380
What is that?

00:29:47.380 --> 00:29:48.471
Three and a half percent?

00:29:48.471 --> 00:29:55.490
You don't have to do a lot to get on the board and I think you have to do a lot less than people assume.

00:29:55.490 --> 00:29:57.253
I think there is hope.

00:29:57.795 --> 00:30:05.788
There's just a few things you can do if you're not already on the board, or things you can do to optimize, but at the end of the day, it has to work for your workflow.

00:30:05.788 --> 00:30:09.516
So if you're creating content, again I have to ask why.

00:30:09.516 --> 00:30:11.799
I think it's probably to be found.

00:30:11.799 --> 00:30:14.532
I don't know anybody who puts a website out there and goes.

00:30:14.532 --> 00:30:15.635
I hope nobody finds this.

00:30:15.635 --> 00:30:30.411
So take the extra 10 minutes 15 minutes to optimize and get that content in the hands of the person who needs you, who doesn't yet know you but who types a query into Google that you answer Like.

00:30:30.411 --> 00:30:47.069
Serve them with that extra 15 minutes and you'll be surprised at what you can drive through your doors course.

00:30:47.109 --> 00:30:52.750
So what do you advise marketers, solopreneurs who are putting up a website to get in the game so that they're not in the 95% of pages that aren't even getting any traffic from Google?

00:30:52.750 --> 00:30:59.759
What are the top two to three things that you advise clients to do?

00:31:01.381 --> 00:31:20.519
I work with a lot of multi-passionate entrepreneurs, of which I am one, and so I think you have to remember that for every additional property that you create, there is an exponential amount of work that goes with each additional one.

00:31:20.519 --> 00:31:29.758
So, for better or for worse, I encourage people to have a single site, and especially solopreneurs, right.

00:31:29.758 --> 00:31:35.835
So, like I talk about purpose, I talk about SEO and I talk about digital entrepreneurship.

00:31:35.835 --> 00:31:39.653
Those are my three domains and I have them under like pillar pages.

00:31:39.653 --> 00:31:41.395
They're very organized and hierarchical.

00:31:41.516 --> 00:32:06.977
It's clear to Google what I'm doing, but I have a single website and so I think, understanding that if I publish a single post on that single site, it helps with the overall health of a whole site, versus I have three disparate sites, distinct sites, and now I have to post three posts a month or six posts a month instead of just two to keep that same site fresh and healthy in the eyes of Google.

00:32:06.977 --> 00:32:12.174
So if you have the resources to have the distinct properties, by all means do it.

00:32:12.174 --> 00:32:22.519
But as a solopreneur, I say be organized with your hierarchy from the outset and focus on a single branch of content at a time.

00:32:22.519 --> 00:32:25.724
Get one thing going before you start adding in the others.

00:32:25.724 --> 00:32:30.500
So that would be my first thing, especially for my solopreneurs, because I know that's really hard.

00:32:31.040 --> 00:32:31.742
Don't get fancy.

00:32:32.430 --> 00:32:33.635
Yeah, don't complicate it.

00:32:33.635 --> 00:32:35.758
This is like people have 38 social handles.

00:32:35.758 --> 00:32:43.174
I'm like, oh my God, like just stop, Like I'm tired, I don't need to just put it all in one feed, I don't need to just put it all in one feed.

00:32:43.214 --> 00:32:44.557
I don't care, and it's just confusing.

00:32:44.557 --> 00:32:45.919
It is just confusing.

00:32:45.939 --> 00:32:48.784
Yeah, maybe have two, one that's personal, one that's business.

00:32:48.784 --> 00:32:56.655
But oh my goodness, I think we're driving ourselves nuts, right, I think we're driving ourselves nuts trying to feed the content beast.

00:32:56.655 --> 00:32:58.480
When in doubt, feed Google first, social.

00:32:58.480 --> 00:33:01.645
It drops out the bottom of the algorithm in 24 hours.

00:33:01.645 --> 00:33:02.669
Who cares?

00:33:02.669 --> 00:33:13.320
Right, you have to hit the right person by guessing the content to post, hope it shows up in their feed and when they're doom scrolling, it'll be enough to get them to stop With SEO.

00:33:14.001 --> 00:33:16.973
Your posts live for a very long time.

00:33:16.973 --> 00:33:22.234
Like I said at the top, when I had my daughter, I did not create any new content.

00:33:22.234 --> 00:33:23.750
It was an albatross around my neck.

00:33:23.750 --> 00:33:29.403
I knew it was a problem and Google kept feeding me for two whole years, which was awesome.

00:33:29.403 --> 00:33:32.315
So no social post is going to do that for you.

00:33:33.156 --> 00:33:34.720
When in doubt, feed Google first.

00:33:34.720 --> 00:33:37.491
Eat that frog, get the big post done.

00:33:37.491 --> 00:33:40.237
You can chunk it up and feed it into social later if you want.

00:33:40.237 --> 00:33:44.845
And then understand on-page SEO best practices.

00:33:44.845 --> 00:33:47.618
Go and look at what those are.

00:33:47.618 --> 00:33:53.912
And then I have to put in the fourth of set up Google Search Console and submit every URL.

00:33:53.912 --> 00:33:59.780
The second you hit, post and publish, go and submit it and say Google, there's fresh content on my site.

00:33:59.780 --> 00:34:10.690
I'm the worst at publishing on any sort of regular cadence, I'm really bad at it, but Google crawls my site and indexes me very quickly because I tell him I have new stuff.

00:34:10.690 --> 00:34:19.030
There is something to be said for getting in the SERPs, like showing up and getting found.

00:34:19.030 --> 00:34:19.893
That's the whole point.

00:34:19.893 --> 00:34:22.760
And if he doesn't know you exist, do you even exist?

00:34:22.760 --> 00:34:27.833
If a website is on the internet but is not indexed by Google, is it really a website?

00:34:27.833 --> 00:34:30.001
It's a philosophical question.

00:34:30.001 --> 00:34:30.650
It is.

00:34:30.650 --> 00:34:34.442
There's trees and forests and all sorts of things in there, so explore that.

00:34:35.530 --> 00:34:41.202
All right, thank you very much for sharing your stories, your expertise and your insights today.

00:34:41.202 --> 00:34:54.916
Sharing your stories, your expertise and your insights today, I'm going to link to your website and your LinkedIn, so if people would like to dive deeper into the wide world of SEO and organic content, they can reach out and contact you.

00:34:54.916 --> 00:34:57.360
We really appreciate you being with us today.

00:34:57.570 --> 00:34:58.657
Thank you so much, Eric.

00:34:58.657 --> 00:34:59.400
This is a pleasure.