Do you have to be techie to do SEO? Ep. 138

Are you wondering if you're technical enough to do SEO? Have you heard that it's hard, complicated, or overly technical, and now that's intimidating you? If so, be sure to listen to this episode because I will help you see how little technical skill is required to do SEO today. Yes, you had to be technical to understand SEO years ago, but it's not that way now. I'll explain what the 3 most important tech pieces are for your website and how to verify if they're OK on your site, and then you can get back to creating great content for your ideal customer. 

Transcript

0:32

Hi. Welcome back to the podcast. Today I wanna answer a question that I got from a potential student. And it was a great one, and it was Rachel. Do I have to be really super techie to do SEO? Can I even do it if I'm not technical? Because I'm not technical. So let's jump in and answer this and kind of talk about it because I. I want you to really understand the amount of tech that you have to understand and comprehend and be able to do in order to do SEO today is so minimal compared to what it was like maybe a decade ago. So, you know, I've been very honest. I'm not super techy. I am focused on the content strategy. I work on the optimization. How do we find the right content for our customer? How do we align that? Where do we find the opportunities for us to rank? What keywords can we go after? What phrases can we use to try to rank in ai, SEO? Like I'm all about your content strategy and your visibility, not the tech side of things. I don't code, I don't program, I don't do any of that. And you really don't need to to succeed with SEO today either. So from a tech standpoint, let's talk about what's important. So one of the first things we're gonna wanna look at. Is the speed of your website, how fast does your website load? This is gonna be really important because Google likes a speedy site for the simple reason that consumers want websites to load fast. If your website is reminiscent of like dial up internet circa 1999, where we're waiting, we're waiting, we're waiting. Or maybe a more current day situation would be like. You are on your cell phone and you have one bar of service, and all you see is that little spinny dial that yeah, something might happen at some point in time. If your website is doing that, you are not gonna rank high because it's not a good user experience. So what causes a website to be really slow? There are a couple things. Normally the one that we see that's the bigger problem is the size of your image files, which is why I talk to you about making sure that you're minifying, minimizing. The file sizes. You want your image files to be in kb, not mb. KB is smaller. We want small files because small files load faster. That's really the main thing that generally slows websites down. So if you are still uploading photos like straight from your phone, or let's say, oh my gosh, you're using your DSLR camera and you have these huge file, these huge photo files. You're gonna wanna make those smaller. You're gonna wanna use an image ification tool, something like JPEG Mini, or if you're using Photoshop, export for web. If you're on. WordPress you can use like WP Smush or plugin, whatever, just to make sure that those image file sizes are smaller. While you're doing that, while you're working on the file, go ahead and make sure you optimize that file as well. Making sure that you are using your keyword in there along with the dash, the one that looks like the minus sign in between words, because Google reads the dash as a space. Remember that, and then your bonus tip. Is to make sure you're also including your business name, because that makes it a little easier for you to show up when someone searches your business name. So that's one reason your website might be loading slow. I. The other main reason that we see is because you are on like a shared hosting. So sometimes when we have really cheap hosting, we are on a shared server, meaning our website and another website share that server and share those resources. And so if that other website gets busier, has more people coming to it. Stick away from you and take some of your resources because you only have so much to share. So you wanna look at that and see who's my host? What's my server? Am I on my own dedicated one? Sometimes it's worth paying a little bit more money to make sure that you have enough speed to be able to serve your website quickly. So how do you find out if your website is fast enough for Google? There are a couple places you can go. There are tools. One is the Google Page speed test. That's the one I generally use. You go, you put your URL, it's gonna look at an. Mobile and desktop. How do you load on mobile? How do you load on desktop? How are you doing? And it's gonna give you a score and it's going to show you like red, yellow, green, are you? And it's just like a stoplight go. Caution stop. And then it's going to also tell you like what you need to address. So that's a really easy way to do it. You can also use a tool called Pingdom. Either one doesn't matter. Use the one that you want. Both of them will give you a free report. So that's the first thing. Is your site fast enough from a tech standpoint? The second thing is going to be, is it mobile friendly? So years ago we actually had separate sites. So in many cases it was like your website, and then if it was a mobile site, it was like mdot for mobile. And so we would have two different versions. And we would have a desktop site and we would have a mobile site. We don't really have to do that today. Today most of our website templates, especially on like WordPress and Kajabi and Squarespace and all that, most of them are what's called responsive design, meaning the website template itself adjusts based on the size of the screen. So that you have a good user experience, no matter what screen you are on, you can probably think about, you know, 10 years ago maybe you were on a mobile site and it was terrible. It was very hard to use on your phone. It was not user friendly. You couldn't read things, you couldn't really scroll. That was a site that was designed for traditional desktop that was on mobile, but it was not responsive. It was not really. Designed with mobile search in mind. So most of our sites are going to be mobile friendly. Most of them are going to be responsive. What you wanna do is take a look at your website on your phone, and I want you to look to see are the menus easy to navigate? Are the images too big? What can you see? On your website without scrolling the slightest on your phone, can you see and figure out what you do or what you offer on that phone screen with no scrolling? Does your opt-in, show up, et cetera? Like really take a look at it. What do you see basically above the fold? We've talked about above the fold before. That's an old term. It came from newspapers. It was what was above the fold on the newspaper, meaning what showed up in the box when somebody was looking at the newspaper, when they were walking by. Today, above the fold is basically without scroll, what shows up on your website or now on your phone. When you go to your website without scrolling, we wanna make sure the most important information is there above the fold. So we wanna make sure that on mobile, we know what you do, who you help, et cetera. Now, if you are not sure to focus more on mobile or desktop, where does my traffic come from? Here's a little bonus for you. You can find this out in your Google Analytics account. So if you are curious, do I need to. Being mobile friendly? Well, if 99% of your traffic to your website comes from a desktop, I wouldn't worry as much about being mobile friendly as if 75% of your traffic came from your mobile's mobile devices compared to desktop. Now, in most instances. You probably get more mobile traffic than desktop traffic to your website. That's generally what we see. Google also is doing mobile first indexing and has been for goodness gracious, at least 10 years, where they index your site mobile, your mobile site before they index your desktop site. So how you appear on a phone is quite important, so you wanna make sure that. Your site loads quickly on phone and has good images and is clear and is easy to understand. So that's really something I want you to look at from a tech SEO standpoint. And we're talking slightly different now. We're starting to talk. I told you we were gonna start talking a little more about conversion optimization and some other tips to really help make sure that once they get to your site. They want to engage with it because one of the big ranking factors is engagement. How does somebody work with your site? So if people are coming to your site and they're leaving very quickly, Google knows your site is not good from a user experience standpoint. So you can be very well optimized. And start to rank and start to get traffic. But if that traffic does not engage well with your site, if they don't find what they're looking for, it's hard to navigate, it's confusing, et cetera, you're going to lose those rankings quickly. So we wanna make sure we're looking at both ends of it. Not only are we looking at the traffic that we're trying to get, but we're making sure that the site itself is set up for conversion. And this is one of the things we wanna look at is what does it look like above the fold. Can somebody tell what I do? Can somebody find my opt-in? Do they know how I help them, who I help? All of that's gonna be really important. So now I. Now that you understand, like we're talking about the conversion, we're talking about mobile versus desktop. Now let's talk about what we really need to worry about from an SEO standpoint. So like I've told you, it's not about being super technical. It's a. About creating the content that your ideal customer is searching for the content ideas that they need help with, and you optimizing that content so that Google can find you. I had a conversation earlier today with a prospect who was telling me, you know, when I search my company name. The website doesn't show up and I don't know what I need to do so that when we do show up, when people are searching for us or they're searching for the type business that we have, like we don't exist, and then somebody had just introduced her to chat, GPT search, and she's like, so I went in there and we don't show up in there either. If you're not showing up, if you're not doing SEO on your website, you're not going to show up in all these different places. SEO is your visibility. So you have to help Google and now AI Chat, GPT, Google. Again, Google, because we have Google AI overviews and Google AI mode. We also have perplexity. We have other AI based search in addition to chat GPT. So we really wanna make sure that we are optimizing for. All of them so that we have a better chance of ranking in Google and AI search because it's not going away, my friends. So don't worry so much about the technical stay, very focused on creating great content, being helpful to your ideal customer, using the keywords that they would be searching for. Optimizing meaning that you're putting all those keywords in the places that Google is looking for them. If you're not sure what those are, get a copy of my. Beginner's Guide to SEO. It's got that information in it for you. If you wanna a little learn a little bit more, join me in the free live SEO class. I'll put the link in here. I've been teaching it live each week so you have a chance to come in and learn how to show up in Google and chat GPT. Come on in, take that class with me, ask questions. Join me in simple SEO content. Let me teach you how to do this. We'll make it as easy, simple, and straightforward as possible. And seriously the tech not a problem at all. Go ahead and check your site speed. Go ahead and make sure that you look good on mobile and that you have minified your images, meaning you've made your image files smaller in kb, not mb. You're gonna be good. That really is about all you have to do from a tech standpoint, and then follow SEO best practices and we'll get you ranking in both Google and AI SEO. That's it for today. I'll see you back here next week. Bye for now.