How can you tell if your SEO is working?

Are you trying to do SEO on your own and wondering if what you're doing is working? Find out how to tell if your SEO strategy is working in this week's episode. I'll walk you through what to check to see if everything is working as it should be, so you can be visible, generate traffic, and most importantly, leads for your business. SEO is a great channel for small business owners if you do it the right way. Let me teach you how to do SEO on your website. 

Transcript

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Hi, and welcome back to the podcast Rachel here, and I'm so glad that you're here with me this week. Today's episode is going to answer one of those questions that I get asked all the time, and that is how can you tell if your SEO is working? So I get this from people in the free training classes. I get this at the beginning from new students, especially people who have tried it. For on their own. They're working on it. They're not quite sure if what they're doing is right, if they're at the point where like. They still need to just wait a little longer to see results or if they're maybe doing something wrong because they've been trying to figure it out on their own and they need some help. So when your SEO is working, you will no longer ask Rachel, is what I'm doing working? Is this gonna pay off? Is this gonna happen? Like, do I just need to wait longer? All of those questions will honestly go away because you will know with certainty that it is working because you will see all the different things coming together. So the first thing we look at to understand whether or not we're doing the right thing. Is rankings? Do we have rankings? Do we have visibility? Are we showing up? So when we're doing this, like when I'm working with a client, or if you're in simple SEO content, you are learning to track your keywords. So when you choose a keyword. You create a piece of content on your site, or you update a page on your site or a blog post and you use that keyword, we take what we call a baseline view. So we look to see where did you rank before you did the work. So did you exist at all? You know, were you on the first 10 pages? If you were ranking using a tool, did it give you a number? Did you show up anywhere? Most of the time, you're not going to have a lot of visibility for a keyword if you've never used it before, you've never optimized for it, et cetera. So that's gonna be the very first thing we do is like, just baseline. Where are you at? Then we look about every two weeks, once a month. We don't wanna make adjustments really quickly because it does take time. We want to see is that rank moving up? Meaning is our number getting smaller? So let's say you start out and you find a keyword and you create a piece of content and you're wondering, it's two months down the road. Is this working? And when you started and you looked at your baseline rank report, you were zero. You were non-existent. You know, you either it didn't register at all or you were a hundred, something like that. And let's say that in two to three months, you are now showing up in position 30. Okay. It is working. It's not far enough down the process yet to be driving visibility and traffic. But it's working. It's starting to show up. Google is starting to understand that your page is about this keyword. It's starting to show you Now. We want you to move up higher than that in order to really be more visible. The great thing about Position 30 is when we get to that point, we're actually starting to be visible enough potentially to show up in AI based search, because some of the. Um, research studies that I've seen have shown that websites that are being cited by AI are actually more in the twenties and thirties than in positions like one through one through three. The way it works on Google, so you don't have to be all the way up at the top to start showing up in AI based search, but we just wanna see is anything moving? Is there any movement? So that's the first thing we look at is rankings. As you get smaller, meaning you get closer to number one, you should start to see an increase in traffic to your website from an organic channel, so from your SEO. So that's the next thing we look at is website traffic. Which pages are getting traffic? Are you getting traffic to the pages that you are focusing on? So here you wanna look at your page level data. You don't just wanna look at your total traffic number, but you actually wanna look at page level data. Which pages are you doing SEO on, and which pages are getting organic traffic? So you're gonna need to look in Google Analytics or Clicky if you're one of my students. You know, we use Clicky because it's easier, it's more user friendly. So if you, if you're in simple SEO content, you should have that set up on your site already. If you don't and you need help, just ping me and ask me. During one of our group calls, I'll make sure you've got the guide and everything.'cause that does make life easier. So we're looking to see which pages are getting traffic. So that's step number two. Then. Step number three is to look at are we generating leads? So if we're starting to have our keywords grow, more people are finding us, we're starting to be visible in AI based search. We're starting to get some traffic, and we're looking at our traffic from. SEO. So organic. We also, if you're using clicky, you're gonna be able to see your AI based traffic just right there. It's gonna show you a little robot. It's awesome, and it's gonna have a little robot icon right there in your traffic data information. Or if you're in Google Analytics or Squarespace Analytics, something like that, it's likely going to be, I know in Google Analytics it's in referring traffic, so you have to go into referring traffic and then build a filter to be able to find chat, GPT, Claude, um, perplexity, things like that. It is easier in clicky. I will put the clicky affiliate link in the description here as well. If you are a listener, you're not in simple SEO content yet, but you want to be able to use an easier to understand analytics program, go grab that link. Get signed up. It will make your life easier. It really will. Most of my students have switched over to it. When I ask'em, what do they think? They're like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. Shout out to Darcy, who is another friend of mine who teaches SEO, who introduced me to Clicky because that's what she used with her students and she's right. So much easier for you than Google Analytics. GA used to be great. Not anymore. They've made it unnecessarily complicated, especially for people like you and me, small business owners. Okay, so now we know. We've got some traffic coming in. Now we wanna look at leads. Are you generating leads? Because as long as you have an opt-in on different pages, you have a way for people to work with you. You've got a contact page, something like that. You should be starting to get leads if we're bringing the right people into your world. So when your SEO is working, you look for rankings. Are you showing up on Google? Now, don't just go use your Google Chrome browser that you always use, that you go to your website from open an incognito browser window, search the keyword that you're curious about, find out where you rank or. I use a ranking tool like Uber suggest to keep track of that. So Uber suggest is a full SEO keyword research tool, but it also has rank tracking, which is very helpful'cause it'll show you over time how you are doing. So either way we wanna look at that, we wanna see how are we ranking, then we wanna look at our analytics, whether it's clicky analytics, Google analytics, et cetera. We want to see and understand which pages get traffic, because if we're getting organic traffic, but it's not to pages that are going to really help us convert, then yes, it's working, but no it isn't because yes, you're getting traffic. But no, you're not gonna generate leads. I had a situation, um, just exactly like this with a one-on-one client a couple years ago. She had a podcast, great podcast, ranked very well, had some big names on her podcast, had done all sorts of optimization on her own, kind of trying to figure out what to do. She was very concerned because her traffic looked like it was down. When I dug in and looked into it, I said, your traffic is down. However, it doesn't really matter because it's down for pages for podcast episodes. That were not going to lead to your products or services like you were ranking high for somebody else's name. You're no longer ranking as high for their name, so you're not getting as much traffic that's interested in them. What we needed to do and what we did work on doing then. Was really focusing on creating proper optimization on the pages that would lead to conversions for her, so her products and services pages, rather than doing all the optimization on the blog post. Yes, it's great to be visible for a big person when they're on your podcast, but being visible for them doesn't put money in your pocket the way that it does. Being visible for your products and services. So that's part of what we look at is are we bringing the right people into the website? Are we ranking, are we visible on Google? Are we visible on chat, GPT to determine chat, GPT? Right now there's, there are a couple tools that are starting to give us some insights into visibility, but what I found is the most helpful at this point is just to go into Claw or chat GPT, open a new chat, ask it to forget everything it knows about you, say. I want you to pretend that you know nothing about me, nothing about buy me business, because I want to understand what somebody who's never heard of me would see. And then ask them whatever question tied to your niche. So let's pretend that you are a life coach and you help people who just don't feel fulfilled in their life. And maybe you target women in middle age. So you could go into chat, GPT or Claude and ask. Um, what do you know about feeling better about myself in middle age, or I'm a 45-year-old woman and I just feel like something's missing in my life. And you could start by seeing, does chat GPT suggest life coaching? Does it suggest something like you, does it know your business? Like what is the key word or the phrase that somebody might search? So I have a student. Who is a life coach, and I'm gonna walk you through this so you can kind of see. So she coaches people on binge eating and she has a new client she got, so it's, it's all working for her because she got that client, that client was searching on chat, GPT, trying to figure out how to explain binge eating to their partner. So they went to chat GPT and. Asked, how do I explain binge eating to my partner? Like, this is what I'm struggling with. They wanna support me, but I don't under, I don't know how to explain it to them. Chat. GPT actually recommended my students podcast and said, you know what? This podcast will be really helpful. They have an episode that's all about this. The new client went and listened to that podcast. Fell in love with her, listened to more podcasts, went to the website, did some research, figured out, you know, how to work with her, what it cost, all of that. Booked a call and became a client and she said when they got on the call, the main question was just like, are you taking anyone? Do you have openings right now? She already knew how much it cost. She already knew what the program involved, all of that. She'd done her homework. She was ready to commit to working with her. So if your SEO is working. You're going to be getting leads. You're going to be getting traffic to the pages that you're optimizing. You're going to be having new customers tell you. I found you on Google. I found you on Google Maps. I found you in chat, GPT. All of that is gonna be working. You're also going to see your keyword ranking and visibility increase, meaning your ranking number should get smaller in time. These are all the things that we look at. I recommend that we look at'em about once a month, and also understand that it's probably gonna take three to six months before you start to see much happen. So you kind of have to give it a little while to marinate, but you know what? If you've been working on a page for over a year and you're not seeing these signs. It's not working and it's time to come into simple SEO content or work with me one-on-one because you're putting time and effort into it. I wanna help you make sure it pays off so it's time to take a different approach. So jump in, see how things are going. If you have questions, if you're one of my students, hopefully you already know all of this'cause we talk about this on a regular basis. Otherwise, I'll see you inside of simple SEO content and help you with this because. If your SEO is working, you will not be asking Rachel, how do I figure out if it's working? You'll know because your customers will be telling you, they found you through Google, they found you through the Google Maps, they found you on chat, GPT, et cetera. You'll know you will no longer be questioning. So if you're questioning something's not working quite right yet and we can fix it, let me help you. Alright, that's it for today. I'll see you back here next week. Bye for now.