EP 1: SEO is a Journey and Not a Destination

Quality SEO is only successful if you optimize for both search engines and the human visitor. Click To Tweet

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Podcast Transcript

Intro:

Welcome to SEObits, the podcast that helps smart business owners jumpstart their SEO strategy. Tune in each week for fresh SEO insights and actionable tips that will help you improve your site’s SEO one bit at a time. Now, here’s your host, SEO Trainer and Consultant, Rebecca Gill.

Rebecca Gill:

Welcome to the first podcast episode of SEObits. I’m Rebecca Gill and I’m your host.

My goal is to provide weekly updates and information on SEO but do so in bite-size pieces. Each episode will be less than 15 minutes long. I would not be talking about algorithms or penalties. I just don’t believe in using scare tactics with SEO because I think it goes against the whole purpose of SEO and it distracts from the process itself.

Instead, I’ll be talking about real-life applications of search engine optimization and what I’ve learned over the last 15 years. I truly want to give you bite-size pieces of information that will educate you and empower you as well as provide actionable advice you can implement on your website or blog.

As I record this first episode, we are already at 200 subscribers for the podcast. We haven’t even launched yet. I can’t tell you how thankful I am for this and for all of your support. Many of you came from my work with iThemes Training or my private Facebook group. I look back and I think I don’t know how I got here today but I’m very thankful I did because I am truly blessed by working in a community full of business owners and website developers and freelancers. Again, thank you all for your support in this podcast endeavor and I hope I do you proud and I provide some great information as we progress.

So with that said, let’s move into our bite-size piece of information for today’s episode. I think it is important to start SEO journey with a quote from Google that has become the basis of my SEO strategy and process. I want this to become the basis of your SEO efforts as well because it’s really important and it will help set the stage for you as you move forward.

So, Google’s comment or Google’s quote is, “Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results.”

So, let’s look at this statement that is from Google. It’s from Google’s search engine optimization starter guide. This guide is a really good PDF tool and it provides a good introduction and overview of SEO. And Google uses this to help webmasters understand what’s important and why it’s important, and it’s the why that’s really critical there.

I love this PDF because it’s a super helpful resource for anybody who is new to SEO whether you’re new to website development or you’re a small business owner or you’re a blogger, it really helps to just give you a good basis.

So let’s break down that Google statement in chunks because there are some really good points that we need to review and I want to point out and make sure that you grasp and digest. So, the first one is the fact that Google states SEO is about making small modifications. This is important because Google has clearly stated that SEO isn’t a one-time event. SEO is a journey and not a destination. There is no big, red, easy button that you can push or a consultant that you could hire that will produce voodoo that you buy over time. SEO just doesn’t work like that.

SEO is a long-term process that you execute over time. It’s something that you continue to work on and you strive to improve your website or your blog.

The next important piece is that Google is calling out and specifically mentioning the user experience. Quality SEO has a beautiful blend of optimization for both search engines and the human visitor. You cannot have strong SEO without having a good understanding of your visitor, staying focused on their needs and working diligently to create a positive user experience for these human people that are coming to your website or blog.

I know we all get tripped up in algorithms and the things that Google is saying and their data and their updates. But really, the core of SEO is focusing on the user and making sure that you’re helping them and you’re creating a really good experience for when they visit your website or blog. That’s super important and that’s why Google specifically stated in their getting starter guide.

So those statements probably conflict with the information you’ve been given by SEO consultants in the past. Am I right? This is totally not what people who are trying to get you to hire them actually tell you should be doing.

SEO consultants have presented search engine optimization as a service that only they can do. And worse yet, they perform these services in secret and fail to educate or empower their clients. That is absolutely the wrong approach. And I hate it because it does disservice to those within the industry that really do want to help.

The best SEO is created by having a strong understanding and focus on a target demographic and their individual needs. You can only do this if you have a clear understanding of who is coming to your website and what type of information they need to solve their problems. Doing this successfully requires a partnership between a consultant and a website owner. That is if you are hiring a consultant.

You don’t always have to hire a consultant. But if you do, it has to be a partnership. The consultant can’t fully grasp the full needs of the target market and therefore, cannot create a strong SEO process all on their own. They need you, the website owner, to be active in this process.

Again, this is probably really different than what you’ve heard in the past and this is why I get so angry with the way SEO is promoted and sold.

As we progress through our podcast episodes, I want you to remember a few important points about today’s SEO. The first one is, I’m going to say this again, SEO is a journey and not a destination. SEO is something you do over a long period of time and it’s not a short-term fix.

The second point is you cannot outsource SEO fully and expect your consultant to do everything for you. While they can perform many technical SEO tasks on their own, they will require you, the website owner, to be an active participant in the process. This is because no one knows your target demographic better than you do and no one is in a better position to be able to serve them than you.

The consultant, if you hire one, can help assist in these efforts and help guide you and make sure that you’re doing the right things but you have to be active and you need to be vested and invested in this process and making sure it is a success.

OK. So point #3 is anybody can learn SEO. Anybody can execute a successful search engine optimization process and campaign. So it’s not a matter of if you can do it. It’s a matter of do you want to do it? And the reason I ask if you want to do it because SEO does take time and effort and you have to want to be able to allocate that to the process for it to work.

And that leads me to #4, SEO is hard work. I will never tell you it’s easy. I’d be lying if I did. What I can tell you is that SEO is worth every minute you allocated to it. I truly believe that. Whatever time you invest or whatever money you invest, you will get it back tenfold if you’re doing it right.

So, point #5 and my last one is that SEO is really about planting seeds and working daily to nurture growth so it is sustainable. This means you spend time planting seeds and these seeds will literally produce growth for years and years to come. The work you put in today can produce results for over a decade.

And if you don’t believe me, just ask me. I can give you plenty of search terms that I worked on with either my old company or with clients when I first started Web Savvy that are still ranking on page one of Google and they’ve had little change to the content or little effort and activity on making that specific content ranked. Yet, they’re still staying on page one. They are still ranking in a competitive environment. And that is because we did a lot of things right and we really work at focusing on the user and providing value to them, and that’s what counts.

So, I’ve been using internet marketing and been active in it for over a decade, probably about 15 years. I’ve been heavily active in SEO for well over a decade. And while I may have lost my love for SEO a while back, I definitely have renewed admiration for it and I had a strong desire to really help educate people and empower them to use SEO.

The reason I regained my attraction for SEO is because the search engines are becoming smarter and SEO is evolving. It’s not just about penalties and trying to help people get themselves out of issues that they’ve created by doing really crappy things and buying things they shouldn’t be buying and hiring people they shouldn’t be hiring and just taking shortcuts. That’s where I’ve lost my love. That is not today with SEO.

It’s not about 200 data points that Google addressed daily. Instead, SEO has matured into a sophisticated marketing tool that has a sole purpose of helping people. When you focus on helping people and providing value, you move away from data and you move into the role of servant. And it’s that role of servant that’s really important because if you work at being a servant to your target demographic and if you work on providing value to the human website visitor, you will find success in SEO and you will see that the success lasts much longer than any ad you can buy or email that you send.

My view of pay-per-click has always been it is cocaine for marketers. You spend a lot of money, you get a quick high, and then there’s nothing residual left for you to reap benefit from. That’s where SEO is different.

SEO has long-term value and it truly does make a huge impact on your business, your lead funnel, and your ultimate revenue. I lived it, I breathed it, and I fully believed it. And that’s what I want to share with you as we move forward with SEObits.

Thank you so much for joining me today. I truly hope that you found this information of value and I look forward to providing you additional information in weeks to come. Thank you so much.