 Really, there are wonderful speakers to choose from, so I'm honored to be in your presence and to dive into this conversation about SEO and building community. I really wanted to start this off by kind of shifting our mindset away from maybe some more traditional understandings of SEO and maybe more, it's really technical, it's difficult, I don't know where to begin, what is SEO? Search Engine Optimization, for those that don't know what SEO is. This is a good talk to come into for beginners because the focus is really about building community and the SEO strategies are just how we line up with that vision, with the value of building community. And I think this conversation is essential to have right now because we're seeing so much content on the web and we really need to ask ourselves what value we're offering the world when we're putting our content out individually. So that's why I think that this talk is so important right now. A little hiccup? Alright, so WordPress community, again talking about this value, this understanding of what community is and really this WordPress community and for me personally WordPress has created so much in my life. I have been able to do so many things that I could have never imagined, you know, 10 years ago coming out of college. I was able to start a yoga studio and be the person that does the website and the marketing and creates all the online necessities for the space that we created with our yoga studio and without WordPress that wouldn't have been possible. I was able to make new connections, new friends, rekindled relationships, Michelle, and I've been able to actually pursue a career in WordPress which is just amazing. So I love this idea of democratizing connection. It's this idea of really broadening our understanding of what connection is and how it ties into building a community and what that looks like online. And I think that SEO is our blueprint for creativity in that regard. So our SEO strategy is our practice. It's something that we keep tending to and something that is going to help us grow and reach our goals. So this brings us into tending our garden. So I love visualizing SEO and the internet as a garden. So it's not something that you can just set it and walk away. It's something that needs to be tended to. It needs love and care and needs attention on a daily basis. It really does require all the nourishment of putting in that time and understanding what that little piece of garden that you have, that landscape on the web that you take up, what it needs, and what the internet needs from you. So I love this analogy of growing our garden together and all of our little gardens kind of interweaving with each other on the web and it's just a beautiful space for connection the internet is. I forgot that doesn't work. So how do we build a bigger online community? That's the question we're here to answer, right? So we kind of have this understanding of why. We want more traffic, we want more engagement, we want more conversions, we want people talking to us, we want that conversation to unfold on our blog or on our website. Whatever we're creating we want people to share that experience with us. So we know why we want to do these things and we want to build a community. But how do we do it is not so clear. So personally I've come up with my own understanding of this and it's to be intentional, to be aware, and to build trust. So we're going to go through that today and how it ties in with three specific SEO strategies and really be able to put this into action. So the first is keyword research, being intentional, really starts here. Our SEO process is an understanding of really what is being searched on the web and how do I fit in, how do I have an understanding of what my people are searching for, my audience, like what are their pains and worries and what do they love and what do they hate and how can I best communicate. So we really need to take our time with keyword research as our starting point to really take that intention of I want to build community, I want to have a conversation and really nailing it down to but what, about what, what are we talking about, what do we need to be sharing. So the core concept of keyword research is essentially understanding I might have this idea of what I want to come up for and search and what actually is searched could be very different. So I always love to start with my clients just kind of brain dumping all these keywords, getting a big old list of keywords and really just getting all of our ideas out on paper or wherever, you know, out loud, whatever works for you to really creatively get everything out of your mind and out somewhere that you can ideally visually see. So you see all these different categories, you see all these different scenarios, you have all these keywords, these phrases really to gain a better understanding of what you think you should be ranking for and then the keyword research aspect is actually understanding what people are actually searching for. So that's the process we're going to be going through. I love this quote, empathy is the starting point for creating a community and taking action is the impetus for creating change. So empathy is so important when we're doing our keyword research. It really allows us to put ourselves in the shoes of our customer, our client, our people, our audience, whoever we're trying to connect with and really understanding them as best as we can. So seed keywords are where it all begins. These kind of little simple keywords, they might not be so simple. They're general, they're short, they're maybe one to three words. Really a long tail keyword is beyond two to three words. That's when you get into the longer phrases, more specific. Seed keywords are your products, your brand name, your services, the niche and category that you kind of take up space in, your industry. It's this really broad idea of what you're offering and you need to start there so that you can nail down the specifics with each of those seed keywords. So keyword research, seed keywords, building your lists is the next step. So once we kind of have this brain dump of all this information out on paper or on the computer, whatever it is, we kind of have to really focus ourselves in on something. So first you need to kind of get these ideas out. And so here's an example of a gardening center. Garden supply, gardening tips, backyard landscaping, gardening gifts. These are some broad ideas and maybe for this particular business it's some priorities. These are really topics that we want to be making sales on. We want to draw people in regarding these topics. We know that we want to do something with these associated lanes that we take up in on the internet. And if it's a brick and mortar, it's really difficult. I work with a lot of creatives that don't necessarily know how to bridge the gap between their physical space and that they take up in the world and how that actually translates to their online space and what they should be representing themselves as online. So our seed keyword, I always love to just pop it into Google and get Google Suggest to help me along. When I run out of ideas, I can't think of anything else. I'm just at a loss, do a little Google Suggest research and see what else is going to come up. Like what did you miss? Maybe what things are irrelevant to you in your business. Make a negative keyword list of I don't want to be focusing on these keywords, I don't want to necessarily come up for something that isn't relevant to my business or my offering. So seed keywords are really this little seed that we start with to be able to hopefully grow our garden. So working with these seed keywords, there's a lot of tools out there to use. These are some of my favorites. I love to use all of them for any project that I really take on to get some different perspectives and fill in the gaps and these are all clickable so when I can get my slides and you can explore these tools for yourself. Each of them are going to be a little different and the goal here working with your seed keywords is to build out your list, your keyword list. So I use a Google spreadsheet and I'll show you that in a moment of what that kind of looks like. Each little tab of the spreadsheet is going to be the seed keyword, this big idea that you're trying to go after and then you're going to use these tools to populate the list within them. So long tail phrases are really the goal here, really specific, nailed down ideas and these tools are awesome to go through that. So Ubersuggest will pull in all the Google Suggest queries so rather than typing in your keyword into Google and I used to do this before I realized there were tools out there and just writing them down or copy and pasting them. Also at the bottom of Google, at the very bottom of your search results, those Suggested search queries, that's what Ubersuggest and keyword.io will pull in all that for you into a nice report. Google Correlate is awesome because it kind of gives you some associated ideas with what you're talking about and it might give you some creative inspiration for where you can take your topics. And Google Trends is also really awesome to evaluate where your keyword's going, where it's been and is it really even relevant to focus on at this point? Is it already gone and already had its time or is it kind of up on an upswing? And so the public is one of my favorites as well especially when for your content writers out there, really this is all gearing towards writing content so whether you're guiding your client to write content or you're writing it yourself, these are going to be awesome but answer the public specifically with blogs, question and answer. What better way to do market research and understand what your audience actually has questions about than actually looking on answer the public or Quora? So this is a kind of visual of what my spreadsheet starts to look like. So we have our seed keywords all the way at the bottom, all each tab is that seed keyword and then we start to fill out our lists and I really go crazy here when I first do a report, I'll just pop in as much as I can and then I start to nail it down and start to really focus in on what my client actually wants to focus on and I'll mark things in red that are irrelevant, things that we don't want to be focusing on just to make sure that we're really clear about where our lists are coming from. So continuing on in creating this spreadsheet, we've got all these tabs with all these keywords and we need some data around this. We need to understand what these keywords mean and really where there is the most opportunity for connecting and building this community. So Google Keyword Planner is free and it's an awesome tool to use. There are a lot of paid subscription tools out there as well. Moz is a good one or Ahrefs is also great and those tools, the paid subscriptions are going to give you more specific and a little bit more insights but Google Keyword Planner actually just had a facelift and instead of giving you an average of your clicks of this could happen between 500 and 1,000 or 50 and 100 and now it's actually giving you some actual, this is how many clicks we actually expect. This is in terms of how many clicks for a specific date range. So the cost, right, right. So this is all coming from Google AdWords and it's really like even if you're not running any ads, this is just valuable data to understand the viability of any topic or keyword that you're trying to work with. I actually don't really use actual implementation of ads very often because I like to really focus on that organic traffic and this is just really helpful to understand the competitive nature of your keyword and seed keywords are obviously going to be very competitive but the long tail keyword phrases that you're working with are going to start to become a little more specific and they're going to be a little easier to chew on. So we're basically going to use this tool. I just take my one tab at a time, take my list of keywords, pop it into Google Keyword Planner, get the data and paste it back into my spreadsheet so I start to have a filled out document. So kind of give you an idea of what that looks like. You can customize this however you like, you know, color code, organize by length of the keyword or, you know, really the competitive nature is really what we're going for here. So if somebody is paying, you know, an insanely amount of money for clicks on a particular keyword, we might want to nail that phrase down a little bit more so it's a little easier to go after. You have a spreadsheet. So now what? Like you get the spreadsheet that has a billion tabs in it with all these keywords and when I first started doing SEO, I gave this to a couple clients and I was like, isn't this so cool? Like, look at all this data. They're like, yeah, but like, now what? Like, what do I do now? Like, I don't, this is great. Look how hard this looks. Like, I have so much to focus on now. So, and I love Oprah. Competitor analysis, being aware, that's our next step. So keyword research is being intentional, really starting off on the right foot, understanding where you're coming from and all the information out there that we need to really hone in on. And competitor analysis is going to be where we start to become aware of our market, aware of our industry and how we fit into the mix. I see a lot of articles out there talking about competitor research and it's talking about spying on your competitor. I don't really like that idea. I think it's more just really getting to know your industry and knowing what's out there and how your competitors are serving your same similar audiences and how you fit into the mix. Where do you communicate better? Where do you offer better services? What did they get wrong? What are they missing? You can really get a lot of good insights and really focus yourself into a niche that's needed. So step one, we're going to download Moz bar. It's also free, yay. So we're going to use this tool to better understand our competitor links that we're looking at when we start to pop in these keywords into Google, better understand what the viability is for each one. And it is a process. This is a practice. This is something that takes time and it takes a subjective look at each keyword and how it shows up in search. You really have to take your own creative mindset into this process and take your time through it. So Moz is going to help us understand page authority and domain authority. Authority is essentially Moz's understanding of what Google ranks a website as. So it's kind of like a little score of ranking in search, and I'll show you that in a moment. So once we have this Moz bar, we're going to get to what that looks like. We're going to enter our Google keyword into Google. We're going to look for one or more of the below of these little options and review the quality of the content. So if you can find some articles that are with a page authority of less than 20, it's out of a scale of 100, 100 being like Google, and it's very hard to get that high. The lower page authority is going to give you a clue that it's going to be a little easier for my site to rank above this one, because maybe I'm going to write a better piece of content. I am going to write a better piece of content to make sure that I rank above that competitor. Sites that are kind of spammy or directory listings, blogs that kind of include and talk about everything, that's going to be a good clue that, yeah, there's not really any great content out there, and I have an opportunity here to hone in on. So this is an example of what the Moz bar in action looks like. So once you toggle the Moz bar in your browser on, it's just an add-on extension. I just put in gardening tips, a seed keyword, this big idea, into Google search, and these are the first three search results, so you can see the HGTV 73 page authority, and I really want to bring your attention to page authority specifically. We're trying to outrank pages, not whole sites. It is a good idea to look at the domain authority and understand how competitive a website is as a whole, but really we're trying to dominate in pages, especially when it comes to writing comprehensive content. We want to be the best page out there for that. So really focusing in on that and not getting too discouraged when you see a high domain authority, but a low page authority. So this is a good example of a very competitive keyword. This is going to be really difficult to beat. HGTV, that's a brand. It's a good clue that this is a very competitive keyword and that they're already doing some great work. And links are a whole other topic, but just to bring your attention to how many links there are, it's a good clue as to how valuable this piece of content is and how much it gets shared and all the links coming to this page to and from. So it's an understanding of how, again, how competitive. So this keyword is from my seed keyword of gardening tips, vegetable gardening for beginners. So we're getting really specific here. We're looking at a specific beginner mindset. Vegetable gardening is a really honed in term. So the page authority, the very first search result is only one, but the domain authority is 75. So again, nice to look at, but that page isn't doing so well in terms of the scoreboard that we're looking at in terms of authority. So this gives me a clue that this might be a good keyword to go after, if this is something that is, you know, I can get excited about and write a good piece of content around, then we might be able to have a chance to outrank these other competitors. So we kind of move into building trust. This idea of now we have our keywords, we have an understanding of what our competitor environment looks like, and now it's time to actually start writing content and providing value. And I think with the mindset of building trust and maintaining that mindset throughout the process, you're gonna write a better piece of content, you're gonna care more, you're gonna take care of your audience because you're gonna, you know you've put in this time, you put in this time to research the specific query that people are looking for and they're not getting a good answer around or they're not being, it's not being represented well, and you know that you're gonna be able to do it better and provide that value to your people, your audience. So some simple tips for writing content in terms of SEO. You wanna use your keyword term, the specific phrase you're trying to rank for in the beginning of your article, and you don't wanna use it too much, you wanna be contextual here. So that means that Google's understanding content better and better by the day. So it's able to really read your content and understand what it's talking about. So keywords, back in the day, they used to white out keywords in a page and put it on a white background so you couldn't see the keywords and then you would have all these keywords on your page and you'd rank in Google and it worked and now that's black hat and you will get penalized for that. And it just doesn't look good, like it's just not a good tactic. So using your keyword phrase that you're really trying to nail in on, use it in your title right in the beginning if you can. That's becoming a little less important, but if you can, it's helpful. Use numbers in the like three tips for success or three ways to do this or that. That's a really attention grabbing way to also tie in your keyword and make it tangible, make it actionable and really give your reader an idea of what this piece of content is gonna look like. Keep your sentences concise, so be very clear into the point, especially in the beginning of your content, you wanna keep your reader going so you wanna make sure that their attention is grabbed right up from the beginning, not overwhelming them with too much content and just really grabbing their attention right off the bat. Include images, charts, videos, any kind of visual aid, something that's gonna offer a different kind of learning experience for your audience or whoever is coming to this page, you wanna try to make it as accessible as possible and really hone in on all different kind of learning styles. So if somebody's more a visual learner to offer those kind of visuals and maybe even a podcast or a link to some kind of audio, any kind of additional value you can add through other media is always wonderful. Yeah. How concerned do you get in keywords in your metadata for making? Yes, you do wanna include that in your alt tags for your images, you wanna make sure that you're including it in your meta description, anywhere that you can to really help, you're really just trying to help Google understand what your page is about. So yes, anywhere that you can optimize is always great. We're not getting too technical in this talk, but all those SEO practices, I'll have some resources for you too at the end are good to maintain. Yes. Do you have a search? No, they'll be able to see them as well. I mean, Google's gonna read the pages in an entirety and get an understanding of what your page is about. So anywhere that you're adding content, that's gonna become relevant. Yeah. I had something that I think it's lost. So comprehensive content, that's what it was. We wanna create comprehensive content. We wanna really be this authority in our industry for whatever we're writing. We're not just writing to get rankings, we're writing to provide value. We're building community. We're writing because we wanna connect with people in a new way. And comprehensive content is becoming more and more important. It's much better to spend your time writing a really in-depth piece of content once a month rather than writing a bunch of little articles that don't really offer much substance several times a week. So really find a rhythm and a pattern that works for you. Monthly seems to work well for me because it's a lot. It's a big project. It's a lot of work. And depending on how much time that you really wanna allocate to it. So for my personal stuff, I give myself that month. But the comprehensive nature is gonna help Google further understand what you're trying to do, what you're trying to communicate. And Google's actually gonna start being able to read videos soon. I don't know if they already are, but it's happening. And so that kinda gives you, or at least for me, it gives me a clue of Google's really understanding more like we do. So it's understanding conceptually and contextually what's going on in this page so that it can best provide that result for searchers. And regarding that idea of this comprehensive content, it's this idea of offering that value once again, coming back to being that authority in your industry, that go-to person, that's gonna be a way to build trust with your audience, that they're gonna know who to go to. Any kind of content you're creating. I mean, blog posts are kind of more, this is where I'm kind of like leaning towards of the focus, but it could be anything. Just being as in-depth as possible and really trying to give every scenario an answer regarding that specific term or topic that you're discussing, yeah, right here. Yeah, yeah, that's usually how I would accomplish that. Yes, and the numbers are a little more eye-catching and in terms of click-through rate, which we're gonna get to next, it seems to work better. People tend to respond better to the number right in the beginning. Gives them an idea of what content's like. That's the title of your presentation. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Get attention. Yeah. I said, do you have any perspective on it's better to take one page and put a lot of content and weight it to a particular topic on that page versus bringing that content up and creating several different pages with some sets of particular topics? Yes, that's a great question. And the first, it's creating that content that's as lengthy as you can. Really, articles that are ranking really well are more than a thousand words at least. So we really wanna get that content out there and you can link to other pages. You know, you can build out your other pages, but every page you build, if you're creating this understanding for this topic, it's gotta go all in. So it would be better, my personal approach, and there is a lot of opinion about this, but I do like to keep it all in one page and focus on ranking that page. And then where I start to get into other topics, like where this topic deserves its own page, I'll dive into that rabbit hole for creating that content. Thank you. So your five or six main headings, you're talking about creating one very lengthy blog post and then if you had a similar topic, so maybe you're writing a first article on planning tomatoes. And then next month you're gonna talk about planning papers. That's a separate, when you talk about a separate page, it's a separate post. Yeah, yeah, essentially. But go on to the blog. Yes, that's correct, exactly. And the search engines will find that eventually. Yes, yes, if it's well optimized then we create comprehensive content and that brings me to a point I had lost earlier and it came back. The idea of this contextual understanding, Google's understanding of your page, your keyword research doc is gonna be a great tool for that to help Google further along in understanding your content. So the keywords that are within that tab of the seed keyword that you're focusing on or if you pull the long tail keyword out of that tab and you're working on writing that piece of content, look at the other keywords in that same tab and see what's related. This is a good way to include the same kind of topic in different ways and these keywords are gonna be sprinkled throughout your content to help Google A understand your content better and to not overuse your target keyword. You only wanna use that target keyword that you're really focusing on no more than three times in your content. And depending on the length you can get away with it a little bit more but it really does depend on how long your content is. So this is a great little kind of cheat sheet for click-through rate and just gives you some inspiration for writing titles and just helping people to find your article a little bit more. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, yes I have a link at the end and I'll provide that for you. Yeah, no worries. So using Quora and Udemy is an awesome strategy for understanding the structure of your content. You of course don't wanna necessarily steal somebody else's structure of their class course that they've posted on Udemy but you might want to understand, all right this is what content's already out there, this is how many people have taken this course and it gives you an understanding of like how many people are out there at least in this lane of the internet that care about this topic. It kind of validates you and helps you understand that yeah this is a need and there are questions that need answered. So I like to look at Quora and Udemy to understand how I'm gonna structure my content, break it up and answer different questions and really be as valuable as possible. Adding modifiers to your titles are great. These are some easy ones and you can throw those numbers right before it, seven easy ways to plant your vegetable garden using a different fast or best review this current year and that means using 2018 like the ultimate guide to gardening 2018. You wanna make sure that you're really making that as relevant to right now as possible. It's gonna lead people and if they see 2017 might not be drawn to that content. Say if you're revamping an old piece of content they're 2018 on there, add some more tips and tricks and start promoting it again. Bucket brigades are awesome. I think that they are a great way to break up content and it's just a really easy way to kind of add some more white space in your page and lead people through. So if somebody's scanning your piece of content and they see some of these phrases they might be like oh this is crazy, what's crazy? Like I gotta keep reading and maybe they'll be more enticed to actually read your content. So we're being intentional with keyword research. We're being aware by understanding our industry and our market through competitor analysis and we're building trust by writing really awesome content. And I think that this is really speaking to being of service in your industry and using our SEO practice as that a practice to build trust. A practice that we keep coming back to to provide value to better understand our businesses, to understand ourselves and how we communicate with our audiences the connection that we have with them, how close are we to their problems? How do we actually get in their mind without doing it in a way that I just want more traffic? I just want more clicks. It's not that it's community. You wanna feel connected with your people and I believe that SEO is the blueprint for that. So I have some resources for you. You can check these out. Specifically the sleep is important. This podcast is amazing and I'm obsessed with it and sleep and it just is relevant because without a strong foundation, your SEO practices aren't gonna be that strong, right? So a couple SEO resources and some other things I've been loving lately. And thank you so much. I'm Amanda Gorman with GiveWP, Making Lives Better. And I'll be at the happiness bar with any questions and I'm happy to take them right now. Oh yeah. Yes, that is an excellent tool. I could do a whole talk about search console, webmaster tools. It is so essential. It's almost better than analytics to me, at least in terms of keyword research and understanding where you're gonna find your niche. So yes, and I was gonna include this and I'm really glad you asked this question. If you go into your, I can't remember what the little menu is called. It's where you find all your keywords that you're currently ranking for. It's on the left hand side. It's one of those menus. Just search in there and find, it'll have at the top, it says clicks, impressions, click the rate, position. And I click all of those to understand where I'm positioned for keywords already and I'll take that list and that'll be a whole another spreadsheet that I use and kind of go to and be like, oh, we're number three for this keyword. I wonder if I write a little bit of content about that or improve the content I have, maybe it'll start to get boosted up. Yes. Yeah, yeah, that's the best, one of the best places. I mean, it can happen in hours. It really can happen instantaneously. It's pretty quick. It depends on how much you're getting clicks and how Google translates that. And if somebody like bounces, so they explore a piece of content that's above yours and then they bounce and go to yours and spend some time there, it's more likely that's gonna be boosted up because Google's like, oh, this is more valuable to the search query. Contact info, sure. Absolutely. You probably want to go in depth with that one. And search articles might be seasonal or just kind of time used, so for that one, you maybe don't want to put as much into it, but how do you kind of, what's your process for weighing how much to put into an article or content that you're looking at? It's a great question. And I think it's really about your priorities of where you want to focus on and what's going to be the most of value to your audience and if it's seasonal and you just want to get some, you know, some essential content out there, just go ahead and publish it, you know. It's just gonna be difficult to rank if the content that is already out there is more lengthy, more valuable, has video, has other kind of tangible things that are boosting the ranking for that page. So it's really just, do you want to beat every competitor? I don't think so. I think you're just trying to be as much of value as possible and then maybe selecting one article that you want to spend your time on really getting that ranking up so that you get those clicks in and they start to spend time on your website and explore the other important information that's there. So I don't think that, you know, you can certainly spend your time on every page and, of course, you want to optimize as much as you can but in terms of the comprehensive content, I think it's better, it serves you better to be specific and have some goalposts. So maybe mapping out like I want to have four comprehensive content pieces this year. You know, really just like starting small and creating those pieces and seeing where it takes you. Yeah, it's really subjective. I mean, it's really, you have to really get in touch with where you want to provide value and where that meets your clients and where they're at right now. So I like to find gaps in the market, understanding like this competitor is misrepresenting this information or they're not sharing anything about this topic and I like to fill in those gaps to make sure that it is well rounded and that you kind of serve your audience as well by filling in spaces that were not served before. Does that make sense? Yeah, cool, thank you. Yeah. So I know as being one, two, three, and four over, that you post like over a week, so it's better to have the single article. I mean, if each one is lengthy and valuable, I wouldn't see any, I mean, that's a series, you know, I think that's a valuable way to keep bringing people back. Give did that with Gutenberg and I thought it was awesome but each piece was in depth and talking a lot about this particular topic, you know, one by one, yeah. I love Yoast and All in One SEO pack is also great. Those are the really two options that I use. All in One SEO. I've just been exploring All in One SEO a little more but Yoast has been my go-to on sites usually. I don't use both, not in the same thing. No, no, no. They're essentially, they're very similar. I'm more exploring All in One SEO just to kind of, I met a bunch of those guys last week in a rally so I was like, oh, maybe I should check this out. The functionality seems similar but it would be kind of fun to test the difference. Really, it's just a guidance. It's helping you understand like this is the topic I wanna focus on and this is the green mark, the ways I'm doing it well, the ways I'm not doing it well. I think Yoast has really awesome suggestions below. Like, hey, you're really not doing this right. Fix it. Yeah, anything else? Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it.