Best SEO Practices for 2020 with Meg Clarke
Episode 425: Show Notes
Today on the show we have Meg Clarke of Clapping Dog Media. She is an SEO strategist who teaches creative small business owners how to grow their organic traffic and rankings so they can make a great impact and reach more people. She is also a sourdough bread baking genius, so you can look forward to several bread references throughout this episode! In Episode 45, we interviewed Meg where she talked about SEO for newbies, but today we’re taking it a step further by addressing intermediate and advanced issues that are more applicable to listeners who are somewhat experienced in this area. A lot has changed since 2017, so she discusses updated SEO practices, stuff you can do to prep your business and brand for launch and what to do if you are pivoting and need to start tackling different topics on your existing website. She also dishes out resources for finding targeting keywords and hidden SEO within your website and shares what she reckons is worth spending time on.
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Before we get into the meat of the episode, it’s worth mentioning the incredible strides we have made with our SEO since a few years ago. But, while we’ve done well, we also desperately need maintenance. Our traffic used to be at a low 5 to 10% from Google despite our volume of content, but now over 50% of our traffic comes straight from search. But, as we said, we also need to brush up on our SEO, so we’re just as eager to hear what Meg’s got for us. So, pull your notebook closer and get ready for some fresh SEO strategy!
Taking Your SEO to the Next Level
You’ve been in business for a few years. You’ve done the groundwork and you’ve gained some traffic. But now it’s time to bump it up a notch and take your SEO to the next level. The first piece of advice is just to keep showing up in a way that is true to you and in the spaces that you want to occupy on the internet. Since our last interview, Google has introduced a new concept called EAT — expertise, authority, and trust. And these are the things Google tries to understand and capture when it crawls websites, so their robots are scanning for these three factors when deciding which websites to bring up for the user. Fortunately, there are plenty of things website owners can do to raise their EAT scores, and that includes frequently talking about the things they focus on. For example, if you help creative entrepreneurs with SEO, then you should write to this audience, using the appropriate language to talk about it on all your platforms. In this way, you become known across the internet as the SEO person for creative entrepreneurs and it builds trust with Google because you are who you say you are everywhere on the internet. Remain consistent in who you are and keep putting your wisdom out there.
Distinguishing Between Traffic and the Right Traffic
Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, everybody is online; now more than ever! Many people at home are keeping themselves busy on the internet, and so gaining traffic should technically be easier now than ever before. You can get traffic through clickbait or by being dramatic, but the question is, is this the traffic that matters and converts? And this is what SEO is all about: getting traffic that leads to sales. But to attract the right kind of traffic, you need to go through the navel-gazing branding process to figure out exactly who you want to be, what you want to offer, and who you are out to serve. What is important is to get very specific about it and narrow it down – be a specialist rather than a generalist. But what happens if you want to pivot along the way and change who you are and what you offer? What happens to your existing traffic? Meg advises us to hang on to that traffic, so do not simply delete your account or website! Try to take that following with you as you transition. If you want to change your blog, do not change the URL but rather just add an update at the top that lets people know why and how you have changed what you talk about and offer. When thinking about attracting the right traffic, you also want to consider whether you adequately answer the questions the searchers type into the search engines. Google tracks not only how many visits you get but also how long people linger, and based on this information, they also mark you as a trusted source, or not. If people leave your page quickly, this might be a sign you are attracting the wrong kind of traffic.
Determine Your Focus Areas and Adjust Your Content Accordingly
When you have a clear idea of your brand identity, ensure your blog categories reflect the specific things you will focus on. If there are five things you want to be known for, don’t have 30 categories within your blog. Having a list of the things for which you want to be recognized and discovered for helps you to plan your content. Do not have more than eight areas of expertise. In terms of old content, you can simply revise earlier posts and add those eight keywords in where applicable for an instant update. You also want visitors to binge-read your content, so be sure to show them related links and make it easy for them to navigate to related posts. But finding the right words and terminology your target audience will punch into a search engine can be tricky. With the common use of voice search, Google has honed in on the intent of what you are writing about and the intent of what the user is searching for. Artificial intelligence is employed to determine the exact information people search. For this reason, the specific words are not nearly as important today as they were a few years ago when everything was about keywords. As long as Google understands what your intention with the search is, it will fetch the relevant information, regardless of whether you typed in the exact terms or names.
Thoughts on the Backend Side of SEO
When it comes to the behind the scenes of SEO, what is most important? Megan says the backend carries about 10-15% of the weight while 85-90% relies on the words and content. So, the technical aspects are important and you will gain more organic growth if your technical side is shipshape, however, it is not everything. The biggest recommendation on this front is to click on the SEO tab in Squarespace and make sure that you’ve got good titles and meta descriptions in there, but having said that, millions of websites do outstandingly without having any of this information, because Google first and foremost reads the content visible on your website.
Don’t Have Much Content On Your E-Commerce Site? Don’t Fret!
So, we’ve mentioned blog content a few times, and some of you are getting worried because you don’t have any such thing. But don’t worry, you don’t necessarily need it. For e-commerce sites where products are sold, the rules are a bit different — Google crawls e-commerce sites differently. Let’s face it, what will you write about a pair of earrings? With shop pages, Google reads the title, the main navigation links, and it goes to your products, and because they are images and links, Google will follow every one of those links to refer back to the shop homepage to understand what that shop page is all about. Meg’s biggest recommendation for e-commerce sites is to have two or three sentences at the top, above your product pages, that explain, in words, what is on that page. That saves Google from having to crawl all the links. If you sign up to Google Search Console, Google will let you know if you do something that prevents you from being discovered and this also allows you to communicate with them about search-related queries.
Advice for Managing Different Products on the Same Website
If you sell two different kinds of products, such as office products and t-shirts for example, can you sell them on the same website? Well, it comes down to the aesthetic feel and ethos of the products. If it is the same, feel free to use the same website for both. This works well because your traffic for the one product will feed the other and vice versa. But if you do have two different websites for different products, that is still okay, as long as you connect them. The site with strong authority can be used to send traffic to the other site. You can do this by cross-referencing the sites and talking about the other products you sell. But be careful not to build and try to maintain too many sites at once, because people often forget to pay attention to the website that has the strongest authority, and you end up with two mediocre sites. The more websites you have, the harder it is for Google to make the connection between your products.
Quote This
My number one advice is just to keep showing up. Know who you are, know the space that you want to take up on the internet, and keep showing up.
—Megan Clarke
Highlights
Taking Your SEO to the Next Level. [0:07:01.1]
Distinguishing Between Traffic and the Right Traffic. [0:10:01.1]
Determine Your Focus Areas and Adjust Your Content Accordingly. [0:15:27.1]
Thoughts on the Backend Side of SEO. [0:21:37.1]
Don’t Have Much Content On Your E-Commerce Site? Don’t Fret! [0:27:50.1]
Advice for Managing Different Products on the Same Website. [0:32:30.1]
#TalkStrategyToMe [0:41:20.1]
Organize your content around your focus areas.
Prepare your audience before you pivot.
Establish which pages are performing well.
Only edit old content that is still getting attention.
Use Ubersuggest to find keywords.
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Meg Clarke
Clapping Dog Media
Website | Instagram | Facebook
Meg Clarke is the Owner and CEO at Clapping Dog Media where she works with creative entrepreneurs to help them get found by Google. She is obsessed with the details, and an expert at connecting the dots of data to get your business found with all the best SEO tricks.
KEY TOPICS
SEO, Google, EAT score, Websites, Traffic, Keywords, Specializing, Backend SEO, Content, E-commerce
