Ep. 22 - Blogging for SEO with Cortney Hickey

Creatives Meet Business

Hi there folks!

Creatives Meet Business is an event and podcast series based out of Austin, Texas for creatives of ALL disciplines to get from zero to one in thinking of themselves as business owners (in the creative sector).

This episode features Cortney Hickey, Digital Marketing Manager at lookthinkmake, who joined us in February during our event on Digital Marketing. As you'll soon find out, she shares some completely brilliant insights into the world of SEO and what you can start doing now. She chats about when to be creative (and when not to be creative), how to set up a Keyword Planner, how to update previous content to be more searchable and so much more. Because there's so SO much that's exciting about this episode - let's hop in and hear what Cortney has to say!

• 0:00 to 1:35 - Ashland Opening Remarks and Intro of Cortney Hickey
  • There's a couple hisses and pops in this episode - sorry!
• 1:36 to 2:07 - Introduction of Self and Topic (how to get search engines to work for your blog)
  • SEO can seem intimidating, but it's not!
  • SEO is for any size of business
  • There are tools you can start using today
• 2:08 to 2:50 - What Search Engines Do
  • Two functions:
    • Spider - they crawl around every page and link on the interwebs and create an index of everything that's out there
    • Answer Machine - create ranked lists of websites that they deem relevant and popular for a certain search term using algorithms or ranking factors
      • The full algorithm and ranking factors aren't revealed, but SEO professionals have a very good idea of what they're looking for
• 2:51 to 4:03 - Why Blogging Is Important to Search
  • Search engines see new content as a ranking element
  • Search engines include dates for when posts were written
  • 3/4s of people use search engines to find local business information
  • Power of SEO grows over time
• 4:23 to 5:04 - Blog Content and Best Practices
  • Focus should be first on quality content
  • Ultimate goal: write useful blog posts that are optimized for search
  • Focusing the content of each post pretty narrowly
    • What's the goal?
    • Is there a metric I can measure that goal against?
    • Keep the content between 300 and 700 words
• 5:05 to 7:51 - Keyword Research
  • The terms need to be something that people are searching for
  • Google Keyword Planner tool - it's free, you just need to create an Adwords Account
  • Enter in your website, theme or keyword you're thinking of and it will create a list of keywords that are relevant. Also provides search volume for the keywords.
    • The more search volume, the more competition. And thus, the harder it is to get ranked.
    • Look for long tail keywords
  • Example about "favorite things to do in Austin" blog post, get more specific.
  • Google Keyword Planner is a good place to start, but it's not creative.
  • Think outside the box!
  • Think in the searcher's brain and not just from what Google has told you
  • Once you have your keyword, pick around 3 to 5 variations of that keyword
  • Keep it natural in your content
• 7:52 to 11:07 - Onpage Optimization
  • If you have a website hosted on Wordpress or another CMS, there's usually a plug-in that can help you get started. Yoast for example is helpful for Wordpress
  • The plug-in will analyze content, give you information on keyword density, give you an opportunity to fix your titles and descriptions of pages, and is really useful for people just getting started.
    • No code!
  • The most important aspect of this is your title tag (what shows up in search engines that people click on)
    • Don't get creative here, say EXACTLY what the blog is about
    • 70 characters or less is a good length
  • URL - most URLs are based on the name of the post, but you should shorten as much as you can.
    • Remove stop words (e.g. And, The, An) to shorten the URL
  • Meta description - the search preview snippet shown below your title
    • Not an SEO factor, but very important to stand out from other results on page
    • Any words in here that are used by a searcher are in Bold.
  • If you're updating any images or using any media, you can set alt descriptions and give an exact title of what your image is.
    • Helps search engines with what image is about
• 11:08 to 12:12 - Once the Post is Published - Linking
  • What other resources can you point to, include other internal or external links
  • Internal linking - the way your own website links to pages within itself
    • Important ranking factor
    • Search engines will think the page with the most links to it is the most important
  • When you write a new blog, think about an older, more authoritative page to point from.
    • Look at your homepage or a popular previous blog, see if there's a module you can link from
• 12:13 to 14:47 - Outreach and Amplification and SEO Takeaways
  • Social sharing and telling everyone you know!
  • Main takeaways:
    • Results of SEO don't happen overnight
    • You can't hurt anything by getting started
    • You can revisit previous content and pages to your website and make changes
      • Go to Google and type in Site: (and your website)
      • It will show all of the pages it has crawled and indexed and include the titles and meta descriptions
        • Google has webmaster tools to provide more help if pages aren't showing up
    • You can update pages on your site, not just blogs
      • Homepage, services, etc
      • Make sure external links aren't broken
    • Don't be afraid to get local with your content
• 14:48 to 16:27 - Ashland Closing Remarks
  • Stay in touch, email us ([e-mail]) or connect with us on social
  • Come check out our three day "Experience" this September - www.cmbxp.com (September 14-16)
  • Need help with goal planning? Connect with us for a goal planning session!

If you like what you hear, share the podcast with your friends, rate and review. To stay in the loop - follow us on Twitter, Facebook or subscribe to the newsletter.

More on Digital Marketing so stay tuned!

Thanks!

Ashland, Creatives Meet Business