🤖 SEO Basics, Web Analytics & the AI of It All — with Emily Gertenbach

This episode was transcribed by Jessica Braun.

Amelia [00:00:02] [Music begins to play, overlapping with introduction to the episode] Welcome to Off the Grid, a podcast for small business owners who want to leave social media without losing all their clients.

Amelia [00:00:08] I'm Amelia Hruby, writer, speaker, and founder of Softer Sounds podcast studio. On this show, I share stories, strategies, and experiments for growing your business with radical generosity and energetic sovereignty. Download your free Leaving Social Media Toolkit at softersounds.studio/byeig and join us as we do it all off the grid [music jams and fades out].

Amelia [00:00:38] Hello, hello, welcome or welcome back to Off the Grid, a podcast about leaving social media without losing all your clients. Or in today's episode, a podcast about SEO, a.k.a. Search Engine Optimization and A.I., a.k.a. Artificial Intelligence, and all of the space in between those two things, which is, like, I guess, less and less space as we're getting into the current era.

Amelia [00:01:02] I'm your host Amelia Hruby [laughs]. If you're new to the show. Welcome. It's great to have you here. And I'm really excited because today I'm welcoming our first guest of Season Two, Emily Gertenbach.

Amelia [00:01:14] Let me tell you a little bit about Emily before we dive into this conversation. Emily has been writing SEO content for over a decade. In that time, she's worked with everyone from local agencies a few blocks from her house to internationally recognized software companies considered to be on the leading edge of user experience and design. Those include places like Upwork, Figma, MemberSpace, and more.

Amelia [00:01:36] Emily and I were introduced by my friend and past Off the Grid guest Taylor Elyse Morrison, and I'm just so excited to have her here today, so excited for someone to finally bring some SEO expertise instead of me just, like, sharing from a very amateur perspective. So, thanks so much for joining me, Emily. I'm so happy you're here.

Emily [00:01:57] Thank you for having me. I'm so excited that Taylor introduced us and I'm really happy to be here and I love talking about SEO. So—

Amelia [00:02:05] Yeah!

Emily [00:02:05] I'm ready.

Amelia [00:02:06] Well, let's— let's just dive right in. So, I think the listeners— folks tuning in will be a mix of folks who are like, "What is SEO? I've never heard of this," and folks who are like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm optimized, everything's good. Got it going on [laughs]." But let's start at the very beginning. Can you share with us, like, what is SEO and, like, what's a quick 101 for folks who are new to this conversation?

Emily [00:02:30] Absolutely. So, as you already said, it stands for search engine optimization and the 101 is that SEO is just the process of making sure that your website appears in Google search results. And let me preface that by saying I'm going to keep saying Google search results because Google pretty much sets the standard for everything we do in SEO. But the SEO actions you take will also help you rank higher in other search engines too.

Emily [00:02:58] So, if you like to use Bing or DuckDuckGo or Brave Search, this will all apply— kind of using Google search almost like we call almost all tissues just Kleenex. It's kind of a blanket term [Amelia laughs] at this point.

Emily [00:03:10] So, SEO is all the actions that you take to make yourself rank higher in search results and ideally outrank your competitors. And there's lots of different moving parts to SEO so it can include everything from writing content on your website to creating landing pages based around specific topics to, you know, doing videos and audio even like this, and including the transcript and formatting things a certain way.

Amelia [00:03:36] Yeah. So, tell us, like, why is SEO important for small business owners? Why should we be working on our SEO from your perspective?

Emily [00:03:45] So, you really should be working on your SEO because your website is something that you own.

Amelia [00:03:51] Mmhm.

Emily [00:03:51] You might hear people say things like, "Oh, well, Facebook is good for SEO," or, "Instagram is good for SEO," but that's not really quite the case. You can do things to rank higher and appear within the feeds on those platforms, but those platforms can take down your content at any time if they really want to.

Emily [00:04:10] Your website is something that you own and you control the content on, so it's really important that you're using that as a hub to talk about what your brand is, who you are, what you provide. And then, SEO is a way of getting that in front of as many people as possible. And generally speaking, if you're using a website builder, which a lot of us are like Squarespace or Wix or Duda, a lot of that technical stuff is already handled for you. These companies are producing a web builder platform that's going to be pretty SEO-ready. So, what you as a small business owner will want to focus on is what are you saying about your business, how are you saying it, and where are you putting that content.

Amelia [00:04:52] Something you're pointing to that I'm always trying to get across on this show is that in our journey to leaving social media, we're really trying to transition to what's often called owned channels in our marketing. So, exactly what you pointed to, the channels we own, so our website is an owned channel, our newsletter is an owned channel, and something that's gonna come up later in the season to preview for folks is I think our relationships are also owned channels for marketing our businesses and those are the things, as you pointed to, the no platform can take away from us.

Amelia [00:05:27] You know, we might use a certain website builder or a certain, you know, newsletter platform, but we still own the content and own that channel itself as opposed to, as you just said, you know, Instagram or Facebook or TikTok can always just take your content down—

Emily [00:05:43] Mm.

Amelia [00:05:43] Can just ban you or shadow ban you, and then you've lost all of the audience and influence that you've garnered there. So, I was really paying attention to your point, and it resonates with me around, like, if you're using a website builder, which most of us are at this point, your website is going to be set up for SEO success in— on the back end of the technical stuff. But say I'm a business owner and I've got a website, you know, I build my sites on Squarespace—

Emily [00:06:10] Mm.

Amelia [00:06:10] So, I'm a business owner and got my website, probably on Squarespace, going. Like, what are my next steps if I want to improve my SEO? I think it can be really, like, opaque what that means [laughs]. Can you walk us through, like, what are a couple of things I can do next to try to work on SEO for— for my business when it already has a website?

Emily [00:06:28] Yeah, absolutely. So, the very first thing I would say to do is go in to your Squarespace account or Wix or whatever builder you're using and go to each page and open up the settings for that page and make sure that it has a URL that relates to what's on the page.

Emily [00:06:44] So, sometimes these builders will assign things like your website dot com slash, and then a bunch of gibberish because you know—

Amelia [00:06:51] Mmhm.

Emily [00:06:51] You started it— it was wasn't live yet so make sure that it— the URL— the website relates to what it is. So, on my website I have e.g., creative content slash home, slash about, slash resources.

Emily [00:07:03] So, you want to do that. That's going to make sure that your site map, which is a list of all the URLs on your site, makes sense, and is organized well, and that helps direct search engines as they're crawling the Internet, and helps direct them around your site and helps them understand what you're offering.

Emily [00:07:20] The next thing would be to go on to each page again and make sure that you have big headers at the top of each page and you don't just want to make the text larger. You don't just want to be like, "Okay, this is a, you know, 76-point font."

Emily [00:07:33] When you're editing the page, you actually want to go in and select what they call paragraph styles. It's usually a little paragraph symbol is in the toolbar and select heading one and make that be whatever's the top title of each page and then throughout the page you want to have other sub headers that break the content up and have those be H2.

Emily [00:07:54] And what this does is when a search engine— their little crawler bots arrive on your page, they can't read like a person does, but they can ascertain information about your page from the code. And so, when you've labeled your headers as header one, header two the— that goes into your website's code and the search engines, they start to understand, "Okay, this is what this page is about. These are the main topics."

Emily [00:08:18] So, you want to make sure you have those headers labeled and make sure they relate to the content that comes beneath it on the page. And the third thing you can do is to start posting articles on your website. I'm not saying you have to become, like, the world's most prolific blogger tomorrow, but you do want to be putting content on your site regularly, and by creating content, you will start giving the search engines more information about you and your business and more opportunity for them to say, "Oh, someone's searched for this term here. We know who has that information." It's your website, and then—

Amelia [00:08:57] Mmhm.

Emily [00:08:57] It gives you more chances to show up in search. So, that's really just scraping the surface of SEO. But those are the top three things that I always recommend folks do, especially if they've just set up a new website. But it's never too late. You can begin implementing those things right now, even if your website has been up for years.

Amelia [00:09:13] That's so helpful. Thank you for this really, like, clear breakdown of— I love, like, a three-step process. And it's reminding me that maybe what we haven't quite emphasized as much so far, that I want to emphasize now, is like the why we are doing this.

Amelia [00:09:28] And I think the why for all small business owners is we want more people to find our services or our products, right? We want people to find them when they are searching or Googling, as you pointed out, like we want Google to serve our website up to people who are searching for things that are relevant to our business or to our offerings.

Amelia [00:09:47] And that's why we go through that three-step process. That's why we work on setting our website up for success in ranking higher in search results. Something that I worked through that I bet you have a lot of insight on and I felt like I was doing this in like a cave when I was trying [laughs heartily]— but how do you help people think about, like, what searches do I want to show up as a result for? And how do I think about, you know, what are the key words that I'm optimizing my site for? Because I think that's another piece of it. Like, we're optimizing our sites for search engines, but we're also optimizing for specific keywords. So, how do you think about that keyword side of the puzzle too?

Emily [00:10:27] So, it really all comes back to the people behind it all— who you want to reach. And you had mentioned that you're going to talk about this later in the season, but like relationships being—

Amelia [00:10:37] Mmhm.

Emily [00:10:38] Something that we own. So, really thinking about those relationships, either the ones you have or the ones you want to cultivate with customers, with followers, with listeners. Those are the people that you want to think about. So, it's— you know, my approach to SEO, and not everyone agrees with this, but it's worked very well for me and my clients is keeping it human-focused.

Emily [00:10:57] So, the way you start thinking about it is really understanding who your customer is. You probably have customer or listener or reader personas already. If not, I'd back up and I would start doing that— start thinking about who are you trying to reach?

Amelia [00:11:10] Mmhm.

Emily [00:11:10] What do they like? What are their pain points? What are their problems? What can you offer that will be a solution for them— whether that's something you want them to buy, content you want them to read, and then start thinking about, "Okay. What— what would you ask if you were in this person's shoes?"

Emily [00:11:26] So, like, if someone's looking for me, well, someone who offers my services online, they might not really know exactly what they need, but they know they need SEO, and someone's told them that they should have a blog so they might start searching terms.

Emily [00:11:39] And I market a lot of what I do to software companies, so they might start searching blog writers for software as a service or software-focused blogs or SEO blogging for software companies—

Amelia [00:11:51] Mmhm.

Emily [00:11:51] And they're going to start seeing results ideally with me in them. So, an example I like to give is, let's say you run a shoe store, we all buy shoes. [Amelia laughs] You want a shoe store; you want people to find it but obviously there's a lot of competitors. You've got your Adidas [laughs], your Nike, your New Balance, and you know, how are you going to compete with them?

Emily [00:12:13] Well, ultimately, you're not going to compete directly with them. You're going to think about what can you offer your customer. So, rather than optimizing your website, just so, oh, when people search shoes, they'll see me, think about, okay, where am I located? And do I specialize in a certain kind of shoe? Maybe I have a shoe store in Miami that specializes in water shoes for women.

Emily [00:12:36] So, I would start writing content on my site about what are the best water shoes for women? What are the best water shoes for women who like to surf? What are the best water shoes for women who live in Miami and want to buy locally?

Emily [00:12:51] So, start thinking really specific in that way. And what that will do is it'll start helping you rise in the search results for those really specific terms and no not everyone searching for shoes is going to find my hypothetical shoe store in this situation, but the people who I really want to sell to, they will find it.

Amelia [00:13:09] I think this is really important— so many pieces of what you just said. So, one piece of it is, like, working on your SEO can be a really nice opportunity to get back in touch with some of the fundamental aspects of your business, which are those, like, ideal client personas, you know, audi— who your audience is, who you want to buy from.

Amelia [00:13:27] And I think SEO also, like, challenges us as business owners to identify the niche or niches that we're a part of and to be really clear about that for ourselves. I also think SEO can invite in some really creative opportunities for how to position ourselves.

Amelia [00:13:48] So, for instance, I'll use an example of a good friend of mine who is a web developer or designer— both— shout out to Kening who realized that the trap— this post that was bringing the most traffic to their web work was actually a post on branding for astrologers because they'd noticed— they were like— they were just super into astrology, had worked with a couple astrologers and were like, "I should make a post about this," and you know, it's not— their whole business isn't web design for astrologers. But, like, that post was niche enough and calling in a really specific potential client that it was ranking much higher in search results than a post just about, like, web design basics, right, where you're really competing against Squarespace, against Adobe, against all of these brands that have so much more web traffic than you as a solopreneur or small business owner most likely will.

Amelia [00:14:39] And I've seen the same thing for my business, Softer Sounds. So, for instance, you know, I've got a whole free resource section of the website and the posts about how to launch a podcast, you know, how to choose a podcast hosting platform, how to record your show. They— they don't get that much traffic.

Amelia [00:14:55] What I've seen from my analytics is people find my site and then might go through a bunch of those posts. But I have one post that gets a ton of search traffic and that post is— I don't remember the exact title, but it's something like, "The Eight Best Canva Templates for Free Podcast Cover Art." So, it's super specific and people are searching, "Canva template podcast art," and that's how they're finding that.

Amelia [00:15:21] So, it is really like— I think SEO is an invitation to get creative and find those, like, really specific things that people are searching for that you can rank for. And you know that creativity comes with its challenges. It can be really— it was definitely disappointing for me to feel like— as I was choosing keywords, I really felt like all the podcast keywords were so saturated. I was never going to break through that. But I have found some success with these much more specific keywords.

Amelia [00:15:52] Do you have any advice or reflections on that or things you've seen for your clients or would want to share with other small business owners trying to figure out this— this keyword game?

Emily [00:16:01] Yeah, that's really spot on. And what you— the example you gave with your own business, that's a perfect example of what we call a long-tail keyword, which is one of those really specific keywords that can connect you with people.

Emily [00:16:12] And it does— I like what you said about it opening up avenues for creativity. I mean, you know, you could look at that and think, “Okay, well, what kind of content can I spin off of this? Is there other business opportunities based on this that people are interested in?”

Emily [00:16:25] All in all, I would say that, you know, don't be too discouraged by, you know, looking at keywords and seeing, like you said, you're looking at podcast keywords and okay, you're seeing other podcast websites are already ranking for those, that doesn't mean that you won't.

Emily [00:16:38] This is a really good opportunity to go in and look at some of those competitor's websites and see what they're doing. And I'm not saying by any means don't rip them off, but just because something is ranking doesn't mean it's really good. It might be ranking because there hasn't been anything that was better that came along. So, you as a business owner might be able to create the content, the page that is better than what's already out there, and then you will ultimately eventually rank above them.

Emily [00:17:04] And you know, you can also— what really helps is there's keyword research tools out there. That's a whole discussion in itself. But a lot of these keyword research tools, they will show you two values. They'll show you the search volume, which is how many people have searched and the search difficulty or the competition score, which is an estimate of how tricky it might be for you to reach the top spot for that keyword. And remember, that's the top spot. You can still certainly rank, even if you're not in the top spot and there's absolute value in ranking. You don't always have to be number one. It's okay if you're a few down, especially when you're just starting on your SEO journey.

Emily [00:17:42] But when you— when you're doing this keyword research, if you're using one of these tools, then what you want to look for is one that has a decent volume but not a super high difficulty score. And that is what we'll see a lot with those longer tail keywords. But sometimes it will surprise you. I recently realized that the keyword, "best tools for writers," had high volume, but not a whole lot of difficulty, and nobody had ever bought the domain for it. So, I bought the domain for it. And now I'm going to [laughs lightly] create content. So, you never know what's out there. Sometimes those things will surprise you once you dig in.

Amelia [00:18:13] Yeah, that's such a cool example. It feels like a real treasure that you just discovered. What a cool thing.

Emily [00:18:20] I got so excited.

Amelia [00:18:21] Yeah, I think that's something else that's coming up for me here that's, like, a very common lesson on Off the Grid, something I say over and over again that I'm thinking of as you're talking about SEO, is sometimes when we start to work on our SEO, we actually realize that the content on our website is not anything people are going to search for when [laughs softly] we want them to find us.

Amelia [00:18:46] So, for instance, I'll use myself as another example here. The Softer Sounds website, like our main blog, is a free resource section that has lots of resources for starting a podcast. But our business, like I'm not going to get the percentage right, but I would say, like, 70% of our business is editing podcasts and only, like, 5% is launching podcasts.

Amelia [00:19:09] It's actually, like, [laughs softly] a very small part of the business. And those people that are coming to us to launch shows aren't coming through SEO. So, it's— it's like when I started going into the SEO of it all, I was like, "Oh, my content strategy and my business needs do not align."

Amelia [00:19:26] And if I'm doing all this work to optimize SEO on these posts, it's actually not selling the thing I sell the most of. And I think that's very common [laughs lightly]. I think often, you know, when we go to share or write something, we might realize that it's not directly promoting our core offerings and it doesn't have to.

Amelia [00:19:48] Like, I create those free resources because one of the values of the business is radical generosity and creating free resources to launch podcasts is, like, a mission and impact focus of ours. So, I feel fine about that choice, but it was really eye opening to be like, "Oh, if I want people to come to the company through search, I need to create materials that are going to be for those searches that I want."

Amelia [00:20:13] And so, a search that we— a keyword we rank really high for is, "feminist podcast editing," but like nobody searches for [laughs]— except the one client who did and found us that way, right? So—

Emily [00:20:26] There you go.

Amelia [00:20:27] I guess I'm sharing all of this to say— let me tie it back in, like once again I think SEO as an opportunity to reflect on the alignment of our content and our offerings.

Emily [00:20:37] Mmhm.

Amelia [00:20:37] And there are many different motivations for making content. But if your motivation is to make content to make money [laughs lightly], you need to make sure that the keywords you're optimizing for are also the things that make you money. And that is, like, a real disconnect I see for people all the time.

Emily [00:20:54] Yeah, that's a really good point. Yes, if your goal from your content is to make money, like if you have an e-commerce store, the main goal, you want people to come and you want them to buy products. In that case—

Amelia [00:21:04] Mmhm.

Emily [00:21:04] You really do need to be hyper-aligned with the keywords you're targeting, the audience you're targeting. In that case, you know, if you're— if you're in that situation, you're not feeling super confident in SEO, it might be worth working with a consultant at least once to get kind of an understanding of what you should be targeting.

Emily [00:21:20] But again, coming back to your audience base, if you have the chance to research or even talk to members of your audience, your customers, that can give you some insights to make sure that they're really well-aligned. And if you're not seeking to make money off of your SEO content directly, then yes, you can get a little more— a little more broad with it.

Emily [00:21:39] But I have also experienced something similar to what you did. You know, I work in SEO, but sometimes, you know, you're starting out and you're like, "Okay, this is— this is a topic. I'm not really sure what people want to hear about it." Sometimes all you can do is start creating content. I had started a— a group of articles on my own website, and then I noticed that an article I'd written that I'd intended to be a one-off about analytics tools was getting a lot of traffic, and people were really particularly interested in one section that was talking about one particular Google Analytics alternative.

Emily [00:22:11] So, I pivoted and now I'm going to be going deeper into that topic and—

Amelia [00:22:17] Mmhm.

Emily [00:22:18] Ultimately, I will be driving people in my case to work with me on related services or sign up to follow my blog to get updates, and potentially work with me in the future. So, it's a little different than an e-commerce situation. But don't be afraid to pivot. I mean, we all, even the pros, so to speak, sometimes think that they've got it nailed down and they're doing it and they realize, "Oh, wait. Maybe not." And you just kind of have to go follow what the audience wants.

Amelia [00:22:42] Yeah, exactly. Like, your SEO strategy doesn't happen in a vacuum.

Emily [00:22:47] No.

Amelia [00:22:47] It is reliant on other humans appreciating [laughs] and consuming the content you're creating. Like, that is also what cues search engines to raise your rankings.

Emily [00:22:57] Yes.

Amelia [00:22:58] And I think too something kind of inside of what you're saying that feels really important to me is again, like once we get people on the owned channel of our website using SEO, we really want to then get them deeper into the owned channel of our newsletter.

Amelia [00:23:12] And so, I really see a missed opportunity for lots of people on these beautiful blog posts where they don't have a newsletter sign-up embed or button or, like, prompt. Like, once we get people there, we really want to then get their email address so we can be in their inbox sharing the new content we make and reminding them that we exist. Because in this day and age, like, how often do we actually just go look at the same website because we're, like, thinking about it, wanted to see what they made that was new. I mean—

Emily [00:23:41] Yeah.

Amelia [00:23:41] I have, like, two sites I do that for, and they're blogs I've been reading since the early aughts. So that's the—

Emily [00:23:45] Same. Same.

Amelia [00:23:46] I've been trained for 20 years to do that [Emily giggles] with new stuff I encounter online, like maybe I'll bookmark it, but then it's just in the abyss of my bookmarks and I'll probably never go see it again.

Emily [00:23:55] Yeah, that is very true. And you— there can even be a benefit to doing that. I think even if your end goal is to get people to buy a product through SEO. So, maybe you do want people to buy products in your ecommerce store, but your ecommerce store is very new and you're having trouble getting the sales off the ground just through SEO because it can take like six months for your SEO to warm up, so to speak.

Amelia [00:24:16] Yeah.

Emily [00:24:16] So, in that case, you know, maybe start creating blog content about topics related to what you're selling, maybe you're selling homewares, maybe you start a blog that gives tips on decorating and cleaning and you get people to sign up for your newsletter that way. And then, over time, they become more interested and loyal to your brand, and then you begin generating more of those sales from the products. So that— exactly what you said. Get them as deep into your own content as you can, and that's going to benefit you in the long run.

Amelia [00:24:46] You know, now we're getting more into the realms of content marketing, and I think that— I don't think all SEO is content marketing. I think some SEO is content—

Emily [00:24:56] Mmhm.

Amelia [00:24:57] Marketing. It depends on how you're using it.

Emily [00:24:59] Correct.

Amelia [00:24:59] But I just did a podcast episode that is all about like— it was called, "Ten Things I Hate about Content Marketing [laughs heartily]." So—

Emily [00:25:06] That's a great title.

Amelia [00:25:06] There's a little tiny SEO section in there with some of my gripes. But I think that what I do want to point back to is more so what you just said around, like, SEO takes time.

Amelia [00:25:17] And I think that often when content marketing is pitched to us, it's pitched as a kind of like fast, easy solution. And in the case of SEO, that is not how this works so I just want to highlight that.

Amelia [00:25:28] Now, here in Off the Grid, we're a fan of things that take time, because also your SEO content has longevity, right? Like, I'm a fan of things, maybe it takes time to get going, but like it will also last a long time.

Emily [00:25:41] Yes.

Amelia [00:25:41] And that's something I love about SEO that you really don't have when you're doing content marketing, for instance, on social media, right? And everything disappears within—

Emily [00:25:49] Yes.

Amelia [00:25:49] A few hours. But that said, I want to pivot us a little bit into something you did preview, but I didn't double click on yet, which is you have emphasized over and over again that our SEO should begin with our clients. We start with the people that we're creating things for. We write it as the people that we are or that we've hired to do so.

Amelia [00:26:11] But I think a lot of the way SEO gets talked about and a lot of what people do instead of talking to their ideal client is actually use tools like Google Analytics or Hotjar or, you know, tools that are scraping data from site visits to try to tell you what people want.

Amelia [00:26:31] And you wrote a great blog post on why you don't use Google Analytics anymore in your business or for your clients. I would love to hear about that journey. So, like, how do people use analytics tools and SEO and why don't you do that anymore?

Emily [00:26:47] Yeah, that is something I recently wrote about and it is definitely a controversial topic, we'll say, across [Amelia chuckles heartily] SEO but I very much believe in my approach now, which is I personally am not using Google Analytics anymore and I very rarely use it for my clients actually. And I'm still seeing great results. And here's why.

Emily [00:27:05] So, to back up, like you said, people are using Google Analytics and tools like Hotjar because it's just sort of been this industry standard that we've all been taught that we have to know as much granular, quantifiable data as possible about our website visitors in order to make SEO work. And for a long time, I didn't question that. You know, I started to learn SEO back in 2010 at work, and I wound up working for an e-commerce company and then another e-commerce company and some other jobs in between.

Emily [00:27:36] And it was just standard. We just used Google Analytics. We used Hotjar, which is a tool that basically tracks where people move their mouse on your page and you can see a recording of it or like a heat map, and it's actually super creepy. This is just standard. It's what we did. And then I started to think about it, you know, and I hadn't questioned it for a long time, like ten years.

Emily [00:27:56] And I started to become more interested in data privacy in my personal life. I started to really think about exactly how many different websites and apps and tools had my information. And that's not to say I'm off living in some sort of, like, large human-sized Faraday cage and I'm not letting anything in or out. I'm not. I still have an iPhone. I sign up for tons of apps. I do SEO, but I have decided to move away from those analytics tools.

Emily [00:28:23] And the reason is I think that a lot of times we, and I use the royal we here, we conflate search engine optimization with conversion rate optimization. So, search engine optimization, as we talked about, is what you're doing to get yourself to appear in search results and get people to click on your website, come through, read your own content, sign up for your own newsletter, etc.

Emily [00:28:45] Conversion rate optimization is what can happen once people are already on the page. So, if you have, again, an ecommerce store, you're using SEO to get people to your website. But if you find that people aren't buying at the rate you want, then you need to make changes to the content on your product pages. And that process is called conversion rate optimization.

Emily [00:29:07] So, tracking is useful for that and I don't want anyone listening to feel bad if they are using analytics tools like Hotjar or, you know, some businesses really do still need that level of data. If you run an ecommerce store, yes, you probably will need to use more of those tracking tools.

Emily [00:29:24] But if you're creating content either as a pure content creator or to advertise services or even a software tool, I don't believe that we need to be using that level of data for SEO purposes. So, I am able through tools— there's one called Ahrefs, one called Mas, one called Semrush.

Emily [00:29:47] These are really in-depth keyword analytics tools. I— through these tools, I am able to see Google search data, what people are searching for online, but I'm not seeing anything related to who's clicking on my website. I don't actually need to know that. In this case, I just need to know what people are looking for and I don't need to be tracking them through the whole process.

Emily [00:30:08] So, when I use these tools— like my one of choice is Ahrefs, when I use that, I'm seeing what people are searching, but it's all anonymized. It's being pulled from publicly available data that they're taking from search engines and all I can really see is what they've searched for and what country the search originated from.

Emily [00:30:25] So, how do I know when people are actually clicking on my website? Well, then I use a tool called Google Search Console, which is a complement to analytics. And usually, they're talked about in the same breath, "Oh you have to link them together," but you actually don't.

Emily [00:30:38] You can have a free Google Search Console account. And what that will do is that will just show you what people have searched, what they searched when they saw your website somewhere in the search results on Google.

Emily [00:30:49] So, I use these two together. I use tools like Ahrefs to learn— okay, I know things about my audience. Let's dig a little deeper into what they're searching for.

Emily [00:30:59] Then I create content on that and then I can go into Google Search Console and I can see, "Oh, okay, well, I am appearing in search for, you know, a, b, c, and d, how does that line up with what I had done my research on before? Do I need to create different content?"

Emily [00:31:15] But I don't actually see any information about where people are moving on my website or what they're clicking on once they get there. Because my goal is to get them onto the page. And I take this approach with my clients too. Right now, with all of my clients, I am strictly using that publicly available search engine data. I am not tracking any analytics data. I'm not using any analytics data in my work.

Emily [00:31:40] Now, some of my clients do use analytics platforms on their own. I have no control over that, but I'm not accessing that data and pulling it and I am continually writing content that's ranking in the first spot for my clients. So, to me that went to show that, okay, we can separate these two things. Some people need it, but we don't all need it. We don't all need to be collecting all of the data all of the time.

Amelia [00:32:05] Okay. I want to highlight multiple of the things that you just shared. So, the first is I feel like I need to do a full-on disclaimer that I do have Hotjar on the Softer Sounds website [laughs lightly].

Emily [00:32:17] Sorry [laughs].

Amelia [00:32:18] Literally all I do with it is open it up and feel like a creep and close it [Amelia and Emily laugh together]. Like, that's it. I have not gleaned any information from all of this data that we're tracking, so I share this just to say like I definitely got told, “You got to have the site analytics.” And I'm not really into Google. So, I looked at Fathom. Which I know is a different privacy ballgame altogether.

Amelia [00:32:40] And then, I set up Hotjar because I was like, "It'll be cool to, like, watch people click around my site." And what I learned is nothing. And like, I was just following that template of like, these are the things you're quote unquote, supposed to do to have information about your business. And I think that on Off the Grid, like over and over again, we're just tearing down those like quote unquote supposed to dos because really what you're centering— what I'm centering is like, we just need to be having conversations with the people that we want to buy things from us. And that is what will tell us what to create for them.

Amelia [00:33:11] And I think so often that's just scary. Like, what keeps us from doing that as small business owners or solopreneurs is often fear of like, "Well, what if they don't like what I'm doing at all?" Or like, "That feels overwhelming to, like, reach out to people— or super vulnerable," but I definitely want to re-cent— like just continue to center us in the client-first approach to how we create content as opposed to these sorts of analytics tools.

Amelia [00:33:38] I love that your career is proving that you don't need them to rank high on search either. Something else I think is really important that you mentioned was the difference between search engine optimization and conversion rate optimization or SEO and CRO. And I think some of our listeners will also be able to map that on to the difference between content writing and copywriting.

Amelia [00:34:01] So, with content writing, you know, we are making content often optimized for SEO, but with copywriting we are writing persuasive copy contents. I mean, to me copy is like the persuasive nature—

Emily [00:34:13] Yes.

Amelia [00:34:14] Such that we are converting people to generally buy something from us, but sometimes to join our newsletter or do something else. Like, copy is really about getting people to do something. And I think you're so right. This is my whole "Ten Things I Hate About Content Marketing" diatribe is that very few of us are actually content creators, [laughs lightly] like we're content creators only for the sake of something else, like only for the sake of courting a conversion. Sounds a little clinical, but, like, that's what we're doing.

Emily [00:34:41] Yeah.

Amelia [00:34:42] And I think it's really important that we think about that with how we're creating content and with, like, how we're thinking about our websites. And I don't say that to say like, "Thus we need the analytics [laughs]." I think it's actually like, "Thus we need the deeper conversations with the people we want to take that journey."

Amelia [00:34:59] Because I can say from— I've had Hotjar on my website for over six months, nine months maybe I have stared at all those heat maps. I am a very smart person and marketer and they still have told me really nothing about what people want on my website except that way more people look at the free stuff on my site than ever inquire about services and, like, that's a sort of obvious truth I did not need nine months of analytics to discover [laughs].

Emily [00:35:24] I, like you, had originally installed Hotjar on my website and I got nothing out of it. The only time I've ever gotten anything out of it was when I was working on a really large e-commerce site. So, like, there are use cases, but for a lot of us, maybe not so necessary.

Amelia [00:35:35] Yeah, I also love Google Search Console. Such a great tool to know, like, what are people searching that gets them to your site so that you can— for me, like, my strategy with SEO is I made a set of, I think, six blog posts in the first few months of my business that were optimized for certain keywords I had in mind, and then I just put them up and let them sit for six months.

Amelia [00:35:57] And then, like six months later I checked in. I was like, "Okay, what searches are actually bringing people to the site," which is where I made my Canva discovery.

Emily [00:36:04] Mmhm.

Amelia [00:36:04] Like, "Oh, it's truly just that one." [Amelia and Emily laugh together] That one's working great. So, I think that it's such a great tool and, like, I don't want to understate that.

Emily [00:36:13] It gives you a good idea. And so, you could then start creating content around those keywords that you've identified and then look in Google Search Console and see if it's really working or if there are the surprise ones popping up that you weren't expecting. And then, you can, you know, revise your approach from there.

Amelia [00:36:28] Yeah. As we start to wrap up our conversation— so I love we got, like, our SEO primer, we talked a lot about why SEO is— can be so great for small businesses. Also, how it can be challenging for small businesses. Like, we've talked through a lot of, like, tools to use, data privacy, you know, of course everyone's going to have their own value system around data privacy and how important it feels to you or not.

Emily [00:36:53] Of course.

Amelia [00:36:53] But I want to kind of wrap up taking us somewhere else [laughs lightly], which is more to the future of SEO. So, over this year, we're recording this in early spring 2023, the search engines are coming out saying that they're going to start using more AI in search. So, we've had Microsoft and Bing, I think, what purchased ChatGPT. Is that true?

Emily [00:37:17] They made an investment stake in the company and now they've integrated it. Yeah.

Amelia [00:37:20] Yeah. And I know that Google has said they're also going to be using more AI in search— in search results—

Emily [00:37:26] Mmhm.

Amelia [00:37:26] And how they surface search results. And I know there were some people, like ready to straight up, like, put up a gravestone for SEO in those moments. [Emily laughs] And I'm sure that you're not one of them, but I am wondering from your perspective, like, how do you see AI and these, like, AI tools impacting SEO in both, like, the near future and, you know, do you have any visions for how you think this will change things five, ten years down the road.

Emily [00:37:49] Yeah, that's a really good question and certainly extremely relevant. I just saw that opening. I rolled out ChatGPT-4 to its paid users yesterday—

Amelia [00:37:58] Yeah.

Emily [00:37:58] Or today. So, very timely. And yes, the day that Microsoft announced that Bing would include AI search, I— it was an interesting day to be on the Twitter-side— or the SEO-side of Twitter because people were melting down.

Amelia [00:38:10] Yeah.

Emily [00:38:11] I do not think that AI is going to do away with SEO as we know it. And here's why. Like I said before, these companies, Microsoft and Bing, Google and their search, they want to make money and the only way they do that is, again, by creating tools that people are going to want to use and that people understand how to use.

Emily [00:38:30] So, if they suddenly just like— were like, "We're burning everything down, search as you know it is dead, you just have to talk to the chat bot." It wouldn't go well. People would be like, "I don't know what I'm doing here. This is so unknown."

Emily [00:38:42] What we're seeing right now is that in search results, the companies that are integrating more AI, they are by and large putting the AI-generated results, so to speak, at the very top— right on the top side of the page.

Emily [00:38:57] And right now in Google search the— you know, sometimes you will do a search and they'll be like a paragraph of text at the top or over the side. That's called the featured snippet. That's something that Google has identified as being the most hyper-relevant in a nutshell response. And it gets featured at the top of the page so people can theoretically read it and not even have to click, although a lot of people do still click.

Emily [00:39:20] I think we're going to see, at least at first, the featured snippet going away and being replaced by the AI result and currently with Bing and Brave Search through the Brave browser is another one— they are using AI results and they are giving citations. Now—

Amelia [00:39:38] Mm.

Emily [00:39:38] What's interesting is that the result it generates isn't always entirely accurate because it's not— it's not like a featured snippet where it's pulling verbatim from our website. It's the AI—

Amelia [00:39:48] Yeah.

Emily [00:39:49] Interpreting different sources and these AI tools, if they don't know the answer, they won't say I don't know the answer. They very confidently make something up and state it as fact. [Amelia laughs heartily] So, definitely click on the cited sources and check it out for yourself.

Emily [00:40:02] But I think that what we'll see at first is we have to start thinking about the way we rank a little differently. Rather than thinking, "Is this good enough that I might get picked to be that featured snippet?" It's going to be like, "Okay, well what can I do to help ensure that not only do I appear for search, but that the AI is like, 'Hey, you should check this out."

Emily [00:40:21] And we don't know what that's going to look like yet because we're still— a lot of us people who aren't working on machine learning— are still fairly in the dark about exactly how these AI tools work. Like, I understand it at a very top level, but I'm not, you know, in there messing with the code writing these programs.

Amelia [00:40:41] Mmhm.

Emily [00:40:41] So— and their integration into search is extremely new. So, part of the way it develops is going to be on how people react to it. If people are like, "I hate this," it's probably going to fade away. Not AI in total, but AI in search will probably fade away to a point. But if people are willing to adopt it, then I think we will start to see it become more solidified. Things will move out of the beta phase. It'll be more like, "Okay, this is how it works in search, this is what you can expect."

Emily [00:41:06] And then we can all start to begin reworking our strategy, our approach to it. It all comes back to the human thing. These search engines are going to show whatever's most relevant to the human user, even with the integration of the AI tool. So, as long as you're continuing to focus on your human user base, customer base, reader base and create content that they're going to find value in, then you're still going to be winning the algorithm, so to speak. You're still going to be ranking and you're probably, I suspect, going to be selected by the AI as the quoted result for relevance searches. But it will all continue to evolve.

Emily [00:41:46] You know, one thing that I think about a lot, though, is back in like 2012, I remember I was working in house doing SEO content and the big thing was voice search. Voice search is going to revolutionize everything. Soon no one's going to be, like, typing anymore. We're all just going to be talking into speakers. And yes, today, in 2023, as many as 50% of searches, depending on who you ask, are done through voice search. But that's because a lot of people are saying like, "Hey, Alexa, what's X, Y, Z?"

Emily [00:42:18] There's so many searches done every day. And even if only 50% of them are still being typed, that's massive. And it never changed anything really about how we approached SEO because the voice assistants would just pull whatever the top Google search result was and read part of that out to us. So, it was just a different delivery method. And right now, I feel like that's what we're looking at with AI.

Amelia [00:42:43] Oh, thank you for that very thoughtful and insightful answer. I feel in complete agreement that it's certainly going to change SEO in ways we don't know yet, but it's not going to— like I just don't— Google can't straight up pivot to only providing AI answers without losing all of their ad revenue, which is, like, their primary [laughs]—

Emily [00:43:05] Exactly. It's all about the money.

Amelia [00:43:07] Yeah. So, it's like— it's— they need to have search results so they can put those eight million ads at the top of them that we all have to scroll through. Right.

Emily [00:43:15] Yeah.

Amelia [00:43:15] So, you know, I think you're right. We will see this shift. I have already seen some of those, like, featured snippets morphing into—

Emily [00:43:20] Mmhm.

Amelia [00:43:22] AI answers in Brave and elsewhere. And, you know, sometimes I'm fine with that and sometimes it's horrible [laughs] or like, sometimes I'm just like, "This is the least useful four sentences I have ever read in my life. They all say nothing." But I think, you know, if I was going to take away any lesson from this for small business owners, it's just the same things I keep saying over and over again, like being focused on your ideal client or customer, being focused on and really clear about your core offerings, only creating content that is going to be bringing people to those core offerings, letting go of some of the content that's sending people outside of your ecosystem or elsewhere.

Emily [00:44:00] Mmhm.

Amelia [00:44:00] And just really, I don't know, I hate when people say that's about SEO. I was just about to say like, be a real human writing for real humans, but like, that's just, like, the least useful thing to me because I am not a robot, so I can't write like a robot and I'm not writing for robots [laughs] but—

Emily [00:44:14] I think that's really relevant to our— what we last talked about AI too, so I am— my whole thing has always been human-focused. I'm very focused on the human user versus just playing to the algorithm. But I think we also need to do what you said and, you know, write like a human and write it ourselves or work with a human. And I'm not just saying this because I am a writer, but currently it is possible to detect if something is AI written.

Emily [00:44:37] So, even if you do want to use one of these AI tools to maybe help you create an outline for your content. You still want to be writing content yourself or working with someone who's writing content that's really clearly injecting that human, you know, speech patterns into it. Because AI can— there are detectors that can tell and they— that might be penalized in search eventually. We don't know yet. But again, everything comes back to the humans.

Amelia [00:45:04] Yeah, and definitely that's the kind of business I'm running. And I think most folks listening to this podcast are also running human-centered businesses.

Emily [00:45:13] Yeah.

Amelia [00:45:13] And I also think it's just so important to, you know, write in your own voice or in—

Emily [00:45:19] Mmhm.

Amelia [00:45:19] Your brand voice, or, like, bring on people who will write in your brand voice because, as a podcaster, like, voice is so much— whether that is our spoken voice as in podcast or just the tone and tenor of our writing. Like, so much comes through in that, and as much as I see AI tools generating, you know, plenty fine text, like—

Emily [00:45:41] Mm.

Amelia [00:45:41] What it doesn't have is— is you. And at the end of the day, I think that especially for solopreneur or tiny businesses, like, the thing that makes it sell and makes it magnetic and makes people want it, is your energy being there.

Emily [00:45:55] Hundred percent.

Amelia [00:45:56] Often I just think when people want to go to AI are going to— even when people try to go to SEO in certain ways, they're like, "We're just seeking that, like, quick fix—"

Emily [00:46:05] Mm.

Amelia [00:46:05] "We're trying to, like, skirt the system. We're trying to find the, you know, quote unquote, magic bullet that will make marketing easy for us." And I just think it doesn't really exist. Like, that's the promise of virality on social media that so many of us, myself included—

Emily [00:46:20] Mmhm.

Amelia [00:46:20] Bought into and have had to step away from and, you know, SEO is the same. Like, it's not magic. It's not going to do magic for us [chuckles]. But it can be a great tool if you think that driving traffic from search engines to your business is something that will help you grow or achieve your goals.

Emily [00:46:37] Absolutely.

Amelia [00:46:37] And that's maybe not every business, but I think it's most of us.

Emily [00:46:40] I think it's a lot of us.

Amelia [00:46:42] Yeah.

Emily [00:46:43] Yeah.

Amelia [00:46:43] Well, Emily, thank you so much for taking this time to talk to me about SEO, I'm sure—

Emily [00:46:49] Thanks for having me.

Amelia [00:46:49] Yeah, I know our listeners will love it. Tell us where we can find you online and anything else you want to share today.

Emily [00:46:56] Sure, you can find me online at egcreativecontent.com. You can also just google my name. As far as I know, I'm the only one with my name, so I'll come right up and yeah, I have some resources on my website that, kind of, carries on what we talked about today. I also provide support to small business owners and small agency owners that are looking for help, kind of figuring out that initial path that they should take with SEO.

Amelia [00:47:21] Mmhm.

Emily [00:47:21] So, that's where you can find me. Also on LinkedIn, I'd love to connect.

Amelia [00:47:24] We'll put all that in the show notes. [Outro music begins to play] Thank you so much. Thanks to listeners for tuning in and we will see you all or hear you all or talk to you all off the grid.

Amelia [00:47:42] Thanks for listening to Off the Grid. Find links and resources in the show notes and don't forget to grab your free Leaving Social Media Toolkit at softersounds.studio/byeig. That's softersounds dot studio slash b-y-e-i-g.

Amelia [00:47:58] This podcast is a Softer Sounds production. Our music is by Purple Planet and our logo is by n'atelier Studio. If you'd like to make a podcast of your own, we'd love to help. Find more about our services at softersounds.studio. Until next time, we'll see you off the grid [music fades out].