Why Search Engine Optimization Benefits Your Business with Lauren Taylar

In episode 36 of The Podcast Podcast, I am so excited to have Lauren Taylar joining us. Lauren is a brand designer, website designer, and SEO strategist. She helps powerhouse coaches and creatives build a highly converting website and create an evergreen lead generation machine so that they can stand out, get seen, and make more sales. After spending 2 years in the SEO industry servicing billion-dollar global brands, Lauren is passionate about combining the art and science of websites to give her clients a rock-solid online presence. In today’s episode, Lauren shares her knowledge and wisdom on all things SEO.

In case this is your first time tuning in, let me introduce myself. My name is Tara Counterman. I’m the founder and CEO of Profitable Podcast Productions, the creator of Profitable Podcast School and basically, 1000% obsessed with helping online entrepreneurs step out of the busywork, stop struggling for paying clients and actually get their message out there.

So if you’re ready to dive into this episode and hear more from Lauren and all her SEO knowledge, check out the points I share below! And for even more juicy details, listen to ALL of episode 36 of The Podcast Podcast on your fave streaming platform.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION BENEFITS: LAUREN SHARES HER BACKGROUND AND HOW SHE GOT STARTED IN THE ONLINE COACHING SPACE.

After graduating from college, Lauren got a job at an SEO agency. She spent two years working on accounts for billion-dollar brands and high profile clients. This involved a lot of technical and content writing work. Ultimately, all of this made Lauren realize she wanted more for herself. Eventually, she discovered the online space and realized she had this passion for design, especially website design. Now, Lauren is passionate about combining her past technical experience alongside her passion for design. 

As she has come into the online business world, she’s seen a huge gap between design and SEO with websites. Alongside this, Lauren shares that a Facebook Ad is what started her transition into the coaching space. She remembers coming across an ad one day about two girls who were building their business from Bali. She took the webinar which dove into how you can start a service-based business and work from anywhere in the world. This entire concept hooked Lauren and she was so intrigued to learn more. Later, she took a design course from them and realized she was obsessed with designing logos as well as websites. This has driven her to help coaches and creatives master SEO as well as having a bomb ass website!

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION BENEFITS: LAUREN BREAKS DOWN WHAT SEO MEANS AND WHY YOU SHOULD HAVE AN SEO STRATEGY IN YOUR BUSINESS.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s all about making your website readable by search engines. It’s also about making content/technical tweaks to give your website the best chance of ranking high in search engines such as Google or Pinterest. Lauren shares that it’s essential to have an SEO strategy in your business because you have to think long-term. Building a blog and pairing it with an SEO Strategy is a long-term visibility plan that can work for years. Instagram and Facebook posts only last hours, where we constantly have to recycle content. Whereas, blogging has a life span of years. So, instead of chasing down clients on Instagram constantly, people can find you as they search for solutions to their problems on Google. 

Lauren also says that by implementing an SEO strategy and being top ranking on search engines, you are establishing yourself as an authority, growing your business on autopilot, while also leveraging more sales. I asked Lauren for her opinion on SEO if someone was using Facebook Ads and Pinterest. Lauren highly encourages still implementing an SEO strategy because ultimately, anything can happen. Facebook could go down tomorrow for all we know. The other perspective to look at is exposure and cost. By ranking on Google and getting traffic, this is organic and free. Whereas you have to pay for Facebook Ads. Over time, if you are mastering your SEO skills, you won’t need to use ads anymore. This saves you MONEY and increases your EXPOSURE! What a win-win.

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SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION BENEFITS: LAUREN SHARES THE 3 BIGGEST MISTAKES THAT SHE SEES PEOPLE MAKING WHEN IT COMES TO SEO.

The first mistake Lauren shares when it comes to people using SEO is not doing keyword research. If you aren’t using the exact words or phrases that people are searching for in Google, you are basically setting up your blog or podcast show notes to fail. Most business owners don’t take the time to do this research, but it’s critical to rank and show up in search engines. Lauren points out that even though you may say something in a specific way, that doesn’t mean other people are searching for that specific phrase, so do research! 

The second mistake Lauren shares is writing short blog posts. Lauren defines a short blog post as 500 words or less. Although this may work for Pinterest, it definitely won’t serve you on Google. Google wants to showcase high-quality content, and they don’t see 500 words as high quality. Lauren recommends aiming for writing at least 1,000 words in your content. If you can go up to 3,000 that’s even better.

The third mistake Lauren shares is keyword stuffing. Lauren explains that keyword stuffing is a spammy SEO tactic used to trick Google. This looks like taking a long tail keyword, 3 words or more, and integrating this into various parts of your website or blog. Lauren has seen this, especially in photographers. She points out that this method is very unnatural and robotic, so it’s best to avoid this. We have to focus on the user experience, not on Google. While we do want to rank on Google, we ruin the user experience by keyword stuffing. To avoid this, Lauren recommends reading your content out loud and determining if it sounds natural or unnatural.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION BENEFITS: LAUREN DIVES INTO SITE SPEED AND THE ROLE THAT PLAYS WITH SEO.

Lauren shares that site speed is another huge aspect of SEO. She shares that specifically, images are the number one way to slow down your website. Typically, when you get photographs from a Brand Photographer, they will give you file sizes between 3 and 15 MB. This is huge! You should be aiming to get it down to 500 KB. Make sure you are condensing your images before uploading them to your website.

Lauren shares her 3 step process to do just that:

1. Lauren opens up the image and selects Edit File Size. She will manually condense the file size down to a minimum of 2,000 pixels wide for banner images. She recommends never going lower than 1,500 as that will compromise your image quality.
2. After that, Lauren will go into Jpeg Mini Pro to further condense the image.
3. The last step is going into Tiny Png and even further condensing the image. 

By using these tools and manually condensing the image, you can increase site speed without compromising the quality of the images on your website. Lauren shares that it can be time-consuming but it’s definitely worth it. Keep in mind that if your website takes about 10 seconds to load, people are most likely going to leave. Nowadays, people will give your website about 2-3 seconds to load. 

The other point Lauren brings up with site speed and images is file names. She shares that you can use the file name of your image as an opportunity to further rank with Google. She recommends adding a keyword to your image file name, you can put one keyword that’s in your blog post title or whatever keyword you are trying to rank for. Alongside that, you want to utilize alt text. Alt text is a way to tell Google what your image is and to communicate it to visually impaired people. You can do this by typing in the keyword, putting a dash, and then briefly describing what the image is. If you don’t do this and you upload the image without any file name, Google won’t know what the image is. Make sure you utilize this feature for both Google and the user experience. 

WHY SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION BENEFITS YOUR BUSINESS WITH LAUREN TAYLAR: THE BOTTOMLINE

I hope this episode has helped you better understand exactly what SEO means and why it’s so beneficial to your business! Be sure to grab Lauren’s free checklist that you can find on her website.

Lauren has tons of resources you should check out. You can also sign up for the course I have been taking from her, SEO Strategy Simplified. If you do purchase this course, be sure that you email support@profitablepodcastproductions.com to claim a pre-recorded bonus that dives into behind the scenes of what we’re changing over at Profitable Podcast Productions since taking Lauren’s course and working with her!

Believe it or not, this is just scratching the surface. SEO is so worth putting the effort in because if you can get to the point of driving free traffic to your podcast or website, it will be more than beneficial for you long-term.

So don’t forget to tune in to episode 36 of The Podcast Podcast to hear ALL the details about the points I just outlined above! 

And if you love this episode as much as I do, don’t forget to take a screenshot, share it on your Instagram stories and tag me @ceopwr so that we can spread this important message to even more entrepreneurs and online business owners!