Top SEO Tips for Small Business Owners with SEO Expert Lauren Taylar
In this post, I’m talking about my experience working with SEO expert Lauren Taylar. I’ve been so lucky to connect with someone who truly knows the ins and outs of SEO, and it’s had a huge impact on my business. And want to know the best thing? It can do the same for you! Keep reading to learn more about the importance of SEO and all the ways it impacts your business.
Lauren Taylar: SEO Expert
I want to share a bit about Lauren as an SEO expert. She specializes in brand design, Square Space and web design, and SEO strategy. She’s been doing this full time for two years, and before that it was her side hustle. She loves sharing what she’s learned with small business owners in a way that will actually make sense to them. While SEO can seem like an intimidating and confusing topic, it doesn’t HAVE to be that way. And she’s here to prove that to YOU!
The Benefits of Focusing on SEO
There are so many benefits associated with a focus on SEO that you may not be aware of. To really reap the benefits that Lauren shares, you’ll need to have a website or a blog – somewhere that your audience can go to that you own. This should be something outside of your social media platforms. While those are a great tool for engaging with customers and reaching more people, they don’t have full SEO the way a website or blog does.
Thus, a website or blog is a great way to get your content out there. SEO makes your content on a blog more evergreen. That means that it will attract more customers over time without you having to do a thing once it’s out there! How cool is that? The idea of attracting more people to your business without having to be on all the time is pretty awesome if you ask me.
So, showing up on places other than your social media platforms can help you gain traction making sales using a more passive method. It also is a great way for you to figure out how you can repurpose your social media content on your blog. We call that working SMARTER, not HARDER, ladies and gentlemen.
It’s also really simple to take a podcast episode and turn it into a blog post. Transcribe the content you have spoken, clean it up a bit, be strategic and thoughtful in the way you present it – and – just like that, you have content you can easily optimize to be found by potential customers over and over again (hint: CEO PWR can do all this work for you!).
Are People Still Reading Blogs?
All of this talk about blogs may have you wondering, are people even still reading blogs? I thought they were so 2010. Well, that’s something Lauren and I discussed.
Lauren explained that no matter what form of content you’re using – video, audio, or written – there will be people that prefer each one of those methods. You need to think about how people want to consume content and be inclusive of all types. It’s ALWAYS good to have your content in different forms so that you’re not inevitably alienating people who prefer one type over the other.
With that being said, blogging is definitely NOT a dead marketing strategy. In fact, it’s a really smart one! Turning show notes from a podcast episode into a blog post helps that site turn up in the first page of Google search results. Having simple show notes – which are thin content at usually only a few hundred words – are not likely to rank highly in a search. However, a full blog post that’s strategic and that is more than a transcription is much more likely to reach people and to be something that individuals engage with more.
LISTEN ON SPOTIFY | LISTEN ON APPLE PODCASTS | LISTEN ON GOOGLE PLAY
Common Blog Post Mistakes
Lauren shared some common blog post mistakes that she’s seen time and time again. The first is to not include headings and make your content look like one long essay. That’s not something that people WANT to read from an aesthetic standpoint, which makes headings so important.
Next, not having a call to action anywhere in a blog post is a huge mistake. You always want people to understand what the next step is after they read the post. It’s so important to have a call to action at the bottom of your post especially, giving people the next place to go to make a purchase or continue engaging with your business.
General SEO Website Tips
Lauren also shared some more tips on how to optimize your website for SEO. One that frequently goes uncaught is to optimize images correctly. It’s important to not have huge image files on your site, as they slow down site load time. Make sure to resize these to keep load time three seconds or less to avoid losing customers before they even have a chance to see all the great stuff your site has to offer!
Behind the Scenes of Lauren’s SEO Strategy
Lauren gave us a peek behind the curtain of her own SEO strategy, which is way cool and super useful. She always starts with keyword research, which is where she formulates the titles of her blog posts. This tells her what people are Googling, so she knows exactly what to write about.
From there, she writes her content without really thinking about the SEO behind it. She aims for her posts to have at least one thousand words. During the editing process, she goes in and adds the keywords again so that it occurs about four times per thousand words. When you’re doing this, read sentences aloud to ensure where you’re adding the keywords in sounds natural to the reader.
From there, she takes care of her formatting with headings and makes sure that the keywords are present in the URL. Then she writes her meta description and her post is ready to go!
Lauren recommends posting once every other week if not once a week. She explained that when you first start writing and posting and writing, it may seem heavy. At that point, it’s important to do it at least a couple times a month. But once you gain momentum, writing will come more naturally and you’ll nail down your process, so you’ll start doing it on a more regular basis.
While Lauren is an expert and this is like second nature for her, it can be the same for you once you gain an understanding of SEO the way that she teaches it to small business owners.
Keyword Strategy Tips
Understanding keywords and your strategy around them is a bit tricky at first. Lauren shared that you don’t really want to write for the same keywords more than once. However, you can use the same “root” of the keywords you’ve already written about while adding a different tail onto them to differentiate them.
It’s not uncommon for people to worry about what they’ll do when they run out of ideas of what to write about. While Lauren noted that there’s so much more to write about than people think, she also shared the clever idea of building an “ultimate post” with three to four thousand words about a topic. From there, you can link out to shorter, related blog posts. Not only does this help you generate micro topic ideas, but it also helps with SEO because you’re adding internal links to your site.
Learning SEO the Right Way: The Bottom Line
There are so many SEO teaching programs out there, but it’s so important to learn this the right way for your business. Learning how to write both for great SEO and in a way that appeals to readers, how to make your site authoritative, and how to gain quality backlinks are just some of the things that can make a world of difference for your business. They’re also just some of the things that Lauren can teach you!
I hope this post has inspired you to enlist in Lauren’s help for your site’s SEO or to learn more about the topic. She’s truly an amazing resources that can impact your business in amazing ways.
And don’t forget to sign up today for the SEO Strategy webinar to learn how to Monetize Your Website into a client-generating machine!
This was a very entertaining and easy-to-read article. You kept it relevant and provided an easy read. Thanks for the insight!
You are so welcome! Thank you for reading 🙂
Thanks for sharing this useful information! Hope that you will continue with the kind of stuff you are doing.
I am so glad that it was useful Abby! If you have anything specific you want to learn please don’t hesitate to let us know 🙂