Episode 022 - SEO for Authors with Liz Jostes
April 14, 2020
Liz Jostes of Eli Rose Social Media describes the data that drives search engine optimization, identifies outdated approaches to avoid, and provides tactics that authors can apply to ensure readers can find you and your books online.
Liz Jostes’ corporate career in marketing was centered around consumer behavior and buying habits, and what causes a customer to make the buying decisions they do. |
After graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in Marketing, Liz worked as a project manager and analyst for marketing firms. In 2008, she started in online marketing, focusing on blogging, managing a WordPress website, SEO, and social media and in 2011 founded Eli | Rose Social Media. Liz is a frequent speaker at social media and social technology conferences, chambers of commerce, local meetups, professional organizations, and at the University of Memphis.
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Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Liz Jostes. Liz, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Liz: I am great. Thanks for having me, Matty.
[00:00:08] Matty: It is my pleasure. To give a little background on Liz for our listeners, Liz Jostes’s corporate career in marketing was centered around consumer behavior and buying habits and what causes a customer to make the buying decisions they do. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in marketing, Liz worked as a project manager and analyst for marketing firms. In 2008 she started in online marketing, focusing on blogging, managing a WordPress website, SEO, and social media. In 2011 she founded Eli Rose Social Media. Liz is a frequent speaker at social media and social technology conferences, chambers of commerce, local meetups, professional organizations, and at the University of Memphis.
[00:00:50] And our topic today is going to be SEO for authors. So, Liz, can you just give a little background on what SEO is and why it's important in today's environment?
[00:01:02] Liz: Sure. There's a lot of people, regardless of whether they're authors or work in other industries, clients of mine, who feel that SEO is very scary. So hopefully on top of giving you guys some foundations about SEO and how that applies to your specific case, you also feel like it's not so scary and we demystify things a little bit, and you feel confident to go ahead and try to implement some SEO for your website.
[00:01:29] SEO stands for search engine optimization and usually people think about SEO and they think about their website or their blog. So we're going to assume that any of the authors who are listening in at least have a website or a blog as some sort of foundation to their online presence. Because in general, when you're doing business online, having that website in your name is the online version of a brick and mortar store.
[00:00:06] Liz: I am great. Thanks for having me, Matty.
[00:00:08] Matty: It is my pleasure. To give a little background on Liz for our listeners, Liz Jostes’s corporate career in marketing was centered around consumer behavior and buying habits and what causes a customer to make the buying decisions they do. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in marketing, Liz worked as a project manager and analyst for marketing firms. In 2008 she started in online marketing, focusing on blogging, managing a WordPress website, SEO, and social media. In 2011 she founded Eli Rose Social Media. Liz is a frequent speaker at social media and social technology conferences, chambers of commerce, local meetups, professional organizations, and at the University of Memphis.
[00:00:50] And our topic today is going to be SEO for authors. So, Liz, can you just give a little background on what SEO is and why it's important in today's environment?
[00:01:02] Liz: Sure. There's a lot of people, regardless of whether they're authors or work in other industries, clients of mine, who feel that SEO is very scary. So hopefully on top of giving you guys some foundations about SEO and how that applies to your specific case, you also feel like it's not so scary and we demystify things a little bit, and you feel confident to go ahead and try to implement some SEO for your website.
[00:01:29] SEO stands for search engine optimization and usually people think about SEO and they think about their website or their blog. So we're going to assume that any of the authors who are listening in at least have a website or a blog as some sort of foundation to their online presence. Because in general, when you're doing business online, having that website in your name is the online version of a brick and mortar store.
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[00:01:56] So that is central to your online business, your online presence. But SEO also can apply to other profiles that aren't on your website. for example, any kind of social media bio you have, whether it's a Facebook profile or business page, Twitter account,
[00:02:13] You who might have author profiles on different book specific sites like Goodreads. Every kind of online profile has some bio section or a little about section. And those areas are also key to SEO because it could be specific platform search. So if someone's looking up authors who write a certain way, the genre of books on Facebook, that bio section is how that would be found in that search. But also Google, and when I say Google, know that I also mean Bing and Yahoo and all those search engines, it's just that Google is like 80% of the search, so we tend to default and say Google, but just know there's good search practices regardless of which specific engine you are using.
[00:03:00] Those social bio sections are what is favored in Google search results. So if someone is looking for you by name, or perhaps looking up certain titles of books that you have, if I'm looking up Matty's name, in addition to seeing her website, I would be seeing those social media profiles ideally, if you've optimized them well. just know that any sort of good practices when we talk about SEO and keyword usage, you want to make sure you extrapolate all those from not just your website and incorporate those good practices in those other bio areas of any other kind of online profile.
[00:03:41] Search engine optimization is essentially a way to match search engine queries to the various website pages and blog post or product pages on the internet. The way that I like to describe SEO when I'm training people is it's like the game show Family Feud, and you're trying to guess what the survey says.
[00:04:05] That's really what's you're going for when you are trying to figure out what keyword phrases you want to be using for any given website page or blog posts that you're trying to optimize for. Because when someone sits down to Google and they type something into that search, they have a phrase that they're entering and they're trying to get results that would match that phrase, that gives them the information that they're looking for.
[00:04:32] So if you think of anything that you would Google. Once all those search results show up, when you're looking at them on Google, that large top line that's blue is your title tag. The title tag is something you actually can add to your website pages or your blog posts from the administrator view of your website. and then that gray text that's smaller and underneath and a few lines long, that's your meta-description and your meta-description is also something that you add in on that backside of those website pages or those blog posts.
[00:05:08] So when you're implementing SEO on your website and you're actually putting in those custom title tags and those meta descriptions on your various website pages, that's that missing piece that connects your website pages with that search query that someone just sat down and typed into Google.
[00:05:26] So that's the information that you need to input on your website pages or your blog posts to help them be found in search. as you start to understand this more and you start to do more research,
[00:05:37] you start to look at those search results differently. You can realize if you're looking up, say, big authors in your genre, when you're seeing that big blue line and that smaller gray text, you know that's the search phrase that they are using and that's the meta-description that they are using on their site.
[00:05:56] Moz has a free toolbar, and you can basically peek in on the SEO of any website page on the internet so you can see what other people have or don't have for their title tags and meta-description. It's another great way to do research is peek in on what your competitors are doing. That can also help you get some ideas.
[00:06:21] Liz: for authors specifically, there's two elements to that title tag because you all are known by your names.
[00:06:30] People who already know you or they already know your business name, they're not the people that you're worried about on SEO. SEO is helping people who don't know you exist find you by subject matter or topic searches.
[00:06:45] Of course if people want to find out what Matty's latest book is, they might type in what they know of the title plus Matty's name. Obviously that's still important because you guys are personally branding yourselves with your name, but there's that separate kind of search where, if people are looking for a certain genre or books about a certain kind of thing, but they don't know that you write those books, there's those subject matter searches that you also want to incorporate.
[00:07:15] So in my world, it could be, "SEO training for small businesses" as opposed to just trying to optimize for my business name. you all have two layers to that. It's like a shoe store might say they sell shoes for men, women, and kids. But if you are Nike, everybody knows Nike, so they're going to type "Nike shoes." If you're J K Rowling, people are typing "J K Rowling" into the search. But for smaller authors, you want to incorporate your name, but you've got to make sure you're also focusing on those subject matter type searches.
[00:07:50] For anyone who wants to conduct their own Google research, one way to do it is as you type what you think you want to optimize for, whatever that main keyword phrase is for that page or that blog post, you'll notice that as you start typing, Google will auto suggest options. So those are also a good way to get additional ideas of ways to optimize.
[00:08:15] Matty: It's interesting because if I type in "suspense n" then I not only get "suspense novels," but also "suspense Netflix movies."
[00:08:23] Liz: Right now, I have suspense novels written and it says, "suspense novels 2019," "suspense novels 2020," "suspense novels for middle school," "suspense novels for book clubs," "suspense novels by black authors," "suspense novels for young adults." Those are all different kinds of phrases that may or may not apply to you, but if Google is auto suggesting, that means that these are commonly used phrases.
[00:08:47] Now you have to make sure that whatever phrase you're trying to optimize for corresponds with whatever it is that's the text that's on that page. You don't want to pick something that may be super popular, but then it doesn't really relate to whatever the content is of that page. When you're choosing your keyword phrases, you're not going to want to simply pick "suspense novels." It's just too broad. When you're searching for possible key word phrases like we're doing now, you can see whenever you type something into Google, they'll give you a count of search results. It might be like, "Wow, this is the most popular search phrase. I should use this."
[00:09:26] But the balance to that is the more popular the phrase, the harder it is for you to rank for that phrase. So you don't want to have all these super big, huge, billion research result phrases that you put on the pages of your website. You do want to have some more specific phrases too, because it's easier to stand out from the crowd, so to speak, when you're not trying to compete with 70 bajillion other people.
[00:09:54] Another thing to look at, if you scroll all the way down at the bottom of that search engine result page, there's usually some other suggested searches too. that's another place to look for ideas. Most people search in long phrases, almost sentences. that is called long tail keywords.
[00:10:12]"Suspense novels" is just two words. though "suspense novels for, book clubs," that's a much more specific phrase and a longer phrase. You want to do those longer tail keyword phrases for any SEO that you're doing.
[00:10:26] Every page on your site or every blog post, you want to have something unique, so you don't want to have the same title tag that's copied and pasted across multiple pages of your site. Google doesn't like it either. Google wants every page's SEO to be unique, so keep that in mind too. If you have some phrases you feel like you want to use, you do have to plan that to make sure you're using them on the best pages and like I said, they're all unique.
[00:10:57] Matty: I want to resurrect some information I have from the retail industry from years ago about SEO: that you can't accommodate keywords or search phrases on a webpage by, for example, putting them in white text on a white background. That it has to be text that is visible to an actual human reader.
[00:11:17] Liz: Yes. Another outdated SEO tactic used to be that you would put exact match keyword phrases over and over and over throughout the website page with the blog post, and that just became very robotic. Google says it wants you to write for humans, not for robots, so it's actually good for the average person because it makes SEO easier to understand. if someone said, "Hey, what is this book about?" you're going to give the same kind of information each time you give that answer, but it's not like you have this word for word memorized statement. Google understands and wants you to use those conversational variations and it is more savvy when it reads the copy on your website pages or your blog posts. I think it makes it feel less daunting because you can feel as long as you're being appropriately descriptive to explain about your book or whatever the concept is you're talking about in your blog post, you're doing a good job with your keyword usage. Don't feel like you have to have that one phrase that's repeated endlessly and very robotically throughout the page. Google doesn't want you to just have random phrases at the bottom of a page. There are other and better and more effective ways to incorporate your keyword phrase.
[00:12:40] when you're working on those title tags and the meta descriptions, your title tag maxes out at like 60 to 65-ish characters.
[00:12:49] Now your meta-description for a long, long time maxed out at 150 characters. And your meta description is always written in sentence form. almost all of the website platforms, still have some sort of notation like, 150 characters max.
[00:13:08] But over a year ago, Google started allowing for a longer meta-description. So right now, there isn't a maximum character count on meta descriptions, and you'll notice if you go through some of those search engine results, you might see some that have just two lines and you'll see other meta descriptions that are four lines.
[00:13:30] Google can ultimately decide to show whatever information from your website pages it wants to show. It might just take, say, the middle two sentences out of your meta-description if it feels like that's what's best to match that searcher's query.
[00:13:45] Matty: I did have a question about the editing of this data. I don't want to have to walk through, this is what you do in WordPress, this is what you do, in Weebly, this is what you do in Wix. But just generically, if people are maintaining their own website, where should they be looking for the fields where they would be inputting this data?
[00:14:04] Liz: When you edit a website page or a blog post, there will be fields in that edit view. If you're composing a new page or you're editing a page, it's normally on that edit page view or edit blog post view itself. it might be at the bottom; they might have to expand a little section to see. they'll be labeled either "SEO title" or "title tag," and "SEO description" or "meta-description." on WordPress and others, it's usually below the content. But it's almost always in that edit page view itself, because really you have to, put SEO on each individual page, so you're not going to have it somewhere else, you need to have it where that page is.
[00:14:49] Matty: And if someone investigates the program they're using and they find that SEO capability costs more, how do they make the decision about whether it's worth it to invest the money, maybe in an upgrade, versus just making sure that the appropriate terminology appears in the text of their webpage.
[00:15:08] Liz: Usually when I have even seen the upgrade costs, it might be five or $6 a month. So it shouldn't be a huge amount of money to have that added capability if you don't have it already. I mean, ultimately you are going to be limited because you're missing out on having the title tag and the meta-description.
[00:15:29] Of course, Google will index every page on the internet. if you've been around for a long time and your web pages have existed for a long time, you might have an advantage because it's already crawled and indexed your website pages for 10 years.
[00:15:44] But if you have images that you're going to put on your website page or your blog posts, those images by default don't have any value to those Google crawlers. You can actually assign a word value that the website visitor can't see. But it's behind the scenes again, so you can attach an alt tag to that image. For that alt tag, you would really be picking that same keyword phrase that you were optimizing that website page for. It gives you another chance to have that keyword phrase on your page.
[00:16:17] you've probably seen pages or blog posts that you use the larger heading style texts. So that's always a good place to put that keyword phrase you want to optimize for. I mean, ultimately, if you're going to compare a site that's the same number of pages and the same age as a site that has SEO and one doesn't, and the other one does your, you're not going to really be able to beat out the one that has those SEO capabilities.
[00:16:44] consider your long-term goals for your websites. if you have a website but it's old and outdated, you feel like the content isn't good, or maybe it's just a single page website, it's probably not going to do you a lot of good, even if that one page is optimized.
[00:17:04] Because really when you optimize your site from the backend, you need to make sure you have really good content on the pages too. If your site just isn't strong to begin with, then if you do have SEO capabilities or you don't have SEO capabilities, it's probably not going to help you much, either way.
[00:17:23] that's brings us to another point. You don't want to have a hundred pages on your website just for the sake of having a hundred pages to try to optimize for a whole bunch of different phrases. But you don't want to just have a couple pages either because each page that you publish on your website is a new chance to rank on a new keyword phrase.
[00:17:44] Each new link that's published is like casting a new line into the sea of Google. And the more lines you cast, the more fish you catch. It's good to have more pages or to logically break out your content, but you don't want to have a whole bunch of pages where you have two lines of texts or three lines of text because those aren't strong pages content-wise. So Google would not be choosing to serve up that page to answer somebody's question, because Google will feel that that searcher's really not going to get the answer they're looking for because this page is really light as far as contents goes.
[00:18:24] maybe a more applicable example would be if you are an author and you have 10 books, if you just have a single book page that has all your 10 books, and that's the only kind of link that you have on your website for those different books, it's going to be really hard to optimize for 10 different books on one page because you have 60 characters and your title tag. you could still have the main book page where say you link up your 10 books and each book has its own page about it on your website. that would be a way to do it. You still have that sort of hub page that's attached to your books button in your navigation, but you still are making sure each book has its own presence on your website. If you have 10 books, but they're broken up into, say, three different series, maybe you would have a page for each series.
[00:19:22] So that would give you a chance to optimize your series book pages for the name of your series. that's a little bit more specific than simply your overall genre of books on your single book page.
[00:19:36] You don't want to have a ton of pages, but you don't want to have too few pages either because you really miss out on those ranking capabilities.
[00:19:45] Liz: And so everyone knows, if you're Googling author competitors or big names in your author spaces, there's a way to hide your private results because Google tries to personalize your search results. So if you're constantly like, "who is this guy?"--like your arch-nemesis-- "Where is it ranking?" Google is going to show him up higher because you always are looking for him or visiting his website.
[00:20:11] Or if you are constantly Googling yourself, it can artificially inflate some of your pages too. if you're looking at the search results, in Chrome at least, there is a Settings tab underneath that search bar and you can see there's some different options there. there's a Hide Private Results option. You can toggle to that and then you might notice that the order of some of those things in those search results changes.
[00:20:37] This is something that I'll encourage you to, Matty, get your SSL. Everybody should have their SSL, even if you're not selling, actually transacting through your website. It used to just be that the SSLs were required for businesses that were eCommerce business but over a year ago, Google said it wants everybody to have their SSL and it is a ranking factor.
[00:21:01] For people who actually sell through their site, there's actually a higher-level SSL. But you'll notice if you go to websites that don't have it, it actually shows "Not Secure" in your browser search bar versus the Google search bar. when you get your SSL, it'll put the little lock icon there and it'll say "Secure" next to it. So it's just a small ranking factor.
[00:21:24] Matty: I had a question about cost benefits. This takes a certain amount of time, a certain amount of research. People maybe have to learn how to access the fields that they need to put this information into. They would then have to take the time to put it in. are there any stats that an author can look at after they've gone through a certain amount of that effort to see if they're getting any payback as a result of the time they've invested in that.
[00:21:47] Liz: I would definitely hope everybody has something like Google Analytics installed on their site or some kind of analytics program for their website, cause that just gives you all kinds of information whether or not we're talking about SEO.
[00:21:59] If you have it installed you would be able to notice differences in total page views. If you've had a chance to implement SEO on some pages but not others, you'd be able to see if those pages where you implemented the SEO have increased in those organic search results.
[00:22:17] Also, if you create what's called your Search Console, it's also a free Google tool. You sign up and then you can just start getting information. Your Google Search Console will connect with your Google Analytics, but you can just sign into it on its own. It will tell you what phrases caused any page on your site to show up in search. There's an impressions column and then they'll show you how many clicks you got from search. This is helpful because you can see what phrases people are using that are pulling up your pages or your blog posts on your site, and how many are then clicking through. If you see 10,000 impressions but two clicks, you can also feel like, maybe I need to work on this because getting to page one of search results is one thing, but it doesn't really matter if you're not getting the click through.
[00:23:14] How people describe it is that the title tag gets you ranked and the meta-description gets the clicks. You have to make sure that both are strong to get those people over to your site.
So the cost benefit thing, I would say goes back to that data and look at your baseline without SEO and then look at how that changes based on your analytics in the future to figure out how it's helping you and where it's helping you. And know too that, if you start working on SEO today, it's not like tomorrow, it's suddenly going to change. Give it some time.
[00:23:50] Usually if clients want to have some kind of SEO monitoring, we don't do it any more frequently than three months. Of course, if you are in a not so crowded space, you might see the benefits of that SEO very, very quickly. I feel like most authors, are selling at least countrywide, if not international, so it's going to take longer. Depending how much you want to geek out about some of this data, you can even set up some simple spreadsheets for your main pages on your websites, what kind of traffic they get today based on at Google Analytics, and then look in a month or look in three months and then keep track of it that way. There's a lot you can do, but you need to have some kind of analytics tracking on your site to really be able to tell outside of just having more book sales or something like that. That will give you very specific data if you do something like a Google analytics.
[00:24:46] Matty: The thing I like about analytics is that it would help people identify where users are using Google in a way that's different than the way they themselves use it. Because I think it's very easy to just extrapolate on whatever you do is what everybody else does. I have learned other people are different than I am, I hardly ever use my phone to do anything other than listen to podcasts and make occasional phone calls. And when you see the stats about how many people are using their phone as their primary method of interacting with the internet, it makes you realize that I think the other important thing about SEO is the responsive design of a website, so that the website is consumable by both desktop and mobile access.
[00:25:29] Liz: And Google switched to mobile first indexing also. It is absolutely a factor as far as SEO goes. The mobile responsiveness is definitely an important quality.
[00:25:39] Matty: Well, I feel certain that we could have a day-long tutorial on SEO, but I think you've given people stuff to think about. I know I'm taking away a couple of action items from this. If you could send me a couple of resources that people can go to to get more information that I can include as links in the podcast, I think that that would be really helpful--let people do a little further investigation on their own. And of course, we want to let people know where they can find more about you and Eli Rose Social Media online.
[00:26:12] Liz: Sure. It's elirose.com. I also have a blog where I write all kinds of how-to articles and explanation-type articles, whether they're about SEO or Facebook ads or social media or planning your content.
[00:26:30] Matty: Well, thank you so much, Liz. This has been so helpful.
[00:26:33] Liz: Thanks for having me. Definitely fun
[00:02:13] You who might have author profiles on different book specific sites like Goodreads. Every kind of online profile has some bio section or a little about section. And those areas are also key to SEO because it could be specific platform search. So if someone's looking up authors who write a certain way, the genre of books on Facebook, that bio section is how that would be found in that search. But also Google, and when I say Google, know that I also mean Bing and Yahoo and all those search engines, it's just that Google is like 80% of the search, so we tend to default and say Google, but just know there's good search practices regardless of which specific engine you are using.
[00:03:00] Those social bio sections are what is favored in Google search results. So if someone is looking for you by name, or perhaps looking up certain titles of books that you have, if I'm looking up Matty's name, in addition to seeing her website, I would be seeing those social media profiles ideally, if you've optimized them well. just know that any sort of good practices when we talk about SEO and keyword usage, you want to make sure you extrapolate all those from not just your website and incorporate those good practices in those other bio areas of any other kind of online profile.
[00:03:41] Search engine optimization is essentially a way to match search engine queries to the various website pages and blog post or product pages on the internet. The way that I like to describe SEO when I'm training people is it's like the game show Family Feud, and you're trying to guess what the survey says.
[00:04:05] That's really what's you're going for when you are trying to figure out what keyword phrases you want to be using for any given website page or blog posts that you're trying to optimize for. Because when someone sits down to Google and they type something into that search, they have a phrase that they're entering and they're trying to get results that would match that phrase, that gives them the information that they're looking for.
[00:04:32] So if you think of anything that you would Google. Once all those search results show up, when you're looking at them on Google, that large top line that's blue is your title tag. The title tag is something you actually can add to your website pages or your blog posts from the administrator view of your website. and then that gray text that's smaller and underneath and a few lines long, that's your meta-description and your meta-description is also something that you add in on that backside of those website pages or those blog posts.
[00:05:08] So when you're implementing SEO on your website and you're actually putting in those custom title tags and those meta descriptions on your various website pages, that's that missing piece that connects your website pages with that search query that someone just sat down and typed into Google.
[00:05:26] So that's the information that you need to input on your website pages or your blog posts to help them be found in search. as you start to understand this more and you start to do more research,
[00:05:37] you start to look at those search results differently. You can realize if you're looking up, say, big authors in your genre, when you're seeing that big blue line and that smaller gray text, you know that's the search phrase that they are using and that's the meta-description that they are using on their site.
[00:05:56] Moz has a free toolbar, and you can basically peek in on the SEO of any website page on the internet so you can see what other people have or don't have for their title tags and meta-description. It's another great way to do research is peek in on what your competitors are doing. That can also help you get some ideas.
[00:06:21] Liz: for authors specifically, there's two elements to that title tag because you all are known by your names.
[00:06:30] People who already know you or they already know your business name, they're not the people that you're worried about on SEO. SEO is helping people who don't know you exist find you by subject matter or topic searches.
[00:06:45] Of course if people want to find out what Matty's latest book is, they might type in what they know of the title plus Matty's name. Obviously that's still important because you guys are personally branding yourselves with your name, but there's that separate kind of search where, if people are looking for a certain genre or books about a certain kind of thing, but they don't know that you write those books, there's those subject matter searches that you also want to incorporate.
[00:07:15] So in my world, it could be, "SEO training for small businesses" as opposed to just trying to optimize for my business name. you all have two layers to that. It's like a shoe store might say they sell shoes for men, women, and kids. But if you are Nike, everybody knows Nike, so they're going to type "Nike shoes." If you're J K Rowling, people are typing "J K Rowling" into the search. But for smaller authors, you want to incorporate your name, but you've got to make sure you're also focusing on those subject matter type searches.
[00:07:50] For anyone who wants to conduct their own Google research, one way to do it is as you type what you think you want to optimize for, whatever that main keyword phrase is for that page or that blog post, you'll notice that as you start typing, Google will auto suggest options. So those are also a good way to get additional ideas of ways to optimize.
[00:08:15] Matty: It's interesting because if I type in "suspense n" then I not only get "suspense novels," but also "suspense Netflix movies."
[00:08:23] Liz: Right now, I have suspense novels written and it says, "suspense novels 2019," "suspense novels 2020," "suspense novels for middle school," "suspense novels for book clubs," "suspense novels by black authors," "suspense novels for young adults." Those are all different kinds of phrases that may or may not apply to you, but if Google is auto suggesting, that means that these are commonly used phrases.
[00:08:47] Now you have to make sure that whatever phrase you're trying to optimize for corresponds with whatever it is that's the text that's on that page. You don't want to pick something that may be super popular, but then it doesn't really relate to whatever the content is of that page. When you're choosing your keyword phrases, you're not going to want to simply pick "suspense novels." It's just too broad. When you're searching for possible key word phrases like we're doing now, you can see whenever you type something into Google, they'll give you a count of search results. It might be like, "Wow, this is the most popular search phrase. I should use this."
[00:09:26] But the balance to that is the more popular the phrase, the harder it is for you to rank for that phrase. So you don't want to have all these super big, huge, billion research result phrases that you put on the pages of your website. You do want to have some more specific phrases too, because it's easier to stand out from the crowd, so to speak, when you're not trying to compete with 70 bajillion other people.
[00:09:54] Another thing to look at, if you scroll all the way down at the bottom of that search engine result page, there's usually some other suggested searches too. that's another place to look for ideas. Most people search in long phrases, almost sentences. that is called long tail keywords.
[00:10:12]"Suspense novels" is just two words. though "suspense novels for, book clubs," that's a much more specific phrase and a longer phrase. You want to do those longer tail keyword phrases for any SEO that you're doing.
[00:10:26] Every page on your site or every blog post, you want to have something unique, so you don't want to have the same title tag that's copied and pasted across multiple pages of your site. Google doesn't like it either. Google wants every page's SEO to be unique, so keep that in mind too. If you have some phrases you feel like you want to use, you do have to plan that to make sure you're using them on the best pages and like I said, they're all unique.
[00:10:57] Matty: I want to resurrect some information I have from the retail industry from years ago about SEO: that you can't accommodate keywords or search phrases on a webpage by, for example, putting them in white text on a white background. That it has to be text that is visible to an actual human reader.
[00:11:17] Liz: Yes. Another outdated SEO tactic used to be that you would put exact match keyword phrases over and over and over throughout the website page with the blog post, and that just became very robotic. Google says it wants you to write for humans, not for robots, so it's actually good for the average person because it makes SEO easier to understand. if someone said, "Hey, what is this book about?" you're going to give the same kind of information each time you give that answer, but it's not like you have this word for word memorized statement. Google understands and wants you to use those conversational variations and it is more savvy when it reads the copy on your website pages or your blog posts. I think it makes it feel less daunting because you can feel as long as you're being appropriately descriptive to explain about your book or whatever the concept is you're talking about in your blog post, you're doing a good job with your keyword usage. Don't feel like you have to have that one phrase that's repeated endlessly and very robotically throughout the page. Google doesn't want you to just have random phrases at the bottom of a page. There are other and better and more effective ways to incorporate your keyword phrase.
[00:12:40] when you're working on those title tags and the meta descriptions, your title tag maxes out at like 60 to 65-ish characters.
[00:12:49] Now your meta-description for a long, long time maxed out at 150 characters. And your meta description is always written in sentence form. almost all of the website platforms, still have some sort of notation like, 150 characters max.
[00:13:08] But over a year ago, Google started allowing for a longer meta-description. So right now, there isn't a maximum character count on meta descriptions, and you'll notice if you go through some of those search engine results, you might see some that have just two lines and you'll see other meta descriptions that are four lines.
[00:13:30] Google can ultimately decide to show whatever information from your website pages it wants to show. It might just take, say, the middle two sentences out of your meta-description if it feels like that's what's best to match that searcher's query.
[00:13:45] Matty: I did have a question about the editing of this data. I don't want to have to walk through, this is what you do in WordPress, this is what you do, in Weebly, this is what you do in Wix. But just generically, if people are maintaining their own website, where should they be looking for the fields where they would be inputting this data?
[00:14:04] Liz: When you edit a website page or a blog post, there will be fields in that edit view. If you're composing a new page or you're editing a page, it's normally on that edit page view or edit blog post view itself. it might be at the bottom; they might have to expand a little section to see. they'll be labeled either "SEO title" or "title tag," and "SEO description" or "meta-description." on WordPress and others, it's usually below the content. But it's almost always in that edit page view itself, because really you have to, put SEO on each individual page, so you're not going to have it somewhere else, you need to have it where that page is.
[00:14:49] Matty: And if someone investigates the program they're using and they find that SEO capability costs more, how do they make the decision about whether it's worth it to invest the money, maybe in an upgrade, versus just making sure that the appropriate terminology appears in the text of their webpage.
[00:15:08] Liz: Usually when I have even seen the upgrade costs, it might be five or $6 a month. So it shouldn't be a huge amount of money to have that added capability if you don't have it already. I mean, ultimately you are going to be limited because you're missing out on having the title tag and the meta-description.
[00:15:29] Of course, Google will index every page on the internet. if you've been around for a long time and your web pages have existed for a long time, you might have an advantage because it's already crawled and indexed your website pages for 10 years.
[00:15:44] But if you have images that you're going to put on your website page or your blog posts, those images by default don't have any value to those Google crawlers. You can actually assign a word value that the website visitor can't see. But it's behind the scenes again, so you can attach an alt tag to that image. For that alt tag, you would really be picking that same keyword phrase that you were optimizing that website page for. It gives you another chance to have that keyword phrase on your page.
[00:16:17] you've probably seen pages or blog posts that you use the larger heading style texts. So that's always a good place to put that keyword phrase you want to optimize for. I mean, ultimately, if you're going to compare a site that's the same number of pages and the same age as a site that has SEO and one doesn't, and the other one does your, you're not going to really be able to beat out the one that has those SEO capabilities.
[00:16:44] consider your long-term goals for your websites. if you have a website but it's old and outdated, you feel like the content isn't good, or maybe it's just a single page website, it's probably not going to do you a lot of good, even if that one page is optimized.
[00:17:04] Because really when you optimize your site from the backend, you need to make sure you have really good content on the pages too. If your site just isn't strong to begin with, then if you do have SEO capabilities or you don't have SEO capabilities, it's probably not going to help you much, either way.
[00:17:23] that's brings us to another point. You don't want to have a hundred pages on your website just for the sake of having a hundred pages to try to optimize for a whole bunch of different phrases. But you don't want to just have a couple pages either because each page that you publish on your website is a new chance to rank on a new keyword phrase.
[00:17:44] Each new link that's published is like casting a new line into the sea of Google. And the more lines you cast, the more fish you catch. It's good to have more pages or to logically break out your content, but you don't want to have a whole bunch of pages where you have two lines of texts or three lines of text because those aren't strong pages content-wise. So Google would not be choosing to serve up that page to answer somebody's question, because Google will feel that that searcher's really not going to get the answer they're looking for because this page is really light as far as contents goes.
[00:18:24] maybe a more applicable example would be if you are an author and you have 10 books, if you just have a single book page that has all your 10 books, and that's the only kind of link that you have on your website for those different books, it's going to be really hard to optimize for 10 different books on one page because you have 60 characters and your title tag. you could still have the main book page where say you link up your 10 books and each book has its own page about it on your website. that would be a way to do it. You still have that sort of hub page that's attached to your books button in your navigation, but you still are making sure each book has its own presence on your website. If you have 10 books, but they're broken up into, say, three different series, maybe you would have a page for each series.
[00:19:22] So that would give you a chance to optimize your series book pages for the name of your series. that's a little bit more specific than simply your overall genre of books on your single book page.
[00:19:36] You don't want to have a ton of pages, but you don't want to have too few pages either because you really miss out on those ranking capabilities.
[00:19:45] Liz: And so everyone knows, if you're Googling author competitors or big names in your author spaces, there's a way to hide your private results because Google tries to personalize your search results. So if you're constantly like, "who is this guy?"--like your arch-nemesis-- "Where is it ranking?" Google is going to show him up higher because you always are looking for him or visiting his website.
[00:20:11] Or if you are constantly Googling yourself, it can artificially inflate some of your pages too. if you're looking at the search results, in Chrome at least, there is a Settings tab underneath that search bar and you can see there's some different options there. there's a Hide Private Results option. You can toggle to that and then you might notice that the order of some of those things in those search results changes.
[00:20:37] This is something that I'll encourage you to, Matty, get your SSL. Everybody should have their SSL, even if you're not selling, actually transacting through your website. It used to just be that the SSLs were required for businesses that were eCommerce business but over a year ago, Google said it wants everybody to have their SSL and it is a ranking factor.
[00:21:01] For people who actually sell through their site, there's actually a higher-level SSL. But you'll notice if you go to websites that don't have it, it actually shows "Not Secure" in your browser search bar versus the Google search bar. when you get your SSL, it'll put the little lock icon there and it'll say "Secure" next to it. So it's just a small ranking factor.
[00:21:24] Matty: I had a question about cost benefits. This takes a certain amount of time, a certain amount of research. People maybe have to learn how to access the fields that they need to put this information into. They would then have to take the time to put it in. are there any stats that an author can look at after they've gone through a certain amount of that effort to see if they're getting any payback as a result of the time they've invested in that.
[00:21:47] Liz: I would definitely hope everybody has something like Google Analytics installed on their site or some kind of analytics program for their website, cause that just gives you all kinds of information whether or not we're talking about SEO.
[00:21:59] If you have it installed you would be able to notice differences in total page views. If you've had a chance to implement SEO on some pages but not others, you'd be able to see if those pages where you implemented the SEO have increased in those organic search results.
[00:22:17] Also, if you create what's called your Search Console, it's also a free Google tool. You sign up and then you can just start getting information. Your Google Search Console will connect with your Google Analytics, but you can just sign into it on its own. It will tell you what phrases caused any page on your site to show up in search. There's an impressions column and then they'll show you how many clicks you got from search. This is helpful because you can see what phrases people are using that are pulling up your pages or your blog posts on your site, and how many are then clicking through. If you see 10,000 impressions but two clicks, you can also feel like, maybe I need to work on this because getting to page one of search results is one thing, but it doesn't really matter if you're not getting the click through.
[00:23:14] How people describe it is that the title tag gets you ranked and the meta-description gets the clicks. You have to make sure that both are strong to get those people over to your site.
So the cost benefit thing, I would say goes back to that data and look at your baseline without SEO and then look at how that changes based on your analytics in the future to figure out how it's helping you and where it's helping you. And know too that, if you start working on SEO today, it's not like tomorrow, it's suddenly going to change. Give it some time.
[00:23:50] Usually if clients want to have some kind of SEO monitoring, we don't do it any more frequently than three months. Of course, if you are in a not so crowded space, you might see the benefits of that SEO very, very quickly. I feel like most authors, are selling at least countrywide, if not international, so it's going to take longer. Depending how much you want to geek out about some of this data, you can even set up some simple spreadsheets for your main pages on your websites, what kind of traffic they get today based on at Google Analytics, and then look in a month or look in three months and then keep track of it that way. There's a lot you can do, but you need to have some kind of analytics tracking on your site to really be able to tell outside of just having more book sales or something like that. That will give you very specific data if you do something like a Google analytics.
[00:24:46] Matty: The thing I like about analytics is that it would help people identify where users are using Google in a way that's different than the way they themselves use it. Because I think it's very easy to just extrapolate on whatever you do is what everybody else does. I have learned other people are different than I am, I hardly ever use my phone to do anything other than listen to podcasts and make occasional phone calls. And when you see the stats about how many people are using their phone as their primary method of interacting with the internet, it makes you realize that I think the other important thing about SEO is the responsive design of a website, so that the website is consumable by both desktop and mobile access.
[00:25:29] Liz: And Google switched to mobile first indexing also. It is absolutely a factor as far as SEO goes. The mobile responsiveness is definitely an important quality.
[00:25:39] Matty: Well, I feel certain that we could have a day-long tutorial on SEO, but I think you've given people stuff to think about. I know I'm taking away a couple of action items from this. If you could send me a couple of resources that people can go to to get more information that I can include as links in the podcast, I think that that would be really helpful--let people do a little further investigation on their own. And of course, we want to let people know where they can find more about you and Eli Rose Social Media online.
[00:26:12] Liz: Sure. It's elirose.com. I also have a blog where I write all kinds of how-to articles and explanation-type articles, whether they're about SEO or Facebook ads or social media or planning your content.
[00:26:30] Matty: Well, thank you so much, Liz. This has been so helpful.
[00:26:33] Liz: Thanks for having me. Definitely fun
Links
To install the MozBar in your browser, go to https://moz.com/products/pro/seo-toolbar. Once installed, when you click to activate it, you'll be able to view the title tag, meta description, ALT tags, and other SEO elements on any page on the internet.
Here are links to SEO blog posts on Liz's site:
https://www.elirose.com/2020/02/small-business-seo-fact-vs-fiction-keyword/
https://www.elirose.com/2019/09/seo-keyword-research-searcher-intent/
https://www.elirose.com/2017/08/small-business-seo-do-dont-help/
Here are links to SEO blog posts on Liz's site:
https://www.elirose.com/2020/02/small-business-seo-fact-vs-fiction-keyword/
https://www.elirose.com/2019/09/seo-keyword-research-searcher-intent/
https://www.elirose.com/2017/08/small-business-seo-do-dont-help/
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