Key Takeaways
- Establish realistic goals and objectives
- Define the channels that you want to be on
- Define a clear plan of action to be on those channels and a distribution plan.
Resources
Full practical SEO frame guide.
Episode 5 – the Overview
Episode 6 – the Audit
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Raw Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the small business sweet spot. I’m your host Barb Davids, and this show is dedicated to helping small business owners like you get more organic website traffic and also to help create and distribute content and analyzing the numbers so that we can make better informed marketing decisions. It is action oriented, direct and conversational.
And if you’ve been looking for SEO or content marketing help, please stick around to the very end where I share about the group coaching program, small business sweet spot. I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s go.
Welcome to this week’s episode, we are going to dive into the strategy part of the SEO framework. So this is going to be everything around building the plan and getting really tangible about what we’re going to do to drive traffic to our website. In the previous two episodes, we covered a really high level of the SEO framework.
And we also covered the audit, which is the first part, getting some clarity around what’s already happening and some of the potential that we have with our website and how people are searching. So next, we’re going to ask some specific questions and taking the information from the audit, applying that into the strategy. One of the things is looking at specifically the goal that we want to have and identifying that objective and how it relates to our business.
So how much traffic do we need to get to the business goals that we have? That is something that needs to be super, super clear so that you can better choose your channels and figure out the content that you need to get in front of the people to get them to your website. With all that information, now you’ll want to choose what channels to be on. I would say maybe go one, two, three channels.
Perhaps I do, for example, I do my blog posts, of course, because I’m doing organic traffic. But then I also do Instagram, LinkedIn, and only recently have I added in YouTube. But before that, it was just the three channels.
The other thing you want to think about with channels is if you have budget and do you want to put some money towards, let’s say, Google ads or social Facebook ads. Social Facebook, let me rephrase that. Social ads in general.
The next bit that you’re going to want to think of is how are the leads going to come in and how are you going to capture those leads and how does it come into your workflow and into your system? How are you going to track those things? For example, if somebody comes in from a social ad, are you able to identify that in your Google Analytics so that later down the line you can decide, is that channel working for you? If so, are they converting or by how much so that you can decide if you want to put more energy there later or not? Then once they’re in your system, how are you going to convert them? They come in as a lead, provided that you’re selling a service versus an actual tangible product. Once they come in, how are you going to convert them? Is it going to be through an email series? Let’s say they downloaded some sort of checklist or something like that, or maybe it’s just a question. Being really strategic about how you reach out to that lead and saying, okay, here’s how we can help.
Here’s where your pain point is. Then give them the tools so that they can make an informed decision and see how you could work together. Once you have clarity on your traffic goals and how they’re going to come into your system and how you’re going to process the leads, this is where it gets fun.
You can decide on where and how and what you’re going to publish on what frequency. Here’s where you’re going to want to ask yourself, how much energy do I have? How much time do I have? What are my skill sets to be able to create this content? For example, if you’re not a copywriter, or if you don’t like writing, that would be something to take into consideration if you are choosing to write blog posts on a regular basis. As you’re thinking about that, consider what can be repurposed.
If you have, for example, three different channels, let’s go with a blog post, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Let’s say you could repurpose the one blog post into multiple social posts. Let’s say you’re doing a blog post per week.
You could take that one blog post and break it up into, let’s say, four different topics or pull out four pieces and then use that on your calendar for Instagram and LinkedIn. You would do one social post the initial week when it gets published out, and then do another social post the next week, and then the following week, and then the following week. Or you could spread it out every two weeks, especially as you get more content, you’ll have the opportunity to spread things out a little more.
They won’t have to come so close together. In addition to that, you could even create video from those. It doesn’t even have to be just text, caption, post type things for Instagram and LinkedIn in this example.
So let’s say you have the blog post, you could create the social captions, but you could also create that caption in different formats itself. So let’s say you’re doing a carousel post from the blog. You could create that as a reel.
You could create that as a video for LinkedIn. So consider it doesn’t even have to be one type of social post. You can create multiple types of social posts and get even more out of your blog.
Once you have your channels in place and you know what kind of content you’re going to do, and you have a workflow and or a repurposing type of thing in mind, then you’ll want to create a production schedule. This is going to help you be successful with publishing your content on a regular basis and keeping that consistency that Google loves and that the people in your audience love. So take the end result.
Let’s say you want to publish something on a Tuesday, just back it out from there in terms of what your resources are. So if it only takes you a day to come up with a social post, then you need your blog post, let’s say, at least two days before so that you can create the social post and then schedule it. However, you’re not going to want to do it just one by one.
So as you’re considering this, just think about being able to batch content. And I know people use that term quite a bit, but it’s not as icky as it might seem. It is, however, very helpful so that you can keep your mind completely into what you’re doing and you’re not going back and forth and stopping and starting all the time.
One thing that this helps with also as you’re creating your content and batching out and publishing and things of that nature is having a list of ideas to go to, especially when you’re in the ideation phase. I have a whole other piece on this and a whole other episode. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes.
But having a place to go for ideas is super helpful and it takes some of the anguish out of creating and publishing the content. And finally, as part of the strategy to get more website traffic, we want to think about how to expand our reach to get in front of more people. How do we build up our street cred in order to get more people to the website and also to convey authority and to convey expertise? There’s a few different ways that we can do this.
One is by creating blog posts that attract people to want to share your information. One example of that is a listicle. So let’s say, for example, on my website, I have a list of ClickUp templates and it was actually created more for me because I wanted to see what kind of templates were out there.
However, I do try to let people know that I’ve created this blog post and that they are featured in it. So maybe they would want to share it with other people. Another example is guest posting.
So I have one member in my small business sweet spot and the SEO strategy that she has isn’t necessarily around organic traffic specifically, at least to start. She has been able to guest post on a very credible website and we could see from her analytics that she was getting traffic from there. So by increasing the amount of guest posts that she does on the website, that effectively increases her website traffic.
Wrapping up the strategy in an SEO framework, we identified the traffic goals that we want, the objectives for our business. We decided on what channels we want to grow on and how often we want to publish there, how we’re going to publish, how we’re going to distribute, and then also trying to identify ways to widen our audience and get more website traffic beyond the content that we have. The biggest and best takeaway for this episode is to define the channels that you want to be on and define a very clear plan of action to be on those channels, a distribution plan.
All right, that wraps up this week’s episode. If you have any questions, do let me know. And there are links in the show notes for anything mentioned here today.
Cheers. Thank you for sticking around. I hope you enjoyed the episode.
If you’re looking for SEO and content marketing help, consider joining the Small Business Sweet Spot. It’s a group coaching program where you can get answers to your questions about your business directly and clarity around the marketing strategies that you would like to implement in your business. You can find all kinds of information at compassdigitalstrategies.com. And if you liked the episode, please tell a friend.
Cheers.
