You're not alone. This is so normal. And that's why we exist to try and educate people that there are better ways and that things like social media, it doesn't matter.
Like, it doesn't matter if you're not getting the engagement there, because there are other ways that will get you the results way faster. You just need to know them and give them a shot. Welcome to the Level Up With Katie B podcast, where performance meets spirituality and you get all the tools you need to unlock your next level of badassery in life and business.
I'm Katie B, airline pilot, human design coach, side hustle extraordinaire and crazy cat lady. And I know what it's like to have a vision for your life that is so big that it feels bananas. I know what it's like to be busy and still want to live an abundant and fulfilling life.
And I know that you have everything you need to achieve all of that without burning out. I know you're going to bring your dreams to reality. How do I know? Because if I can do it, so can you.
Each week, I and a series of guests will share human design insights, manifestation secrets, energetics and mindset tools that you can use to start stepping into your power as a conscious creator of your most aligned life. Buckle in, baby, because it's going to be a sweet, sweet ride. Well, hey there.
If you're new, welcome. I'm Katie and I am so chuffed that you found your way into this little slice of virtual paradise. I always love meeting new people through the podcast.
So welcome, welcome, welcome. If you are a longtime listener, welcome back. You're amazing.
And I really hope you know how much I appreciate you spending your valuable time with me here. Guys, I am fizzing today because I have the best freaking episode lined up for you. Today, I'm chatting with Nikki Sabaris, who is a Facebook ads and SEO strategist and coach.
Nikki is an expert in her field. She helps online businesses profitably grow and scale their brand so that they can live life on their own terms. And you know, that's what we're all about here.
Let me tell you, if you have been thinking about starting a side hustle or online business, or maybe you've already started and you feel like you're peddling and peddling and not really getting anywhere fast in terms of creating the profitable business that you're looking for, then this episode is going to change everything for you. First of all, if you haven't started your business yet, if it's still just a vision that you are working on bringing to life, or you're in the very early stages, this episode is going to save you a shit ton of time, energy and money by helping you set up your website the right way from the beginning. For those of you that have started but haven't been able to create the revenue that you want, this is going to lift a very heavy load from your shoulders and make your life in business so, so much easier.
Because you know, that's what I'm all about, right? We are here to build long-term sustainable success, not just in our everyday lives, but specifically in our businesses, right? And yes, human design is a bloody important role in achieving that. But we also really need solid business strategies, right? Today Nikki explains exactly what search engine optimization is and why the heck we should be prioritizing it in our business. So if you've heard the word search engine optimization, you're like, crikey, I don't even know what the F you're talking about.
Stay with me because it's actually so, so simple to understand. If I can understand it, you can too. But what I love most about Nikki is that she gets people like you and I. She's an empath.
She knows what it means to have a solid business and want to have huge positive impact in the world. And she's really focused on helping us, us small business owners, get the results we need to be able to thrive. If you stick around to the end, Nikki shares some super easy actionable steps for improving your own website optimization.
And seriously, they're so, so simple. After talking to Nikki, I've actually already implemented them myself. And honestly, if I can do it, then you can, because I am not a tech savvy human.
Okay. I really want you to be able to soak up all of Nikki's wisdom. So settle in and enjoy this chat.
Welcome Nikki to the Level Up With KDB podcast. I'm so grateful that you've taken the time to come and yarn with me and share all the good juice on SEO to the Level Up With KDB crew. Of course, I am so excited to be here and that we randomly cross paths.
So I love that. Super random and just another little, I guess, proof of the universe putting things out there in our paths, synchronicities that you never know how things are going to unfold because I got an email from you by accident, which led us to meet now, which is amazing. I know.
And I'm so excited that it did happen because otherwise we wouldn't be here right now. So Nikki, tell us about your business. What is your business and how did you get into it? Yes.
So my business name is The Digital Exchange and you may have known me, I was previously operating as Miss Marketing. So for some of those of those of you who may know me or may not know me. So I started my business about five years ago after leaving my corporate marketing role as a marketing manager.
And I started as an all service marketing agency, but I rebranded last year to The Digital Exchange. And we have a focus on Facebook ads, Google ads and search engine optimization. So ranking in Google so people can find you when they make a search.
So we help businesses grow and scale using proven methods like the ones I just mentioned. And we teach, but we also manage marketing for clients too. That's so awesome.
And so did you learn about the Facebook ads and Google world and SEO in your previous role when you were in corporate or is this stuff that you have learnt since leaving? I would say a bit of both. So when you're in corporate, you tend to learn the basics of things, but you find that you outsource a lot of things to agencies. So I was a marketing manager for an international company and we have kind of people that did particular jobs and then I would oversee all of those projects.
So I was on the tools a little bit, but I would say, and I did do each of those things within the corporate roles, but it was when I really left that corporate role and started building my own business that I delved further and further into each of those things and took them to an advanced level. Amazing. And is that why you're so passionate about helping small business owners or entrepreneurs in particular, because you've seen how powerful it is in your own business? Exactly.
So I use these tools and I guess these marketing channels in my own business and I know how powerful they are and that is probably the main reason that I like to use them. I guess the, sorry, what I should say, the main reason that I kind of offer them as services and that I teach them. So, okay.
So I'm a bit of, I guess I'm a rookie in the world of search engine optimization. I'm definitely a rookie in terms of Facebook ads. I tapped in when I first started my business three and a half years ago, quickly realized I knew nothing and tapped out pretty quickly.
I was like, oh, fuck, this is too much. I was just pouring money down the drain. And then in more recent times I've started, I'm always, I'm all about manifestation and I'm always open to what the SEO keeps being loud and proud in my face.
And I think part of the reason is because I am about turning my business into the most chill, grounded, working smarter, not harder kind of entity. And to me, the little I know about SEO, that is exactly what it does for us in business. Is that correct? Yes, pretty much spot on to be honest.
And I probably should have mentioned that some of the other reasons that I love, I guess, SEO and ads as well, because it does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. So search engine optimization actually attracts people to you. So it kind of goes with that manifestation vibe if you like.
So essentially you're doing the work and then letting people come find you as opposed to nearly every other form of marketing where you've got to go out there and try and sell. Essentially with search engine optimization, you're taking actions on your website and then on other people's websites. And then basically you put in the work, most of it upfront.
And then after that, leads just start to find you or sales find you based on what they've searched in a search engine like Google. Yeah. So that's like the holy grail of online business, right? Just attracting aligned customers through a few tweaks.
And from what I know about SEO, it's like you say upfront, there might be a bit of work that needs to go into it. But then once you've got it all set up, it starts working for you. Probably doesn't mean that you don't have to look at it ever again, but compared to social media, which a lot of the business owners I work with, when I say marketing, they think social media.
It's like there is nothing else in the online space except social media. And so this idea of being able to lay some really solid foundations and have something operating in the background working for you, it sounds amazing. Yeah.
And I mean, I know I experienced the exact same thing. Everyone wants to spend so much time on social media. And for me, it's so upsetting to watch because the speed, or I should say the lack of speed at which leads and sales come in from social media.
It's terrible. They just trickle in so slowly. And so many business owners spend so much time focusing on that area.
And it's so high maintenance social media, you have to be posting continuously. And what you're generally finding is you need to be looking at your insights because what you'll see is that you're probably getting hardly any engagement. Engagement's probably coming from family and friends if you're a small business.
Love our moms, sisters, best friends, et cetera, all loving our posts, appreciate all that. But you're probably seeing a lot of the same people liking your posts. It hardly gets shown to people outside of your following.
So it's really hard to reach new people, unlike something like search engine optimization, where anyone that's making or searching your chosen keywords is finding you. And yeah, so just those things alone make it really hard. But then also, if you look at your insights on social media, you'll also see hardly anyone generally clicks through, probably less than 2%.
Maybe one or two people are clicking through to your website every time you post. Sometimes you'll see that there's none as well. And on average, if you need about 100 people to visit your website or two to buy or to book with you, then you're going to need to post a lot in order to be able to see one sale or one booking.
So it's not the best marketing channel in terms of getting your bang for your buck. Yeah. A lot of the people I work with, I attract empaths because I am one.
I attract soul-led, heart-led business owners and entrepreneurs. And that is a really freaking hard environment to be in for empaths. When you are, you're being brave enough to navigate social media, show up sharing what you're so passionate about.
And then, like you say, it's like crickets or your mum and your auntie are liking it, but you're not really seeing any growth and it's taking so much time. And it hurts. It hurts people.
And then it affects their confidence because it makes people feel like, oh, well, obviously my business is a freaking crap because no one's liking what I'm talking about, which is so not true, you know. Yeah, it's so not true. And honestly, it's generally there are so many businesses experiencing the same thing.
And it's the only ones that are getting like a lot of engagement. Generally, the people that have built their following years ago when the algorithms weren't finding it so hard or if they've gotten some huge influencer on board that's really closely aligned, then that's kind of when you'll have a big following and you'll be getting a lot out of it. But I guarantee you, you're not alone.
This is so normal. And that's why we exist to try and educate people that there are better ways and that things like social media, it doesn't matter. Like it doesn't matter if you're not getting the engagement there because there are other ways that will get you the results way faster.
You just need to know them and give them a shot. So and I guess that's why we're here today. And I have to say, I'm an empath as well, so I can totally relate to all of that.
Yeah. I mean, when you are in business, it's for anyone that is empathic or identified being an introvert or highly sensitive. It's a journey.
It's an emotional roller coaster. And social media, in my opinion, is quite like it can really affect people's mental health. Right.
So, you know, I don't know if you see your business in this way, but you're really having a huge positive impact on so many layers. If you're helping people tap out of that churn and burn, you know, being so affected by the vanity metrics on social media, then you are making a huge positive impact on your community. So that's amazing.
I've never actually thought of it like that, but I actually love and appreciate that because we aren't like, of course, I'm here to build people's businesses, but I do want to have an impact on their life. And that is part of our core values. So I guess the impact that we're having, we want it to, like in our own business, we want that to kind of transcend into other people's businesses and the lives that they have as well.
And I can completely understand how social media can have that impact on someone. And it's so hard to not compare yourself to other people within the industry. And truth be told, there's so many people with a lot of followers as well.
And you don't, you don't even know whether they're actually getting your leads or sales from it. You can have people with much smaller followings that are getting way more leads and sales that are converting than people with huge audiences. And we are seeing that more and more now, even with people that actually choose to use influencers.
A lot of them are wanting to use those micro influencers with accounts that are under 10 grand, 10,000, because of that exact reason, like the community is a lot tighter in those groups. So interesting. I never thought about that.
Oh, maybe I could be an influencer with my 700 followers. You're definitely on the way. I think you could.
I feel like you're definitely got a close-knit group and you're having a positive influence on everybody, you know, already in your community. So there's definitely, there's definitely some opportunity there. Yeah.
So I really feel that part of the reason my community still prioritise social media is that they just get it. It's something that feels really familiar. So it feels a little bit safe, even if it is somewhat overwhelming and scary.
It's like, they know that all they have to do is be consistent and like post and show up. And that to them is their marketing job, you know, tick on the marketing to-do list. But I feel like, and from what you've told me and what I've read, SEO has a lot of different layers.
And so at first sight, it can seem extremely overwhelming, especially for the solopreneur that already has a lot of balls in the air. But what is your perspective specifically on the return on your investment from SEO compared to social media? That's a good, that's a great question. So yes, I would, I completely understand where you're coming from just first off.
So social media is, does seem easier because we post in our normal everyday life. So we're posting on Facebook in our own personal lives and in Instagram. So it seems easy.
We just create a post and put it up. But if I must say, it has been, I guess some of the biggest SEO agencies have come out and said that search engine optimisation actually drives 1000% more traffic to your website than social media, which is huge. So if you need, going back to that stat I mentioned before, 100 people to come to your website for two people to buy a book on average, and search engine optimisation is driving 1000% more of that, more traffic to your website on average than social media, it's pretty much a no-brainer.
Not only that, SEO, or I guess organic search, which we like to call it, accounts for 54% of all website traffic. So that's, I guess, that's a huge amount of traffic that you could be sending to your website that you're missing out on. And there's about 90% of pages across the website, I mean, sorry, across the World Wide Web that aren't even ranking.
So if that is your, one of your pages on the website, you could be missing out on a whole lot of traffic. So I definitely feel like I'm in that 90%, probably not just on one of my pages, but on my whole website. So we're going to take a short break.
And when we get back, I would love to hear about, because I know you're about to open doors to an incredible course that's going to help people like me, and a lot of the people in my community, figure out their SEO saga and apply it to their business. Hey, how's your self-care game at the moment? You know, I am all about prioritising your mental, emotional and energetic health to ensure you feel the magic of an aligned and fulfilling life. And you know, the fact that you're listening to this episodes means I know you get it.
You know that this is an important part of being your most badass version. But let's not forget our beautiful bodies, the vessel that allows us to be the bridge between your soul journey and rolling around in bliss of your 3D reality. Your skin and hair health is absolutely a part of that and goes far beyond just slapping some cream on last minute before you walk out the door.
It goes beyond that. The truth is that a nourishing skin and hair care routine can be a sacred part of your day. A beautiful ritual that helps you reconnect with your body, be in reverence for it, and on top of all of that, help you feel confident with glowing skin and healthy hair.
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You can start looking and feeling younger and more confident and you can start today. If you are intrigued and you want to find the right solutions for you, take the skin and hair solutions tool quiz. The link is in the show notes and it's so much fun.
It's like having a derm in your pocket. You'll get a skin analysis and personalized recommendations. It is super simple and such a fun way to discover beautiful solutions unique to your needs.
Remember, you're not just taking care of your skin and your hair, you are taking care of you and that is the most beautiful form of self-love. Okay, so Nikki, you've told me how incredible the results are, how much more traffic is going to come to my website from having good SEO set up in the background. Your course that is, it's open very soon.
I'll have the dates in the show notes, but it's called SEO Made Easy, which sounds amazing because I need it to be easy because I got so much on, I need it to be very, very simple. So, what's the sort of person that you expect to have on board your SEO Made Easy course? Amazing. So, the 11th of April is the opening date for, I guess for Australians or anyone on this side of the world.
It's going to be the 10th for the other side of the world, US, Europe, etc. Anyway, so going back to your question, basically anyone that is looking to get their SEO done. So, it doesn't matter really what kind of business model you have.
So, whether you're an e-commerce business, we have a lot of e-commerce businesses that do jump on board, but in saying that we also help anyone that wants to get found in Google in a really simple bite-sized actionable way. So, if you're someone that just wants to get your SEO done, but you want it broken down into easy steps, then this is the program for you. So, we have in the program where we have e-commerce types of businesses, we have service-based businesses, course creators, coaches, content creators as well actually.
So, as I said, it's available for all business models and we have different sections that you can focus on if, for example, if you're a service-based business and want to go after local businesses, whereas if you're an e-commerce business, we definitely have sections for that as well if you are that type of business. Amazing. So, by the end of the course, will I have my website totally SEO'd to the point where it's the foundations are set up and I just have to do like minimum maintenance moving forward or what does my website look like at the end of this? That's a great question too.
So, essentially, for those of you who don't know, SEO can be broken down into three main areas. So, you've got your website set up, then you've got your keywords and then you have your backlinks. So, your website set up is things like you're checking your website speed and making sure that's optimized for Google, making sure that you are actually found in Google's library so that when someone searches you, you can be found.
You don't just magically appear in Google. There's certain steps you need to take and your website set up also involves making sure your website is responsive to different devices. So, they're kind of the main things that we cover off in that website set up.
The next section is finding the right keywords that your audience is searching to find you and for you to make a sale, get sales and bookings. And then we make sure that you add all those keywords for each page across the seven different locations you need to add them. And then the final section is backlinks.
Now, backlinks is probably the most underrated part of SEO. People always forget to do it, but that is the links from other people's websites to yours and without those backlinks, you won't actually get the boost you need. So, the other two areas almost become redundant in terms of SEO if you don't implement that third section.
And we provide a whole bunch of different ways that you can get those backlinks both using software or just manually finding ways as well. Oh my god, I'm so excited because first of all, I think a lot of people when they do think about search engine optimization, they think only of keywords. Like, I'm going to pop keywords in some blog and some, you know, whatever sprinkled throughout and job done.
You just said there's seven different places on my website that I need to have keywords popped in and I'm like, I can't even imagine where that is. So, that's exciting to me that there's already something that I know that I'm missing that I can get out of your course. But then backlinks, oh, I heard you speak about backlinks when you were on the Imperfect Action podcast.
And so, I went down a rabbit hole and I was like, I'm going to figure this out. I did all the research, Nikki, and I got nowhere. I was like, I just don't know how to gain traction with this whole backlinks thing.
So, the idea of demystifying it. Can you just explain briefly to the crew what a backlink is for someone that's never heard that term before? Yeah, of course. So, actually, funnily enough, I wrote a post last week on my blog that was all about why SEO keywords aren't the holy grail of SEO, because everybody just focuses on keywords, but without the other areas, it doesn't really count.
It doesn't take off. So, backlinks are links from other websites to yours. And essentially, you need to think of them as a trust factor.
So, Google wants to know how it can trust you. And the way that it knows if it can trust you is if someone is recommending you or referring you. So, say you were to have me on your podcast, which you are, and then you put a link in your show notes to my website, then that tells Google that you think that I'm trustworthy.
So, it therefore then goes ahead and boosts me a few points. So, then every time I get a backlink, it boosts me a little bit more. So, there's some websites that provide more higher quality, I guess, boosts than other sites.
So, someone like a news website, they have a lot of what we call domain authority. And basically, every time you get a backlink from another website to yours, it gives you a point of domain authority. So, your domain authority is a score between 0 and 100, 0 being no authority and 100 being a lot of authority.
And the more links you get, the more that authority builds up. So, if you get it closer towards 100, then you start like, yeah, the closer you get towards 100, the higher you're going to be in the search rankings. But you don't need to be at 100 to get to position one.
It just depends on your industry and what keywords you're going after. You could have an authority score of 10 or 12 and still be in position one. Right.
Okay. So, just so I'm clear, with a backlink, are you rated based on, is your authority increased based on if people click on the link or just if your link is showing up in multiple places on the internet? So, your authority score is based on the websites that are linking to you and what their authority score is. So, say if the media had an authority score of 60 and they were linking to you, that might boost you a couple of points.
Whereas if a website that was linking to you that had no domain authority, it wouldn't boost you at all. So, it's basically like all the power behind the website, all the authority scores behind the websites that are linking to you, that's what's really going to boost you up. So, sometimes if you're going after like a lot of websites with no domain authority, it would be relatively pointless.
You'd be better off investing time in a website that has a lot of domain authority like the media, but there's a lot of little hacks that people don't know about until they do programs like this where you can easily get in the media. So, it's good. And not only that, so you're not only getting to position one, so you're getting marketing and you're getting advertisement and exposure that way, you're also getting recommended.
So, if a media has you on their website and someone's randomly reading an article, that provides exposure in another way. It's not just providing it when someone searches you. And I also, going back to what you were asking before about if most of the work can be done up front, generally with SEO, you can do the bulk of the work up front.
So, you can do your website set up. Once that's all kind of set up, it doesn't require a lot of management. So, getting the speed right, making sure your image sizes are all small enough when you load them.
Those things don't generally change after you've loaded them to your website. The image isn't going to get bigger. So, in saying that, you don't need to go and fix that.
It's already done. There's a whole bunch of things you can tick off. Then you add your keywords.
And if you want to keep getting more and more work, you can just keep adding more backlinks to your website. But if you're a service-based business, you're capped at your time unless you bring on staff. So, that's something to think about.
And, you know, it depends if you have a product-based business that is, you have a standard product versus a customized product. I've got clients that have, or students that have custom products, and they actually can't take on too much work so that we get them to a point where they've got just enough work. And they're at that point, they actually don't need to keep building on their SEO because, you know, they're already at a point where they're getting enough sales.
Yeah. That's so cool that you can tailor make your SEO for your business needs. And I had never even thought that that was something that we would even need to think about.
Well, exactly. And then not only that. So, you know, we have a client called Vintage Secret and they sell repurposed designer jewelry.
And they've actually cut their Facebook ads budget in half because they were getting, you know, they're having getting too much work and they wanted to keep it at a certain amount. So, she's a busy mum and she only wants to, you know, sell a certain amount of items or she only needs to sell a certain amount of items to hit where she wants to hit in terms of revenue and in terms of like the time that she has available. So, you might get to a point where, you know, you don't even need to.
It's like she wants to sell a certain amount. So, she likes to run ads. If you're a service based business, you might only have a certain amount of time and you don't want to hire staff.
So, you wouldn't even need to run ads or do so. You could quit social media. Oh, Nikki.
Oh, my God. Stop it. Those results are insane and like I really feel like this is an untapped potential for so many solopreneurs.
Like, imagine, it's like you can turn a tap for how many clients you want. Turn it on as much as you want. Turn it off if you want to go on holiday and you don't, if you're a service provider and you don't have time to take new clients.
Like, that sounds amazing. What would you say to someone that is like, oh, this seems like quite a lot. Maybe I'll just outsource.
Maybe I'll just pay someone to SEO my stuff rather than learning to do it myself. So, I think when you outsource it, it can be quite pricey. So, you're kind of looking at say a thousand dollars a month to get your SEO managed.
And as I was saying before, you kind of do, you can get like the bulk of the work done, like a lot of the work done upfront. So, unless you're trying to get more and more clients and you don't really need to have it managed ongoing, it's something that you're almost better off doing in-house because you want to be adding it to any new pages that you add to your website. So, if you're adding a blog to your website or you're adding a particular service, it's a skill that you want to have and just be able to, you know, whack on the keywords when you add a new page.
Of course, you can go and outsource it, but it's not as scary as you think. You just have to know the right steps and you just need someone to guide you. And I think that's why in my, that's why I definitely do in my marketing, I say, we will get it done with you by holding your hand pretty much in six weeks.
So, we'll get the bulk of it done in that time. And then you can walk away and you're not having to spend too much time maintaining it. Obviously, until you get it to a certain point that you want it to be added and you're getting the amount of, you know, bookings or whatever that you want to get, you can keep adding backlinks to your website, but you're going to get the bulk of it done in the program.
So, I think it's better to do it this way. I actually used to offer SEO as a service, but I was finding that more people wanted to do it this way. And that's why I started doing it like that.
I do find with Facebook ads and Google ads, you can get a good mix where people do want it managed or they, you know, they might want to do it themselves when they're first starting out. I found with SEO, people generally prefer to just have this skill in-house and just get it done. Yeah.
Yeah. I've kind of got a little bit of an ethos in my business that I want to know how to do everything that I need to do to run my business before I start outsourcing. Like, I just want to know how shit works so that I can really know if my financial investment, when I do decide to outsource, is going to the right people, you know, the people that get what I'm actually trying to achieve.
So, definitely SEO seems like something that, and actually, now that I've talked to you, it feels a lot more manageable. If you're saying that I can set up my website to be up and running and like with high quality SEO in a six-week time frame, that is, that's totally doable. Yeah.
And I mean, don't get me wrong, in those six weeks, you're definitely going to have to commit to the program. And, you know, I would say minimum three to five hours, but if you really want to go hard in and just get it all done and wipe it out, you could, you know, put in a bit more, a few more hours and get it to that point. Again, if you did want to keep building your backlinks up so that you were getting to those top positions or going after bigger and bigger keywords, which will make more sense in the program, then that's totally, you know, that's going to take a few more hours as well.
But generally we find, so we get a lot of clients or students that have even come to us that have outsourced their SEO in the past. And there's a lot of kind of what you call blackout tactics. So there are dodgy tactics that agencies will use that you need to be careful of in order to try and boost your position really fast, but it can very easily get you penalized by Google where you won't get, like Google will stop you from getting ranked at all.
So essentially they can do things like get dodgy backlinks and websites to link to you. And they just create these websites to link from one website to another. So things like that.
So you have to be really careful when you are working with an agency and make sure that you get examples of other maybe businesses that they've worked with and the kind of tactics that they're using, because I've seen even good agencies that people have recommended like, or, you know, or agencies that I know that people have recommended doing these kinds of tactics and it could end up getting you penalized and you'll end up in a worse position than what you started out in. Oh my goodness. That would be heartbreaking.
Putting your trust and an investment into someone that's supposed to be, you know, boosting your business and then having it have the opposite effect. That would be just heartbreaking. It is.
And we've had clients that now work with us that it has happened to them and it has like completely ruined the trust with even other service providers. Now they don't want to go and work with other service providers for things that they need and they'd rather just do it themselves because of that experience. So it is really hard to get the trust back with, you know, working with people once you've had some kind of experience like that.
So it is super important to do your due diligence up front. Yeah. Okay.
That's important for everyone to hear. I guess there's never any guarantee, right? And so yeah, due diligence and, you know, maybe just learn how to do it yourself. Exactly.
And, you know, the thing with SEO is it's a lot less, I guess, less of a gamble than something like, say, paid advertising. So with SEO, you're pretty much guaranteed to get traffic if you follow the steps. And you do need to, like any form of marketing, you do need to have a product or service that people want that's got the right pricing and the right messaging and all of those things.
So it's the same for anything in marketing. But yeah, it's a lot less of a gamble than other forms of marketing. And I'm not saying that paid ads and Google ads are.
Sorry, like Facebook and Google ads are. But with those, you really, really, really need to know that your offer is validated before you move into something that's going to amplify whatever's going on in your business. So it's always better to get your search engine optimization set up first and then moving on to things like that to make sure that you're getting the sales organically.
Okay. Yeah, that makes so much sense. Just one question that I have is the way that I tell if my SEO is having a positive impact on my business.
Is it Google Analytics? Is that what I'm looking at? Yeah. So you've got Google Analytics and then you've got Google Search Console. So Google Search Console is also a free tool by Google.
And that will tell you basically if you're ranking, like where you're ranking or how much traffic you're getting, what keywords you're getting found for. So it tells you all the information about search engine optimization. And then Google Analytics will give you more information about the type of traffic that's coming to your website, how much of it.
And I guess a breakdown of who they are, if they're using mobile versus desktop. Both tools are amazing. But think of like Google Search Console as what's going in and then Google Analytics is what's coming out.
So yeah, more of like the activity. I guess it's Google Search, sorry. Google Analytics is more like the activities that people are doing and the interactions they're having on your website and who they are.
So if they're females versus males or if they're a certain age demographic or what their interests are. OK, cool. All right.
I'm going to have to check that out. We said in our actual SEO Made Easy, we have a tutorial, video tutorials on how to set up both of those and also how to understand both bits of software. Oh, my God.
OK, I'm getting more and more excited. I was already excited, but because you know why, Nikki, is because I've tried to figure this out myself. I've tried to Google my way through learning how to operate Google Analytics and understand what it's telling me.
And I got confused and frustrated and put it in a too hard basket. So I'm so excited to have it make sense because I can feel that it's really important for me to understand. But I just haven't had the right to teach it yet.
So it's so true. And the thing is, you can go into programs like this and they're absolute beasts of software, like they have so many things you can do. The thing is, you don't actually need all of the elements.
Like when you're a small business, you might only need to look at 10 or 10 things in there. So it's just about knowing what those 10 things are or three to five things that you care about and going So generally, most of those things are things like looking at whether you're getting sales or bookings, looking at how much traffic you're getting, looking at where that traffic is coming from so you can boost your time and money that you spend there and spend less time on other things. So, for example, the thing that you can see in Google Analytics is where your traffic is coming from.
And I guarantee if most of your audience goes in there, if they haven't set up, they'll see that it's probably not coming from social media. You know, this is also something I cover in a freebie that I have, too. And essentially, what I get you to do is I get you to look at where your traffic is coming from and then think about how much time you're spending on each of those places and see if you're actually getting the return on investment.
So if you're spending an hour on social media a week, but you're actually getting no traffic from it, but then you're spending an hour on search engine optimization, but you're getting 20 people a week visiting, it makes more sense to spend that hour there than on social media and completely cut out the vanity part of social media where everyone just wants to get that kind of following up because that's generally a lot of the time what it is. We just want to get our following up so that it makes our business look bigger and better, but it's not actually driving it. It's not actually getting us the dollars in the bank that we want.
I'm sold. What do you think would be a really easy piece of advice that someone who, let's just say, someone who's never actually heard of SEO until they listened to this episode, what do you think the most easy piece of advice to help them out would be today? Well, I might give you one for each area of SEO. Can I do that? Oh yeah, definitely.
So speed is a huge factor when it comes to your Google ranking. So you want to make sure that each page of your website is ranking in under three seconds. I mean, sorry, is coming up in under three seconds or loading in under three seconds.
So you can Google Pingdom speed test and basically put your website in, and it will tell you if your website is loading in under three seconds. And if it isn't, I'm pretty much almost sure that it's going to be to do with the fact that your images are loaded too big. So you want to smoosh those images and make sure that they aren't too large when you load them into your website software.
Now, every website company is going to have different instructions on that. So you can just Google website instructions for say Shopify or Squarespace or whatever platform you use, but generally under 300 KB would be recommended. So I would do that.
That's for your website setup. If you're looking for keywords, look for keywords when you first start out that have a low search volume. So people are going for keywords that have a high search volume.
So you think, oh, I want to get keywords that a thousand people are searching a month. But the thing is, you're not going to be able to compete with the big companies because they're going to have a higher domain authority than you. So if someone's got a higher domain authority than you, they're probably going to win the traffic.
If all things, other things are equal. So you want to go for smaller keywords, I mean, keywords with a smaller search volume, and you can use a tool like SEMrush or Keywords Everywhere to find that kind of information. Generally, it's hard to find that information without one of those kind of tools.
You can hunt and pick all over Google, but it's just easier to use a tool like that. And they do have free trials. Okay, cool.
Can I just ask one question about the keyword thing? So, you know, this is probably opening a can of worms, but AI has taken over the world, right? And if I type into ChatGPT, make me a high SEO scoring web page description for this website page, and it spits something out, is that going to work? So, I mean, it depends. I think you really need to do your analysis with the keywords within some kind of software like that first. So I think we will get to that point.
And there is definitely software that's coming out that's able to do that. But generally, the super powerful software that does do this really good stuff, you have to pay for or use these free trials. Yes, to some point.
But if you want to, I guess, be unique in terms of the copy, but then also be more analytical and more focused on what you go after, then I think it is better to do this kind of, I guess, process that we take people through. Yeah. Okay, cool.
All right. And then backlinks. Yeah, so that's the links from other websites to yours.
A super easy way to do that would be to give someone a testimonial and then ask them if they would link, put the testimonial on their website and then link from their website to your website. That's probably the easiest way to do it. Or add it or go add yourself to a few free directories.
Okay, amazing. Well, all those three things seem totally doable. So that's amazing.
They definitely are. And I think it's just knowing what the steps are. Like you said, you've been kind of hunting and pecking all over to get information.
And I was the same when I first started out and I'm like, okay, when I first did a program, I'm like, I just need someone to tell me all the bits. And then I realized that it was doable, but you just need kind of someone to hold your hand through the process as you're doing it. And the beauty about the program that I've now just opened the opportunity where for every round past alumni can come back and actually ask questions.
So you can be still part of the Q&A session. So basically during the program, we have six live Q&A sessions, and we have a Facebook group that's open. And that gets archived in between each of the intakes.
And then six months later, we reopen it again. And then you're welcome to come back and ask any questions that you have. We weren't offering that before, but we thought, why wouldn't we? Like, why shouldn't we just invite everyone back? And you know, that's been something that's a lot of people have loved.
If they wanted to grow their SEO even more and have further questions they want to ask. Yeah, I can totally see the value in that because not only do they get to stay up to date and have their questions answered, but any people that are going through SEO Made Easy for the first time, it kind of gives you more insight into what happens after that was set up. You know, had everything going for a little while and what are common questions that keep popping up or common challenges and that sort of thing.
Yeah, that's exactly right. And Steph Taylor, which you mentioned before in her podcast on Imperfect Action where you first heard me, she was doing this in her programs. And I was like, oh, this is actually so good because truthfully, when we run programs, we don't run programs just we don't run them for the sake of running them so people buy them.
And, you know, we want people to actually get results. And if that means opening up the forum for people to be able to continue to ask us questions, that's actually better. So we want to provide those opportunities for you to be able to succeed and continue to, you know, ask us questions as the time goes on.
Yeah, so good, so valuable. So remind me again when your doors are open for SEO Made Easy. So from the 11th to the 18th of April, and I'm running a free masterclass next Tuesday, like the sorry, next Tuesday, all the information will come out.
Yeah, all about that. So that's really exciting, too. So if you want some free information about how to grow your website traffic, jump in on that masterclass too.
Amazing. I'll have the link to that in the show notes for anyone who is interested. Amazing.
Thank you so much. Nikki, thanks so much. I genuinely am so excited to get on board and start your course.
I wish the doors were opening tomorrow because I'm pumped for it. I'm so excited to have you in it. I know you're going to bring this good energy.
So yes, definitely. And thanks so much for taking the time to come and chat with us. It's been so, so good.
Thank you. Oh, no problem. And thanks again for having me.
I've loved it. You guys. Oh, my God.
What an awesome episode. Hey. And honestly, I just feel like I've had a little bit of a masterclass in this podcast episode.
Nikki's so generous with sharing her insights. And I'm so, so grateful that we've all been able to benefit from that in this podcast episode. If you are like me, though, and you are like, yeah, OK, I need to learn more about SEO.
I want to implement it in my business. I want to experience all of this magic. Her masterclass, which is three simple and free strategies to grow your traffic and sales now without social media is available to register for now.
So click the link in my show notes and register for that masterclass now. I'm going to be there. I hope to see you there.
I'm so excited to learn more about how I can make my business more profitable without using social media. That really takes my talk. It really excites me.
And I'm sure it probably does for you, too. All right, my love. Thank you again for being here until next week.
Take care. Keep milking the shit out of life and I'll catch you in the next episode.
