Episode 022
===
[00:00:00] welcome to SEO Day Studio with your hosts, the Findability Queen Denise Millet, and the entrepreneur Whisperer, Kim White. This is a space to hear the questions that fellow entrepreneurs have about SEO and get them answered. So many discussions involving techy topics like SEO are loaded with jargon and unnecessary complexity.
So much so that anyone outside the tech industry has difficulty getting to the real meeting inside the information. Denise believes that every entrepreneur can benefit from search engines. Once they hear how they work in a clear and straightforward way. She's on a mission to help entrepreneurs get the content and they spend hours creating included in search engines.
So when their customers search online, they're findable because she believes if they can't find you, they can't do business with you. So stay tuned. The fun starts now. Welcome to [00:01:00] the SEO Day podcast. I am the mail keeper, the official mail keeper, Kim White, and I am here in the studio with our findability queen herself, Denise, Millet.
Denise, thank you for giving business owners a place to get their questions answered about findability and SEO. Thank you, Kim. I'm so happy that you're here again with me today, and you are the official mailbag keeper. Thank goodness making my job so much easier.
I dove into the mailbag and pulled out a great series of questions by someone who asked to remain anonymous. We wanna give a little quick information though, about if you submit questions to. Have Denise answer them on the SEO Day podcast. You are welcome to stay anonymous. We just wanna give a shout out [00:02:00] to whoever wants to be shouted out and a thank you because we're grateful for your questions.
So just wanna put that little plug in there. But today anonymous is the name. First question, how do I know if my keywords are working? Yeah, here's a good one. Here's a really good one. So there are a couple different ways that you can get clues as to whether they're working. You can look at the Google Search Console, which we've talked about before, which is where you submit your website and it tells you what the traffic is to your different pages.
we talk about having a major keyword theme for each page, right? So if you have a certain theme, which is a keyword phrase on a page, and that page is getting more traffic, then the others, [00:03:00] then there's likely chance that you're getting more people searching for those keywords.
It's not concrete, it's not hard to fast or black and white. So you have to have intuition and look for clues. So that's one way to see if things are happening. The other way, which I think is a little bit more, well thought out if you plan and the strategy is your blog post topics, if you make your blogs have keyword themes.
You're trying to target and you get more reads on certain posts or podcast episodes with certain topics, and you get more downloads or interest in those episodes, you know that those keywords are doing good for you. And so that's really the best way to figure those things out.
Question number two is how do I see the results of SEO changes?[00:04:00]
The best way that I could say, and I do this sometimes I'm not always good at it, but I try, is I go into search console and take a screenshot of the traffic to a certain page or the site before I do something, and then I'll go back and measure it after to see what kind of change that happens. Or if I change keywords on a page, I take a snapshot of that beforehand and then after.
And then the platform that I use, we use Kajabi. We have page views per page over a period of time. So I'll look at. Prior period of time and then after, but give it time. It's not a quick thing. So you have to not do this like the day after. As we've said, SEO is a long game. It is not a short, overnight, super changes, so you [00:05:00] have to really be patient for that.
But those are the best ways that I think that you can get the idea of whether it's working or not. Thank you, Denise. Question number three. Is there a tool to see what keywords are bringing visitors to my website? I'm sorry. Is there a tool to see what keywords are bringing visitors to my website? You know, there is in, Google Search Console, it will tell you where your, the words used in search to bring people to your site.
I'm going to caution people though because it's, they can only count so many things because of privacy. protections. Some people have it turned off that they don't want any history saved when they search for things. There are some people in some countries that they can't store information on who uses their tools.
So I'm going to say you [00:06:00] can find out things. But it's not as reliable as you might want it to be. So I think your best bet to find out, what's bringing people is to look at page views overall over a period of time and see if they increase or decrease and see if that you can get the clues from that.
there are keyword research tools that can look at how many visits per month, like SEMrush and others. There are only a small snapshot of the data that they've captured for a certain amount of people on the, it's not all the searches. It's what they can get, which is a subset of all the traffic.
So yes, it can give you some clues. Some of the free tools will do that in the keyword research, tell you how many have been there for a certain period of time, so you can look at those, but I wouldn't call it concrete. I would put them all together and see what the trend is.[00:07:00]
It tells a story. Yes, a story. Yes. Look at the story.
So let's head over to a word from our sponsor today. This episode is brought to you by the findability Queen Denise Millet. Visit her YouTube channel youtube.com/at findability queen for her collection of short videos, answering questions about findability and SEO for entrepreneurs every day. Welcome back to the studio.
We are still talking about websites and SEO with Denise Millet, the findability queen. Our letter today is from someone who wants to remain anonymous, but they had multiple questions, so we're trying to cover them all. And here's the fourth question for today. Where do I look on To see how people are [00:08:00] getting to my videos.
Oh, this is a good one. because YouTube has fairly good analytics options. So if you go to your creator studio at YouTube, there is an analytics option, and then you, look under content and you pick which one you've posted, like videos or shorts. You should then see where people in the period of time you have chosen, where people have come from, whether it's the shorts feed, or whether it's the video feed or whether they came from outside and search.
So that's really the only way you can see some of the traffic that's come, to you from different places. Thank you. And our final question today is, are downloads a good measure of the result of SEO for my podcast? Ooh, Kim. Spicy one. Spicy. Spicy. So they're about [00:09:00] the only measure you're going to get for downloads, but here's the thing.
I don't download things for podcasts anymore. I used to download them on my phone because it was slower and I didn't have wifi available everywhere and it was a different world, so I'd always download them and then they would travel with me on my phone, but. There's wifi everywhere now. My whole house everywhere.
So I just play and it plays, or I play it on my home speaker. Right? I don't know if those plays are being counted as downloads or not. And I'm not sure they tell us openly what's included in those numbers. So if that's me and it's just little me and I'm not an avid podcast person, I maybe once or twice a week, I fit it in.
But think of the people that listen to them all day long. What are they doing? Right, so that's one thing to think about. Then the other thing to think about is the privacy protection that we all have the option to opt in and opt out of things being [00:10:00] saved about us as we travel around. And a lot of people don't pay attention, but there are a lot of people that do.
So we don't know whether those statistics have everything included, and there are so many platforms. How do you know? You know who aggregates, who adds them all up to tell you all the downloads? So you'd have to go to one place, apple, one place, and then you the other one here, and the other one here and add them all up.
So it's nice to see, it's nice to see that there's interest and we all wanna see that, that feedback, but I'm not sure I would, count them as totally a hundred percent accurate. What do you think Kim? Well, as someone who listens to more than a thousand podcast episodes a year, I think I make a dent in there and I should be counted as a category.
Denise.
I bet you're, I bet you're right Kim. Kim's listening. [00:11:00] So thank you for answering these questions, Denise. We're going to close the mailbag for today and we'll jump back in next week. You did a great job of making it clear what SEO is and how we can use it for our businesses, so thank you very much. Thank you, Kim.
And thank you to our question submitter. I really appreciate your questions and. I also want everybody to make Tuesday their SEO day. I want you to put on your calendar a chunk of time where you can listen to this very short podcast episode as it drops, but also get some things done SEO. The other thing I want to talk to everybody about is the first thing is getting those keywords really working for you.
So I gave you a jumpstart. quickly find your perfect keywords, simple and easy, guide to being findable. It's a free, If you head over to my website or the link in the show notes, you can grab your copy today and hopefully it'll get you started on a path. So you feel good about SEO working for you and your [00:12:00] business.
So thanks for that, and until next time. We'll see you then.
Thank you for joining Denise and Kim in the SEO Day studio for today's discussion. If you would like one of your SEO questions answered in the future episode. Head on over to denisemillet.com/questions to let us know. The link is also in the show notes. We hope you enjoyed listening to this episode of the SEO Day podcast.
Follow the show so you can hear when new episodes get released and stay in the know about SEO. Until next time.