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Spa Marketing Made Easy | Spa Business Growth
SMME #455 Marketing Month Part 3: Why Blogging is Back (And How AI Makes It Easy)
00:16:55
Remember when blogging felt like midnight writing sessions and endless editing? It's back, but this time it's different. In this Marketing Month episode, Daniela and Lucy dive into why consistent blogging has become one of the most powerful SEO tools...
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- [00:03]
Daniela
Hello, my dears. Daniela here. And welcome back to another episode of Spa Marketing Made Easy. This is the third part in a four part series that we are calling Marketing Month here at Auto Esthetics. And Lucy and I had a long conversation that covered a variety of different topics of what's going on in the marketing world right now, what are we doing with AI. And we decided to just break it into four parts rather than having one big conversation about a variety of different things.
- [00:36]
Lucy
So we, this phase, this, this part.
- [00:40]
Daniela
Three of Marketing Month, we are talking about blogging. And I never thought that there would be a time that I was like, blogging is coming back. But as AI is kind of changing the way that we search and changing the way that we use the Internet, it's more important than ever to make sure that our SEO is optimized, to make sure that website is updated, to make sure that we are providing the information necessary to come up in search. And so blogging is a really, really incredible way to do that. And SEO is so vitally important for us in the aesthetics industry because that is one of the top ways, if not the top way, that you are getting new clients and patients into your spas. And so we want to make sure that we have our websites optimized for SEO. We want to make sure there's meta descriptions, we want to make sure that we're answering all of those common questions that our clients or patients are asking. So we're going to get into that, we're going to talk about a little bit about our process of how we're using AI to create blogs and always make sure that you have human eyes on it. That is the number one rule here with any type of AI content. We say that we're an AI first company. And what that means is that we run everything through to get the first draft, but then we are using our human eyes and skill sets and knowledge base to refine it and add those elements to really make it the best. All right, so go ahead and listen to that interview. I hope that you enjoy. And I am so excited to see.
- [02:26]
Lucy
The blogs that you will create. I want to get into that a little bit more, into the importance of, of blogs a little bit more, I think, for us, I mean, at least, I have felt like this has been the year of the blog. I feel like, you know, when we very, very first, I'm talking like year one, we were doing blogs. That's what we did constantly. And Huffington Post was still like a big thing. And so we were, we were Blogging. And then we sent an email out, and those were all just straight up handwritten blogs, you know, that we were like, writing out and editing. Like, you were in comp one.
- [03:16]
Daniela
It was your time and so much time.
- [03:20]
SEO Specialist
Midnight to.
- [03:21]
Lucy
Oh, my God. And you're like researching all of this stuff and how am I pulling these? I mean, it was like a ton of work. And then I remember thinking, and now I have to write an email to send also. And I have to do this every single week. And that was just to get people on my email list so that maybe they would buy something. Yeah, right.
- [03:47]
Daniela
I've got to do all of this.
- [03:50]
Lucy
And then in 2018, we launched the podcast, which made my life infinitely easier because I can talk all day long. I can talk all day long. That's not a problem. But the writing and the perfectionism that goes into writing is. Am I going to use an Oxford comma? Am I going to use a semicolon now with chat and its dashes, you know, loves a dash.
- [04:16]
SEO Specialist
That's probably a pro tip we should share in here is chat loves a dash. So if you find that it is giving you a lot of dashes, you can prompt it to say, please remove.
- [04:27]
Lucy
Remove the dash. I am like, so one of the things that we always put on our task board is put human eyes on it. And that's just a task that maybe that looks a little bit weird or feels a little bit weird, but we are. We say put human eyes on it. And it's in being an AI first company, we're going to have AI do the first draft and then we go through and we put human eyes on it and we read it and we make sure that there's not 700 dashes, and we make sure that it actually is true in what it's saying is aligned with what we believe and follow the direction that we gave it. So that's definitely an important piece of the puzzle as you're going through and training. But to get into blogs and the year of the blog, you know, a lot of times in marketing, this is actually one of the reasons that we decided to do the print magazine is there's just so much on digital and there's so many people that now because you can create content so easily, people, there's gonna be a heck of a lot more content out there. And we saw that where people were blogging and then everybody went to podcasting. There was a lot of people podcasting. And I was like, I think the blog is gonna come back that people can Just read. Right. And read what they want to read. With the print magazine, we've got a lot of pen and paper kind of people in our world that are still doing paper planners. And like I've got my highlight, my color coded highlighters right there. Like that's, that's our people. And so for us, like we got so many requests to have the print magazine and I actually, I love it. I love having the print magazine too. Okay, so the year of the blog. The year of the blog is important because I do think that this is one of the, the most tactical things that you can do if you're trying to improve SEO. There's obviously SEO, like headers and meta descriptions and, and things like this formatting side of it. Formatting, yes. But the more content, every time you post something new to your website, there's going, there's these directories, like I'm not an SEO expert, but there's these directories that get posted to. And that's what Google and all of these other search engines are looking for to see how up to date is this site. How long are people hanging out on this site? Because they're trying, they're looking at those metrics to analyze how relevant this piece of content is. So if you're consistently posting blog posts that are speaking to your ica, that have your town's name in it, that have like the, the keywords of the things that they might be searching for, the likelihood of that coming up on page one increases the more frequently that you're doing it. What do you know about SEO? What's your.
- [07:45]
SEO Specialist
Yeah, what I was going to piggyback off with you is the, when you were talking about the pages, it's indexing it.
- [07:52]
Daniela
Indexing.
- [07:52]
SEO Specialist
Okay, then also will be applicable to your overall like authority. Sc so basically that's how much does Google trust you? So the. I think the most important thing that I have learned about websites is that it's a living, breathing document. And a lot of us see it as a static thing where it's like, okay, I've got my services, I've got my prices, I've got my team up there and now we're good. And I'll change it if I change prices or I'll change it if like I add a service. But other than that, we're good to go. And that's not necessarily the case because it's another, what we want to call a storefront. It's essentially living and breathing as your business evolves. So what I think our website does really well is technically we have two blog pages because the podcast is considered what would be a blog on a website. So that is updated every single Monday and then the blog is updated every single Tuesday. Meaning Google is constantly getting a new link from us to index and then it's reassessing our authority score within our industry. So the trust that you're building with the search engine is extremely important. And I know it might seem confusing, but it's essentially like the more active you are and the more you're giving your content to the search engine, the likelihood increases that it's going to recommend you and show that you are a trustworthy business, essentially. And I think that's probably like a easy 101 type way to explain that, because there's way more that obviously goes into it. And, and we know that. And we're. We don't claim to be SEO experts. Like, we. I know a good bit about websites, but obviously we have discussion.
- [09:47]
Lucy
We invest. Yeah, we invest in SEO as well. We work with HLM and have worked them for years to invest in our SEO. And SEO is a long game. It's not something that happens overnight that is like, oh, I'm gonna start paying this company. And, and like, what is it actually that you're doing? And I don't know, I don't.
- [10:12]
SEO Specialist
Habitual practices that you can control and do yourself is what's important to understand so.
- [10:22]
Daniela
Well, and to leave. Yeah, to leave that to the.
- [10:26]
Lucy
Like. Yeah, I don't know all of the things that are going on, but I don't need to know all of the.
- [10:34]
SEO Specialist
There was at one point the practice was Google Business Profile was also like a social media platform. And so whatever you were posting on Facebook, you needed to take that. This was in 20. This was in 2020. And I was working at a sports complex.
- [10:49]
Lucy
Oh, when it was G plus, it was G. I remember that from the.
- [10:53]
SEO Specialist
SEO expert that we were working with. Like, whatever you post on social, also posted on Google Business, like in your profile, because that's also a living, breathing document. And the more you upload, like the services that your sports complex is offering, it's just going to continue to learn more about you. So if you kind of see your website as almost like feeding Google the information that it needs from you, that's kind of like how I've always viewed it is the more you give to it, the more it's going to know and essentially you're going to become more of a trusted source on the Internet.
- [11:28]
Lucy
That's a really important piece and we think about that too of just the same way that we are. That's essentially how you're training these AI tools as well, right? Like the more content. Yeah, the more content you give it, the more feedback you give it on what works and what doesn't work. That's going to make the content that it puts out so much better.
- [11:56]
SEO Specialist
Obviously you want it to be the most relevant, the most up to date. So I think it's pretty self explanatory to say like don't give it five years ago descriptions of your services like make sure those things are updated as you've evolved. But you can ask it like I ask chat pretty frequently before I start this project with you. Do you have a best understanding of the atto aesthetics company info? And sometimes I will ask it that to repeat back to me. So I'm not just always up uploading the company info. I want to make sure that my custom GPT is giving me the most up to date information.
- [12:36]
Lucy
I still upload it every time I do, I do. But I'll copy and paste. Yeah.
- [12:41]
SEO Specialist
Yes, I copy and paste. And then I ask like, okay, do you have a good understanding of this? And then it'll usually give me like some debrief document of something that I've already uploaded, which is good.
- [12:52]
Lucy
Yeah. I say, I give it the instructions. I say, do you understand? And please ask me any questions you have to make this an exceptional document.
- [13:03]
SEO Specialist
And I think the fact that you're saying that I think that's a lot of things that people don't know is that it will ask you questions.
- [13:11]
Lucy
Oh, every time they didn't ask me.
- [13:12]
SEO Specialist
Like seven questions, it's a one sided conversation. They think, oh, I asked the questions and it answers no. You can say I've uploaded this document, like what, what's confusing about it? Or like what questions would be helpful to clarify details. And it'll, it'll come up with like five bullet points of questions and I think that's probably something that a lot of people might be missing.
- [13:35]
Lucy
Yeah, it's sometimes, especially with Sintra I use. So Sintra will Penn will ask me like millions of questions and I'll answer them all and then I'll be like, just to be clear, da da da da. And I'm like, come on Pen, just show me your draft.
- [13:56]
SEO Specialist
Don't be overanalyzing.
- [13:58]
Lucy
All right.
- [13:59]
Daniela
I hope that this conversation gave you some practical ideas for how to approach blogging and, and SEO in your spa and such an important thing to remember that your website is a living, breathing document, okay? It's not something that you set and forget. So really hold yourself accountable. Whether you're using Monday.com, whether or whatever type of project management software you're using, make sure that you have check ins.
- [14:27]
Lucy
With yourself to update the website to.
- [14:31]
Daniela
Make sure that everything is accurate on your website, on your blog post, on your podcast episodes, on your Google business profile. All of these things that are going to help you to come up in search. And remember, you want to come up in search so that you can attract new clients or patients into your business.
- [14:51]
Lucy
All right?
- [14:52]
Daniela
Now, with the AI tools that are available out there, if you know how to use them correctly, there's really no excuse to not get this done. It is so quick and easy when you have AI creating that first draft for you, but you've got to put human eyes on it. You've got to make sure that it's aligned with your voice and your values.
- [15:12]
Lucy
And you've got to make sure that.
- [15:13]
Daniela
It has that human component.
- [15:15]
Lucy
All right?
- [15:16]
Daniela
So again, we're an AI first company, but we always put those human eyes on to make sure that, that it has that softness, that aliveness, the. The different isms that you have in your business. All right? So I hope you found this episode helpful and if you did, come hang out with me in the Spa Marketing Made Easy Facebook group. I am going live in there every Thursday at 11:00am Eastern Time. We've got some cool trainings and spa marketing school and we're actually going to start something cool in November. We are some laser coaching over in there and we get a lot of questions. A lot of people are submitting questions to us either in the DMs or sending us emails. And we decided that it would be really fun to start just answering those questions live over in the Spa Marketing Made Easy Facebook group. So if you have a question that you want me to answer, send us a dm, send us an email, let us know and we just might pick your question to get answered. So few more spa marketing schools going in October and then in November, we're going to start with our laser coaching series to make sure that we're getting your questions answered. So be sure to be in the group. We've got a link below this episode. Come hang out with me over there. And I cannot wait to see your blogs and what you're doing with AI in your business.