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Foreign. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Kate show. It's episode 288. I can't believe I'm getting that close to 300 episodes. Oh, so much has happened since I launched this podcast in 2018, and today I'm going to talk about something that I have mentioned a few times on the podcast, but never to this level, never to this depth. And you might recall that a few episodes back, I mentioned that we at Socialite are now offering SEO services for the interior design community as well as adjacent industries. So all the huge, you know, home stagers and organizers and window treatment professionals. But I wanted to take today to break down what easier SEO for design looks like. I don't say easy SEO. There's no such thing as easy SEO. But it is easier. And after doing this for so many years and completing my own certification and just like really diving into it and of course, testing it on my own business first, because that's what I do. I don't use my clients as test subjects. I use my own business as a test subject. I have realized that just like other areas of marketing, SEO has been vastly, needlessly overcomplicated and therefore also quite expensive. And there's no reason for that. So today I'm breaking down easier SEO for designers. And with that, I have a question for you. Is your website bringing you the right leads or any leads at all? Now, a lot of the people I talked to were like, not really, or I get leads, but they suck. And if this is your situation, it could very well be that a lack of search engine optimization is to blame. Now, that is a good thing because it's actually pretty straightforward to fix. Today, I'm walking you through what our SEO transformation process looks like here at the Socialite agency. So. So if you're hoping to, like, DIY your SEO, you're going to learn a lot from this episode that you'll be able to go put into practice right away on your own site. But if you're trying to find someone you can trust who, number one, knows the home industry, number two, knows SEO, and number three, doesn't charge ongoing fees for silly things like keyword monitoring, you're going to love this episode, too. All right, so just getting right into it, I. I want to go over a few things that I have seen be the main issue for people in the home industry who are lacking good SEO. First off, the main elements of SEO are copywriting, site layout, loading speed, and user friendliness. Most websites have, quote, unquote, thin content issues. Which means they have less than 300 words on any given page. Now there is a trend to have a very minimal website, fewer words, and just, you know, focus on the images. But that is so harmful for SEO. I wish that people would stop promoting that like it's a good idea, because it's really not. Also, most websites have oversized images, which does definitely hurt loading speed. So even if you have your project professionally photographed and your photographer is super nice and he or she gives you web size versions of your photos, those are still not compressed enough for your website. So that is something to be mindful of. Also, most websites don't seem to have SEO titles or SEO descriptions. So Google is just pulling from whatever meager text it can find on your website to fill in those gaps. And it's probably pulling text that you didn't want pulled. So that's not helpful to you or to the clients who need to find you. Also, most websites are in general, they're just not optimized for SEO at all. Now if they are, they tend to stop at the technical SEO such as loading speed and tap targets. We'll talk more about what those are later. These sites are rarely optimizing each of their money pages, so their homepage, their about page, and all their services pages for a specific keyword. And they're not optimizing those pages for a specific keyword because they didn't do any keyword research and therefore they aren't sure which keywords to use. So they just cram tons of keywords into each page hoping that something will stick. But the truth is that nothing sticks and they get very frustrated. So this is where I kept running into a wall because I realized that my clients needed good SEO for their websites, but they were being told that it would cost them thousands of dollars a month to get good SEO. And it just doesn't have to be that expensive, it doesn't have to take that long. Like truly, even if your SEO is so crappy that you need a full new website that can be done as quickly as one month anyway. So it's kind of like I don't get it. I don't get what's going on here. I don't get why people are being so taken advantage of when it comes to SEO, especially in the home industry. I, I like to believe that a lot of it's just misconception, but I do know that some of it is price gouging and the fact that kind of like how the car mechanic, if he knows you don't know much about cars. He might tell you that you need to pay for things that you don't need. Unfortunately, that happens in the marketing industry too. And you guys know I am very much allergic to that nonsense. I am not here for it. I am here because I have your back. And people kept asking me over and over again, do you know an SEO company that I can work with? And I unfortunately have nothing but bad stories to share from clients. Who hired an SEO company, felt taken advantage of, didn't get any results from it, but spent a lot of money. And I'm like, surely, surely there has to be someone. And I frankly didn't even know where to start. And I started looking into SEO more and more, started incorporating it more frequently into the custom sites that we design, because what good is a beautiful website if it's not optimized for search engines, right? Also, there seems to be a lot of my website design colleagues who claim they're putting SEO elements into a site, but if I run it through an SEO, what is it called? Not a scanner, an analyzer, basically, it tells me all the things that are missing. And it's kind of disgusting because I'm like, my client paid for SEO and they didn't get SEO. That angers me, truly, it does. So finally I was like, I've had enough of this. I am going to officially make SEO part of my service offerings and, you know, get all my certifications because I've been practicing it in theory, but I want to be official now. I want to know all the ins and outs. I want to have all the nuts and bolts. I want to truly understand this. I'm going to test it on my own business, see how that goes, and make myself either a proof of concept or proof of failure. Thankfully, proof of concept is what we got out of it, and we are able to officially offer SEO services now. I've been offering them for a while, but it just hasn't been official. Okay, now it's official. So I want to tell you how we transform people's websites from the perspective of SEO for the design industry exclusively. Now, this is a very kind of step by step workflow podcast. So if you're looking for ideas, you're not going to find them here. You're just going to find actual steps. Before we get started with anyone's SEO project, we first get our own admin login to their website. And if this is something that you want to do with us, you'll need to give us access to your site. And you'll also need to purchase our one time SEO audit service. Now, after the audit is complete, you don't have to continue. You're going to have a report that shows you all the things that need to be fixed on your site, along with a range of fees and how to get those fixed and whatnot. I'll get into that, but it always starts with the one time audit. First, we're going to interview you about your business goals and your ideal client and your ideal project because we want to understand your vision for your business. We want to understand what are you trying to get out of your website because there are no two businesses, no two design businesses that are exactly the same. Then we start with a deep audit of your website by running it through various tools to check for loading speed, backlinks, domain authority, any keywords you might already be ranking for, and we will make note of that. Next, we're going to check your traffic sources as much as we're able to through your on site analytics. Now at this point it is helpful to have access to your Google Analytics and Google Search console for this part, but that's optional and it's okay if you don't have those tools set up yet. If we end up working together on your SEO, you'll definitely have those set up. The next step is that we're going to check your website copywriting against the ideal client avatar you're trying to reach. We'll have obtained your ideal client and ideal project info from you by now to make sure that, number one, it's obvious through your copywriting who you're targeting and what problems you solve and how your client's life will be impacted by working with you. Now this is essentially following the infamous storybrand framework as made possible by Donald Miller. I am not certified in storybrand, but storybrand, ironically is the same method that we've been following in my agency for years before storybrand was a thing, because the cool thing that Donald Miller did was he took the best marketing secrets and made them digestible. For people who hadn't been working in the marketing industry for years and years now, that would have definitely helped me out early in my business, but that didn't exist early in my business. You know, his book didn't exist yet. So I kind of had to figure it out the long way, the hard way, but I'm grateful for it. And now at least when I say story brand, you guys might have a good idea of like, okay, I know what she's talking about. The next step after we look at the copywriting is we produce a comprehensive report that summarizes the audit. The report will clearly list the issues on your site, what needs to be fixed, and a range of fees associated with those fixes. So, again, we're looking at copywriting, keywords, user friendliness, tap targets, headlines loading speed, image sizes, and often at this point, our clients will start with their most critical site issues first, or they'll complete some of the fixes themselves, or they'll ask for a payment plan if they want to move forward with us. And of course, we're happy to accommodate all of these situations. I'm not here to send you a huge invoice. I'm here to help you get your website SEO fixed. That way you can get back to focusing on your business. Because being burdened by SEO and always wondering, is my SEO good? Has anything I've done really helped it? That's stressful, okay? It's taking up creative real estate in your brain. So my goal is to get you feeling confident again, and I want you to have a concrete reason to feel confident, and that is knowing beyond the shadow of a doubt that you finally have good SEO for your website. Now let's get into the actual SEO work. So let's say you hired us to do the audit and you got your report and you looked through it and you decided what parts you want us to tackle, what parts you thought maybe you could tackle on your own, and you're ready to just move forward. Well, I can tell you right now that nearly all websites suffer from a lack of copywriting that speaks to their ideal client. And unfortunately, this impacts the other SEO elements of their website, including the SEO title, SEO description, headings, image, alt, text, page layout. Because page layout is often dictated by the amount of text it holds. So we start with the copywriting and the keyword research, allowing us to rewrite the money pages of your site. And again, the money pages are home, about and all your services pages. And from there, we optimize each page for a specific keyword or keyword phrase. Now, each page can be optimized for only one primary keyword, and it's important that we choose that keyword wisely, which is why the keyword research is something that we definitely can't skip. Optimizing for keywords while also following the tried and true and quite profitable story brand framework is no light task like disclaimer. I got a headache yesterday and a kink in my neck after working on this for a client. But it was so worth it. So worth it. I'm so Proud of it. I'm so excited to present it to the client. Now you might be like, wait a minute, I don't really know what the seven Step Story Brand Framework is. And basically it's the fancy name for a method that my agency's been using for years. But again, thank you, Donald Miller, for writing a book about it and laying it out in a way that everyone can follow with a little bit of practice. Basically, the seven steps are this. Number one, a character, your client. Number two, a problem, their pain point and their negative emotion. Number three, a guide that's you and your empathetic brand. Number four, a plan so your services, what they do, how they help, the pain point, how the client will feel as a result of working with you. And then a call to action, how the client can take action on your services, the process, workflow, how it works, whatever you want to call it. And then number six is avoid failure. So how your client will continue suffering if they don't work with you. Kind of like a nice before and after comparison. And number seven, a success, what life will look like after they work with you. Now, this shouldn't just be implemented in website copywriting, but it should be implemented on pretty much every piece of marketing content you create. You can even apply this in a single ad, which actually can't have tons of text, but your website absolutely should have a significant amount of text because it's impossible to convey all of this appropriately on your website, which is the mothership of your brand if you're too afraid of having words on your site. But there's a lot more to SEO beyond just copywriting and keywords. Once copywriting is complete, we're going to apply the appropriate keywords to all website images, compress those images to increase loading speed, and we will make sure that the visual representation of your images won't be impacted. Your images are not going to look like garbage, which is very important for designers because you guys need to showcase your work on your website and not make it look low quality. But then we move into the other big element, which is SEO for user experience. So we move into this, which has everything to do with the layout and design of each page, even the non money pages. So if you have an FAQ page, for example, that's not a money page, but it should still look good and be really easy to navigate and use. We will incorporate the new copywriting everywhere that it needs to be. We will rearrange, add or remove elements, add calls to action and buttons that lead people further into your website and we'll be double checking our updates against our SEO tools the whole way to make sure that we are visibly and analytically improving the SEO of your website. It's not just about having a website that ranks well, but that ranks well for specific keywords that your ideal clients are searching for. But as any good business owner, you're probably like, okay, so let's just say I do do this myself or I hire someone else. How do I know if it's working? How do I track this? Well, here's what you need to do. After you or we at Socialite or any other SEO specialist revamps your SEO, you need to set a monthly reminder for yourself to check your Google Analytics and your search console. If you don't have those things set up prior to us working with you, I can assure you you have them by now and we've personally walked you through how to make sense of them. Because what good is all the data if you don't understand it? You're going to be checking for which pages are getting the most traffic and where your traffic is coming from. Direct URL will always be in your top three and organic search should start appearing up there as well. If not be number one. You will also need to do some practical things like add a line to your contact form that allows people to explain how they found you so through a referral, through a Google search, et cetera. And you could also do keyword monitoring that can be helpful, but it's not worth paying us or any other SEO company to accomplish. Simply set up your own keyword monitoring and let it run. We can help you get that set up, but again, it's not something that's so complicated that you need to pay someone to monitor for you. All right guys, so that is how we approach SEO for interior designers and all those related industries. And I am excited. I'm excited because I know the home industry needs this and I'm excited to offer it in such a way that is practical, that doesn't result in a ongoing monthly fees aside from any sort of payment plan that somebody might want just to make it more digestible, which I totally understand. But this is practicality in action. This is you taking responsibility for your website SEO without being taken advantage of. And that's pretty darn cool. All right guys, if you have any questions about your website SEO, if you just want some more resources, if you'd like to hear about some of the tools that we use, please reach out to me. You can go to katesocialite.com to get in touch. Look through my blog posts. I've got lots of information on there that people have told me is quite helpful. So guys, until next time, keep your marketing simple, your message clear and I will talk to you soon.