No Such Thing as “Ready”: BTS of Julia’s Mini SEO Audit
📝 SEO isn’t something you need to have things perfect in order to take action on.
There are various hesitations that show up when a business owner is thinking about doing SEO, but isn’t quite ready to do so.
Time, money, and…
Not feeling “ready.” 👀
I hate to break it to you—but there is no such thing as “ready” when it comes to SEO.
There’s having a website that’s set up to work for you and… not.
I have this conversation a lot, so I know it’s an important thing to speak to.
To really paint the picture of what can happen in a YEAR, I’m introducing you to Julia, a nutrition coach for women & moms who also weaves in mindset! And taking you behind-the-scenes of her recent Mini SEO Audit.
Tune in, take notes, & with this one—remember you’re so not alone.
Topics covered in this podcast episode:
Hesitations before “starting” SEO
Why it’s better to have some SEO strategy vs it being “perfect”
What I actually review in a mini SEO audit
The deliverables you get in a mini SEO audit
How the mini SEO audit supports you & your business
Mentioned Resources:
SEO Offers & Services:
Join SEO & Grow 🌱 (the 3-month group coaching program, starting again in March)
Sign up for DFY Website SEO (typically books 1-2 months in advance)
»» Fill out the inquiry form to book a discovery call
Related Episodes:
SEO & Grow Graduate Case Study Interview w/ Dr Cecily Moore (therapist & coach)
Done-with-you SEO Support Case Study Interview w/ Justin Blackman (brand voice strategist)
Connect w/ Brittany:
This episode of The Basic B podcast is brought to you in partnership w/ Leah Bryant Co.! Help me reach more service providers like you by following the show & leaving a rating or review on Apple & Spotify!
The unedited podcast transcript for this episode of The Basic B podcast follows
Hello and welcome back to The Basic B Podcast. I'm your host and favorite SEO coach, Brittany Herzberg. Today, I want to be real direct, just go straight for it, and speak to one of the biggest hesitations I find clients encounter with SEO. And actually, I wouldn't even say clients, because this hesitation pops up before leads turn into clients. It's something that keeps them stuck and can often keep them stuck for quite a while. And by stuck, I mean not getting leads from Google,
not seeing their program fill up like they hoped it would, not growing their email list or podcast like they really want to. With love, it's often because you're not putting out the bat signal, which is exactly what SEO helps you do. So much of the time our bat signal is dependent on us going on Instagram, sharing the content, doing the thing, saying the thing. But SEO enables these pages and these things to work for you and to go out and market for you.
It seemed the best way for me to paint the picture of this would be to share a real story. So with that in mind, meet Julia. You're going to hear so much about her and what she does. So for now, I'm just going to share that she's a nutrition coach for women and moms who also weaves in mindset. It's really fascinating. Now, there are various hesitations that show up when a business owner is thinking about doing SEO,
but still not quite ready to do so. We've got budget, which is why I have options that range from free to low ticket to done with you to done for you. There's also time, which is also why I've got options that range from free to low ticket to done with you and done for you. And then we've got the one that I hear almost weekly. I'm not ready for SEO.
And this is where Julia was a full year ago. She was refining her messaging, her offer suite, and her business in general, really. We talked about SEO, and she was interested, and she even shared that she'd be most interested in done for you. Then the conversation petered out, which is cool. No worries. It totally happens. No big deal. I remember one thing we kept circling back to, though, was that Julia was not feeling like she had things clear enough yet.
And I feel like I can say this because Julia and I are on a very similar page here where there are perfectionist tendencies, ⁓ another word that kind of gets thrown around is like high achievers. All or nothing thinking, that kind of thing. And this is something that is not specific to me or specific to her, but this comes up quite often in a lot of different circles that I run and a lot of different people that I connect with.
So if you're also feeling like you have to have things all the way figured out before you do SEO, just know that that's not the case.
Julia was still working on her message at that time. She was getting even more clear, even on her ideal client, all of those types of things. She was like, I'm not there yet. And I've heard this from other people too. So she was concerned that I wouldn't have what I would need to move forward with SEO and with keyword research until she had everything nailed down and it was perfectly nailed down and it could be said flawlessly on a podcast interview. But here's the thing. She did have her who, how and what clear enough and
know that because she would share a line with me and I would say something back like, so you work with these people and you have these offers right? And my answer would be right in line with who she wanted to attract and work with. One thing I like to remind all, every single one of us, me included, all business owners of is this. It's better to have some SEO strategy in place versus it being perfect.
When you have nothing in place, the robots are going to take guesses at who you help, how you help people, and what you're known for. And their guesses are not always good ones. But when you have something in there, even if it feels rough or not quite right, the robots can start getting a sense of what you do and sending the right people your way. OK, let's get back to Julia. So every once in a while, we'd resume this SEO conversation.
Then I heard Julia was expecting her first baby and SEO entered the chat again, in a really powerful way too. I mean, here she is very close to becoming a mom and having her time and her life wildly shift. She's thinking, what can I do to get my site to actually work for me and maybe even sell this new self-paced course I have while I'm away?
And that's another thing too. She wants to shine a light right now on her self-paced course while she's on maternity leave. And then she wants to do more one-to-one coaching in a few months. And later this year, she knows she wants to host a group program. That's amazing. And her SEO strategy can morph to match whatever season she's in.
but we've got to get something going for her site so it can have a chance to start working for her, especially during this season while she's away becoming a mom, learning this new life. So my suggestion, knowing the background that so many business owners have with previous investments that didn't feel good or previous SEO pros that some maybe didn't have the best interaction with, maybe certain things weren't delivered. Like we all have those stories.
So my thought was to start with a mini SEO audit.
This is specifically designed for someone to get a taste of 1. What it's like to do SEO and 2. What it's actually like to work with me. It's a low-ish ticket offer, which is currently priced at $77 and it packs a punch. You get a high level view of what's going on with your site. What does the traffic look like? What are the keywords that the robots are associating with your site? As well as what does the SEO strategy currently look like for your homepage? I'm checking things like your SEO title, your meta description, and your
H1 heading. So you purchase the mini SEO audit, you answer a few questions, I review your site, do some keyword research, and create a three-part SEO strategy for your home page that you then plug in.
You get the Google Doc, which has the audit, the keyword research, the SEO strategy, and even a video explainer so you know what you're looking at and video tutorials so you get everything plugged in in like five to 10 minutes. Again, all for $77. So let's go a little bit more behind the scenes. I'm going to pull up Julia's audit and I'll take you through it. And she actually implemented everything this morning. So I'm really excited to see how this is going to work for her site. Okay. So over on
her Google Doc and this is the same for everyone.
whoever you are, whenever you get this mini SEO audit. There's some kind of introduction at the top. There's a video where it says start here and that is the video explainer of the Google Doc. And then we get into the review of the site as a whole. And I will tag these, but the tools that I like using, I prefer to use tools that you can also use. So I often have free tool suggestions. So Ubersuggest, the free Chrome extension is one that I look at here at this part of the process. Then there's also the free SEMrush account.
that you can get and also the free detailed chrome extension detailed seo chrome extension so i'm looking at all those things and what i'm able to pull together for her report for this seo for this website part of the review is i've got the traffic and i can see that there's a little bit of a wave happening same thing with her keywords so i actually mentioned this to her and she was like that's when i moved my site so i wonder if that maybe impacted the traffic somehow and this is one of the cool things that happens
with the audits is I call something out and then the business owner is like yeah this thing happened so you can start to see how your actions impact your website and then also what positive things we want to like reinforce and do so that hopefully we have these positive signals this positive sign from the data
And this also is very gently starting you off to help you see how you can interpret the data and what we can look for and then what we can use the data to do in the future. So that is one thing. Then it gets into this section where if people have keywords that their website is ranking for and not everyone does, but if someone has keywords that their website is ranking for, I include a screenshot so they can see what the keywords are. And something I noticed that was coming up with Julia's was like,
Bachelorette in Florida 30 a bachelorette party rosemary beach bachelorette I don't know what this is but I know that Julia doesn't like plan bachelorette parties so I made a note and she actually said that it was a blog post and clearly this blog post was something that the robots just like cloned on to and they were like this she's known for bachelorette stuff and she's not so her question which was a really good question
After she got this audit and she was looking through it and leaving comments for me, she's like, should I delete this blog post? Because clearly it's bringing lots of traffic in for that and that's not what she wants to get found for. So that's something that we were able to talk out in the comments and that's the type of questions that I get back from people once they have these audits. let's see other keywords and then, okay, so we looked at the whole website, just overview the traffic, the keywords, that type of thing. And if you end up walking yourself even through this mini audit, one thing
to ask yourself when you see keywords, if you see keywords, is this question. Are these keywords that I actually want to show up for? Are these keywords that someone who could be a potential client of mine would be looking up? Really, really sit with that because some of these are going to be like this bachelorette party and it's gonna be like, yeah, no. It's really not.
Alright, so the next part of the audit gets into like, here's the website page, here's info from the form. So I like to ask people if they know their who, how, and what. I like to ask them for that because then I can do a better job with keyword research, with putting together this SEO strategy. But I am able to do it if people don't have those answers. I would say though, like 95 % of the time people are like, yeah, here's the answers. Because they've listened to me or they've been sent to me some way, shape, or form.
After that information is brought over, also then take a screenshot from that detailed SEO extension of what the current SEO title and meta description look like.
And if you've been in my world for a while, you'll know that these things actually show up as like angry red bubbles or it will say something is missing. So the angry red bubbles show up if something is too short or too long. In this case, the description was a bit too long. It was 174 characters. So that had an angry red bubble and I was able to explain that to Julia in the video.
After I have that screenshot is where I go into the keyword research. So at this point I'm assessing if there are any keywords that actually make sense for her website to show up for and one that she was ranking for is her name. However...
people don't necessarily know to type in our names. They don't know Brittany Herzberg in SEO. have to have that figured out for them at some point. what I encourage business owners to do is to utilize the SEO title in the meta description with things other than your name. I put your name on your about page, but on those other pages, it's really like, what are you? Who are you? Why are people coming to you? Who do you help? What offers do you have? Which is why I ask those questions, which is why I really
don't want anyone to pass go without having the answers to those questions. So keywords have been researched, they are plugged in, and then I use those to create an SEO strategy for that page, for that homepage. So I have target keywords selected and then I have the SEO title, the meta description, the current H1 headline, and then the suggested H1 headline. I'm going to share with you the SEO title and the meta description, which I was actually pretty surprised that Julia was like, my gosh, this is great. And she plugged it in.
immediately, because since we had had so many back and forth conversations, I thought perhaps she would want to talk some of that stuff out, because sometimes there are business owners where they're like, well, what about this? Well, what about that? But actually, even as I say that, a lot of people who get these mini SEO audits are like, oh, yeah, cool, I'm going to take it and run with it. But there are sometimes where there's questions like one or two questions. OK, so for the SEO title, which, you know, has to stick within that 40 to 60 character limit,
It says, sustainable weight loss for women, mindset and nutrition coaching. I really, really, really wanted to weave in that mindset piece because that is something that Julia has gotten so clear on and even just in our like behind the scenes DM conversations, she's talking about like rewiring your thinking, rewiring your thoughts. So I wanted to make sure that was in there. And it also had a really good search volume. And then for the meta description, which needs to be 140 to 155 characters, it says this.
They're all or nothing thinking shut up their inner mean girl fix their diet and finally get a body They feel confident in because of it. So I love this and pro tip which I think I've mentioned before on the podcast When I'm writing meta descriptions for my clients, I will very often go to that web page So if it's the home page, I'm looking at the home page if it's the services page I'm looking at that services page and I'm looking for a section that's one to two sentences that really embodies like their vibe how they
talk and what is it that I'm gonna find on this page. So that is a line straight from her home page and I was like this is so perfect. Then one of the notes that I will often make for clients in these many audits is that there are often more than one h1 headline on that page.
I've shared it before. think I had like eight or nine on my page when I first started doing SEO and we want one. So Julia happened to have three and one of them was like a ticker banner that was going across her homepage and she had no idea that she could change the formatting. So I was able to point out that she could change the formatting and she took it from an H1 to just normal paragraph text. So we were able to do that and I actually really liked her H1 so I suggested that she leave it. And then the very very bottom of the page
which is the same on everyone's Mini Audit.
are the two tutorials. one of them shows you how to plug in the SEO strategy into the backend of your website. I use my Squarespace site as an example. And then I tell people how they can tag me in a comment if they have any questions, which many people do opt for that. So please know that if you have a question, definitely follow up with me. And then the final tutorial is how you actually submit this page for indexing to Google Search Console. And I even point out how to make sure you have a site map submitted to Google Search Console.
So they get these video walkthroughs, which I kind of just did for you in audio form. People will often either write an email response back to me with a question or just saying thank you, or they'll leave comments in the Google Doc, or they'll leave comments in the Loom video.
The mini SEO audit is a small offer and it has helped so many business owners do things like increase traffic to their site, start ranking for keywords they actually want to be associated with, and yes, even book discovery calls sell digital products and sell physical products too.
It was really designed to give you a taste of what SEO is like and what it's like to work with me. By no means is this a final stop, but if you're on a budget or if you just need help with that new website you launched or even a sales page or you want to see if SEO could help drive traffic to that new product, this is definitely a good starting point. And as you're ready to move on to bigger and even more impactful things, that's when you can get the SEO basics course or join SEO and grow, which is the group coaching program, or
you sign up for Done For You website SEO, which I would say typically books out one to two months in advance and it's starting to lean two months in advance. So if you even think that this is something that you might want this year, I would encourage you to fill out the inquiry form on my contact page sooner rather than later. If you have any questions, find me with those. I'm going to be over on Instagram. And remember, I'm always over here cheering you on on your SEO journey.
