How to Avoid These 3 SEO Mistakes
I see service providers make these SEO mistakes all the time—but that doesn’t mean you need to make them to learn from them!
You’ve heard me say that SEO is the equivalent of “extra credit” for business owners. But the truth is… you aren’t just born with this knowledge! You have to go out and learn this new skill or hire someone with this skill set. But what red flags should you be looking for? What mistakes should you be aware of? And how can you avoid them? Don’t worry, friend! I’ve got you.
I’m using this podcast episode to highlight the 3 SEO mistakes I see way too often & how you can avoid them. Without further ado—click that play button!
With this podcast episode:
Learn what SEO metrics you *should* be aiming for to increase traffic.
Discover questions you need to be asking your SEO agency or provider.
Uncover the hidden truth about blogging, SEO, sales, and conversions.
Don’t forget you can submit a question that will get answered in an upcoming podcast!
Mentioned Resources:
Keyword Research Tutorial (YouTube video)
How to Blog w/ SEO (email course)
Ubersuggest (free Chrome extension)
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
Welcome back to the Short and Sassy series of the Basic Bee Podcast. These episodes are designed to be on the shorter side, to be super actionable, and about a variety of topics. And today, I am sharing the three most common SEO mistakes that I see in DMs, with clients, and everyday conversations, because yes, people actually talk to me about stuff and I've got a lot of business owners in my world. But these are the three most common mistakes I'm seeing, other than straight up just avoiding SEO.
And we're just going to get right into it, my friend. So the first mistake that I see is, and this is actually the DM that inspired this whole podcast episode because I was like, oh my gosh, I see this come through quite often. Let me just address it. The mistake is aiming for a high search volume. Here is why that is a problem that I want you to, and a mistake that I want you to not fall into, not fall prey to. So the DM that came in,
was, I'm paraphrasing because I don't have it pulled up right in front of me, but the DM that came in was something like, I've been doing keyword research and I have found all of these keywords and they have super high search volume and I'm so excited. And I had to respond back and be like, um, not to burst your bubble, but we really don't want to be aiming for a high search volume. And I have this tutorial all about keyword research, which I'll link below. And I sent this to the person and they came back and they're like, oh my gosh.
Thank you. I would have, you know, if I had implemented these keywords, I would have been like, SOL, and it would have been very, very bad. Or maybe not very, very bad. That's not a wonderful way to phrase it, but it wouldn't have helped them. Probably at all. Definitely not to the point where we want it to help you as a business owner to grow your business, get more visibility, all that good jazz. So high search volume in my world is going to be anything over 1,000. And let me.
reverse this train a little bit because I probably need to inform you about what search volume is. So let's say you're using my favorite tool, Ubersuggest. It's a free Chrome extension. There is a paid version unless you're going to turn into an SEO pro, like don't pay for the paid version. Not a knock on it. It's just not the best use of your money. So there's a free Chrome extension. You can plug it in. I will link that below as well. And when you use this tool, when you're doing keyword research.
Brittany Herzberg (02:25.334)
which keyword research is basically just going to Google, typing in a keyword, hitting enter, Uber suggests we'll be there on the right side of your screen, giving you three different pieces of information. The only one I want you to pay attention to is the one that says VOL for volume. And what search volume is, what that VOL volume is telling you, is on average each month, how many humans are going to Google or other search engines like Bing and typing in these phrases. How many people are...
actively looking for answers when they're typing in these things. If that number is over a thousand in my world, that is going to be too big. And why is that going to be too big? Because if you use a word like copywriting, or massage, or windows, if you're just using those one words, oftentimes you're going to end up with search volume, search results, there we go, that are in the millions. There are loads of answers that are going to populate.
I don't even know how many pages that correlates to, but if you were to search through all of them, you're going to be sitting there for a hot minute. So what it does when you end up with those higher search volume results, over a thousand, you end up being a small fish in a big pond and practically that means that you're going to be buried on like page five, page six, page seven, page eight. You're going to end up all the way down in the search results. And most people aren't like me where if I want to find something specific, I will.
go to page four, five. I've done that before. If I'm looking for a certain answer or if I'm not getting the answer I really hope, or if I really just like am looking for that person or that message that I connect with, I will go and search. Not everyone's gonna do that. In fact, most people are not going to do that. So the good, better, best is not to be over a thousand, but the good or the better, I guess, is to be in the search volume of zero to a thousand.
And the best option is to be in the search volume of 0 to about 100. And what that does is that lets you be a bigger fish in a smaller pond. That lets you end up with more of those warm to hot leads where they are really looking for help, really looking for answers. And if they're presented with you, there's a higher likelihood that they're going to buy from you, book with you, ask you a question, book a call, whatever that thing is for you, whatever that action step is for you.
Brittany Herzberg (04:49.898)
So that is what you should be doing. Aiming for a search volume of zero to a thousand at least, zero to a hundred would be even better. So that is thing one. Thing two is, or mistake two, is hiring an agency. Hiring an agency, hold on.
I have to cut that out.
Brittany Herzberg (05:19.68)
Mistake two is hiring an agency or an SEO expert to do the work, but not knowing how to really use their skills and their expertise and their time and their knowledge. Not knowing how to use them, if you will. And to be clear, to be super transparent here, this is something where the burden, quote unquote, the burden.
is on the service provider. So let's say you and I are working together. You've hired me to do an SEO packet for you. That burden is on me to take care of and help you navigate this process. I would love if that happened all the time, but let's just be real, that doesn't happen. So I want to make sure that you're prepared. I want you to be clear on what's going to work for you. Best case scenario.
How much time do you want to invest into this? How involved do you want to be? What kind of explanations do you want even? Do you want someone to really break it down and send you really, really long emails? Do you want them to send you long loom videos? Do you want to get on a Zoom call with them? Do you have the time to get on a Zoom call with them? Do you want them to just give you like the high level bullets of like, these are the things I found, these are some action items you could take, here are the results that you'll get if you do these things.
What does that look like for you? And really get clear on what that looks like for you, again, in an ideal world, before ideally, before working with a service provider, before hiring an SEO expert. It would be lovely if you would have these questions in mind, hopefully I'm catching many of you before you go into the hiring process, maybe you're just like kind of looking around and trying to find out who might be a good fit, what that deliverable, what that project would look like.
That would be ideal, right? But you could also put this into play, into action, if you're already working with someone. If you've already worked with an agency or an SEO provider where things just like didn't pan out, it wasn't a great experience, one, know that you're not alone. I have this happen a lot, and this happened in my massage practice too, where my clients often, for both businesses, would go and have negative experiences, and then I'm over here inheriting
Brittany Herzberg (07:39.754)
the distrust that they have in the industry or with those providers. And it's really sad. It breaks my heart. And all I want to do is be like, nope, that was like a bad situation, a negative scenario. I'm so sorry that happened. This is how it can be if it's a good positive happy situation scenario. And it takes a lot of trust and it takes a lot of guts and bravery to be willing to go and try to work with someone else again. So kudos to you for being open to it or
you know, possibly being open to it in the future, but I'll get off my soapbox. You're not alone and everything can be salvageable. So whether that's with working with a different provider, whether that's by just asking some clarifying questions while you're working with a current provider or agency, like there's hope. Okay. So figuring out how much you want to do and how involved you want to be in the process is going to be key. Figure that out first. And then as you're talking to maybe interviewing, maybe just kind of like
figuring out, sussing out providers, then you can go, okay, I can give a little bit in this area. I could meet you halfway with this. I could do that or no, my boundary is firm on this. I can't, I don't want to do blank. So whatever that thing is, some questions that you can think through to ask them, maybe you're gonna do like jot these down and ask an SEO agency or provider as you're talking to different people. I'll just like list them for you. What specifically am I getting?
So what are those deliverables? What does the project look like? What have you seen work for your clients? That's gonna be huge. And if they have case studies, we're just gonna like love that a little bit more, right? What is your process or method or framework? This way you'll get their spin on it, their unique take on it, and that's always really pretty cool. Why are you recommending X? What's the thought process here? I also want to go back to that first question with what specifically am I getting?
More than likely, you're gonna get a proposal. It's gonna list some stuff out. But then again, the number of times that people are like, I don't know what this means, I'm not clear. And they're asking me as a friend or as a, maybe they're coming to me and I'm the second or third person that they're talking to. If you don't feel like you can ask that potential SEO agency or SEO provider that you're gonna work with, if you don't feel like you can ask them these questions, that might not be a good fit for you.
Brittany Herzberg (10:03.026)
Or if you ask them and they give you the brush off or they don't give you the time of day or whatever, if you have a good, sorry, if you have a bad feeling about it, listen to that because the people I've talked with had a bad feeling and they went ahead anyway and they were deeply, deeply sorry that they did that. So just some stuff to think through. All right. Mistake number three.
It's partially my favorite. We have a love-hate relationship over here. No, I really only love it. Mistake number three is thinking you can get away without blogging. Really? That like, really? SEO requires you to keep feeding information to the search engines so that the robots can make sense of what you do and then put you in front of the right people and the people can feel confident that you're gonna help them and that you are trained and qualified to help them.
There's a three part process to improving your SEO. Part one is to fix the issues or the errors with your SEO, which you'll find in an SEO audit in my work that is found in the SEO packet. I used to offer them as one-off offers, but I've really realized in the last few months that I can't offer that as a standalone offer. It's only gonna be in that SEO packet because we figure out what the issues and errors are. We're able to go in and fix those.
And then step two to the three part process is to create content blogs. I'm not talking about going and creating a medium profile or a sub stack. Please for the love of everything. If you're creating long form content and it's going to be a blog, it's going to be written. Put that on your website. You need that SEO juice. Medium is doing just fine. They don't need that. Sub stack does not need that. You, your website, your business, you need that. Okay, off my soapbox again.
But if you're doing like YouTube, of course, YouTube is the second most used search engine. Go use YouTube. Go put videos out there. Do a podcast. Hint, hint. If that's how you like to get content out there. But especially if you're doing written content, blogs, not a medium profile, not a sub stack. Thank you. Moving on. Part three, get some backlinks. Backlinks are when other websites send people to your website. So that would be like...
Brittany Herzberg (12:24.874)
my me, I do this actually, that would be like me writing a blog where I'm like, oh, I used Leah's podcast roadmap to help me create this podcast, which I actually did. And we're going to be talking with Leah on the, on the podcast about the roadmap. I in a blog that I recently wrote, I linked out to Leah's website. I showed people, hey, this is where that roadmap is over on Leah's website. That's a backlink for Leah.
for her website where then I got a link to my website. So from Leah's website, you could come to mine. That's a backlink for me. So whenever you get a link from somewhere else to you, that is a backlink. Those are wonderful. They happen when you get on podcasts, when people do link to you from a blog. Sometimes this is paid, but it can also happen organically. And something I love doing when I write case studies for clients, but also as I am writing case studies about my clients.
where it gets like super meta and very confusing is I love having backlinks in there. So I'm writing a case study today actually and in the case study, which is going to live on my client's website, I'm linking out to their client. So my client is A. So the case study that's going to live on A's website then links out to their client B. Hopefully that makes sense. Sometimes it can get really confusing.
But you get backlinks and I found this very interesting because my website SEO started doing amazingly well, but I wasn't putting out blog content. I was finding the time to, you know, I was finding it hard to carve out the time and keep that time carved out where I would write blogs for my website, get them written, get them posted. But I was going and talking on other podcasts. I was guessing on podcasts, which sometimes even had a YouTube video associated with it.
When you go and guest on a podcast, you don't get just one backlink. You get many, many backlinks from just doing one podcast episode. So if you're listening to this and you're like, I don't wanna do my own podcast, go guest on podcasts. That will get you traffic back to your site. That will get you, it'll be an authority building, credibility boosting type of thing for you to do. Okay, so those are the three mistakes. Again, just to recap.
Brittany Herzberg (14:46.442)
Mistake number one is aiming for a high search volume. We want to keep that search volume zero to 1,000 at least. Mistake number two is hiring an agency or an SEO expert without really knowing how to make the most of their knowledge and their time. Think through what's gonna work for you. Best case scenario, first. Really think that through. And then the third mistake is not blogging. And I'm talking to myself here too, friend.
And on that note, there are a couple of things that I've got that can help you. Thing one is going to be the SEO basics checklist. It's a free resource. It will be linked below. That gives you, it walks you through all of the SEO pieces that you need as you create a blog, as you create a webpage. So, you know, where to put the keywords, how to use them, ideal character or word counts, the type of thing, it's got all of it and it'll put you on my email list. And as part of that, like introductory email sequence.
you actually get a video walkthrough where I literally walk you through this document. It is amazing and I get the best responses so make sure you've got that. Thing two is that the How to Blog with SEO email course starts again on February 19th. This is going to be really key for you and it would be something to think about joining if you want to focus on creating content that is going to last longer than the stomach flu. You know.
I've heard a lot of people talking about wanting to get off Instagram. I support that decision. I love hanging out over there, but I created a 9 grid, you know, for the podcast Instagram profile because I don't have enough bandwidth to go and post over there. And those posts at most, at most, last 48 hours. My blog is going to last for months and years to come. So if you want to start creating content that is actually going to last.
you're going to want to check this out. Especially if you feel like I give you templates in there. We have a live call at the very end where you can ask questions. I've done hot seats for people. It's incredible. I'm actually kind of like working on the structure of it a little bit from how I've launched it. Not how I've launched it from the material, the way it's been launched the last couple times. I'm updating that a little bit, but I'm so excited. It's a 10-day email course. You have a very manageable task every single...
Brittany Herzberg (17:05.858)
day for the most part, although that's part of what I'm working on. I want to give you some built-in buffer time to actually get some stuff done. Because life be life in over here, my friend. It just really does. So check out the SEO Basics Checklist. Check out the email course. At least look at the information. See if it's something that you even want to do. It's only $97 and you have access to the material for life. It's given to you in a PDF. It's yours to keep. You get all the resources. You get all the videos. It's there for you. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me.
And I hope this was helpful. If it was, please, please come over to Instagram and say hi and tell me. I would love that. And remember down below in the show notes, you will have a space to also go submit your question that I will answer on a future podcast. I'll see you later.