Optimize Your Core Website Pages—NO Keyword Research Required
“You do not need to pay for a keyword research tool OR even do keyword research to make your website pages more effective.”
One thing I see too often in my work as a Lead Gen Strategist & SEO Coach are missed SEO opportunities.
Everything from social media bios without a keyword, headshots that aren’t titled appropriately, & blog posts with no focus keyword.
But the worst offender is the one I’m guiding you through today.
→ Ineffective (or missing) on-page SEO strategies for your “core website pages.”
In this episode, you’ll discover what your 7 “core website pages” are, the 3 easiest SEO strategy pieces to optimize for each page, & how to optimize those core pages for SEO—without spending even one second doing keyword research.
Topics covered in this podcast episode:
What SEO opportunities most entrepreneurs are missing
The 7 “core website pages” Brittany guides business owners to optimize
The 3 easiest SEO strategy pieces to optimize on every web page
How to optimize your “core website pages” for SEO—without doing keyword research
How to audit your existing on-page SEO strategy for your site
Which service providers you can count on to incorporate SEO as part of the service
What to do before doing keyword research
How to find the best keywords for each “core website page”
Why you need to follow best SEO practices to show up in AI searches
How optimizing these SEO pieces actually brings in aligned leads
How to not lose your voice with SEO (read: sound robotic)
We don’t do dusty digital shelves over here. We learn AND implement.
Over the next week, I want you to take action:
➡️ Make sure you’ve answered those BIG 3 questions first. Set a timer for 15 minutes, write those answers, treat this as an internal document. It never has to see the light of day.
➡️ Write down any of the core website pages I mentioned that apply to your website as it is today.
➡️ Now review the SEO title, meta description, & H1 heading for each page & make any necessary adjustments.
That may look like removing the site title from the SEO title, or adding meta descriptions, or changing extra H1 headlines to H2 headlines—you get the idea!
Do what it takes to get these 3 SEO pieces following best practices AND sharing very clearly with the robots AND humans what you do, who you do it for, & why YOU are the best person to help them!
Mentioned Resources:
🔗Detailed SEO Extension (free)
🔗Join SEO & Grow (for a limited time, take 10% off when you use code BASICBPOD at checkout)
Related Episodes:
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 lead gen strategist and SEO coach, Brittany Herzberg. Oh yeah, I'm saying it loud and proud now. I'm a lead gen strategist because that is exactly what SEO can do for you, your business and your marketing efforts. It can add that little pizzazz to anything you create and share online, like your website content, guesting materials, you name it and and program it so it calls in those aligned leads for you.
One thing I see quite often in my work are missed opportunities, especially as a type 1 I see social media bios that are missing a keyword or two so that profile can actually go to work for you. Or headshots that are submitted as part of a podcast interview that are not titled appropriately, as in just a jumble of numbers versus a name and keyword that could actually help the episode and you become more findable. Even blog post titles that are not featuring a single keyword, they're so broad and it's not clear what they're about or who they're for, so they're not getting much love or traffic. The list goes on and on.
But the worst offender is the one I want to talk you through today. It's the very first stop for anyone in SEO and grow. Any guesses? I'm talking about an on page SEO strategy for your home page and your about page and and your services pages. These are what I call your core website pages. They're the ones listed on your navigation bar and often in your footer too. Some of them may be unlisted like a freebie or opt in page. There are 7 that I talk about most frequently. They are: your home page, about, service—This will also vary depending on if you have one main page or sub services pages—podcast (if applicable), freebie, blog, and contact. There can be more, but for the sake of simplicity we're sticking with these today.
What's important for you to know is this specificity is the name of the game. If I or anyone has a follow up question like what kind of coaching is going on, a program for who, anything where we need clarification, that is an opportunity for you to fill in the blank and help a sister out. Okay, these on-page SEO strategies may be blank, they may be auto filled, they may be filled with some SEO strategy currently and there's nine times out of ten a way to refine it and tighten it up even more so it can actually go to work for you. Just because someone says they did your SEO titles and meta descriptions, for example, for you does not mean that they did it, or even that they did it well, or that it's going to be effective. So humor me, stick with me while I get through the rest of this.
The SEO pieces to pay attention to are SEO titles, meta descriptions, and H1 headlines. Again, there are more pieces, but to just give you a solid starting point that can actually move the needle for you, we're going with these three. And to know what to make sure to include in those three, you'll need keywords.
Now, before you go find keywords, what are you going to do? Yes, you're going to answer the big three questions. Who do you help? How do you help them? And why you? What makes you special and different and better than other options out there? Once you've got those answers, then you can jump into keywords.
What you should know about selecting target keywords for each page is that ideally you'll have one to two target keywords. Yes, there will be some overlap quite often from one page to another. That is totally normal and helpful because what's happening here is that you're giving a comprehensive overview of your work to the robots very clearly. What you're not going to do is have the exact same keywords for every single page. The thing that's going to change is what you're telling them about or what your perspective is. I'll talk you through this by sharing ideal types of keywords to find and use for each of these core website pages. But look, you do not even need to pay for a keyword research tool or even do keyword research to make your website pages more effective. If you even just get the tiniest bit more intentional with the words that you use in a few key places, you'll be light years ahead of most others in your industry. So hear me when I get into these types of keywords and do not let keyword research be the thing that holds you back. You can still be super thoughtful about the words you're using.
Okay, here we go... Home page here you really want to highlight what you do and who you do it for. It is really straightforward and it's often the most simple thing that's just literally not on the page yet. And your site cannot go to work for you without that about page. You want your name and professional title or what people seek you out for? I love you and I don't care if you hate the term people are searching for to get to you, I need you to use it. That's how you're going to show up in their searches. So if that's healer or coach or something like that, put your feelings aside and add it to this page. Then we have services. This is where you want to highlight the transformation or offer that you provide and who you're working with. Service is actually a really great word to use here, and if you have multiple service pages, you'll have opportunities to be really specific with each service type on each page, which is really wonderful. Your Podcast Page Shocker to no one. The word podcast will be used here for sure. You also want to think about what your podcast is about and who it's for. And if you haven't honed in on that yet, now is your chance. Your freebie page this you want to also highlight the transformation or offer or even insight that you provide. Words like resource or guide are going to work really well for this page and you could even get specific and share the type of resource. Is this a quiz or a PDF or a private podcast or a checklist? You get the drift? Blog Page There are often types of blogs that people are going to be searching for that will work really great for this page. And even just the word blog. You want the word blog here. That should be here in pretty much every single case. Your contact page is the last one up. Words like find or hire or contact work really great, likely along with some of the words from your home or about pages because it's what they're looking for.
Now let's get back to those SEO pieces to pay attention. SEO titles meta descriptions H1 Headlines this is what you need to know about each one. But before I get too far into it, remember SEO titles and meta descriptions are the two pieces of copy that show up on a Google search results page. You plug them in on the back end of your site. Every site is capable of this and the one time they pop out and really need to do their job is on that results page. What's their job? To share enough information with the reader so that the person leans in and clicks over to your website. You do not want to inundate them with information. 1. You don't have space to do that. 2. It's information overload. You need to keep this high level so that like I said, they're leaning in. They want to know more. That's all you're looking for is to lean in.
First up, SEO titles these should be 40 to 60 characters long. You can use punctuation here, but you don't need to end with a period. I will most often use those vertical bars. If I really need to separate something, this is a really good place to add in any location specific like local SEO keywords. This is what you can think of as the headline of Google searches. So you need to be very clear and almost stop their scroll on this results page. You can kind of pull that train of thought over from social media marketing and then the description goes on. To share a bit more about whatever this is, websites often give you a default SEO title, which is just your site title. And I may be saying some foreign words but stick with me. If you use a tool like detailed SEO and you see something like dash Brittany Herzberg, you want to go into your website settings and change that so the site title is not auto populating in the SEO titles anymore because you're wiser, you're creating SEO titles and the problem is that if you leave it there and don't do anything about it, it's going to make your SEO titles too long and it'll get cut off. Which we for many reasons do not want to have happen.
Next up, meta descriptions. These should be 140 to 155 characters long. Yes, including spaces. You do want to use punctuation here. I find that they work best when they're written in first person, so almost it sounds like a mini love letter from you to the reader. They should capture your voice and your vibe, but most importantly they need to give a high level overview of what's on the page and who it's for. Yes, that sounds incredibly tricky and I find that so many business owners want to cram these descriptions full of information. But like I said, people only need enough information so they know what action to take next. We want the right people leaning in to learn more and come over to your website and take a next step from there. My pro tip is to grab one to two sentences from the webpage itself and start there. That way you're already capturing your voice and your vibe and you're able to give that high level overview of what this page is all about so that it gets the right people to lean in and want to click over to your website and take a next action. If you want to go deeper with meta descriptions, there was a recent SEO Best Practices episode where I dove like way, way deep including examples with meta descriptions.
Last thing, H1 headlines. There can and should be one and only one H1 headline for every page. I say this all the time. You've probably heard me say it a thousand times and it is okay if this matches your SEO title. In fact, sometimes the SEO title is swapped out for the H1 heading because a search engine just feels like it. That said, as someone with copywriting experience, sometimes the language that's on the page works really well and business owners really want to keep it. So if you're adamant that you want to have that as your H1 and keep it as is, you have my blessing so long as you make freaking sure that your SEO title and meta descriptions are on point. I've actually done this very thing with one particular client, and they're still seeing success. They have a specific way they want to speak to their ideal clients, especially on their blog posts. So when we create their case study blogs, they select the H1 heading, and I make sure their SEO title and meta descriptions are following best practices. And those blogs have been bringing in lots of traffic for months and months and months, and a few have even been big hits for years. So that's my explanation with some context. But you must make sure that there's only one, because the robots get really confused and overwhelmed. So you just need to make sure that it's really obvious which heading they need to pay the most attention to. The H1s are the only headlines that have this rule of having one per page. You can use as many H2s and H3s as you would like. Most people stop at H2s and H3s, but there are such a thing as H4s, 5s, and 6s. Whatever you do, just make sure that the headlines are nested properly and. And you can listen to the heading hierarchy episode to learn so much more about that.
And now what to do with all that information? Well, take action. Of course. We don't do dusty digital shelves over here. We learn and implement. So over the next week, I want you to do a few things. I want you to make sure you've answered those big three questions first. Period. I don't want to hear about it. Set a timer for 15 minutes, write those answers, treat this as an internal document, and pretend that it's never going to see the light of day. Okay? Then you're going to write down the core website pages I mentioned that apply to your website as it is today. So again, those were home about service or multiple services pages, podcast, freebie, blog and contact. Now, I want you to review the SEO title, meta description and H1 heading for each page. You can use detailed SEO Chrome extension for this and make any necessary adjustments. This may look like removing the site title from your SEO title or adding meta descriptions or changing extra H1 headlines to H2 headlines. You get the idea. Do what it takes to get these three SEO pieces following best practices and sharing very clearly with the robots and humans what you do, who you do it for, and why you are the best person to help them.
You should also know that I just updated the SEO Basics Checklist and to include the list that I talked you through today. Each page and the types of keywords or just words that'll work best for each page are now inside the SEO Basics Checklist. So you have no excuses, friend. You've got everything you need to make some power moves. If you do want to actually take a little time to do some keyword research, I love this for you and KeySearch is my favorite keyword research tool. It's affordable, super easy to use and you can always sign up for one month. Go ham grab all the keywords you need for your core website pages and maybe even some for some like blog posts or something. But that is my favorite tool.
If you know like I know you know that it's time for you to go all in on your SEO so you can finally have a website and content that are working for you 247 so you can go be a human. Whether life is lifing or you just want to have a day to yourself at the beach with some ice cream and a good book, SEO and Grow is where you want to be. You can sign up now, doors are open, you're in for four months from the date that you join and payment plans are available. And I did a thing for a limited time. You can take 10% off your total when you use code basic b pod at checkout. The code applies to all payment options. I made sure and again that code is Basic BPOD B A S I C B P O D Alrighty, it is time for you to go. Take action.
I would love to hear what changes you make based on what you learned today. You can always DM me on Instagram or text the show using the link in the show notes. A few of you have done this recently and it's been so fun to connect with you. You're doing such a great job even if all you did today is just listen to me sharing this information with you. Keep going and remember that I'm over here cheering you on on your SEO journey.
