5 SEO Mistakes I Made & How The Lessons Changed My Approach
"SEO isn't meant to be done all at once. It's meant to be done bit by bit, consistently over time."
Funny thing about being an SEO coach… people assume you’ve never made an SEO mistake. (LOL)
This entire episode is about to show you just how wrong that assumption is!
From website SEO oopsies, to podcast SEO oh nos, to me finally figuring out the most effective and efficient approach to SEO—you’re gonna hear it all.
Tune in and save this one as a reminder that even when you think you’re messing it all up, you’re doing a great job just by making yourself aware of the SEO opportunities available to you!
Topics covered in this podcast episode:
The mistake that was costing me clients before I even understood SEO
How going “guest-heavy” on my own podcast was killing my SEO
The project that felt so big I avoided it for years
A trap I stumbled into that was making my work harder than it needed to be
The aha that shifted my entire approach to SEO (the method I now teach)
Two client wins I just heard about & have to share with you!
Take notes on which of these 5 SEO mistakes you're currently making. Once you’re aware of the mistakes, you can start to correct for them 😉
To get my eyes on your SEO (website, content, & social media), book your SEO Game Plan (get $47 off with this link)!
Mentioned Resources:
SEO Game Plan (get $47 off with this link!)
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 to the Basic Bee Podcast. I'm your host and favorite SEO coach, Brittany Hirzberg. Today I want to talk to you so that I can help you avoid some very, very common SEO pitfalls. This is exactly why I actually created the SEO game plan, because I want to come in, I want to take a look at things, I wanna see what's going on on your website, I wanna take a look at what's going on with your content, with your Instagram profiles.
And share with you about what's working well and what opportunities have been overlooked because there are just so many things that we don't know when we first jump into SEO. We're like, I want to do this. I'm gonna take the steps. And then you're like, but but what do I do? And how did I do? That's another great question, right? Is like, how did you actually do? So with this, I review your website, your content, your Instagram profile. I share with you exactly what is working well and what opportunities have been overlooked. I give you a report.
Along with a video walkthrough so that you're not like, what? What are these words? P.S. I don't actually include any graphs or charts or anything. I just want this to be a very straightforward. Here's the thing, here are some words, here's some plain English of what's going on, because the graphs and charts can just be really confusing. Once you get that report, from that very day, you have two weeks with me in Telegram to brainstorm the very best SEO game plan for you.
This is gonna look like what tasks need to be done, in what order, and who's doing what, whether you're working with me, working with someone else, completely bringing it in-house and DIYing all of it, you will have a game plan. Of course, the link to grab your very own SEO game plan will be below in the show notes. All right, now let's get into it because there are some mistakes that I have made along my own SEO journey that's been both my SEO journey with SEO for my business as well as.
Doing SEO for clients because all of my stuff is incredibly meta and very confusing and there's just this spiral. So bear with me. There are five mistakes that I made that I want to talk you through, break down, and help you avoid them. Mistake number one. I did just enough so something worked. And then I stopped. When I very, very, very first started doing SEO. I happened to do something that worked.
Brittany Herzberg (02:17.856) I happened to change my address because at the time I had a massage practice. It was in North Carolina. I was closing that one and moving to New England. So I let the internet know. I was like, this seems like a good idea. Lo and behold, that's exactly what brought two clients to me. That's how they found me on Google. They went to my website. They booked with me that way. Before that, I didn't know how I was going to pay rent. I didn't have people coming to me. I didn't have any other marketing activities in the works. It was literally just, I hope my website works for me.
So once that happened, yes, I was curious about SEO. And I learned what to do. And then I did the bare minimum. So I optimized some SEO titles on a few pages, optimized some meta descriptions on a few pages, learned that I needed to have only one H1. So I made sure that there was only one, but I didn't go beyond that. I wasn't really looking at blogging. I wasn't really doing anything beyond that. I wasn't taking it over into like
social media profiles and optimizing like my Instagram profile or anything like that. Frankly, I don't even think I had an Instagram at that time, but I I digress. So I did just enough so that it worked. And then I was like, cool. I took my foot off the gas and I went straight into like learning mode and not so much implementation mode. So that was one mistake that I made. The second mistake that I made was once I started my podcast, I went heavy
Heavy on the podcast guests, because I have so many incredible friends who are so talented. And I just wanted to really use my podcast as a platform to get their message out there. But that meant that my message wasn't getting out there. And that meant that my website started ranking for all of these things that I don't actually do, like social media marketing, like Akashic Records readings. It was ranking for things that I straight up just don't do, let alone the fact that.
Every once in while I still have a massage keyword that trickles in, but I don't do massage therapy anymore. I'm straight up SEO. I'm an online business owner now, exclusively. But taking it back to the podcast, I had so many guests on and I was therefore not featuring my work. I was not ranking for keywords associated with the clients that I help or the types of offers that I had, or even my title like SEO coach. They were nowhere to be found, which is why.
Brittany Herzberg (04:37.782) I switched and this year I have been so focused on doing solo episodes because my gosh, I learned that you want to hear from me. What? Shocker. I learned that that was one way that I could actually then create podcast episode blog posts, which is very confusing to say, but blog posts about my podcast episodes that would be keyword rich for things that I actually want to show up for, for things that I can help people with. So that has been hugely beneficial.
And if you do actually have your own podcast and maybe you notice that your website isn't ranking for keywords that you want to show up for, this could be something to consider. I got a couple of my clients, you even heard recently when Meg was on the podcast, how we were talking about she switched to solo episodes, more solo episodes. The guests aren't going away for either one of us, but if we want our podcast to actually help us build our businesses, this was a decision that we had to make. The third mistake that I made with SEO.
Is something that I see a lot with people that are in my DMs, even a lot with clients and discovery calls that we have. We built it up to be this big, big, big, big project that you end up avoiding because it feels so overwhelming. That was me. I built up SEO to be this huge project. And I was like, my gosh, it's gonna be so big. This very much ties in with the first mistake that I made. This is part of why I stopped because I was like, my gosh, it's so large. Like, how in the world am I going to tackle this thing?
And then I started peeling it off. And it was like, okay, even this year, for example, right? I went back back to the basics. I took myself back to the basics. I was like, we're gonna look at the core website pages. I'm going to optimize those. So everybody got brand new keyword research. Everybody got brand new SEO strategies. From there I was like, What blog posts can I write? Just standalone quote unquote regular blog posts that are not tied in with my podcast. I've been sharing a few of those. It has not been as frequently as I want it to be, and it's okay.
That was a side note for me. And if you're in the same spot, there you go. It's a side note for you too. With my podcast, I also went back to the basics with that. I looked at the show as a whole. I was like, okay, what is actually going on? Revisited the keywords, looked at the title, looked at the show description. And then even with the individual episodes, the only guest episodes that I've had have been case studies. So everything has been thoughtful, even at the episode level, titles, the keyword tags, all of that good stuff.
Brittany Herzberg (07:04.02) even going back to my social media profiles and revisiting those. I think I still need to go do my YouTube one, so don't judge that too harshly and know that it's on my to-do list. Okay, thank you. Love you. But the point is it was this giant project and I even for myself had to split it off into digestible, doable, smaller tasks because SEO isn't meant to be done and done once. It's meant to be done in chunks, to be done consistently, and that is kind of like feeds the machine so that you keep getting shown and
People can find you, they can book with you, they can inquire, they can take that next step with you. All righty, mistake number four, making the little details more cumbersome than they need to be. This came to mind actually because I just got off a call where I was talking people through how they can optimize blog posts and podcast episodes. And as I was going through it, I was like, wow, there were times where I was not taking this and using it as this, where I was doing this individually and doing that individually.
And maybe it's me being an Enneagram type one. I don't know. Probably, possibly, who knows? But I was making the work harder for myself than it really needed to be. I'm sure no one listening can really. I'm sure, right? Like, no way. What, Britney? That is crazy. So something like a good example of this. I'm picturing the SEO tables and how I teach people. And like, let's take, for example, here, let's use the podcast and
Talk through how I'm going to record this podcast, optimize the podcast for SEO, and then turn it into an SEO optimized blog post. There are things that once I create it once, I can repurpose it, I can reuse it somewhere else. Example number one, I'm going to do the keyword research. I'm going to create a podcast episode title. That podcast episode title, because I make sure that it's 60 characters or less, I can then go use that with my blog post title too, and my SEO title. So I'm creating it once and I'm using it three different times.
Similarly, I am going to take that title and I'm going to just put dashes between each word and turn that into the image title. Let's say it's mistakes I made in my SEO journey and it's mistakes dash I dash made in my SEO journey. You follow that becomes my image title. And then that image title can then become my URL slug for my blog post. Okay, I know that I'm like talking about this stuff and it's probably easier to picture visually. So maybe I'll end up putting this in the blog post or something, but
Brittany Herzberg (09:27.488) Just know you don't have to reinvent the wheel. You can create something once and then reuse that and tweak it slightly in other places. So that was definitely a thing that I was doing. Mistake number five, which is actually a very, very big mistake that I was making, and my entire business has shifted because I realized the mistake that I was making is this. I was encouraging clients to start anywhere. Start with SEO anywhere, your website, your blog post, your podcast, your social media profiles. No.
There is a much more efficient, more effective way to do SEO. And I have finally figured out like what that was by looking back at clients that I worked with, by looking back at my own stuff. And I've put that into the SEO and grow method. That is what that method is. Step one, we look at your website SEO. We are getting those core website pages tightened up so that they have a very effective SEO strategy plugged into them. Then we are going to look at content.
On a monthly basis, blog posts, podcast episodes, YouTube videos, what have you, as well as anything that's off of your website, your Instagram profiles, your LinkedIn profiles, your Pinterest profile, your podcast guesting assets, anything like that. Whenever you're doing a speaking gig somewhere else, all of these things, you have your really solid SEO strategy for your website at that point. And there are so many things that you learn and create at that point.
That you can then go and take off your site. And that's really key to be able to take things off your site and optimize those social media profiles, those guesting assets, those directory listings. Because having each of these assets, your website, all of the things off your site, having those things, sharing a cohesive message is what helps the robots find you and refer you faster and higher up in the search results to those people who are looking for you. That is how people are showing up in AI search.
It doesn't have to be any like fancy tactic. It's just the basics done well, done in the right order. All right, come back, Brittany. And then at the same time, we're doing content. We're making sure that blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos are all optimized for SEO. And then the third phase, that's when you start looking at what other visibility efforts you could do. That's when you start looking at the metrics and tracking those and making marketing decisions based on the data. Things like
Brittany Herzberg (11:47.682) I'm paying a social media manager, but I'm not seeing any traffic coming from Instagram to my website. Hmm, maybe I should rethink that investment. Or gosh, I stopped blogging for a few months and I really noticed that that's impacting my inquiries or my website traffic or whatever that may be. Looking at the data and taking action from there, looking at what you can do to your marketing efforts for that coming month. So, like I said, that was a big mistake, probably the biggest one. And because I created the SEO and grow method and put it into that.
really efficient approach. I'm having clients like Megan, who's a photographer, who wrote to me this week saying that her click-through rate has increased since we worked together on her SEO. That's huge. That means that more people are seeing her show up in Google search results or AI search results and they're clicking over to her website. They're actually like, this sounds like something I'm looking for. Click, go to her website. And then of course once they're on your website, we hope that they take some other action like joining your email list or
inquiring or purchasing something from you. Well, Duronda is a nonprofit consultant and she also shared this week with me that she is still getting clients finding her on Google and taking action, like booking a $997 coaching call with her. I mean, and we worked together years ago. So this stuff works. It takes a little time at the beginning to get it all plugged in, but there's so much that you can do with it. It's not just some like
Dead asset. It continues to work for you. There are lots of SEO mistakes that are unavoidable. The biggest one being not doing SEO earlier because it is such a big unknown. But having a guide by your side and creating a plan that works for you and for your business can be incredibly helpful if you find yourself still leaning toward wanting to avoid SEO, which again, I totally understand. So this is the point where I tell you to go check the link in the show notes.
Get your SEO game plan, get yourself in my world. I will review things for you. We will together look at tasks, look at who's going to be doing what, and you're gonna feel so much more confident with the marketing activities that you're doing and how you're actually using your resources, your time, your energy, your money. Okay. Thank you for listening. Bookmark this one because I have a feeling you're gonna need to come back and give yourself a pet talk pretty soon. But remember, I'm over here cheering you on on your SEO journey.
