SEO Q+A :: Podcasts, Websites, Images, Authors, & More!
“SEO likes time. It takes a little time for SEO to work. So start with your main website pages because that’s where we want to direct people.”
Whether you’re newer to SEO or it feels a little old hat by now, it’s never a bad time to brush up on the basics! And what better way to do that than with a good ol’ Q+A episode?
In this solo episode, I’m pulling questions out of my DMs, emails, & group coaching calls so I can share these insights & tips with you, too!
Tune in, take notes, & return to this episode whenever you need 😉
Topics covered in this podcast episode:
How impactful podcast SEO is
The best order to work on SEO (on and off your website)
What to make of SEO with LLMs & zero-click searches
What the penalty is if you exceed SEO title & meta description character counts
The best way to write meta descriptions
What to do if you have an “on the side” offering but you don’t want to have a service page
If it’s worth it to ask a media feature to link to your site vs Instagram profile
How authors can use SEO to increase visibility & book sales
Why image optimization is a critical best practice for SEO
Ask your own question!
Mentioned Resources:
Buzzsprout (get $20 off)
3-Step Image Optimization Tutorial
Related Episodes:
3-Step Image Optimization Tutorial
AI & SEO w/ Nina Clapperton (part 1)
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
Brittany Herzberg:
Hello and welcome back to the Basic B Podcast. I'm your host and favorite SEO strategist and coach, Brittany Herzberg. This week I'm trying something new. I'm doing a Q and A episode solo. I know you really love these when I do them with guests, but my DMs, emails and Google Docs overflow with with really good questions that I'm asked regularly. So I've pulled some of the one to one conversations out of the hidden depths of the DMS and emails so I can share this important info with you too. By the way, if you like this kind of question and answer situation, you'd love SEO Foundations. It's my six week mentorship for entrepreneurs. We meet weekly and the calls are part me sharing information and best practices about a topic and then you asking questions for the other part. It's a great fit for anyone wanting to either take time getting familiar with SEO or someone who's super self motivated and maybe on a time crunch and wants the ability to ask questions in real time as they're implementing SEO. I will leave the link below. Now let's get into the episode Question number one. Is Podcast SEO really that impactful? Yes. The end. This is something that I have seen work and work really, really, really quickly. Some of the examples that I love highlighting are the fact that one of my clients had a 16% increase in downloads days after we optimized 10 of our podcast episodes. And by the way, if you haven't heard me talk about this before, when I go and I optimize someone's podcast episodes, I'm only looking at the episode title and tags. So you'll hear people say one thing or another about tags. But I find that they are hugely valuable. I'll give that example shortly. But I find that they are so impactful, so valuable and really just overlooked. So you have Libsyn and Buzzsprout. I use Buzzsprout and I love them that actually have a place for tags at the bottom of every podcast episode. And then you have things like if someone is hosting in Acast or Spotify or something like that where there is not a section for tags. But that doesn't mean that you can't take advantage of this. I have a workaround that I love sharing with people and it's basically you put I don't know if you ever saw when people were doing this and they may still be doing this at the bottom of their Instagram post, under their caption they would write the whole caption and Then they would have this, like, dash line at the bottom, and then they would say different keywords. So you can actually do that with your podcast episode. It's one of the tips that I share in my podcast SEO resource. If you're interested in learning more about that, you can definitely go do that. But I was mentioning tags, and because I have one client where we optimized again, about 10 episodes. One of the episodes, the title was perfect, the keyword was in there. It was perfect. It was the perfect character count. So I didn't touch it. The only thing we did was add tags. And that episode in about. I want to say it was in the range of four to six weeks. That episode specifically increased downloads by 40% in that amount of time. And all we did was update the tags. And it was an older episode, so it wasn't like she was regularly posting about that or promoting that episode. So all we did insert the tags, downloads increased, which means that her show as a whole is getting found and potentially getting more followers that way. So podcast SEO works fast. It could be in a matter of days, it could be in a matter of weeks. But it is quite amazing how well it works. One of my clients, even well, more than one, but specifically one client, she has a podcast. And we had already optimized her website SEO, but then we did again, 10 podcast episode optimizations. And what she noticed after that, she and her team were like, wow, people are using this code a lot more. Oh, that means that they're coming from the podcast, so they have a specific. I don't know, it's like, you know, some kind of discount code for her membership. And it's like, insert podcast 10 and you'll get whatever percentage off or something like that for her membership. So they know specifically when people are typing in that discount code that they're coming because they listen to the podcast. So it's pretty darn cool to be able to see all that stuff happen. So, yes, it's impactful. It's very helpful for individual episodes, but also the show as a whole, I could go on, obviously, for hours about that. So let's go on to the next question. What order would you recommend working on SEO? I love starting with your main website pages. That is always where I'm going to point people toward. It wasn't in the past where I always pointed people to, but this is what I have seen work the best. So start with your main website pages homepage. You definitely want to do that. Do that one first. That's why I offer the homepage optimization with my mini SEO audits, because that is the one doesn't matter if you have a 10 page website or a one page website, you want your homepage optimized for SEO first. That one could be your about page services pages, any kind of freebies, any kind of like link in bio services pages, any type of that stuff. You consider those your main website pages and you definitely want to have those optimized for SEO. Then you can move on to things like content like your blog posts or your podcast episodes, ideally both YouTube videos. Again, that can even come into becoming a blog post and you can embed the video in there. And then third phase is where we're going to go and touch up your social profiles or any kind of directories that you're in. I know I have a lot of therapists, even myself when I was doing massage therapy. There are different directories that you can be listed in and you can optimize your profiles over there. So that's what I like to do. SEO likes time. It takes a little time generally for SEO to work. So start with your main website pages because that's really where we want to drive people to anyway. So if we start with the main website pages, they have more time on their side with SEO. So start there, then go for your content, then go for different social profiles and any other profiles like directories or that kind of thing. This is what I teach people and show people inside SEO foundations. And then this is what we actually work through in SEO and grow in the group coaching program that I have. Next up, what do you think of SEO with LLMs and zero click searches? All right, before I answer this, let me break down the question. So LLM, if you haven't heard of that, they're your chatgpts, your clauds, your Geminis, they're large language models. So that's essentially like our AI tools that we can use. Zero click searches. That's what happens when someone, let's say you type something in Google and you don't end up clicking on any of the results that pop up. Maybe you're just looking at that AI overview. Maybe you are clicking down to the people also ask, you know, some of those questions down there. Maybe you're getting enough information from some of the images that are showing up or something like that. Whatever the case may be, you're not clicking over to a website or a blog post or a profile or anything because you're getting your answer just from what you're seeing on the search results. Page. So a lot of people noticed that the clicks to their site dropped, especially in the last. I would say definitely I've seen this happen really big time in 2025 with Google having their AI overviews come on the scene. But this was happening a little bit. And so anyway, people are seeing this happen with their traffic. So a lot of people are really concerned that this is happening. But I am finding that the people who click over to your site are that much more likely to be looking for support and willing to pay for it. If they're coming to your site, let's say they're coming to your blog post. They're really looking for your step by step, your directions, your insight, your experience with whatever that topic may be. They're really looking to get more information there. If they're coming over to a services page or maybe even a blog post where you're breaking down, I don't know what it's like to work with you for done for you SEO or something. They're kind of at that point doing a vibe check, that's what I call it, where they're coming over to your website trying to see quickly what it's like working with you, what the price point is. They're looking to see if they like you. Again, like the vibe check is, is a real thing and it's not something that you hear a whole lot of people talk about, but it's something that I definitely notice happening with myself when I do my own searches. But also in interacting with people where I have noticed that they did click over to my page and maybe they asked a question or maybe they saw that I wasn't the SEO person for them and they clicked away. So I don't think that zero click searches are bad. I think they're actually making the traffic that comes to your website. It's just better. You know what I mean? It's not about quantity, it's about quality with that. That's what I'm noticing. I've even had clients where I've seen their traffic take a dip, but they're getting inquiries. So visually, just checking out the metrics visually and seeing that graph and seeing that line go down, that may cause someone to panic, but what's actually happening is they're having quality like really good, dreamy clients still inquiring to book with them for one to one or done for you or something like that. So you have to put it all in context when it comes to SEO with LLMs, you really just want to follow best SEO practices. You want to do that. You want to make sure you're using your headlines in the hierarchy that we organize them so one H1 on every single page, and then as many H2s as you feel like you need. Every H2 is going to support the H1, and then as many H3s as you feel like you need. Each H3 is going to support the H2 the that it's underneath. So you want to be making sure that you're using that. I call it like a heading or headline hierarchy. Other things you want to do is just be clear. I mean, you really should be doing that anyway for the people who are coming over to your blog or your website. But we want to be clear because the robots and the people need to understand what we're doing and what it looks like, what the experience looks like, what other people are saying about working with us, that kind of thing. So follow best practices with SEO, even though large language models like ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini are here. And do not freak out if you're seeing zero click searches. It's okay. And I would be very curious if you start, you know, tracking your metrics and noticing what's happening as far as, like the quality of inquiries that you're getting, or even if it's people signing up for an email list or something like that. Alrighty, what's the penalty? If I go over the SEO title or meta description character count, what happens? It's less of it being a penalty and it's more of it being a not great user experience. So you have a certain amount of characters. So the SEO title is 60 characters, 40 to 60 characters long. You want it to fit that space because what happens if it's 75 is that it'll show the first few words, but then it'll do the ellipsis, the dot, dot, dot. What I've noticed is that people feel like they're not getting the full picture, they're not getting the full information, and therefore they can't really make a good decision of whether or not they should even do something as quote unquote, simple as clicking over to your website. So we want to make sure that we are putting the SEO title and the meta description in the right amount of characters so that it shows up in full. Because that really is going to give the person who could potentially be a client or at least a website visitor, they're going to feel like you're being transparent all up front, like you're sharing all the information, and then they're going to feel like they're making a well informed decision. And that's what we want people doing for sure. Related to that, here's another question. Why is it better to write a meta description in first person? Also, if you're like me and you're like first person, I recommend, and this is what I do too, I recommend that people write meta descriptions as if you're talking to the person who's reading this on the Google search results page. Okay, so as an example, I've got my homepage, I'm looking at the SEO title and the description, the meta description. So this is how my meta description reads. As an SEO strategist and coach, I support entrepreneurs to go from social media burnout to having content actually work for them, turning searches into sales. See how I said I, I me my. You're going to put those words in there so it's going to be less of Brittany Herzberg is an SEO strategist and da da da da da. Because I want the person to feel like I'm talking to them. I want that to feel like a possibly first touch point of someone coming into my world, getting to hear my voice, getting to see how I say things and explain things. So that is why I like doing that. That is what I have seen work really, really well. As opposed to Brittany Herzberg is the la la la. Another reason that works really well for character count. So if I had my whole name that's what, 16, 17 characters long? It's a lot. So that takes up a lot of space. Sometimes it makes sense to do that. So maybe I would use my name on my about page or my contact page or something like that. Another reason why I don't really need to have my name in there is that my domain name is Brittany herzberg. So Brittany herzberg.com so my name's already in there. But the main reason that I suggest people write meta descriptions in first person is because it feels conversational and it feels like a really cool touch point for that person if that is the first, you know, interaction that they're having with you online. Next up, what should I do if I have an offering that's kind of on the side, but I don't want to create a page for it on my website. This has come up a lot, especially in the SEO and Grow program where people are saying I like doing this type of coaching or I like offering this type of service, but I don't want to have a fully built out service page for it yet, or I don't want to ever have a fully built out service page. So they've been asking what should I do about that? You can definitely always anything that you feel like you don't want to call out on a main website page or you want to dive deeper on create a blog post. So for one example, I have one client. She is a birth doula and she also is a birth photographer. She hasn't wanted to make a full blown services page for this service, so I recommended that she definitely at least start blogging about it. She could do almost like a case study, but she could go in depth with, you know, one family's birth story and going into like how she connected with the parents and what the pregnancy was like and all that kind of stuff. Right. And then share the photos that she took, of course, with the family's permission. But that is something that could be done. Or if there's a certain type of coaching that you want to offer, maybe it's a really niche kind of thing, you could blog about it instead of having a full blown services page about it. And then what those blog posts allow you to do is share your experience, really highlight some case studies or types of scenarios where you've worked with clients, what you've noticed, what you like about this kind of coaching or this kind of service, and really share that and really give insight into what that experience is like working with you. Is it worth it to ask the author of a media feature to link my website instead of my Instagram profile? This is actually something that I talked someone through recently, just within the last couple months. So again, she's a photographer, she had been featured in an article and they were linking to her Instagram profile. There's nothing wrong with that. But that is not where your SEO juice is going to go. You want to be having people link to your website more so than your Instagram profile so that you can really get that SEO juice. It helps make your website be more findable. Backlinks are great and that would be an example of a backlink where another site is linking to your website. It's just better for your findability. For Google and other search engines getting to know what you're about, who trusts you, why they trust you, why they like you, what you are known for, what you talk about, that kind of thing. So yes, it's absolutely worth it to write to the author of any kind of media feature, whether that's a podcast episode or, you know, getting shouted out in Glamour magazine or something like that. I always talk about how I was featured for migraines in Glamour magazine. Not glamorous at all, but yes, definitely write to the author. At least you tried. You know, I mean, if they say no, they say no, and that's okay. Or if they never write back to you because their inbox is so overflowing, that's okay. At least you tried. And maybe you could try again in the future. But it's always worth it to ask, because that SEO juice going to your website versus, like, your Instagram profile is so worthwhile. Next up, is there anything authors can do to optimize their websites to help their books get found? Yes. So glad you asked this question. I kind of don't like it when people say that. But anyway, yes, you can absolutely do stuff for your website in addition to whatever you're doing on wherever your book is listed. Like, if you have it on Amazon, you can obviously optimize that page. But then something that I learned actually from my boyfriend, who is a nonfiction book editor and author coach, he was sharing that when someone types something in Google, and if they go to your website and then from your website, they go to your Amazon page and then they make a purchase from there, that whole trail of Google search, clicking on your website, going to Amazon, making the purchase, that helps you in the Amazon algorithm. So all of these things really play nicely together. And your Amazon page is going to be optimized for whatever you're going to optimize it for over there. And then on your website, you can set it up a little bit differently. So if someone is doing whatever search on Google and your website shows up, and then also maybe your Amazon page shows up too. I don't know all of the correct words, but yes, in short, it is a great idea, at least to optimize. Like, let's say you have a website and you do other stuff, but you have a page that's dedicated to your book or books, then you can optimize the book page or pages. If you don't want to just optimize your website. Now, let's say you have a website that you created just for the book. You could definitely optimize that website. And if it has multiple pages, you can optimize each page for findability as well. So there's a lot of opportunities here. But definitely the thing that really made me go, oh, my goodness, was when I learned that it can be really, really helpful to you and to your book sales if you have someone who sees your website or webpage in the search results, clicks to it, and Then clicks to Amazon or wherever and then buys the book. I just thought that was so cool to see that. That trail really can be super impactful. All right, last one. Why do you recommend Optimizing Images? This is a loaded one. But I mean, the short version is because it's amazing and you can get found in image searches. The last time I checked the statistic, and it's probably changed, but in the near recent past. Let's go with that. I saw a statistic that said that the Images tab is the second most visited tab. So you've got the main search results where you have all of, like, the pages and the articles and the blog posts and that kind of thing. And then you have Images as an option. You also have videos and some other stuff. But Images is a tab that people go to to try to find answers and to try to find whether they're looking for something that is almost like a shopping experience or like a shirt or I don't know, like an arts and crafts thing for their kid or themselves or a product for their dog that might be something that they would like, duh, go to Images for. But they also may go over there when they're looking to find a podcast or when they're looking to see some example of working with a website designer. They maybe go over there. They definitely are going to go over there when they're looking for any kind of photographer. So there are so many reasons that you would want to optimize an image, but that is the reason, because you can end up getting found in an image search. I always love to tell this story. So when I first started learning about SEO and actually implementing it for myself, I was going from massage therapy to copywriting. And because of that being the lane that I was in and the new lane that I was going to, I was calling myself Healthcare Copywriter. I think it's Healthcare Copywriter because I was copywriting and I wanted to be writing for healthcare providers. So I went through. And one weekend I spent like the whole weekend optimizing images, getting them uploaded into blog posts and my website pages and all this stuff. And soon after that, I saw that I was dominating the top two or three rows of that keyword. So if I just went and typed in Healthcare Copywriter and then went to the Images tab, I could see if I. It was all my pictures. Some of them were stock photos, Most of them were me. My face. You could see me. And that's when I really realized that it was totally worthwhile to optimize images. So I have a blog post and another podcast episode. I'll make sure this is linked below where I talk about my three step process to optimize images. But step one is making sure that your image title, which Normally says like img3542 instead of saying that you want it to have keywords in there. So I would want it to say something like Brittany Dash Herzberg, SEO Strategist that could be a headshot image title for me. So those are the kinds of things that you want to do is weave in keywords in the image titles. But that is what an image title typically looks like, and that's why we don't want it to have just the plain old whatever that your camera or your iPhone gave to that image. You actually want to put a little bit of thought and time into it. Also, side note, it's not typically as simple as just going in the back end of your website and retitling the image. There are exceptions, I've learned, but not typically the case. And I also feel like it's probably a best practice to just go ahead and retitle the image on your computer and then pull that into your website, your Squarespace, your WordPress, whatever that is. All for this solo Q and A episode. Please let me know if you like this and want more episodes just like this one. You could either say hi on Instagram or text me using the link in the show notes. But just know that if you text me in the link in the show notes, I don't have a clue who you are or how to contact you unless you tell me. Not that I need to, but I'm just letting you know that if you do want me to reach out to you or you do want to share that information, you're welcome to and I have no idea unless you say that in your text message. All right, until next time, I'm cheering you on on your SEO journey.
