SEO is *Not* the Place to Ditch Your Personality
“It feels SUPER scary & risky to be your truest self—especially as a business owner.”
Fresh brand photos just landed in my inbox—and they've got me ALL the way in my feels about identity, confidence, & showing up as the realest version of you. So naturally, I had to record this episode.
SEO is NOT the place to ditch your personality. In fact, it might be the most important place to let it shine!
In this episode, I'm calling out the "polished professional" trap & giving you simple, doable tips to bring your vibe into your SEO strategy so you attract the most aligned clients (and actually enjoy your business while you're at it)!
Topics covered in this podcast episode:
Why playing it safe & aiming for “perfect” or “polished” is actually costing you clients
The moment with a photography client that made me realize how often people strip their voice from their copy
Why trained professionals (therapists, former academics, etc.) struggle with this the most
How those 3 Big Questions kickstart the whole "claiming your vision" thing
3 ways to start bringing your personality into your content & SEO right now
The 3 things to start trying today:
1️⃣ Stop apologizing for the quirky thing—it's probably why people love you so dang much
2️⃣ Start sharing your hobbies, catchphrases, & fun facts (INFJ? Romantasy reader? Millennial bird watcher?)
3️⃣ Use copy straight from your website to draft your meta descriptions—your voice is already in there!
Mentioned Resources:
📗 Get the SEO Playbook
⚡ Join the June 5-Day SEO Sprint (save $500!)
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 B podcast. I'm your host and favorite SEO coach, Brittany Herzberg. I've got hopefully a short and sweet episode for you that I've been dying to record, and it's pretty well timed since I got my fresh brand photography images back last week. So I'm all about the personality and the vibe. It's like in my veins at this point. It's got me reinvigorated about identity, the vision, confidence, all of it. Let's get into it, shall we? Here's the big focus for this episode. SEO is in fact not the place to ditch your personality. I need the you that I'm meeting in your SEO strategy to be the same you I'm going to see on your website, on your core web pages, on your blog posts, even on your extra landing pages. Because when it's not not the fullest, most authentic version of you, trust is instantly lost. That opportunity for connection shot the hell. Not to mention your happiness and satisfaction are greatly impacted. Because whatever version of yourself you're putting out there, whatever the vibe is, that is what you're going to attract. And if you're not being the realist you, you're not going to get the most aligned clients in your DMs or in your inbox. Over the last month, I heard several people say in some way, shape or form that they're nervous to be their truest, most authentic, genuine self and they're opting to be this polished version of themselves instead. And that is a huge problem. Potential clients aren't able to connect with the real you. They aren't able to envision what it's actually like to work with you. And you end up attracting people you don't even feel comfortable working with, or at the very least, people that you may feel guarded around. There are a few different scenarios where this played out. One of them was on a coaching call where someone else was hosting it and there was a woman who was sharing that. Basically she didn't want to speak casually or use slang in her web copy or emails and or even in client calls because she feared people wouldn't think of her as professional. But she had this very hands on personal medium of photography and especially with that people need to be able to feel comfortable with you. And that starts with your website and your client communication emails. In my own SEO program, there was one photographer I was working with in Google Docs and I kept finding myself saying use your website copy because that has your voice and your vibe baked in and it was really surprising to her because she was drafting these at the time. It was meta descriptions and she was like, oh, I never even thought about that. So she had a little bit more robotic sounding of a meta description. And nothing is wrong with that, but it's more effective if you can put your personality in there. That's just one example. And then on a one to one call, this actually comes up with a lot of my trained professionals, like therapists or former academics. Online business is just an entirely different way of thinking about presenting yourself and speaking. And it flips everything that they have learned on its head. So they have learned to put this more polished version of themselves out. And what works really well with online business, with human to human connection, is just being you, is being the real, raw, unfiltered human version of you. From childhood. We have our uniqueness all but stripped from us. Conform by doing this, blend in by doing that. This is the next right step. And because of that, it feels super scary and risky to be your truest self, especially as a business owner, because so many of us cannot strip the us versus the business like we have it so just intertwined, woven in. You don't want to run the risk of upsetting someone by saying the wrong thing or, or, or, or, or. And that gets to be so exhausting. You're monitoring your words, your actions, and spending so much brain power wondering how these things are being perceived. But when you let your little freak flag fly, when you let those quirks shine, when you embrace all of you, you attract the most aligned clients who value you as a service provider and a human. And if you haven't felt that yet, let me assure you there is no better feeling. I've witnessed this in my own groups, groups I'm a part of, and I've experienced it myself. Back to those branding photos I just got, the moment I clicked on the gallery and opened it, I was just like, yes, this is the version of me that I am now. This is the version of me that I want to be sharing with the world, especially with my business. I have felt this version of me internally for about a year now, actually a little bit longer than that. But I've been slowly bringing her to the surface with new branding, new photos, new SEO, new content, new website copy, new offers, all of it. It has me lit up, excited, feeling so much more confident and eager to share everything I have going on. But for me, and for lots of my clients, it started with SEO, with the strategy, which many people don't expect me to say. But those three questions I ask you really get you to think about that version, really get you to think about that vision, to name it and claim it. Let's take it back to your personality and vibe and talk about this a little bit. Because when people say bring in your personality, that can feel daunting. What do you actually mean? How do I even do that? We start wondering what makes us special and how we even showcase that without being braggy or unrelatable. Look, show off. Confidence is attractive. Whether you're talking about this in the context of dating or in a business setting. It's human nature to want to be around a leader, someone who seems to know what they're doing. It's why all these people can be online saying they're a coach and they get booked without a lick of experience. They're confident and people are drawn to it. So how do you start to bring in this confidence, this personality? I've got three things for you. Anything you find yourself apologizing for. I find more often than not that is a fun or interesting part of someone's personality. And half the time it's the biggest reason I love being around them. So one, stop apologizing for it. I was even reminded of that recently. So stop apologizing for it. Be aware of it and maybe lean into it a little bit more. Just let it be a part of you and maybe shine a tiny little spotlight on it. That awareness is going to be really helpful. Another thing you can do is that any kind of hobbies or catchphrases or fun facts that you've been burying, those tend to be really interesting things people want to know. It's why I mentioned that I'm an INFJ, an Enneagram type 1, a 3.5manigen, a Libra rising, a Millennial bird watcher, a Romantasy reader. All of these things actually become touch points for you. There's probably at least one thing I just said that makes you want to message me right now, especially if it was something I just mentioned. Start dropping that. You can weave it in your copy, you can weave it in your content. Just start sharing it. Another one is that this is really interesting because the number one way I bring this into SEO, an easy tip I can give you right now is to use copy from your website like I was mentioning earlier, or if you have copy in your Google Doc. If you're still in draft mode, use this copy to draft your meta descriptions. I usually find one to two sentences and. And I pull that in and then I Whittle it down. So it's the, you know, the right character count. You need those descriptions to be about 140 to 155 characters long. They need to summarize what's happening on that page on a high level and intrigue the person enough to click over to that page because they're seeing this only on that search results page. So I find it works really well to use your very own words from your website to make that happen. And it's an easy way to include, like I said earlier, your voice and your vibe into a summary. Oh, and this is another part too. It really helps it to write it in first person as if you're talking to the reader. So a lot of times if you're grabbing that copy from your Google Doc or your website page, it already is written as such. Give any of these a try. I mean, what do you have to lose if you're over letting the robots guess who you are and what you're about? I would love to show you even more of what you can actually do to set your website up to bring in more of those aligned leads for you. And the best places to get started are going to be the SEO Basics Checklist. Get this, if you're brand new to SEO and you just want to dip your baby toe in the water, it's not even your big toe. There's a Google Doc and a short video tutorial that welcomes you into the magical world of SEO. And from there you get my weekly emails. You could opt for SEO and grow group coaching program. Go here to join me for that. Four months of personalized support where you get to learn all of the SEO basics, find the best keywords for you, and create and implement SEO strategies for your core website pages. And learn what it takes to stay on your SEO on a monthly basis with metrics, tracking and content creation. That's the most comprehensive option that you've got. You could also opt for the five day SEO Sprint. The May Sprint is closed, but you can check the link in the show notes to sign up for the next one because yeah, I'm totally going to do this again. It was so much fun. This is where you go to get hands on support to get your website SEO done in one week, created, implemented, sent off to Google Living Online. Okay, you can totally do this. I know that it's a very scary thing to think about letting the real you out there. But if that mastermind taught me nothing other than this, which it taught me so much more, but if it taught me nothing other than this. It's that you like. The truest, most real, authentic, genuine, pulled back version of you is what people want. They want to see that. People don't want the robotic SEO. Whatever titles, meta descriptions, whatever it is that people think is the dry robotic version of SEO stuff. People don't want that. It doesn't work as well as when you weave in your personality. You actually have your vibe in there. You're sharing your vision, you're intriguing people. You're saying the funny thing. You're using the slang word. Do it again. What else do you have to lose at this point? It a try. Okay? Reach out with any questions that you have. And remember, I'm over here cheering you on on your SEO journey.
