Description

Harris opens the show by giving an account of his experiences with implementing good search engine optimization (SEO) practices and what he’s learned. After spending a little bit of time learning about SEO, he says that he was able to grow his organic traffic sooner than anticipated.

Your goal for top-of-funnel content is to rank highly in search engine results whenever someone looks for your target topic (e.g. the topic of your blog post, podcast episode, or video). You can use SERP to measure how well your content is performing and if your SEO practices are paying off.

Shawn gives an overview of 6 good SEO practices that can offer a big impact with relatively low effort:

Choose the topic for your content carefully and consider the target audience. Your content needs to educate or entertain the audience. “How to,” “getting started”, or “what is” guides work very well, as those keywords are searched very often. Do not try to sell your product or service in this top-of-funnel content; your goal needs to be to entertain or help people in order to build trust with them.
Your title is the most important part of your content piece. Spend some time to figure out what people are searching for. You can do this by searching Google to look at how other, similar pieces of content are titled as well as by using tools like Ubersuggest and Answer the Public to look at search volume. Try to make your title as close as possible to what people are typing into the search field.
There is no hard rule when it comes to content length or word count. Look for similar content, and make your content similar length. I usually look at similar content and think “How can I do this better?” which often results in slightly longer content than those lookalike pieces. I aim for about 1200 words in my written blog posts, but that could change based on the subject, the audience, and how the search algorithms operate at any given time. Do not duplicate (copy and paste) content! It will hurt your search rankings.
You should care about site speed (for both desktop and mobile browsers). Google will rank fast sites higher than slow sites. You can check your site speed on Ahrefs and Neil Patel’s SEO Analyzer. Many speed analyzer tools will offer you a list of things you can fix or tweak on your site to make it load faster.
It’s OK to link out to other, relevant content. Don’t worry about trying to “keep people on your site.” Your goal with top-of-funnel content should be to build trust with your audience. You’ll often find articles (e.g. Wikipedia) or videos outside of your site domain that can help the audience in their journey while consuming your content. Link to those other content pieces, even if they are outside of your domain.
Measure your success. It’s hard to improve if you don’t measure how well your content is performing. Google Analytics and Fathom Analytics are good tools for looking at page views, how long people view content, etc.

There are plenty of SEO tips that were not covered as part of these 6, but we feel that the majority of them make only a small difference (which can add up, but you must be diligent about using them!). We recommend using an SEO plugin as part of your content management system (CMS), such as Rank Math for WordPress. These plugins will often give you a checklist while you’re creating content to remind you of the small tweaks you can make (e.g. adding alt text to images).

Sponsor

We want to thank Cyber City Circuits for sponsoring this episode! Cyber City Circuits is an electronics shop and contract manufacturer based in Augusta, GA. Use the coupon code HELLOBLINKSHOW to receive 10% off your order of electronics or mention that you heard about them on the Hello Blink Show for a 25% discount on the assembly costs of manufacturing.