65: SEO for Designers: How to Gain 1000 New Website Visitors Fast with Barb Davids

Welcome to Episode 65 of The Designer Within Podcast, where host John McClain explores the intersection of creativity and intentional design in home and life.

This episode features special guest Barb Davids, a digital marketing and SEO expert from Compass Digital Strategy, who breaks down SEO in an easily understandable format for interior designers and other creatives. Barb discusses the importance of blogging for SEO, optimizing website images, the role of Google Business Profile, and basic tips for boosting website ranking. 

She also covers the impacts of AI on SEO and provides insights on running effective ads. This episode is packed with actionable advice for designers looking to enhance their online presence and attract more clients through SEO.

Here is a rundown of what you will learn in this action packed episode:

• Understanding and starting with SEO
• The importance of blogging for SEO
• Visual aspects of website affecting SEO
• Using Google My Business for SEO
• Ads for SEO and business growth
• Diversifying geography and platforms for SEO

Timeline:

02:15 Upcoming Events and Social Media Engagement

03:38 Introduction to Special Guest: Barb Davids

05:04 Understanding SEO for Designers

10:05 Blogging for SEO Success

15:20 Optimizing Images and Google Business Profile

20:15 Link Building and Diversifying SEO Strategies

32:08 User-Friendly Website Management

32:23 SEO Services for Clients

33:22 The Role of Ads in SEO

35:11 Effective Ad Strategies

39:07 Common SEO Mistakes

41:27 AI and the Future of SEO

48:13 Optimizing Website Structure

53:02 Expanding Geographic Reach

56:37 Finding the Right Keywords

59:22 Working with Barb for SEO Success

Barb Davids, founder of Compass Digital Strategies since 2018, is a digital marketer with over 25 years of experience.  She's not here for the fluff – Barb's passion lies in providing direct, results-oriented digital marketing solutions for ambitious business owners. She has helped them get 256% more organic search traffic, 22% more leads and 51% more sales from Google organic search. When she's not behind the laptop, she's out running with her dog, Stone, in whatever city she's digital nomading at the time.

Transcript

For people who have never done it, what does it involve as far as getting the ball started with SEO? And then how does it impact specifically a designer's website or any creative person's website? I think the thing to remember is that you're just trying to answer people's questions. So, you have your website, if you just put your services in your homepage, Google doesn't have enough information to be able to say, Hey, this is what this person is doing.
Now, we think it has enough, but there's like thousands of other websites out in the world. And so, in comparison, It might choose somebody else's because it has more context, more information, like blog posts. If we can tell Google, we want to talk about lampshades or designs or trends or whatever we're trying to talk about for the people that we're trying to get in front of, if we look like the authority on that using blog posts, then Google is more likely to break our website over somebody else's welcome to the designer within podcasts, the podcast where creativity meets intention and great design in your home and life.
goes way beyond aesthetic. I'm your host, John McClain, an interior designer, business advisor, and full believer in the power of intentional design to inspire a better way of living. Whether you're a homeowner looking to elevate your space, a design professional striving to grow your business, or someone ready to create a more fulfilling life.
This podcast is for you. We're here to explore the art of design, the business behind it, and the mindset that fuels it all. Because great design isn't just about what's on the outside. It starts from within. So let's dive in and discover the designer within you. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to another episode of the Designer Within Podcast.
I'm your host, John McClain. If you are new to the podcast, Welcome to the fun zone. We have a lot of fun and learning here. Yes, you can combine fun and learning in the same sentence. If I sound a little under the weather, it's because I am. I got back from KBiz, which was fantastic. I had such a great time.
I was the host of day one, the entire day, panels, and the Design Bites competition, and the 30 Under 30 recipients this year. So it was just a fun, action packed day. Long day, but I loved every second of it. If you came by to see that at KBIS, I so appreciate that. KBIS is one of my favorite, favorite trade shows, and I just think that it's just the place to go for interior designers, and builders, and contractors, and architects, and anyone in our industry, honestly.
Who is interested in finding out the latest and greatest technology, products, trending things, et cetera, in the kitchen and bath field. It was just an amazing, amazing time. So I had a great, great time there, but I think there was a bug going around. And I think a lot of us who were at KBiS actually got a little sicky, sicky.
So this has been a sick week for me, the week after KBiS, and I've just been sounding like this. This is actually good, if you can believe that. I sounded much worse the days before this, but I'm definitely happy to be on the other side of that nasty bug, and I'm happy to be here with you, of course. The next trip I have on my agenda is High Point Market in April, so I will see you there.
We are working on lots of panels and presentations that mark it. So stay tuned to the podcast and to my Instagram to find out more there. And if you're not following me on Instagram yet, head on over to at John McClane Design and take a follow. I will put everything there. So I'm going to be talking a little bit more about that in a little bit, um, as far as updates on events.
And of course, any sort of learning opportunities I have for you there. And of course, my design projects are there as well. So it's just a fun place to be too. Also, if you've been a long time listener of the podcast, or maybe you've just joined us and you're finding something here that you enjoy. Please hit that download button wherever you subscribe to your podcasts.
Listening is great, and I really appreciate that. But podcasts are an interesting animal because they only track downloads, which is so strange, I think. They need to do a lot of fixing of themselves in the tracking department so that they can properly track listeners. But for now, they only track downloads.
And I would love it if you added us to your automatic downloads. Every single time we have a podcast, which is every two weeks, as you know. So yes, we come out with a new podcast every two weeks. I can't even tell you. Oh my gosh. So many great guests I have upcoming this year on the podcast, including one very, very special guest that I will be announcing soon that I know a lot of you are going to know, and a lot of you are going to love, so stay tuned for that, but please hit the download button right now.
Stop the podcast, hit pause, go to the show and hit the automatic download. button. I would appreciate that. Now, today's episode, we have a special guest, Barb Davids. She is an expert in digital marketing and SEO, and is joining us from Compass Digital Strategy. In this episode, we will dive into the world of SEO, which I know a lot of you are timid about, or don't know anything about, or are very scared to even learn more about.
But we're going to make this easier for you to understand, and we're going to discuss the importance of it for designers. And just small business owners in general. Barb is also going to share invaluable insights and practical tips on how to optimize your website, improve your online presence, and ultimately attract more clients, which is what we all want.
From understanding the basics of SEO to leveraging blog posts and even social media. We will cover it all on this episode. It is so full of great tidbits. And here's a little background on Barb. Barb Davids is the founder of Compass Digital Strategies since 2018 and is a digital marketer with over 25 years of experience.
Barb's passion lies in providing direct, results oriented digital marketing solutions for ambitious business owners. She has helped them get 256 percent more organic search traffic. Wow. 22 percent more leads and 51 percent more sales from Google organic searches. When she's not behind the laptop, she's out running with her dog, Stone, in whatever city she's digital nomading in at the time, which I also think is very interesting too.
So get ready to take notes and enhance your digital strategy with Barb Davids. Let's get started. Hey Barb, I want to welcome you to the Designer Within Podcast. Thank you for having me on John. I appreciate it. I'm happier here. I love this topic. I think it's so important all of the time. And I think very many people just ignore it or do it poorly or never get into that.
And that topic is SEO and how we're going to optimize our website. Listen, you guys, this is some juicy information here. If you've ever been coached by me, or if you've ever. Heard me speak or anything, you know, how important SEO is and how I feel it is important and Barb is going to lay it all out for us in a very easy to understand, simple format, and also we can talk about ways that she can help you as well.
So I gave your bio bar before we started, but go ahead and tell everyone who you are, how you got into this business and why you got into this business. My name is Barb Davids. I like pina coladas and walking on the beach. No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I don't even like pina coladas at all. Like they, they seem like they should be fun, but I cannot stay on them.
So Barb David's come to digital strategy. So I help small business owners get more website traffic and leads mostly through organic search, which is SEO. And it started because I've been in digital marketing for like. I don't even know how many years I'm teen years. I used to be in the furniture business quite a bit and helping with digital marketing that way.
And I would work with other SEO companies and they would just kind of be like vague and they wouldn't really describe like what they were doing. And I had people to report to that. I needed to know what was going on. And so at one point that's kind of like what kind of spurred me into my own business.
So I started a photography business professional, but part time and I went to go look for information just for that industry. And it was kind of like going down a rabbit hole and I thought it was kind of funny considering I'd been in the business like why couldn't I find information specifically for that industry and around the same time I was thinking, Oh, I kind of want to like work anytime, anywhere.
So then I started building up my business on the side and then I went to some networking groups to get to know other photographers and they needed help with SEO and digital marketing. And so I started helping them and then. Kind of, I don't even know how it like really happened. Like the universe just kind of threw it at me and said, here you go.
So I ended up having my own business, helping other photographers at first. And then it kind of grew to help them understand more about SEO. And you know, if they were working with somebody or just how to get more website traffic. And so that's kind of how it started. And here we are now, I love what you're doing for just the world at large.
But I think what my takeaway is a lot of designers may think like, Oh, that's not for me, I'm not quote that kind of business. I don't have to do SEO marketing. I don't have to worry about that kind of ways to market my company, but in essence you do, and if you're wanting to reach people anywhere, anyway, online is the way to go.
So for someone, I want to really. Simplify this, Barb. I want to do the SEO for dummies, if we could, for just a minute. And for people who are really just getting their toes wet with this, how would you explain SEO for them and the reason that it's beneficial for their websites? Yeah, the easiest way is to say, okay, when you go search for something, like you pick up your phone.
You type something in, you're looking for some SEO is making it so that your website shows up when somebody does that. So it could either be in maps or it could be just in Google search results. When somebody types in interior design service near me, then your business would show up from that using. SEO.
And for someone who's never done it before, it might seem this foreign language, something so complicated, which of course is why we have wonderful people like you to help us out. But for people who have never done it, what does it involve as far as getting that rolling and getting the ball started with SEO?
And then how does it impact a specifically a designer's website or any creative person's website? Again, I think a lot of people think of it like. You know, you're searching for a product it sends you to Amazon, right? And you're searching for something it sends you to walmart. com or whatever. But for us creatives out there, how does it affect us as well?
So I think the thing to remember is that you're just trying to answer people's questions. And sometimes we are going against Amazon. Sometimes we are going against Walmart, depending on what we're trying to sell or the service. So we try to find things that our clients or our audience likes. So that we can get in front of them in other ways.
So a lot of it has to do with blocking, basically. So you have your website and by itself, if you just put your services in your homepage. Google doesn't have enough information to be able to say, Hey, this is what this person is doing now. We think it has enough, but there's like thousands of other websites out in the world.
And so in comparison, it might choose somebody else's because it has more context, more information, like blog posts and also just like freshness. So we, if we are fresh with our website, Google knows that our business is in business, basically. So if we can tell Google, like we want to talk about lampshades or designs or trends or whatever we're trying to talk about for the people that we're trying to get in front of, if we look like the authority on that using blog posts, then Google is more likely to break our website over somebody else's.
Okay, that explains it very succinctly. Thank you. That's great. And, and you just hit on something and I kind of just, let's just go into that now, which is blogging and blog posts and probably, I don't know, when did blogs kind of become a big thing? Like 2012, 2013, somewhere in there. Blogs were actually before that, probably more like 2005 or six, right?
People were blogging and. You know, that was the thing to do. And then it sort of fell by the wayside. I think when social media came along and everyone was thinking, Oh, I have to now be on social media. I can't do both. How do I juggle all of this? I have always been a proponent of blogging. I feel like blogging is just number one.
It's fun. Number two, it gets your message out. As you said, it establishes you as the authority figure. So all of those things aside, I think people who have never tried it should definitely start trying to do more blogging, but. How do we even dip our toe into that? How do we get started in that? And then I'd like to talk to the direct benefits of blogging and how we can optimize our blog posts to really bring people to us.
Yeah. So with blogging, I think the benefit of it, I'll start there because I think it's hard to see that too. People did gravitate to social more, or they think they don't need to blog because they're on social and it is going to vary from person to person and their preferences and where they want. But if we look at it from like the blogging perspective, you write a blog, you put it on your website, and then it sits out there forever.
So like, you don't have to do anything else with it technically. I mean, there's some best practices, but for the most part, you're not out there constantly doing a blog post every day, like you are on social, trying to get out in front of other people. And I'm not poo pooing social by any means. I just think that organic and being able to blog and get things from, or get traffic from Google has quite a bit of longer shelf life.
So like, for example, I have a client who wrote a blog in like, I think it was like 2018 or 19 or something like that. And it was a big old guide on what she was selling and for a little while it got a lot of traffic and then it kind of dipped down and then we refreshed it and then it got more traffic and more leads again.
And that was written like eight years ago, six years ago, and she's still getting leads off of that one blog post. And I think that's the power of. The blog post that people don't realize on top of the fact that if you create a blog post, you can use that for so many different things. So you can use that in your newsletters, you can use it in social, so you can like piecemeal it or take it apart and use different pieces and use it in other areas of your marketing.
So that's what I kind of like about the, the longevity of it. It does take time and resources in terms of do you write yourself? Do you hire somebody to do it? Is it, you know, how long do they need to be? All of that kind of stuff. I agree with all of the things that you just said. And I do think that it is not an untapped area, but I think a lot of designers mostly focus on the visual aspects of our websites.
And we're thinking only about the photos. And I go to so many websites and, you know, I get kind of pissed off because I'm like, come on, like you could do so much better. You have beautiful work, but we're not talking about it. There are no words to describe. What people are looking at. So I think that is a great point there.
And then I want to move into this visual side of things. But yes, give us some tips on when we are writing our blogs and if it does feel overwhelming and maybe some ways to strategize that to write it effectively, reach our target audience, and then, you know, throw some SEO in there too. Yeah. The one question I get asked a lot is how long does a blog post need to be?
There is no specific number that Google says you have to have. And I've seen websites where they're like, even slideshows. You can even have a slideshow and just not have any words. And it could rank, like there's just different ways to go about it. And it could be as long as 3, words. Generally, what I tell people is to do at least 800 words.
I like 1200 better when it gets lower than that, like 500, I feel like there's not enough oomph in it. Like there's not enough, it's just surface level information. And that doesn't really help the person who's reading it. Some of the questions, if you're trying to answer a particular question and it gets answered in 500 words, then that's totally fine.
But if you can do a little bit longer, that's great. And then typically when people are on a. WordPress, WhereSpace, whatever their, their site is on, there's a place to put the blog. And when you put it on there by default, there's some things you can just put in your headline and then you can start writing and then you can hit publish.
Because by default, it's going to take the headline and make that the t there's a thing called title and page description and meta description. And the reason I'm bringing that up is because in Google, when you scroll through, they have that line link, that blue or purple, and then there's a description underneath.
And you can actually specify what those are in your blog post. And by default, it picks up sort of the first words that are happening, but you can make it seem, um, maybe a little bit different in tactic. And maybe you want to change it a little bit, depending on. What other people are showing up in there.
I kind of think of this one as like the headline in the title and the description of your page, kind of like window shopping. So if you're going along the street and you see a window and you're like, Oh, that's kind of cool. I want to step in there. I think about that the same way as my website is my page title and my meta description enticing enough to want to get people to like click into my website and see what I have to offer.
So those are like two of the biggest things that you can work on. And then the other things are adding images, which is great for interior designers. I mean, that's perfect. So adding a couple images, usually like every scroll, I say to add something visually just to keep the reader engaged. And making sure that the images are optimized.
So, a lot of us use the images from our camera, or we'll use images from Canva, and we just take and we upload them as they are. But when, for example, when they come out of a camera, let's say if the interior designer probably gets them from a professional camera, those file names DSC underscore twenty thousand twelve, or whatever it is.
But really we need to rename it. it to be whatever the target keyword is for the blog post that we're writing. So, if we're talking about, I don't know anything, I should have came up with something off the top of my head. But let's say we're talking about blue couches in a yellow room, that we want to put blue couches in a yellow room as the file name.
And then when we upload it, we can add an image alternative text, which is, The phrase that screen readers read when it comes through and it's reading all the words on the page. And we can use that opportunity also to put our keyword in. Initially, it's mostly just to describe the image in words so that the screen reader can know what's happening, but if you can put the keyword in there naturally, then that's a great way to do it.
And then, of course, putting a bio at the end of your blog post is a very helpful thing to do to showcase your authority. The bio is a way to tell Google that you're a real person, that it's from a credible person. So it's one of those, and even just the reader for that matter, like if they're looking at your blog posts and they land on that first, they might not know a lot about you yet.
So using that bio at the bottom can help say, Oh, this person, they know what they're talking about because it shows their accolades or how long they've been in business or like something fun about them. So that's always a good thing to have at the bottom as well. And then the other thing is a call to action.
So when somebody gets done reading the blog post, you don't want to leave them hanging with, okay, well, what do I do next? So either put your contact form right there at the bottom, which I highly recommend versus an extra click going to the contact page, or maybe you have a download or join my email newsletter list or something like that.
So that's the very high level getting started with a blog post. Oh, okay. Gosh, I love that. High level, John. No, I know that. I love it all. And I think all of those things are so fascinating. I think a lot of the designers are solopreneurs, the people that are listening to the podcast, some of them are solopreneurs, some of them have a team, but most do not.
And I think, again, it might sound overwhelming, but when you break it down to, okay, here's what you do, here's why you do it. And I kind of think of it like, for lack of better words, kind of writing for someone who's visually impaired in a way when you're, when I'm doing SEO keywords, I'm trying to think about ways to sort of give it to give that verbiage to people who are doing that search for that online.
Well, you know, I love what you said about writing a story in your blog, and I think that's important. It should have a beginning, a middle, and an end as far as kind of setting that up, because if you're just writing a blog for the sake of SEO, then no one's ever going to come back and read your blog again, right?
And that's to have good content on top of. All the other SEO things inside of it. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And then back to the visualization part of the visual part of it. So if we, you hit on something there. So, so Google can actually search the images. Is that what you're saying without having the keywords behind it?
So that is another way that it can find what we have on our, on our websites and our blog posts. So there's a couple, it's like kind of twofold in a way. There's the images. This area, this, which is really big for interior designers, of course, the images of Google. So there's a whole little image search area from Google that it looks at all the images on a website.
But not only that, like when you put the image in the page, it can use all the information from the image as context and it can actually see whether or not the image was taken from a camera, if it's from your phone. So sometimes I've been experimenting a little bit with uploading phone photos. Because of the whole AI thing, I'm trying to set myself apart.
So I'm kind of curious to see if that's going to do anything. Most of the time, the information from the camera is left in there and it's like behind the scenes. And then it uses the file name as another way to do it. If you have gobbledygook in the file name, it doesn't really give Google anything to go off of.
So that's kind of helpful. And the image alt text as well. The description that it comes with in some of the platforms and captions. The caption helps from the overall piece of it, but because it's like on the page, it's not like, so I was, I always have to say, I walk around with like a disclaimer, right?
Like a big splat over my head because things can change at like any moment, but like Google doesn't tell you specifically that that will help because not any one thing helps. It's like all the things combined together that really like pull together your SEO. So it's like a. Everything steps on top of each other.
Yeah, and I think the goal is to make Mr. Google happy, right? I remember back when Google Plus was a thing, right? And that was, um, you know, we were all, Oh my gosh, you have to put everything on Google Plus now because Google loves that. He's like, what do we do to kiss up to Google these days to really kiss its butt and be like, Yep, okay, you know, trust us.
Are there any other tactics that we can do to say, Hey, Google, we're legit. Please rank us higher other than what you've just discussed. Well, you could buy ads. You could buy ads, that's one way to do it. The other one is Google Business Profile. So that's a free service that anybody can use. You claim your business.
Even if you don't have a brick and mortar store, you can claim it and just hide your address and then put some information in there. There's three things I think mostly that it works off of so that maybe you can come up in maps, which actually really helps with. And then the other one we don't have any control over, which is proximity, because where somebody is typing it in, it depends on where they are compared to where you are technically, because even if you're not showing your address, Google has it, because they need to know where you are.
And so they kind of look at it from that perspective, but. It's another way to get in front of people too and just to share photos, you can, all you have to do is share a photo like once a week on there just to show activity and that really helps as well. Oh, that's a good tip. I didn't realize keeping it fresh was important too for that.
So I guess as we're having new projects come along, we could upload photos of the new project. Absolutely. Is there a limit to what they will let you upload on their Google, Google My Business, Google Business? No? Not that I know of yet. The only thing is maybe too large, like it can't be too large, but I think most cameras, probably some of the newer ones, they might be too big, but you can always just resize them before sending them up.
And a lot of the time you don't get to share words with the photos, but they also have a posting system, kind of like social. So if you post it up to what's new area in there. You put your photo and then you can put like, I think it's 750 characters. Now I can't remember, but like the first 300 characters, what matters anyway, you can put like what you just did at somebody's home or show an example.
Oh, that's great advice. I just added a new photo to ours the other day. And then they sent a report back saying, I guess, I don't remember if it was congratulations or what the wording was, but basically that photo has gotten X amount of views and they were so excited about it. So again, I guess. It was making them happy that we were adding new photos to that and keeping that fresh because it's a give and take they want something for what they're giving us, right?
They're sending us traffic. And for that, they want some kind of content from us, I'm assuming. And I want to also encourage people when we're asking for reviews, which is another good thing for your Google business profile, you could always encourage your client to upload a photo with their review, because that also helps with getting more visibility.
Very, very good. Yeah, the review part of that is essential. We have that as part of our off boarding process when we end a project, that automatically the email goes out. With links, by the way, people don't just say, go find me on Google, go ahead and send the client the link and make sure you want to, you want to bring that horse to water and then give it water to drink.
That's what you want. Do you want to make it as simple as, as possible? So you've talked about Google the entire time. Are there any other search engines that we should be concerned with? No, I'm just kidding. So technically not really like from a general perspective at the moment, it's still Google is the biggest market share.
However, there is. So much changing and there are things that are called I think it's generative engine optimization or geographic engine optimization Some people have called it just search optimization. We're going to hear a lot of buzzwords about it, but basically there's things that some people might've heard or they've seen them on their phone already.
There's a thing called perplexity. I think search chat has already come out with their own like search engine. So Google used to have these partnerships with different companies like Apple. So whenever somebody came up on the phone. And did a search like it would automatically go to Google. You didn't really have a choice.
You'd have to actively remove it in order to search somewhere else. Well, they were claimed a monopoly. They were taking over the world basically in the search, obviously search area. And so now they've been told that at some point, something's going to have to change. And so it's possible that that could do a shake up as well.
So while we're all trying to optimize our business for showing up in Google, at some point we will have to think about the other places, like the AI overviews, or the perplexities of the world, the different things that are talking, or even voice search. To show up there, it's still, the, the basis is still the same as what we've been doing.
Creating content that is going to answer the question of the person asking. However, there are some things that we can do a little bit more proactively than we typically have done in the past, which is getting links and mentions from other people in the world or other websites. So that their website links back to our website because more of those mentions and more of those links just looks favorably to all of the different like algorithms that are out there now trying to pull things.
So, like the latest industry one, like there were some of them that were. When you go to like perplexity, they're going to pull together information from a lot of different blog posts. So it's pulling from existing content already out on the web and it pulls it together in a very nice, pretty paragraph for you to read.
And then it gives you these numbers of where it found all the sources. So if you can show up in those sources. You're going to have a better chance of showing up and a lot of those right now are lists and things or they might be high level like New York Times or something like that. So those are some of them.
And then YouTube is another whole search area that you can go out to. And put yourself if it's part of your marketing method to be able to show up for too. So it's kind of like you don't want to look like if you're an investor, you don't invest in just one thing, you invest in multiple things. It's like that on search or your marketing in general, you want to diversify because if any one thing goes away, then you're kind of out of luck.
Like if you did your whole business on Instagram and Instagram went down, that would be a problem. So you want to kind of like strategize your marketing in different areas. Should we be worrying about getting our business listed on Bing, B I N G listing for our businesses? Yeah, I think it's the same way as everything else.
You can do things, but they don't do things much differently than Google. It's got a very much lower market share, and it's possible that Like you could even try it out with just ads, maybe that might be a way, but the amount of people that come from Bing versus Google, it's almost not worth spending your time there, but the things that you're doing for Google actually help Bing as well.
That's the funny thing. So, Oh, okay. All right. So they kind of play well together on the playground. When you touched on something that I want to go back to, which is looking back to your website, let's talk about what that is. But for someone who's never done it before. How do they start to get links back from other people's websites?
Because I can raise my hand and say it has driven traffic on our website just to be featured on another, preferably larger, you know, larger, wider reaching website when they add a link back to me. So if I write an article for, you know, Martha Stewart living, I put a link back to my website, boom, that instantly adds some SEO to our website.
So let's talk about. Ways that we can do that on a simpler level, if we're not, you know, writing articles for major magazines or getting featured in major magazines, are there other baby steps that we can do to get those links kind of coming back to our website to increase SEO? Yep. The simplest way is to get in front of journalists.
And the simplest way to get in front of journalists is using a service called, I think it's called SOS. It used to be HARO, Help a Reporter Out. And they're still out there, but there's a new one, Peter Shankman had created the HARO one, and now he's created this SOS, which is, now I forget what it stands for, but basically he sends an email on a daily basis, and it has a list of reporters and the information that they're looking for, and they say, okay, I'm looking for this.
Can you answer me by such and such a date? And then you can contribute to that article that they're writing. And there's best practices that you can look up to see how to respond back to them. But that's the simplest way to do it because all you do is you get this email and you're like, Oh, I can talk to that.
And so then you send an email, like maybe takes five, ten minutes of your time. And then you have a potential backlink from that. The other simplest way, maybe not the easiest, but definitely the simplest, is to create a blog post that is so good That you push it out to all your marketing channels and then people will want to link back to it.
That's a nice sustainable method because the other option that I don't recommend is buying links, which a lot of people sometimes think about doing, but it's against Google's guidelines. So if they catch you buying links, it's possible that they could not rank your website higher. They could even penalize you potentially, but buying links isn't even a longevity term.
So like if you buy backlinks, sometimes they are as cheap as, I don't even know, they're super cheap sometimes, but they come from then really bad, crappy websites. And then if you buy them, it's not even guaranteed that they'll keep forever because it's not like something that is an earned link. So that's kind of the bad way to go.
But I forgot where I was going with that, but those are the two simple ways. And then the bad way don't do the bad way. Google is smart. You guys Google is not, Google is not a dummy Google. You might think you're pulling the wool over Google's eyes, but you, you are not, you know, one thing I do and maybe it's.
Right. Maybe it's not, I don't write an article on the blog about a product or a brand that I really enjoy using, and we legitimately had used it in a project. Then I will actually send that blog post to the brand or the, you know, the product that we use. And I will ask them, would they like to feature it on their website or on their blog?
And a lot of times they will add that to their website and add a bit more verbiage to that. So it's basically added back to their own blog. And then it adds a link back to my website from their blog as well. So I think that, is that a tactic that you have seen used before as well? As long as it's genuine, some of those tactics out there, like if you, or the listener gets an email and somebody says, would you put this badge on your website in exchange for a link?
Like that's not a true genuine one, but the way that you describe it, yes, that's a genuine reciprocation. Yeah. And again, you're helping each other out. I mean, I go as far as to list the links in, um, newsletters that we do on social media bios. I think the purpose of a blog for me is it keeps your website fresh.
It keeps it interesting. It gives people a reason to keep coming back. And I even hold a spot on the front of our website for like, quote unquote, latest news, right? The things that are going on with us that are exciting. And I'll put that there to keep people. You know, coming back to the website to see what's happening for new things.
So speaking of that front page of the website and SEO, when on our website do we start SEO? Is it on the first page? Yeah. I'm a firm believer in do what you want. Meaning what? There are rules, but they can be broken. I do realize that a lot of people say that there's a strict roadmap and how you have to do SEO.
But it's not like it's not fixable. That's the whole thing. So what I recommend doing is if you're going to start with SEO, just start with your most popular pages first, and that is your homepage. But technically your homepage generally comes up for a plethora of keywords. So because you're trying to balance that with.
The usability, the aesthetics, how you want people to feel when they land on your website. Sometimes I say, don't worry about that too much for your homepage. You do want to put like your core phrase in the spots that should be. However, I understand that there's a feeling that you want people to get at the same time.
So I would say, start with your popular pages, your service pages. And then the blog pages and on that first page, it could just be like, I see a lot of things that designers do, for instance, where it's just like a scrolling images and scrolling images. And I hate those type of websites personally, because there is no content there.
And I think that you should draw people in from that first page of your website, of course, with your images, but also with what you have to say. And as you said, your perspective now, will you show it for our website platform that we use? And I, and I actually love it. I feel like it's very. user friendly for me.
And if I need to change something quickly, you know, on the weekend, when the web designers not working, then I can do that. So it's very user friendly, right? And I noticed when I'm in there, there are ways to add SEO here and, and tweak the name of this and so forth. So what services do you provide for your clients who have.
Very little SEO, or maybe they have some and it needs to be repaired. Do you offer services of like analyzing my whole website, then coming back to say, here's what we should do. Or do I just like say, here, here are the keys and you take it over, Barb. How does that work for your company? Yeah, it's pretty simple.
I have a free SEO power up plan. So it kind of helps people give an idea of how they can boost their SEO power, get some visibility on Google. And then there's a website marketing makeover service. It's a three month program that we go through and then following that, they can either step into the group program where they can still get consulting for me at a reduced rate, or they can have it done for them if they're just like, yep, I'm done.
Yeah. I think a lot of people get to that point probably where they've tried it. And they feel a little bit overwhelmed with it. And then they're like, yep, you do it all. Yep. And people don't like SEO. Yeah. It's as, as you said, it's not a sexy term, but it's a necessary term. It really, really is. Back to the ads part of things.
How much do ads play in not only making Google happy with you because you're giving Google money, they're loving that, but also in just bringing that traffic to your page. Counterpart of that question is, are people turned off by ads in your opinion when they see an ad on a website for an interior design firm?
How do you feel that people perceive that? Do they feel like because it's not organic that maybe they shouldn't interact with that? What are your thoughts on all of that? So I think ads are effective. If they're done properly over the years, yes, they are getting more ignored. However, there's still a place for them, depending on the industry.
I have a client that uses them and it has a very large ROI. And that is the only reason that we use them. There are some other people I've used that ads for, and they did not get a return on their investments. They spent the money, didn't get any leads or sales. And that's when it's not a good idea from the business perspective.
I think it's worth trying if there's budget available. Like try two, three months, try at least 500 just to see what happens. And again, I say that knowing that it depends on the cost per all the, there's a bunch of details and stuff, but if you get a return on your money, it's definitely worth it. And sometimes I do recommend that for clients, if it's like a supplemental type of strategy, for example, I sometimes have somebody that has a brand new website.
And it does take a little bit of time for SEO, generally speaking, anywhere from 6 to 12 months before you really start to feel it a little bit more. But to see bigger traction, I generally say just give it a little bit of time. For the websites that we've started brand new, what I'll do is wait for that to get going and then do ads in the beginning.
So it kind of supplements. Trying to get a more aggressive approach to getting more leads faster. And then later it can either be taken away if it doesn't need to be needed or can continue if it's getting a return. And as far as the type of ad, are you sending people to just general services about your company?
I like to place ads for growing my email list. So I will give out, you know, a download or something like that. And that's how I get people to be added to my email list, which I think a lot of designers could go that same route as well. to try to collect emails of people who are interested in them. What kind of ads are we running when we're trying to increase our SEO and overall increase business?
What type of ads should we be considering? So there's a couple different types. There's the text search ads in Google ads. And then there are local service ads inside of Google Maps area. And then there's also dynamic and a few more. But generally, if you're doing like the normal Google search text ads, where it shows up at the top, you're going to want to do a more bottom of the funnel.
Because typically people that are looking for a service, they are like in it for something specific. And so they're almost like in the consideration stage. And so they're looking for a solution. And I would put like an actual service, like a free consultation call, or something that gets them closer to wanting to work with you.
Virtual design. Yep, exactly. And then the displays, which you can still do through Google, but you can also do it through other websites, or you can do it through newsletters, even they have ads there, depending on who's selling ads in their newsletter system, but you could do a visual and that wouldn't be good when for like newsletter or something to get them into the door.
So you could put something like get free design tips, you know, like something to get them in to get them to know about you. And then the local map ones are. I don't recommend them as much typically for most clients just because I don't really like how You have to like pay to play there so much with the green check mark and the badge Whatever they're doing over there, so I don't do those as much but it is an option Yeah, I do like five tips for I think it's called five tips to design like a pro Which is a download that I have On my website and then sometimes I will market that little free download for people So I love your advice on being very specific about it But don't just say i'm an interior designer call me like no that's not going to get anyone to pick up the phone It's not going to get anyone to email you, right?
You have to be very direct on those ads for sure. But as you said before, all this SEO and all the content, if you create one blog post that you're like, wow, this is so good, it could turn into a social media post, it could turn into a Pinterest post, it could turn into a newsletter focus, it could turn into an ad down the road, right?
So you're not just creating one piece and saying, Oh, gosh, I spent an hour. Or whatever, creating that and I'm done with it. No, no, no. Come up with a system that will allow you to replicate that in other, in other ways. Speaking of other ways, you touched on Pinterest earlier. So, is Pinterest a part of your strategy for SEO, for website design and SEO optimization at all?
Nope, I'm really not a fan of Pinterest. I have tried it a few times myself and with clients and I just have not been able to figure out the return on that. And I know people just rave about it, but it's not something that I have found to work. So yeah, I, I, I do know of people that do it, so I could refer somebody to them.
Interesting. And then as far as YouTube, you said YouTube earlier, do you dabble in YouTube at all with your clients? No, just not in terms of, well, we do run an ad for one of my clients on there and it's gotten a lot of good traction, no leads, but it seems to be like it's a brand exercise that we're doing.
That one is more about content creation. I haven't done it from the perspective of. Search and find and do it from a search engine perspective. I've done it more as a marketing piece of my business. Every time I have something that I can do as a video, like my podcast or something, then I push it up to YouTube and I'm starting to take those blog posts and create videos and podcasts from those.
So I can utilize the content more. Yeah, that's definitely smart, smart to do. We talked earlier about how to kind of make Mr. Google upset with us and ways to get them not on our side. What other ways do you know that would aggravate Google to where they lower your rankings and basically penalize you for what you're doing?
You mentioned, you know, of course, some of these buying of links and so forth. Are there any other ways that people could get in trouble with Google? So they wouldn't penalize you. But one thing is to have a slow loading website. So if it takes a long time for your website to show up, they don't look kindly to that one.
There's a free Chrome extension that you can use. It's called Lighthouse, Google Lighthouse, that you can add and then run that and see how Google likes your website. So you can see if it's going fast or slow. And then if there's errors on the website, so if you have like a lot of broken links, like, When you click a link and it goes to that 404 funny page or if something's not like the form doesn't work, like definitely check all your forms.
So that's another thing to check. And on that piggybacking off of that, how often should we revisit SEO optimization on our websites and change things around and update it? Like how often should we reassess it? So once you go through and kind of clean it up, if you wanted to go through and check all of the pages that you have, you can do that once.
And then I say come back like at least once a year, just to give it a visual. It's not like you have to change everything every year, but at least go through it and look at it. If you do create a new one, here's one thing to catch just in case, because I know a lot of people do this. Don't create a new URL, just update the content on the old URL.
Because the longevity of that is seen by Google. So if you're creating a new one, it looks fresher, but you lose the history and the quality of the older blog posts as well. Oh, very good advice. Yeah. Especially if you're sharing something specific. Absolutely. This may be an odd question and if it is just say, John, you're dumb, move on.
But. Instagram, we're posting on Instagram, obviously, and I know Instagram is an actual website, right? They have a website. Does that at all affect our SEO that we're having things on Instagram that is also, it's an app, but it's also a website? Does that even remotely relate to each other or no? No, I don't think so, because Google actually sees those as two separate entities.
Okay, so Google says I'm here, I'm better than you, you're going to use me, but still we recommend using your content on Instagram. Okay, good. I want to start talking about AI just a bit to get your perspective on it. I know you mentioned it earlier. How is AI affecting SEO? Because many people are heading to chat GPT and entering things in there.
And by the way, I think that's a great way to get the juices flowing when writing blog posts. I think it's a great assistant to someone who is working on something to get another. Set of eyes. They may be robotic eyes, but they're on it. So ai, where are we with it now and in the future? Are we going to be required to show up on an AI search just like we are on a Google search?
I don't know. Yes, absolutely. . That's the short answer. We're gonna have to be on books, but you know what? The trouble is they look at it differently than Google does. Google has its own algorithm, Bing has its own algorithm, Perplexity has its own way, but AI is essentially pulling from existing material.
It is not yet, I can't ever say that it's not ever going to because I have no idea what happens in technology, but it's pulling from existing material right now. So it has to get its content from somewhere. Where does it get its content? It gets it from our website. So it's not creating something new right now.
If we want to show up in AI, if we want to show up. In front of the people that are searching, we have to do things to our website to do that. It's like marketing. It's kind of like before websites, we had to show up in yellow pages. We had to show up in postcards, in direct marketing, in magazines, in phone calls.
So it's just another way of showing up. But I think how that's going to change is going to change about 20 times in the next 10 years or something. It's kind of like a long time ago when they used to say you had to have back links to your website in order to rank. It was like a popularity contest. The more backlinks you had, probably the higher you would rank because it looked like it was a favorable thing.
But then people found out how to abuse it so that you could buy backlinks. And then Google was like, Oh, well, now that that's happening, they had to redo things to say, okay, which websites are bad and which websites are good. So there's always going to be a way to try and find a way around it. And then we're going to, as business owners, we have to find a way around that again.
So I think it's going to be. Ever changing and ever evolving. But I also think if we diversify our marketing, that will make it a little less stressful because we're not so reliant on one medium, because when you are, and then that medium goes away, then we're like, I've already seen a lot of. I don't want to say like a big dip, but I have seen a dip in my client's traffic from organic search.
And it's very disheartening because it was the biggest one, because we're. We're on our way to doing some other ones, but yeah, I think it's going to be interesting. And it is going to be tough as business owners because we get so much information. We're in chat GPT all the time, but normal consumers currently, they still are in droves going to perplexity or chat GPT.
So it's a slow roll over. And at some point it's going to cross. And then maybe it won't even be like perplexity. Maybe it'll be like a human face on our phones or something. Who knows? Yeah, who knows? I think that when you go now to a search, it more and more search engines are putting AI into that, right?
And even on the, even inside of, let's say I have my courses on Kajabi, for instance, and inside of Kajabi, there is. You know, all of these search engines that they built inside of that, that will answer it in AI for me. So I think now, you know, you go to Google and you put things in, and then there's that little AI thing that pops up at the front of that tells you, you know, all this stuff there that AI has found and many times I'll have to say it, it finds the answer really quickly for me versus just doing that old fashion, old fashion, by the way, is the wrong term for Google search.
But that older method of doing that, it is in there. But what I took away from what you said was. Do your SEO. Now do it right so that you do show up down the road on these AI search bots that are out there so that you are part of that now. And I think, like you said, by having that content and keeping it updated and keeping it fresh and keep it out there in a constant way.
It'll allow you to show it because where is AI searching from now on my chat? Is it 2023? Are we there yet with that? Or is that where it's searching from the year? I don't remember the year that it cut off on chat GBT. It depends on the, it depends on the model and it depends on the platform. Yeah. Yeah.
And as I said, I think more and more people are just making that an integrated part of their actual. Platform, whatever platform they have, whatever service they're offering. Have you ever worked with someone who has worked AI or chat GPT or perplexity or any of those things into their sort of like question and answer situation on their website?
Is that something that I can see that going in that direction where. We actually put that on our website and it answers questions about why should I hire an interior designer or how long does this process take? Have you worked with anyone who's done that? And if so, has that increased with SEO for their websites?
I have not, and I would not recommend it currently only because you can't control the answers and I'm very big about brand awareness and we have chats on some of my clients websites, but a real person is behind it. I'm too nervous still yet to just let. AI takeover and something of that capacity.
Because if something were said incorrectly, and I've heard a couple of worry stories, I guess I don't want to spread them anymore, but there were horror stories about what people come back with and maybe the tools are changing too. Because. Sometimes you can put safeguards in place, but I'm still old school when it comes to that.
I feel like a person needs to be behind the chat bots and things like that. Cause I know what I'm talking to a chat. I get so frustrated. Like, could I just have a human, I need my question answered. Yeah. It kind of goes back to when you're calling those, you know, the number on your credit card and it has, you have to go through 15 prompts to get there and none of them are real people and you get so agitated.
Yeah, I agree with you there, Barb. I think that's a way that we can hold true to not fighting. AI, but also not totally giving into it and really giving that human side of things. Because even on the questions that I have on my website about working with a designer, there are questions that my clients have asked me over the years, or I've heard from prospective clients over the years.
And so they're real questions. They're not something that are being pulled out of thin air. I agree with you, especially. With us designers working with clients at a higher level, very expensive homes with very nice furnishings and so forth, larger investment amounts. Those people are going to want that one on one service.
And that is why I firmly plant my feet in the ground and say, AI can never take what we give as interior designers and as business owners in general. Even, you know, in your line of work, you give a catered couture service to your clients that only you can give that can never be replicated by AI. And I think.
That's the reason I'm not overly scared about it. I just think that it's there for now. We should be aware, like anything, threat or good, we should be aware that it's there and understand what it can do for us and how we can best utilize it. On our website, is there anything that matters about the length of our website?
The number of pages on our website? Like, should we have the one page that we used to have? I know a lot of people still have that where it's like, you know, one long page with all the things on it. But more and more of us are having the portfolio page. We're having the about us page. We're having the blog page.
We're having services that we offer. Is, is there any help with that, with SEO by having multiple pages? Yes, because if you only have one page, there's not enough context. It's rare that you can rank a one page website with nothing else on it. Because there's not enough context for Google to. Really get a sense of what's going on because each page of your website can show up in Google, right?
It's not ranking a whole website. It's ranking one page So if you are an interior designer and you have a one page website and it is interior design even if it's for somebody in this space like even if it's a really long phrase that you're ranking for if it's just the one page and just the one keyword You're trying to outrank other people and so the other people that are targeting that same keyword They have blogs and they have other pages They're gonna get more like I don't know gold stars or whatever you want to call it from Google.
Yeah So it's hard to rank with one page the more quality pages. That's really what makes it different I can see that. And I guess the title of that page would play a role in finding you. So if someone says, tell me about John McLean or John McLean bio, the about us page will pop up and it will actually say about at the top.
Right. So that'll be part of the SEO I'm assuming. Yep. Absolutely. And most of the time there's some pages like the about page, depending on the industry, I say, you don't really have to target a specific word because it is what it is. Like it's going to be about you. Like sometimes you put a service as the about page or you have a service.
And you want a good name with it, you can try to target it, but sometimes pages are just the pages and you have to think about the user experience. So when they do come to your website from whatever medium, like you're talking to them at lunch and you say, Hey, check out my website. Or if you direct them from your social, when they land on your website, you want them to have a good experience.
And that accounts for SEO too. Very good point. You know, one thing that really annoys me is when I'm sharing a link from someone's website, let's say I'm sending a link and it always pops up for some reason when I'm in DMs on Instagram and I'm sharing a link from someone's website. They always either don't have a description of what that page is, or they have some blank image that they never uploaded on that, right?
It's like just some stupid placeholder image. And I found it because when I was sharing something about my own website with someone on social media, I was like, Oh gosh, we need to. That's a new page and we haven't added anything to that. So is there anything to that, that you want to speak about just as far as like the behind the scenes of every single page on your website?
I think there's so many things rather than just the SEO part. What is that called? That image that you, is it just called the title in it? I don't know what it's called. Yeah. I call it the feature image feature image. Okay. Yeah. I'm not sure on show it exactly where it's at, but usually it's either called thumbnail or representative image or feature image and WordPress.
It's over on the right hand side. Usually you can say that. And then what happens is this is my favorite trick or hack. So when you go to Google and you type in to the search bar, site, colon, your domain. com, then you get a list of all of the pages that Google can see. It shows the page title and the description.
And so you can get a sense of what people are seeing when they type in and they see your website. And a lot of times people will see, Oh my gosh, my homepage says homepage. It doesn't even say interior design services. Like it's really crazy how we just, we forget that part of it. So that's one way you can go.
Just that's the easy, simplest way to just do a first step. Actually, it's just go site colon. And then your domain. com and then just see all those and then go fix that. And then that description that comes up there and that featured image is what's used when you share it like you were talking about in the DMs.
So just making sure that that is the image that you want. I love that. I think that, wow, that's great. Great tip. So I'm sure everybody right now is doing that very thing. Doing that. The reason I bring that up is because I feel like this well rounded complete perspective, complete view of our businesses is very important.
And if we are sharing a page from our website or if a page pops up from somebody else, you want that to be that professional image that you're giving to clients in front of them. You want it to be as professional online as you are in person. And I think that is something that many people. Either don't think about it, don't value.
But to me, it's a whole experience for everyone to be a part of your business that way. Yeah. It's part of the brand. Yeah, it is. Before we close out, I want to talk about geography of your SEO and how that works. So obviously if you're in an area and that's the area that you focus on, let's, you know, I'm in Los Angeles, so that's where I might focus.
What if I wanted to focus on other areas of the country, of the world, to get business out there, or to get SEO that way? Are there tactics that we can use to expand our geographic area? Yeah, I think probably the simplest way is to start thinking about the keywords that people are searching, or people are asking, because that keyword People can ask it from anywhere.
It doesn't have to be specifically from your area. But another thing you could do is work with other people or collaborate with other people in areas that you want to show up for. Or maybe you could do some sort of, it's kind of more from collaboration because, because you're, if you're focused on local search, then it's going to see it that way.
But I'm trying to think of like how to say this. Technically the more the local search comes up is the Google maps piece. So if you're writing about keywords that your blog posts actually target, those can come up anywhere. But if you did want to expand more, I think it's just getting out there for more topics for the most part.
I was just thinking off the top of my head how you could do that with collaboration with other people or networking groups or conferences, like going out to those. And if you mention all of these things that you're doing on your website, It could trigger Google to say, Oh, this person was over here. Or like, it'll just diversify the topics on your website.
Yeah, no, I see that. Google will understand that you're working in different areas just by the fact that you're talking about those areas. Is it important for us as designers to say. I don't know, this specific project that we worked on in California was amazing. Da da da da da da. Is that important to kind of include that in the description of the portfolio project?
Yeah, I think for two different ways, just because it adds a personal level to it. From the reader's perspective, whoever visits the website, the reason I'm hesitating is because when you say that you're working in a specific area, like on your website and your footer or whatever you're doing, it doesn't necessarily mean that.
You're specifically set for that place as far as Google's concerned. It can't stop it from showing somewhere in another country is what I'm getting at. So it's still going to be able to show up there. You can't say, I don't want to show up in New York because I don't want to service New York people. But you could do things like don't mention New York, or you could explicitly say down at the bottom for the reader that you don't want to show up there.
But you can't really tell Google to ignore certain states when it comes to SEO. Well, I was thinking less of ignoring those or prohibiting those, but more gaining the ones who are looking for work in those areas. That's kind of where I was thinking about it. So maybe if I want to work in Los Angeles and I say, you know, I'm talking about Los Angeles on my blog post about this project and so forth, is that going to attract more people in that area?
Yeah, Google. Yeah, I guess I was trying. Yeah, backwards explained it basically. But yeah, if you're, if you want to show up in one. That's a really great way to do it. Super easy, right? Because you're always going to be in that one and you're talking about it and you're mentioning like side streets or that you met at the coffee shop or not even just mentioning the city and stuff.
But your Google business profile really makes a difference with that as well. But if you wanted to expand that's when hitting some of the larger target area is I think Because by default, you might show up more in this area versus somewhere else, but it's not necessarily going to not show up somewhere else either.
And to expand your footprint. No, that makes sense. How do we find keywords? How do we start that search for keywords that are best for us? Right. The million dollar question. Well, you don't have to go deep into this, but seriously, how specific should we be on keyword for those searches for our websites?
Yeah, I think the simplest way is simply to go to Google. There are free tools out there and you can always say free keyword research tool. Go type in a core keyword like interior design and see what comes up. That's one way to do it. Then just go into Google, start typing in a word up at the top, like typing blue couches, and then all of a sudden you're going to see an automatic drop down.
And every most popular phrases around that phrase is going to show up there. And then you can see what people are interested in to be able to write about. So that's one way to target. Google can only show one page at a time in its results, right? And the other one is, if you scroll down a little bit on Google, there's a People Also Asked area.
And when you see that, there's like five of them down there. Those are questions that people also ask around that same subject. When you go down there, you can see and you can answer those questions. And then if you click down the dropdown area on the first one, second, third, it keeps popping with more of them.
It's like little bunny rabbits popping out. Like there's this whole bunch of questions that you can answer. So that's the simplest, easiest way just to look for content to write about. Let Google give you information to give to Google. That's right. The easiest way Google will tell you what to do on the subject of your area and Google business and so forth.
What if you are a service based business and you don't list your area, you don't list your physical area? Is that a no no? No, that's good. You can do that too. I mean, you can still put servicing, well, you can put United States if you want. Or I can't remember if it specifically asks you for a city now, but you can hide your address.
Just, I don't think you have to put a city. You can put zip codes if you want. I've tried back and forth different ways and it doesn't really matter because it sees where you are, like technically in the background. I know the biggest difference would be someone who worked from home or worked from somewhere where they did not want clients to visit them.
And then you could just hide that address, right? So people, that's what I do. I hide it. And I just say United States and then I just let it do whatever, but you could target just a city and be like Los Angeles. This is the only one I want to serve. When people get into placing ads, of course, they can place their ads in specific cities and specific countries.
And that's where you can really cater that down to people is when you start placing those ads. You're a wealth of knowledge. It's so much information. So good. And I love the way that you broke it down into like Digestible parts. But just as a recap, tell everybody how they can work with you. If they're like, yes, I love everything Barb is saying today, but I don't want to do that.
So tell everyone the, again, the methods of partnering with you and working with you to learn more about SEO. The simplest way is just to go to the website, compassdigitalstrategies. com. And whatever somebody is interested in, there's the free SEO power up plan. There is a free website marketing starter kit.
There's a link to the podcast. It's all on the website. Yeah. And we didn't even mention your podcast. So you have a podcast as well. I'm assuming you're diving deeper on a regular basis into these topics as well. Yep. A lot of tips and tricks and tactics and how tos and some behind the scenes and some like in theory stuff too, just to help people understand like the return on SEO, because I feel like everybody thinks it's like a big black hole and like they have to spend money on it forever.
And it's definitely not that. Yeah. And what's the name of your podcast? Small business sweet spot. Well, this has been a sweet spot today. I've learned so much. I know everyone listening has as well. And if you can take one thing away from what Barb has said today and better your business with it and grow from there, I think that's great, but please check out Barb's website and the podcast and find ways to work with her as well.
And all those lovely freebies that you have as well on your website. But thank you for being here today, Barb, and sharing your wealth of knowledge on the all things SEO. It was a pleasure. Thanks, John. Thanks for tuning in to the designer within podcast. I hope you found today's episode inspiring and full of actionable ideas to help you design a better home, a thriving career, or simply a more intentional life.
For more tips, resources, and free downloads to support the design of your home or the design of your career, head on over to JohnMcclain. co. That's JohnMcclain. co. And remember, to make big changes on the outside, you need to start within. Until next time, I'm John McClain. Stay creative and stay inspired.