More 2 Marketing

Susan
More to marketing. Welcome to more to marketing. The podcaster explores marketing products and everything in between. I’m your host, Susan and today we’re going to be talking about SEO. I am very excited to announce that we have a true expert on today in the field of SEO, none other than Kate Toon. Kate is a guru in all things SEO. She’s an award winning entrepreneur, author, speaker, educator, podcaster and parent of one human and one fur baby. I can relate to the animals and fur babies and humans from her humble backyard shed. She masterminds and ambitious. Business universe helping thousands of other humans to build their own version of success through digital marketing business. Now, welcome to the show, Kate.
Kate
Ohh it’s lovely to be here. Thank you so much for. Having me, I’m so excited. Tell me a bit.
Susan
More about yourself and your journey and all the other pieces happening right now.
Kate
Ohh gosh. Well, as of today I’m not sure what my journey is. I’m a bit delirious. I just got back from Bali and I’ve been very poorly. So I’ve just come back into the office today and I’m trying to remember who I am and what I do. So I started by cleaning my desk, which is always top priority. But I guess look these days, you know, I built my business on the foundations of copywriting and and SEO, which we’re going to talk about today. But these days, I think I’ve sort of evolved into more of a. Mystic. You know, business mentor, digital marketing coach. Cause I’ve done a bit of everything, you know, I’ve got a conference. I’ve got memberships, courses, funnels out the Gazoo. I speak, I’ve got podcasts. So I think of myself more as a generalist than a specialist now, but that doesn’t mean that, you know, SEO wasn’t what got me here today.
Susan
Hmm, it definitely was. Your first baby, wasn’t it?
Kate
Mm-hmm. Well, copywriting was my first baby. But the problem with copywriting is there is a lot of copywriters and a lot of copywriting doesn’t make much money. So you really need to niche down as a, as a copywriter. I. Sink and find a specialism and I didn’t want to specialise by industry so I chose to specialise by skill and back then SEO was a rare thing. Not many people really understood SEO and understood how to write for for humans and search engines. And if I’m honest, people still don’t understand it. So it’s still a relevant niche today.
Susan
100% agree and it’s something that constantly comes up when anyone is ever looking for their rankings. On Google or Bing or whatever they’re on as well, they’re always first going SEO seo.
Kate
What is it? It’s.
Susan
As if it’s SOS.
Kate
Yeah, SOS. I like that. It’s. Oh, I should. That’s still that’s that’s the OS OS that I’m writing that down. I love it. Why have I not thought of that myself? Yeah, I think that. I’ll. I’ll give. I’ll send you $1000.
Susan
That’s all good. We need to share.
Kate
I think this is it and I think the the the other problem is is that we are bombarded by emails from idiots saying greetings of the day. I will guarantee you #1 ranking and and we hear terror tales of people who’ve been ripped off by CEO agencies. So once we know it’s vitally important. Our business, but equally we’re utterly terrified of it, which is a really bad.
Susan
Combination and I I think for a lot of people out there, they might not even know what SEO.
Kate
Is, so they are very good. So I mean SEO stands for search engine optimization, which isn’t particularly any more helpful to be honest. The analogy that the well worn analogy that I like. Do today. To use is. Have you ever watched the bachelor? I have of course you have. Who hasn’t? Well, if you haven’t, it’s basically a a weird man comes into a mansion full of 30 odd women and he has to pick one by the end. And he and the truth is, we know that that man comes in with exactly in mind what he wants. You know, you’re 6 foot tall, blonde with big called Susan. I’m just joking.
Speaker
Yes.
Susan
Brunette.
Kate
No, no, she’s a brunette. All he wants, you know, 2 foot tall, you know? Brunette called Kate, middle aged cake. But what you what I mean is he knows what he wants. He’s got a list of. Things that he wants. And so when he’s going out there to pick from all these women, he he already knows what he wants. And if they know what he wants, then they’re probably in for more of a chance, right? Google’s the same. Google knows what it wants from the 30 websites. It’s evaluating every time it tries to choose a site to show. So you know, it’s a silly way of putting it. But say Google wants. Websites to be blonde. Well, then you need to go out and dye your hair blonde, you know? Say Google wants your website to be 6 foot or then you need to be wear high heels. And it’s the same with Google. Google wants your site to be speedy, it needs to be under 3 seconds, so make it under 3 seconds. Google wants your website to look good on mobile devices, so do it. So really it’s the art of making Google pick you the art of making Google fall in love with your website. Is that a terrible analogy? I kind of stretched it a bit too far. I think it works.
Susan
I’m more worried about the women that are like 6 foot two and need to. Be chopped off. Yeah, I know. What?
Kate
Do they do?
Susan
They have to Crouch exactly like stumpy along or something. I don’t know.
Kate
It’s it doesn’t quite work, but I hope it gives an. Dear that you know, it’s it’s not as random as you think it is. There is a very clear set of rules that Google tells us right. 98% of what Google wants from us, they tell us, is a big guide called the Google Webmaster Guide and then the rest of it is kind of here, say and and experimental and testing and people like me. Going wow, I’ve done this and it really made a difference. I’m not. Google’s not confirming whether that works or not, but I think it is, so it’s a bit of a combination of what Google says and what Google doesn’t say.
Speaker
Hmm.
Susan
And going into this into more detail, what has been your approach to SEO to try and be more successful in those more gut moves, I suppose compared to what? The guide says.
Kate
Well, I think you know back in my day, back in the olden days when I started out, which was a long time ago, it was very easy. These are the days of 10 blue links on a web page. Now you look at the search results and there’s, you know, shopping carousels and featured snippets and videos. When I started out, there wasn’t even blended results. It was just websites on the. This tab and then there were no videos. Because YouTube didn’t exist. And now You Tube is the second biggest search engine and obviously owned by Google Now. So what I did when I started out wouldn’t work today. So what I did was I blogged and I blogged and I blogged, and I shoved keywords in here or there and I got people to link to me and.
Susan
Lots of links back then.
Kate
Yeah, I mean, not so much. I didn’t really think about that too much back then. It was really blogging. Everyone thought blogging was the go, and unfortunately people still think it works today. And unfortunately, blogging is a very slow route to SEO success today. It’s just not gonna work in the same way it used to. Because there’s so many different ways to consume content now, and I can’t remember the last time I read A blog post. To be perfectly honest. So these days, if I was starting again, you know, I’d start with the foundations, which is always the same, doesn’t matter who you are, what business you’re in, you need a really great website. Hmm. The Great news is it doesn’t really matter what platform it’s on now. It could be on Shopify. Squarespace, WordPress, Wix, Weebly. They’re all pretty much of A muchness. I’d say Shopify and WordPress have the edge, but you need a great website. It needs to look good, be full of awesome content, be fast, be look fantastic on a mobile, be easy to use.
Speaker
Uh.
Kate
And you know, load really well and be accessible for people with hearing difficulties and vision difficulties. That’s the first step. And unfortunately, that’s the.
Susan
Step that most businesses skip. Ohh, tell me about particularly the accessibility one with not even knowing that there’s an A or an AA rating out there, or what the small things they need to do.
Speaker
Yeah.
Susan
Even for images. Yeah, it drives me insane.
Kate
It. Does cause you know like. You’ve got to think that the majority of people looking at a website are not like you. You know, they probably don’t have English as a first language. They probably don’t have fast Internet. They may have site impairments, hearing impairments. They may have dyslexia, they may be older, they may have issues with their hands and not be able to use the mouse as well. So you know we we tend to build websites on big beautiful Mac computers in our nice comfortable Western world with our, you know white skin and perfect vision and we forget everybody else who in the world.
Susan
And there’s even this simple thing of colour blindness as well.
Kate
That colour contrast.
Susan
Colour paths.
Kate
Yeah, contrast is so important. I’m sure you’ve seen it, Susan, but you know, designers will often come up with something that aesthetically seems quite pleasing, but functionally, as utterly useless, like Grey copy on a lemon background and you’re in coals and the sun is shining on your screen and it makes everybody a bit colour blind. You know, drains the colour from your screen and you can’t read a word and to all your prettiness. That’s cost you a fortune is ruining the functionality. Of your site.
Susan
And even down to some simple things like even font sites.
Speaker
Oh.
Susan
Yeah. Yeah, people think. Ohh yeah, we’ll blow it up. It looks great on the side of a bus, but then when you shrink it down and put it into context on packaging or even onto a social media post, it’s not legible.
Kate
I know the number of people I see showing images on Instagram where the taxes looks must look good when they designed it on camera on their Mac and then you look it on your mobile. What? What? What does that? Say yeah, I think we we all get trapped in our little bubble and we all think we want feedback, but we find it very uncomfortable when people actually give it to us so. Yeah. So the foundation of all SEO is a decent website, you know, because you want to drive people from Google to your site and really wanna drive people from socials to your site. So that would be my first step, absolutely.
Susan
And then once they’ve got the the fundamentals done, what should they then do activities on next?
Kate
I mean, I think I think the next thing would be to really you know, you’ve probably got your website up and you dump some fairly basic copy in or maybe even Lauren it some the next thing you need to do is really think about your keyword research, you know, cause that’s gonna define the architecture of your site. Like do you know you’re you’re a marketer, do you have a page for social media, marketing management?
Speaker
So.
Kate
Or is that a bit generic? You’re probably not going to rank for it, so instead you have a very specific page that says. #Research or, you know, Canva graphic creation or infographic creation, you know, so you and and then maybe you realise that you’re not gonna be able to conquer the world. So maybe you had a a local keyword in there as well. So really looking at your keywords, what people are typing in, how you can relate that to your content on both your selling pages and your information pages. So your pages that are sell your services, all that kind of stuff, but also your blog posts so you know I think people forget that questions are keywords like how do I rank on Google is a question and you can rank for that that whole quest. Question. And so my next thing would be keywords and then obviously the next thing is integrating that into your copy and then you know optimising as much as you can nice images. But then after that we’re kind of done with the site and then we move on to the the real work which I think you know what I’m going to talk about which is backlinks, right. So you mentioned that the.
Susan
Yes.
Kate
Thing. So it’s not just about going out and going. I’m gonna collect 17 backlinks. It’s about building the brand of you and and what you wanna do is make a connection so that when anyone says Kate two and. People go ohh SEO. Yeah, yeah. That’s what you want to happen and. And that that. You do that through social media, so people often ask me, does social media impact SEO? Not not directly. Like backlinks from social media have no impact. On on your link on your authority on your ranking, none. But if you’ve got a big following on Instagram, highly likely or hopeful that they’ll visit your site, click on your content, link to it, share it with the mate that influences SEO. There’s not the people, it’s what the people do. Does that make?
Susan
Sense it does. And have you ever found LinkedIn improving as well?
Kate
The backlinks backs back links from LinkedIn still don’t count to improve domain authority, so there’s this notional idea in SEO of domain authority. Which? Is. You know, all things being equal, if my site and your site were were the same going after the same things, they were the same speed. They loaded the same, they were the same aesthetic. And if you have more links from real real websites than I do, then if we’re both going after the same keyword, you will win, right? Because your authority. Will be higher like maybe your authorities 28 out of 100 mines 17 and. So what we wanna do is build links from really reputable sites that improve that domain authority. So a link from like the New York Times is gonna have a lot more impact on your domain authority than a link from your mum’s blog about tea cosies. Yeah, but links from social media do not add to domain authority at all.
Susan
And I suppose you’re using all this right now. For your new book as well. So do you want to?
Kate
Yeah.
Susan
Talk us through.
Kate
That that’s such a great segue. You know? I asked Susan at the beginning if I could mention her book. Isn’t she great? She’s done this podcast for a while. You can tell she knows what she’s doing. Yeah. So I it was actually. The the book was interesting because it was obviously a a bit of a a thing for me to write a book. I was very excited about that I wanted to go to the airport and have my moment, but it was actually an an opportunity for me to really flex my marketing muscle and use all the skills I’ve learned and put them into my own thing. So yeah, before I even put pen to paper. We thought of the title. Yeah. Guess what. The first thing I did was Susan.
Susan
I think you.
Kate
Googled, I googled it. Look, you see I’ve said that to all the people and they’ve not got it. People are like I’ve got. I’m running a book month in my community at the moment and the number of people have come up with titles and I’m like, I feel like I’ve heard that before. And then you go and Google it and there’s an existing book because we think we’ve made this idea up in our head, but we haven’t. We saw it eight years ago in Dimock. And then we forgot because our brains are crap. So I googled it and I made sure it was virgin territory and then I then the next thing I did was I bought.
Susan
Yes.
Kate
The domain name. Nicethe.com dot AU and the AU. Then the next thing I did was build a sales page on my own site and redirected that URL to that page. Yeah. And then the next thing I did was start building back links and I did that through digital PR, so articles and all that kind of stuff. And and then social media, I created a separate Instagram channel for it. I you know, I promoted it in my group. I’ve I’ve used affiliate not affiliate but you know advocacy getting other people to recommend. I’ve done competitions for reviews. I’ve got my email marketing. I set up a podcast with the book so you know it’s every. Marketing touch point. And I mean, I know I’m here to talk. About SEO but SEO? Is only part of the price.
Susan
It is a piece of that piece of it.
Kate
Yeah, it’s a part of the piece of the pizza. Now. I would say it’s probably 3 pieces of the pizza, whereas you know, email marketing is one piece. Social media is one piece. The SEO is so important. The statistic that I love to throw around is something I I think it’s 71% of all transactions or whether it’s business. Service E commerce everything start with a Google search. Umm, so they may have heard of you on Instagram. They may have listened to your podcast, but if they want to find you. They will go to Google and if you’re not on Google, you are not on the Internet. Google has 95% share in Australia and about 85 worldwide. Bing made a valiant attempt recently to come back up again with this. New AI model. But Google Google dominates and it can will continue to dominate. So yeah, if you’re not on, Google it. Not on the Internet. When was the last time you actually typed a domain name into a browser? You don’t.
Susan
Unless you, unless you know it so well.
Kate
Yeah. Or unless it’s bookmarked, right. But even Nike shortest brand name in the world. I’ll go to Google and type in.
Susan
Mm-hmm.
Speaker
Like.
Kate
You know, because I don’t want to typein.com because it’s four extra characters and I’m a busy woman. You know, it’s ridiculous.
Susan
Right. And other things might appear too, because sometimes you might be like, oh, I know there’s a sale up and then the sale appears as well, so.
Kate
Then you can click off on that instead. Exactly, and this is the thing SEO is complex like even if you go and search for cartoon, which is. Which I’m sure everyone’s going to do immediately after this and you’ll see that I am competing with myself because I’ve got a couple of different websites. And then you know, my LinkedIn is competing with my website and my Instagram and and that’s OK and now my book is popping up and then you know what you want is to own that first page of Google. You wanna make that first page your . You want to make it your landing page, right. So if you type in Kate, 10 or 6 figures in school hours, you’ll see everything on the first page is me. You know every image, every video, every social media channel, and that is just about consistent effort. There’s no magic to. Even on my course, there isn’t a magic trick I teach that I don’t tell you unless you pay me $3000 and I’ve interviewed nearly 400 SEO experts for my podcast. No one has a magic trick, it’s just effort and smarts. You.
Susan
Know and I have to say, even when I was doing my. Website itself, Mortimer. Marketing. I use simple method just like you said. Make sure you’ve got the content, the structure you have keywords throughout and then naturally it will start organically appearing and that happened for me within two weeks.
Speaker
Hmm.
Kate
Yeah, I mean this is it. You, you, you know, chose a really important choose a good brand name that’s relevant. Available and menu. Terrible, you know, and so many people just come up with something very generic that already exists, and then they go, oh, it already exists. I’ll shove A-IN. Honestly, the first thing, the most important thing is thinking of that brand name. And it feels hard. It feels like everything’s gone, but it doesn’t need to be dramatically different. It just needs to be different enough. And that’s why a lot of people I recommend these days. You know, if you’ve got a vaguely unusual name brand.
Speaker
Hmm.
Kate
Your own name, because after this, I’ll be honest. Even after this, I’ll always remember Susan Walsh. I might not find it as easy to remember your brand name because I’ve connected with you the human.
Susan
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So for me, my results was within two weeks, but. Be cool.
Speaker
Or.
Kate
I think.
Susan
Or can it take shorter or longer depending? On your uniqueness.
Kate
Yeah. Well, I mean, I think obviously what you were searching for then was your personal brand. So what you did was you hit the first milestone of Esio, which is to rank for your own name and rank for your own business name, which should be relatively easy if you have not picked something super generic. So two weeks is pretty good. It’s it’s, I’ll.
Speaker
M.
Kate
On the bottom. It you know it, but I think you you. Chose the the. The ease was because you made a good decision about your brand name. The next challenge, of course, is not to be found for who you are, but you found for what you do and that’s when it gets a bit more tricky, you know, and what you need to do there is think of yourself as a small fish in a small pond. So when I started out as a copywriter.
Speaker
What I do?
Kate
Tried to rank for copywriter Newtown right which is sub. Well, within Sydney, within NSW, within Australia and then once I’d succeeded to rank for that local SEO, I expanded it out to Sydney and then kind of Australia and then I just wanted to rank for the word copywriter, you know, and I and I succeeded for a long time. I was #1 for copyright. And then we. Could just Neil Patel came along and I’m pre Neil.
Susan
Amazing.
Kate
Tell which makes me laugh because he’s super famous now. A lot smarter than me. A lot younger anyway. You know, he probably did. He probably. Let’s talk about generational wealth. No, let’s not. But yeah, you know it. You kind of people get disheartened because they picked like a two word keyword phrase like, you know.
Susan
He probably had more money behind him to to.
Kate
Video Editor Sydney and then he won our ranking and it’s like because there’s other video editors have been there for 20 years, you might need. To add some modifiers like what makes your video editing special, only do weddings, or you only do christenings, or you’re really affordable, or you only do videos for TikTok. You only do black and white, you know what is it? What is it that makes you different? And add those modifiers in and the good that people think. Ohh well, if you know if I’m trying to rank. Like affordable video editor for christenings in Sydney, who’s typing that in? You know who’s typing that in? Not as many people, I grant you, but those people know exactly what they want. And they’ve got their credit card in their hand. And if you rang, they’ll buy from you. You don’t need hundreds of thousands of people to find you. You need the right people to find you.
Speaker
Hmm.
Susan
Then after you.
Kate
Who want to spend money? And that’s what people misunderstand. They they get obsessed with ego ranking because they just wanna be top of the rankings for this. It’s like, does that keyword make you any money? Because if it doesn’t, what’s? The point? Right. And same with all markets. Same with all market.
Susan
OK.
Kate
Thing you know, all that silly faffing about on Instagram looks pretty, but is it making you any money? You know, that’s the question we need to ask ourselves.
Susan
Exactly. And Google Adwords has become so expensive now compared to what it was 20 years.
Kate
It’s ridiculous. Ago. I mean it was. It’s all for me for times like SEO course or whatever. It’s always been, you know, prohibitively expensive, you know, 40-50 dollars. For a click. You know, and I I also, I just resent. Giving money to Zuckerberg and Google and Bezos. And a lot of them. So you know, I won’t do Facebook ads. I won’t do Google ads and I’ve tried. I have tried over the years I’ve done, you know, lead Gen campaigns and all kinds of stuff. But I just find that the conversions aren’t as good as from great, good sort leadership, content marketing and just consistent marketing as well.
Speaker
Yes.
Susan
I I completely agree, and that that’s probably a perfect segue into what are the key mistakes done by marketers when it does come to SEO.
Kate
I think you know the biggest one is outsourcing it without understanding it. So thinking ohh it’s too hard. Well outsource. It’s some dude in Pakistan. And not understanding and paying for it for years and then getting really angry that nothing’s happened. But then you know, that’s. So I think that’s the biggest mistake. The second mistake I think is blogging thinking that blogging is going to make any difference. I’m not saying don’t do it. Of course, do it. But don’t think it’s gonna move the needle as much as building backlinks and then we’re building backlinks. I think it’s building backlinks in really basic. Basic * weights, you know, like, oh, I’m gonna list myself on true local and put myself on this directory that just let me submit with no, you know, review of my content. Great. Or putting links in comments. None of that works. You know you wanna build a decent backlink. It’s gonna take. Three to four hours. You’re gonna need to contact the publication. You’re gonna need to pitch an idea. Write a really good article. Send it off to them. Meet their editorial guidelines. That’s how you get a backlink that’s worth having anything that’s worth having. Has to be worked for if it comes too easy, it probably isn’t going to move your needle at all.
Susan
Yeah. And I I think one of the things I’ve seen a lot of is. Actually.
Kate
Internally, backlinking. Yeah, internal linking. So that’s great. That works. That’s fantastic, right. So there’s an idea again, another analogy because you know, I love my analogies. It’s it’s the idea of a rising tide lifts all boats. So if you have one piece of content on your site. He is ranking really well and and you know he’s doing well and it’s getting into action. Then link from that article to other content in your site because. It will lift. It up for example, years ago I wrote an article about 10 things not to do. In Facebook groups. And it got I I don’t know. It’s had like millions and millions of reads now I don’t do Facebook groups. I’m not on Facebook you know. But what I did was I within that I put ads for my own products. I deep linked into my services and then people who enjoyed the artillery click on those or at least see them and and that therefore helps the rest of the site. The internal linking. Is powerful. You just don’t want to overdo it.
Susan
And one of the things I see a lot as. Well, is. Keyword call to actions that I find a lot of that. What’s your view on those?
Kate
I I I think at the end of the day, we never want to sacrifice conversion and connection and conversation over SEO, right? So I’m a copywriter at heart. That was my first love, a call to action is possibly one of the most important pieces copy on the on the page. So it needs to be a call to action. You know, it needs to, say, get involved, you know, reserve your spot. Don’t you know? Grab your thing. So I like to write a call to action that finishes the sentence I want to. I want to buy. Now is the obvious one. I want to join the membership. I want to get the get the get the discount whatever it may be. So I will not shove A keyword into my call to action if it ruins that flow. Now obviously if my if if my product is called the recipe for SEO success and I have my call to action. Say I want to, you know, I want to. Join the recipe for SEO success. It kind of works right if if the keywords there it kind of works but it’ll probably.
Speaker
Yes.
Kate
Be. Like what would be better and and drive more excitement would be, you know, grab my spot because that implies urgency and that there aren’t many spots and that you’re going to miss out. So I would sacrifice the keyword there to have a more urgent. An exciting call to action.
Susan
Yeah, that makes complete sense and I think. Just going through a whole pile of different websites. I think a lot of them missed that. Yeah. And just want to shove as much in as possible.
Kate
Ohh yeah totally. I mean, I think in contextual links, so I’m talking about call to action buttons at the end of whatever. If you’re writing some copy, I think it’s great to have a few contextual links within the copy that are wrapped around the relevant keywords.
Speaker
Exactly.
Kate
So you know you you’re writing an article about hedgehogs, and you’re talking about what hedgehogs eat and you wrapper link around the word mealworm because you’ve got another article about mealworms, which is more comprehensive. And that makes sense. Like if I’m really into it, I might click on that and open it in a new tab so I could read that later. Contextual links are great. Wrap them around the keywords, but call to action should be more about driving the sale.
Speaker
Yeah.
Susan
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. I I know you use a whole pile of tools, but what are your most favourite ones that you use all the time when it comes to? SEO.
Kate
You know what? I’m tool minimalist, so my my main tools will be Google Analytics, Google Search console. There’s a great little Google Chrome plugin called Seo Meta.
Speaker
I like that.
Kate
In one click it’s free. You can just install it and then whatever website you look at it gives you basic SEO data on it. I guess my. An easy paid tool that I use on the course is woo rank. It allows you to run a fairly comprehensive basic SEO audit that addresses maybe 80% of the problems it started raining like like Armageddon at the moment. So if I hope you can’t hear. The rain in. The background if I’ve started to shout, it’s because I cannot hear my own voice.
Susan
Can’t hear it?
Kate
So SEO Meta in one click Woo rank always find it very hard to say that correctly. Woo rank and then I guess if you wanna go into the paid sexy. The bleeding, expensive tools you’d be looking at SEM rush or a HFS or HFS. How we want to say it. Those are the 2 market leaders, but they can be a little bit overwhelming for most people.
Susan
Yeah. Yeah. And I’ve always just used basic Google because I’ve just found that enough for what I’ve needed.
Kate
Yeah, yeah. Well, I see The thing is a lot of people. Don’t do all the stuff that they can do just from Google Analytics and Google Search Console. You know they don’t go in and go ohh. Google Analytics says that my time on page is 0.1 seconds. Let me address that before I go and spend $1000 on an SEO tool that’s gonna tell me exactly the same bloody thing. You know, like address the obvious stuff 1st and the accessibility and the usability. And the speed, all of which you can do with free tools. And then you’ll get to the pointy end, and then you might need the expensive tools. But you know most on the courses that ioffer most people get through the entire course and do most of the fixes without. Ever using anything other than a two week trial of one of the big tools? Yeah, I shouldn’t say that. I love you big tools, but they’re not for everyone.
Susan
It’s particularly if they’re more of a smaller business too. That makes complete sense.
Kate
Yeah. Ohh it so expensive, yeah.
Susan
And if you’ve only. Got a couple of pages as.
Kate
Well, if you’ve got a small and also you know if you’re a cupcake maker, you know, yes. You wanna make sure your SEO is right and you maybe don’t wanna outsource it, but it’s not like you wanna be an SEO. So you don’t need to go out and buy like a combine harvester to to pick one seed from the ground. You know what I mean?
Speaker
Exactly.
Kate
Like that was a really. Bad analogy. I’m getting carried away.
Speaker
Yeah.
Susan
All good all. Good. I it’s your excites. You tell me why.
Kate
Does it? I don’t know. It did like ASIO, it still does. I mean, I couldn’t talk about it the way I am now after all these years. The the reason it excites me is because it works, you know, and so many things in marketing and so many things were sold online. Don’t work and and and you feel like it’s, you know a snake or. Real SEO when done right, when learned properly, can can make an astronomical difference to your bottom line. And for me, because I’m a copywriter, I don’t sell the features I don’t sell. Ohh, I can make you rank better and I don’t sell the benefits. Ohh I can make you more money. I sell the advantage SEO has led to me having a really beautiful life. That sounds really. Woo woo and I see people on my course having transformative experiences where they thought this was something they could never do, and now they’re getting sales and they can’t handle the amount of sales they’ve got and therefore they’re able to hire a member of staff or or finally get that warehouse that they wanted, you know, and that to me, that is what gives me joy, not necessarily the SEO. But the end result.
Susan
I love that love, that it’s about the the journey and working together on that major milestone and seeing it happen.
Kate
Yeah, exactly. So you know, I get more joy out of seeing other people do great. Now then I’ve I’ve kind of feels a bit. I sound like an old bag, but I’ve had my huge wins. You know, I’ve had my whatever and and it’s so tangible to watch someone else do that. You know, it’s really enjoyable.
Speaker
Thanks.
Kate
Yeah, it it.
Susan
Is it? Is that feel good moment, isn’t it? Of the the seeing the cycle happen again?
Kate
Yes, exactly.
Susan
I have my final question for you. I ask everybody this.
Kate
I know what’s coming, yes.
Susan
What brand? If you could be any in the world, this represents you. And why?
Kate
Well, you know, I’m a personal brand, so that would be very, very hard. Gosh, I, I’ve, I’ve thought about this question for a long time. And and I, I don’t know, can I pick a movie star instead?
Susan
You can do whatever you like.
Kate
So I I like to think of myself as a Celeste Barber of a CEO, or maybe the Tina Fey, because I I, I still really struggle to find a brand that’s 100% genuine. I mean, I think we’re getting there with The Who gives the craps and the, you know, the dollar shaves and who just really genuine, genuine and they are who they. But they still to me because they’re not a person. The whole artifice of a brand still feels a bit removed. I love personal brands, you know, I mean, I love the people and and and when a company gets beyond about 5 or 6 people and it starts to become an entity, I just think no matter how hard they work. I know you’ve got shareholders and I know you’re you’re an entity. And I I just care a little bit less. I’m not sure if that makes me kind of some kind of revolutionary, but yeah, I I struggle with that.
Susan
It’s you’re more about the the human side, not necessarily about.
Kate
I really AM.
Susan
I suppose the the the glamour and the dollars and the cars and everything else. It’s about what you’ve actually done to help others.
Kate
Yeah. No, like I I. Yeah. Yeah. And I’ve never. You know, I’ve never bought something cause he’s got a logo on it. Possibly I have. Without meaning to. I mean, obviously I’ve got his apple because they subliminally manipulate us into buying their crap. But you know, like I’m not someone who go out and buy a Dolce and Gabbana handbag. Do you know what I mean? Brands don’t matter to me. What matters to me is quality and. And and the user experience and the customer experience and price, let’s be honest in this market, price matters as well.
Susan
Ohh definitely huh? Percent. I’ve got to say thank you so much. I’m just going to do a recap. OK, so SEO isn’t scary, do you? Can get in there and get started. And the first step is always to start with the basics. Start with your website, get it. All right first. Make sure you’re not having any dropouts, that your site’s got beautiful content that you’ve actually got everything laid out. Right. And you’ve actually put.
Speaker
Sorry.
Susan
Thought into what your brand name is? Then think about what your keywords are going to be. They’re going to be searched against and research them. Think about if you’re too simple. Do you need to put any modifiers or unique words in there just to help you stand out that little bit more? And also questions can rank too. Ensure you integrate into your copy and that you’ve always got it naturally. In there, so it flows nicely. The last thing you want to do is it sticks out and it doesn’t make sense like in a call to act. And once you’ve got all of these set up, continue to optimise things change over time, so make sure you’re always doing what’s best for you and your brand. That makes sense for who you’re trying to reach back. Links can be your best friend as well as internal links, but make sure that they’re actually quality links so going to domains with authority so that you’re not going to be just doing it for no purpose and no gain. I help you with the Sr and Google. Google is the dominance with 71% of transactions starting with Google. You need to make sure you’re going to rank there in some way. So put your best foot forward when you’re doing SEO and that will help you along that journey. Was that a good wrap?
Kate
Up. You’re so good. Yeah. You send me those notes? Ohh.
Speaker
Yeah, that’s fantastic.
Kate
No, I love that. Thank you for this discussion. It’s my first podcast in a while. I’ve really enjoyed it.
Susan
Oh, thank you. Do you have any final things you’d like to to end with? Maybe 6 figures in school?
Kate
Wise word. Oh yeah, they’re glance. Yes, well, we you can test my SEO out after this. Go and Google Kate Toon or Google six figures in school hours. And the thing I would challenge the listeners to do is if you do do that, look at how different the search engine results pages are. Google has completely changed. Depending on what you search for what it shows, and it’s only going to get more exciting with generative AI, which is coming down the pipe. So yeah, thanks for that. And if you want to learn more about SEO, I have a group on Facebook called the I Love SEO Group. So you can come and join that and learn more.
Susan
Fantastic. Thank you so much, Kate, for being so generous with your time. Everyone else makes sure to follow. More to marketing to hear some more fabulous.
Kate
Look.
Susan
Guests. More to marketing.