210. Why is SEO less daunting than you think? (f. Mariah Magazine)
Ever felt overwhelmed by SEO and wondered where to start? 😨 Award-winning SEO strategist Mariah Magazine joins us today to demystify SEO and empower small business owners to boost website visibility and traffic. Discover how infusing your authentic voice into your content, prioritizing user intent, and providing engaging information can elevate your SEO game and drive meaningful connections with your audience.
Episode transcription
Phil
Wish you could be number one in Google search results?
Lauren
Ever wonder how to master SEO?
Phil
Our guest today, Mariah Magazine, is an award winning SEO strategist and consultant. Mariah is known for making the complex world of SEO accessible and actionable. You'll see.
Lauren
In today's episode, Mariah will teach us how small business owners can drive visibility and traffic to their websites without feeling overwhelmed.
Phil
Let's dive right in.
Lauren
So, listener, I am. I'm thrilled to have Mariah on our call. Mariah is honest to god, one of the coolest people that I've ever spoken with, period. Confidence just radiates out of this individual. And I feel it because that confidence makes me feel more confident about a somewhat scary topic, which is SEO.
Phil
And as soon as you think you're going to be bored by SEO, then Mariah swears or does something and you're okay, reel me back in. I love that.
Lauren
Before I say more about Mariah's credentials, can I just make a little sidebar? Mariah, you were probably one of the first people who I think in, it must have been one of our first three emails, you wrote the word shit in an email, like, you're the shit, or this is the shit, or something like that, and it took me aback in the best way possible, and I was like, I love this person.
Mariah
I think I use it as my sign off when, I really like people and, like, genuinely mean it. Like, I'm not telling everybody that they're the shit, but, like, if I've had a really good conversation or just I'm feeling on fire about something, I'm just like, dude, you're the shit. Because I think that more people we need to hear it. You know what I mean? Like we have social media always telling us and like society and our parents and our friends and I mean hopefully your friends aren't telling you that like you're awful but like we have people telling us that like we're not good enough even in subliminal ways that we need more people being like you're a genius at what you do.
You're really really fucking good at the thing that you're really good at because we don't get to hear that enough. You know what I mean? And I think that that's part of it and it's funny that you say all of these things and that I'm super confident because I do think that I have some level of, energetic confidence that I really, I truly cannot explain.
But also if you could hear how I talk to myself sometimes, it would just, it's just a normal human thing. It's one of those things where it's yeah, but can I do that? Is that going to be good enough if I do that? And all of those things too. But I'm really grateful that you can feel my authenticity, and I think that that's where it comes from, is I can't not be myself.
I truly can't, and I don't know where that comes from. I joke around with my friends with networking and business, right? People talk about networking, and networking is so important, and I love networking. What I fucking hate about networking is having to dress in a blouse and a blazer.
That's not me, I'm not a blouse and a blazer girl. That is just not me, and so it's those things of just knowing who I am and who I'm not, I think is really, really helpful, but I think that that's kind of what also makes it come through that I'm super confident. It's because I'm not trying to fit myself in a blouse and a blazer.
Lauren
I love it. I love it. And I will say having been in kind of the passenger seat a few times with your SEO consultations, like we've done it for Phil's brand. We've done it for different clients. Like we've had multiple calls with you where you are. in action. You're in your element. And I just think that you have this wonderful gift where you make SEO feel not scary and in a way, you're encouraging people to embrace their authentic voice in the way that they show up online and you're walking the walk as well when you do that by writing things in emails like you're the shit because I would literally never, ever type anything like that to a client and I wish I did.
Phil
This is such a good place to start this conversation because particularly with AI now making content creation and keyword driven content so easy, I had a great conversation with Neil Schafer, who said to me, Now, more than ever, human driven content is more important human driven content is better for ranking, he said, and we talked about this.
Mariah, you started this podcast talking about, you know, your own brand personality. What are you thinking about, or what's your opinion on this kind of in between zone of, personality and human content, but also SEO, ranking, that's your world.
Mariah
Yeah, I think that it's interesting because I agree with the sentiment of Neil.
I think that human driven content is going to be more powerful than ever. I think I've said this on a couple previous podcast episodes on other podcasts, but like I think YouTube is going to blow the fuck up. I think that Google is still going to be really, really important, obviously, because, like, as a society, we're just trained to, like, go to Google and type in things, right, and, like, I don't think that that is going to change, and so, as long as there are search engines, there is going to be SEO, so people that are like, SEO is dead, listen.
SEO has been dying, quote unquote, for the ever since that it began. People love throwing out like that random stuff. But I think that what's even more important now is like your actual tone, your actual perspective, because people lose sight about like what the goal of SEO is, especially if we're talking about small business owners.
It's not about getting every single person. It's not about just like showing up and getting all this traffic to your website. Yeah, that's really cool. But what's even better is like finding your people and finding when you show up on Google, so you rank accordingly, then those people come over and they end up saying things to you like, Oh my God, your website or your blog post spoke directly to me.
You're the person I want to work with. If we need to hop on a consult call, cool, but like, take my money. I've literally had clients say that to me because my website copy, although it's optimized for SEO, it's not like super generic robot sounding. It's very much me, and I think that we can utilize both of them.
I don't think it's a choose one or choose the other. And I actually had a question in an interview that I did recently where she was like, well, how do I write blog posts that like sound like me and like aren't super robotic sounding? And I was like, Write blog posts that sound like you, like you're already answering your own question within your question because that's the shit that sells.
That's the shit that drives conversions because where do conversions come from? They come from relationships. I know that it's old, but like people truly buy from people that they know, that they like, and they trust. So SEO is how we can get them to know you, but how the fuck are we getting them to like you?
And that has to come from your personality coming through on your content in whatever way that is. If you can get AI to sound like you, by all means, take it and run with it. But it's like we even more so have to keep coming back and infusing our brand voice, our tone into the content that we're creating.
And so I think that I'm kind of in like a unique position where it's like. And there's a lot of people like this in the online space, but like where my brand is me, I am my brand. When I show up, I don't have a brand voice document. I've never done that. I've never went through and like figured out what my brand voice is because like, it's just me.
It's just how I talk. You know what I mean? And so it's like, I think that we need more of that. People that want to work with me are going to want to work with me because I'm me. And I'm also really fucking good at what I do. It gets to be both of them. When usually business owners think that it's either one or the other people are going to work with me just because it's me or people are going to work with me because I'm really good at what I do.
Yeah. But there's a lot of people that do what we all do. I'm not the only SEO consultant out there, but people are going to choose to work with me because I'm me. And they like me and they know that through reading the content on my website, or like I said, I think YouTube's gonna blow up because you can feel the person, you can see my mannerisms, like I'm not bullshitting it, like you can see my teaching style, you can pick up on like who I am through that content.
And I think that that is just going to resonate so much deeper when all of these bigger companies are simply trying to churn out quantity over quality to rank for random words and like rank for all of these words, like small business orders. We don't need to rank for every single word. We need to prioritize and find the ones that align with the gaps in the market and how you want to show it for your people.
Yes, that does not mean that you need to be associated with 4000 keywords. Like, you don't, we just have to find the ones that we want to prioritize. I want to talk about that. That was literally question number one for you. I want to. I want to speak about SEO today for someone that, let's assume they, they know literally nothing.
Maybe they know that SEO stands for search engine optimization, and that's it. I know about SEO. In large part, I've learned a lot from you. But even I find choosing keywords overwhelming. Where should someone start with SEO? It might not even be keywords. We'll get there. Where should someone start? I think that you have to start with like, why do you want to show up on Google?
Like, what's the point? And I know that like, this is the question that like, all the questionnaires kind of start with of like, why do you do what you do? Like, let me feel your passion. But truly, that's what drives me. That's The clients that I like working with the most is the people that give a shit about what they do.
It's the passion. And so it's like, why do you do what you do? And so getting really clear on that and like what solutions that you offer for people, that's where we have to start. We have to kind of like brain dump these things and be like, what are the solutions that I offer? And then we can kind of extract keywords from there.
But when it comes to like choosing specific keywords, People don't want to hear this because, like, it's not like a quote unquote framework, but some of it is like, what jives with what you want to show up for? What feels really fun for you to be able to show up for? And, like, getting that energetic piece because we can best practice things until the cows come home.
I can teach you how to optimize. I can teach you how to do keyword research. But if your energy is not behind these keywords and you're not passionate and like you don't have this underlying want to show up and to serve people, I think that things can fall flat. And SEO people don't talk about that a lot.
I could talk about like keyword difficulty and how difficult a keyword is. We need to take that into consideration. We also need to consider, like, how many times somebody is searching for this keyword. We need to keep that in consideration. We also need to keep into consideration the user intent. When somebody types in a specific keyword, what are they looking for?
So a lot of business owners are like, Okay, let's say, like, I want to show up on page one for brand development. Okay, so the user intent, we have to Google that keyword to see what content already shows up on Google for that keyword because us, we might be like, yeah, brand development, I want to target that keyword on my homepage.
Okay, well, is your homepage the best solution to the problem? I don't know. We have to go to Google and see how Google is viewing that keyword in order to see if that intent aligns because business owners come at it from, yeah, but I want to rank because I wanna. Okay, cool. Like, a lot of people do, but like, why?
And we have to put the consumer first. So if somebody types in brand development, are they looking to? Learn about brand development. Do they want a brand development DIY course? Are they in college and they're looking for the definition of brand development because they're in a course that they don't want to be in?
Or are they looking to hire a brand development agency? Are they looking for a brand development consultant? Like we have to consider these things when we're trying to rank on Google because a lot of people will try to target, let's say, brand development when really there are brand development agency, and so they might get frustrated that they're not showing up for brand development, but in order to show up for brand development, it's all educational content and teaching what brand development is.
It's not people looking for a solution. Don't hold me to what is showing up on Google for this exact keyword because I have not looked, but I'm just kind of playing and giving an example here where it's like, we have to focus on the user and we have to be able to see why are people typing in that keyword and do you like for real for real.
I love that example because I, we've had multiple clients say, how do I rank number one on Google for, and it'll be like an industry where there are millions of competitors coach, right, exactly. And it could be, you know, a sports coach or executive coach or life coach or all the different types of coaches or like a coach for a junior soccer team, whatever.
And so I love that you are recommending, first of all, for people to get back to themselves and think about what is it in a dream scenario that I want people to be getting from me online. Do I want them to be buying my course? Do I want them to be hiring me as an agency? Do I want to be coaching? Do I want to be, I don't know, a keynote speaker?
Because I think, again, instead of. Trying to fit this and overcome this kind of like Mount Everest of terms, it's much better to more precisely because I don't know about you, Mariah, and I would love your thoughts on this, but obviously traffic to your site matters, right? Like the volume of visits matters, but In my eyes, I imagine if you have a super high bounce or like exit rate, that is not going to be good for you either, so it's probably better to have fewer visitors that actually want to stay on your site, right?
Yeah, Google judges a website in over 200 factors. And that's the part that people hate about SEO. Because it's like, there's always something to test and tweak. That's the part that I love about SEO. That's why you have a job, because people hate it. Yes, yes, exactly. And like, I just love problem solving and like dipping in, seeing a thing and then giving my perspective and then like popping out.
But essentially, how long somebody spends on your site, Google used to call it bounce rate. Now in the new version of Google Analytics for GA4, they call it engagement rate. So it's Are people engaging with your website? And so they give you a percentage of like how engaged people are on your website.
That is a ranking factor because think about it, Google is a business. Do you think that Google will continue to recommend you on page one of search results if it's seeing that people are coming to your website and then bouncing away? So engagement rate, like things that contribute to an engagement rate are like clicking on another page, clicking on a button.
Or spending more than 10 seconds on a page. Okay. So it's things like that. And if you have a low engagement, right? So people are coming, they're not scrolling, they're not clicking, they're not doing anything, then they're clicking the back button and going back to search results. If Google continues to see something like that, it's going to be like, okay, we got it wrong.
This isn't the best solution to the problem. Google wants people to continue to use their search engine. That's why they keep switching up the algorithm. Like business owners, we get mad about it because it's like, damn it. I mastered and hacked that algorithm and now it's changing on me. And I don't know why I got Southern on you, but basically.
It's doing that so that it's better understanding its clients, the more that people use Google. And so it's trying to reconfigure the algorithm to better serve its people because Google is a business. Google wants people to continue to use it. So that is my long winded answer of saying, yes, engagement rate does matter.
That's why your perspective, your tone, your personality, giving people more information than maybe you think that they need. And I say this because naturally, like me as a consumer, I'm a fact finder. I need all of the facts before I make a decision. I'm going to be going into a research rabbit hole. I might, I don't do spreadsheets so much, but like I'm taking notes on my phone or I have a note in a Google doc of like, and I'm popping through websites and I'm looking at prices and I'm just, I'm a researcher.
If you only give me five sentences about your service and your competitor gives me like a longer sales page with bullet points and the starting at investment, I'm probably going to reach out to them in order to book a consult call. Okay, so we have to keep in mind that people, they utilize information in different ways.
And so I find that a lot of clients will come with, it's called thin content. So less than 300 words on the page. You're unlikely to rank on Google if that specific page has less than 300 words. Because the Googlebots, just like the client, just like me as a consumer, they don't know enough. How can I put you in the filing cabinet, which is basically how I visualize Google's index.
It's just a really big filing cabinet. So how can I put you in the filing cabinet, in the right place, towards the front, if you don't even have enough content for me to understand what this page is about? When you have competitors, that are, and I'm not saying like you need a 5, 000 word sales page, it's not about quantity, it's about balancing, giving your customer, your client, or your ideal person enough information to be able to make a decision on, do I want to book a call?
Do I want to buy this thing? It's the same thing with e commerce, right? Like e commerce, you think that I'm going to go on Google and type in, I don't know, like glasses, and then I'm going to buy glasses off of some random website on the internet. If they tell me, Two sentences about those glasses?
Absolutely not. Go on an Amazon checkout page. They have like a ton of content because I can't feel the glasses like I'm in a store. And so I need you to be extremely descriptive. It's the same thing with service providers. I didn't meet you at a coffee shop. I met you online through Google search. I have no idea who you are.
I haven't been referred to you by anybody. So it's like, I need to be able to feel like I understand your perspective, your values, and just like your tone. And if we would even be friends before I consider converting. So with all of these things that play into SEO, when it's not like, Like a lot of these things are user experience.
So it's like when you have a solid brand, when you have a solid website, you're better off for SEO. And then of course we add that layer of like, okay, well now we have to optimize for the keyword. Meaning we have to put this specific keyword in certain places on the page so that the Google bots can understand what this content is about so that it can put you in the section of the filing cabinet that you want.
So there is a system and there is like a process and of course there's best practices, like this is a strategy. But there's also that piece that a lot of people miss that we already talked about of like who are you and like why do you want to show up and what do you really give a shit about? Amazing.
Amazing. Okay, I have some practical questions that I'm sure are hot on our listeners minds. So first of all, you mentioned thin pages. Which are pages on your website that are 300 words or less. How many words should be on a page of a website? Okay, so, I'm glad that you asked this question because there's caveats and I'm sure we could always Oh God, here we go.
It always depends on context. So, it depends on the page. So, the first thing that I want to say is not every page on your website is going to show up on Google. It just won't. It can't. Okay, so if we prioritize, and it's like the contact page, when is the contact page the best solution to the problem?
Probably if somebody goes to Google and types in Mariah Magazine contact, or contact Mariah Magazine, then my contact page will be the best solution to the problem. But the contact page isn't necessarily a page on the website that you need to really beef up and add like a thousand words and have it be like a sales page.
Okay, so some of the pages on the website are for user experience. So we have to keep that in mind. And then, essentially, how many words you need on a page will depend on the specific target keyword that you are trying to target. So if you are competitors for, let's just keep it going with the brand development agency, if you are people that are showing up for brand development agency, have maybe 500 words on their page, well then maybe you can hang around that 500 words or go a little bit longer.
So it's on a keyword by keyword basis. If you were trying to target, let's say brand development versus brand strategy, what's the difference? Like, let's say that that's the topic of a blog post. And then you look and the people on page one are at around 1200 words. We might want to like beef this up to really give it a chance of ranking, see if we can give more examples, bullet points, and like really make this the best solution to the problem, because that's how we get on Google.
So it's not so much about like. The amount of words, like the amount of words matter to an extent, but it's also, are we giving people the best solution to the problem? And the reason why you would look at who else is ranking for those top keywords is because they're doing something right to end up on the first page of Google anyway.
So you can be strongly inspired by what they're doing. Correct. Yes, and then that's not to say that we're going to copy them. We're not going to copy them because this is all coming together beautifully because your brand voice and your perspective and just like who you are and what makes you different from your people.
That's what matters. So it's like if you look at somebody else's blog post about let's just say SEO 101 like what is SEO? My blog post and somebody else's blog post could be extremely similar in terms of the title of the blog post, the length of the blog post, and even maybe the SEO title in the meta description.
Those two pieces are called metadata. This is the information that shows up on Google searches that entices the user to click from Google over to your website. Okay, so all of those things might be similar, but what's really different is my teaching style and the fact that I probably use curse words.
Yeah. Because you go, you're the shit, you, you fucking got this. Exactly. Keeping a basic for people, when someone says, when my website comes up in a Google search, I want it to show the about page, the services page, the projects page, or the blog page. Is that as simple as submitting your website to Google search console to have control over how that appears?
Or how does that work? So are you talking about like. I think you're referring to, like, what's called the site links. Yes. Where it's like, you have, okay, so we don't, at this time, to my knowledge, have control over what shows up under site links. It's kind of like Google wants to showcase the best solution to the problem, so they might scan your website.
What are the most visited page on this website? What do we think that people are coming to this website for? And that's usually how those site links will be populated. So that's why it's important to, like, if you have that, make sure that, like, your privacy policy page isn't showing up on your site links, which can happen.
But the solution to that would be to de index that page or like block that page from showing up in search results. And I know that your people mainly use Squarespace. So doing that is literally as simple as going to the page settings, clicking on that SEO setting, and then you'll be able to see like block or like discourage this page from being crawled.
So we do have control over like blocking a certain page from showing up. okay, we can show up in those site links, but we don't really have control over like I want this page to show up in this page. That one, Google chooses, and it's kind of a pain in the ass. Mm. I didn't know that. I always learn something new from you.
Yeah, it's a little annoying. And then also, so the other thing, if you have pages that aren't showing up or that you want to show up there, it's like, can we also create like a deeper interlinking strategy on the website itself, because when we link. Let's say that we have a page, we're just going to keep going with this example, the brand development.
Like, let's say we have a page about brand development and if we want that page to show up under the site links, are we linking to that page a lot throughout the website so that Google can see, ah, this page has a lot of links to this page throughout the website. It must be of importance. And so it's things like that, that Google kind of picks up on and can kind of like help us manipulate those things a little easier, but it's never like a, yeah, do this and then that will happen.
It's not like a quick fix. Another measurement that people will often use of how well they're doing with SEO is their domain authority score, which is a number from zero to a hundred, and it's freaking hard to get to a hundred. What is your advice to someone that wants to increase their domain authority score, which is probably everyone?
Okay, so let me just break down like what the domain authority score is. So it's kind of like word of mouth from Google. Okay, so the example that I like to give is Oprah. If Oprah, she's super authoritative with Google. Everybody knows who Oprah is. Even like the Google bots, if they were humans, they would know who exactly Oprah is.
If Oprah was linking back to my website, because Oprah, super authoritative with Google. If Oprah was linking back to my website, Google would be like, oh, Mariah must know what she's talking about because Oprah, who's authoritative, is linking to Mariah's website. That link. From Oprah site to my site is called a backlink.
Okay. So that's one of the main metrics of how Google comes up with your domain authority score is how well recommended on the internet via backlinks is this specific website. So this is one of the hardest things to grow because you don't have direct control over it. It's not an on page thing that you can just go in and like start setting up and optimizing for keywords on your website.
It's relationship building for the online streets is basically what it is. So if you want to increase it, we have to do it in a way that makes sense. So it's like you will see if you go on Upwork, if you go on Fiverr, there's agencies that'll be like you can pay us and we'll get you numerous backlinks and they'll have a high domain authority score so that will push your domain authority juice up.
Google says specifically You cannot pay for backlinks. It's manipulative. If they see or notice or even think that you've paid for backlinks, they might start dropping your search rankings. So I know like the domain authority score. The other thing to keep in mind, it is out of 100. I have never seen anybody's website at 100.
Never ever. Even top people like let's say social media examiner, I think that they're only in like The 70s. I think Oprah is actually in the 60s. Tony Robbins is maybe in the 60s or the 70s. So it's like these massive people that everybody really knows about. I think maybe the New York Times is like, maybe like a 98. Something like that. So it is nearly impossible to get that high. I would say most of my clients, smaller business owners that aren't small and medium sized business owners that aren't like massive corporations, I don't think that I've seen anybody over a 50. I would say most of my people are 30 or under.
Okay. So we have to keep that in mind because like I'll do an SEO audit for people and they're like, I'm a four. And I was like, listen, I know it sounds a lot worse than it really is, but actually your competitors, when we do it, I was like, your competitors are actually a two and a five. So we don't have to blow this shit out of the water in order to start really ranking.
But in order to help increasing that, it's relationship building. It's being a guest on people's podcasts like this, and then they'll probably have show notes on that podcast website. And so they'll link back to your website. It's getting listed in if there's blog roundup posts by bloggers, like if you're an e commerce shop or if you're like a keynote speaker and a blog wrote the top seven SEO keynote speakers.
If I wanted to get listed in one of that backlink, I could reach out to that blogger and be like, hey, if you were looking to update this post, I just wanted to throw my hat in the ring and just build a relationship that way. Or it's like. collaborations and stuff like that. Like if you do a guest post on another blog, a blog that has a bigger domain authority score or like an online publication like New York Times or something like that, guest blogging used to be very, very popular.
And it's since people have kind of thought that it's not as effective. But that's not true, but it's, it's like everything, it's quality over quantity. I don't want you going out submitting guest blogs to random small bloggers that aren't really going to do anything. Instead, we want to try to get a medium size or at least a little bit above your domain authority score.
But these things, where do they all stem from? You can cold pitch people for sure, but it's also relationship building. That's why this shit takes so much time. It's because you can't really bullshit it. You know what I mean? It's really well, I'm not going to rank to like a random person because then Google might be like, okay, well, Mariah is giving out backlinks to everybody.
So now we don't actually trust her more. So it's like that website has to be careful and who they link out to too. That's why it all comes back to relationship building.
lauren
Does having a dot com domain matter from an SEO standpoint today in 2024?
mariah
I don't think so. I could be wrong. I've never looked into it.
If it did, I would say it's like super small.
phil
Yeah, it's almost like if it did, it's so low on the list of importance that focus on, you know, more important things.
mariah
I think back in the day, because there wasn't, like if you had a website, it was kind of like, wow, you must like know what you're doing, you built, you spent the money to build a website.
Back in like the 90s, you know what I mean, or like early 2000s. And so I was like, man, if you got a com, poof, you're, you're really like the shit over there. When it's like, no, I could buy a com about literally anything. So that's why I think that it would drop really low.
lauren
We had a client who almost spent well over $3,000 for their com. I can't remember what the price was exactly, Phil, but you probably remember. And then Phil was like, do not pay that. I was like, spend that money on other things.
mariah
The only thing that I can think of that doing is if somebody had a website using that com and they had a high backlink. If they had a bunch of backlinks, like they built relationships around this domain name. And so Google thinks that that domain name is authoritative. And now that person is selling that domain name because your domain authority follows your domain name. So that's kind of the only reason that I could see where it's like it might be worth paying for. If, like, you want to buy somebody's blog or buy somebody's business and then you're actually not starting from zero.
phil
In this case, I think it was a branding play. They thought, oh, then thing. com. But now we see with apps and software and businesses that you, we almost don't even assume that it's name. com anymore. I suppose people might still, but like. You learn it once by seeing it displayed in the browser after a Google search, and then you remember it, mostly, I think, you know?
lauren
If someone has built their Squarespace site, like it's up, what do they do next? Like, they've asked themselves the questions, they know what they want the intent to be. Now what?
mariah
I would say the very first thing, you have to customize that SEO title and meta description for your homepage. And that's going to be like in your page settings on home, you can click SEO settings and then it's going to take you to a button that says website SEO settings.
We want to go ahead and fill that in with hopefully your homepage target keyword. And we want to customize that SEO title and meta description because like I said, those are the only two pieces of metadata that show up in a Google search result to entice somebody to click from Google over to your website.
So spend some time customizing those things. I do actually have a guide on my website. So crafting successful SEO titles and meta descriptions if people want to dive into that. We can leave maybe a link below in the show notes or something like that. They can use the code SEOLOVE10 for 10$ off. But that's a question that I get so many times.
It's like, okay, cool. Like we have to do this, but like, how the hell do you do it? So that's why I created that. But the other thing that we have to do is set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console. So a lot of people hear about Google Analytics, and it's basically, it's a free analytics platform created by Google, and it's how we're able to see, like those things like engagement rate that we talked about, it's how we're able to see where our traffic is coming from.
If we're spending a lot of time on Pinterest, but then I look into my Google Analytics and actually Pinterest isn't driving conversions like YouTube is, well then why am I spending money on Pinterest marketing? So it just as a business owner helps us understand our website traffic, where people are coming from, and how they're using our website. So that's the first one.
The second one is a little less known. It's Google Search Console. So Google Search Console is basically how Google sees your website. So when Google's crawling your website, scanning your website, trying to figure out where you belong in the filing cabinet, as it's scanning and crawling it, it's going to try to pick up if you have any errors on your website.
The only way to see really what the errors are is to have Google Search Console set up. So that you can see as the Google bots are crawling your site if there's errors. The other thing, Google Search Console, it allows you to see what keywords you're already showing up for Google on. So a lot of people think that like you have to pay for a massive expensive SEO tool in order to see this stuff. You don't. You just need Google Search Console set up. And so it's pretty simple to set up. I have tutorials for both of these things over on my YouTube channel.
phil
I love it. I learned so much from you, and you also, you're so good at giving us examples. Now tell us directly, where can our listener go to just soak up your knowledge?
mariah
Yeah, for sure. So, MariahMagazine.com has literally everything. So I have a shop. I have numerous digital products. Like if you want to dive into keyword research, that's my best selling workshop replay is the how to do SEO keyword research that actually works. And so snagging that one, you can use the code SEOlove 10 for 10$ off of anything in my digital product shop.
So you can check out those options over at my website. And you can also learn about like hiring me for consulting or just I have Q and A like brain picking sessions. I have the SEO strategy intensive, which is really, really helpful. If you're just like, Hey Mariah, can you walk me through like, can we do keyword research together, competitor analysis, and I educate and teach you SEO for your own websites.
You don't have to like build the bridges and connect the dots yourself. I'm going to literally tell you. So that's a two hour session. You can learn about that. on my website too, but if you want to dive in. We've done it, loved it. Yeah, it's so fun. We've also hired you to do it for our clients. You're amazing.
Thank you. Thank you so much. So yeah, I love the SEO strategy intensives because it's just like, I get to give examples that actually matter to you and then I find that that's what drives action. So there is those options and then I have a YouTube channel so you can just search Mariah Magazine over on YouTube. I have a full channel, tutorials for like, SEO, tutorials for Google Search Console, Google Analytics, all of that stuff. Also like, website tech stuff. I really, tutorials are, they're my shit. I love tutorials. And then, if you want to hang out over on Instagram, that's where, I slide into the DMs. I like having conversations with people.I'm Mariah Magazine's CO over there.
phil
Genius. Thank you so much. Genius! Genius. You've been the best. Thanks for hanging out with us on Brand Therapy.
mariah
Thanks so much for having me.
