2046• 3 SEO Mistakes For Written Blog Content and How To Fix
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We are going to be covering a very, very, very important topic, and that is SEO. Now, if you don't know what that means, it's search engine optimization, and it's really, really important that you get the basics of this. Well, hey, hey, hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome to the Rock Your Brand Podcast. I'm your host, Scott Boker, a serial entrepreneur on a mission to help you.

This show is designed to teach you, to inspire you, to motivate you, to take massive action and build a future-proof business. So whether you're just starting out or taking your existing business to the next level, this is your home. Now, if you're ready, I'm ready. Let's rock your brand.

What's up guys? Welcome back to another episode of the Rock Your Brand podcast. I am fired up today because we are going to be covering a very, very, very important topic and that is SEO. Now, if you don't know what that means, it's search engine optimization and it's really, really important.

that you get the basics of this. All right. What this does is this allows you to write content in a way that is picked up and indexed by Google. That's who we're really creating content for. We know that's the largest search engine in the world. Doesn't mean you won't get Bing traffic, Yahoo. Uh, what is the other one? Duck, duck, go any of the other ones. You'll still get traffic through those sources. And yes, you can still get traffic through Pinterest and other channels, but

but we're really writing for the search engines, okay? Now, I don't mean writing for the search engines, like we're just gonna give them and try to trick them what they need. That's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is we wanna create content, and you're gonna see in the very first mistake that I'm gonna cover here, I'm gonna cover three of them, by the way. The very first one is somewhat common sense, but if you don't know it, you might just go ahead and say, well, I'm gonna do that because it seems like it's right.

Um, when in fact it will not be as good. Let's just say that. All right. So I'll get into it here in a minute, but I'm going to cover three of these. Now, these were somewhat inspired by a coaching call that I recently did. Actually, I did, it was my third coaching call with this gentleman and, uh, the second coaching call after he had selected his niche and all that stuff and kind of guiding him to this point, he went off and did keyword research and he was going to do what we call a content blitz.

All right. Now the content blitz is where we just, we figure out 30 different topics and we just, we do them as fast as we possibly can with keeping in mind that we want to always make sure that we're, that we're making quality content. The one thing I will say, and this is like rule number one, create useful content that is created for and written for a human, not for a search engine. Okay. Google wants it to be,

created and written for a human. And the better that that is achieved is, or that you actually create that, that you achieve that result is going to come back to you and reward you with traffic. All right. And I'll talk a little bit about why that's super important and why you want people to consume your content.

Uh, and stay on your site even longer. All right. And I've got one thing that will help you keep people on your, a little bonus state of the end. Um, that'll keep people on your website longer, which then in turn sends a signal in a sense and lets Google know, well, this content is pretty good because people are sitting on it longer.

Um, and just to give you an idea, like normally, I mean, we all know, like we're bouncing from thing to thing, right? We're bouncing from social media to, you know, over to maybe a search query. Maybe we're on YouTube, like whatever we're bouncing all over the place. So our attention span is really, really short. Ideally, if you can get someone to sit on your site for a minute, that's a long time. Most of our sites were over three and a half minutes on each post that we write.

How do we do it? Well, stay tuned because I'm going to share that one little tip. All right. Now, let me say this before I do dig in here. All right. This is a very simple process, right?

but it does require you to follow a process. If you would like to have that process right in front of you, I would encourage you to get a copy. And if you can't watch, if you're not watching and you're listening, I'm holding up the book right now. It's about 92 pages. The six figure website method in chapter 10, we go in detail about what I'm going to cover here today, but this here gives you the blueprint to build out

a niche property, a piece of digital real estate, something we also call the six figure website method. All right. So if you want a copy of that, head on over to the six figure website.com. Again, that's the six figure website.com. And that's the number six. All right. So the six figure website.com, go grab a copy. I'm telling you right now, it'll be the best

$4.99 you've ever spent. That's what it's cost. It's under $5 and you'll get three case studies walking you through other niche properties, how they've built them, all of that stuff. And we'll give you a walkthrough video of the blueprint to implement all of this. All right. So go grab a copy. Very, very inexpensive. Now let's dig in. What are these three SEO mistakes for written blog content and how do we fix them? All right. Now I'm assuming that your keyword research is, is good.

Okay. And what I mean by that is, you know, you're going after questions that are being searched for by people. Right. And, you know, I'm not going to get into keyword research here. I've done other episodes on that. And I've also detailed it out inside of the six figure website method book, but I'm just going to assume that you've done good keyword research. Okay. So number one thing, the number one thing, one of the most important things when writing a piece of content is the title.

Okay. Now I'm not going to leave it there and say, well, you just got to have a good title. No, here's the mistake. You're going to do keyword research and you're going to find through these tools, these various tools we use Uber suggest. Um, that's our primary one that we use, but you can just use a Google search query and just do like auto suggest and you can get keywords, but

You don't want to necessarily just write a piece of content of what that keyword is coming up as because it gets a higher search volume. So let me give you an example. If I was looking for catching bass, right? I might type in, and this is one of the pre words that I put in there or the, you know, the word before I would actually start the keyword string would be can. So it would be can.

You catch bass in a pond. That's what I would want it to be. But what if you did a search and then you looked at a tool and it said, but if you write something that was can catch or can catch bass in pond, you would go, oh, I'm going to write a post on that. I'm not going to do it on. Can you catch a bass in a pond? Because you're thinking, well, if I make it exactly what that is, I'll get the thousand search volume versus the 300. No.

Okay. Do not fall into that trap. Number one, like I said, we're writing for humans. We want this content to be legible. We want it to be able to be read. If someone came to a post and they saw that the title was can catch bass in pond, you'd be like, wait a minute. It doesn't even make sense. Who wrote this? Right. It doesn't make sense. So a better way of doing this would be to write it as it's being read.

pronounced by a human. Okay. So can you catch bass in a pond? Okay. Now you might say again, maybe the other one gets more search volume. You're still going to show up for that search query. And I have proof of this. I have, uh, and we're going to get into this in the second mistake and the thing that you can fix is

You're going to show up. If you do it right, you're going to show up for sometimes hundreds of different variations of the keyword. So you're writing on that long tail keyword in a sense, right? Can you catch bass in a pond? And if you write it that way, you will show up for can catch bass in pond. You will show up for that and other strings of that, other variations of that. So make sure that when you are writing your title, okay. Also known as in the SEO world, your H1 tag.

That's your, that's the most weighted thing on your post that is telling Google and anyone else searching for it. That is what this is about. Answering that question. Okay. So make sure that you do that. Um, the, uh, student that I was talking about that did the coaching call. This is very similar to what he did. He had great keywords, but he was just putting it in the title exactly how it was coming up in the keyword tool.

And we had to revise that and we have, and now it's perfect. Okay. So that's one thing. Always keep in mind, you're writing for a human, even though the search query that you're looking at inside of the tool says something like can catch bass in pond, you're going to still want to look at, can you catch bass in a pond? Like something like that. And you'll probably see a suggestion that makes more sense, but you'll be like, oh, but it gets lower search volume. I'm going to do it for the higher one. Don't worry about that. Okay.

Here's another example. What teachers make. So you might have someone that goes on their phone and says, you know, I'm just curious what teachers make. And they're like, what teachers make? They're going to do that, but they're going to land on because Google's smart enough. They're going to land on a post. What do teachers make per year? Or what do PE teachers make per year? You're still going to show up for what teachers make. Okay. So you wouldn't want to write it for that, right? You wouldn't want it to be what teachers make.

It's more of what do teachers make or maybe what can teachers make? Something that makes sense. Okay. So I like always, even if it doesn't look like it's the keyword that it's telling me,

Is the one that people are searching for. It's close, but it also makes more sense. I will write it that way. I will adjust my title. Okay. All right. So that's the first thing. Title number one, most important thing in that is the title. Okay. So make sure that we get that right. Second thing.

is we want to add good secondary subcategories. These are also known as your H2 tags. Okay. H2. Now there's also H3s, H4s, H5s. We're not going to get into that. Not really important. Okay. And basically what an H3 is, is a subtitle of the subtitle. So it's kind of like

The H1 is the main title. Your H2 is your subtitle. And then if you had another little subcategory in there that you were kind of teaching about or explaining about what the subtitle was, that would be an H3. Don't worry about that right now. If all you did was wrote a post or wrote an article with H1, H2, you're good.

Okay. You don't have to go into H3s and H4s. You don't have to, but sometimes it makes sense. All right. So that's the first thing.

But now let me give you an example, because if you don't do good secondary subcategories, H2s, you're missing out on a huge opportunity because you can rank for the subtitles. Okay. For those H2s, we're basically telling again, Google that this article is about this topic and there's going to be various subtopics around the main topic. All right.

And again, I go into this in depth inside of the six figure website method book. Make sure you grab a copy. It's all detailed out there for you. I give you examples and all of that. All right. And I break it down. So you have like a little checklist. All right. So let me give you an example. So if I was looking at the, what do teachers make? Let's say, let's say I wanted to know what that was. Okay. What do teachers make per year? Maybe that's the title of the post that I'm going to write.

Well, I did this. Okay. And again, I go right through my same process. You go into auto suggest, you put that in there and then it will give you, once you hit enter in Google, it'll give you these subtopics. Okay. Or you can go to the top post and see what their subtopics are. Obviously, if it's ranking in page one on, you know, position one or position three, four or five, doesn't matter. You can see what the subtitles are.

You probably want to model something like that. All right. So here's an example. I did this real quick before I got on here because I wanted to give you an example. So what do teachers make per year? Subcategories under there, their H2s would be this teacher's salary by grade level, teacher's salary by work environment, teacher's salary by subject, teacher's salary by region, teacher's salary by education degree, teacher's salary by experience level.

Okay. So I just gave you one, two, three, four, five, six different subtopics. Now I can all, I can rank now for teacher salary by work environment, teach teacher salary by subject, by region, by education degree. All of those now are technically related to this post and I could be picked up for that and start ranking for those. So now instead of me just getting traffic from what do teachers make? I have all of these other opportunities. So

So leverage the opportunities within that. Okay. So make sure that you do that. So, but that's another mistake I see a lot of people making is they don't really think out there, you know, think through their subtopics or their subcategories really, really important. Why not totally optimize and leverage that one piece of content? If you're putting the time and effort in, or if you're having it, having someone do it for you and you're paying for it, get the most bang out of that buck.

Okay. So that's number two. All right. Making sure you have good secondary, secondary subcategories. The third one, another big one that I see people make, I see this mistake a lot. Okay. And that is not having any images, like not any, like zero. All you have is this large block of text. Now, number one, as a user or a reader of that content, it's the minute I go there, I'm like, oh my gosh, my eyes are just, you know,

blinded by all of this text, right? So one other thing that you want to do, and this is a little side note is you always want to break up your text. I like to have no more than three to four lines per, you know, post. Okay. It's just more scannable. Your H2s, your subtitles, they're more of a bold look. So it gives it a nice scannability. But what images do is they allow you or the user to see it with a different modality. They get to visually see it now.

Right. And it's kind of like eye candy in a sense. It allows them to stay engaged. Like I said in the beginning, we want them to stay on our post longer. Why? Because it sends a signal to Google that this content must be good. People are staying on it longer. They're staying on it for two, three, four minutes. Must be good. Right. So we always want to think about when you're writing an article, how can you make it scannable?

How can you make it more? I don't want to say entertaining, but more to the sense of where you're enjoying the experience, right? We all love books with pictures, right? That's why in the six figure website method book, I've got pictures, but they're actually screenshots of different examples and websites and things like that. But you still, if I didn't put that in there, it wouldn't be as good. So I always like to think about when you're writing a, a post is think about it as like a magazine article.

Think about it like that. When you read a magazine article, you don't want it to just be text. You want to see images. You want to see examples. You want to see things like that. And when you do that, you also have another opportunity to get picked up for your keywords and making it relevant. How do you do this? You're going to title the images. Here's a big mistake. Big, big, big mistake that I see people making.

They'll go find a stock image, royalty free stock image. They'll download it. They'll upload it to their site. They'll embed it into their, into their article. Wrong. Not a good way of doing it. Why? Well, here's why. Number one, you have data associated with that file. Okay. So it will probably say something like if it was like a teacher, right? You're, you're, you're creating that article about teacher salary and you have a teacher in a classroom.

Well, if you just download it, it's probably going to say unsplash. That's the name of the site. Unsplash forward slash 1020 by 480 and JPEG. And that's what it's going to say. It gives no information to Google of what it is. And that image has probably been used all over the Internet.

So a better way of doing this is taking that image, creating a new version of that image. And you can do this in Canva, just export it as a new image, or you can just take a screenshot of it, rename it. But when you rename that image, you want it to be a keyword. Have you ever looked at Google images? Google has images and you can search through Google images.

Would you want yours associated with a post that's related to that when someone is searching for that and then them use that image? Here's the other thing. If they take that image that's on your website, a lot of people are lazy. They don't want to actually download it and use it.

which if it's on your site, technically you really can't do that. What they'll do is they'll just, they'll copy the link location and embed it onto their website. What does this do now? It creates a backlink going from someone else's site to yours, which by the way, helps with SEO. Okay. So there's a lot of cool things you want to be able to do here with the image, right? Better user experience, better

allows you to have opportunities to also have more content on your site that is relevant with that topic. And you can also be found in Google images and get backlinks. So there's a bunch of great things that you can do here. So don't skimp on the images. All right. And then when you start getting into like media vine and things like that, there's actually ad placements that can be overlaid on those images, more images, more ad placements.

Okay. So that's another reason why you would want to do that. All right. So those are the three. Okay. The three big ones. Uh, again, if you do just those, you're going to be way ahead of the curve. Okay. Now let me give you that little bonus tip to get people to stay on your website even longer and adds a little bit of a backlink to your site. Okay. What is that?

Taking a YouTube video, even if it's not yours and embedding it into your post. Okay. Now, why is that really, really powerful? Number one, find a good video that people are already enjoying.

and then including it on your website, people are probably going to enjoy the video. And guess what? It might be a four minute, five minute, 10 minute video. What are they going to do? They're going to watch the video. And even if they watch only three minutes of the video, guess what? That's counted as time on your website. They're not going to click the video and then go over to YouTube because they're going to click on, on play on the, or the play button. And it's going to play automatically on your post.

This will allow people to watch and consume content on your site. They're not even reading it now. They're just watching really, really powerful. You also get, and this is probably a no follow link. There's no follow do follow. We won't get into that, but it's still a backlink coming from a large authoritative site, YouTube.

And again, Google, YouTube, they kind of, you know, own each other. Um, so make sure that you do that. Um, so I always like to send that signal over by embedding it. Oh, you don't have to add a link. All you gotta do is embed the video. That's the link in a sense, because what you're doing is you're taking a file that is, that is hosted on YouTube and you're embedding it on your website and inside of WordPress. Super easy to do. I mean, you just go through the, uh, you know, the, the little tab there that says embed a video, click it. Okay.

Take the URL, copy it in and you're done. Super easy. So that's a little bonus tip there for you. All right. So recapping here real quick. Number one, title. Super important. Make sure that you get that right. Number two, don't skimp on the secondary subcategories. Take a little bit of time to do the outlining process and come up with at least five.

I like five to be my minimum. All right. And then the third thing is add images. Do not skimp on images and make sure that you're titling them or renaming them keywords that are related to the article. All right. And I'm telling you right now, you'll be way, way ahead of the curve. All right, guys. So that is the three SEO mistakes for written blog content and how to fix them. I do want to remind you though.

I have a lot of details of how to do this. Every part of the process in the six figure website method book, make sure you grab a copy, the six figure website.com. Uh, if you want help with that outside of just the book, we do have a class. You can get access to that. Once you go through the six figure website method, we'll give you opportunities for us to help you further in, in various areas. Um, we have a content creation challenge class that we can,

Um, give you access to keyword gold mining is what we call it. Uh, we have access to that niche. If you need help finding your niche, we've got that. We've got that there. We've got a niche, uh, finder fast track workshop, but I always like to start with the book.

The book is going to give you the roadmap, the blueprint. And if all you wanted to do is get the book and follow the instructions, you're going to be okay. All right. So the six figure website.com, go check it out. Be the best five bucks, less than five bucks that you'll ever spend. In my opinion, by the way. All right, guys, that's it. That's going to wrap it up as always. Take care, take action, have an awesome, amazing day. And I'll see you right back here on the next episode. Now let's get them.

So once again, I just want to say thank you so much for listening. This is always one of the highlights of my week. And until next time, remember, I'm here for you. I believe in you and I am rooting for you. But you have to, you have to, come on, say it with me. Say it loud. Say it proud. Take action. Have an awesome, amazing day. And I'll see you right back here on the next episode. Now go rock your brand.

Oh, and one last thing. If you can do me one small favor and leave me a review over on iTunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast and just let me know what is one thing that the podcast has helped you with since listening, whether you just started listening or if you're a longtime listener like this one right here from Leanne.

She says, content is invaluable. Five stars. Hosts forever keeps my attention. The content is always extremely helpful. He's given me more of an education in the last year and a half that I've been listening than I would have gotten with a degree in entrepreneurship if that's even a thing.

Tons of incredible, useful information, tips, and motivation. My favorite things are one, he is not boring. He's engaging and motivating in a personal and professional way. Two, he doesn't dribble on about off topics. And three, the titles are on point. When I'm struggling with particular issues, I know that I can go to the podcast, search through the podcast and find what I'm after.

This is great because I certainly don't have time to go through a million episodes of different podcasts, just hoping that I'll run across the topic I'm needing at that time. So I appreciate these so much. Your review will help inspire and motivate other people, and it will also allow us to reach more people inside of these platforms. So if you would do that, that would be amazing. And as always, remember, I'm rooting for you.