Are you optimizing your podcast show notes or website content for search engines? Let’s see if it’s working! In today’s episode, I’m walking you through how to track your SEO efforts to ensure your search engine optimization works for you!
Clocking In with Haylee Gaffin is produced and brought to you by Gaffin Creative, a podcast production company for creative entrepreneurs. Learn more about our services at Gaffincreative.com, plus you’ll also find resources, show notes, and more for the Clocking In Podcast.
Today’s episode is brought to you by Mic Check Society, a community for podcasters. Each month, I’m dropping an exclusive training, hosting a monthly hot-seat call and coworking sessions, plus you’ll get access to our Facebook group to connect with and network with other podcasters! Grab your seat inside Mic Check Society today!
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is when search engines like Google are crawling your website, indexing your content, and allowing their users to discover you. I started in SEO when I was an intern at an ad agency, this was my first taste of what content marketing is. When you make this a priority in your marketing efforts, it’s important to track those efforts.
Using Google Analytics & Google Search Console to Track Your SEO Efforts
Two major tools that can help you analyze the results of your SEO efforts are Google Analytics and Google Search Console. They serve different purposes and can get a little confusing. But, we are going to dive into them to try and make them a little easier for you to use.
When looking at your overall search engine strategy, you likely have some type of goal. Having that goal in mind is great, but won’t necessarily help you in understanding your results.
It is so important that you are also looking at your conversions. If you are getting tons of people onto your site and not converting any of them, you should be trying to change that. You may be doing well on optimizing the Google side of things, but your site content needs attention.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to fix this, check out the training on Mic Check Society.
Google Analytics
Getting Started with Google Analytics
Traffic is the number one thing we are looking for when working on SEO. Inside Google Analytics, you will be looking at your traffic. I like to go to :
Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium
Here, you can see where your users are coming from. You can look at what sources are most effectively directing users to your site. It’s also super important to give your content time. Some of your posts will immediately get traffic, but it’s good to give it at least 3 months to be active on your site. For even more accurate results, give it 6 months.
At Gaffin Creative, we blog weekly and that content gets traffic immediately. So you might see more immediate results.
If you go back to the source/medium section, you can look to understand if your content is working and what is working specifically. You can begin to analyze if you are seeing just as many referrals from each source you are using to direct to your site. This is where you can see what source is worth you investing in. If you have a lot more traffic coming from one source versus another, you can reoptimize your content to make those sources work better for you.
Another great feature is the timeline. Under your Google Analytics dashboard, you can see all of the traffic that has been coming in for as long as you’ve had your Analytics account set up. I like to go in and analyze trends or spikes in traffic.
Any trend changes based upon your content will be so helpful to you. You can look by day, week, or month. I like to see the changes in results as far back as when we began pushing blog content in January 2021. In December of 2020, our total traffic was 71 visitors, by September of 2022 we had 803 users coming from Google. That is a huge jump! This can be attributed to the consistent content we have pushed during that time. These are blog posts, podcasts, and more. And, these results are coming from the content we put out as soon as we started, not just the new content. By June of 2021, we double our organic traffic. By December of that same year, it was quadrupled. This optimized content can make a HUGE difference.
Conversions
This is what you want to look at in order to see if your efforts are actually paying off. A great way to get a closer look at the effectiveness is to analyze your conversion rate. There are two ways to find this out.
The first is to go back to that Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium. You can add a secondary dimension. Here, you are able to type in landing page. Now you can see what landing pages are performing the best. Mine happens to be the homepage, this isn’t always ideal. For me, the homepage directs the user pretty well, so it works. Then, I have quite a few pieces of content that opt people into my newsletter. One well-performing piece of content is my Podcast Budgeting Worksheet. People are able to download the worksheet and opt-in to my newsletter. Then I can market to them through the newsletter. For the most part, every person who comes to that page becomes a subscriber. It has become one of my best-performing pages.
Another thing to consider is, what is the goal of your content.
Google Search Console
Getting Started with Google Search Console
Inside of Google Search Console, you want to look at your performance and search results.
I can go back all the way to May of 2021, I have had 463,000 impressions on my website. Of that, I have had 6,440 clicks. What I love about this is Google Search Console will show you what your top search queries are and what your top pages are. So I can see what keywords got them to my site, and what page that brought them to.
Then, I am able to rework my content based on what keywords are bringing people to my site and if the content they are landing on is accurate to that search. What can you improve in what the user sees to make them convert from a search to a click?
Look at the organic traffic and make sure that your results are steadily going up. If it’s not steadily going up, something is not working.
Is Search Engine Optimization the Right Approach For You?
If you are in a unique field, or one of the first in that field, I say go for Google first. Establishing yourself on search engines early on can be a major benefit for your brand. If you get any inquiries from Google, or you want to, go for it.
When I first started, there weren’t a lot of people doing what I was doing. I wish I would have started optimizing my content earlier. But, the efforts that I made in the last year to two years have done so much good for my brand!
You can make Google bring great results for your brand and bring back lots of value.
Mentioned in Today’s Episode
Podcast #79: Why Coaches and Creative Educators Need to Be Optimizing Their Podcast Content for Search
Podcast #10: Beginner’s Guide to SEO: Optimizing Your Website for Search Engines
Podcast #11: 11: Using Google Search Console for SEO Planning
Blog: Boosting Your SEO Rankings with Your Podcast
Blog: Podcast SEO: What You Need to Know as a Podcast Host
Mic Check Society
More than likely, you’re already doing all of the necessary work to optimize your podcast show notes, but just aren’t implementing it into your blog posts. So, I have created a training just for you. This is for anyone who is trying to serve their audience but also make money in their business. Head over to Mic Check Society and join the annual membership to be a part of the new SEO strategy training. This training, Optimizing Your Podcast Show Notes for Search Engines, walks you through the technical aspects of SEO, why it’s important, and how to optimize your content. You will walk away with the knowledge of keyword research, how to find those keywords and content planning around those keywords, and you’ll even take on the technical aspects of your blog posts.
Today’s episode is brought to you by Mic Check Society, a community for podcasters. Each month, I’m dropping an exclusive training, hosting a monthly hot-seat call and coworking sessions, plus you’ll get access to our Facebook group to connect with and network with other podcasters! Grab your seat inside Mic Check Society today!
Catch the Show Notes:
Clocking In Updates (0:13)
Two Tools to Use (5:55)
Google Analytics (8:00)
Timeline (10:50)
Looking at Conversion (14:20)
Google Search Console (16:00)
Is Search Engine Optimization the right approach for you and what could it do for your brand? (19:25)
Mic Check Society (21:00)
Review the Transcript
Hey, y’all, welcome back to clocking in, I’m really excited about today’s episode, but I am with most episodes. So before we dive in, I do want to do a few little housekeeping things and share some updates. So the first one is, you may have noticed that this episode is the first one I’ve released in two weeks. So I did not release an episode last week. And that’s because I’m testing something out with the podcast over the next few months, and we are moving to every other week for episodes. And there are a few reasons for this. One is I always like to test things for my clients. And if see how moving from a weekly episode to a bi weekly episode, and then back to a weekly episode, what that could look like. I have done this for clients in the past. And they’ve had some really great success not just in like numbers, but also in being able to maintain the quality of their content. Which leads me into why I’m actually doing this. Part of this, as you may have realized from past episodes, because I’ve shared a little bit about it on the podcast is I launched MIC CHECK society, which is a podcast, educational community. And I’m loving it, I am loving it, loving it, loving it. But because I’m doing this, I still want to be putting out content on the podcast without taking away from the quality. And because I’m creating content inside a mic check society as well. That’s deeper education. And for people who are like in the trenches of their podcast looking to grow and looking to monetize and all of that, I’ve decided to scale back for the time being, just as I’m ramping this up doing so much marketing around it, and welcoming new members in, I want to make sure that I’m providing that quality, while not taking away from the quality over here. So that is one of the reasons I’m going to every other week. But then also, I am in a weird transition right now. So earlier this year at the beginning of 2022, we brought on team members. So I started with a team member, one with one team member last year. And then in January, we brought on two more and we are working to scale into somewhat of an agency. So there are a few team members now and my goal for this last quarter of the year.
And yes, I’m counting September in with that I’m getting a head start. But my goal is to really focus on streamlining our processes, open up opportunities for more offerings, so more service offerings, and then just be able to provide a really quality experience for all of our customers and all of our clients so that they can have a really solid podcast, whether we’re doing just the editing, or we’re doing a full strategy for them. So that’s the reason that you’re not seeing weekly episodes from us, but you will continue to see those bi weekly episodes. So make sure that you’re on our newsletter, you can sign up at Gaffin creative.com Ford slash newsletter, or you can follow us over on social media on Instagram. My handle there is at Haylee Gaffin. And I will always be posting new episodes from both me and all of our clients are Gaffin creative. And then you’ll even see a little bit about my check society. If you are interested in my check society and you have not grabbed your seat yet, make sure you grab it because our launch rate goes away in just a few weeks. So on September 30 is the last date to grab our current rate, which is discounted. So you can grab your seat inside my check society for $39 per month, until September 30.
On October 1, the price does go up to $59 month. So go grab that today, I don’t want you to miss out, I am really excited for what we’re building the guests educators that are coming in this year. And we’re even planning early next year guests as well. So now because my check society has become so big for our team at Gaffin creative I do want to share a little bit about the topic we’re talking about this month inside of my check society. And it is about how how podcasts are should be optimizing their shownotes for their podcast for search engines. So we’re talking all about SEO, what you need to know how you need to be doing it, how to approach search engine optimization for your podcast in your show notes all inside of my check society. Because of that we also released an episode two weeks ago so our last episode that we put out was titled Why coaches and creative educators need to be optimizing their podcast content for search. So since we put that out and then inside of my check society, you can find the like, how to do I want to share about How to actually track those SEO efforts. So let’s dive right into that.
Hey, y’all, welcome to the clocking in Podcast, the podcast for entrepreneurs and professionals making their way in the working world. I’m your host Haylee Gaffin. This podcast is produced and brought to you by Gaffin. Creative, a podcast production company for creative entrepreneurs. Learn more about our services at Gaffin creative.com. Plus, you’ll also find resources, show notes and more for the clocking in podcast. So let’s clock in and get to work. Okay, so in today’s episode, we will be talking about two very specific products and tools that you can be using. And I have talked about this in past episodes, which we will link in the show notes of today’s episode about how to use them how to go about them. But specifically today, I want to talk about your results. Now, the the two tools that you want to be using are Google Analytics and Google Search Console. And they serve different purposes. And honestly, it can get confusing as to like, I don’t understand why they’re not together, I think they should be. But that’s a whole other.
It’s not my specialty. I’m not, I don’t work for Google. So I can’t tell them why I think they should be together. But anyway, let’s talk about them. So when you’re looking at your overall strategy for search engines, you probably have some sort of goal, like I want to get this many new people to my website in order to get this many people to convert. Having that goal in mind is great. But it’s not necessarily going to help you with understanding your results, unless you’re just looking at the number of I want X number of people to come to my site, because that is what is being optimized and what we’re looking at for your efforts. Now, I will go ahead and throw in this note here, because I do think it’s so important that you are looking at this as well of if you’re getting you know, 500 people to your website in a month, and you’re not converting any of them into clients, or you’re not converting any of them into buying products or signing up for your newsletter or opting in for a free downloadable. That is something you should be looking at.
Once you are in a place where you’re like, Okay, what I’m doing for Google is working. But what I’m doing in my site is not it’s not converting anyone. So what is the problem? Today, we’re not actually going to be talking directly about that. But we are going to be talking about getting people to your site. So if you are interested in that concept of like, okay, I’ve got people to my site, why are they not converting? We do talk a little bit about that in our training inside of my check society. But let’s talk specifically about tracking those SEO efforts in getting that traffic, because traffic is the number one thing we’re looking for when we are tracking that SEO effort, and all of the work that we’re putting into our search engine optimization. Now, when you are inside of Google Analytics, let’s go there first. So you will be looking at your traffic. And the way I like to do it personally, there are a couple of places that you can go.
But I like to go to acquisition. So this will be like in your sidebar, acquisition, all traffic. And then I personally love to go through the source medium aspect of it. And when I look here, this is where you can see like, Oh, it’s from Google, it’s they came directly from it, or they clicked on the link from this referral, or they came from Pinterest, or blah, blah, blah, all of those sources, and traffic mediums.
Those are the things that we can be looking for. Now make sure that when you’re doing this, you have given your content enough time to actually make a difference. There are going to be posts that you put up that immediately get traffic like it happens. But you need to give time. And I typically like to start looking at the results of the work I’m putting in about three months out. So three months after I’ve started doing this, what does that look like? But you’re really going to see more results in the like six month range. But that is not to say that you won’t see results immediately. Because you absolutely can I see it happen all the time. We’re blogging every single week here, even though we’re still only doing one episode every other week. For the podcast. We’re still blogging weekly, we’re putting out content and that content is getting traffic. So let’s go back to the Google Analytics source medium section. So when you’re in this section under acquisition all traffic source medium, what I like to do is I look at this to kind of understand, okay, is my content working? What’s working in it?
And am I seeing justice? Many referrals, as I am on Google, am I saying just as many on social media, or Pinterest or whatever the search engines are that are out that are out there or referral programs that you have set up or other people that are sharing your content? I like to look at that information here. Like, what would be worth my time in this moment. And in this season of, okay, I have far more traffic coming from Google than I do from Pinterest. So why don’t I create a little bit more content on my website, and then share that on Pinterest, versus like just creating content around products and all of the things that are living on your website, but not new content. And then the other thing I like to look at in here as well, is the timeline. So I can go in to my Google Analytics dashboard. And I can see all the traffic that has been coming in. For the last however long I’ve had Google Analytics set up. What I like to do personally, is I like to go in and click on Google and they like, I like to go in under the source medium section and click on Google and I can see traffic, and what traffic is coming in? And are there any trends are there any spikes in new content that may have helped generate new people into my site, any of that is going to be so helpful to you. You can look at it by day or week or month.
But when I go in, and I look because we Gavin creative started blogging in January of 2021. That was when we actually like we had created content before we launched with quite a few pieces up. And then we just started pushing out weekly content. When we did this, we were getting like, we were not getting a ton of traffic week to week from Google, we weren’t, like it’s funny to look back at now, considering how much we’ve grown. But if I look at like, I’ll pull up a month to month explanation. I’m going to take you all the way back to December of 2020. In December of 2020, our total month of direct or of organic traffic from Google was 71 visitors. Now at the time of recording this episode, we’ve just past August, in August, we had 803 users come from Google slash organic traffic. That is so many more. And that’s because we’ve put in all this content over time onto our website in a way that’s optimized for search engines. And that comes from blog posts, it comes from podcast episodes. And it’s not just stuff that we put out this week or last month, it’s stuff that we put out 2021 early, and that’s two years, we grew that much in two years. And it’s been consistent. So if I if I imagine a visualization because this is a podcast, it’s not very visual. But every single month, we increase and increase increased. And considering the fact that we started actual blogging, and putting podcast episodes out. So our blog went up January 2021. Our podcast went up March 2021. And then by June, we had doubled our monthly organic traffic. And then by December of that same year, we had quadrupled our monthly organic traffic.
Now I don’t I can’t do the math that fast for what 71 going all the way up to 804 103 is, but it’s quite a big jump. It is far more than 100% of traffic. And that’s where we’re sitting now. So those are the things we’re going to look at for like seeing if your efforts are actually paying off. In my opinion that pays off so well, because of those 803, I can probably give you an idea of how many of those people have converted into newsletter subscribers. So let me pull that up. And the way I’m going to do that there’s two approaches that I take to looking at this. But the first one is going to be when you’re in Google and you’re in that acquisition all traffic source medium section, you can actually select a secondary dimension. And in that secondary dimension you can type in landing page that’s going to show you which landing pages are performing the best for me. My homepage is actually performing the best which is not always ideal but For me, it’s fine. I’m okay with that, because I do have a lot of content and a lot of direction on where to go from there. But then I have quite a few pieces of content that opt people into my own newsletter. So one of those is, it’s a podcast budget worksheet, people can download this worksheet. And by doing that they opt into my newsletter, and then I can market to them through my newsletter. That landing page is in my top seven pages that rank. For the most part, every single person that comes to that page converts into a subscriber because they download that opt in. Now, the other thing to consider too, is like the content you’re putting out there.
What is the goal? Like when someone’s reading it? What is the goal. But again, we’d talk a little bit more about this in our training. So head over to Mike tech society.com, if you want to get more into that. But I do want to take you over to another tool as well. And this is Google Search Console, I’ll share instructions on how to get access to Google Search Console, if you don’t already have it. Once you’re inside a Google search console, we are going to be looking at your performance and search results for your website. Now I’m going to pull back all the way to like May of 2021 within my Google Search Console, just so I can give some data. And for me, I’ve had since May 19 2021, I have had 463,000 impressions of my website.
Total, I’ve had 6440 clicks. But what I love about this is Google Search Console tells you what your top search queries are, and what your top pages are. So I can look at like the search, the actual the keyword that actually got them over to my website, and then what landing page it was that ranked for that. Typically, I’m going to know this anyway, because I’m planning it, because I’m thinking about, okay, if someone searches this, what is the end result, like? What content should show up for them. And that’s how I’m planning my content. And I do talk a little bit more about this in the training and then in past episodes as well. But the way that I like to look at it is if people are actually clicking on your content, you’re showing up pretty high. The other thing I like to look at is the search volume. And I also like to look at kind of the conversion of clicks, like impression versus click, if I have a piece of content that, like let me go into my pages really quickly. So I have one piece of content that has 4000 impressions in the last year and a half of those 4000 impressions. I’ve had 228 clicks, what is it that I could I could improve in what the end user sees when they’re searching to make them click this. So you can click into whatever page it is, and then go back to your queries and see, okay, well, they searched for this thing.
But that’s not actually what this page is about. So maybe I need to optimize the keywords within the page, or they searched the correct terms, but they didn’t click on it. So what is it that my optimization or my dead, my metadata needs to say in order for them to click on it. That is how I approach actually tracking my results. But again, one of the biggest components is going to be just looking at the data inside of Google Analytics, comparing it over time, making sure you’re only looking at the organic traffic within Google Analytics, and making sure that it’s steadily going up. Because if it’s not steadily going up, then the efforts that you’re making are not actually working. So it could be that you’re not you’re not planning for the right keywords, or you’re not optimizing your pages correctly. Or maybe you’re not doing anything. And you’re just curious and looking at your own data. So my my suggestion to you is fix search engine optimization, the right marketing approach for you. And in addition to that, what could it be doing to help your brand? If you get any inquiries from Google or you want to like maybe you’re in a space where your business is one of a kind or there’s not many people who do what you do. I say go for Google now because once people get in like when I first started managing podcasts, it wasn’t really a thing. There were not a ton of podcast managers out there. Now, there are quite a few of us out here. But I feel like I started, I didn’t start early enough, in my own opinion, on optimizing my content for search. I started blogging a little later than I wish I had.
I also started my podcast far later than I wish I had. But the efforts that I’ve made in the last, you know, year and a half, two years of creating this content on my website have done so much good for me, I’ve gotten clients off of it, I’ve sold some of my digital products, I have members inside of my Czech society that came from Google, I have loved every single piece of content that I’ve put out. Because it has returned its value to me. Not only that, but the content I have put out, I can always reference I can go back and create more content from it and repurpose it. But then, at the end of the day, I have people who find my business and my work through my optimized content for search engines for both podcasts and blogs. And I’m pretty happy with that. Now. If you do decide that my check society is right for you, and you want in on this training, make sure you grab it before the end of the month, we will be raising the price on October 1, and I don’t want you to miss out on this opportunity. But then also, if you’re just curious about more search engine optimization, search engine optimization content, and you’re not quite ready to make the leap into my check society, I will be linking a couple of other episodes and blog posts that that can help guide you in this process. But inside the training, I am walking through each and every step of planning your podcast content for search engines, how to actually optimize that content for search engines and what you should be doing each and every week to ensure that you are getting the results that you want.
So I want to leave you with a little bit of encouragement, it feels like you have started too late or you’re too late to the game, I want you to know that you’re not. There will always be something you wish you’d started earlier. Like me, I wish I had started my business earlier. I wish I had started my podcast earlier. I wish I had done so many things earlier. But that doesn’t mean I should never do it. It means I should just be excited in this moment and get started on it. So if you are ready to get started, go do it. Give Google Analytics a little run through search it. Take a look at what is inside of it and how you’re even ranking now because you could be ranking for things that you don’t even realize you’re ranking for. Anyway, I really hope today’s episode was helpful to you and I will see you inside of my check society. If you’re a podcaster and you’re curious about what we do inside of there. Head over to Mike check society.com where you can learn more. This has been another episode of The clocking in podcast. You can find the show notes for this episode and more at Gaffin creative.com. Thank you so much for your listenership and support. If you love this episode, I’d be so honored if you leave me a review in the Apple podcast app. Until next time, I’m your host Haylee Gaffin clocking out.
