Let’s talk learnings and results in 2020! I love doing these kind of episodes because I get to share everything I’ve learned with my clients to my audience. It feels so abundant (perfect to go along with the holiday season).

If you’d like to hear more about my SEO learnings, I recommend you check out these other episodes:

• 3 SEO Myths in 2019 / ep 77

• SEO Results and Learnings in 2019 / ep 116

• Websites in 2020 / ep 129

• Starting a blog in 2020 / ep 127

This has been quite a year for transformation! I have so many exciting learnings that I want to share with you that you’ll be able to apply to your own SEO strategy.

In many cases, unique times call for unique measures and this year has created some special circumstances to experiment and innovate in new ways that we could have never previously imagined.

Listen to the podcast version of this content here:

Here are 3 learnings from clients this year that have gotten some interesting SEO results.

1) Keep your keywords simple

So many times, I see my clients and students overcomplicate their keyword strategy. The reality is your ideal client is probably searching for the most direct and straightforward keywords to get your services, products or content.

Although shorter term keywords do sometimes are the most competitive, it still helps Google understand what our website is about a builds on the bigger body of work as part of the content on our websites.

For example, if you are a nutritionist who is helping women with her hormones, creating a page targeting the keyword “hormone course” with your course is an easy way to allow people to find you, even if that keywords has high competition.

Client Results + Learnings

With all my AIM and Retainer clients, we are targeting multiple keywords at once. When one of my clients published a in-depth guide on a simple transaction keyword (like “hormone course”) she got pretty immediate results. It was surprising since it was a fairly competitive keyword, but at the same time made sense: a lot of people are searching for that and some of those people are looking for this type of brand to talk about this content.

The learning is to not obsess too much about keyword. You shouldn’t be spending more than 1 hour per month finding keywords for your content. The rest of your time should be spend creating the content and innovating on how to make that content the best of its kind.

2) It’s okay and normal if writing for SEO doesn’t come naturally

I’d say this is one of the top barriers I see my audience struggle with when it comes to doing SEO: creating amazing SEO content that checks all the boxes that makes it “SEO” optimized.

What I’ve noticed with a lot of clients is they get so perfectionist about this that it stops them from writing all together. And that is what creates the bigger problem.

Instead, I recommend that you separate a part of your content writing for exclusive SEO writing (using keywords, headings, etc.) and then another just for whatever you feel like writing about and creating.

This way you allow your creative juices to flow while still targeting those SEO principles.

Client Results + Learnings

For one of my clients, I made it super clear that apart from the keywords, she was free to write about anything she felt inspired to write about. She ended up writing a blog post on a topic that was trending in her industry and immediately started ranking and getting traffic.

The learning here is your SEO strategy is actually enhanced by your intuition and creativity. Stop worrying about doing all the SEO thing 100% of the time. Instead, focus on creating your best content and everything else will follow.

3) Make sure the rest of your marketing is supporting your SEO

This is especially true if your blog is just getting started but is really relevant in all cases. When you publish a blog post, you can’t just expect it to sit there and magically start to rank. You need to actively share it with the world on all other platforms you are active in.

SEO Results + Learnings

For Cassy of Woash Wellness (read full case study of her SEO results here) one of the ways she was able to leverage her SEO results was to have a consistent email and PR strategy. I believe this was an important element to her success with SEO since it supported the rest of the work we were doing on her blog.

Final Thoughts

Think about how you want SEO to work for you? What type of clients would it ideally bring you? How would it work in conjunction with the rest of your marketing?

Feel free to share in the comments below; I’d love to hear what you are dreaming up for your own SEO.