December 15, 2023 | Read Online

Friday Insights - SEO

What I'm doing to crack Google and my incredible feat of human ingenuity this week 😜

Johanna Renoth

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Hiya,

this week, my interviewee ghosted me. 👻 Pfffft!

My brain was 100% blank for this week’s newsletter. What on earth am I supposed to write about now?!? I had thought the newsletter was taken care of and my mind sent all brain cells involved in creating these emails on holiday. Maybe, you know this: you mentally check something off and it ceases to exist for you. That’s exactly what happened here.

To make lemonade out of those lemons, I’d love to share with you what I’ve been learning behind the scenes. It’s been a while since I’ve sent a Friday Insight, so here we go with an edition on my SEO learnings so far.

We’ll explore:

SEO learnings and regrets
How I won at being human on Wednesday.

Let’ get into it!

SEO Experiments & Moral Dilemmas in Digital Marketing

Let’s start with one of my top three regrets this year in marketing: I SO should have started doing SEO years ago. Sigh!

I didn’t for similar reasons you might not have, either:

First, I was overly focused on socials wayyyy back in the day
Then, I thought it was too technical and would take too much time
To make matters worse, I don’t love Google’s dominance over the structure and our experience of the internet

I still think the third, but your girl also has to eat. Sometimes, navigating the moral dilemmas of digital and algorithmic marketing feels like being stuck between a rock and a hard place and you just have to do what works well enough in the greater scheme of things.

I don’t like what social media is doing to the world and people, so I’m off them. I’ve also realized, though, that manual, cold outreach for opportunities is tiring, especially because I don’t currently have a VA who can support me with this.

So, even if I may not love what Google is doing to the Internet, some realism is in order, hence SEO it is. I realized I needed to take care of my Google-game, when I saw that Bye, Social Media! shows up nowhere on the SERP (search engine results page) when you enter “marketing without social media”. That’s not good, at all. 😱

Cue the SEO deep dive.

🔍🔍🔍

SEO Learnings So Far:

It’s not as hard to understand as I thought it would be. Yay!
There are a TON of really good tutorials available on YouTube.
I actually enjoy it [WHAT?!?]. The combination of strategy and content, data and communication really intrigues me.
You don’t seem to have to write like a robot for it to work. That was one of my main hang-ups and I’m glad there’s leeway with that.

Actually Helpful SEO Tutorials:

I knew some things about SEO beforehand from a job. I’ve been going much deeper with the below:

Mariah Magazine’s tutorials - check out her work in our interview
The Beginner’s Guide to SEO by Ahrefs, an SEO software company
Matt Diggity’s complete SEO checklist (his materials are great, overall)

I’ve been really enjoying this deep dive. It’s a little like going back to uni and obsessing over a topic for a week for a term paper. It’s fun to go through learning sprints like that. Now, I need to translate the learning to doing.

A Win At Being Human…

Otherwise, I battled fate this week and won. I wore white jeans on a train drinking coffee from a paper cup without a lid on it and emerged victorious.

It’s the little things…

Happy Marketing,

Johanna 📣

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