Kristen 0:03
Okay, TPT sellers, ready to see growth in your business? You’re in the right place. Welcome to the Savvy Teacher Seller. I’m Kristen Doyle, and I’m here to give you no fluff tools and strategies that will really make an impact on your sale. Let’s get started y’all.
Kristen 0:23
Hey, y’all, and welcome to this episode of The Savvy Teacher Seller. I’m your host, Kristen Doyle. And today’s episode is all about finding and taking advantage of the easiest opportunities you have to move your website content, whether it’s blog posts, podcast episodes, products, or any other pages on your site, right up Google’s search ranks.
Kristen 0:45
Because the higher you are in the right searches, the more traffic you get to your website, from people who are actively looking for the very thing that you offer. We’re gonna use a free tool called Google Search Console. And if you don’t have it set up yet, don’t worry, it is very easy to connect to your site. And you can use Google Search Console with any website platform, as long as you own the website.
Kristen 1:08
Once you connect it, it will go back and process old data. So you don’t even have to wait around while it collects data for you or anything like that. You just need to collect it, give it a few days, and then it will process lots and lots of old data for you so that you can do the process that I’m going to teach you today.
Kristen 1:24
So the goal of this process I’m going to teach you today is to identify those quick SEO wins, that you have opportunities to take advantage of within your Google Search Console. We’re looking for the pages on your website, that you have the most potential to rank higher in search and to get more traffic over to your site.
Kristen 1:47
Keep in mind, of course, that SEO is a long game. So when I say quick wins, these aren’t going to be instant fixes. But these are the ones that will be the easiest for you to move into top search rank positions for. So let’s dive into the process.
Kristen 1:59
First, you’ll want to log in to Google Search Console. And if you have multiple websites in there, just make sure you choose the correct site that you want to be working on right now. And then click on performance. And there are four metrics that Google shows us at the top of the performance page. The first one is clicks, that’s pretty obvious. It’s the number of people who have clicked on a link in Google search results to get to your website to that specific page.
Kristen 2:24
The next one is impressions. And impressions is a measure of the number of people who have seen your page listed in the search results, whether they clicked or not. The next metric is a click through rate. And that just gives us the percentage of people who saw your page listed in the search results and then clicked on it. So it’s just a ratio of clicks to impressions.
Kristen 2:46
And then the last metric that we’re looking at is position. This gives you the average position that your page appeared in a Google search over whatever time span that you’ve selected at the top of the page. Notice that on here, you’ll see positions like 12.7 and 3.8. This is because they are taking an average because Google, of course, personalizes its search results based on what it knows about the person searching, whether it’s their location, or their gender, or past interest, their age, all of those sorts of things, play into what search results Google is giving you.
Kristen 3:23
And so that’s why you might appear in different places for different people. So go ahead and toggle on all four of those and set your date range to the last three months. Now you’re going to see this wild and crazy graph that has all four things showing on it. And to be honest, it’s pretty hard to tell anything from those numbers on the graph once you toggle all four on so just scroll down below that.
Kristen 3:46
And you’ll see several tabs. We are going to focus on pages and queries. Pages are as it sounds like just the pages on your website that have shown up in search. So start by clicking on that. Now it should be sorted automatically by the number of clicks. If it’s not click on that word to sort it by clicks.
Kristen 4:06
You can add a filter to look specifically for pages that fall within certain parameters like within certain search positions, or they’re getting a certain number of clicks, that sort of thing.
Kristen 4:17
Now your best opportunities to move up in search results relatively quickly are going to be the posts that are already ranking pretty high, but not all the way at the top. So look for posts, somewhere around positions three through 20. Those are the ones that are close to the top but not quite there. So you’ve got a lot of potential to move up.
Kristen 4:37
In my experience, when you have posts that are way buried in search, those are a lot more difficult to move up than the ones that are already doing fairly well. For each of those posts, if you click on the post URL, it will filter to just that post. Then click on queries. This is going to give you the search terms that people have entered into Google that you are ranking for.
Kristen 5:01
And you’ll see all four metrics for this as well. How many clicks do you get when you show up for this search term? How many impressions? What’s the click through rate? And, of course, what is your search position for that term. So choose the best of those terms based on both the data that you’re seeing there, which ones are getting you a lot of impressions and a lot of clicks, but also based on which ones are most relevant to your content.
Kristen 5:26
Sometimes you’ll see a keyword that you are showing up in search results for, but you’re not getting any clicks for it. And when you look at it, you think well, yeah, obviously, I’m not getting clicks, because this keyword has nothing to do with what the content of my posts is. So those are the ones you want to just ignore, it happens.
Kristen 5:43
But for the ones that you see that are good, solid, relevant search terms that are getting a lot of impressions, you want to improve your optimization on the post for those. Now, sometimes you might even find that a page that you click on has no search terms that you want to optimize for. And that is okay too. Don’t feel like this is some sort of checklist where you have to go through every single one of your posts that falls between three and 20 in search results.
Kristen 6:08
Sometimes what you’ll find is that you’re already ranking really high for the most relevant search terms. And the terms that you’re not ranking for, aren’t really that relevant. So just leave that post alone. But if you do find terms that you’re not ranking in the top three, or four, and they are good, relevant search terms that are seem to be getting a lot of traffic, because you’re getting a lot of impressions, then those are the ones that you want to go into that post or that page and better optimize for that keyword.
Kristen 6:38
Keep in mind, maybe you’ve selected a different keyword when you created this content. And now you’re seeing how people are actually interacting with your content. And you may want to change the keyword that you are optimizing for.
Kristen 6:49
So once you’ve selected that keyword, head over to your website and update the page. If you’re on WordPress, use your SEO plugin. And if you need a recommendation for that rankmath is 100% my top recommendation for a WordPress SEO plugin. There’s a paid and a free version. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with using just the free one. I personally use the paid version, but the free version is great as well.
Kristen 7:11
If you’re on other platforms, then you won’t have the advantage of having an SEO plugin. But you can still optimize by making sure you’re using the keywords in all the right places like your title, the post content, and so on.
Kristen 7:24
While you’re in your website, and you’re looking at that post, give it a little evaluation. What is that post doing for your business? Because if it’s ranking high in search, and you’re getting traffic to it, especially if you’re working to improve the traffic to it, you want to make sure that that post is somehow serving your business, it’s helping you to grow.
Kristen 7:45
So maybe this is a post that is promoting a product or a service. Maybe the point of this post is to get people onto your email list. It could be something totally different as well. But whatever it is, make sure that those calls to action are really clear and easy for people to take. Make sure that you are selling them on the idea of taking that action, whether it’s finding out more about a product or service or it’s joining your email list to get a freebie, make sure you’re making that enticing and you’re making sure that you take advantage of the traffic that you’re getting from search.
Kristen 8:18
Like I said at the beginning, keep in mind that SEO changes are a slow and steady wins the race kind of game, it might take three to six months to see your page move up significantly in search results. And that is totally normal on Google search. So don’t expect these to be overnight changes.
Kristen 8:36
There you have it; a quick strategy for taking advantage of that lowest hanging fruit on your website, and finding your best opportunities for improving your SEO within Google Search Console. Remember, focus on pages that rank between positions 3 and 20. and optimize them for the most relevant search terms that are getting lots of impressions.
Kristen 8:57
Be patient and persistent as you’re monitoring and adjust your strategy over time because as I have said a couple of times now, SEO is a long game. Your action step for today is to identify one post that has potential and make a few quick changes to it to see if you can move it up in the search results.
Kristen 9:15
If you want to dive further into how you can use Google Search Console and Google Analytics, or you need more help with getting them set up for your website. Then you will love my Google tools masterclass. It walks you right through everything and it even includes a custom dashboard that I’ve built for you to make it easy to track and analyze your data. You can find all the details at Kristindoyle.co/google And right now it is 50% off through April 15 when you use promo code podcast. Thank you so much for listening. I’ll talk to you soon.
Kristen 9:50
I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If you did, please share it with another teacher seller who would also find it helpful. For more resources on growing your TPT business, head to Kristindoyle.co/TPT. Talk to you soon.
