I recently sat down with Kevin Willett of the "3 Questions With..." show on YouTube to discuss the answers to some common SEO questions, share some tips, and help Kevin's viewers get a better understanding of their SEO. Our conversation spans two videos — watch them below or keep reading to get all the answers & tips!

What is organic growth?

Kevin: Can you explain a little bit about what organic growth is is for someone who has heard the term but may not know what it means?

Emily: When you run a paid ad, such as a PPC ad (which you see in Google results) you’re paying Google every time someone clicks on that ad. So, in order to maintain the traffic that’s coming in, you’re constantly spending money. And that’s a great avenue for a lot of businesses, but as soon as you stop paying, that traffic stops. With organic growth, you put time and effort in up front to create something, in this case content, and it continues to bring in traffic to your website.

You don’t have to keep paying someone every month to bring in clicks on that thing you created. It does it itself, so if you think of it like planting a seed in your garden, which is very apt because of the organic reference, you plant that seed. And sure, you’re going to have to water it sometimes; it’s going to need a few little tweaks. But ultimately, it’s going to grow into a plant and it’s going to flourish. It’s going to give you flowers or vegetables or whatever it may be. That’s how this organic growth works. You plant the seed and it begins to grow and flourish and bring in traffic to your business, and it becomes pretty hands-off on your end.

What makes a keyword "competitive"?

Kevin: Everyone talks about SEO when we all, small business owners, understand the importance of it. But we really don’t know how to do it. So, you have to know the keywords that people are searching for and understand what you may want to be targeting. Because I always joke, I run a networking group, I want to come up on the first page for the word ‘networking.’ Might be a little bit farther than I’m thinking, you know, it’s probably not going to happen overnight, right?

Emily: Yes, that is correct! SEO does involve some patience because when you decide "I want to rank for a keyword," well, there’s lots of other websites out there that are also trying to rank for all those keywords. So it becomes a matter of, one, knowing what people are looking for. You run a networking group, so people are looking for networking, but you might specifically want to target people in the greater Boston area. So, then you’d want to look for keywords that are a little longer: ‘networking in Lowell’, ‘networking in Boston’ and start to target those. And what that does is it reduces the amount of competition.

An example I give is shoes. If you run a shoe store in Lowell, Massachusetts, and you want to rank for the keyword ‘shoes,’ well you’re going to be up against the Famous Footwears, Nike, Adidas, New Balance. It’s going to be really hard. But you can instead do ‘shoes in Lowell’, ‘shoe stores near Boston’ and you can begin ranking for those keywords, because those are what your actual local customers are searching for.

Is an SEO strategy necessary?

Kevin: So Emily, I brought you on the show today because I want to talk about SEO strategy. Because I'm guilty of it. Emily, as we were joking before the show, I like to do Facebook Live and do a lot of posts in honestly, Emily, it's whatever's on my mind today. And it works in some ways, but if you say cab, what's your strategy? I just told you I'm like whatever's on my mind. That might not be the best strategy. Right? Maybe a little more effort on the strategy idea?

Emily: I mean, we I think we're all guilty of that to a degree. It's easy to hop online and talk about whatever is top of mind and that does work really well for things like Facebook Lives where you're really kind of doing some off the cuff, engaging with people on social media. But when it comes to your SEO strategy, the content you're putting on your website, I do really encourage business owners to have a defined strategy that they're working with. 

Rather than you know, thinking "all right, well today I feel like writing about this blog post and putting it online," take some time to strategize every few months. It's nice to do it quarterly and really look at:

• What are your potential customers searching for?
• What are questions that prospects keep asking you when you talk to them?
• What's top on their mind?

...and then start creating content around these topics? Because this is, these are things that people want to know they're either asking you or we can see that they're looking in search for these topics. So if you're producing content on it, then you're going to be steadily moving higher and higher in the search results, because you're being really relevant. And that's what Google wants to see. 

How can someone start forming an SEO strategy?

Kevin: That made me smile because as you know, we do video interviews—because you're doing one right now. And that's why I say to my clients, what questions are you getting Emily? You know, what do you what are people asking about? That's what we should be doing videos on. So at least at least we go to the right direction now. And so we got all one for one so far. So but the challenge is how do you form that content strategy? You know, sometimes we just don't know what to do with it, whether even start? 

Emily: Yeah, that's a really good question. So first place I say to start is if you're having conversations with prospective clients, and customers, think about what are they asking you sit down, take 20 minutes just kind of do a brain dump. Think about what are they asking you? What are things that maybe you discover people aren't already doing when you meet with them, and come up with a list of topics. That's the great place to start because these are things that you're probably explaining to people over and over again. 

By writing content on it, one, you're saving yourself some time because you can just send them a link and to your ideal audience clearly has these things top of mind. And then next I say go ahead and take a look at a keyword tool. Start digging into what are people actually searching on Google. What are they looking for? Pick out some terms that you feel relate really well to your particular business and that you feel comfortable talking on. You want to make sure that you're creating content, all the things you actually do have expertise in.

I mean, I could write an article on you know, growing apple trees, sure, but I don't know anything about that. So I want to be creating content for my site that's really relevant to my business, and what my audience wants and when you when you start with questions, you're already getting it makes it easier to think about "okay, where do I look into keywords?" From there, group your topics together. Look at the topics you thought, of look at the keywords you did some research on and think "okay, these three kind of relate to each other and these four also relate to each other." And start creating content in clusters.

For example, I do SEO content, strategy and writing and I'm also really interested in data privacy. So for my website, I create clusters of content groups of blog posts around things people need to know about SEO, I write about how my approach to what I do keeps data privacy in mind. And then I also write content about ways to write better, writing tips, things like AI —should you use, it should you not use it. I kind of think in batches, in groups like that, and that's that's a really good way to sort of organize your strategy when you're just getting started.

How can people start finding the right keywords?

Kevin: We always talk about keywords, we need the keywords. But if I don't know what my keywords are, I guess wrong. I assume people are looking for networking and they're looking for something different. How do I know what these fancy keywords are?

Emily:  So to start, very, bottom level thing you can do is just go into Google search. Do it in an incognito or Private tab because your browser remembers things about you and your searching preferences.

Open up a private incognito tab and just start typing in some searches to things that you think people might be looking for when they're looking for your business. And look at the results. Even if you're not seeing your business in the results. That's fine. But look at the results. Do they seem to be in line with what you were expecting? Or do they maybe feel a little different?

You can also scroll down to the bottom of the page and look at where it says "people also asked". This will give you some ideas for other questions, other keywords that you can write about. That's a really basic way of approaching if you want to get a little more specific, the next step would be to use a keyword tool.

Keyword tools are pretty expensive, unfortunately. There are some free ones on the market—free and very low cost, Ubersuggest is one. Another one that I recommend to folks who really want to do this themselves is called Keywords Everywhere. That's got a nominal fee, but it's pretty affordable. And what those tools will do is those will show you searches that people are making online and how many searches people are making. But there's one catch.

Those free tools usually pull from something called Google Keyword Planner, which in itself is a free tool by Google. Google Keyword Planner is often used for paid advertising. So you're getting some information about people's interests, but the data isn't 100% aligned with organic search. So it can be valuable you can start to say "okay, there's more interest in these terms versus those other terms".

If you really want to get a really clear picture of exactly what people are searching for, and seeing an organic search results—that's nothing anyone's paying for—then you do need to access it through an SEO tool. Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz are three big ones. But like I said, they're pretty expensive. It's actually—probably for most people, it's gonna be more cost effective for you to engage a consultant on a one-time basis to help you with that research and access those tools and go from there...versus paying for a subscription you're only going to use a few times.

Why work with an SEO strategist?

Kevin: That's funny because that was gonna be my next question. Isn't it more cost effective to consult with you, someone who can take a look at my website, see what I have going on? And suggest those keywords and perhaps start writing some content for me so I can make sure because I find it even when we want to do it? Because Emily, we only want to do it for a little while. You know, the first time we do a couple of blog posts, we think, "Emily, it didn't go viral like I expected!" So it makes more sense to reach out to you and have a work with you on this and try to do it ourselves. Like all things.

Emily: Yeah, just like it makes more sense for me to reach out to a professional photographer for headshots or, say, an attorney to help me trademark something versus trying to do it myself. Same in this case, for less than the cost of one year of these keyword tools I can work with my clients to come up with an initial SEO content strategy for them, give them some keywords and even help them start building the frameworks on the articles they should create. So it'll make it a lot easier and faster for them takes all the guesswork out of it