It’s easy to get caught up in the hype of the latest Algorithm change, but when you’ve created great content, you’ll also have engagement. Find out more of Kate Toon’s Recipe for SEO success for retailers.
Bringing Business to Retail
Kate Toon's Recipe For Seo Success For Retailers
Bringing Business to Retail podcast, episode 19, with Kate Toon. Welcome to the Bringing Business to Retail podcast on SelenaNights.com. Stay ahead of the competition by opening your doors to business experts so you can learn, grow and be inspired. Passionate about bringing business strategies to independent retailers. Please welcome your host, Selena Knight. Welcome back to another episode of the Bringing Business to Retail podcast. Today, we're talking SEO or search engine optimization. Three little letters that make most people cringe and open their wallets to spend thousands of dollars on something that is almost considered the dark arts. A couple of episodes ago, we talked with Belinda Weaver from Copyright Matters on how you can start to master those dark arts for yourself when it comes to your e-commerce site. Well, today we have the delightful Kate Toon on the show, giving you some more tips on how to harness SEO in other ways for your retail store, ways that will stand the test of time of algorithm changes and still provide great content for your customers. Now, before we jump into today's episode, I want to say thank you to Shel Hamilton, who wrote me a lovely review for the podcast. Shel says, "So much great information, five stars." Selena, thank you for doing this show. I'm not in retail, but a friend recommended your show and I find it really interesting and helpful for my service-based business too. Now, funnily enough, I actually know who this person is, her name on the podcast is Shel the hypnotist. Now, I actually listened to Shel's podcast, not that she would know it, but I do. And her podcast is called Meditation Minis and she has like five minutes worth of complete meditation bliss. So if you're really, really busy, they run for about five to 10 minutes. And I find them really great to just kind of chill out when you don't have a lot of time, if you're on the bus or if you're waiting for something or someone, have a listen to Shel's podcast. They're called Meditation Minis. So Shel, thank you so much for your review. And which reminds me, I should go over to your podcast and leave a review too. So let's get this SEO party started with the slightly quirky, but ever so lovely Kate Tune. Hey there and welcome back to another episode of the Bringing Business to Retail Podcasts. Today I have on the delightful Kate Tune from recipe for SEO success. And we've just been chatting and she's told me a few fun facts, but we are going to be talking about SEO. Now, I know we talked a little bit about, well, a lot about SEO with Belinda Weaver, a couple of episodes ago, but Kate is going to give us a completely different take on it. So welcome to the show, Kate. Thank you so much for having me. That's okay. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do? Well, like Belinda, I am originally a copywriter and I call myself an SEO copywriter, but over the last sort of four or five years, I've moved more specifically into helping small businesses, bloggers and huge back greedy corporates work out how to do their own search engine optimization. So not just the copy and content side of things, but all of it. So technical links, everything, basically. And I run courses and workshops. And yeah, that's, that's kind of what I do SEO. I'm a big fan. Now, I did a little bit of research and before this is completely off topic, but I found a few fun facts about you that I would like you to maybe just expand upon. Oh, Lord, this is, you were, you were once a given keeper. I was a given keeper. Yeah, I volunteered for several months at a given sanctuary in Thailand. And they're really horrible creatures. I'm afraid to say they're very vicious. And I like to reach out of their little cages and pull your hair. But yeah, it was a great experience. It was good fun. And, you know, Paul Gibbons, they had quite a nice life though. It was good, good life for them. And also a radio DJ. Oh, yes, I put that in there because it makes me sound cool. But I was a DJ at university and I got to interview lots of good bands, like Blur and Pulp and Radio. Well, oh, yeah, I was like, cool. I was called to call for school. Yeah, not cool anymore. But back then, I was pretty damn cool. And there are a few more you have written a couple of books. Yeah, I have. I've written a... Do you want to tell us the titles? Yeah, I wrote an anthology of poetry, funny poetry, like Spike Milligan poetry called Gone Dottie. And I wrote a children's book called Wobbly Gym about a pirate with a wooden leg. I'm going to have to look that way, won't I? Why don't I quite like pirates? Yeah, she's probably been old for it now. But yeah, that was fun. And I crowdfunded both of them. So I raised all the money through crowdfunding and that was a fun experience. Well, there's another episode we'll have to get you back on. Oh, yeah, a bit of an expert on the whole crowdfunding thing. Written a TV pilot, made a few short films and had short plays performed around the globe. You've got this writing thing covered, haven't you? Oh, I kind of... I was super into my creative writing a couple of years ago. I must admit, it's gone by the wayside a little bit as my business has become more successful, which is good and bad. But yeah, I've written lots of short plays and had them on in New York and London. And yeah, it was fun. And I'll hope to go back to it one day when I've made my millions. And the one that I think will be most dear to our listeners heart is... Do you know what I'm going to say? No. That you sold undies in a large retail store. Oh, I did. I used to work. Yeah, it wasn't topshop. It was another one. It was even worse. It was Burton's, that was it. Burton's, which I think is now defunct. And my job pretty much involved refolding underpants after people had kind of rifled through them. That was all I got through. I wasn't even allowed on the till. So yeah, it was great. That was my, that was my retail experience. How does one fold underpants? Well, there's the way. There is a way to get the why at the front. People listening to the show who work in advance will know this, Selena. But maybe I'll come back on and we can do a show about that one day. Sounds like a plan. Okay, so we are here to talk about SEO. Now, give us just a couple of paragraphs on what SEO is and why it's important. Well, I'm sure my good buddy, Belinda, did a good explanation, but it's always good to hear a few different angles. Essentially, the way I look at it is SEO is simply the process of optimizing your website so that it comes up at the top of the natural rankings when someone types in keywords that you want to rank for. So if you sell piglet jumpers and someone types piglet jumpers into Google, then you want your site to come up at the top and we use SEO to make sure that that happens. Is it hard? Well, look, I don't think it is hard. I don't think it's rocket science and part of the reason why I've shifted from sort of being a paid SEO consultant into sort of training people is I think there's a lot of misinformation and kind of almost deliberate confusion put out there by SEO people to make it seem like this incredibly difficult thing. But it, like anything else in marketing or retailing or anything, it's just a skill to be learned. When you know the rules and you play by them, it's not really that hard at all, no. Well, this is actually why I brought you on because you and I started a discussion about a certain topic which we'll get onto and it sparked a little bit of debate and it actually made me think back to the years in my retail stores when I did hire SEO companies and I was spending tens of thousands of dollars a year for the services that they were getting. And to be honest, you never quite felt like you knew what you were getting, but I don't know if this was just me, but I like to think I'm a reasonably smart, confident person. But all the companies I dealt with and to be honest, I did actually change companies a couple of times because I was so intimidated by the fact that it appeared like I should know what they were doing and I should appreciate the fact that I was giving them thousands of dollars. But I never kind of felt that I was, like I never quite knew what they were doing, it just seemed like this big elusive thing. And when you, when I would start to question, it would just kind of be some flippant answers that made me feel like I knew nothing. And if I just kept my mask up that I wouldn't look stupid. Yeah, well, I think, I think you've hit the now so on the head it's untrue. I mean, you've defined exactly the sort of people that I'm trying to help because I think one of the biggest issues with SEO is the lack of confidence. And if you're not confident talking about something or dealing with something, it's very easily, easy for somebody to pull the wall over your eyes. Now, I'm not saying that all SEO consultants are bad, although they're all trying to mislead you. But you know, there's a third chunk who don't seem to have your best interests at heart. Let's put it that way. And you know, they throw around jargon, they use acronyms. And you know, as you said, they kind of say it as if you should know. And also, there seems, I think as a business owner, if you have paid a lot of money for something, there's almost a level of embarrassment that you don't really want to admit that you don't understand how it works because you paid all this money. And I think that's one of the first steps that a lot of the people who I work with have to take. It's kind of admitting that like, you know, I've had people on my course who spent 20 to $40,000 on SEO. They've never understood what's been going on. They've never really got the results that they thought they wouldn't. And then they're kind of like at this thing. And they're too embarrassed to admit that, you know. So the first step is kind of going, hey, it's OK that you don't understand it. You know, that's fine. But don't pay for something that you don't understand. That would be my point. And that would be my point too, because I was that person. Yeah, you're not alone. You are not alone at all. OK, so this is not exactly where I said that we would head today's topic. But this is where we are is how if you are going to hire someone for the elusive SEO God, how do you set results? Like, how do you set targets and results? Like typically all these people are going to say, we're going to get you to number one ranking on Google. Like, should that be the only result that you aim for? No. And to be honest, if you have people do say that to you, then run a mile because no good SEO consultant would ever make that promise. Because it's largely unachievable. And secondly, look, I could get you to number one spot tomorrow for a random keyword that I convince you is a good keyword, but that really has no traffic behind it at all. And that's what a lot of these SEO companies do. So they pick quite an obscure keyword. They kind of lead you merely down the path and say, look, this is going to be great for you. But the truth is there's no traffic behind it. And if there's no traffic, there's no competition. And if there's no competition, well, then anyone could get you to number one spot. So most good SEOs will not focus on ranking. Yeah. And even if they do focus on ranking, they won't focus on ranking you for a couple of keyword phrases. Realistically, you want to be ranking wealth hundreds and hundreds of keyword phrases. You know, so at the moment, I think I rank in the one to three spot for about 200 odd keywords for my copywriting sites, you know, I'm not fixed on just the word copywriter. Because think about it, there's so many different ways that people can type things into Google, and especially now that Google's got the speech recognition feature. So you can actually just talk to Google and tell it what you want. People are going to stop saying things like, you know, shoe shop in Wuronga, they're going to start saying, where can I get great shoes? They're going to start asking question based things to Google. So, you know, ranking becomes even less important because how do you optimize for all the various millions of different questions that could be, you know. So most good SEOs will not guarantee number one ranking. They will not focus on ranking that much. I mean, it's an aspect of SEO, obviously, but it's not everything. They'll focus on other things like time on site, so making sure that people spend a long time on your site. The longer people spend on your site, the more likely they are to do whatever it is that you want them to do. They'll focus on engagement, so getting the content on your site shared and liked and, you know, spread across social media. They'll focus on driving links to your site, so good quality links from relevant sites, and not to other things, you know, and they'll be complete. A really good SEO will be completely transparent about all of that. They'll say, this is what we're doing. This is how we're doing it, and this is the results we're getting. And if they're secretive in any way, then probably you don't want to be working with them. No, I think mine, what used to confound me is, I'll be honest, I kind of suck at numbers. Numbers do my heading, and most entrepreneurs are the same. I'm just like, yeah, as long as it looks like it's at the top of the chart, we must be doing well. And so I would get these weekly or fortnightly charts, and I'd just be like, oh, all at the top, kicking it in. Not sure how we're going, but clearly we're off the charts, so we're doing well. Well, I mean, I think it's one of the things I often say is, I never really look at my statistics. Isn't that a terrible thing to admit as an SEO consultant? You know, why? Because I'm too busy answering all the phone calls and the emails I get. You know, I don't need to look at my stats, because I've got the conversions. So, you know, a good SEO will be talking about what your goals are, you know, and goals are different. It won't always be a sale. It might be a sign up to your newsletter. It might be, you know, a download of something that you've created, but they will talk about your goals, and that's really how you should measure things. That's the bottom line. SEO is not sort of an entity in itself. It's just another part of the marketing mix, just like anything else. And all it is for is to drive conversion. That is 100% thing. So at the end of the day, it doesn't matter where you rank. It doesn't matter how much page time you have or any of those things. How many has your conversion rate increased since you employed the SEO company? If it has, they're doing a good job. If it hasn't, they're not. That is fantastic. I'm running that in great big letters on my notes with three exclamation marks over it because this is really, really important stuff. Like as a business owner, I don't care if you're a retailer or anybody else, you need to know what, not what even what you're getting for the money, but what the outcome is supposed to be. And I hear this so often, and I also hear it with business coaches, which is I spent thousands and I got nothing. And funnily enough, the first question I seem to ask people is, well, what was your goal when you went into it? And most of them didn't have a goal. And especially when it comes to SEO, they just want more money. We want more sales. But like you've just said, a lot of people aren't defining the goals. And I'm assuming that having the goal of increasing sales will be different tactics, but all part of that giant sales funnel, then having more people on your mailing list and spending more time on your site, which potentially could convert later. So by having those goals, you're going to know which will get onto the next bit, which is what it is you need to write to get them to do that thing. Yes, exactly. I don't know. I think that's a good way of putting it. You work out what your goals are and you take them to the SEO company rather than expecting the SEO company to set your goals for you. Why on earth would you be paying upwards of one, two, three grand a month unless you're crystal clear on what you're getting back for that? And I think it's fair enough to say, look, I'm not really interested in all these charts and numbers and whatever. I don't get that, you know, that's not what I'm interested in. I'm interested in knowing why my blue widget isn't selling as well as my green widget. So Belinda talked to us a lot about how we can use keywords and whatnot in product descriptions. What other pages on, and I say we're going to focus mainly on e-commerce websites, and you can always jump in until we, and you can agree with me, even if you don't, because I want to hand it home to everybody in retail that they should have a blog attached to their e-commerce website. But if we're on an e-commerce website, what other pages are important apart from a product description? Well, I think this is going to lead into something that we said we would talk about, which is content duplication. Yeah, so unless you're very unusual, what you sell will probably be sold by somebody else. So you're selling blue widgets, there is probably another website out there that's selling blue widgets, or you bought them wholesale and now you're selling them, you know, these terms better than me, you're the retail lady, but you know what I mean. So I can go to sites and see the same product again and again and again on heaps of different sites. So unless you take the time to write, yes, keywords, excellent keywords, go the keywords. But unless you take time to write really awesome content around that product that really answers customer questions, states the benefit, outlines all the features, solves their problems, and is unique. Well, then you're just competing on price. I can buy that blue widget on Bob's site, it's $10 cheaper. Why will I buy the blue widget from you? That's what the project product descriptions need to do. Yes, keywords, but you know, honestly, it's pretty obvious what the keyword is going to be. It's going to be the name of the product, you know, you can only really optimize one product description for one keyword phrase. So if you're selling a blue widget with wheels, your keyword phrase will be blue widget with wheels. That's as long and short of the SEO keyword research you do for that product. Then you start writing awesome content. So for example, I worked with a retailer called Hip Kids recently. They haven't put the content live, but they needed product descriptions because the products they have are great, but they are sold by other people as well. Some of them unique, but they wanted people to buy their product. So we wanted to write quirky, fun, interesting copy that was unusual that, you know, really, when you read it, you were like, I so want to buy from this company. They're so awesome. They're so cool. So I think with product descriptions, it's not just about shoeboarding keywords in. It's about really identifying what problem is this product going to solve for the customer and making your content unique. Does that make sense? It does. It does. And so apart from the product description, are there any other pages on your website that you should be optimizing? Well, I think one of the most often missed opportunities is the category pages. So people do put effort into product pages. I can see that people are making more effort. But then their category pages generally just look like a list of products. So take the time to write really good category level descriptions and put that content in, you know, 100 to 200 words that describes the category. You may even put that beneath the images of your products, but at least there's some content on the page. But then I think the pages that really are going to make the difference in what I was just talking about between why I buy from Bob, rather than buying from Sue, are things like, you're about page. Why? What makes you you? What is your mission? What are your goals? What are your values? Why is your customer service better than anybody else's? What's your story? Why did you get into this retail game? Why are you selling, you know, piglet jumpers rather than hedgehog jumpers, you know, really make your about page engaging? And then I think all the other pages, all pages, but they like, I see terrible delivery pages that like, don't give me any detail about delivery. There's a couple of lines and they're ugly. I see really bad FAQ pages that just don't really answer my FAQs at all, you know. So really, all those core pages are so important. And I would put my effort into those, then the products, then the categories before I went anywhere near a blog post. People seem to think that blog posts are the only answer to SEO because it's new content. But every product is new content, you know. Does that make sense? It does. Now, back to that about page. Do people really read them? Like, are people really going to make a decision on who to buy from based on that page? I'm not sure if they're going to make a decision to buy. But yes, you know, there are stats and results and surveys that say the about pages, often the second most viewed page after the homepage, it definitely is on my site. People often want to know who you are before they want to know what you sell. It's about building trust. It's about proving that you are who you say you are. And if you do everything right and you do start to build that kind of loyalty and that trust, your about page becomes even more important because people want to connect with people, not brands. So if you are, if you want to portray yourself as like, you know, a home business with it's you and your husband, selling this stuff, people like that stuff, you know, people want to buy local, people want to help small businesses, people want to connect with other humans. So the about page is a place to show that humanity, and rather than just listing pictures of products. And you're right, because I love reading about pages. Yeah, me too, definitely. And you know, you're about your about page. It doesn't stop on the, you know, you don't finish the about story on your about page. You should be bringing that kind of youness through every page of the site. So, you know, I think about page is a great place to start to establish your tone of voice, who you are, how you want to portray yourself, your goals, your missions, your values, all that kind of stuff. But then you can start plucking bits of that out and bringing it into the site. You know, so if you want to be warm and approachable, you start writing really nice, warm, approachable sub headers on your product pages, you know, and it sort of starts to flow through the whole site. I'm just, I'm actually, I'm sitting here picturing some of the about pages in my head that I've been to recently. I've been analyzing about pages because we have a guest coming on talking about how to craft the perfect about page. And of course, before you have a guest on, you have to go through and check everything. So you don't get extremely embarrassed. Neil Patel's from Quicksprout. He's done his as an infographic, which is very on brand for him. And it's very cool. So, you know, it doesn't have to be, I think, you know, some people think, oh gosh, I've got to tell my life story. And sometimes you go, and it is someone's life story. And you're like, why are you telling me all this? Because at the end of the day, although the about pages about you, it isn't really about you. It's about what you can do for your customer. Yeah. So I am a lovely, warm person, which means that, you know, we started the company in '97, which means that, you know, you have to constantly bring it back to why I should care. Belinda has a great phrase, which is so what. So whenever you write anything, just say the word so what after. And if you, you know, just does that, it's such a good trick if you're right. I like that. It's great. So yeah, everything you write, you just go at the end. So what, you know, we were established in 1992. So what? We're an Australian company. So what? It doesn't really works because you're like, which means that we are blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, I use it a lot when I'm writing. I like it. I'm going to use that one too. Now you mentioned home page. Now I spend a lot of time on people's websites, especially retail websites. And you can have anything from simple, the simple slider across the top and nothing else, to vomit-worthy pictures and texts. And I've seen them to the point where literally every brand they stock is listed in the footer. Is there, is there like a recipe for creating a beautiful optimized home page? Well, at the end of the day, you don't really need to worry about optimizing your home page for SEO that much. Your home page about all the pages in your site will always be the one that ranks best. And so what I mean by that is generally I rank, I optimize home pages for the name of the brand. So if you are Bob's plumbing supplies, well then pretty much that's what your home page is going to be optimized for. Your product pages will be product related. Your category pages will be related to the categories of products that you sell. And then you've got your about page for names and things like that. You can't really optimize, you know, contact us in terms of conditions and privacy. So I would say on your home page, think more about creating that awesome first impression. You've got about 20 seconds, sometimes even less, to get people to love you, to go any further in your site. One of the sites, the retail e-commerce sites that I like best is called Tiny Me. And they sell like sort of, I think stationary and kid supplies and stickers that you stick on lunchboxes. And I think our home page does a great job because it displays an awful lot of information that without footers stuffed with brand names and without hideous sliders that nobody's ever going to click on. And big left hand knabs full of category descriptions. It does a great job. I don't know if you can bring it up. Well, you're chatting to me, but I think it's a really well done page. And there's copy on there, but they haven't gone over the top, you know. You just need about 100 to 150 words of copy describing what you do. And that's probably enough, you know. Yeah. And I just brought it up. And it's not, when I was saying before, sometimes you go onto websites and it's vomit worthy pictures in the sense that my eyeballs want to vomit. There's so much on the page. I can't stay on there. It just hurts my brain too much. So looking at their website, and I am not a website analyst in any way, shape or form, but all the pictures flow well together. They're they're even boxes. So they're, you know, they're segregated and everything is nice of me on the page and the pictures are all complimentary. And they don't have every product that they sell or every category that they sell. They just have the information that need. Yeah, they have a flavor. You can very quickly from the, you know, that they take the letter box approach because most people will only see one lump of this at a time. You know, no one's going to see the whole page. If you scroll, scroll, you start to see more and more stuff. But the other stuff's gone by the time you get down the page. So you're only ever seeing a sort of letter box worth of content. And they've thought about the fold. There is a fold. I'm sure you've probably talked about this before, but with all web pages, you talk about above the fold. And it's an old newspaper term from when newspapers used to be folded up and sold. And, you know, you put the most important headline and the most main story above the fold because, you know, that's what it's going to sell. So these people, like, timing me have really thought about what should go above the fold. They've got their navigation, but it's gray. So it's not too in your face, you know. So the line that stands out for me is the world's cutest and bestest personalized products for kids. So straight away, they've got a bit of quirk there because obviously bestest isn't a word, but it's kind of cute, you know. They've got a brief description of what they sell. And then they've got three main pictures. They've got jigsaw bags and stickers. And pretty quickly straight away, I get what they do and why they do it. And then they've got proof point. The next thing is a proof point trusted and loved by over 200,000 happy customers. And then they've got an offer as well. So even if I only ever saw that, I never scrolled. I'm pretty sold already, you know, kind of like in the site. So yes. So this was a question that I was going to ask you a little bit about. And you don't have to delve into it too much. And the reason I say that is because we have a guest on Nick from Theme Ballet. And he actually is going to mention how much you should sort of, you know, things that you can look at when you build a website. But from an SEO point of view, what sort of audit can you do on your website? Because Nick didn't talk about that. Nick talked more about the design and the fundamentals. But from your skill, from someone who doesn't quite know what they're doing yet. And I know that you've got some classes that can help people with that, which we'll talk about later. But what do you start looking at when you're new to all of this? Well, I think unfortunately it's the three main things that I think all e-commerce people need to think about are most technical, unfortunately, but not scary technical. Don't freak out. Don't turn the podcast up. It's okay. Number one is making sure that your site is responsive. So making sure that it looks good on different devices. So have a look at your site on a mobile on the smallest mobile screen you can and see not only does it fit because there's one, yeah, you can build a site that fits, but how easy is it to use? How easy is it to click the buy button to enter stuff into fields, all that kind of stuff. Lots of people now are buying from their mobiles and from tablets. So make sure that you have a good play with your site on those devices and make a list of things that maybe don't work to speak to your developer about. There's a test that I can give you this Selena for your show notes that you can put your site through. It's called Google Mobile Friendly Test. And it will tell you what's wrong with your site. I'm not saying that you'll be able to fix those things. You might have to speak to a developer to get them fixed. And that's fine. Everybody needs to develop an hour again, but at least you'll be aware of what you need to do. So making number one responsiveness is your site looks good on devices. Number two would probably be speed. So there's another tool that I can give you that will tell you how fast your site is. And obviously e-commerce sites are at risk of being very slow because of their images. So it's very important that you make sure you squished your images as much as possible before you put them up on the site. There's lots of great tools out there that you can put images through, and it will make the file size of the image really small without you making any difference to the quality of the image. Does that make sense? That would be great. If you can, if we put those in the show notes, that is a question I get asked so much with people like, I don't have Photoshop. How do I make the pictures smaller? Oh yeah. I mean, there's so many free tools out there. Like I use Canva.com, which is free, which will help you resize your images, you know, put watermarks on them, put your logo on them, put text on them. And then there's heaps of free that it's called smushing, which is free tools that will, you know, change the file size of your images. And another thing is I find a lot of people, you know, they've been given from their photographer an image, which is 2000 by 2000 pixels big, and they upload it into their website. And the website automatically makes it the right size because that's what the website does. But you're still loading that giant image. So, you know, making sure that the image is the size that it needs to be before you upload it is really important. So yeah, I can give you lots of links for things like that. And you know, 95% of them are free. So you've got no excuses for not using them. We love free. Yes. So that was two things. I've still got one more. Sorry. So responsiveness and speed and images are a big part of the speed thing. But the final thing is crawlability. So you want to make sure that Google can get to every corner of your website and find every product in every description. And so I would highly, highly recommend that you sign up to Google Webmaster Tools. It's called Google Search Console now. And I can give you a link to that. Again, the sign up process is super easy. If you already have Google Analytics, it's one click thing. But even if you don't, again, it's something that, you know, your developer would charge you like half an hour to do for you. It's not a big thing. But Google Webmaster Tools tells you everything that's wrong with your website from an SEO point of view. It tells you if you've got broken links. It tells you if you've got mistakes and errors. It tells you if you're accidentally blocking Google from reaching things. And it will even send you an email if there's any dramatic problems. And if Google's thinking about giving you a penalty, and it's free. Wow. A great little tool that anybody can use. That is amazing. And of course, I have not done that to my website. So that's what it's funny. Every time I, and this is the whole point of a podcast, isn't it? So the whole point is that you learn something new. And every single interview that I do, I end up with pages of notes. And I always leave going crap. I really need to do that thing. Yes, exactly. Well, that, you know, that's, I know we're going to mention it later. But that's why I set up this little 10-day SEO challenge, because it covers a lot of the things we've talked about today, but breaks it down into like bite-sized chunks. Which is perfect. Let's go there now. Tell us about the 10-day SEO challenge. Oh, well, it's actually kicking off on Monday. So by the time this podcast goes out, probably we're already started, but it will. There will be another one coming up soon. It's free. And it's just a 10-day challenge to build up your confidence with SEO. So to start dipping your toe in the water and doing some of the things we've talked about today, like learning how to squish images, or how to sign up for Google Search Console, or how to write really good title tags for your product descriptions and things like that. But it's just, you know, about half an hour to 45 minutes a day for 10 days, achieve 10 things. And honestly, even those 10 things will make such a difference, not just to ranking and all those things that we worry about, but to your confidence, so that if you do decide to keep working with an SEO consultant and not go on to do my fabulous course, you will at least have the confidence to say, "Hey, you know what, I did that 10-day challenge with Kate Tune in." She said, "That's not a thing. That thing you're saying is a thing. It's not a thing, you know, and that's what you need to have." So you can talk to so-called experts and not feel like a fool, essentially. And how nice is that going to feel when you can say that? And actually, I'm going to have to sign up to this course myself. How nice is that going to feel to you? Like, how confident and how business onary, that's my word. Are you going to feel when you can say to someone, "Hold up." Kate said that Kate said, "I don't need to have 400 things in my foot up because that's so 2010." Yes, yes, exactly. I think that's it. And I think, you know, as a business owner, we're expected to be so many things where so many hats, you know, you have to be an accountant and a marketer and I don't know all the other things. And, you know, you can't be all these things. You of course, you have to outsource some stuff. But if you know a little bit, you can outsource with confidence. And I think that's so important. And I was actually going to have you on today to talk about blogging and we haven't done that. So I think we are going to have to get you back on to talk a little bit more about that. But one of the notes that I wrote down that I want to ask you about, and it's probably somewhat relevant to what we've talked about and somewhat not. But I think it's something that's really important, which is you mentioned to me that there's a way that you can encourage people like to interact, either to comment or to press the buy button by using a snappy closer. Now, that is not a baby related to Python, mind you. A snappy closer. Do you mean like a call to action? Well, you've got here, encourage comments with a snappy closer. Oh, have I got that? Gosh, I, yeah, yeah. So, you know, I think people just sort of like write a blog post and it finishes. Like, well, we're finished talking about that now, bye. And instead, you need to finish your blog posts by saying, so have you ever tried this product? What did you think of it? Did you have this problem? Or, you know, being a bit controversial, like, you know, so we would never recommend that you do this, this, and this. Do you agree with us? You know, you've got to kind of, you've got to ask people for comments. If you don't ask, you don't get. So, we would love to hear your opinion of this blog. We would love you to share this, this article. You know, you're, you're, they've, most people, by the time if they've got to the bottom of your blog post, they've committed two or three minutes of their life, which doesn't sound much, but you know how busy we all are. So, if someone's got to the end of the blog post, it's very easy. That's the point where they're like, well, look, I read this. I may as well comment on it. I may as well share it, because then I get something out of it too. My friends think, wow, look at us sharing that all to an awesome article, or, you know, they're grateful for the tips. So, at the end of every blog post, yeah, ask, ask for something, ask for them to do something, ask for an opinion, or give them an opinion and ask them to challenge it. Does that, does that make, does that make, does that snap your clothes or anything? It is. And I was, and as you were talking, I was thinking, you could so relate that back to product descriptions and the category pages, because you can say, you know, put a review widget into your website and say we would love to hear. Yeah, I mean, I don't understand why some sites don't have that review, which I know people are nervous that people are going to write negative reviews, but the truth is, if people will write negative reviews anyway, it's just, if you don't have if you don't have the option for them to do it on your site, they'll do it somewhere where you can't see. So, I would rather control my reviews and be able to answer them, you know, and deal with them than have someone go after some snarky little site and write nasty things about me. So, that's what I always recommend, you know, have a review widget, someone gives you a negative review, respond rationally if their points are valid, apologize, offer them a new product, offer them to call your customer service team, if their points are valid, defend yourself in a non-defensive way and move on. But at least you're aware of what's happening, you know, and more people are positive than negative I find in my opinion. But the negative, the negative, sorry, and we are, I'm digressing, but just quickly, negative comments don't have to be negative comments. So, the first thing that I think about when you said that was, I love the website anthropology, and I love the fact that they have the widgets, and in fact, you can upload a picture. So, someone might give something one star, but it actually says you have to type in your body type from the drop-down box, so it might say, you know, tall and athletic, voluptuous, love my curve, something like that. So, you actually choose. So, if the person who rated it one star was tall and athletic, well, I am not tall and athletic, I am of the voluptuous side. So, you can work, you can actually see. It informs your buying choice. Yeah, so, you know, negative doesn't have to be negative. Absolutely, I totally agree, I totally agree. And another thing that you can do, which I think, again, as a way of expanding your social reach and your SEO, you know, lots of clever retailers do do that. Say, take an Instagram photo of you with our product, and you'll go into the draw to win blah, or take a video and upload it to bloody blah, and you will go into the draw to win blah. You know, that's what can be at the end of your blog post or your products. It doesn't just have to be, give us a comment. You know, give them something else to do, continue the conversation, give them the next step. That's, again, that's what I would advise. And so, to make this completely relevant, I've thought I will ask you the question. Does having those reviews on your website increase your love from Google? Like, does it make you or from a search engine or your SEO juice or whatever the right word is? But does having those reviews make you more popular in internet land? No. So I use the term SEO juice. I like that term. And so having those comments on your site is not going to increase your ranking for that particular page. It's more words on the page. So that's good, especially if you haven't got many words and somebody comes along and writes a 300 word review, well, all of that will be indexable and, you know, could include some good keywords. But I don't think it's about that. I think it's about engagement. And that's what really we're aiming for. If someone's taking the time to write a positive review on your site, it's worth heaps, heaps and heaps. You can make it into a graphic and share on your social media. You can use in your sales material. You can email that person and thank them and add them to your email list and put them in a VIP group and make them an advocate for the brand and send them some flowers. I don't, you know, it's not about the SEO comments and that are about building your brand, building brand loyalty and spreading the words. But from an SEO point of view, no. Reviews on other sites will help your SEO. So I often, when I want people to review my business, I always ask them to review it on Google my business page. Because then, you know, the way that results work, sometimes when you type in a business name, what actually comes up first is their Google My Business page before even their own website. And for example, if you type in K2 and copywriter into Google or copywriter Sydney, you'll see my Google My Business page come up. Yeah, and I've got 75 five-star reviews. The person after me has got no reviews at all. So who are you going to pick? Who are you going to get to? You know, you're going to click through to the one with the reviews. So yeah. And that brings us back to a perfect circle, which was right at the beginning where you said, and I wrote this down, do not focus on ranking, focus on engagement. So you're talking about those reviews where you just said it again. Do not focus on engagement, focus on the engagement and giving back to the customer because it sounds like that is naturally going to progress you higher than the rest of the people. Yeah, I mean, look, at the end of the day, everyone wants to rank number one of every keyword in the world, but it's impossible. So while I'm not, I am no, by no means saying that ranking well is not important. I'm just saying don't make that your only goal. Don't become fixated on three or four keywords. And if you're not at number one, you're failing and don't go in every day and check if you're above your biggest competitor or not, because ranking changes all the time. No two people will see the same results. It changes based on where you geographically get located, what sites you've visited, what applications you're logged into, what actions you've taken on the site. So, you know, ranking is important. Obviously, ranking is what drives eyeballs and traffic and conversion, but don't become fixated on it. You know, there are so many other aspects to SEO than just getting to number one spot for one particular keyword. Well, that has been so enlightening. And I have to say, even though it has been quite some time since I hired an SEO company, I already feel with my two pages of notes that I've taken so much more confident. And can you tell us a little bit more about where we could sign up to your recipe for success 10 day challenge? Yeah, just head to www the recipe for SEO success.com.au. It's a bit of a mouthful. So you can just type SEO e-course into Google and hopefully I will be ranking pretty well. But pretty much, if you type any take tune, thankfully, is a rather stupid name. So if you type that into Google anywhere, something that I'm doing will come up and you'll find me eventually. But yeah, it kicks off at the beginning of October, but the challenge, the free challenge runs every two to three months. And there's a little Facebook community you can enjoy and where you can ask questions. Highly interactive. So yeah, get involved. So if there are waitlist by the time this goes to air, we will have been past your first 10 day challenge. So if people go to your site, can they sign up on a waitlist for the next one? They surely care that it will be launching sometime in January, which I know seems a while away, but we're probably all very busy getting ready for Christmas if we're retailers. So, you know, January would be a good time to come up clean out of your big rush at Christmas and your new sales, and maybe think about what you can achieve in 2016 for your SEO. And of course, we will link back to the show notes. Thank you so much today for all that information, Kate. I am actually going to, sorry, I'm going to compile my pages of notes into a download so that if you've been listening to this on the go, you can take away what I thought were the most important parts. Fantastic. And I'll give you the links to all those little tools that I mentioned as well. Thanks so much. That was awesome. Thank you. Now, don't go just yet. You know how sometimes I remember to ask people the question of what makes you go well when you walk into a retail store. And sometimes I forget. Well, in this episode, I forgot, but before Kate left, I did actually remember. So here's Kate's answer of what makes her go well when she walks into a store. So the last question that I like to ask when I remember is what makes you go well when you walk into a store? A real life store. A real life store. Do you ever go into real life stores? You know what? I don't that often. But I think what it would be for me is lots of color and lots of, you know, bright products. I think that's what I'm envisaging in my mind. And also, I think, you know, some real aspirational items that maybe I can't afford right now, but they're surrounded by slightly smaller aspirational items that I can afford right now. Does that make sense? I'm not much of a shop. I must admit, I do all my shopping. I love it and I love color. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode of the Bringing Business to Retail podcast. You can find all of the show notes over at selenenight.com. If you found something that you heard today particularly useful, I'd love it if you could leave me a review on iTunes or Stitcher. And of course, feel free to share this episode with someone that you think could benefit by listening to it. Want more retail bid strategies? You can watch the Bringing Business to Retail TV show where each week I'll answer a question or provide you with a simple, actionable retail bid strategy that you can implement in your business right away. If you have a question or a guess, I'd love to hear from you. Drop my team and email at podcast@selenenight.com, and I'll see you on the next episode. Have a great week. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]