519: From Keywords to Community: Building Better SEO for Pet Care with Mikaela Vargas
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How can pet businesses stand out in an increasingly competitive digital landscape? In this episode, Mikaela Vargas, owner of Pet Marketing Unleashed, dives into the world of SEO and how pet care professionals can use it to grow their businesses. She emphasizes the importance of writing organically and using firsthand experience to create content that resonates with both users and search engines. Mikaela also highlights the value of local SEO, internal linking, and building relationships with local businesses for backlinks and reviews. By focusing on user experience and staying consistent across platforms, pet businesses can elevate their online presence and build a stronger community.
Main topics:
Impact of AI on SEO
Importance of Firsthand Experience
Local SEO for Pet Businesses
Backlinks and Domain Authority
User Experience and SEO Ranking
Main takeaway: Focus on becoming a specialist in specific topics rather than spreading yourself thin
About our guest:
Mikaela is a marketing and systems nerd, animal lover, and the founder of Pet Marketing Unleashed – a small business committed to helping petpreneurs save major time while they build stress-free, sustainable, and successful pet businesses. She equips pet business owners with the branding, websites, marketing templates, and education they need to attract and onboard their dreamiest clients while away from their desks or out with their dogs! Her Facebook group, Unleashed Petpreneurs, is the go-to community for pet industry entrepreneurs looking to upscale their marketing, processes, and websites with ease. When she’s not working with clients or students, you’ll find Mikaela at the beach with her toes in the sand, hanging with her son, taking photos of her pup for his famous #wherewils IG Stories, and reading books with her husband in their TV-less SoCal home.
Links:
Get her NEWcourse: https://www.petmarketingunleashed.com/seo-course --> PSC15 to get 15% off
Search Engine Console
Ubersuggest or Spyfu
Google Analytics
Free email template: https://www.petmarketingunleashed.com/partnership-template
This blog can also be useful: https://www.petmarketingunleashed.com/post/seo-trends
Previously on
Episode 143: https://www.petsitterconfessional.com/episodes/143
Episode 435: https://www.petsitterconfessional.com/episodes/435
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
seo, website, linking, blog post, pet, google, writing, people, keywords, business, content, helpful, big, blog, recommend, page, ranking, pages, firsthand experience
SPEAKERS
Collin, Mikaela Vargas
Collin 00:00
Music. Welcome to pet sitter confessional today. We're brought to you by tied to pet and pet perennials, SEO, what? What is it? It's kind of a black box, but we know it's important as a business and but sometimes it's hard to know how to get started or exactly what we need to do. Additionally, it's constantly evolving and changing as the internet adapts and grows, and content changes and the needs of our clients change as well. So to help us tease through some of this, we're really excited to have Michaela varkus, owner of pet marketing, unleash on the show to talk all about SEO, what we can control as a business, and steps that we can take to increase that on our websites and for our business. So Michaela, it's super exciting to have you back on the show. You're with us, back on episode 435, and a few others back beyond that. So for those who haven't listened to all of your episodes and they're missing out on an awful lot, can you please tell us a little bit more about who you are and all that you do?
Mikaela Vargas 00:54
Yeah, I'm glad to be back on the show. I always enjoy talking with you. So yes, my name is Michaela Vargas. I am the owner of pet marketing and leashed, as you said, we specialize in branding and website design for pet businesses. And a big, a big portion of that is SEO, obviously, because, you know, that makes a big difference on your website and what people are actually in terms of content and copywriting or design and user functionality, all that fun stuff. So I'm excited to kind of dig more into the specifics of SEO
Collin 01:23
well. So for SEO, I mentioned, kind of in the lead up to this that it's constantly changing from your perspective on what you're seeing. How is SEO right now? What is its current position, and kind of, how has it been changing this year?
Mikaela Vargas 01:38
Obviously, I can't answer that question without mentioning AI, like AI is like, the biggest thing right now. And, you know, people are trying to navigate, should we use it? Should we not use it? How's you know, what's the best way to use it? That sort of thing, and that can significantly impact SEO. So I see the biggest thing would be when you are writing content on your website, whether it's a blog or even just like your general copywriting on your website is to include firsthand experience. So that's something that Google is is putting in. And for those, I forget exactly what we touched on in the last episode, because I know we mentioned SEO a little bit, but Google favors that firsthand experience, and they used to have what they recommended in an acronym called Eat, which is E, A T, and it stands for expertise, authority and trustworthiness. With the content on your website, they've recently added experience, so now it's E, E, A, T and I. You know, they, they created that because of AI, because, you know, if people are just creating content with AI, it's not necessarily giving you anything fresh, anything new, anything personal, and especially when you talk about the pet industry, you're going to want that firsthand experience in there. So that's a really big thing that I feel like is important when it comes to SEO, and that landscape is reeling in your first hand experience and putting that forward on your website. Yeah,
Collin 02:56
I mean that you see a lot of this. I know there's a lot of discussion about how AI will be logged or tagged. I know, like Instagram right now, is doing a lot of made with AI or things like that. And I think that was the initial concern of, is this going to be, you know, down regulated? Is this going to be not, you know, brought forth as much and and from what you're saying here, it's going well, as long as you have these firsthand experiences, you're incorporating that maybe you're still proof checking, and you're doing all this stuff with it. It's really that newness, that freshness, because AI can't make that, they can't make up those things that you yourself are experiencing, because it's just a big conglomeration of everything. And I guess that also kind of the user is going to sense that as well, right where they're going to be able to tell what is fresh and what's coming from you yourself,
Mikaela Vargas 03:46
right? Yeah, the user can tell, and Google can tell, and they've actually started de indexing sites that are solely created from Ai copy. So that is so because Google doesn't want to say, Hey, you can't use AI like they are all for it. They have their own versions of AI technologies. They just don't want sites to solely be run from Ai because that's run by a computer, right? And they are also a business, so they don't want their search results to just be a bunch of AI websites. So when you're using AI, it's just important to, you know, I like to use it for things like maybe ideas, outlines, you know, maybe getting ideas for strategy, that sort of thing. But like when you are taking that and writing your copy or even doing your, you know, Page SEO settings, your blog posts, things like that, you're going to want to bring in that firsthand experience. They Google wants your content to be helpful and useful for your users. And if you just bring in information that's already on your website or on Google and other websites. You're not necessarily bringing anything fresh to the table. It sounds like
Collin 04:47
a bad way to use this would be to go to chatgpt and write, what are 10 topics cat owners need to know about, right? And it lists out 10 topics, and you go write a blog post about number seven, and then you copy and paste that onto your website. I get I'm getting that. Probably not the best thing to do, exactly.
Mikaela Vargas 05:01
Yeah. I mean, that could be something where maybe you have that idea and then, how can you run with it? How can you make it your own? How can you use your first hand experience to build that into your blog post and weave that in, even just simply, like, adding, like, after 15 years of experience, pet sitting cats in San Diego. Here's what I've learned about you know, that sort of language can really be helpful.
Collin 05:22
Yeah, I find myself where I will write out my own story in chatgpt and say something like, you know, what are two things I could expand on in this or, like, how would I make this applicable to this scenario or things like that? So it's kind of like starting, I like that idea of just brainstorming with it and then going from there,
Mikaela Vargas 05:38
Exactly, yep, that's perfect.
Collin 05:42
As far as SEO, I know that there are a lot of there's a lot involved with it. And so I was curious from from your point of view, Michaela, what are some of the biggest misconceptions of SEO, especially from for business owners?
Mikaela Vargas 05:56
I think a big thing that business owners think of when they think of SEO is keywords. Like, we need to be using keywords, and we need to be putting our zip codes, and, you know, like, it's keywords in the zip codes. And I think there's really an over emphasis on it. And I think if you're writing organic copy, that's going to come naturally. And there's a lot that plays into your SEO outside of just even your website, right? There's a lot of things you can do outside of your website that can really help, which makes it really fun. So I think a big thing is not focusing so much on the keywords. You know, I recommend making sure that you run your SEO settings on your on page settings, so your website platform should allow you to customize. You know, everything that you need to do on your on your like, your page, title, tag, your meta description, things like that, that you can customize on your own. If you're writing organic and strategic copy, those keywords are going to come in naturally. And of course, there's a place for keyword research. Like, I'm not saying not to do it, but I think a lot of times we just like, Okay, I need to plug in San Diego dog walker. Like, 20 times on my website, it needs to be everywhere. But that could also hurt your SEO, because if you're putting that on all of your pages everywhere, like that's going to like cause competition between your pages, because each page is an opportunity to rank on Google. So if they're all ranked, trying to rank for the same exact keyword, you're going to run into some issues. So by writing organically, right? If you have a page for a dog walking and you have a page for pet sitting, now you have two different opportunities to rank two different searches that can show up on search results, that sort of thing, if that makes sense.
Collin 07:25
Yeah. Again, it's not just about the homepage. And I we get caught up in this ourselves, of going, Oh, it's all about that homepage. I wanted to land on the homepage. And actually, a lot of instances you don't right, you actually want them to land on the dog walking page because they're searching for dog walking. This is the direct answer, the direct information that they're needing. And so trying to make that homepage the be all, end all of everything really complicates. It really makes it muddy and messy and and the fact that you mentioned that now you've got competing pages because you've just, you know, you pray and spray the words everywhere and just like, well, I guess I've done it, because every website that every web page that I have has 100 links, it has 100 instances of this word, I'm good to go, but that could actually end up hurting you in the end, exactly.
Mikaela Vargas 08:14
Yeah, I like to think of home pages more so as like a directory for people who, if you have a business card and now they know your website, they can kind of land on it that way. Of course, you know, maybe that's where you can kind of bring in that pet care aspect of it, because that's more general. And maybe if somebody is searching for that, that's a place they can land and then from there, all right, what are the services that I have? But yeah, like having a page for different services that can, yeah, lead them exactly to the dog walking page or the pet sitting page is really helpful.
Collin 08:41
Yeah, you know, you mentioned, like, the directory for people kind of already know you, or they're, like, searching, like, one of our consistently highest ranked searches for people, how find our website is they just search our name, right? Which means, like, Okay, well, they're familiar with us from somewhere else, but they don't remember our website, so they're searching for us. That's great for them to land on that web page, because then they can go, Ah, yes, here's the brand, here's the thing, here are the people that I talk to. Now I can go from there and just using it as like. That's where like so kind of sounds like, using that as the big brand landing page, being like, if you kind of already familiar with somebody, versus the no contact has no idea who you are. Searching for services that they need to get connected with more of those, those kind of services pages, yeah, and I
Mikaela Vargas 09:24
love that you guys are doing that research too, with the analytics and figuring out where people are finding you, because that can also affect the best practices, right? Like, I can tout like, here's what you need to do, like, right now, but it is different for every business, and different clientele are different, like, what they're searching for, and it's I mean, for lack of a better phrase, it's just good to use common sense in that reality, right? Like, if you're looking at, okay, how are people finding me? Are they searching for X, Y and Z? Like, what are they searching for? And then from there, how can I use that on my website to create content? It really
Collin 09:55
kind of puts all those things together, because now we're going, Okay, well, what are my offline. Marketing tactics. You know, what are those like, and how are those going to be driving people to my website and really making sure that we have a strong link there for what we're putting out there, right? Of going, well, obviously, you know, so for us, whenever I see that people are searching our brand's name and coming across our website, it's like, okay, we're our offline marketing is doing really good people are coming really, really familiar with our name. They might not know what we do, okay? So that's that's something else, right? But that's okay, because that's what our website's there to educate them on and showcase everything from there. So we can lean more into those, those different avenues, and know that, okay, those, those are actually working. Those are actually getting to where we
Mikaela Vargas 10:40
need to go, right exactly, and how can you do more of that? Or, hey, we want to test out another strategy to get, you know, something in particular, right? Like, say, you're getting a lot of pet sitting clients, but not dog walking, and you want to lean into that. Then, okay, how can I now alter my copy on my website, or create new blog content around that, and then start to track, is this, you know, making a difference over time,
Collin 11:01
right? If you, I guess you know, if you start seeing your name plus dog walking, right, if you see people are late, are coming to you from that, it's going, Okay, well, there's a lot of association with my company and that service. Is that good or bad, right? I want you know, for us, we don't offer grooming. We don't offer boarding. So when I start seeing those pop up in our shirt, on our hits, it's like, okay, like we you know, what does this mean? Where are they getting this from? What you know? Where is this getting out there? And how can we better control that?
Mikaela Vargas 11:27
I'm actually really glad you brought that up, because it's surprisingly common for if you start to do keyword research that you might be ranking for something completely unrelated to what you do. So you might show up as like, like, something completely like, I say, you have a blog post about, like, this party that you threw for your dog, or something like that. Like you might show up as, like, your business name, pet party, or something like, so it's really helpful to, like, go on to a tool, maybe, like, Uber suggests or something, and then start to see what keywords are you showing up for, because it could be something completely unrelated, and you don't want that, right? You might be ranking might be ranking but, like, not for the keywords that you want to be ranking for, which is, you know, does not help you.
Collin 12:08
No, it's funny that you mentioned that we, we went through a thing where we researched a bunch of local things, because we want to drive local traffic to our website through blogging. And I, I struggle with whether we should take this down or not. We wrote a blog about a local Cat Rescue for us and Michaela, the number of phone calls I get for people who say, I have a stray cat, can you help? And I go, Oh, no, you found us through the blog. And they're like, Yeah, I'm calling you. I'm like, no, no, the phone number, ha. So what we've actually had to do is we went back to that blog and completely restructured it, because I still want that information out there and helpful, of like, making it very apparent now, of like this, you know, here's their contact information. This is not us. This is redirecting everything out to them, because it's still like, the number of people who think we're a cat a cat rescue is is phenomenal. So I'm like, well, that blog does amazing, let me,
Mikaela Vargas 13:04
yeah, I wonder if that's something too, where you can put, like, an opt in in your blog post that's like, hey, adopted a new cat, like, from this rescue. Here's a special offer and have it, you know, like, actually, like, a big graphic, I think, really helpful, because, yeah, I mean that that still could be relevant traffic, even though you're getting those annoying phone calls. Those annoying phone calls, because now, if they do go to that rescue and get a cat, they'll think of you,
Collin 13:27
yes, yeah, and leaning into that and going, okay, what can I do? What? What do I need to but that links back to what you that phrase that you you mentioned a couple times of saying, just write organically, right? These things will naturally come up if you yourself are writing and talking about things that are pertinent to you and your business, and where you're doing that, and not stressing out about those key texts, because I did not go into this blog and intentionally put in all in just stuff. It with the name of our town and, you know, zip codes and all this stuff. It just was written in a way of going. Here's something that's really cool. Here's who we've talked to. We really enjoyed, really enjoyed this thing. And words naturally come up, and so really going it needs to be natural from that perspective. Yeah,
Mikaela Vargas 14:09
agreed. And something too that could be really helpful for a lot of people. When it comes to like that this keyword topic is people typically like to find all sorts of different keywords that they can rank for. But when it comes to Google, they really are looking for somebody who's an expert on, like, very specific topics. So what I would recommend, instead of finding all sorts of different, like singular keywords, you know, for example, I do, I have a lot that I offer in my business, but like, if I do blog posts on like 50 different topics, I'm kind of like, almost like, making it a sea of all sorts of different topics. Whereas if I'm like, hey, no, I love branding, I love website design and I love SEO, those are going to be my main like content, you know, centered topics that I'm going to blog about. That's something that's really helpful too. So if finding a few things that you want to specialize in, especially for local businesses like local pet. Care businesses, I recommend having kind of like a content bucket on your local area. So whether it's like pet friendly restaurants or dog friendly hikes or but in your area, that could be kind of one center bucket, and then finding things that you specialize in. Is it reducing stress in dogs? Is it the importance of exercise, like, whatever it is, and refining it down so that you have, like, they call it topical mapping, so like you have, like, your map of like, here are the important things that I want to focus on, versus just like, singular keywords that you're just like, spreading yourself, then you want to be a specialist and that Google recognizes. Like, hey, this person, like, does a lot of content about San Diego and stress reduction in dogs like this is if someone is searching for something related to that in that area, like we want to have their website higher. And
Collin 15:47
that can be hard, too, because many of us, when we get started writing blogs, we go through a lot of the what are the, you know, 20 questions people have, or what's something that you really are passionate about? And we can find ourselves writing, you know, from from week to week or month to month on a whole range of topics, because it may be where we have interest, or maybe we just think we just have to be writing like, Okay, I just have to write. But really, what I hear you saying is going no your your your content that you're producing needs to point back to you and your company so that you are associated with the right things, and that as you're putting stuff out there, you can start generating those couple pools of things that you're well known for, as opposed to but Well, it's kind of like, okay, I'd rather have 100 if I wrote 100 articles, they need to kind of generally be across three or four topics. I don't know if that's what it's versus 100 articles on 100 topics, that's kind of not getting you where you need to go, right? Yeah.
Mikaela Vargas 16:44
And I think a lot of people get in that mindset of, like, I need to post all sorts of different stuff, but especially when you look in this obviously goes a little bit out of SEO, but still is relevant. It's more just a marketing strategy in general. When you think about your business and how many pet care providers there are in your local area, if you're it's a really competitive area, you need to figure out what makes you you and what makes your business unique, and how can you make your business a little bit more niche? So, you know, a lot of people are specializing in certain things, like working with small dogs or senior dogs or dogs with disabilities like and then now, how can you create that in your content so that it's an easy yes. Now, when someone searches for pet care and your senior dog company shows up as a result, and they have a senior dog, it's like, yeah, well, 100% I'm gonna work with this company, you know.
Collin 17:32
And that may mean that we have to change the pace of our content creation, because if now, if we're only writing about a handful of topics, it means that I might not be able to bust out a blog a day, right? It's because, I guess I just can't do that. I may need to space those out a little bit more, and having to be okay with that and remembering this is for the long haul. This isn't for an immediate hit or turn around tomorrow. I'm trying to build this resume, build this portfolio of expertise and of knowledge that proves that I know what I'm talking about.
Mikaela Vargas 18:04
And if you are looking to save time, and you have a lot of blogs on your blog posts and say that you've done this like I have 100 blog blog posts on all sorts of different topics, what I would actually recommend is going back to those blog blog posts and sprucing them and tailoring them more with your specializations, I think, is really helpful, and Google likes you doing that as well, because you would have written that blog post in 2019 and, you know, so many things have changed the blog like maybe the links in the blog post have expired, and, you know, that sort of thing. It's nice to go back. And I've actually been doing that a lot too. I think it's really helpful, and it's actually a time saver. So you don't have to be creating constantly new blog posts. You can go back, update your blog post, make it more relevant to what you want to specialize in. Or, you know, if you are trying to kind of group your specialties in there, that could be really helpful as well. Have
Collin 18:52
you heard of time to pet Chris and from raining cats and dogs? Has this to say?
18:56
Becoming a time to pet client has been a game changer for us. We can give our pet services clients real time, cloud based information they never imagined they'd be interested in. And most importantly, to me personally, I can better manage my company and look forward to more and not a small thing. Time to pet is responsive to my request for new features and modifications to existing ones. If you're
Collin 19:21
looking for new pet saying software, give time to pet a try. Listeners of our show will say 50% off your first three months by visiting time to pet.com/confession I know, as we've acquired, you know, certifications or more experiences or attended conferences and things like that, going back and adding some of that knowledge back into those, those blog articles, or looking at ones where we wrote and we're going, Oh man, this is just way too generic and it's really boring. Instead of writing a brand new one. Let me take this and let me work with that. Do you ever recommend just deleting blog posts or things like that?
Mikaela Vargas 19:57
It really depends if you are going. To delete a blog post, you want to set up a 301 redirect, because you don't want somebody to somehow land on that page if they come across an old social media post or however that has been linked in in Google, you don't want to lose that traffic. So first, I'd make sure that either no one's clicking on it, if you're going to delete it, or if people are and you still want to delete it, you want to set up that 301 redirect in your website platform to make sure that some people aren't going to land on an error page. But in general, like something that I actually learned somewhat recently is if you're going to create a blog post that's going to be posted every year. So for example, we do one that's like pet holidays, like a calendar for like that calendar year, we would create a new one every year. And best practice instead is to kind of update that blog post and just change the title to say, hey, updated for 2024 for example, and keep that same blog post. So I would recommend trying to figure out a way to do that and make your blog post more relevant. If you do have that, like convoluted, like, no one's clicking on this, I need to kind of start fresh. I think there's a time and place for deleting blog posts, and I don't think people need as many blog posts as we think, and that's where kind of refreshing old ones can come into play, because you want to make sure that your website is more relevant. I think that's more important than having a fresh blog post. We want to still be updating our website, but we want to make sure that all of information on there is accurate and up to date.
Collin 21:16
And that's where coming in and looking some of those, at those analytics, looking at the keyword searches and going, Okay, what do I already have at my disposal for? How can I make this? What can I do with this and really digging into that? Because if you already have it sounds like, if you've got a blog post that's generating some traffic, people are already clicking on it, finding some ways, then rethinking and going, Well, how do I change that? Or what do I do to make that to get the end result that I actually want, which is more bookings, or whatever your goal is for that. Yeah. And
Mikaela Vargas 21:46
the beauty of blogging too is that you can have exponential growth over time. So my highest generator of traffic to my website is actually a blog post I wrote, I think, originally, in like 2018 which is kind of nice, compared to, like social media, where it's frustrating because it's like, okay, I posted this, like, last week, and now it's just like, gone into the other right? I mean, of course people can go and look, but like, that's not typically how people are finding you. Whereas with blog traffic, you have that exponential growth ability, especially if you're updating the content, so it's fresh and it's relevant, and like, it's exponential. So the more people look at it, the more it's going to show up in search results. And like,
Collin 22:19
it just kind of grows from there. You mentioned the phrase local SEO a little bit. Does that just have to do with these, these blog posts, and the local keywords I know you mentioned, you know, not focusing just on name of town and zip code. What other things go into having a good local SEO? Yeah.
Mikaela Vargas 22:38
So this is where we kind of can talk a little bit more about what can happen off your website. So even things like Google Business Listing, which formerly Google My Business Yelp, getting reviews online, being in directories, so getting backlinks, if you're a part of like your chamber of commerce, things like that can really help with SEO, especially if these are local businesses that you are getting links from but getting reviews on Google Business Listing and responding to the good reviews with your business name in there, things like that can really help establish your domain authority. So there's a lot that you can do outside of your website to help with that local SEO factor. But yeah, a large portion of it, that I do recommend is is making our blog posts more local specific. So not just doing here's, you know, 10 pet care tips. It's like, no, like, what can what's going on in San Diego, what's going on? What are like, the places I like to take my dog, like, things like that that can be more relevant. Here's where I get my equipment for my, you know, things like that that's more local and engaging and linking with other people who can now then share it on their profiles, like expanding your community base and content around that can really help you.
Collin 23:46
Mentioned the directories. I know every directory and every listing service is just a little bit different, but if we are part of our chamber of commerce, part of these is there anything that we need to do on our end to make the most out of that directory listing.
Mikaela Vargas 24:02
It really depends on their offerings and what they allow, because, you know, sometimes, obviously it's just going to be a backlink and that's it. But the more that we can kind of create partnerships with directories, like, Hey, I am, you know, a member of this, can I do a guest blog post on your website? Or, you know, anything, any way that you can kind of create collaborations, or find other people that are mentioned on the Chamber of Commerce as well, and kind of like make it almost like a connected web Right? Like now we write, we do, like a guest interview blog post situation, and we mentioned the Chamber of Commerce, we link to it in there, but we're also now linking to the other business that we did the interview with. Like, creating that sort of like web with your local community is really helpful. That
Collin 24:43
takes getting to know people right, takes having those conversations and sometimes getting outside of our comfort zones, though. So that is something that we have to think about of going, and I've done this too. We're part of a couple different chambers and scrolling through their list and just going, Yeah, who would make a good partner here? And sometimes. It's not always just the obvious, like, Oh, here's another pet person, or here's the grooming thing, here's the thing. It may be. We've had a lot of, a lot of good connections with businesses whose owners are just pet fanatics, right? They just, they, they have like, we'll see them on social media where they'll post about, like, it's bring your pet to Work Day, and it's like, you are my people, and I need to talk to you.
Mikaela Vargas 25:21
Yeah, there's other fields, right, like carpet cleaning services, who might like daycare or realtors or, you know, people knew the neighborhood, like, there's so many different types of businesses that we can connect with and shameless plug here. But I think this could be really helpful for people listening. Is we do have a free email template for helping to establish partnerships, so I can send you the link to that, so people are wanting an email template that, you know, can help them reach out to people and establish that partnership. Maybe offer for, you know, doing a guest blog post exchange, and that can save time too, right? Like doing an interview blog post is so much easier than, like, writing a long form blog post, right? You just, hey, here's my list of questions for you. I'm going to create this into a blog post. Like, there's so many benefits to that, yeah, a
Collin 26:03
great idea, maybe reaching out to a local vet to talk about health concerns that they have in the local community, right? I don't know. Like, if you have, if you have got tick season, like, in where we live is in the Midwest, there's a, there's definitely a tick season. So interviewing about that, again, this written organically, the town's name is going to come up your region where you live, is going to come up as they're answering or as you are asking that question. And you're right. It does save time, because you can send out four or five, six of those, they respond within a week or a month or whatever, and then you format those and put them on a blog, and then link to their website and their listing, and then they can do the same and share with you your educating clients, allowing getting them access, exposure for the other people who you're working with, and building out that mapping, which really helps lift your SEO and brings people together.
26:52
Yeah. Well said,
Collin 26:56
Well, that's it. Okay. You mentioned you mentioned content for for SEO. And I do want to just circle back to that a little again, because that can be confusing. And so is it blog posts? Can we do videos? What's the association with social media when it comes to this? And kind of, what should we be focusing on?
Mikaela Vargas 27:22
Yeah, so when it comes to the actual content in your website, for SEO specifically, I definitely recommend just having, like, organic text on your website, because a lot of people like to add a lot of graphics, or sometimes I've had people actually like embed, like a Canva blog post. I don't, I don't know, so that that actually has the text on there, but it's almost as an image. So like, if you can't like, it needs to be actually on your website. It's really hard for Google to understand what the content is if it's, if it's like, in a graphic form, or even on video. Now, when it comes to video, if you're embedding, like, a YouTube link, that can help with SEO, in the sense that like YouTube is also technically a search engine, so that can help. But as far as like the content, your website should not be replacing the like native content your website. So if you have a blog post, but the most of it is just like a YouTube embed video, I don't recommend that. I recommend having the full blog post. And then also, if people prefer to listen, they have the option to kind of go to YouTube as well. And then as far as like social media, that's honestly kind of like a new thing that they actually might forget the name of what they call it, but they're actually potentially going to be starting to show social media posts and things in search results as like graphics, so you can like see it, and it hasn't been released to everybody yet, but that's something that now, when writing social media captions to be writing that in more of like an SEO friendly style, using keywords like Instagram is becoming more like a search engine kind of as well, too. So it's it's interesting. Now these kind of best practices are, find everything.
Collin 28:56
Yeah, it's all. It all becomes more and more connected, right? And in one sense, that makes it easier, because if we have these best practices and still does instilled in us on one platform, it's easier to translate that to the others, knowing that it will trickle down and through to the other ones, versus kind of what it is right now. Of like, well, I have got my best practices for my website, and I have my best practices for my Instagram and then for my Facebook, and then who knows what's going on in LinkedIn, I don't know. So like making sure that we all have an understanding of that, and just trying to be consistent, too, across what we do. Yep,
Mikaela Vargas 29:28
that's exactly what I was going to say, is that consistency is really helpful, especially when it comes to SEO and how smart Google is becoming. You know, trying to navigate the AI and what's more genuine. So the more you're consistent across platforms, you're mapping back, like, we kind of talked about that web, like, if there's like, this interconnected web between all of your different platforms, different businesses in your local community that are all kind of vouching for you, you have a lot of reviews on Google Business Listing and Yelp and things like that, that's going to increase what's called your domain authority. The higher your domain authority, the better for us. The other higher you're going to rank in the search engines.
Collin 30:02
We've been talking a lot about, about content and things that we're producing for that local SEO for Google to, you know, to suck up and give back out good answers. I know it's a big part. Again, their goal is to get people connected to good, high quality information that answers their question. That's what they've always done. I was curious, because this, I think, I hope this links back down a little bit to the actual website design itself, because I visit a lot of websites, and some of them are completely inscrutable to me, and I don't understand how to use them or what to do, and I bounce and I move somewhere else. So when it comes to to SEO, is there any connection at all to websites usability from from the user's perspective?
Mikaela Vargas 30:39
Yeah. So when Google analyzes a website, they basically see a whole bunch of just data and numbers. They don't see how pretty the website is. Mind you, if the website is laid out very nicely and organically, it's pretty, people want to stay on it longer. Those are the metrics that they look at. So how long are people staying on the website? What's the page load speed time? So if it takes 10 seconds to load your website and people are off of it like that's not going to help you in terms of SEO. And that's you know directly goes into the usability of your website. Same thing with user experience. If people are clicking and going between different pages, like navigating it, staying on it, coming back to it, that's all you know, directly correlated to usability. And that's going to help with your SEO directly. Because if people are on your website longer, that means that you must be somewhat valuable, and now Google wants to show you higher in the search results. Again,
Collin 31:28
from from Google's perspective, they interpret that data point of increased usage or longevity on pages as as there must be something useful here. There's there for a reason. Hopefully it's not because you've trapped him in an endless loop where it crashes the website and they can't and they can't go back and get off of your website. That would be bad. I don't know if you maybe try that. Write that down on your next thing. No, I'm kidding,
31:50
entrapment.
Collin 31:53
It's wonderful. They're looking for that, that at that user interaction with that too. And I think that's so hard as a business to to capture, right? Because too too often, I think we lean into the the data, the word, dump, the keywords going, as long as I've got this, it's okay, but it sounds like if somebody if it's not, if they don't prefer it, if it's hard to find what they don't what, if it's hard to find what they're actually looking for, and that usage goes down, that's actually going to hurt your SEO ranking,
Mikaela Vargas 32:24
right, exactly. And even things like, so I know a lot of people like to have pages just for, like, different zip codes, but if you land on all of those different pages, it's just all the same page with different zip codes. People aren't staying on those pages. That's not going to actually help you. Like, if you're going to create zip code pages, they need to be very unique. They need to be useful for each location and different. And a lot of times people get stuck in that, and that's something that's that can actually hurt your SEO, even though that's been touted as such a popular thing, because, again, Google's smart, and they know that this is not a valuable page if all you're showing are zip codes or you don't even if that's the only thing that's customized on that page. So that's something I keep out for too, is making sure that each page off your website is valuable, has important, an important role, and you're leading them through that journey. And that goes back to that usability. Another
Collin 33:10
word associated with this is accessibility, and I think that this for me, I've become more and more aware of what it means to have an accessible website, and is it accessible from your perspective? And you know, you've got two different hats on here. You've got the design, you've got the SEO side here. What does it mean for a website to be accessible?
Mikaela Vargas 33:30
Yeah. So really, making your website as accessible as possible ensures that people with disabilities can understand, navigate and use your website. The tricky thing with accessibility is that local areas have all sorts of like. It just varies by region in terms of the laws and what you need to be doing, what you should be doing, what the best practices are. It varies a whole bunch, but there are some standards that I do recommend having, and WCAG is a great resource to help also in terms of like, if you want to learn more about accessibility and things like that. So WCAG, I can send you the link for that after this too. But in general, the biggest thing, and this is also really good for SEO, is setting up your site hierarchy. I'd say that's one of the biggest things that you can do. So essentially, when we go back to how Google analyzes your website and that all sorts of data and numbers is kind of what they see. So with that, your text is ranked in terms of a hierarchy. So for example, your main header on your page is going to be an h1 a header one, the first sub header after that's going to be an h2 and it kind of, you know, falls under that all the way down to paragraph, P for paragraph. So you want to make sure that, you know, for example, every single page on your website has an h1 and it only has 1h h1 because sometimes we have a lot of people who are copying and pasting text, and now we have a whole bunch of H ones. Now Google doesn't know what the h1 is. What is the page about? How am I supposed to rank this page if I don't know what the main topic is, that sort of thing. So following that sort of site site hierarchy. Is super important to help navigate the site for SEO purposes, but also for accessibility purposes. So if somebody's coming on your website using an e reader, because they can't see you, want them to be able to still navigate your website and know what the flow is of your website. So that's kind of how the interweb again, the interlinking between accessibility and SEO comes into play. I
Collin 35:20
know if you're like me, if you're listening, you tend to like the to choose the hierarchies of like, Oh, this one's big and bold. I want to put that here. And this one's not. So I'm not, I don't want to use that much and, and, man, the P for paragraph, it's kind of small, so I want to make that bigger. So let me do the h4 it that that doesn't sound like that's such a good idea. Yeah.
Mikaela Vargas 35:39
And, and, honestly, 100% of the time you do not need to have your biggest text be categorized as the h1 so for example, if you have a slogan that you want the biggest on your homepage, but it doesn't have your main keyword in there, you can make the bigger slogan your h2 like categorized it, and then have your like, local dog walker in San Diego as the h2 and it's a little bit smaller underneath, so you can do that, you can manipulate, or you should be able to, depending on your website platform.
Collin 36:08
Yes, yes, it's changed that. But it's those tags, because that Google's going to look at those texts and go, How is this supposed to be organized? Because, again, when they see that text, they're thinking data. And there's a structure and organization to this, and it's supposed to have a purpose. It's supposed to do something. And so the first thing that they look at, I don't know first thing, but one of the things they look at is those tags to go. How is this supposed to be organized? I think back to a lot of just whenever I used to write outlines for my school papers, like you'd have the big heading, and you'd have the sub points and the sub sub point. And thinking of it kind of like a flow of that through your website. That way, you can look at a page, look at the headings, and go, Oh, here's the important stuff, or this is what this page is supposed to be about. And then let's go look for it. Let's go look deeper.
Mikaela Vargas 36:49
Yeah, and that actually links again, back to the usability factor that we talked about, too. It doesn't, you know, it's good for accessibility, it's good for SEO, and it's good for user experience, because they now can easily navigate your website
Collin 37:01
speaking of links, actually, I know you mentioned the word backlinks earlier and in the context of building those partnerships and stuff, so talk to us about how backlinks can impact SEO.
Mikaela Vargas 37:13
Yeah, so backlinks are essentially when another website is linking back to your website, and they're really great for SEO, because what it does is helps increase your domain authority, which we kind of mentioned earlier. It's essentially like, your street cred, right? Like, it's like, it lets Google know, hey, like, can we trust this website? A lot of people are linking to it from the local community. It seems like they're a trusted business owner, a trusted website. Because the thing is, with backlinks, it's become very popular for more spammy type accounts. I don't know if you get these emails, but I get them all the time, of people like trying to backlink, like, hey, like, you know, can you link back to this website on that, you know? And it's like, first of all, who are you? Are you related to my industry, you know? Like, I so a lot of people are doing that to help with SEO, and Google's also picking up on that. So you want to make sure with your backlinks that you're getting people in your industry or people related that like where it makes sense people in your local community to link back to you, and it basically helps to establish you as a trusted resource amongst your community. Hire friends at
Collin 38:11
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Mikaela Vargas 39:39
your website? I would just say to be cautious if it's a super spammy situation and their site then gets the indexed, you don't want to be associated with them either. So that's, I mean, it's not going to like, make or break your business, but like, you also want to think again, back to like the organicness of your website and the value of your website if it does. It makes sense to put on your website, then don't put it on your website, even if you think that it's going and one backlink from like, a spammy thing isn't going to like, oh, now I'm ranking number one on Google. Like, that's not how it works. It's going to again, go back to that web of like, all right, there's five different businesses in, you know, a 10 mile radius of this business's website service area that are all recommending back to her, that, along with the reviews and all the other things like come to kind of come together so it just, it needs to make sense and
Collin 40:28
that, yeah, again, going, I can't get too far afield, right? I can build partnerships with another. But it's also, like you said, thinking of going, well on, what was their website on that I'm being backlinked from? Like, what? What What was that content? If it's just a random, like, I don't know, like, just like, you know, here are popsicles and, Oh, also, you know, here's this dog walker. Anyway, back to popsicles. It's like, that's not, that's not what you want at the end of the day,
Mikaela Vargas 40:51
right? And a lot of those, those emails that you can tell are mass sent out, are those sort of situations. Every once in a while, I will get somebody who is a marketing expert, who has expertise in a certain subject, and I've done like, one or two of them where, like, Okay, this is relevant information, but like, it's just something that I I kind of don't really do anymore, and it would be something that I would want to do with people who are in my industry, who are smaller, because that's really what Google is Looking for. So those
Collin 41:21
are the so again, backlinks are for when somebody else links to your website. What is the relevance, if any of internal linking from maybe a blog post about the importance of dog walking to to my service page on dog walking?
Mikaela Vargas 41:36
Yes, highly recommend. Okay, I definitely recommend, yeah, internal links. So linking from one page of your website to another page of your website also linking to another website too. So linking from your website to the local groomer that you recommend is also really helpful, because it's telling Google, Hey, I am. My priority isn't necessarily on just keeping people on my website. It's to help find valuable information, whether that means staying on my website or going elsewhere. Just make sure if you are linking to external websites, that you're having that page open in a new tab. That way they're still technically on your website, and you're not like losing that traffic, and they know how to get back. Yeah,
Collin 42:15
and just from a user perspective, nothing burns me more than whenever I lose that spot on that website. Now I'm sitting at this going, Well, you're right. How do I get back so it might even have been valuable. It just makes me angry, and I want to go do
Mikaela Vargas 42:27
something done onto the next service provider.
Collin 42:32
I might not be that spiteful, but it comes pretty close, because you're thinking that good what is the best practice here? Always open in new tab or new window, whatever option you have open in new one, because, like you said, one they want to know. You want to leave a way for them to get back to you. You don't want to just have them immediately jump from your website. It's one of the worst things you can do is go, Hey, welcome to my website anyway. Bye, right? You know it's, it's Hey. Here's an option for you to go look at. I'll be over here waiting for you, and it allows them to then make that decision, because they may open up like me, I'll open up six or seven tabs to save for later, while I continue scanning that website for more information for me. And it's just I need those later, or I don't. They're not necessary right now.
Mikaela Vargas 43:16
Yeah, and again, linking back to how all of this is related, the longer somebody is on your website, even if they open something else in a new tab, the better data you have for usability, which is the better for SEO, right?
Collin 43:28
And those, those links are those. Do those need to be positioned in, you know, Buttons? Does it matter if the link is in a button that says, you know, click this? If it's a button that says, you know, learn about the groomer, or do I need to be linking on the text? And making the text hyperlinked is one better than the other?
Mikaela Vargas 43:46
That's honestly a good question. I mean, when, again, it's kind of one of those things that I would recommend best practice for usability. So if you're writing a blog post, there's no reason to, like, break that up and then add a button in the middle of it. If you're recommending certain businesses, I think, in a blog post, just use, like, hyperlink the text. If you're having, like, a resources page of, like, recommended businesses, that's where you could potentially have buttons linking to them. Yeah, I
Collin 44:08
was just curious, because I always went, you know, it comes to my mind of because you mentioned earlier about how, you know, Google can find text on, like, an image, or things like that kind of, you know, baffling to them. So if it was the same to buttons, or if they could see, they obviously could see that hypertext, and they hyperlink, they know where it's going,
Mikaela Vargas 44:26
so Right? And there's the button link text as well. And something too. I just wanted to go back really quickly to the accessibility when it comes to best practices, also outside of just the site hierarchy, making sure that you're adding alt text to your images, so in your what in your image on your website, there should be some setting depending on your website platform, where you can head into the settings of the photo and customize your alt text, and that's where you can let Google know what this image is. That is definitely important for accessibility and also for SEO as well, because
Collin 44:57
it's indexing that tag on the photo. So. And I guess because some some features are going to help service, they're going to read out what that image is supposed to be to somebody, or, you know, it's going to help them, you know, get know what's on that page
Mikaela Vargas 45:11
Exactly. And, yeah, just making sure that you're not keyword stuffing those alt text either. I like to kind of find a blend of like, okay, this is what the image is, but also it's in San Diego during the dog walking service. You know, combining what the image is, but like using your keywords in it too, all
Collin 45:29
the more reason also to have your own photos and use your own stuff on that, because it's easier to write about that than a stock image of like, random dog number two on walk in grass, right? It's like, okay, well, I can actually tell a little bit more here about what's going on if I know this dog, if I know this cat, yes, exactly. Would that maybe be a good option for using something like chat GPT, throwing an image into it and saying, write an alt text image. Write an alt text for this. And you know, for my for my website, potentially, I
Mikaela Vargas 46:02
actually am not super familiar with, like, image AI technology, as as much as just like chatgpt, like putting in, like, you know, prompts and things like that. But if it can, I know there's actually some different softwares that people recommend that can help write page title tags and meta descriptions and things like that. I like to just do that sort of stuff organically, or at least making sure that you're really customizing them, because you want to make sure you're using, you're clearly describing the image, because, again, it's another thing that Google can kind of tell. Like, okay, this is just like stuffed with all the keywords, and we're not distinguishing between all of these different images, so just making sure that it is really clearly describing what's in the image, but also incorporating your you know, it's a kind of a, it's almost like a science. So I'd be curious if that's something that AI can do really well. I'm not sure. Yeah, yeah. I
Collin 46:47
was just, I may have adding alt text to our images has been on my to do list for a little while, so I may have to dive into that and just see, just see what's going on there, and I guess also making sure that those photos are relevant to that content that you have again, so you're not so it's all one, one, good unit.
Mikaela Vargas 47:02
Yes, exactly. It all works together.
Collin 47:06
We've been talking about a little bit of data, and you've mentioned a few resources and understanding, you know, keywords or how people are accessing your website, as far as other tools or resources. What do you recommend for for tracking, for analyzing SEO and for keeping up with this.
Mikaela Vargas 47:24
Yeah, my biggest ones are Search Engine console, and that's something I recommend you do right away when you have your website live, because by connecting to that, you're essentially letting Google know, like, Okay, it's time to index this site and show it in the search results. If your website is published, eventually it should. It should automatically do that, but sometimes it can actually take a while. So a lot of people are like, I'm not even ranking. I'm not showing up in Google. And I'm like, Are you connected to Search Engine console? Like, that's a first step, so make sure you're doing that. But it also is super helpful in other capacities. They do have a little bit of the analytics components as well. I actually like the interface of that more than Google Analytics, even though Google Analytics is more robust in terms of analytics, that would be my second tool that I recommend is Google Analytics. Some website platforms also have their own, like native analytics, and that can be just an easy way to kind of get some, you know, groundwork data that you can use for your website as well, like which blog posts are doing the best, which which page are they saying on? The longest Where are people coming from? Like, those are some really good data, you know, metrics to track. And then also Uber suggests is the one that I mentioned earlier. So that's a really good one to be able to see, like, what you're ranking for, what keywords you could be ranking for, and how hard it might be to do. So that's really helpful. And you can also use Ubersuggest, or another one is called spy foo, like spy f u.com and that one you can actually put is, yeah. So essentially, what that is is also to kind of look at your competitors data so you can kind of see all right, what are they ranking for. How can I either get those keywords, or how can I, you know, get some new ones that can, like, really differentiate myself from them, depending on what people are searching for. And
Collin 49:04
obviously, with any sort of data, you can really go overboard on this and Google Search Console. It is very intimidating when you first land on it right, and it can be very unsure of what to do or what the power is. Any tips on using it well, or other resources for that?
Mikaela Vargas 49:25
Yeah, I think the biggest thing that I actually would want to touch on, I can go back to tips here. But when it comes to Search Engine console, a lot of times people get errors. I don't know if you get those two. So a lot of times people it's very common that you'll get some sort of, like, this page is not indexed, or, like, some sort of thing. And you're like freaking out that, oh my gosh, something's wrong on my website. It's going, you know, something's happening most of the time. That's fine, and it's a page you don't want to be indexed. So I just want to put that out there, because that can be really alarming, and people get really scared with that. But when it comes to Search Engine console, I would say, you can, they have. Like an insights, you know, I can't, it's hard to do without, like, visually showing they have, like a, like a quick insights when you land on the page and that can give you, like, a very rough overview of what your insights are. And then you can kind of click and expand from there. I think that's a good way to get started on, like, they're more like analytics. But there's also a way for you to, kind of, I think, on the left hand side to click over to Pages, yes, and you can re index pages. So if you go in and you update your website after listening to this podcast episode, and you update some blog posts and do things, you can go back to Search Engine console and request it to be re indexed immediately so that you can get those results faster. So that's definitely something I recommend with Search Engine console. But I do have a whole I have two different lessons on Search Engine console in our SEO course that can also help walk people through that as well, because it is a really helpful tool.
Collin 50:50
Yeah, and again, just going, Why am I here? I think that's what you have to start with of going, am I here to see how people are finding me? Am I here to see how long people are staying on certain pages. Am I here to find broken links, or if I'm here to find, you know, non indexed pages or whatever, and really coming in with a purpose each time you're there? Because if you try and do everything while you're sitting there, you will just never leave right? It will never be done. And you're right going, okay, and when you do see an error, or when you do see things going, let me look into this to see if this is even important, because your website may have hidden pages or things that aren't supposed to be indexed. And so it's okay that that's not because that was the whole point behind it, because you, you know, you it has the what the robot dot text on it, so it's not supposed to be crawled. It's not supposed to be looked at. We have a lot of those on our website for various reasons that we just have, or maybe we're not using them right now. We're working on them or whatever. And so going, Oh, I'm that's fine. So keeping that in your mind as you're working through this too, of just going, just one thing at a time, yes,
Mikaela Vargas 51:52
exactly. And they have a nice, like, color coded category, so you can see, like, okay, in green, these are all the pages that are indexed in red. These are the ones that aren't. But like, it looks like the ones that aren't is okay. Like, we don't necessarily need a 401404 page index in Google. We don't want that showing up. So that's just something to keep in mind, because I think it's not like, necessarily the best tool for, like, understanding which one shouldn't be. So just keeping that in mind, don't, don't get
Collin 52:21
alarmed. Breathe. Who? It's okay. It's okay. This may actually, this just pops into my head, and it's so what is the role of and is it important for us to set things like schema or local business schema or things like that on our website? Is that something we need to be concerned about? Or should we let you know somebody else worry about that?
Mikaela Vargas 52:43
Honestly, I feel like a lot of those like back end, things that are more like coded and like, those should be things that are run properly by your website platform. And I think that's something that a lot of people are running into issues with. If they have a less popular website platform that they don't have all of the, you know, things like sitemap automatically done for them, or even, like site security, like all of those sort of, like basics, and that's something that you can kind of go back to, that usability and accessibility and all that stuff if you don't have the SSL certificate, like all that kind of stuff. Like, those are mandatory things that you need on your website, and that should be handled by either, I don't want to say a website designer, because sometimes WordPress designers handle that, that sort of stuff, but your website platform should be taking care of a lot of that stuff for you. Yeah, going
Collin 53:32
again, just at each stage as a business owner, we have to understand of like, okay, I may need to know about this, but I also need to know who's in charge of this, and it might not be something that I'm supposed to worry about. I just need to ask the right questions and see is that being taken care of, and then move on and not sit there go, Oh, I've got to go update my job. But my job, you know, one thing that we worked on is, okay, we have a job post. We can make a job post schema on our website, and that will search on Google, and people will find it, but, well, maybe I don't need to do go through all that, all that trouble. I'll just do something else with my time,
Mikaela Vargas 54:05
yeah. And I mean the proper, proper linking between pages and using that usability factor will also help naturally with a lot of that kind of stuff, too. And it just kind of because, I mean, you can get even more specific with SEO and like, all sorts of weird codes and like, advanced features that I really, truly believe are unnecessary. Maybe, if you're like a multi billion dollar business, like that coder, sort of stuff is worth your time, but otherwise, it's really just handling the foundations, making sure your website platform is taking care of all the things that are mandatory on a website. You're customizing your on page SEO settings. You have great content on your website, and then you start to look into your local community on how to get backlinks, partnerships, reviews, and you're pretty solid. It
Collin 54:47
can be frustrating, though, right as a business, because we always want to, I want, I need to do more. What's the next thing? How do I take this to the next level? How do I supercharge this? And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and going, you know, just go talk to somebody. Else, right? Go do a guest blog with them. Go invest in your community, because that's really what we need. Because in some instances, we're treated a lot like the same as Coca Cola and Apple, these big, multi, international companies and all this stuff. In a lot of cases, we're completely different, and we need to focus on what we need and what's necessary for us and our business, so we stay in scope and we don't go crazy with all those other things?
Mikaela Vargas 55:21
Yep, absolutely. And I know, like, I would say, it's much more worth your money and time to invest in guest blog posts, things that are off page SEO related, than spending monthly monies on like key paid keywords and things like that. Well,
Collin 55:38
I know that SEO, it continues to be a big topic, and there's a lot going on with it. So Michaela, if people are interested in getting in touch with you learning more about this, how can they do that? Yeah, so
Mikaela Vargas 55:50
we recently launched our SEO course. It's Pet Business SEO unleashed, and we're offering your listeners 15% off with the code, PSC 15. And of course, we'll put that, I'm sure we'll put that in the show notes also. Notes also. But the nice thing with our course too is we start off with an audit. So like, you'll get the foundation of like, okay, what like, how much do I need to do? Do I have those, like, necessary basics that I don't necessarily need to stress about, because that should be handled by my website, platform, all of that stuff. We have an audit that kind of walks through that process. So then now, you know, okay, what do I need to focus on throughout the rest of the course? And we handle all of the, you know, on page SEO settings. We handle Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and then off page as well, getting, you know, kind of like a comprehensive but I think the biggest reason for creating this course was that it, I feel like SEO has made to be so confusing, and it really is not that complicated. And even like, when I finally learned everything, I'm like, but what am I missing? Like? What am I missing here? Because this is complicated, and it really, really doesn't have to be like, if you break it down, it's it's pretty straightforward, especially if you're being organic in the way you're presenting yourself.
Collin 56:59
A reminder that it's not about tips, tricks and hacks, right? It's about being organic, being natural, and just following a few simple rules and basics, like in that and that, and knowing like that's that's enough. So how can people find that that course, and get connected with it?
Mikaela Vargas 57:15
Yes, so it is pet marketing. Unleash com slash, SEO, Dash. Course, you can also find it by just going to pet marketing unleash.com and you'll find it easily from there.
Collin 57:24
Okay, cool. Well, I will have those links in the show notes and on our website so people can click right to those. Michaela, as always, an immense, immense pleasure getting to talk with you today. I'm really thankful for your time, and thank you for walking us through these, these basics, and helping us get set on a good course moving forward with the SEO and our website. So thank you. Thank you so much, Michaela. Well, thank you. I
Mikaela Vargas 57:45
find it very enjoyable, and I hope it was helpful for your listeners. My
Collin 57:48
biggest takeaway from my conversation with Michaela was the importance of intentionality. SEO is something that's going to happen, whether for better or worse, with our website, as the algorithms decide what the heck to do with our content and our information, we can intentionally do things to make it better. So think through how would you want to be found? What is going to make your business stand out? It's you, it's your services, it's where you offer them and how you offer them. There are tools that Michaela talked about where you can learn more about keywords and what to include and how to do that, but do it in an organic way, in an engaging way, where people love the content. When people love your content, Google and other engines recommend it more because it's helpful to them. At the end of the day, it's not about spamming, it's about being helpful, just as you help people with your services, help people with your online presence, your SEO will be fantastic. We'd like to thank today's sponsors, tying to pet and pet perennials for making it possible, and we really want to thank you for listening. We hope you have a wonderful rest of your week, and we'll be back again soon.
