Episode 25: How to Show Up on Google: Practical Tips for Beginners with SEO Expert Cinthia Pacheo

Molly Cahill
Why hello there and welcome back. Today's episode is with my friend Cynthia, who is an SEO or search engine optimization expert. And I have to be honest, I was kind of like on the fence about having her on the show, because the last thing I ever want is for anything on this show to be overwhelming and for you to feel like she had a PR person on and she's an SEO person on and she's got all these, there's all these different things I have to do. So I never want anyone to be overwhelmed. But then my friend Vicki Schilling made a great point. And she was like, you know, I used to feel that way too. And then I realized that I am not responsible for the content that my audience consumes. And they can take or leave what works for them and what you know what they need to hear. And I was like, You know what, that's really good point. So, because SEO is just something that we just can't avoid, like it's not sexy, it doesn't give you quick results. You don't get that dopamine hit of comments, and likes and followers increasing. But having a really strong SEO game, you just mean people are googling stuff all day, every day. And I know it's not just about Google. But I think that's like the top thing that comes to people's mind. But you really do need to have a strong SEO strategy in place in order to be able to play the long game. Because SEO is something that can get you found for literally years to come. It's not like a social media post. It's going to be super short lived. So I love it because Cynthia makes it super duper accessible, like she doesn't feel overwhelming. And because I am an SEO novice, I asked a lot of really beginner questions. Selfishly, I wanted to know the answer myself. So here we go. Here's this awesome interview with my friend Cynthia. Welcome to holistic marketing simplified a podcast for helping moms professionals looking to simplify their marketing. I'm your host, Molly Cahill and this podcast is brought to you by holistic marketing hub, our hybrid program that supports you with personalized coaching captioned templates, and virtual classrooms. In this program, we teach health and wellness professionals how to fish but we also bait your hook, head to holistic marketing hub.com to learn more and use code podcast for $100 off, you can find full show notes, resources and more at Molly cahill.com/podcast. Okay, Cynthia, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I was just on your podcast a few days ago, and I just love it. You just have this like really calling anybody ever tells you that like it's really calm. Like you're just like chill, like, I want to hang out with Cynthia. Want to fly to Central America or what? Well, well, I guess we're where? Central, right?

Cinthia Pacheo
No, it's South America. A little down more down south.

Molly Cahill
Yeah. Very good. Geography not so great. So tell us a little bit about you, Cynthia, and how did you have to be in the SEO world?

Cinthia Pacheo
Yeah, so yeah, my name is Cynthia. I'm the owner and founder of digital bloom IQ. And basically, I was working in a consulting firm before starting my business. And I was working with all these different clients in web analytics. And and then I stumbled upon the female entrepreneur space. And I was like, Wow, all these women are amazing. And I saw a lot of people talking about Instagram and social media, but not many people were talking about how to use their website. And so I decided, okay, I want to start my own business. And initially, I was very much focused on web analytics. But I quickly discovered that for a small business, just focusing on web analytics wasn't really profitable. And so that's also when I pivoted a little bit into Well, initially a little and then all into SEO. And I realized that this was just like this huge gaping hole for small female founded businesses and even medium to small, like a lot of these clients that I work with just had no idea because it just felt really technical and overwhelming, and, like out of their reach. And so that's where I wanted to make the most impact. And that's what we do today, we have a course and we have done for you services that really focus on attracting those people who are finding you who are looking for you on Google already.

Molly Cahill
Yeah, and you kind of have a middle of the road offer, which is what I'm going to take you up on what is your keyword retainer, which is Yes. To me, it's like a hybrid. It's like done for you, but not.

Cinthia Pacheo
Yeah, to get you going. Absolutely.

Molly Cahill
Yeah. So we're gonna talk about Cynthia has a free download to that we're gonna give you at the end of the show, but so, I was just telling before we hit record, I was telling Cynthia, my husband came in this morning and he's like, he's just looking at me like, are you okay? Because I had like, my coffee in my hand. The TV wasn't on. And I was just like, staring at the wall and he's like, 1000 Yard Stare. I was like, Well, I have this podcast interview at I'm 30. And I'm trying to like. So I've been in online business for four years. So not a super long time, I have a team. And I still, when anybody says SEO, my eyes glaze over. And even you like when you're explaining some stuff to me the other day, I was like, you're like, does that make sense? And I was like, no, but um, and so like, how do I make this podcast interview like, something that's palatable for you that are listening and like, it doesn't feel so overwhelming because there is a big chunk of you listening, who I'm sure has somebody who professionally did your website, especially, I have a lot of brick and mortar chiropractors who use I'm going to plug perfect patients, it's somebody, I do some collaborations with, who actually if you're a chiropractor, and you need a site, they have a free setup, if you use that link, but like a lot of times that that piece is done for them the SEO piece like local, but then there's a lot of people who don't have the local SEO done for them. And there's you I have a huge virtual like health and life coaching audience as well. So let's start with what I feel is kind of like the easy button, which is not out now trying to outsmart Google and playing into Google's hand, which is Google business profile. And it used to be called Google My Business.

Cinthia Pacheo
Yes, they changed it like a million times.

Molly Cahill
Oh, don't even so this is funny guests. Literally yesterday, I was like, I'm doing some updates to the hub. Because I was like, Do I even want to update this insights classroom? Because literally, when I looked at my insights last week, it looks different. So I'm like, it's just so annoying. And like, stop moving everything around.

Cinthia Pacheo
Yeah, they drive us crazy with that.

Molly Cahill
So Google business profile, what is it? And how is this? Like? How can people like it? To me? It's just like the most accessible, easy way to start?

Cinthia Pacheo
Yeah, yeah. So basically, Google gives us this free platform that's connected with Google Maps, and your just overall SEO strategy. Because it just tells the world and Google, hey, this business is here, right. And so if you have a physical location, you want people to find you physically right on a map. And so this is just one of the many directories that we recommend that you can register in. So we've got Yelp, Facebook, Apple Maps, I'm not going to get into all of them. But this is crucial if you have a physical space, right? Because you want people to find you. But you're going to

Molly Cahill
talk about this for virtual as well, right? Like, I have a Google business profile, and I'll link doesn't have much on it. But like, it's on the list, it's on the list.

Cinthia Pacheo
Yeah. If you have a virtual business, you can set it up. It's just like a bonus. But it's not it doesn't have to be like the focus of your strategy, right? It's kind of like an extra thing that, again, helps you have kind of more of a presence, right. So one of the things that Google looks at is like, Is this a real business? Like, is this Is this legit, right? And so there's, I don't know how many web pages get created per day, I don't know if it's like 1000s, and 1000s of sites get created each day. And so Google's job is to be like, Okay, what's real and what's not. And so over time, if we can kind of like claim different parts of our accounts in our profiles, it helps Google be like, Okay, here's more proof that this is real, like someone mentioned them, they're here, they're there. And so that's why it can be helpful as a virtual business to register your your Google business profile.

Molly Cahill
I love that elevated the what, what's real. One thing we're thinking about adding to our suite of services, is those Google business profile updates. And when somebody first that updates, and like, yeah, like you update it, like, you know, here's my hours was like, No, I don't know why they call it updates. Do we still call it that?

Cinthia Pacheo
I mean, I guess Yeah, it doesn't matter what you call it. But yeah,

Molly Cahill
actually a post, like, it looks just like a social media post, you can have an image, you can have a caption, if you will. And our thought was, if we're already off, like writing these captions for clients, we might as well throw it on their Google business profile, because

Cinthia Pacheo
that's like another, like social media account, basically. Right?

Molly Cahill
Exactly. And it's not like you would have to reinvent anything. I think the character count for the caption is slightly less than an Instagram caption. But yeah, it's something we're looking to offer in the fall. We just have to wait until we have training to do it. We're just waiting to have like the bandwidth to actually implement it. But yeah, so that's, I feel like that's kind of like an easy button. Like, you can pretty easily set up your Google business profile. You don't have to be super tech savvy to do that.

Cinthia Pacheo
Yeah, you have to claim it. Sometimes they like call you or they send you a letter, because again, they want to know are you real? Yeah. And so that takes time. So I tell all my clients or you know, anybody listening, get started Add to that rather than later because sometimes it just takes a month to get that like snail mail letter. Or even. I'm calling you. Yeah, it's

Molly Cahill
funny you say that because when we lived in Florida, I tried to do it. And I was supposed to get that postcard or whatever with like, a code and it never came. Right when we moved to Ohio, I did it. And it like, automatically verified me.

Cinthia Pacheo
Oh, interesting. depend on the state. Yeah. Yeah. It was bizarre.

Molly Cahill
I was like, Oh, okay. Like, I don't know. Okay, so let's shift gears a little bit. And because we talked about, is this real? That really is like a good segue in to the conversation of E a T, which is not eat. I mean, it is people call it eat, but you're not like eating the thing. But it stands for expertise. What is it authority on this and trustworthiness? Yeah, yeah. And so I feel like back in the day, anybody and everybody could be like, give out health and wellness advice. And you had a higher potential of ranking on Google. But that's not really the case anymore. So do you want to talk about that?

Cinthia Pacheo
Yes. And actually, it was recently updated to e 80. To make it even e eight. Okay, so the first D now is experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. So yeah, so basically exactly what you said previously, I want to say like, five to 10 years ago, which an intranet land is like lightyears away, you could write about anything, you can say like mangoes cure cancer, and if someone was searching that, you know, they could find you. And there were a lot of scam artists and people taking advantage and hacking the system. And there still are Blackhat SEOs that, you know, do things to hack SEO and Google. But if you're an honest business, and especially if you're a health and wellness professional, those of you listening, I know you're very passionate about healing people and helping people online. And so basically, on top of targeting words that people are searching, you need to be able to show Google, Hey, I am authorized. I'm an expert, I have experience and I'm trustworthy. I know what I'm talking about when I'm talking about these things. And if you're not a doctor, like if you're not an actual medical professional, there's actually ways to get around this as well, because Google also wants to feature I mean, it depends on the keyword and there's like nuances to it. But basically, you want to be touching each of these letters on your site and off site to say to Google, hey, I'm a professional. Like, I have people who I've helped already I have case studies, here are my credentials. So one easy way to get started on E a T, is to have a page on your site apart from your about page, because I don't think that should go on the about page, it should be like credentials, or if you have a team, again, your team credentials, that should say, okay, these are all the things we're licensed in, if you have pictures of the certifications, that's great. If you want to look back, if you were certified by like the board of chiropractors, blah, blah, blah, you want to link to the site you want to link to if you're listed on that site, you want to link to that listing. So these are ways to just show Google and humans because humans are also paying attention and they're more important to see okay.

Molly Cahill
Is the health and life coach example a little more? Like if they're certified, let's say for like, what is the big all you all my health coach, people are gonna be like, well, I You should notice there's a big health coach, I end up Yes, yes, that one I something? Yes. Yes. Y'all are all gonna be like, well, you should notice. Let's go with like hormones, for example, like if I'm not a doctor, because because I feel like with the chiropractors, they are doctors. So like, they don't struggle with this as much as the life coaches who aren't therapists. Yeah, the health coaches who aren't doctors, so let's just use hormones for an example.

Cinthia Pacheo
No, it's a great, it's a good question, because I get asked a lot. And I think a lot of people get intimidated, because they're like, oh, no, I'm not a doctor, I can't. So what I recommend is to go towards on the content side, like on your website, to lean towards, like lifestyle pieces that talk about hormones and lifestyle, right? So it's not like pure medical like jargon, right? Because that's probably not what you want to talk about anyway. But you're like talking about no hormones and sleep or hormones and mood and like so these are things that, yes, it's medical, but you are actually more trained to talk about that than maybe like the pure, you know, medical, like, I don't know how to does a hormone work sort of thing. Yeah. And you're licensed to speak to that, right. So, again, the process that I teach is to do your keyword research to look at who are you competing against, right? So if you're competing against like, WebMD II. Okay, try that. But maybe not every single keyword is like, like that. But if you did want to, you would look at, okay, how can my content contrast this other competitor, right? Because WebMD is like a very strong, authoritative website. So one thing you could do is talk about an experience the first E, right? So you can talk about your experience with helping someone with hormones and sleep, because WebMD is going to have less of that, yes, they have medical professionals writing that, but they're not going to have a long story. They're not going to have a video or a podcast episode that talks about that journey of healing hormones that help with sleep, right? So you want to if you're going to do a high competitive and high volume keywords, you want to be strategic about how you approach that. Now, again, that's not all your keywords, or it could be some, but you want to Yeah, think about how you want to approach and be different in that search results. So that Google sees that as well, because Google likes to show us different options on that first page of Google.

Molly Cahill
That's, this is like I have so many quick follow up questions. Yeah. So two things. One, I know one thing that you can do, which is, you know, definitely not the easy button, but is to have your post medically reviewed. Like you can be like, yes, absolutely. Read by Dr. Cynthia. Yeah, yeah. And what what would that look like?

Cinthia Pacheo
Yeah, so I've had clients, I actually had a fantastic client, she did herbal tea, like organic, loose leaf teas. And then on the site, we were talking about how the teas helped with sleep hormones, but she wasn't a doctor. So she had herbalists on her team, right, that we're helping with. And so we had, we had a team page that was very clear about each of the herbalist licensing certifications experience. And it was like a nice paragraph. And you could even have that on a different page. Again, if you're worried, like, it's just too much information on one page. And then I think she also did hire at some point like a nutritionist or a doctor to also verify. So we had that person on the team page. And then we also had them included as part of the author. So you'll see this on WebMD, I believe, you'll have like two authors. One is like the copywriter, or the writer. And then you have the the doctor who's like verifying. So that is a great way to show Google and humans again, humans, Google, hey, like, We are professional, we don't just talk about this stuff. Because we feel like it we'd have a doctor who's reviewing and like, we're citing things where we're linking back to study statistics. And so these are some ways to start to really include that EA T on the website.

Molly Cahill
And then I know another thing you could do is like you can link out to sources, right? That are maybe some higher authority.

Cinthia Pacheo
Yeah, if you have a statistic, or if you have some sort of graphic or anything that you want to mention from other sites, I mean, I do this with SEO, like, I don't spend, I don't have the resources to collect statistics, but I do want to share them with my audience. So I'll just link I just usually linked the text. I mean, sometimes you could do like a quote, and you could get more like technical around the citations. It just depends on how, how much medical, like how much you go into the medical arena versus lifestyle. Right it? And it depends on how your Yeah, how you're talking about things. So but yeah, that helps a lot as well.

Molly Cahill
Yeah, I'll I had somebody helped me with my SEO, like, two years ago, and she was asking me about my college degree and stuff. And I was like, why did she? I didn't get it. And I was like, oh, because my degree actually is in public relations and communications and marketing. And so I was like, oh, like I do you know what I mean? Like, it's just like, adding, I feel like college just feels like so long ago that I'm like, Why do you want to know what my degree is? And but

Cinthia Pacheo
yeah, all that adds up, everything adds up. It doesn't again, have to be at the forefront. And if you don't like I had one, it wasn't a client, but it was someone who asked me, she was someone who had lost a lot of weight eating like a specific type of food, like she had like this whole food methodology. But she wasn't, I don't even think she was a nutritionist. And so that was really tricky, because it's like, okay, you're sharing this methodology, but and she had a lot of knowledge because she had tested a lot herself. But that's where you would lean on the experience, right? So you really want to push just like someone who's had like brain surgery, talking about their brain surgery that's experienced that could still rank now you that person is not lying and saying hey, I'm a I'm a surgeon, but they're saying hey, I had this experience of, you know, whatever, they got brain surgery for cancer or something. And so people are searching, they want to find someone's hands through that right? So you have to think about that intention of what people are searching and if If you don't have the medical certifications, there are ways of getting around it. But in general, you know, if you're talking about something that's going to impact someone's life, you need to show Google that you're, you're legit. Right? You're certified to talk about that.

Molly Cahill
Okay, that. That's incredible. So let's talk about the, we talked about this at the beginning, like the elephant, the room was like, Cynthia, do I have to blog every week? Like, what do you mean keyword? Like, we'll get into keywords in a little bit too. So don't worry, in general, how do you start to even think about ranking? I mean, does your social media play into that? Do if you're featured on another podcast? Is that play? Like? Do I have to be putting tons of this beautiful keyword content on my website? Like every week? But how does what does that look like?

Cinthia Pacheo
Yeah, so when I teach my clients and students around building an SEO routine, we really look at like, what time do they have right now? Like, do it? What resources do they have? Do they have time? Do they have a team? Is there a VA? Who could help with this? Or do they literally have like an hour every two weeks that they could dedicate? So I start with that, because otherwise you're kind of setting yourself up for failure? And I know, time is like, it expands the contracts, like you could probably squeeze a little more time. But I rather just be like, Okay, what are we going to commit to just like, if you go to the gym, right? Like, what do you want to commit to, in the next 90 days, and 90 days is just like a nice chunk of time. So you can like think about that. And so some people, you don't have to blog weekly, if that's not what you can fit in, because I prefer that you blog monthly and do that consistently for 90 days, versus doing it weekly, for a month and then giving up right, that's what I prefer, because SEO is a long game. And so we're looking at building these routines. Because I know that if you blog monthly, if you do it for 90 days, and you start to see some results, you're gonna be like, Okay, let's do it, like every two weeks, and then you kind of like, get excited. You see, like someone found you, they say, I found you through Google, and you're like, oh, and so now. And then you decide, okay, I want to like, have a team helping me with this, or I wanted to spend more time doing this. So that's how I find most of my clients get started is like, they find a, I don't like the word realistic, but they find like a manageable time to start with this. And they dedicate that for at least a nice three months. And then they they start to learn how to track those results. And so to answer your question, and also about like, is this connected with social media? Absolutely. I recommend latching this routine on to anything that's already consistent. So if you sit down weekly to write social media content, could you add on half an hour to that to like, pull out a blog post or pull out a concept for a blog post, you sit down and schedule your posts for the month? Could you add on like an hour to that at the end and just be like, Okay, it looks like this month, we're talking about this topic, could I just take a couple of these posts and like just make it a blog post. So latching it on to an existing routine is a way that just certifies it's going to happen, it's going to happen, because you're already doing the other thing, right. And it also just aligns with the rest of your marketing, which is a good practice. Anyway,

Molly Cahill
I asked you about the difference in a social media post versus a blog post. And I do I do just want to stop and say, if you want to learn about Instagram, quote, SEO or Instagram keywords, I was just on Cynthia's podcast, and we'll link that episode below. So you can listen to it from that angle. But let's talk about so let's just say for example, an Instagram post is 2200 characters. What? How long should a blog post? Like, what's the shortest you could get away with you feel like and is there an advantage to longer versus shorter?

Cinthia Pacheo
I love this question. And I always it's kind of controversial, so it doesn't matter.

Molly Cahill
Yeah, that's no, that's I've heard that too. No, for my my dear.

Cinthia Pacheo
People, like Google's not like it doesn't have a part of the algorithm that's like, Okay, how many words like 1234? I mean, maybe it does have a part of the algorithm that does judge like just the overall concept of a page. But what really matters is is that blog post helpful. So I've had a client who was on page one for several keywords and her blog posts for 500 words, even some are shorter, and she was doing very well. Now the difference is that she did blog more frequently, and I think she actually had periods. It was a lifestyle blog, and she was blogging on some days like daily, she had like a really, really interesting schedule. Most people are like weekly or bi weekly, or even monthly. So the first step to this whole SEO thing is to get clear of like, what are people searching? How do I want to be found right? And what's connected to what I'm selling? Because ranking for for the sake of ranking isn't really enough as a business we want to connect it to something that we are going to sell right because we're here to make money. So even working your way backwards of like what are the objects Questions to someone getting to buying this thing, or like what is going on in their life before they buy this thing. So if again, you're a health professional, maybe they're feeling some pain, or maybe they're uncomfortable, they feel shame around some situation in their life. And so starting to identify those situations and those questions, that's gonna lead you to do keyword research. So keywords are just phrases that people ask in Google, and us doing SEO is just identifying those phrases and using them consciously on our sites to create helpful content that actually impacts people's lives.

Molly Cahill
So you could essentially taken Instagram post, not really changed much except for like, add a had like an h1 or whatever it is that that was the key words. And you could send Yeah,

Cinthia Pacheo
I'm sort of Yes. So I do recommend if you are writing, or if you have someone like on your team writing for Instagram, you can take that as a concept for a blog post, but you still need to go and like think about how is someone having the experience of the blog, because Instagram is a very different experience than a website, right? So I don't recommend copying and pasting and then like, anyone, I don't recommend copying and pasting and then just slapping on the title and stuff. I recommend taking that content. There's probably a large chunk of it that you will just leave it as it is, but thinking about okay, do we add like an infographic? Do we add a video? Do we add we add links, internal links, right? We add images, we add like an outline at the top that says okay, this is what we cover. And you can skip to sections, we add a case study the beauty of a blog versus Instagram is we can like get into it. You know, like it's kind of like inviting someone into your house you can like get go in and really fully I don't know what the equivalent of Instagrams, like the cottage maybe.

Molly Cahill
No Instagrams, like the front yard, right? It's like, this house interests me. I didn't ask, I'm driving down the road, I didn't see this house. But I happened to be driving past this house, and it piqued my interest. And to me, that's, that's the whole difference in I was talking to my personal chiropractor, because they have these really great videos on their Instagram, but they're, they're meant for YouTube. And I'm like, that's not going to perform well on Instagram, because people are typically on Instagram. They're not seeking the stuff out as much as they're just being shown it and it's like, like it do not, it's like, hey, like this, you like this? No, you don't. Next one you like this, like this? No. Next one. Whereas with like YouTube or Google, people are seeking out that information. So you don't have to catch their attention in the like point two seconds you have with a real? Exactly. Okay, someone chose to seek out that information. Whereas with an Instagram post, you got to hook them right away. Not totally, again, we talked about on my episode, how people can actually search things on Yes to Graham. Yeah. How faster algorithm learns?

Cinthia Pacheo
Yeah, I feel like that's it's a whole lesson with like, going back to your question is, yes, like, with a blog, if you can write 2000 words useful, right? So I'm not saying just write 2000 words, because Cynthia Says to write 2000 words, I'm saying like, if it's helpful to your audience to write a really in depth blog post that covers different aspects of how you help them and goes into a case study and has a beautiful image or some sort of table or something, then absolutely, it's like, yeah, you're inviting someone over for coffee, but you're rushing out the door? No, like, you have the cookies, you have the trade, show it off, you know, and then they're gonna click around, right? So show them other related posts, show them your services gives them an opportunity to book a time with you, right? Don't just rush them out. And so I feel like a lot of people like it's okay, they're these are all skills that you get to learn is like, they don't really know how to build that blog post that's going to convert they just think, oh, it's it's, you know, people are gonna find us and they'll just buy from us eventually. It's like, No, you need to really invite them right in Yeah. And have that, like, whatever your brand experience is. You want to think about how you're doing that on a on a blog post. And if blog if the word blog bothers you, because a lot of people get stuck with that word blog. Yeah, they did. Word like articles, thoughts, musings notes. Like I've had clients like me, it doesn't matter. It's like text on your website that's helping your people,

Molly Cahill
right. One thing I would love to know more about is like information pages, sales pages, services pages, like whatever you want to call it. Do you find that those rank often or do you think it's usually more of the educational media stuff?

Cinthia Pacheo
So the they can't rank it's just a different strategy. So someone who's for example, looking for it. Let's go back to the hormones so like hormone core, For moms, I don't know it's a little generic, but like maybe yeah, like, how do I balance my hormones by myself? That's probably more educational, right. But if someone's like searching course, or services or nutritionist, like hormone nutritionist for moms, you could have a sales page that targets that keyword. And that's a trend. It's called a transactional keyword. So it's someone who's ready to buy someone who's like, oh, ready to buy. So absolutely. Now, that shouldn't be the only thing you're doing. But it can absolutely be infused in your sales pages. I've had many clients who have courses work really well because they're lower, lower. In some cases, they're lower price points. So you have a higher chance of converting on that first visit, which we all want like yes, Stripe payments and Pay Pal payments coming in magically. And so if you can have the keyword if you can do keyword research and look at are people searching specifically for my course that can Yeah, that can work for you. Absolutely.

Molly Cahill
That's funny you say I've started using or not started I often often on at for a long time, I've been using the hashtag Instagram course, that's one of gags. I don't always use that but or I'll use like a social media manager, Instagram management. So let's have two more questions asked and then we'll, we'll wrap it up. But we keep talking about keyword research. And to me, this is where I get hung up. So it's like when I hear key word, I think one word, but then there's like phrases and there's longtail keywords, and I just get so confused. Because I'll use me as an example, like I would love to rank for like chiropractic marketing, or like health coach marketing or whatever. But if those, there's such high competition, what's kind of the difference in like, ranking for gut health versus how do I heal my acid reflux naturally, like Kevlar? Like what's the, you know, I'm saying like, that's where I get hung up like what's Are they both keywords like, what's, how does that work?

Cinthia Pacheo
Yeah, so keywords. It's weird. Yeah, keyword is actually could be several words I have people have asked me that before, I'd never thought about it. But it's like, yeah, it's singular. But it's actually it's usually a phrase, there are one word keywords. But in general, that's not what we're targeting. Because it's really competitive, or it's someone who's like searching for Facebook, I mean, they're going to, like, that's not really what we want. Unless you sell a tool, or I mean, people might be searching your name, or your brand name. Those are also keywords. Right. So Molly Cahill, we talked about that for Instagram, like you want to be showing up on that first page. And there might be other Molly Cahills. But like, maybe someone's searching like Molly Cahill social media or something like that. And, and so you want to make sure that you're showing up there. So those are branded keywords. So my my favorite analogy for this is, and maybe some of you aren't into sports, but I used to play a lot of basketball. And so on a basketball team, you have like, I don't know, in total, maybe you have like 20 people. But then on the court, in an active game, you have five. And so a lot of these are like the star players. And there's some players that are good at shooting and getting the basket in the in the ring. And there's others that are good at passing, defending that sort of thing. Same thing with your keywords. So some of your keywords are star players, right. So they're on that first page, they're getting new leads, they're getting new clients, other keywords might be better at passing. So they're still attracting traffic. But maybe they're passing that traffic to other pages. And they're not directly converting, and others are just filler. Like they're not doing much. They're still part of the team. But you need to have them right, you need to have those pages because you might be sending clients to that like objections page or that FAQ page or whatever, maybe the things that aren't like they don't have tons of volume, but they're still attracting a little bit and they're serving a purpose on your site. So when you start to think about it that way, you don't have to put so much pressure on having to rank for all the high volume. High volume just means it's getting a lot of searches and a lot is relative, but let's say it's getting like 1000 searches per month, which could be for your business, like really nice to get 1000 potential opportunities coming to your site each month, right? Yeah. So if if we take that pressure off, we can suddenly look at our website as a team, like a sports team. So everybody's working together in the same direction. And you don't you get to like choose who you focus on. So the strategy I recommend for a lot of my clients is like, let's put out five players five keywords with a variety of skills. So some are potentially page one star players. Others maybe are like at the bottom of page one, or maybe you're sending traffic a different way to that site, because Google looks at our site as a whole right so So you could have the best keywords. But if your site isn't working as a whole, so if people aren't having a nice experience overall, you're not going to rank either. And so once you put out those five initial keywords that again, we want to make sure that they're getting at least 100 searches per month. But they're not all like 1000s and 1000s of searches, right? You can start to track their progress. And so you can use a tool like the Google Search Console, which is a free tool that Google gives us to look at. Okay, I targeted this keyword intentionally, I see that I'm on page 50 of Google, right? Like, I'm way down at the bottom of the barrel. But next month, you check in and now you're on page 20. Okay, I'm still at the bottom of the barrel, but I'm moving. Then next month, you check in and now you're on page five of Google, okay, this keyword player is showing potential because it's growing, it's showing progress. And so now you can be okay, we're going to train we're going to work on this page, we're going to see, okay, how can we continue to send traffic? How can we continue to improve this page? What do we need to do to get this page to page one, because we all start with a website that doesn't have traffic, we all start with a website with keywords that are in like, 100 position, like really low, but it's about tracking that progress. And so you can start to, again, look at your keywords as a whole. And over time, you will have keywords that get to page one, but it's because you you looked at who you needed to focus on, and you could spend that time because we're all busy, we've all got limited time. And so I think one of the reasons people avoid SEO, it just feels overwhelming. Like putting all those this blog content, you don't know if it's gonna like give you a return on your investment. So if you can look at that progress, and also do that keyword research initially to see, okay, this keyword, it does look like it's getting traffic, you can invest your time more intentionally.

Molly Cahill
I'm just like, wrapped my brain is I'm like, wow. Because my next question was going to be like, what tool? We talked about 100 searches a month, like, how do you even look that up? Like what what's kind of the range you'd like to have your smaller like just starting out? Health Coach life coach, you know, like, maybe I'm, I've added functional medicine to my brick and mortar, like existing business? Like what do you kind of tell people to look for in that sweet spot.

Cinthia Pacheo
So instead of looking at specific numbers, I instead look at I tell people to look at kind of the relationship between how many searches they're getting per month and the competition, because that's like a better indicator, because you could have a keyword that has a lot of searches. And it's really high competition, like we talked about before, with, I can't remember what keywords Yeah, like, if you wanted to target that keyword, you could, but now that you have that information, you're gonna approach that keyword differently. And you're gonna look at your competition on that page, you're gonna do a little bit more research, maybe, versus a keyword that has medium to high, you know, searches and like low competition, so you don't have as much as many other websites to compete against on the search results. So there's no like, minimum, like, if you want to target a keyword that's getting 10 searches per month. And if you wanted to write cute, like, a lot of people are like, Oh, can I just I want to write about this thing? Can I write about it? Yes, like, yeah, me my permission, I always laugh because what happens is all these tools, like there's different tools we can use to do keyword research, some are free, some are paid, I'll mention in a second, some ideas. But I've had some clients who they're so in touch with what their clients and their audience are needing. And these keyword tools just pick up on data. They're not like, they're not Oracle's Right. Like sometimes like, a client will start that like I had this, this loose leaf teeth clients say to me, like, I just want to write this thing, I want to write the same like write it like you don't need me to like you are the expert in your audience, your business, please, like I'm doing the SEO component, but you need to do you, right. So she wrote about this thing. And she was, you know, very passionate. And that keyword ended up being a page one keyword, because it wasn't showing up in these tools yet, because she was just like at the cusp of what our audience was needing. And so there's just if you're in touch with your audience, and I still recommend doing keyword research and doing all this SEO stuff, but if you're in touch with what your people are needing, you're going to rank you're going to rank right. And so this what this is meant to do is unlock your creativity not suppress it. So you get to choose which keywords you want to be a CEO kind of intentional on and then there's going to be others where you're like, Look, I just want to write about this, like, I just I have this content on Instagram, I think it's useful, I can share it with my audience. I'm gonna write about it. I'm not even going to worry too much about the SEO part. And so you get to have both worlds. And it doesn't have to be like conflicting, right?

Molly Cahill
So can I go back and ask a clarifying question about the difference between like gut health versus how do I heal my acid reflux naturally? Like those are both keywords essentially. Right?

Cinthia Pacheo
So if someone's searching gut health, what do you think they're like, needing when they're searching that? Because it doesn't give us too much information? It seems like they're kind of, they could be like a medical student.

Molly Cahill
Okay? You don't know how old you are you you feel about you look about my age, probably a little younger. But I, I feel like the older generation doesn't realize the power of Google. And so they will just type in just something really generic and then like, poke around to find it. Whereas I feel like the younger generation literally will search the exact like, I Okay, like for ordering pizza from the, you know, Mellow Mushroom down the street, I wouldn't just type in Mellow Mushroom, I would type in like, Mellow Mushroom Westchester menu, right? Because I know that that's going to just pop right up. So I think, I think I don't know if it's just age or like, I don't know, because I even with my husband, who's actually a year younger than me, sometimes I'll be like, Why don't you just Google like this word? Like, he'll Google something really generic? And I'm like, Don't Google, you know, landscaping, Google, like landscaping for Cincinnati, Ohio in the winter, like the summer? You know what I mean? So no, maybe that plays into it.

Cinthia Pacheo
So there's two things here. First thing market research, which we haven't talked about, or we kind of talked about, but taking that step before even looking at your keywords and being like, who's your person? What's their age? How do they use Google? So you can ask your audience like how to use Google, like, I've done this before? Like, if you needed to do if you need to find this? How would you? What would you put in the Google search? And even talking to clients that have already hired you and saying, Hey, like, can we just take the five minutes or you know, whatever, you could offer them something in return? Or if you have a good relationship, you can be like, okay, like, if you were searching for this problem in Google, how would you, you know, how would you search for it? So getting a little bit of that live qualitative market research is really helpful to complement the data and like the cold, whatever quantitative metrics that you would use for in keyword research? That's one thing. And then on the other side, Google's really smart. Like, if you're, if you're searching like landscaping, it's gonna give you Yeah, a more broad search. And so if you are I mean, that's outside of what we were talking about. So let's say like hormone nutritionist, right, that's like a very broad keyword, we don't know, it sounds like there may be searching for home or nutritionist, but maybe they're also like, someone who wants to become a hormone, nutritionist, I don't know, I see, you're gonna have those keywords in your website, because that's what you're talking about, right? So it's gonna happen one way or another. If you then have like, another keyword that's like, how I became a hormone nutritionist as part of this EA t, you can talk about your story, or like hormone nutritionist services on your services page, that sort of thing. So that keyword that like more broad keyword is going to get automatically infused anyway. But you still want to think about that intention of what someone is needing the other side,

Molly Cahill
or phrasing like, because this is another thing I learned from my friend, Kate korsmeyer, like the difference between what you think of as like a traditional blog, like, example, I was on Pinterest last night, and I was looking at, like, I have a very eclectic decor style. And so I was like, looking up some like, inspiration. And, you know, you go to that word, traditional blog, and they make money typically, like, if they don't offer, let's say, design services, they make money by traffic to share traffic to their site, they've got popup ads, they're getting paid per ad, they maybe have a sponsored post and affiliate marketing. We're not, that's typically not my market. Right? So what I learned from her and this is something you and I've talked about, too, is we're more of conversion sites, right? Like, I can't handle 3000 new clients a month, you know what I mean? Like, so you don't need that you couldn't handle 3000 new patients in your clinic. So you don't need that sheer volume. I feel like you don't have to play the numbers game as much when you're just looking for like individuals into your virtual practice, or, like Yeah, I'd love to sell that many of my course right but like still that would probably create a bottleneck of some sort because I'd have like customer service issue you know, and so when you do have those more specific like, because what am I what made me think about this whole example as one of my my personal health and life coach have worked with for years and then she's hired me to do some of her social media posts. She's you know, gut health is so saturated now that She's like, don't get me started on that every market saturated, but she was like, I don't see a lot of people focusing on acid reflux, like specifically. And so we did a lot of her content around acid reflux specifically. So again, like, I mean, even if you just got 10 people who, like you said, We're searching that exact thing, like you're meeting that exact need for them. And I feel like there's a lot of just like, like, that's amazing. Like, that's powerful. Yeah.

Cinthia Pacheo
Yeah, I mean, my strategy. So I trigger my clients a lot, because sometimes I'll get them to do a more broad keyword like acid reflux healing guide, I don't know if you wanted to, like, target that. And so some people feel intimidated by that, because it's just so broad. I like to have at least one of those, I call them like, in depth guide, like a really needy sort of thing, because it's still helpful to your audience. Now, is that all your strategy? No, I agree, you need to have these like, just more longer, more specific keywords and questions that people are asking. But you get to, when you're starting, I always just recommend having a little bit of a combo, like the like, the analogy with the players is like, you can't have all star players, and you can't have all defensive players, because you're gonna have a problem, right? So just do a little bit of everything. And then you can kind of see how the chips fall. And you can see because maybe, you you know, your audience does need more of that like guide, or maybe there's like this spot for you, in that page, one of Google for that thing. But that's why doing the market research, doing the keyword research that helps you start to like, look at that, be conscious about that strategy. And then when you put it out there, you can track that progress, and then learn from that. So you see, Okay, this one seems to have made more progress. I'm gonna like, go back and improve that a lot of people don't talk about that. It's like, you don't have to pump out new content. Once you've got the ball rolling, it's more about maintaining old posts, and continuing to make them relevant, right, and just making sure that everything's working fine. So a lot of my clients that have worked with me, that's their job now, like, they're not actually creating tons and tons. Yeah, they still publish content, new content once in a while. But it's more about maintaining the ones that are on page one and maintaining that like top one position, which is totally different than social media, because we're so trained to like new new content, like videos all the time.

Molly Cahill
Well, that's like the combination of both because like, social media can give you more of an immediate win. Whereas Yes, is your website and stuff is like more of like the long haul, it's like, it's like, a heavier lift in the beginning. But then it's like, oh my gosh, that's like

Cinthia Pacheo
an invest. It's like a long term investment, right? Like retirement, I don't know, like, probably not that long. But you start to see those. It just feels magical. Like I've had clients again, this loose leaf tea client, she each once in a while she'll email me she's like, we're still ranking for that keyword, that that blog post, you helped us with, like, three, four years ago, like she's on page one of this. And she hardly touches it. So she's like, like, that's the prime example of like, you just create this beautiful content, you spend some time and it doesn't have to take tons of time. Like I'm sure most of you could write a great blog post in about an hour, I think it's more the, it's just different. To write a long form piece like we're,

Molly Cahill
we've been, we've actually been using chat GPT alive or not to just write because obviously the chat GPT doesn't understand nuance. But once I started playing around with it more, I was like, wow, like, I didn't think with the topics that we cover with chiropractors and whatnot. Now, even I thought, Oh, it'll get the pain and chiropractic stuff easy, because that's like what people think of, I was like, it's not going to know about non pain, non pain is going to the chiropractor versus for reasons other than pain. Yeah. And, and it struggled Right? Like it that I kind of had to keep prompting it and keep prompting it and be like, well tell me more about this thing, you know, more about this thing, and eventually got there and we don't use it a lot. But like every once in a while, we'll have clients who would love you, but we would love more photos and videos from you, please thank you. We're having to like go back and reuse the same photos and the same videos over and over and over again. And so we're like, how do we make this a new piece of content. And so Rachel, who's our team lead for the agency who's just I just freaking love her and she basically runs the ship but she found we have a client who like notoriously never gives us photos or videos. And she found five of that particular client outside and she put them together in a real and she asked chat GPT What are five reasons you should spend more time outdoors, right and it kind of like generated and like one of them I was like this doesn't make sense. Like you need to go and then you know we add our own words because it can be kind In a repetitive, but Jana who introduced us, Jana, oh media, like she's got a great program teaching you how to use chat GPT still be in your own voice, right? And yeah, like, like us. So I'm hiring Cynthia for your keyword retainer starting in July. And I was thinking about my strategies probably going to be, so let's just say I like like three new ones. And like one, let's go back and look like, what I can kind of like repair and not repair. But you know what I mean? Like, yeah, so anyway, I'm sorry, I could talk to you for ages. How do people find you like, how can they get started? What's the best way to get started with you chat with you?

Cinthia Pacheo
Yeah. So on my site, if you go to digital Blum iq.com, I have a podcast and I have a blog. And there's a bunch of free resources. I have a 90 day SEO plan, which is a three, four part live webinar training, which is at Digital bloom iq.com/ninety Day SEO plan. And so that's a great place to start, because I go through kind of the foundations of SEO and keyword research is very matching with this episode. And so that's a great place. And honestly, if you're feeling overwhelmed by by all this, I just recommend, start small, start small and eventually down the line, you're going to have the ball rolling, and you can decide you want to hire this out if you want your VA, I have courses that are actually for web developers and vas, because I find a lot of small businesses are just like, don't make me do my SEO. And so I'm like, okay, a web developer could handle some of this. Like that's, that's like in the realm like and so that's why I create a lot of trainings for team members so that the business owner just doesn't get bombarded by you know, another, more information.

Molly Cahill
Yeah, start with Google business profile, or like those directories to like you talked about and these. Absolutely. Okay. Thank you so much, Cynthia. This was like I said, I could sit here I was like, looking at the time I was like, Oh, I could ask her five more million questions, but I appreciate you so much. And again, if you want to hear from the more Instagram keyword hashtag SEO standpoint, we'll link my episode on Cynthia's digitally overwhelmed podcast below. Perfect. Hey, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for listening to holistic marketing simplified, brought to you by holistic marketing hub, our hybrid program that supports you with personalized coaching, captioned templates, and virtual classrooms. In this program, we teach health and wellness professionals how to fish but we also bait their hook, head to holistic marketing hub.com To learn more, and use code podcast for $100 off, and hey, you know, every podcaster at the very end of their episode asks you to rate and review their podcast. Well, that's because it's super important. These podcasts take a lot of time and heart and effort to produce to bring you free information. So in order for me to be able to continue doing that, we need more people to find out about the show. So if you could please just take like two minutes out of your very busy day to leave me a rating and share this on your Instagram stories and tag at Molly a K Hill. That's c h i ll I would greatly greatly appreciate your support. I truly appreciate you so much. I know your time is valuable and I can't wait to see you in the next episode.

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