SEO Tips to Get Your Wedding Business Found on Google with Nina Clapperton

Today, in our first episode, we're diving into a topic that's crucial for any wedding professional looking to expand their online presence—Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. We're thrilled to have our special guest, Nina Clapperton, a renowned blogger and the genius behind "she knows SEO." Nina transitioned from travel blogging to earning an impressive $30,000 a month passively through SEO and now educates over 3,500 students on replicating her success.

In this episode, titled "7 Easy SEO Tips to Get Your Wedding Website Found on Google with Nina Clapperton," we'll unpack the foundations of SEO and how it can transform your wedding business without the hefty cost of ads. Nina will share her personal journey from zero income to scaling her blog to 65,000 page views in just six months, revealing her strategies and the potential of digital products and affiliate marketing.

For those new to SEO, Nina's lessons will demystify the technicalities and show you how to make your content irresistible to Google. You'll learn practical tips, including knowing your audience, focusing on your niche, and the power of digital PR. We'll also touch on the power of backlinking how reaching 50,000 sessions a month can lead to significant financial benefits, like passive income through ad networks.

From discussions on the importance of dedicated service pages to the value of a cohesive SEO strategy akin to donning the perfect outfit, this episode is packed with actionable advice. Plus, Nina shares resources and offers from her website, including a free SEO blog writing checklist and a special discount code "podcast" for our listeners interested in Wedding Academy courses.

So, whether you're a solopreneur managing your wedding website or a seasoned pro looking to refine your digital marketing skills, this episode is your ultimate guide to getting found on Google. Let's get started and learn how to enhance your online visibility, one keyword at a time.

Transcript

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Welcome aboard the Wedding Empires Podcast with yours truly, Jack Bowie, where we plunge into the depths of creativity, entrepreneurship, and the love-infused world of weddings. Each episode, we're going to unpack strategies, insights, and stories that empower you to craft the wedding business of your dreams. Welcome to the Wedding Empires Podcast. Welcome aboard the Wedding Empires Podcast with yours truly, Jack Bowie, where we plunge into the depths of creativity, entrepreneurship, and the love-infused world of weddings. Each episode, we're going to unpack strategies, insights, and stories that empower you to craft the wedding business of your dreams. Welcome to the Wedding Empires Podcast. My guest today is a multi six-figure blogger and the founder of SheKnowsSEO. Love that name. After sharing your stories in living in over 12 countries, yeah, you do move around. Okay. In 10 years on all platforms and making $0, you found out about SEO, learned how to use it, and scaled your blog to over 50,000 sessions in a month. And you're going to tell me later on you got it even bigger than that. In just over a year, you were making $30,000 a month passively. And now you run a portfolio of niche sites and help over 3,500 students do the same thing. So well done you. Thank you. So It's with this blog, right? Yeah, I didn't know what to do after undergrad, so I spent a year traveling across Europe, which I know is more common for Aussies. It's not common for Canadians. Everyone in my life was like, what is wrong with you? Why are you doing that? But I went abroad. I was supposed to go to law school, and then I ate a stale Starbucks cookie in Germany, and I was like, I'm more excited about this cookie than I am about my full scholarship to law school. So I'm not going to do that. I'm going to find something else. So I actually found a $200 flight to New Zealand and then moved to New Zealand for a year. I was very sad to leave, but it was my favorite place in this world and I hope to go back. But yeah, so from there I started writing the blog in New Zealand and sharing it with my family to be like, hey, where is Nina? What is she doing around the world? And I didn't really understand that it could make money. it slowly started to get some traction. I had some accidental things go right, but mostly everything went wrong. And then the pandemic hit, and I was like, okay, well, I'm in my sister's basement in Canada. I don't know what to do with myself, so let's really try to make this work. And at the time, I really thought that blogs were only for, like, moms, basically, or, um, you had to do Instagram. And I am not a visual thinker. I don't take good photos. I don't really care to take good photos. So I kept failing at like doing weird TikTok dances and things like that. Like trying every platform for like a week. And of course nothing happened because I did it for a week. Like instant gratification, I definitely wanted it to. But And then I figured out SEO. I took a few courses. They kind of like told you the things to do, but not when to do them or how to mix them all together. So it was kind of like a great British bake-off where they have like the blind bake and they give them like, okay, here are all the ingredients, but not how much or like when to do them or the oven temperature. And then everything goes wrong. And that's kind of what happened. So I sat down. I have a master's in publishing. I worked in law. And I kind of put it all together. And I was like, okay, my understanding of marketing, let's go from there. And then I created my own strategy. And in six months, I went from about 5000 page views to about 65,000 page views, which was a growth of 51,000 sessions. And I'm happy to break down what that means as well after if needed. But then yeah, I kind of kept working at it. And I learned about affiliate marketing. I learned about digital products. And within another seven months, I had my first $30,000 month, which sounds insane. I thought that's how much I would make in a year, honestly, like I never thought I would be a profitable human being. I thought I was like a capitalist failure for a long time. But it worked out really well. And then I've been able to do this full time ever Wow, well done. So, I guess for anyone listening now, Wedding Empires is going to be a real mixture of people listening to this show. So, they might be thinking about starting a wedding business or they might be, you know, got their own kind of solo gig going on as a florist or a photographer, or they could have a full team around digital marketing and SEO. So, I guess to be Let's explain it for somebody who's new to SEO. Let's break it down in simple terms. And why should a For sure. So SEO, at its basis, is just us translating ourselves for Google. Google is a robot. It can't understand perfect English. So I always give the example of, like, my grandma is 90. And when I had a podcast, I had to try and explain that to her. And she, like, could not grasp what podcast meant. So instead, I was like, oh, it's my radio show. It's my radio show that people can listen to at any time. And it's kind of the same idea here, where we're looking at Google and seeing, okay, what exactly is the way that Google understands these things? And we're just putting it in terms that Google understands. Now for Google, that's not necessarily like we need to say it's a radio show. It's more that we need to signpost things. So for example, if you have a florist business and you never mention that you're a florist or you never mention the location, that's going to be a problem. Google has no idea who you are then. And same thing if you specialize. I saw something once that was like someone makes bouquets and they look like dogs. And I was like, that is the best thing I've ever seen in my life. So you're going to want to find people searching for that. And that's the great thing about Google is it is organic search. So your ideal audience are on Google every day. There are over 3 billion searches a day on Google searching for what they want. And they're telling you exactly what they want in terms they understand. So, we have to try and find out how are they searching, what are they searching, and then we want to create content around that. And that can literally be your homepage or your services, but you need to use terms that they understand. So, for example, I've lived abroad a million places at this point. I think it's like almost 30 cities now in the last 12 years. Got some issues with staying in one spot. But with that, I use the term slow mad. That's what I think I am. Not a digital nomad, not an expat. I tend to spend like three to 12 months in a place before I move on, but I'm constantly moving. But slow mad is not a term anyone else understands. It's probably your first time hearing it. digital nomad or expat are much more common terms. So I want to use terms that my audience understands. I don't want to make up something that they've never heard of. But also we don't want to get too technical. So with SEO, I'm not going to be like, okay, yeah, try to think of like the fanciest term I can think of, like, link juice schema. You'd be like, what is that? Like, oh my God, no. But if I'm like, how to tell Google you're an authority on being like a wedding photographer, that makes way more sense to you. So we want to make sure that we're looking for things that our audience is searching for. We can put ourselves right in front of them. So you don't have to pay like thousands of dollars a month in Google ads or Facebook ads or billboards. My sister just bought a billboard and I was like, Are we in 2024 or are we in like 2004? There's still a thing. But you don't want to spend a ton of money on ads that often get leads that don't really do anything. We want people who want our services, and this is a great way to get in front of them. So another example would be, like, I have my SEO specialist page. Someone's going to Google, like, I want to hire somebody to be an SEO specialist for my website. So well, actually, it's actually SEO consulting is the word I had to use. I don't think of myself as a consultant, but that's what they were searching. So I created a web page on my website. I had, like, five pages, and I was like, hey, SEO consulting. And all I did was write a post that basically explained, hi, I'm Nina. Here are my credentials. I can help you. Here's how I can help you. And I just used that term SEO consultant a couple of times. So Google understood, okay, she's an SEO consultant. And that's kind of the basis of it, really. It's just figuring out what people want, phrasing it the right way so that they understand it's what they want, and then giving them helpful content. and getting them to come to you so you don't have to hunt them down because people are much more receptive when they show up on your doorstep than when you go and cold Great. Okay. Excellent. I know with Wedding Academy, we have quite a few certificate courses and one of those exercises early on is to go through the perfect client avatar and to have people really think about their niche. You know, you can't be a sort of wedding planner for everybody with every need. So I think SEO would be really, really a helpful skill to understand if you're trying to attract Italian destination weddings or micro weddings or, you know, something specific. So, I mean, listening to you, it sounds like doing some blogs around that specific topic. Is there anything else that sort of comes to mind on how someone who's trying to get a real niche, trying to attract Yeah, so first of all, knowing that is huge, like knowing who you're talking about, who you're talking to, and what their pain points are is big. One thing I always recommend people do is find like other venues where people are. So like Facebook, TikTok, Reddit, Substack, I don't know, there's so many out there. But finding a place that your audience already is and seeing what questions they have, If you already have clients, like keep, I have like a million spreadsheets, but one of my spreadsheets is just questions I get asked all the time. I could get asked it once. I could get asked it a hundred times. I'm going to keep a spreadsheet of those questions because those are all things you can create content around. So that's where you can have an FAQ page. You could have dedicated like actual blog posts on it, but even just basic pages that are your services. So like my sister is an architect. She's an architect in two different places. So that means that I have to do, I don't have to do her website, but I do her website. But I have to optimize for two different locations. And the way that you largely do that is putting in a page that says like Toronto architect. And so for her, she does like I don't know. I actually don't really understand the type of house she does. She tells me the words, but let's say it's like Toronto townhouses. Well, I'm going to say Toronto townhouse architect. Then in Muskoka, which is another area, she does cottages. So Muskoka cottage architect, because that's very different than someone who's building commercial buildings or an apartment. So we want to get really specific. Then on that page, you're basically just going to promote yourself and say, hey, I'm Nina. Here's my credentials. Here's what I can do. Here's how I can help you. And having pages like that, you don't need a million of them. You just need to have one dedicated one for your main offer. Now, if you have, like, 10 different offers, if it is, like, Italian destination wedding, Portugal destination wedding, Spain destination wedding, you will need a separate page for each. You're not going to want to, like, cross the stream sort of a thing because, like, they're very different places and someone looking for one probably isn't looking for the other. Unless, like, they're early on in the, ah, what am I doing, where am I getting married phase. So we want to get really specific. then from there what you want to do is from those main pages is get even more specific with those posts that are built around questions that you often get asked. Even like more specific like maybe Rome, maybe Milan, like different places for those weddings. And none of these need to be insane. Like they can be 2,000 words long which sounds like a lot but trust me it fills up really quickly especially when you're filling out like Okay, what are our services? How can we help you? You're going to be able to fill that in really, really fast. And honestly, sometimes a thousand words is all you need, but you really want to then connect everything. So a lot of people, I go on websites, I do a lot of work for different law firms and things doing their SEO. And I go on and I'm like, okay, you have this piece about, I don't know, wills for 20 year olds in Canada. But I can't find it anywhere because you haven't linked it anywhere. And so this is a problem that I see all the time where people assume that because they've created it, everyone knows it exists. And that's not the case. You have to promote it. And one way that you can promote it across your own website is just linking between posts. So we've all probably added a link somewhere in our life somewhere. If you haven't, no worries. You'll just highlight the text, make it a link, essentially. But it would be like me referencing that, okay, my sister's website. From those words, I would link to her website so you could go see it. So same with you talking about like an Italian wedding and you do like amazing rose floral arrangements for it. From the words rose floral arrangement you can then send them to your dedicated services page where you talk about our rose floral arrangements and how we can offer that in Italy. There you go. Now you've connected it all together so people can find it. Having a really, really easy structure for that is so important. Another thing that I recommend doing is not hiding stuff on your website, which does happen. Have what I call an everything page. It's also called a silo page, which is where you're basically going to list everything on your website really easily. So if you're saying, hey, I do 20 services, and I can't find where you talk about those services, that's a problem. So you can literally have a page someone can go to that just says like, here are our 10 services. And then it sends them to those pages to find out that you do Italy, Spain, and Portugal, because maybe they only knew about Italy. So we want to make it like super, super clear. The other thing is stay in your lane. So just because like, you do, I don't know, like, rustic, chic weddings, don't suddenly also be like, oh, and by the way, we can also do these 10 other things. Because people don't want that from you. They want to know that you know this one thing really, really well. So it's like if you start now talking about how I train my own service dog and blah, blah, blah, you guys would be like, okay, maybe that's interesting, but it's not what I'm here for. And we don't want to confuse people or muddy the waters with that. So being really intentional, having one website per business as well. And that doesn't mean that you can't promote floral arrangements and photography, but it means that you can't do like, I don't know, grunge wedding and then like pop princess wedding because I don't think the same person is going for those things. Maybe. I don't know. I don't know. But you want So I have a quick question. I kind of went down that path myself with my own wedding planning business that I had. I had at one time 14 wedding planners that were all contractors and all in different cities in Australia. And I did create landing pages. The business, you'll laugh at this, the business was called Darling Don't Panic. But then I did a forward slash Wedding Planner Sydney, Wedding Planner Brisbane, Wedding Planner. My question to you is, was, and like I went in there and sort of did page descriptions that were more localized and whatnot in terms of the, you know, the, I built it in show it at the time. So, I had the page title and I was able to put keywords and things like that in there. But was that job done or was there a problem? I didn't have those pages on my menu. Was there anything, like, did I do the right thing or were there some missing steps? Because I don't think that I noticed an influx of traffic around So I think you like you bought all the items of clothing but you didn't put the outfit together and that's the problem. I love analogies. I will just make like that. I've never said that before in my life. I just make up analogies as we go. But to me like you had the pieces there. The thing is that, like, yeah, it wasn't all cohesive together. So you would have wanted to have it in your menu. You'd also probably want to double check that you covered everything to prove that you knew those places. So just knowing a keyword and, like, deciding to write on it isn't enough, unfortunately. So, like, when I'm talking about, like, that Muskoka architecture one, I need to go and see what the top 10 are currently doing. And we want to make sure, like, we're going to be, like, I don't know, I'm an oldest child, so this is kind of an oldest child thing in my opinion, but I want to be better than my younger sister. So I'm going to see all the stuff that she's good at, and I'm going to do one more thing on top of it. And so that might mean that, I'm not saying invent services that you have or something, but be more helpful in some way. So talking about, oh, we also know how to get you the best deals at these wedding venues, Oh, we also like, um, do all these things, or we have these contractors, or we specialize in this thing that maybe the other person does too, but they don't mention it. So just having it where the information is really clear for your audience is already going to be huge. have Google My Business profiles, which most places that have a physical location do, but many of us who have an online business, we don't have one because we don't think to. But Google My Business is really helpful for what's called local SEO, which just means SEO that is genuinely in one spot. So I help with SEO services all over the world. I don't go like, okay, I only do it in Toronto. But for somebody who is a wedding planner that needs to be more specific, like, okay, we work in Sydney, you typically have an office then in Sydney. And that can just be like kind of a general vague storefront. Like I don't physically have an office, but I do have legally an office according to Google My Business, because I rented a mailbox in my sister's building. You can't use a P.O. box, but if it's like a physical office, usually they'll let you like sneak in there like, okay, I'm like B or something that doesn't actually exist. But that's going to be a way to claim, this is my space and this is what I know. Then after that, it does come down to having a bit of content to prove that you really know your stuff. Because anyone can say, I mean everyone can open businesses most things aren't super licensed to be honest like you don't I don't know I think for architecture I think legally you have to but you can open a restaurant anyone could you don't have to technically be a cook but you need something that proves that you do know your stuff and that you have some element of like being a real business. And so having that, like you claimed your location is great, but having the proof, and we see this a lot with like TikTok and things like that, especially with marketers, people talking, showing that they know their stuff, it's huge for us trusting them. So having blog posts about that, definitely like wedding, especially for photographers, having a gallery of photos showing that like, look, I can actually take a photo. It's not like my iPhone and there's a thumb in the way or something, that's gonna help too. those little things I think were missing from your strategy but you were almost there for sure and like that's the problem with SEOs it's really like a giant stew you need to have everything together you can't just like you can miss like one or two veggies but you can't miss I don't know you can't mix it all together or can't not mix it all together otherwise it's just stuff on a counter so I have a little side question about Google My Business. I approached that platform in a similar way in that I created a location for each of these planners and I got them to receive the, I shouldn't say this should I on my podcast, got them to receive the postcard and verified it and all of that. When, when you do the areas that you service, you know, when you're filling out your Google My Business profile and ask you that question, I thought it was a good idea for the Sydney planner to also mention that she services the other locations. Is that the right thing to do? Or should the Sydney planner have just said she services where I think technically she could have said it, but I think it's better to like really niche down because most of us bend the rules a bit or like bend our areas a bit. But I would say really being hyper specific would be best. And then on your website, having just somewhere where you're like, and beyond or whatever that everyone usually has. Um, but I think it is, especially for local stuff like that, having a really specific, like one location works a lot better. And sometimes it also just comes down to sometimes luck will just mean that you kind of get away with stuff a little bit easier or that something ranks a bit better. I find that with Google My Business, it is a little bit hit or miss because it is sometimes just like you don't get the postcard and it's annoying. But yeah, I would say probably not best to claim all OK, good tip. Now, I know that we've dabbled in both types of SEO when it comes to on page and off page. Can you explain to me in layman's terms what those two terms So on page are things that are physically on your website. So that's going to be like using a keyword in the text. It's going to be different coding elements, and you do not need to know how to code. Most systems have this built in. So like, for example, in WordPress, if you have a title, it automatically makes it a header, which is called an H1 tag, and literally it descends. So H1 biggest, H2 second biggest, H3 third biggest, and so on. And that's basically you giving your post a title. Every post should have a unique title. then the other headers are kind of like chapter markers breaking it up for you. So like, okay, if you have a post, it's a thousand words. We're not going to sit there and read that if there's nothing that's like, hey, here are some signposts that I talk about these specific things in it. So when I was talking before about your location page, I don't remember enough about Sydney. I was there when I was 16. So I can't like draw on that one specifically. But like, even New York, you might be like, okay, I'm a New York photographer. So you're going to put New York photographer somewhere. Then you're going to talk about the type of photography. So maybe you do like those Insta 360 shots that do the weird globe thing. So like Insta 360 walk on a globe videos. I don't know. But you're going to signpost kind of like the theme of individual sections of paragraphs. It's also going to go with your metadata. So metadata is what users can't see but Google can see. So that's going to come down to like your title for sure. It needs to not be too long. Google likes titles that are under 60, 6-0 characters. Not words, characters. Be careful about that. And then a meta description, which is like if you search on Google, you'll see it always has like a little blurb about whatever that result is going to be. That's what a meta description is. It's 160 characters that says this is what you're going to get when you open this up. Then there's other elements in there like internal linking between your content, the length of the post, things like that. Off-page SEO, on the other hand, is stuff that happens off your site. So it's essentially digital PR. So you going on a podcast like this one, you having someone else reference your services and give you a backlink. Backlinks are just literally a link from them. to your site, having a newspaper recommendation about you, really anything where someone is talking about you is PR. And over time, this builds your authority with Google. Because Google needs to trust you and know, like, okay, there's a thousand Ninas in this world. Who are you specifically? What are your qualifications? So like I mentioned earlier, I didn't go to law school, but I worked in law. So some of you might've been like, how did she do that? I was a law clerk. When I came back to Canada from the pandemic, I got stuck law clerking and it sucked. But so if I'm gonna talk about, hey, Nina worked in law, I need to say what type of law that I did or how I got into that. You're also gonna do the same thing here with like having people talk about you. Like you probably don't wander down the street and just wander into restaurants. You're probably more likely to go to a restaurant that a friend recommended. Same thing here, people will trust you when you're recommended and when you have some authority over time as well. So backlinks are a way that people go like, hey, I like this thing, so I'm going to talk about it. And then the problem is that businesses get really good authority because people really trust them. And then sneaky bloggers, not me, sneaky ones, I'm an okay one. they come in and they're like, hey, give me a backlink for free kind of stuff. And usually like their posts are not great quality. So I typically don't recommend it unless you really know the person and you have like some good samples of their writing as well, because they are getting a huge benefit out of it. You might think you're just doing something nice, but getting links like that would typically cost them upwards of $1,000. So you are saving them a lot and Unfortunately, they're not always the most grateful with offering good content. So, always, always, always vet things because it Fantastic. Okay. Now, let's go back to some numbers that were in your bio. Hitting 50,000 visits a month, that's no small feat. What were Yeah, so I started a blog not really knowing who I was talking to or what I was talking about, and I didn't have a niche. So it is kind of like me going, hey, I work with weddings, and everyone's like, but what type? How? Like, what are you doing? And I also wrote posts for me. So I wasn't like writing to help my audience. I was thinking about what I felt like writing. Often they were very short. So the first thing that I did was I came up with a niche. I came up with a niche and an audience avatar, also called a customer avatar, and I could literally picture this person on my couch. Then I had 180 posts, I think, at the time, and I had to go through all of them and fix them. Because the problem is Google sees your whole site. as one giant thing together. So if you have bad content that's weighing you down, I always give the example of a GPA, which is, I know a US thing, we don't have it in Canada either, but people seem to understand it a bit better. So your GPA is going to be your total grades from every course. It doesn't matter if that course you took five years ago, it doesn't matter if that course was irrelevant to what you're doing. If it's connected together, it's going to bring down your overall GPA. And the same thing happens with Google. So we want to get rid of bad content, update it and fix it, or even just straight up delete it. So I got rid of 80 posts. So I had about 100 left. And then I fixed 100 posts in a month, which was, I didn't see friends that I really like isolated myself to do that. Then the next thing was learning how to find keywords that were things my audience were actually searching for and that were relevant to my niche. So I didn't just go, okay, there's many keyword research tools that will give you an idea of traffic and difficulty. For a while there, I was just picking whatever was green, which is usually like the easy color. But I didn't care if it was fully relevant. So, like, I wrote a beach packing list. I didn't have any beach content on my site. I had nothing else about the beach. So, like, why would anyone trust me about beach stuff? Like, they shouldn't, and they didn't. So, I really got into topic clusters. And topic clusters are just when you get really specific and write content that's related. So, the example I usually give is travel-related, but let's make it wedding-related. So if someone's planning a wedding, there are certain steps they need to follow. There are certain elements of things that are related to each other. And they need to know all of those things. So if you just tell them, like, okay, here's how to handle, like, your seating chart or something. Okay, but what about, should they do like long tables or circular tables? Should they have like a giant flower arrangement on the tables? Do they need place cards? What color napkin goes best with this theme? There are all these extra questions around it. And if you only like dip your toe in and answer one question, you are leaving everyone with SEO blue balls, and that is not good. We really wanna make sure people can be really satisfied. That's We just want to make sure people get all the information because if they don't get it from you, they're going to leave and get it from someone else. And then again, we want to make sure that they know we have all the information so we are linking between it so that we can be like, hey, next, go to this thing. And then from there, I did some backlink building to make sure that people knew I was trustworthy. And a lot of it was just rinsing and repeating and getting really, really specific and very determined. So I did barely anything else. I don't really recommend that for a fair while. And it was really important to me to build this business and for that one the reason that 50,000 sessions is like such a number I harp on is because That can get you into an ad network and that will make you like $2,000 USD passively a month that you don't do anything else and that's really nice because for that business I didn't have Services, I didn't have a course I later made a$7 course, but I didn't have those other income streams and for my main blog now she knows seo that one like i've been fine sticking around with like 25 000 sessions because i have a course i have services i have an email list i don't need the ads in the same way so you guys may not need ads and do think of it like I don't know, people always like, Oh, I only have a hundred people on my website. If you had a hundred people in your store, that's a lot of people. Like that's a good amount of people. So we want to try to like really monetize those people. And the way that I did it might not be best for you. And that's totally okay. There are so many ways to make money in this world. Um, but traffic is really going to be the starting point for it. because no one will know that you have this service or have these offers or that you can do all this amazing stuff if they don't know you. So the first thing is to get them in the door and then the next thing is to convert them. And that's really where I was then able to scale my business to like, I had a $10,000 a month the month after I got my 50,000 sessions and then traffic kept growing. And around the time I was at like 95,000 page views or 100,000 page views, I had my first $30,000 a month. And that was just me continuing to grow. And then in June last year, I had 245,000 page views and I hit my first $110,000 a month. So that was combined amongst multiple businesses though. But it kept growing because more people kept coming. So it's definitely about having that foot traffic first and then sell courses, sell your services, whatever you I have a question. If I was hitting 50,000 sessions a month, what ad platform do I need to be looking up right now? Yeah. So there's two. So the first one is Mediavine, which is like the most well-known one. So Mediavine is the first one. And then the second one is called Raptive and Raptive just introduced a lower, so they used to be a hundred thousand page views. Now they have one at 50,000 page views. So those are the two that are best. I've been with both. I like them both. pretty much equally, honestly. And they're great because they accept traffic from like tier one countries is what they call it. So that's going to be like the US, Canada, England, New Zealand, Australia, like basically anywhere that speaks English primarily is their focus. If you don't have that, let's say you're doing wedding planning in Asia, then you would use what's called EZOIC. It's E-Z-O-I-C. And that one lets in traffic from all over the world. Typically Asian countries have lower ad revenues, but you're going to have the traffic. So you might as well monetize it. Like if people are on your site anyway, um, people don't seem to notice ads that much, as long as it's not crazy. And with these ones, you can always adjust your ads to be like, Hey, I only want to have a couple here or there. Take the extra 500 bucks, extra thousand bucks a month. Like that is going to help you, especially during the off season for your business. Like Yeah. Wow. Okay. I love this. I'm literally going to look that up. Okay. So for the guys that are sort of got their own little show going on there, solopreneurs or, you know, a florist just working by themselves, what are a couple of SEO tasks that they could tackle themselves each month without getting Yeah, so if you don't have a website yet, that's your first step. Second step is then going to be to make kind of the essential pages to show that you're a business. So first your homepage, because they gotta have somewhere to go. Your about page that tells them like, hi, I'm Nina. Here's my qualifications. And that's going to be about you individually or your business as a whole. It's not going to be about your specific location. That's going to come later. Then we want to have a contact page. If people cannot contact you, nothing can happen. And that happens so often where people have a broken form or literally don't have a contact page, have something where people can find you. Then we want to have our services pages. And that's where you're going to put whatever you're good at, like whatever your thing is. So if you do couples photography, great. If you do pet wedding photography, because that people marry their pets sometimes. I'm not obsessed with my dog, 100% I would. But if that's something you do, have a specific page for it. And for each of those types of services, if you have multiple locations, they each need their own page. Those pages do not need to be crazy. They don't need to be huge. And look at what people, your competitors especially, are already doing. Then we're going to reverse engineer it for ourselves. stealing, we are not copying and pasting, but we are looking, what are like the key elements here that I should hit on with mine? Then you do those too. Then you're also gonna wanna have, I would say, aim for five to 10 posts. Not immediately, you can do one a month or something, but try to do a few posts that are around your topic that people are searching. And these aren't going to be things like SEO consultant. These are gonna be informational posts. So it's gonna be things that people are searching when they're starting their journey. Because if you can get them at the start of their journey and you can move them through the conversion buying funnel to the point of buying, they're yours. They are gonna trust you. But you need to get them to trust you first with information. So the example I usually give is like if I go to a dog park and there's some weird dude opening his coat like, hey, you should buy these dog boots. I'm like, sir, I'm calling the police. No, go away. And to me, that's the equivalent of buying ads because I'm just like, eh, not as good. But if I've had someone that I've been chatting with, if our dogs have played together a few weeks, and I'm like, hey, I noticed your dog has cute boots. What are they? Could I buy some too? That's what we want to have organically. And the way that we do that is by turning our blog into a sales funnel. And websites are the same way. So we want to get them at the informational point, then funnel them to that buying point. We'll also get people who are searching for SEO consultant. That's great too. But if you can get some of them at the more generic ones, like best wedding venues in Sydney, what type of flowers are best for a spring wedding or something, You're going to find that stuff, write some blog posts around it. 1,500, 2,000 words, nothing that is that massive. And then just put it out there. And then let them come to you. But again, internal link between these things, so it's all connected. And it is good if you have social media to share these there so that people know it's there. So if you can get it jump-started a little bit, that is definitely really strong. And wherever possible, use photos that you took yourself or that you hired someone to take, because If you're in the business of making dreams come true, listen up because the Wedding Academy is your ticket to success. Running a wedding business isn't always a walk down the aisle. It takes skill, savvy, and a whole lot of know-how. That's where the Wedding Academy swoops in to save the day. 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The custom GPTs are like pre-trained little robot assistant, so you don't have to prompt it, which is the cool thing. So, like, my favorite one that I created is called She Knows Alt Text, because I'm a big proponent for alt text for people who can't see. Any wedding photographers listening, please put alt text in your pictures. But basically, it's pre-trained to do it, so you don't need to, like, go in and tell Chad GPT, like, today you're gonna wear this hat, and you're gonna do this thing. You can just, like, go in, drop your picture, and it'll automatically do the alt text for Okay, amazing. So how can AI play a role in helping our listeners with their SEO? It can basically do anything that an assistant could do. So I always think of it as like a co-writer or like a little assistant who's like working abroad for me and we're emailing back and forth. And it can do a lot of the stuff a person can do. Now, it's a beginner. So it is not the expert that you are. So it might suggest the wrong types of flowers for that time of year. It doesn't know necessarily like the best destinations for things. What it can do really, really well, though, is format and kind of not ideate, but format your ideas, I guess, if that makes sense. So you do the research, you figure out what's important. And a lot of that's going to just come from your natural experience. Like, I can do this podcast and I didn't need to have sources that I'm citing or Google things in the middle or something. I know it because I lived it. So that's my version of research. I'm then going to do like a rough outline of how I think the blog post should be structured. If you've never done one before, you can ask ChatGPT and be like, hey, I think this is the right order for what I'm talking about. Let's say you're doing like the 10 best wedding venues in Sydney, and you list the 10. And if it says, oh, hey, you missed number eight, or hey, you, I don't know, completely left out this location in Sydney, like completely left out half the city. That's something to consider. So you can ask it to kind of fact check you or double check things that you've done. Then when you want to start writing, what I do is I prompt it section by section. So if you're not a strong writer, that's okay. Many people are not a strong writer. You might also be a good writer. Like I'm a really good writer. I do not like doing a first draft. First drafts are so hard for me because I'm just like staring at the blank screen. So what I will do is I'll be like, hey chat GPT, the way that I work on it is with like kind of the newspaper, like who, what, when, where, why, how. So who, what is it acting as? Like what is it doing today? What's its hat? So you're going to be an expert blog writer. Then what is it doing? So blog writers can write blogs, they can write newsletters. It's writing a blog post. Why? Why are we doing this? What is the goal of this piece of content? And the goal is not to sell your services, usually. It's to inform people about this specific thing. The ultimate goal, yes, is to sell your services. But for this moment, we're going to focus on the person. And then that also comes into you saying, like, we're helping this person figure out the best wedding venues in Sydney. They are this type of person. And that's where you fill in your audience avatar. Who, what, when, where, why, how? So what is a good blog post? What does that look like? ChadGPT initially will write you 500 words of garbage. So don't trust that. Instead, we want to tell it how to format it. Like, okay, a good blog post looks like... You can even pull a URL from a competitor and be like, this is a good structure. It is not going to steal content. We're just telling it that this is the format we like. Even someone from a completely... Like, come to my site, take one of my links and show it. Like, be like, hey, I like this structure because it's not going to then copy my content at all for you guys. They're super safe because SEO and weddings are very different. So who, what, when, where, how, who, what, when, when, sorry, when it's going to be. That one kind of doesn't matter quite as much, but it's more about like the stages we're going to work in. So that's kind of how I talk about it. So I don't want it to write 2000 words in one go. I want it to do section by section. So, okay, first we're going to do the intro. here's my notes for the intro. Okay, now we're going to do wedding venue number one. Here are my notes about wedding venue number one that you should include." So we always feed it our research and we're kind of talking to it the way we would like talk to an assistant and be like, okay, here's a blog post we're doing. Here's how it works. Go for it. And this sounds like a lot of prompting. Some of you are probably like, I could just write it in that time. Do it. That's totally fine. But also the more that you do this, you're going to template it. So you're not going to have to like start from scratch each time. You're going to have like your base prompt kind of ready to go and you just Mad Libs it. So you're like, okay, this time it's about best destinations in Sydney. Now it's about best destinations in Rome. Now it's whatever. and you can just change it up each time. So that's what I do then. You can also use it for stuff like proofreading, for formatting, so I'll be like, hey, okay, every other sentence should be bold or something. It'll do that for me, so I don't have to. It'll summarize content and it'll repurpose for you as well if you want to be like, hey, make me 10 Instagram captions about this post. I hate doing social media, so OK, and when you're done, you can save that chat, can't you? And then you can go back to it. So next month when you're doing another blog, if you've labelled it, you know, my, my, I don't know, my co-blog writer, you can jump back into that sort of channel. And it's remembered all those prompts, hasn't it? So yes, you can say, OK, next time we're going to write about Yes. And one step I forgot to say is before you even start doing all of that, train it on your voice. So figure out how you sound. A lot of people want to sound like an academic writer or they want to sound like, I don't know, some sort of like Pulitzer Prize winner. people don't want that people want to have a conversation like i use analogies most seos don't and they do sound like it feels like you're chewing cardboard honestly like they're boring and i don't mean that because like their information is good but they genuinely like i don't want to read their content because it is it's boring I, on the other hand, throw in pictures of my dog, or I will make jokes and things like that. And so people find it easier to relate to my content. Same thing happens here. When you're talking about stuff, you don't need to be like, they're too four or something. Just chat, just have a chat with people. Another good thing is to try voice to texting. like a paragraph or two and then tell chat gpt hey this is nina's style it'll remember that and then you say write a post in nina's style all within the same chat window it's gonna mirror your tone of voice so then it sounds like me and not some like peppy robot because naturally chat gpt was made for ads so it is a little bit like the best thing you've ever seen this is breathtaking and you're like calm down dude like Yeah, it's okay. My chat GBT knows the tone of Jack Bowie. I found that one on a blog post and implemented that pronto and it's worked quite well. Now, talking about voice, I just want to mention something about, you know, how With voice search becoming more popular, how should wedding businesses tweak their SEO to stay ahead of the game? So are there tips that we should be doing to keep in mind that someone could be asking Siri or Alexa and yeah it's pretty similar again it's just using that like what they would be searching in it at least once so if someone is like best wedding venues in sydney or where should i get married in sydney try and pick up on that once or twice throughout your content at least once or twice um the way that i figure out how often the how often to do it is to look at my competitors and see like I will hit command F and I'm like how often do they say it and Google tells us what they like kind of the same goes for Siri and Alexa and stuff if you have one ask it and see what it tells you and then go to that site and see what you can do to like reverse engineer it but often even with like podcast SEO because it can pick up on like the words that we're saying it'll learn from that so with written content it can literally see what's being said and then pick up on things like that that it thinks are helpful. So having clear signposted content with headers works really well. That way you're saying like here are the 10 best things and it's kind of blown up what 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 are. But also just like yeah, making sure that you answer the question. Also, that does happen sometimes. People are like, 10 best venues, and then they don't tell you, and you're like, why am I here? Don't do that. Yeah, and then just kind of phrasing it in the right way that it's something people expect to then have answered. So it is weird because people talk more than they're going to write. So with a Google search, it's usually like, best venue Sydney. But when someone's talking, it's going to be more like, where is the best place for me to get married with my husband? Then you're going to want to kind of fill that out a little bit more. And remember that all these systems are really smart. So you don't need to match it word for word, like match the intent. And if you phrase it a tiny bit differently, that's okay. Always, always, always prioritize grammar. So don't like, I don't know, best wedding venue Sydney, $6,000. Like, that's weird. So instead, be like, here are the best wedding venues in Sydney that cost under $6,000 or something. You can see it's pretty close, but it does not need to be exact. So that's kind of the leading stuff right now. A lot of times, though, those systems are just copying Google or Bing. So if you can optimize for Google or Bing, you've kind Great. Nina, I can't believe it. You've got me lit up on SEO. I never thought it would happen. It's actually been super No, turns out. And you know, I've got some things myself I'm going to go off and implement straight away. Now, we did have a conversation planning this episode that you were going to give us seven easy SEO tips. You probably covered some of them already, but So tip number one is basically what you guys have already done. Yeah, you've basically Jack covered it before, but knowing your audience. So everything should start from your audience. Because ultimately, they matter more than you do. So really, really focus on them. Tip number two is then going to be focus on two things that matter to them. So whatever your niche is, like for my blog, it's living abroad. That's a lot of stuff. So I picked two different what I call topic silos or clusters and said, we're going to focus on these two things. One is even better, but usually we need a couple because we get bored. We're humans. So I went with living in Canada and then just kind of generically living abroad. But the generic living abroad all had the same theme to it. So for a business, it'd be like, OK, dog floral arrangements in all these places and then table settings. Those could be your two things. Or again, one. Then the third thing I want you to do is find a keyword research tool. So KeySearch has a free seven-day trial. Sometimes they up it to a month, so just keep an eye on it. But it has a free trial that you can do. Go in there, and then I want you to type in whatever your niche is. So whatever, like, your specific thing is. So for me, I'd type in living abroad, or I'd type in, like, expat travel. For this SEO specialist thing, I typed in SEO specialist. See what it gives you as suggested keywords that are related. You want to find something that has as much volume as possible, but that you can compete for. So if you start your website today, the DA that you can target is going to be 30. So it'll vary a little bit as you grow. DA is not the biggest thing in the world, but it doesn't matter. It's a free metric from Moz, and it'll show you what yours is in Key Search. Use your style. Main authority. Yes. So it's just like a perceived version of how well you are on this thing. Yeah, essentially. So you're going to go in there and I want you to find a couple of keywords that would work for your service page. So if you have local SEO, then you're going to do like tablescaping Sydney. You're going to get more specific there. Otherwise you're going to stay general and do like tablescaping. I think that's the word it is. I only know from below deck. I don't actually know anything about weddings. And then number four, you're going to go and make your website pages that I talked about before. So it's going to be your about page, your service page, your contact page, especially. Number five, I want you to go back to key search so you can do this before your trial runs out. and find 10 topics you could write about, 10 questions people have. And that can also come from Facebook pages. So follow Facebook groups in your niche, ask people what their questions are about this thing, then take those questions, go to Key Search, and see what the right way to phrase it is for Google. Because one person in a Facebook group will say it differently than Google will think it. Then I want you to write those posts either by yourself or with an AI. Genuinely, I don't care. Do what you want to do with it. But I want you to then read that post at the end and think to yourself, is this helpful? Did I answer the question? Is it something that like would on its own just benefit someone even if they don't hire me? Because people should get a benefit out of it. Then the last thing I want you to do is really just try to prove your authority by going out there and doing some digital PR for yourself. So I know that this sounds like it's not an SEO thing because it's not on your webpage, but it is going to help you. So there are things you can do like partnering with bloggers in your area who will actually write you good content. A great tip and a great way to like create some relationships like that is like search honeymoon travel in your location or like couples travel in your location and a lot of times they write about wedding destinations too and they can promote your services. If you give them like a 10% off coupon code they will promote the crap out of you and they will make you money which is great. because they've already got the people there. You can also go on podcasts, or there's something called HARO, H-A-R-O, which is Help a Reporter Out, or there's Quoted, which is Q-W-O-T-E-D, where you can be a source for journalists and just answer their questions and then get in those newspapers without having to pay $5,000 for Those are my seven tips. Another one in Australia is called Source Bottle, S-O-U-R-O-T-E-D. CE bottle. I think you pay about $20 a month and you get sent to you. And if you feel like, you know, you're that topic or you've got something to contribute, you can reply and get into that story. That's what these two are like as well. I think Harrow has like three or five free a month and Quoted has some amount that are free every month too. So like if you don't have a budget, start free and then pay for it. You can even on Twitter just search like hashtag PR request because journalists will just post directly to Twitter sometimes too. So I know a number of travel journalists that I follow and then I'll see when they post those and I'll respond to it. But yeah, just giving information and don't be afraid to get a bit outside of your niche. So finance tips for couples, you could give tips on saving on your wedding so that you don't go bankrupt for your wedding. Or you can go into fashion and talk about wedding dresses. There's so many options there where you are an expert. You're more of an expert than I am because say yes to the dress is the only thing I know about weddings. because you don't know anything. So just put yourself out there. And the last thing I want to say is a mindset thing. But think of yourself as an expert business from day zero, basically. I started my blog, and I was afraid to tell people I wanted this to be full-time. I was afraid to call myself a blogger, because my dad would be like, oh, how's that blog thing going? And he didn't know what it was. And I think a lot of people do that in your life. really believe in yourself from day one and be like, this is a business. It will be successful. And I just need to feel confident in myself doing these things and confident that I know this stuff. Because if you don't feel confident, it will come through in your blog posts. If you're like, maybe this helped you. No, this will help you. I am the expert on this thing. And yeah, that's going to be a Oh wow, thank you Nina. I've loved, I've actually learned so much from SEO and I can't believe I sold it. I sold it working in a media company and I sold it in digital marketing for an agency and I never really grasped it but you've turn the light on a few things. So, and I'm sure for many other wedding professionals that are listening. Well, thank you for your time today. I know that you have got something on your website for our listeners. Do you want to walk me through what that is? It's to do with optimizing a blog post, isn't it? yeah so I have a free SEO blog writing checklist which basically is just like for writing any page on your website but definitely the length will be a bit more blog post related so take that with a grain of salt when you're doing a services page but essentially it is a checklist of every step step by step that you need to do in order to write a good blog post that is going to be able to rank on Google so some of the stuff is stuff like the meta I talked about and headers and things like that but some of it also comes down to the way to do some research and internal linking, and just really some checks and balances to do for yourself. And a pro tip is that you can actually feed that checklist into ChatGPT and get it to evaluate your blog post for you and tell you, hey, did you do everything on this checklist? Did you actually finish the work here? And if you didn't, it'll help teach you how to fix it. So It's a pretty in-depth checklist. I don't believe in one-page checklists, so it is very step-by-step, but that's going to benefit y'all. And yeah, happy to offer that for OK, well, I'll make sure that the direct link is in the show links for this episode. But if you're looking to connect with Nina and definitely check out her blog post, as I said, I found one that was super useful on ChatGPT and I used it straight away. Her website is sheknowsseo.co. And you can also find her on Instagram with your usernames Nina Clapperton. And you're also on YouTube, the username SheKnowsSEO. Thank you so much, Nina. It's been a joy getting to know you and then hear about your story. This episode of Wedding Empires is brought to you by The Wedding Academy, where you can start and grow your wedding business. We offer certificate courses, group coaching programs, and a whole heap of templates and worksheets and things to help you get started and grow your wedding business. For more information, visit WeddingAcademyGlobal.com. And don't forget to use your 5% discount code PODCAST when checking out. This episode of Wedding Empires is brought to you by the Wedding Academy, where you can start and grow your wedding business. We offer certificate courses, group coaching programs, and a whole heap of templates and worksheets and things to help you get started and grow your wedding business. For more information, visit WeddingAcademyGlobal.com. And don't forget to use your 5% discount code PODCAST when