It all started with a nonprofit client that wanted to reach more of its demographic via Google search. Search engine optimization is not my expertise, but I thought, hey — how hard could it be?
Spoiler alert: Search Engine Optimization is not easy.
At first I thought we could just add tags to their WordPress posts and pages. Nope. Turns out Google does not find pages on the vast Interwebs with those little tags even though that’s what I thought they did back in 2011 when WordPress was becoming the standard content management system (CMS). How was I supposed to know you also need:
- internal links (why?)
- external links (why?)
- at least 300 words (why?)
- and the big one — everyone and their mom linking back to your website to increase your page rank and domain authority (why?)
In other words, I knew almost zero about SEO!
OK, well, I did know one thing: Google crawls the Interwebs with its little spidery feelers in search of defined focus keyphrases that repeat at least two or three times, plus a meta description that contains the defined focus keyphrase the same way it has since 1999. Yeah. It’s an old-ass algorithm just like I’m an old-ass Femmebot. I remember manually adding all those “meta descriptions” to the tops of pages at Latino.com during the first wave of San Francisco’s tech revolution.
But tech shit that worked more than 20 years ago has grown by leaps and bounds, WAY faster than my brain has been able to digest, internalize, and apply (to the point that all the tech leaders are saying the singularity is nigh). Over the years, while working at different websites, I never cared or paid attention to all the different ways you’re supposed to optimize web pages because I saw that Google was always finding everything on the Interwebs in some shape or form, including one of my main clients which didn’t bother with all this SEO business (nor did they need it at the time).
Little did I know, I was unconsciously increasing that client’s so-called “Domain Authority” with the maps I had been building during COVID, check it out:
Woah! In order to help our other client which had great brand recognition, but was not appearing in searches for specific keyphrases, I decided it was time to learn how search engine optimization works. Yay. No. For real. It’s exciting.
It’s 2023. Gotta keep up with the robots.
I started with the basics: Yoast SEO is a popular WordPress plugin that helps anyone, including people who are not experts at SEO. Is this an endorsement of Yoast SEO? No. I’m just using it now in my learning process. There are others like SEOpress, All in One SEO Pack, and Rank Math.
Yoast SEO seemed straightforward after creating a list of keyword phrases and adding them to WordPress posts and pages until the little SEO emoji transforms from red (bad SEO) to green (good SEO). Did this mean Google was going to crawl the client’s site immediately and put their page at the top of Google’s search results? Na, bro. It’s way more complicated than that. Even though it only took a couple of days to see their page show up on the first page of Google search results, within a couple of weeks, it was gone. Poof! Byyeeeeeeee!
Thus, we redefined our keyword phrases and added them all to a spreadsheet.
There is one tab for posts and one tab for pages. As I did the search engine optimization for 20 WordPress posts, new keyword phrases popped up in my mind, so I added those. However, as I did the search engine optimization for WordPress pages, it was a bit more difficult because there were often fewer than 300 words on the page, and some of the titles and urls were super general and didn’t match any of the keyword phrases we had defined.
At this point, I just wanted to ditch the project and tell the client, “This is not in my skillset! Waaa!” At my age, I thought it might be easier to hire an expert who already knows how to do this. BUT, after thinking like a whiney millennial Gen Z kid, I was all: “I CAN figure this out.” My dad is 83 and watches YouTube videos to figure out how to fix the car and the plumbing (and I just learned there are tons of other Boomers doing the same, it’s pretty cool, so hey, aging out of tech isn’t a thing like I thought it was). As a “woman in tech,” I decided I just needed to buckle down, read, and keep running tests until I figured all this out for my client.
It all starts with Google Analytics, Google Trends, bla bla – duh.
For years I’ve been using Google Analytics to find out how many views a particular page gets in a single month. Never used it for anything more because I never had a client who asked for more. Lucky me, haha. Ignorance is NOT bliss in this case. It’s good to know which search terms people are using to find ANY website. It’s just, like…responsible. But when I saw that this feature was “unavailable” on my client’s account, I decided I had too much other work to worry about it, and never pursued it. Little did I know, I was so close to the answers I was seeking.
Google Search Console became the game changer.
One day, during my obsessive testing of this and that, I logged in directly to Google Search Console and discovered a whole “new” world that existed long before I decided to “find it.” Yes, I had Columbus mentality in this department, haha. Google Search Console, which I had used a hundred times before to index a client’s website, ALSO features a very prominent link on the left hand nav bar that says, “Performance.” This whole new world shows all kinds of organic searches that are leading to my clients’ websites.
Now that we see which search terms are actually yielding results, with hard data, it’s clear that our efforts are working, and we’ve been giving them their money’s worth with tangible results: more impressions, more clicks, more engagement, more visibility online, and one more way to fulfill their mission.
