Episode 5: Why SEO is a Great Long-Term Investment With Jessica Freeman

  📍 📍 Welcome to the Creative Minds Smart Money Podcast. The ultimate podcast for creative entrepreneurs blending creativity with financial savvy. Hosted by a seasoned bookkeeper passionate about helping creatives thrive, this show covers the basics of bookkeeping, delivering tips, tricks, and insights to keep your finances in check and your creative spirit free. Tune in to transform your creative passions into a prosperous business without sacrificing your artistic vision.

Hello, fellow dreamers and doers. You’re listening to the creative mind smart money podcast. And I’m Samantha at your host. And today I’m so excited to welcome special guests, Jessica Freeman. Jess Freeman is the creative force behind Jess creatives and is also an accomplished author, wife and mom. Passionate about helping small businesses.

Jess uses her expertise to build websites that attract better clients and convert more people into clients. Living in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband and daughter, you can find Jess sipping her favorite diet, Dr. Pepper and reading murder mysteries. Jess, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and what led you to getting into website design and SEO?

Yeah. So thank you for having me. My name’s Jess. I run Jess Creatives and like Samantha said, I do web design and SEO. And I actually knew I wanted to be a designer when I was 15 and just never changed my mind. So I went to college, got my degree in graphic design, did that for a few years and then slowly kind of moved into web design. And at first I just did the design part, but then started learning more about SEO. And because not all web designers do SEO some people might not know that, or some might, have seen that when they were researching designers. And so I chose to really get into SEO and add that into my services. Whether people want it just SEO or they want it as part of their website, because I find that it makes the website more effective and more worth all the time and money that you put into it.

Yes.

It’s just this thing that sits there and you’re like, I send people to it from Instagram or threads or whatever and that’s all it really does and so I find SEO to be much more effective. It’s another kind of marketing channel and so I am like, it’s just another piece of the pie that I think is so, so crucial and unfortunately, It can be a little overwhelming. It can be a little confusing and so a lot of people ignore it and I’m like, please don’t do it. Don’t ignore it. We need to lean into it. So, hopefully I can convince some people today to do that.

Yes, absolutely. So that being said, can you explain why having a strategic SEO rich website, which you kind of already did, is really a smart investment for a business?

Yeah, so I think it is a smart investment or I know it’s a smart investment, I should say, because it gets your website out there in front of more people. So many of us are relying so heavily on Instagram and threads and podcasts and YouTube and LinkedIn and whatever, and we’re getting burnt out. And yes, SEO, it does require some other work.

So I know you’re going to be like, well, it’s still, it’s still requiring work. Like it’s not just this like one button and poof. But the thing is your Instagram posts from a year ago, no one is seeing.

No one remembers them. They’re not driving traffic. Now, yes, they did drive traffic, maybe get you a client, maybe get you some more followers a year ago, but now they’re just sitting there collecting dust.

Whereas SEO is long term. I have blog posts from six years ago that are still driving traffic. I have a blog post from, I think it was three years ago, two years ago, that has brought me. At least 10 clients,

Wow.

One

single blog post. So yes, yes, you have to optimize the site or ideally you need to blog and so I know you might be thinking, okay, well that’s just, you’re just adding more stuff to my plate, jess, this does not feel like it’s helping my burnout. But think about maybe taking like 10 percent of your time away from Instagram. And doing like one blog post a month, one or two, I’m not asking you to blog every single week. I’m saying create some really educational, valuable content that people are going to be Googling those questions and you’re going to show up as an answer because the other thing, I think a lot of us forget that there are people out there who aren’t on Instagram.

Especially in this last year, I’ve seen so many people who are like, I’m leaving Instagram, like I’m done. especially if you are someone, if you are B2C and not B2B, there are so many more consumers out there who don’t even think about like, I have a sister who is barely on Instagram.

Like she’s not following people like coaches or nutritionists or, you know, like whatever else she’s following, like a few family and friends, but she never posts. Like there are people out there who just are not on Instagram and they go to Google and so we can’t forget this other segment of our audience.

Yes, absolutely. I totally agree. And I think that people rely so much on social media as being just the sole focus that they forget that there’s, in person networking, there is SEO, there’s blogging, there’s email marketing, there’s so many other avenues that they don’t understand. And it’s so important that they know that like, SEO a thing.

It’s so important that you put it on your website because if you’re making sure that your website is SEO optimized, you’re gonna get the payoff from that for sure.

Yes.

And I think that’s so important, especially for creatives, right? Because if someone owns an Etsy shop, for example, and they want to expand to like a Shopify store, they need to have that SEO on their Shopify or they’re not gonna get the traffic that they need.

Correct. Yeah and there’s so many, Kind of types or facets of SEO because yes, there’s Etsy SEO, but then there’s also SEO you can do on your Shopify site or your WordPress site.

There’s podcast SEO, there’s YouTube SEO, there’s blog SEO. I mean, blog is falls under website, but like you can optimize so many things to show up in search that, I mean, it’s just I don’t understand sometimes.

I’m like, there’s so many ways that you could just add in a few keywords and you could get a little bit more traffic, not just immediately, but long term.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So how can businesses identify the right keywords to target for their SEO efforts?

Yes. So this is often the first stumbling block. People are often like, I don’t even know what words to use like I hear you talking about keyword research and I don’t know what you’re talking about.

So for those who are like this part always confuses me. I’m going to start with the super basics.

So keyword research, the keyword is the phrase that people are searching In Google. So like podcast microphone that right there, that’s the keyword. Ta da, that’s the keyword. You have searched it. So you as the business owner need to figure out what are people searching that they could maybe land on my website.

Often this is just your title, system strategist, website designer like whatever that is or the name of your service or the product not literally, usually the name of the service, because especially as creative, sometimes our services have fun names and those typically aren’t going, but if it’s like LinkedIn lead generation or something like that, that’s going to be your key phrase.

And so I love to tell people, take your homepage copy or your sales page copy, take it to chat GPT or any other AI tool like that and say, here’s my homepage copy give me keyword ideas for me to research. Now, the key is the AI is just giving you ideas.

Then you have to go research them, but that is going to help you figure out what keywords to use. Remember also that each page or blog post or product or whatever needs its own key phrase. So you don’t want to optimize your entire website for social media manager. You need to split it up between like social media Management, social media manager, social media services, social media strategy. You’re gonna be like, why I what? Like it’s very similar, but we want to diversify those keywords. Otherwise, Google thinks you’re doing something slimy and sleazy and they’re like, Mm-Hmm. not happening. Like we’re not going to show you in google. So that’s why you need to do some research, make a note of what you find and make sure that you are using different variations on all your pages.

That’s a really good tip, I think, because a lot of times, someone who is, like, for example, me, a bookkeeper, might just use the word bookkeeper on every page or the phrase bookkeeper, not understanding that, bookkeeper, it can’t be used on every page. It has to be like, financial professional or accountant or something like that just to help them out.

Yeah. Yeah. And especially for you, there’s going to be variations of accountant or CPA, bookkeeper, and you can use kind of a combination for that. And sometimes it can even be just a slight niche change. So it might be like bookkeeper for business owners, bookkeeper for entrepreneurs, and that would be considered separate keywords and so you could use those two different keywords on two different pages.

That’s awesome to know for sure. So what are some common mistakes businesses make when implementing SEO on their websites?

So often using the same keyword across all the pages, they’re like, I’m just bookkeeper everywhere. That’s just my thing. But also there’s a lot of what we call black hat strategies. These are like the old strategies. They’re slimy, slimy, slimy, sleazy. They’re not good. Google’s probably penalizing you. So often, I don’t know why agencies are still doing this, but if you ever go look at a dentist website, they have the worst SEO practices because you will go to the bottom of the homepage and it’ll be like, Atlanta dentist is here to serve the people of Atlanta if you need an Atlanta dentist and you live in Atlanta, Then come to our dentist office and we serve people of Atlanta. Like, I mean, it’s just mumbo jumbo. So do not keyword stuff like this. Photographers are also sometimes guilty of this.

You really want to make sure you’re not keyword stuffing because Google sees it and they’re like, nope, not happening. And then on the flip side of that is actually not using your keywords.

So I know that some of you might be like, huh, what? So when you choose a key word or key phrase for a particular page, it needs to go in a few places. So let’s say yours is like bookkeeper for creatives.

You are going to put that in the SEO title. So if you’re using a plugin, it’s going to have on the back end, like SEO title, or under page settings, like on Squarespace or show it there’s like SEO title. So bookkeeper for creatives, you need to put that there so that when I share your link, I don’t see home dash, then your website name. It needs to say the keyword there. Then you actually need to use it in your page copy. So in the headlines on the page, that first headline on your homepage needs to say like bookkeeper for creatives and B and business owners or whatever, use your keyword.

And then if you can, Use like bookkeeper. You don’t have to use the whole phrase every single time, but if you can use like bookkeeper in a few other places throughout the page, that’s also going to be beneficial And people often miss that. And you’d be surprised how many times I’ve been to like a health coach or dietitian website and nowhere on the front page, does it actually say the words health coach or dietitian because they get into the kind of like fancy, fluffy copy and they are like, live your healthiest And nowhere does it say what you actually are and what you do, which I always find that sometimes the SEO copy actually helps with your messaging being more clear.

Right..

But it often helps it be more clear and specific, which I think is, helps the website in general. And then often the third place you can put your keyword is in the page URL. So this doesn’t apply on the homepage, but instead of just, your domain. com slash services, you could say bookkeeping dash services or tax dash services and using those keywords there can also give you a little bit of boost.

That makes so much sense, I think I myself have the Firestorm Finance home. I don’t have that bookkeeping for creatives, and I’m like, wow, that helps so much just to think about that.

Yeah. So that’s your homework after this episode. Go change your homepage, SEO title.

So I know that you kind of already answered this already, but how does SEO contribute to the long term success of a website?

Yeah, so like I mentioned, a lot of people, they build a website and it just sits there and it only gets traffic from Instagram or your email list or whatever, but long term, you want your website to be like an employee for you.

Yes.

paying for this website. It needs to do something. Otherwise it’s like you’re paying an employee to just sit there

Yes.

do any work. Because you want it to be bringing in leads, whether that’s email subscribers or actual like client inquiries, you want it to be bringing in something to your business and getting more attention.

Absolutely.

As you get more visibility, that’s going to bring more clients, more opportunities if someone wants to collab, do workshops, hire you for something, and it’s going to lend to your credibility. When I first started my YouTube channel, this was, eight years ago it was funny because I never went like super viral or anything, but I had so many people this was like the first year and a half that would DM me and be like, you are everywhere. Every time I Google a question about my website there you are, like, there’s your face, there you are.

And I was like, that’s the point. That can help your credibility and obviously your visibility so it’s just helping your website do some of the work of bringing in clients so that you don’t feel like you have to show up on social media every single day.

Yes. And I think it’s important too to note that SEO is a long game. Social media is the short game, SEO is the long game.

Yes.

100 percent 100 percent and I’m a fan of both to be clear I’m not telling people ditch social media go into SEO I mean you can you I have no people who do but I love social media. Actually I love it I love making reels and , you know connecting with people but I also know I’m not worried about Going on vacation and being off Instagram for a week and being like, Oh, I should schedule a post.

I’m gonna lose my visibility or whatever. I’m like, okay, I’m going on vacation and I will still get inquiries because people will still find me through YouTube or through my blog or they’re just Googling for my services and I happen to pop up. I love both, but I love the long term advantage of SEO.

Yes. Absolutely. With kind of touching on like YouTube and Instagram and stuff like that, what role does content play in an effective SEO strategy?

It is huge and that is sometimes the downside to SEO when people come to me and they’re like, I want to work on my SEO. And I’m like, okay, like I’ll optimize all your pages. Boom, done. And they’re like, okay, what else can I do? And I’m like, you should blog. And they’re like. Oh I don’t want to blog, but it is because Google loves a fresh website and especially with the last. Two, maybe three, I’d say at least a two big Google algorithm updates. They are really prioritizing helpful content. And I mean, literally because the algorithm update was called the helpful content update, like they like name their updates sometimes and this one was called the helpful content. So they are prioritizing content that is helpful to people. And part of that, I mean, is self serving for them, because think about if you Google something like pizza places, and then the only thing that shows up is sandwich shops and Mexican restaurants and bars.

And you’re like, I was searching for pizza. And then you try again. Think about if that keeps happening, you’re going to stop using Google. And so they want to prioritize. They want to make sure that they are sending people to content or to websites that are accurate, that are helpful, that are valuable.

And so the pizza is not maybe the best example because it’s not necessarily helpful, quote unquote, But , they want to send people to good websites so that you keep using them and you don’t get frustrated Googling and nothing is working. I’ll just. So, I mean, I think about it when, when have you ever tried to search in a Facebook group and use the search function?

And you’re like, let me type in this word. And it shows you like a bunch of random and I’m like, this is not, this doesn’t even have the word in the search caption or like the post, like, why are you showing this to me? It’s like that frustration. So people stop searching in Facebook groups and they just post again, asking, and people are like, oh my gosh, this has been asked a hundred times, go look at whatever. Google wants to avoid that. And so the content that you create on your website is proving to Google that you are a good resource, that you are credible, you have authority, people should listen to you, and it’s not like necessarily you specifically, it’s not like they need to listen to Jessica. They need to listen to Samantha. it’s , the website, the brand as a whole, that content is building trust with Google. So the more that you talk about your expertise, your topic, the better, because if you have like five blog posts about bookkeeping software, for example, then they’re going to be like, okay, like she’s, a little bit about bookkeeping, but then if the next 10 posts are recipes and vanilla cupcakes and like your travel, vlogs, they’re like, I don’t know if this is really about bookkeeping.

Like, is this really the best place to go? You know? So that’s something you want to keep in mind is it’s building trust with Google and it’s just over time, it’s just going to lend to more and more credibility with them.

Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. How can businesses measure the ROI on their SEO efforts?

So this, I mean, if you like, want to get super technical into ROI, you can look at The cost of what you spent and you know what your clients are paying you and all that kind of stuff But typically when people ask me this they’re like, how do I just like see if it’s working?

Right. Right.

the one easiest way Is in your inquiry form or your contact form is to say like, how did you find me?

Yes.

people will say google or instagram or threads. So that’s the easiest if you have a super basic contact form. That’s just name email message, Go add to it, where did you find me? , because that’s The easiest way to see if it’s working on top of that There are tools out there that can track what you’re ranking for And how much traffic you’re getting you can also look at your analytics to see how much traffic is coming from google. A lot of these tools obviously cost, so people don’t love that.

And because of like Google privacy and that type of thing, it can be Tough in Google analytics to actually see what words are like your ranking for.

Cause sometimes you’ll see three or four, maybe more if you have a lot of SEO and then the rest will say unknown. And you’re like, what is unknown?

Yes.

just saying people have their privacy and whatnot, locked down and so they’re not sharing their data with Google. So you can look for, rank trackers is what it’s called. Ahrefs has one, SEMrush has one, , or you can work. I mean, obviously if you like work with an SEO person, they can give you that information.

typically when I do like just a simple SEO audit, I give people the report of like, here’s what you rank for. Sometimes it’s , here are the two words that you rank for. Sorry. Like, not that I did their SEO, but it’s like, here’s two words and , I would recommend these changes. or, sometimes I’m like, oh, you rank for 600 keywords, here are things you could work on and , maybe move these words up. And then, yeah, just looking at the analytics to kind of see like, am I seeing an uptick in more traffic from Google specifically? that’s the easiest part. I will say that often you have to wait.

We were talking about like long term success with SEO, depending on where you’re at with how old your website is. It could take anywhere from three months. three weeks, up to a year to start to see traffic. typically for brand new websites, it’s going to see, like for a lot of my clients, unless they start blogging right from the get go, it’s going to take at least. six months or more to start seeing organic traffic. If your site has been around for a while, you have some content and you’re like, Oh, I just need to optimize it. You can start to see traction a lot, lot sooner. So like for me, when I post a blog post, I can typically start to see that rank within a matter of weeks, depending on like how competitive is and that kind of thing. So it kind of varies on your website, your content, your niche, all those kinds of things.

So looking at that ROI, You just need to be a realistic and you might need to kind of take into consideration where your website started. So one month in, you’re not like, there’s no ROI. Why did I waste time on SEO?

Right.

And I’m like, uh, you need to give it more time.

Like we said, it’s that long game and making sure that you’re staying consistent with it. Because I think consistency is key, especially if you just started blogging, that SEO is going to take a while for it to build up and for you to really see that payback.

Yeah, yeah, it’s gotta, it’s gotta work its way into the Google system.

Yes. So speaking of tools, what are some tools and resources that can help businesses with their SEO implementation?

Yeah. So, like I mentioned, chat GPT, I feel is really good for ideation.

I mentioned if you need help with getting keyword ideas, then that’s a good starting point. I also like to sometimes even after they give, it gives the, I say they, like it’s a person, it gives the initial ideas I will sometimes also ask it for like, Oh, where they’re like block 20 blog topics that I could talk about.

Or something like that again, still have to do the keyword research, but sometimes the Chat GPT or Gemini or anything like that can give some good ideas. I don’t necessarily recommend it for writing. And then AHREFS which if you’re like, what it’s a H R E F S is the name. They, it’s a paid tool, but they do have a free keyword tool. So you can do the keyword research there. I like that one more than other free ones because they don’t require that you sign up for an account and they don’t have a daily limit. Or at least not that I have experienced, even when I’ve been Doing a lot of, I mean, I use the paid one, but sometimes like in workshops, I’ve used, the free one, or there’s been times where I want to compare to see, is the free one still accurate or what’s it doing?

So if you Google Ahrefs keyword generator, that’s the free one.

Okay.

paid one I think is the Keyword Explorer. So the paid, the free one, you don’t have to sign in. There’s no daily limit. It just, you type in your keyword. It’ll have a pop up and show you then the information. If you are willing to pay, KeySearch is a good tool that’s very affordable and it has a lot of tools in there. You can look up what you rank for. You can do competitor analysis. You can do keyword research. You can kind of track if you want to track specifically like, Oh, I want to see like where I’m ranking for like this keyword or a few keywords. They can even do that. And so those are like my main tools that I recommend.

Answer the public is also good, but now I think it’s been bought out. So now I think you have to log in to use it, but that’s good for more ideas. And then if you’re on WordPress, I prefer the RankMath SEO plugin. Yoast is super popular, All in One SEO is popular, but RankMath is a little bit lighter of a plugin, like in terms of affecting website speed and whatnot. And I really like it because you can do redirects. in RankMath for free, whereas

Yoast charges you. You have to pay for the Yoast premium if you want to do that. And if anyone’s like, what’s a redirect? Like, what is she talking about? A redirect is , let’s say after today, you’re like, oh, I’m going to go change my services page instead of just services now it’s going to be like, Bookkeeping dash services. Ideally, you want to set up a redirect because think about all the places you have sent that link to inquiries and emails on social media, anything like that.

If it’s out there in the wild, you want people to still get to the page without a 404 error. So you go into the redirect and you just type in like, Slash services now goes to and then there’s a second box and you put slash bookkeeping dash services save Done. Now, anywhere that you have that link out there, it will go to that page still, and that’s important one for user experience. We don’t want people to go to a 404 page. You want them to find you and hire you, but it also can affect SEO because if you change a bunch of links and those rinks were ranking in Google and Google sees, huh, a lot of people keep clicking on this. blog posts from Jess about whatever, and then it’s an error and they leave. Okay. Well, then we need to remove that. Boop, boop. Bye bye. No more ranking for you.

Right.

So then you start to lose SEO. And then if they see this happening a lot, then they’re no longer trusting you. And so then overall your SEO can start to like go down because there’s a lot of errors on your website and Google doesn’t like that.

Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s so helpful because, I never even thought of that. Obviously, you have a page that’s already, linked out there. All of a sudden, you change it. What are you even thinking that, oh, it’s gonna 404? You’re just thinking, okay, well, they’ll just find my new page.

But, Some people keep links on hand for who knows how long and then they can’t find you.

Yeah. And , some people, unfortunately are a little lazy and you would think, yes, they might just hop up to the navigation and click on services or, whatever. But sometimes they’re like, Oh, this is so frustrating. Like next, you know? So we just, we don’t want to hurt the customer journey.

Yes, absolutely. So I know you talked about how SEO helps businesses attract clients, but in what ways can it also help retain clients?

Hmm. That’s a good. That’s a good question. I think it helps with especially when again, like people are googling and they might be Hopefully, yes, if you’re working with someone that like they are coming to you for questions but I mean think about like even if you’re working with someone you might you’re still gonna Google even if like Even if I’m working with like I have a bookkeeper I probably still google questions just because I’m like, oh, this is a quick thing like I don’t want to email them and bother them.

Right.

Ideally if you come up, they’re gonna be like look at samantha. She’s always on top of it answering my questions , and I also know a lot of people are just forgetful about like links, business names. They’re like, I have a CPA. I don’t, I don’t know. I don’t know, their name.

I don’t remember their link or, you know, whatever. I remember my previous two bookkeepers before this one, I could never remember their name. Like I knew the name of him, but I couldn’t remember the link or the website.

And so when I’m in local Facebook groups and people are asking for recommendations, I’m like, Let me go Google and find, and of course, neither of them had good SEO. So then I’d have to go into my inbox and be like, okay, where’s my email from seven months ago, trying to, find their website link or whatever.

And so I think both of those things can help with building trust and reminding them and making it easy to find. Cause even though you’re like, I work with this person on, a monthly basis they obviously remember me and know who I am. People are forgetful.

Yes,

So, just making it easy to find you can be good.

Yeah.

minds that sometimes things just fall to the side and someone will be like, Hey, , who’s that bookkeeper you use? And you’re like, I have no idea.

Yeah. So make it easy for people to find you, you know, like let’s not complicate it.

Absolutely , so that being said, how can small businesses with really limited budgets implement effective SEO strategies? Yes,

episode, if you go to the keyword research, apply it on the page and on the backend, that’s as simple as it can get. There are other things you can do. Yes, there are SEO agencies that would charge you a high price for like monthly services, but there are people out there.

Like I have a service where I will just do the keyword research for you. Give you recommendations of where to put it and then you can do all the rest. Like you put it on the website, you make the changes yourself. And it’s a much, much, much lower price because. You’re doing all the work.

Not all you’re doing like 90 percent of the work. And so thinking about, do you have just a little bit of budget? If you have no budget, then just go back, rewind this episode and write down all the steps that I mentioned. If you have a little bit, then thinking about, are there little ways I can invest or just get a little bit of help.

And then there’s also a lot of that goes into SEO. There’s literally like over 200 factors. So there’s a lot, don’t feel like you have to achieve all of them.

right,

But some other things that you can do is a Google business profile can help with SEO, getting listed in any directories, so if you’re in your chamber of commerce or any other online business, creative, like directories or whatever. And then doing podcasts and collaborations. Anytime another website links to you, it’s giving, it’s called a backlink. And that helps your SEO you know, if they’re reputable, like , Susie down the block with her little blog that, gets five visitors a month that’s not really going to help your SEO.

But when you publish this episode, Samantha, I will link to it on my press page, link back to your website, and it will give you a little bit of an SEO boost. Not that you’re going to hop to the top of page one from one link, but that is another thing that helps build trust and podcast interviews are free.

So if, I can’t pay someone, I can DIY a little bit and maybe do a few blog posts. Then my next step would be to recommend doing podcasts because they’re free. You get the backlinks, it’s more exposure and really it can help your SEO.

absolutely. And just to like kind of branch off of that, when do you think someone should really start looking at working with like you or an agency or really start investing like more money into, um, SEO?

On one hand, I want to say whenever you set up your website, because SEO takes a while. And so I would rather you do it sooner rather than later. But I will also say when you are like, really clear on your message, on your marketing, on your niche, because sometimes As we know when you start your business you start in one thing and then you might pivot your niche or change your services.

Or you know something like that and not to say you can’t change your seo because you absolutely can but it can be a little bit difficult depending on how big of a switch it is you know, if you were to go from bookkeeping for creatives to bookkeeping for sass companies like That’s gonna be a bigger switch but it’s not Completely unmanageable and so It’s just gonna take more time and money To do that and then you’re gonna maybe lose some seo and gonna have to recover from that so that’s why i’m like Yes, I want you to do it right away because either diy or You know hiring somebody because it will take time But at the same time i’m like I don’t want you to feel like you have to wait on a website Or whatever because you’re like, well, I can’t do seo yet.

So it’s not worth a website No, it’s still worth it because You Google looks at your domain authority and your domain age. And so one thing I have going for me is that my domain is 13 years old. So it’s been around for a while. Whereas someone who just bought their domain like a year ago, they’re still a baby.

And so Google is going to be like, let’s see what they’re about. is this reputable? do we want to rank them? So yeah, I would say once you’re like, this is where I’m at. I’m all in at least for a few years. I know we all make shifts on our business. That’s when I would recommend.

Awesome. Here’s a really big question. What is the difference between on page and off page SEO and why are both so important?

Hmm. So we’ve, I’ve kind of talked about both without naming them already. So on page is what it sounds like it is on the page. So that’s easy. It’s the, that’s what I was talking about. The headings, the keywords being in your copy on the page. That’s the on page. There’s also images and links and there’s a lot that is obviously on the page. Off page is also what I was just talking about right before this, doing podcasts, getting listed in directories, getting mentioned elsewhere because I like to correlate it to that saying about, you are the sum of the five people you surround yourself with.

Obviously, hopefully more than five websites are linking to you, but it’s going to help build trust, the more and more websites that link to your website, especially if they are well known brands.

And so this is why, Doing PR or getting in the media, like not just podcasts, but like, if you are featured in Forbes or business insider or ink or anything like that, that is so, so good for your SEO, because that is a major authority linking to your website.

Okay.

That is something that you can work on outside of just blogging and putting keywords on your website and again, it’s like a twofold benefit because you get the exposure of being on Forbes or inc, or a podcast and you also get the SEO benefit.

Yes. Absolutely. And I think, that’s so important to note is that you have your on page SEO, but you also need to work on that off page SEO for sure. so what final piece of advice would you give to businesses looking to invest in a strategic SEO rich website for long term gains? Yes.

I would say get really clear on your messaging. And that’s going to help with the SEO, but also the user experience. But it’s going to really help with adding in the keywords, making it clear. So being just like, maybe almost doing like a, an assessment of like, is our brand message clear? Is this where I want to be?

Is this a niche I want to do? cause sometimes I have people who inquire with working, inquire about working with me and then they’re like, Oh, well, I’ve also thought about, like, maybe offering meal plans, or maybe I want to switch from families to just women, and I’m like, okay, that’s fine, but we need to decide before we do the SEO, and so, I would just do an assessment of, What’s the messaging, like the broader messaging that we’re doing, you know, because some of the keywords, you also, there can be different intent and so it can kind of affect how you’re researching the words and so just kind of thinking that through before you dive into the SEO.

Okay. Okay. I want to say thank you so much, Jessica, for being on the podcast today. I really appreciate you taking the time to actually teach us some things about SEO and really dig into that. where can my audience really connect with you?

Yes. I’m so glad that I got to share all my like SEO nerdiness today. I’m really easy to find Jess creatives. S on the end. com, or at Jess creatives on instagram threads tiktok. I’m pretty much everywhere , and if you need, some keyword help I have a free chat gbt prompt That can help you so just creatives. com slash keywords And that’ll take you right to that tool and you can start brainstorming and getting some ideas.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much again, Jessica. I’m so excited for my listeners to listen to this episode and hopefully get all of that good stuff that they need for SEO.

Yes Thank you so much for having me.

And that wraps up this episode of the creative mind smart money podcast. We’ve had a fantastic time with Jessica Freeman diving deep into the world of SEO and how it can transform your business. By implementing the SEO tips and tools Jessica shared today, you can ensure your website not only stands out, but also works tirelessly for you. To connect with Jessica and learn more about her and get even more valuable insights. Visit her@jesscreatives.com or follow her on Instagram. Ticktock. And threads at, at Jess creatives. And don’t forget to check out her free keyword tool to kickstart your SEO journey. Thank you for tuning in, and we hope you found today’s episode, both informative and insightful. Until next time, keep your creative minds. Sharp farewell fellow travelers.