Earlier this year I asked my followers about their burning questions regarding SEO. We picked a handful based on the most common questions and had SEO Consultant Paula Castillo answer them on the Play It Brave Podcast.

Here’s a quick summary of Easy SEO Tips to Get Found on Google Q&A with Paula Castillo

Q: What are the best SEO tips for attracting high-end clients?

A: The most important thing you can do is to get to know your ideal client and know what they are searching for on Google. The Marketing Map course is an amazing resource for knowing your ideal client and creating content (Paula just created a Keyword Research Masterclass for it!).

Q: SEO tips for when you’ve moved your business to a new country?

If you’re moving your business and you want to start ranking for the new location you can start by updating:

• Your information on your website
• Your Google my business info,
• Your listings (theknot etc). And if you can’t remember which listings you are on, and your business has a physical address, you can use Moz Local to help you find where your business is already listed.

On the other hand, if you aren’t moving your business, but you want to start appearing in other cities you can start creating content relating to these new locations and is relevant to your ideal client.

Q: Is blogging consistently and getting clients to review a good start? Do I need to do more? 

Those are two great things to get started with. You can also download Paula’s basic SEO checklist to see if you’re missing something.

Q: What is the best way to name files for website/blog? By what you do, or describing the image?

A little background on this question, you can (and should) name your file something relevant, and add a description to your images because Google also uses the description to make sense of your site (in case you’re interested, Paula has a popular blog post on how to add an image description on Squarespace).

So back to the question, what should the image file name and description be? Google’s guidelines are that you should describe the image, so choose images that support your content because the description also gets crawled by Google, meaning Google also uses it to figure out what your content is about.

Q: how can we test how well our SEO changes are working? I’m excited!

Paula loved this question. While it’s important to remember that SEO takes time, sometimes 6 months to a year to take effect, here are two ways to track your SEO changes:

1. Observing if your traffic coming from Google (and other search engines) is increasing. You can see this data with Google Analytics going to the Acquisition Report and clicking on “Organic Search”. You can then expand the time line on the top right to see the changes.
2. You can also see if you are getting more “Impressions”, “Clicks” and if you are “Ranking” higher with Google Search Console. Paula just wrote an in-depth (but easy!) blog post these 3 metrics to measure SEO using Google Search Console

Q: What is the best way to optimize SEO for your website/business?

This is a big question! The big general answer is that the best way to optimize SEO for your website is to know your customer. Understand what they are searching for on Google and why, and then to optimize your pages for those searches.

Aside from this general answer, Paula mentioned two specific things you can do:

1. Create targeted content, and 
2. Get links from other sites to your site.

Just FYI, Paula created a masterclass on optimizing blog posts for the Marketing Map

Q: How to optimize SEO for Squarespace?

Squarespace is a CMS that “out of the box” has a lot of the tools you will need to implement your SEO. 

You can check out:

• Squarespace’s own SEO checklist, and
• 12 Tips to Make a Squarespace Rank in Google (blogpost by SEO Consultant Style Factory)

Q: I just need a general WordPress blog post tutorial. I feel like I might be missing a step.

Unlike Squarespace, WordPress does not come with SEO optimization tools. The sky is the limit if you know how to code, and if you don’t you can install a “plug-in” that will help you optimize your site easily. Paula has worked with Yoast in the past and likes it.

Yoast also has a comprehensive SEO guide that will surely answer many of your specific questions.

But if you feel like you need help, or if you have more specific questions about your SEO, reach out to Paula for a 30 minute discovery consultation.

We hope you found this Q&A helpful! Be sure to subscribe, share, and leave a review so we can continue creating helpful content for you!

Xo,
D’Arcy