How I Easily Increased My Web Traffic by 127% Using Actually Simple SEO Techniques
*originally published 2/3/2023
How to Market Your Spiritual Business in a Non-Pushy, Intuitive Way Using Effective SEO Strategy
*FYI: Some links are aff links, but I only share if I truly believe in the brand recommended!
SEO: What is it?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In a nut-shell, it’s taking steps to make sure people find you and your website quickly and easily when they are roaming around the vast planes of the interweb. If you thought Google search results were random, think again.
Caveat: I’m not an SEO expert by any means. I’ve simply studied it off and on for a few years, and what little I understand and incorporate into my business has been incredibly helpful. Most everything I’ve learned has come from a select few resources that I highly recommend:
Jason McDonald
Jason Zook
More about these two Jasons later on.
The first few years of studying SEO I was totally overwhelmed and confused by it. It seemed too deep, too complicated and too techy to waste my time on. Fortunately, a few years went by and I found myself intrigued by the concept again. This time I found some very simple and helpful suggestions (from the peeps listed above) and was able to very simply integrate some concepts into my websites. The results fascinated me.
SEO for Spiritual Business is a Long Game
First things first: it’s important to know upfront that SEO is a LONG GAME. It’s typically not a quick win and it certainly won’t be a one and done approach. In my opinion, SEO is more of a mindset than anything, and it’s something that I spend time on just twice per year in my business. I may do small SEO tasks daily as I go about working on my typical marketing tasks, but the actual SEO-behind-the-scenes-deep-dive only happens once or twice a year. In this article I’m going to share my system with you so you can (hopefully) understand the simple basics of SEO and implement it with ease.
Think Like an Intuitive SEO Expert
In my experience, I have found that SEO comes down to one thing: keywords. When you can train your brain to think in keywords, you’ll be thinking like an SEO expert. The best part is, you don’t need to be (or hire) an SEO expert! You don't even need to know a whole lot, you just need to know and master your own keywords. That and that alone, will get you so much farther with SEO than you can even imagine.
It’s actually really, really simple once you have complete clarity on how your business best helps your clients or customers. If this isn’t the case for you, I’d love to help you gain clarity with an Intuitive Business coaching session over here.
After you have a clear handle on who you help and how, keywords become a jiff. You simply need to infuse them into every object you put onto the web - that includes blog posts, images, social media content – everything!
How SEO becomes intuitive
When you are in full alignment with teaching and serving in the way you were born to, you can't help but talk about it, write about it, share it on the internet. This is called flow. When you are in flow with your business, your business niche and your business topic, you’ll find that keywords come naturally and easily to you. With just a little studying you’ll find out where you can easily plug these keywords in an authentic way. THAT is how your traffic grows with ease and flow, which in turn brings in more leads to your business, even while you sleep. The universe and SEO are best buds.
Here’s an example of what happened to me.
How I used SEO to almost double my organic traffic in 1 month
In October of 2021 I spent a month or two working through WAIM’s Content Salad article and course by Jason and Caroline Zook. (You can check out the article here, but to get the full course you’ll need to join the membership.)
The simple-to-follow explanation about SEO helped me understand some of the concepts I had been reading about for years. Step by step I worked through the worksheets and course materials, which gave me confidence and ease in SEO for the very first time, even though I had been studying it for a handful of years. Using WAIM’s worksheets and advice, I was able to pinpoint a handful of keywords for my website.
Sidebar - This was EXTREMELY hard for me in 2018 because I was still in the “throwing spaghetti against a wall” phase of my business. For those of you who haven’t heard me use this term, it basically means that for most business owners, specifically service providers and coaches, we need a year or two of play and experimentation to figure out the exact niche we want to stick with. If you are multi passionate, this is very true for you as well. My best advice? Ignore SEO until you have successfully stuck with a niche and are totally enjoying it for 6 months or longer. If you are in the spaghetti phase, do not rush through it. Enjoy it! This is the most exciting place of business in my opinion. Let your joy and intuition guide you to your most-aligned way of working.
As you may have guessed, I was in the spaghetti phase from 2018-2020. By end of 2021 I had found a niche I enjoyed and was *mostly committed to sticking to it. That made picking keywords much easier than it had been in 2018.
Once I picked my main 2-5 keywords, I spent a month of workdays filling these words into my website. I revisited old blog posts and adjusted the titles and headings. I updated my page descriptions. I combed through all of my pages that included offerings and services and I altered the names to fit into these keywords and phrases. Then, I wrote about 10 articles around these keywords and phrases in a format that would be helpful, entertaining and applicable to what my ideal audience was typing in Google around these specific topics.
Then, I went on Christmas vacation and didn’t look at my SEO analytics for a full 6 months. I just let it do its thing, trusting that the universe and search engines would hopefully reward me at some point.
Before doing this I had my average monthly pageviews was 276 – and I had been in business for 3 years at that point.
In October of 2021, one month after implementing WAIM’s SEO strategies, my pageviews jumped by 127%! From an average of 276 pageviews in early 2021 to 701 views in October alone.
My views dipped down for the next few months, but then came back strong for the majority of 2022. My average monthly pageviews for 2022 was 515, which was a total incrase of 192.88% from the year before. All this growth for only three months of focused SEO work.
To reiterate, here is my personal timeline for SEO implementation over the past two years:
In October of 2022 I implemented simple SEO strategies recommended by WAIM’s Content Salad Course.
In December of 2022 I wrote a dozen SEO-infused blog articles and posted them to my website.
In April of 2022 I dove a little deeper into SEO using Ubersuggest and Jason MacDonald’s Workbook.
The rest of my SEO implementation comes in the pockets of time when I’m doing other things. These activities take me less than 5 minutes at a time. This includes:
Using hashtags on IG
Adding and updating meta descriptions when I create or edit pages on my website
Adding alt descriptions to my images on my website
By February of 2022 I had 552 monthly siteviews, which leveled out to be a rough monthly average for the rest of the year. I now had 127 monthly views coming in organically from search engines.
*I want to verify that during this 6 month period I was heavily grieving the sudden loss of my Dad. Marketing my business was the last thing I wanted to do, so I wasn’t speaking on podcasts, going live on social media or doing much of anything at all to market The Sparkling Hippie. I share this to confidently say that these pageviews were almost completely as a result of doing some light SEO work 4 months earlier.
Because I was so excited about the results, I decided to learn more. I asked my amazing SEO-nerd friend, Dayana, (of DayanaMayfield.com) for advice. She led me to a fabulous tool called Ubersuggest, which upped my game even more! (I’ll share more about how you can use Ubersuggest later on.) By simply following the prompts and strategies suggested by this website, in conjunction with the keywords I had previously picked out, I was able to keep my organic traffic steadily increasing in a super easy way.
The success led me to circle back to another SEO resource - a book by Jason McDonald, that I originally purchased in 2019.
Reading the book in 2019 gave me somewhat of a foundational understanding, so this time I was able to build on that foundation by utilizing all of Jason’s handy worksheets to figure out my specific business keywords. (The best part about buying this book is that Jason automatically updates it every single year, and as a purchaser of the book, you always have access to the updates! I love, love, love this!)
Weekly SEO Strategy for Spiritual Business Owners
I now utilize intuitive business SEO practices as a part of my weekly marketing strategy. It takes less than an hour and again, is more about the mindset than anything else. Once you have your keywords, the road becomes clear. So, let’s talk about how to find your magic keywords.
Once you understand that the internet revolves around keywords, you can pick a few, use them wisely and you’ll master the game.
How to find your magic SEO keywords for Your Website
I want to reiterate here that this entire process is really not that helpful until you’re steady committed to a niche. If you provide a product or service that is tangible, such as skincare treatments, yoga classes or selling your book, journal or card decks, then you have my permission to move full speed ahead. However, if you are a new coach or service provider and any of the following apply to you, I recommend aborting this immediately and instead focus on trying out your thoughts and ideas by calling up practice clients and by writing some sample blog posts (you don’t have to post them, just start writing in your document software and see where you go.) If you struggle to write 10 documents on the same topic, then keep searching for your juicy, aligned, high-vibe niche.
Abort immediately if this is you:
You have lots of ideas for how to serve and find yourself switching between them constantly
You’ve changed your IG handle or Bio more than once in the last 4 months.
You can't decide on what title to give yourself
You have a few different business names you’re thinking about
You just got certified in the last 2 years and are eager to figure out what’s next, but aren’t sure what to do
You have NOT had 10 clients
You have NOT had 10 clients come to you for the same service (aka you’ve seen clients for different services)
If you relate to any of the above bullet points, you are in the spaghetti phase, and that is okay. Enjoy your time in spaghetti land and come back to SEO in a few years. :)
If you passed the spaghetti test and are committed to a niched-topic, and have vividly seen yourself doing this same niche for the next 12 months or longer, then I give you permission to proceed.
This exercise is easier for product and tangible service providers, because the results are black and white. For example, if you are a yoga instructor, your keywords will likely include the following:
Yoga
(your geographic state, city, address where classes are hosted)
(the specific type of yoga you teach)
(benefits your clients receive, which most-likely are relaxation, stress reduction, increased flexibility and detoxification, to name a few.)
You know the benefits because they were drilled in your mind when you received your certification. You know the specific type of yoga you teach, because there is a specific number of types of yoga out there. Your physical location is also a tangible search term, so you’ll use that too.
If, however, like me, the service you provide leans toward something intangible at times (creativity, intuition, and authenticity building) you may have to ground in a bit more to find your practical search terms. Here are a few prompts that may help:
What benefit or end result do you give your clients?
What do your clients say you do well for them? Hint: Look at your testimonials and feedback forms.
What do you want to be known for?
What do you do well?
What would a potential client type into Google in order to find you?
What significant problem does your ideal client face and what words would they type into Google or Pinterest to find a solution?
These questions may be helpful for both tangible and intangible business services, offers or products. To make things easy, I’ve created a simple Google Docs Worksheet for you to access here and use as a journaling document around this.
Know Thy Keywords and Commit them to Memory Forever!
Now that you know your 3-5 keywords, you are ready to master the internet. Seriously. Write these keywords on a sticky note and hang it next to your computer where you’ll see it everyday. Get them tattooed on your wrist. Print them out and hang them front and center at your desk. Whatever it takes to keep these in front of mind, do that!
I’m going to teach you how to infuse every digital thing you do with these keywords, so that you can easily and almost effortlessly begin attracting traffic to your website and social media platforms in an aligned and intuitive way.
We will be using a mixture of hashtags, location tags, content and description writing to make this happen. If you can write a paragraph using your keywords, you’re going to be a total SEO goddess.
How to implement SEO on your SquareSpace Website
If you are a new business owner in need of a website, I highly recommend SquareSpace. It’s easy to learn and empowers you to have control over your own site. It’s not necessary to have SquareSpace as your website host in order to do SEO, but because this is the host that I personally use, know and recommend, I have included special instructions and links on how to optimize your SEO specifically for Squarespace sites.
I highly recommend starting with this SEO Checklist created by SquareSpace themselves. It is very detailed and in my experience, very effective when implemented. Remember your main keywords and phrases and then simply plug and play!
A Tool to Make Your Life Super Easy
One of the most important strategies for SEO is to include a meta description on every page within your website. These descriptions should include your keywords as much as possible. You can write them yourself, or if you’d like a shortcut, I recommend trying out Rytr.me. Rytr is an AI (artificial intelligence) writing machine. You simply place your keywords in the machine, select the type of content you want (in this case, SEO descriptions), and voila! You have a darn good description that came at very minimal effort.
Here’s a few pictures of the exact process I used to create descriptions for my Pinterest Boards. (Psst..interested in Pinterest SEO? Keep reading.)
Select the type of “tone” you’d like your piece to have. I recommend having a play with it - they’re all fun!
If you are filling in a SEO meta description, choose this as the case use in Rytr.me.
Use a few of your magic keywords and type them in the “Page Meta Title” area.
Now for the magic sauce! Click the big orange button that says “Rate for me.”
In a matter of seconds you’ll have a fabulous paragraph to use as your SEO Meta Description! Here’s what it wrote for me:
I couldn’t have written it better myself!
Psst.. use my personal Rytr link for a 10,000 character free trial!
How to implement SEO on your IG account
It may be helpful to think of Instagram as a pretty version of Google. People often use the search or explore feature to find accounts they want to connect with. As an online business owner who totally knows her niche AND her hashtags, this makes your strategy simple and clear. Remember to use words and phrases that your ideal client may be typing in when they are looking for someone like you. Now, use your keywords and key phrases to infiltrate the search world of IG. We will be using a mix of Hashtags, Location Tags, optimizing your bio and post content in order to boost your SEO inside of the Instagram app.
Hashtags
Now that you have your keywords, it should be super easy to implement relevant hashtags to your posts. You can start by going to the “search bar” within the Pinterest app. Type in different variations of your keywords and notice how trendy they are as hashtags. You’ll want to use a mix of very popular tags, and less popular tags – this helps diversify your reach easily.
To make things even easier, try using a tool such as Hashtag Master. This app will come up with hashtags for you. You can simply copy and paste them into your posts, or you can mix them with other relevant hashtags you’ve found on your own.
Hashtag Master demo- easy process for great hashtags on Instagram.
Location Tags
I highly recommend using location tags on all of your IG posts. This helps you show up on geo feeds, which gives people more opportunity to find you. Even if you are an online business owner without a storefront, I still recommend this tip. Who knows, you may meet other customers, friends or peers who are right there in your current location!
Content
I hope this is beginning to sound repetitive. Use your keywords! Write fun, educational and engaging content around your specific niche. If you are doing this, it should be natural and easy to include your keywords inside of your post captions. This will help you rank high in the IG algorithm when people are searching for experts in your niche. IG can also recommend your account to people who it thinks would enjoy your content. In the eyes of the machine, you’re nothing but keywords, baby. Make it easy on the machine by consistently and strategically using your keywords again and again.
How to Implement SEO on Pinterest
Hopefully by now you’re beginning to see the internet through the eyes of keywords and keyphrases. Again, the hard part is determining your niche and keywords, after that it’s all plug and play babe. If you had to guess how you’ll improve your SEO on Pinterest, what would you say? If your answer was “add keywords everywhere!” then you are correct my friend.
Pin Descriptions
Let’s start with pin descriptions. Every pin from your own website should include a keyword-filled description. This description must also be accurate to what the content is about, but hey - if you’ve done everything right, this should be natural and easy!
Board Descriptions
Another big tip for increasing Pinterest SEO is to add keyword-focused descriptions to all of your Boards. This will help people find your content when they are searching for solutions to the problem you provide solutions to. :)
I’d like to share Rytr with you again here, because I think it makes this task so incredibly simple. I was literally giddy the first time I found out about it!
Use the same Rytr process outlined above. Then go to your Pinterest profile and click on the specific board you'd like to add a description for. Click the three dots near the title and click "edit board".
Then copy and paste the meta description into your board’s description. When you’re finished, click “Done.”
And voila! You have an optimized and searchable pin board description! Sit back and watch the likes and follows come to you!
There are sooo many ways to utilize SEO. The bottom line, is find your keywords and stick to them! If this is fun and engaging to you, I recommend going deeper…
If you really want to use blogging and Pinterest to optimize the organic traffic flowing into your business website, I highly recommend Sarah Morgan’s course “Pinterest Powerhouse” which is found inside of the Dare to Grow community. Sarah’s course is helping me improve my Pinterest game, which will lead me to an increase in organic traffic from Pinterest. If this is in alignment with your goals, feel free to use my link to receive 15% off your payment.
I hope you found this article helpful for your SEO journey. As you can see, when you see the internet through the lens of keywords, SEO becomes super simple. Please feel free to leave any questions or comments below. Happy keywording!
Want more?
Check out the podcast episode related to this post.
ep. 68. Simple, Intuitive SEO for Marketing Your Business in an Aligned Way
Feel like you have no clue what your niche is, much less your keywords?? Book a consultation to gain clarity on where your business is headed.