Marketing Happy Hour - SEO 101: Increasing Your Website's Discoverability | Lauren Gaggioli, SEO + Content Strategist

Starting point is 00:00:00 you're listening to the marketing happy hour podcast where we discuss career and industry insights with our peers in marketing we're here to talk about it all like the ups and downs of working in social media how to build authentic relationships in the influencer and pr space managing a nine-to-five and a side hustle at the same time, how to be productive in your life and career without losing your sanity, and more. Ultimately, we're here to build a community with you because we're all trying to navigate the world of marketing together. Are you ready? Grab your favorite drink and join your hosts, Cassie and Erica, for this week's episode.

Starting point is 00:00:57 This week, we're diving headfirst into search engine optimization with SEO strategist, Lauren Gaggioli. Lauren shares how to conduct effective keyword research to determine queries that your brand can rank for and how to create clear website content that actually converts. Plus, why course creation is a fantastic way to create semi-passive income for your personal brand or the business you work for. If you've been looking to crack the code on discoverability online for your brand, then this conversation is for you. Gear up for a fantastic and simply put conversation on building your online presence with Lauren Gaggioli. Grab a drink and let's dive in. Lauren, we're so excited to have you for the first time on Marketing Happy Hour. How are

Starting point is 00:01:38 you doing today? I am so great. Thank you guys so much for inviting me. This is going to be fun. Oh my gosh, you're so welcome. I was telling Erica, I was like, I have learned so much from Lauren over probably the last year or so that I've known you and you had a wonderful presentation at a conference that we both attended recently on SEO and keyword research. And I'm like, it was the most simple way that this conversation was laid out. And so I'm like, we have to have her on. So welcome to the show. You're welcome. But Lauren, we have to open up by asking you a very marketing happy hour question. But what is in your glass either right now or just what are you enjoying sipping on recently? Doesn't have to be

Starting point is 00:02:21 alcoholic, whatever you want. So I'm a home brewer. My husband and I make beer. And so we have an amazing English bitter on tap. So that is usually in my pint glass come dinner time. That's awesome. That's awesome. What about you, Erica? Well, I just have right now an Orabboros everyone probably has heard me talk about this brand it's a sparkling water brand that I love um this flavor is one of my favorites lavender cucumber but they just released or very recently released um a persimmon clove and a like pumpkin flavor sounds really weird but I'm so intrigued and I really want to try it persimmon's like one of my favorite flavors ever so I'm like oh I need to get on there and like order some. But anyway,

Starting point is 00:03:08 Cassie, what do you have in your glass? I honestly, this is rare for me. I don't have anything on my desk right now, but I had some caffeine earlier. I should be drinking some water, but I'm not currently. But I love Lauren, how you mentioned homebrewing. We have a friend who's been on the show, Michelle and her husband makes homebrewing kits. And so it's always super fascinating to hear about that whole space. So really cool that you do that. I did not know that about you. Yeah. That is so awesome. Okay. Let's go ahead and get into the conversation here. I'm really excited to learn from you. Cassie's told me wonderful things about all of the SEO tips that you have to offer. But first, could you just give us a little bit of a peek into your background and how you landed

Starting point is 00:03:53 to where you are today? Absolutely. So it's like, how far back should we go? I think it's relevant to say that I have always been a teacher at heart. I really love communicating and sharing information and stories. So my background is actually in theater and acting. But even when I was pursuing that, like that's my BFA from NYU. But even when I was going through like high school into college, I was always tutoring. I was always volunteering as a tutor. I just love transferring knowledge. So that when I graduated with a theater degree, I would, uh-oh, I need money. And so I started tutoring full-time with one of the large test prep companies. And that really got me into the ACT SAT space, which as anybody who maybe has had a kid on that path to go to college, or if you yourself remember, but then realized very quickly after I got married that my five

Starting point is 00:05:05 to nine job, because I was working in the evenings during the week, did not jive well with my husband's nine to five. So when we got married, I was like, well, if I ever want to see him again, then I suppose I need to do something different. And so I actually had a client. I worked with his daughter who turned me on to the digital entrepreneurship space. And so I took the knowledge base that I had, I had moved into tutoring one-on-one in my own company, but I shifted into providing those courses through asynchronous courses online.

Starting point is 00:05:42 It was a rough year of transition where I was like holding down both gigs and was at the helm of both ships. But it's the best decision I think I've ever made. And as you might imagine, once you get online, you're like, I've launched it. It's beautiful. Crickets. And I went, oh, now I have another problem. Like I went from this referral based business where it was such high ticket items. It was fine if I only had five, 10 clients, but now I'm in the online space that's scalable and nobody's finding me.

Starting point is 00:06:15 So I had to look for something else. And so I very early was sort of led to some of the tactics that people use for SEO, search engine optimization, getting your business found in Google. And so that's really where it began for me. And I very quickly realized that I actually liked doing the marketing stuff more than I liked teaching per se, the SAT and ACT side. So I went, oh, okay, maybe there's a new path ahead, but that's where I got started. Oh, so good. Well, before we dive into kind of the full gist of the SEO conversation,

Starting point is 00:06:59 you mentioned courses and that's a big topic that you love to talk about too. And I know a lot of people are curious about launching a course or they ask themselves, should I create one? Do I have it in me? You know, whatever. There's so many questions we can ask ourselves about that. So I'll, I'll turn that question on to you. What are your thoughts on who should create a course? You know, what's kind of the foundation there and what kind of benefits has course creation brought to your life personally? Oh, man. Let's just say my income didn't dip when I had a baby as a solopreneur.

Starting point is 00:07:35 And I think that right there is the crux of it. However, you have to own that passive income is not passive. It is actually a huge investment of time on the front end to reap the rewards on that principle of investment. You are going to get incremental payback for that heavy lift on the front end. And I think so many people think I'm going to launch it. It's going to be amazing. And I'll just make money while I sit on a beach. And like, if you don't line it up right, that's just not the way it's going to work. You know, planes, when they take off, don't just suddenly end up 50,000 feet in the air. Like they have to climb and it's not going to be any different for you. You're going to have to climb too. And you're going to have to do that really big push to even just get it built and out there.

Starting point is 00:08:28 And I think a lot of people don't own that you really need to be in it for the long haul. So if you are just cutting your teeth and you really just, I actually just wrote an article about this for, I did a guest post for a friend about becoming a mompreneur. I think if you're just getting started, starting with one-to-one offerings that are those higher ticket offerings, that if you have five clients, kind of how I started with testing and tutoring, you need to have that stable base of income to make this worthwhile and to give you gas in the tank. If you are saying, I'm going to build a business and it's exclusively going to be courses and it's

Starting point is 00:09:12 in a domain that I don't already have a tremendous amount of experience in, you are probably going to be answering the wrong questions for the people who come through the door. That one-to-one connection is hugely informative as to what to include and what not to include in a course so i'm actually launching an seo course i started after i sold higher scores i started doing one-to-one seo consulting i knew it worked because i'd done it for myself then i started coaching other people to do it and now i'm moving into an asynchronous offering. And so that progression, it takes time. The time is the magic ingredient for beer, for sourdough bread, for like all the good stuff, right? You want a really great and yummy pot roast. Like you have to take time. Like that's,

Starting point is 00:09:58 that's what you need. And so now that I have insight from having worked with clients in so many different ways, I even ran two beta versions of the course live led. Now I'm locking it into Evergreen. And so my dog is sneezing in assent for the point I just made. So yeah, I just really think that I love it. I love having a passive offering, but it is not so passive. Yeah. Especially on the front end. Yeah. That's a good reminder. And I think, you know, a lot of people that listen to this show, they're in the corporate space. A lot of people are looking to

Starting point is 00:10:40 launch their own things on the side. So this is a good thing to remember. And thank you for clearly kind of laying out the steps for getting there. But it's highly possible. And I think people who ask themselves, do I have a course inside of me? Most of the time the answer is yes. But also in the corporate space too, there's a lot of brands now launching their own offerings, whether it's corporate training or whatever, the escape game, we had Teddy Creek on the show and he talked about that. They're launching this whole side business where of course they're escape games, but they're showing organizations how to build leadership and team connectivity skills internally. And so they're hosting webinars, courses, things like that.

Starting point is 00:11:21 And so whether you're in the brand space or personally, you're trying to build your personal brand, I think there's opportunities there for you no matter what. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, let's dive into the SEO conversation based off of that. So you mentioned you kind of had this course, no traffic was driving to it. And so that's, that's kind of what you started to think about when digging into SEO. So we'd love to kind of know, you know, boosting organic traffic. That's a big question. What are some foundational steps that brands should consider in their content strategy

Starting point is 00:11:58 in order to do so? Absolutely. So the first thing you need is a solid foundation, right? You can't build on rocky shores, right? You need a firm place to grow from. So what that means in the organic search space is a solid website. your website has to be clean and organized. And sometimes I say that and people are like, well, I'm out of SEO. Like, I don't want to touch the website. I don't want to do anything. It's like, okay. But according to Ahrefs, which is the SEO tool that I use, 91% of web pages on the internet are not getting organic search traffic at all. Zero. And to me, I go, well, that makes it feel more doable. Like, can I be part of the 9%? Like, probably. And I probably don't have to go that far. So I very much adopt a Pareto principle here. I say, I go 80-20 on this. I'm like, can you do the 20% of things that will make it a little bit better

Starting point is 00:13:06 and then you can tip over into becoming part of that nine percent minority that is actually like made friends with uncle google and so assessing your website i have a free uh diy audit on my website i walk you through three uh, short videos about how to assess your website, how to look at, are you getting any traffic? Where is it coming from? What's your domain authority? How do you stack up against other websites? And then we look into things like PageSpeed Insights, which is a Google product that will tell you, do you have some issues on your site? I will tell you if you have a WordPress site, you probably have image loading issues. Unless you're like on top of this, you probably

Starting point is 00:13:56 have a problem there. And so, you know, plugins like Imagify are wonderful. Caching plugins like WP Rocket can immediately up-level your website. So you might have to go to the source and upgrade your hosting. Whatever the case may be, if you can get your site loading quickly, mobile friendly, then you are in a minority already. Because most of the sites I look at when people come to me, I'm like, oh, wow, they have a lot of really simple fixes I can do quickly to up-level the foundation. And so that's where it starts because with so many websites on the internet, Google has a plethora of websites to choose from. So you just need to stand out a little bit in order

Starting point is 00:14:44 to start to elevate your brand, elevate your offerings. That's awesome. And I'm curious, as you were speaking, I was wondering, you know, you mentioned WordPress and maybe that has some issues of its own. What website, you know, builder or whatever is the best, you know, I'm sure there's, there's probably not a straightforward answer. They probably all have different, like really good aspects and some not so great aspects. But what do you recommend for somebody who is starting to build their website just so that they can, you know, optimize it greatly?

Starting point is 00:15:15 Absolutely. So the thing you have to balance is control versus roadblocks, right? So I like to build in WordPress because I have so much control. And I've been in this space for almost a decade now. I had my first WordPress site built out, but then I've managed pretty much everything with the exception of a few custom coding projects myself. So I'm very comfortable in the WordPress ecosystem. There are a lot of other CMSs coming online right now. My whole thing is I am not an early adopter of technology. I stand back, I let all the dust settle, and then I dive in once I see who's going to last.

Starting point is 00:15:58 Because the thing you don't want is to build your website five times. That would be the worst, right? That's a total waste of time. WordPress isn't going anywhere anytime soon. If you want an easier option, Squarespace is okay. Wix, I would not do. I would not build in Kajabi. Like the all-in-one solutions are a lie in a sense because everything can't be everything to everybody, right? No tool is that. So I like the ability to upgrade my hosting and control my image size and download a plugin if I see there's a problem. Like I was able to take my WordPress site that wasn't performing very well with site speed and up level pretty quickly. Downloaded a couple of plugins, changed a few settings,

Starting point is 00:16:49 and off I went. The problem with something like a Squarespace, they control your hosting. They control a lot of the backend. And so can you get found? Yes. I actually have a client who I showed Cassie in that presentation. He's 10x he's 10 X, his traffic in the last six months, he went from getting 250 hits a month to getting 3000 a month as an e-commerce site. And his site doesn't perform perfectly, but we found opportunities that weren't being leveraged. He's met that need in the Google ecosystem. And Google doesn't have a choice, right? Like there's nobody writing for these keywords. He's going to take the lead. But

Starting point is 00:17:34 if somebody catches on and their site is more functional, could they overtake him? Possibly. So we're in that conversation right now. Should we change over? So it really depends. I think if you want ease, I would go with Squarespace. If you are up for it, again, if you're in for the long haul, you really want to get found in Google, I'd take that big bite now. I'd figure out WordPress while it's easy and you can fail small. And then you don't have to move it later. Because the other thing, if you are thinking about courses, I don't love hosting off my

Starting point is 00:18:07 site because one of the things for SEO that's really important is that people come back to your site. I host all my courses on my own site through a plugin. And what that means is that I get more people coming back to my site. Google's paying attention. And they know that I have repeat visitors. So if you're offering courses and you're giving all that traffic to Kajabi or Thinkific or whomever, that might actually not

Starting point is 00:18:31 serve you. But if you don't have the technical prowess to fix problems, then having them on WordPress and having a crash is also not good. So you have to know yourself. I'm a really big proponent of taking imperfect action. So see the whole picture, assess the lay of the land and choose what's going to actually allow you to ship. Get those thoughts out of your head, get the courses out of your mind, out of your Google Drive, get them out there. And whatever way allows you to do that in a way where you understand the downsides of each, that's the way you should pick. Oh my gosh. I love that. And I love that you said get them out of the Google drive because Cassie and I

Starting point is 00:19:11 have literally been doing the Google drive brainstorm document, like keeping it open on our, on our desktop for like two years now. So. Yeah. It feels good to dump something in there. Doesn't it? It's like, Ooh, I did it check, but actually did you? Right. Exactly. We're working on that. I listen, we all do it. It's like, this is not me pointing fingers. This is I'm right there with you. No, absolutely. I totally understand. Okay. So I want to talk a little bit about, you know, providing a clear path to purchase for your products. You have this offering content catalyst, and that's where you kind of talk about that. How does content play a

Starting point is 00:19:50 role in guiding potential clients through that journey? Absolutely. So once you have that strong foundation of a website that performs well enough that it also allows you to, you know, get the content out, I think you have to know this about keyword research. And I'll get back to your question in a second, but it's really important to understand that keywords track in different channels. Some keywords are informational keywords. What is organic marketing? Is an informational keyword. Organic marketing course, that person has a credit card in their hand going, I need to learn more about this. I already know what it is. Now I know I need it and I need to know more. And so that's a transactional intent. And you want to be writing content that is very clear and specific to the query.

Starting point is 00:20:40 And what the person behind the query, where they are in their buyer's journey. They're just seeking information. That's an article. That's a blog post. And you cannot push that person and expect a conversion if you are pushing them towards a paid offering because they didn't show up with their credit card in their hand. They just wanted information, and information is free on the internet.

Starting point is 00:21:01 So you want to have a lovely opt-in offer. That's a way to really nurture that person who was like, hey, I need help. Google alley-ooped you, dished you up in the SERPs and said, here you go. This person knows what they're talking about. They've been vetted by me, Uncle Google. You know me and trust me. And so when they come through to your site, you want to engage them by inviting them onto your email list in some form or fashion. Now, if the easiest way to do that is for you to say, join my newsletter, fine, but nobody really needs another newsletter, right?

Starting point is 00:21:36 Nobody's looking for that. Try to give them something enticing that's a useful tool for that person taking the next right step. And so we really have to think about the value we're delivering there. People are getting real, real tight with their emails. It is a kind of currency. Never doubt that you have to actually give them something of value on the other side. Now, by contrast, you can get your sales pages ranking, which by the way, I'm doing right

Starting point is 00:22:06 now and it's awesome. I have a mastermind and it's climbing. I'm on the second page of Google, which as everybody knows is the best place to bury a dead body. But that means I'm on the upward trajectory and I'm almost to page one, which is really where you want to be. So on that first page, if somebody's searching for a mastermind, they know it's a paid offering. Nobody gives away masterminds for free. And so if they click

Starting point is 00:22:31 through, they have their credit card in hand. And if I can make that pitch in a sales page, I can assume a 1% conversion. And so this, if I've done my job right and alleviated all the friction. And so this is the way to really carve the path to a more direct path to client, right? As entrepreneurs, we're all problem solvers. And so your solution is to have a clear paid offering. Make sure that page is robust and SEO optimized. Make sure you know the keywords people are searching and write that content as though somebody who does not know you is going to land there and will have enough information to click buy comfortably. And then on the flip side, the larger aggregate body of your informational content are those blog posts. And if you're

Starting point is 00:23:26 curious about the language people are using, that comes down to keyword research. And when you can really meet that search intent with that clear sort of I'm in a transactional query or I'm in an informational query, if you have that split track mind, ultimately anybody who opts in over on the informational side through nurturing, through email, can end up on that purchase page. Right? That's sort of the flow eventually for those informational queries and why it's important to blog. Blogging is not dead. Absolutely, you need to have information on your site that directly correlates with whatever offerings you have.

Starting point is 00:24:04 No, that's great. And I'm sitting here listening to you. I'm like, I have so much more to learn about websites and like offerings and all of that stuff. This is so great. I know about a tool called Ahrefs, right? I believe it's called that. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:24:18 So how can we use that to get started with keyword research? If that's, you know, if we're a beginner in this area? And what should we look for in terms of like volume and competition in those keywords? Yes. I love that you mentioned Ahrefs because it is my favorite tool. I've tried them all, SEMrush, Moz, like I've gotten into the back ends and I will tell you Ahrefs is very clear. It is also very expensive. And I say this as someone who pays for it. That said, when I was building out my course, Organic Marketing Ecosystem, that's a course about SEO, I needed an offering that was either low cost or free for my clients to go through and do some of their preliminary keyword research. And in digging under the hood, I found out that Ahrefs actually has

Starting point is 00:25:07 a bunch of free offerings in their free SEO tools. So they have a keyword generator. So if you search free SEO tool keyword generator, you should be able to find it. And in there, you can type in the queries you think people are searching for. And then you can see what is the monthly search volume. It's the average from the last 12 months. So if you're searching like Christmas advent calendar, like it's going to be obviously a huge spike in December, but they're going to average that across the 12 months.

Starting point is 00:25:42 And then it'll show you the exact language that is used around that query. It'll show you the keyword competition or keyword difficulty. There you want a really low number, as low as possible. It's a scale of 1 to 100. And essentially, the higher the number, the more people have written about it, the harder it will be for you to rank for it. So really low numbers. I say under 25. If you can go even into single digits, chef's kiss.

Starting point is 00:26:13 That's the best. And then that monthly search volume is the monthly search volume in Google. So it's how many people type this exact query into the Google search bar each and every month? And obviously, their higher is better. But don't poo-poo a little 150 person per month search. Because if you're not getting any traffic right now, that's a great place to start, especially if the competition is low. I think of like the Dave Ramsey debt snowball, right?

Starting point is 00:26:51 Start with your lowest debt, pay that off first and build momentum same idea this is the you know lauren gaggioli seo snowball start with really low low low competition even if the volume is small and snowball it as lou likes to say i know he's been on the show if lou as lou likes to say if you had 50 people standing in your living room asking to hear what you have to say you'd be ecstatic but when we see 50 people downloaded our podcast we're like you know that's that's not actually you have to remember it's a person behind that number and if you can help that person, is it worth it? I think it is. And so if you keep that in mind, just know rising tides lift all ships. If you can get those 50 people, there's probably actually a lot of keywords around that keyword you found that will also come along for the journey because they're close enough. So don't, don't poopoo those lower numbers because because there are people who need your

Starting point is 00:27:46 help oh so good and so with that too so we've done our keyword research we've kind of figured out some of the different terms and and phrases we want to rank for obviously you mentioned using that when building our pages on our site but what about blog content what can we kind of consider when using that keyword research to create blogs? And are there any other considerations, you know, length of blogs, things like that, that we should be implementing into our content creation there? Absolutely. So this is where SEO kind of straddles, like I'm using air quotes here, soft skills like

Starting point is 00:28:21 empathy and like connection and like really using language to bond with folks and also some of those hard skills of like the technical side. So your URL structure needs to be really clear. It needs to be targeted to a particular keyword. Informational versus transactional, the main difference for me is what are we driving towards? What's the single offering I'm pushing people towards at the bottom? Informational, it's something free. Transactional, it's a buy now button the whole way. That's the only call to action. And so we really want to make sure that all of the on-page markings and some of that technical and the soft skills do both need to be working in both channels.

Starting point is 00:29:11 You need to have clear URL structure, using dashes to separate words as like spaces. If people want to come to my site, they can sort of see how I've done it. And that is really important that the URL structure matches the title. And then whatever keyword you're targeting, you want to include it in the first paragraph of your copy. And again, doesn't matter which side of the coin you're on, you do need to follow that in both cases. You want to leverage your headers. So only one H1 per page. It's your title. But H2 through H6. You should absolutely be leveraging that to break up the content in the same way that they say that if you are writing an email and you're doing the like single bolded line all the way through, you should be able to scan just the bolded lines and follow the arc of the email. This is the same idea, but with headers and it breaks up the text. Leverage bulleted lists, numbered lists. Make sure you're making it

Starting point is 00:30:11 reader-friendly, but to your point, Cassie, you do want to have robust content. You do want to make sure you are writing enough that you're providing enough context. And the way that I get there is I remember that I am educating, whether it's educating about a product that I offer and telling my story, the process that people go through, all the things that are included, making sure they know about refund policies, making sure that there's an FAQ section, all of those things add text because I'm trying to be very clear. The way I'm organizing it is, you know, I'm bouncing around, I have, you know, testimonial boxes, that sort of thing in order to ensure that people can see it all. But Google's going to crawl every single word and know what that page is about on the informational side i'm making sure that i am doing really clear um single threaded thought right i'm

Starting point is 00:31:14 going all the way from top to bottom and i'm helping that person have a transformation you came here because you asked this question right so um there's a query, what is the best personal mission statement generator? And I took that query and was like, okay, I see what this person is looking for. They're looking for an easy button for their life's purpose. This is a problem, right? So I took a kind of counterintuitive approach and said, you are the best personal mission statement generator. And then in addition to linking to actual personal mission statement generators, I also walked through why you can't hand off that work. That like, if you're going to name your life's purpose, you can't answer it in a quiz.

Starting point is 00:31:58 Like that, that ain't going to cut it. And so I walked through why I walked through some alternatives. And then at the end, I say all personal mission statements are informed by your core values. Here's my core value list. If you would like to get it, you can download it here. And they can type in their email address. I send it to them. It puts them into a nurture sequence about purpose specific to that query. So thinking about it that way, making sure again, you're leveraging headers. The other thing you really want to make sure you're doing, and this is probably the biggest mistake I see people make, you have to interlink to other content on your site using anchor text.

Starting point is 00:32:39 And what that means is that if I were to write in a different post other than the one I just told you about, something about a personal mission statement generator, I would highlight that text and hyperlink it to the other post. Because Google needs our help. We understand our site, right? We know the map in our head. But Google needs to understand what content's interrelated. And while I talk about purpose in this single vertical, I also talk about organic marketing and SEO. I also talk about digital entrepreneurship. Those are my three pillars.

Starting point is 00:33:18 And I need to show Google that the personal mission statement is part of the purpose side. I likely will not tie to that from an SEO post, right? And so we're helping the bots call our site and go, oh, they're saying this is interlinked. Search Engine Journal just came out with a updated, like, what does Google actually care about for the rankings report? And anchor text is one of the most important things. So podcasters, marketers out there, when you are linking to people, don't say follow Lauren at laurengaggioli.com, just hyperlink my bio, Lauren Gaggioli, that ties to my website. If you want to talk about, you know, organic marketing ecosystem, highlight that and interlink that to that sales page. And that will give me something. It gives you something.

Starting point is 00:34:06 Putting your guest names in the URLs is hugely helpful too, because you'll pop up in the search engine. If somebody searches for me, you get elevated. And so there's a lot of little hacks that you can do. And again, if this is overwhelming, remember that 80-20 rule. Don't do it all. Just pick the few that feel like, okay, I can do this one thing better today and do that first. That's awesome. And that's super helpful. I can't even tell you enough how great this is.

Starting point is 00:34:33 And I think there's a lot of takeaways too for people listening who work in brands and maybe they aren't entrepreneurs or they aren't developing their own offerings. I think there's a lot of takeaways here that you can go to whoever at the brand is managing your website and kind of say, listen to this, because I think we need to implement some of these things on our website to streamline our messaging and clarify what we have going on and drive sales even further. So I think there's a lot of really

Starting point is 00:34:58 great little nuggets of wisdom in what you've shared today. I feel like we could talk about this all day, but we do have to close eventually. So we are approaching the end here. And this is the question we love to ask on every episode of the show. And that's just, what do you know now that you wish you knew a little earlier on in your career? If you build it, they won't come. I wish I knew that. With my first company, like I said, I was in a very crowded space, test prep. Names of companies probably just spring to everybody's mind. You thought about the Kaplans, the Princeton Reviews. You thought about the Revolution Preps, all of these folks. I was able to drive 16,000 new users per month for three years running to the site as a solopreneur. I did everything. I built the courses.

Starting point is 00:35:45 I was a salesperson. I produced my own podcast. I also wrote the content on the site. And that to me, like if you feel like David versus Goliath or maybe you're Goliath and you're still not performing, like sales and marketing are the same thing. If you want qualified inbound leads to show up at your doorstep, the number one salesperson

Starting point is 00:36:09 on your team should be Google. It will make every human's job so much easier. So write good content, show your heart, be empathetic to the struggle they're going through. Make sure you satisfy human need as well as Google's needs. And you will find that there is a level of abundance that can flow into your business no matter its size. Oh my gosh. Thank you for that. I feel like the last couple of weeks we've had just very good insights on that question, just unconventional advice, which is always really refreshing to hear. So thank you for that. But Lauren, as we close out too, we have to know

Starting point is 00:36:50 where everyone can follow along with you, learn from you. You have an amazing website with a lot of awesome resources. So give us all the details on that and we'll be sure to link everything below as well. Wonderful. So like I said, if you don't know where you're starting, then no shame. Like very few people talk about this. Very few people want to talk about this. But you should absolutely look at the ugly stuff first, potentially ugly stuff. Look at where you're starting. And I have the free DIY audit. It's a little mini course. I walk you through it and make it super simple. So that's at laurengaggioli.com forward slash DIY audit. And then if you want to learn more about how to tackle this, I would love to support you. I have a mastermind.

Starting point is 00:37:36 It's very flexible. It's not like a long-term commitment. If you want to do SEO coaching, I do that. I do done for you, done with you. And also I have the brand new course coming out on February 14th of 2024. So if you love your business, you got to learn to love SEO. And so we're going to be launching that on Valentine's day. And, uh, I, if you're interested, you can come to organicmarketingecosystem.com to learn more. Sign up for the wait list and I will ping you when it's ready. Amazing.

Starting point is 00:38:09 Lauren, thank you again for joining us and just sharing all of this knowledge with us. We really appreciate you coming on today. Thank you, ladies, for having me. This was a pleasure. Thanks for listening to this week's episode. We hoped you loved it as much as we did. If you enjoyed the conversation, we'd love to get your feedback on the episode. Head to the review section of your favorite podcast app and let us know what you thought. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. We are so excited to share that our first ever free Marketing Happy Hour digital resource is

Starting point is 00:38:54 now available. Download the Dream Career Game Plan today at marketinghappyhr.com forward slash freebie. That's marketinghappyhr.com forward slash freebie. This five-step workbook will guide you through defining your goals, building your network, diversifying your skills, influencing where you're at, and investing in your growth. Cassie and I created this resource with marketing careers in mind, but the framework can be applied to any industry. Our hope is that this workbook will help you truly elevate your career, whether you're in the market for a new position or just looking to make your mark

Starting point is 00:39:30 in your current organization. No matter where this resource finds you, we are cheering you on every step of the way. So go check it out at marketinghappyhr.com forward slash freebie to download and make your career dreams come true.

Marketing Happy Hour - SEO 101: Increasing Your Website's Discoverability | Lauren Gaggioli, SEO + Content Strategist

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