The Ultimate Blog Podcast - SEO Expert Advice from Yoast: Simple Strategies to Grow Your Blog

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

If you’ve spent any amount of time blogging, you’ve probably heard about SEO (search engine optimization) and how important it is for improving your blog’s ranking on Google. But how do you make SEO work for you now and in the future?On today’s episode of The Ultimate Blog Podcast, Amy and Jennifer interviewed Carolyn Shelby, a Principal SEO from Yoast, to break it all down. Carolyn is sharing Yoast SEO basics, simple tips to improve your ranking and get more readers, and how we can arm ourselves for the future to make a blogging business that lasts.🔗Try Yoast and use the code ubp15 to save 15%🎧Get our Beginner Blogger Tips Playlist on Spotify💻Try Keysearch for keyword research and SEO🔗Check out the show notes for episode 171

Welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast. This podcast is the podcast we wish we had when we started blogging. I'm Amy Reinicki. And I'm Jennifer Draper. Our episodes dive deep into how to monetize your blog, sharing unique insights and practical tips. We bring you in-depth interviews with successful bloggers and experts who offer valuable, actionable advice.

Our mission is to educate, support, inspire, and empower you in your blogging business. Welcome to The Ultimate Blog Podcast. Today, we are going to talk about something that is important for all of us bloggers, and that is SEO. And we brought on Carolyn Shelby from Yoast, which is exciting because we've never had anybody on the podcast before to talk about Yoast. And it's something that we have recommended since day one of Spark Media Concepts. So Carolyn, welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast. Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here.

Yes. SEO is a really hot topic with blogging. It's ebbed and flowed through the years, but I would love to just talk about some of the most important things that bloggers could focus on in regards to SEO and what they need to be focused on likely in the beginning as they start their blogs. Okay. So there's a couple different things that you need to be focused on. There are things that are technical in nature

and then there are things that are more on page and content related. So if we talk first about the technical things, those are the things that plugins like Yoast can help you with. They'll help you get just some of those things that you don't wanna have to think about all the time, but they're very important to helping you rank.

And the reason they're important is because they help the crawlers, the search engines, understand what your content is about and find it easily. And they facilitate the crawling of the search engines through your site. So plugins like Yoast will have a site map generator. You can make your own site map, 100% possible to do that, pain in the butt. I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't give it to an intern to do that.

That's how much of a pain in the butt it is. And the reason you want a plugin to handle that for you, or if you have a theme that does that for you, is because every time you add something new to the site, you need that added to the site map too. You don't need to constantly resubmit the site map to Google, but you do need to have that site map in the correct format, correctly formatted,

and it needs to be in a specific location so that the crawlers can find it. That's huge. Another thing that you need to do is make sure in a specific location so that the crawlers can find it. That's huge. Another thing that you need to do is make sure that you haven't accidentally set your site to be not indexed by the search engines, because if I had a nickel for every site I saw

where they, it's like, well, you got this clicked, and that means you're never gonna be in the search engines. I could buy a very nice latte at Starbucks with the number of sites I've seen that are like that. So they do that. You also need to have underlying HTML structure. So you want to have your H1s in the right spots. You want to have the right code around your images.

You want to make sure that your images have alt text so that they can be accessible by ADA standards, but also it's an opportunity to feed a little bit of extra context into the search engines. One of the great things that I love, and I don't mean to keep talking about Yoast, but I'm in it all the time, even before I worked at Yoast, what I liked about Yoast is in the settings, you can set catch all defaults for like your meta descriptions and for excerpts. So in the backend, you could say, okay, on all of these posts, if I forget to write a meta description, I want you to take the excerpt and use the excerpt as a meta description.

And in the excerpt, you can say, oh, hey, if I forget to write an excerpt, I want you to take the beginning of the content and use the beginning of the content. Because I've wrote a lot of news and in news SEO, that first paragraph, I don't know if you've ever written straight news stories like journalism class stuff.

The first paragraph really is the most succinct description of what's in the rest. We don't do long leads. We don't have these long poetic, this is a story of my life and then, oh, by the way, this is what happened. Everything gets shoved into the first paragraph. So it's perfect for saying, if I need a meta description, just take that first paragraph and stick it in there. But that way, if I forget, no harm, no foul, because there's still something there and it's not empty. You can programmatically code how your titles appear. You can say, okay, I want you to always take the page title and then I want a separator

and then I want you to use the category and the tag and the first three tags. And then I want you to have my site name and always generate it like that. Boom. It's always generated like that. So it's very handy to have a lot of those things that you wouldn't normally think about all the time, taken care of for you, so you can focus on the content, which brings us to the content. So in the content, you need to make sure, especially now, it used to be that you could go, okay, what's a profitable,

what's a profitable niche I can write about, and then go read other people's stuff and just kind of rewrite their stuff? You can't do that anymore. You really have to have not only a little bit of keyword research, so you're using the phrasing that people are searching for, but you need to have a unique perspective and ideally add something of use to the topic that people are going to find valuable and that is different than or adding something to what is already out there. Have you heard about the duplicate content penalty?

It's not a penalty and there's no such thing. So the oh it's not a penalty what it is is the I used to click baseball cards when I was a kid and When you have more than one of the same card which happens You pick the one you like the best and that's the one you keep right? Google's the same way with the index. They don't need 50 copies of the of basically the same content, right? Google's the same way with the index. They don't need 50 copies of basically the same content, right? So they're going to pick the piece of content that they like the best, and they're not going to bother putting in the index the duplicates. So it's not really a penalty. It's more of an efficiency on their part. So what you need to avoid doing

is duplicating what other people have. You need to differentiate yourself. So you need to avoid doing is duplicating what other people have. You need to differentiate yourself. So you need to be different, you need to have value, and you need to make sure then that on the underside that it's technically crawlable and accessible to the search engines. Because even if it's the greatest content in the universe, if the search engines can't crawl it and get to it, it will never be indexed. So those are the things that I think every beginning blogger needs to know right out of the gate.

You can't just talk about nothing. You have to add value. And your stuff has to be findable. So I think one of the questions that all bloggers start asking then is when you're using the plugin Yoast and you're writing a piece of content for anybody who hasn't used it, what we're describing is when you get down to the bottom of your blog post

in WordPress, there's gonna be a little section that says Yoast and that is from the plugin being installed and that is where you're gonna put that title and meta description and all of that. Can you talk a little bit about then what that is where you're gonna put that title and meta description and all of that. Can you talk a little bit about then what that is? I think the question we get is, does Google pull that information? Or is that just like a checks and balances for us

to make sure that we're adding the correct information? What is that section used for? So some of it does end up getting written so like where you can write the title and you can change the slug and you can rewrite the meta description. That's your opportunity to custom write for that page. Something that is going to replace what's in your catch all that we defined in the settings. So if we set in the settings, if I forget to write a meta description, use the excerpt from the top of the content. On the page itself, you have the opportunity to write something completely custom. If you write something there, that is what will get written into the top of the

document and that is what Google will see. If you don't write anything there, the defaults take over. see if you don't write anything there, the defaults take over. So if you skip it, the site will still function. If you take advantage of writing something custom in those spots, that will overwrite what the system would have given it by default, essentially. Now there are other sections though, like where it asks you to set a keyword, right? Meta keywords, which are the ones that appear in the top of the document that Google would see, haven't been a thing for at least 10 years, probably more like 15 at this point. So when Yoast is asking you to set a keyword, a focus keyword, this is not to be shared

with Google. This is to help our system evaluate what you wrote through the lens of this is what you're targeting and then give you advice on how to target that better. So if you don't set that, that's fine, but the guidance it gives you isn't going to be as good because it won't know what you were focusing on. So if you write a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful article about dogs but you don't mention dogs a whole lot and you don't say that it's a particular kind of dog, let's say it's a chow chow or something that you want to write about, if

you don't tell our system that, it's gonna read your content and it's gonna say, okay this is fine, you know. Maybe I'd use some more transition words. Maybe I wouldn't have such long sentences. I get dinged on that all the time. It drives me nuts. Carolyn, you're writing at a much too high of a level. I'm like, it's how I write. But it'll say things like that because you haven't told it that you're specifically writing about chow chows. If you say, hey, chow-chows are my primary keyword phrase and fluffy dogs are my secondary phrase, once it knows that, it can say, oh, well, in that case, you really should mention chow-chows and fluffy dogs in your first paragraph. You really should say it here, and you really should talk

more a little bit about X, Y, and Z. So if you give it that extra detail, which you don't have to do, but if you do, it can help you better. It's just kind of like a guideline. And I think it's helpful to use that to go back because it does give you some steps that, okay, do this, this, this. And so I think that is helpful. I want to ask something else in regards to you specifically, readability. There's a readability. And that is a question we get asked all the time from students is what, like in order to get it green. So if you haven't used the Yoast plugin,

like you want your lights to be green, essentially, that means you're like good to go. And according to Yoast, that means like your content is good. Readability sometimes, I love your face right now. Readability is like like if I get it to that then it doesn't sound great anymore and it takes away the personalization a little bit or maybe a little bit robotic so I would just love to hear directly from you the point of readability and how we are supposed to

be using that specific function within the Yoast plugin. So I'm going to get in so much trouble for saying this. Oh. Oh. Not everything has to be a green light. Mm-hmm. Well, that's what we tell everybody as well. So good. I'm glad to hear it.

It's really, it's a guideline. It's a recommendation. But it's impossible to write guidelines and rules that are 100% applicable 100% of the time. So they're largely applicable most of the time. However, there are situations where, and that speech pattern that I just gave where I said a sentence and then I said, however, that was a comma, however, and a semi-colon and it doesn't like those because that creates really complex sentences. And I tend to write like I speak.

And I speak in complex sentences. So there are frequently times where I will write a post and it's, no, you have way too many long sentences. I'm like, yes, but this is how I speak. Or this is what people expect from me. Or the level that I'm writing, the education level of the people that I'm writing to are going to expect a certain level of complexity in my language. I'm not writing to people, I'm not writing to children.

This isn't for children, this is for adults. Like if I'm doing some sort of complex legal analysis or something, I don't expect most people to read that. Most people, yeah. So in situations like that, I think you have to be confident enough in your writing and your communication skills to say, you know what, thank you for the advice. However, I understand that for what I'm doing, this is really probably more appropriate and thanks, but I'm good. It doesn't mean the advice is bad. It just means that it's meant to be broadly applicable. It doesn't mean that you're not in that 10 or 20% where it's not applicable.

You shouldn't take that as a criticism of your writing because I'm sure your writing is beautiful. There's just different styles and different, you know. Now there are times when it will say you started your heading and then three sentences with the same word. Now from journalism school, I would remember that as being, oh my god, you don't do that. And I have vivid memories as a child of going back through and looking, it's like, I need to, I need, I can't keep saying this word. Yeah, yeah. You know?

And SEO is weird in that even if you're accustomed to, oh, I can't keep saying this word over and over again, you do have to say it a certain number of times, which feels a little creepy to people who were bludgeoned into you don't keep saying the same word over and over again. So there is kind of a balancing act that you have to achieve. But the guidance is guidance. The guidance is not 10 commandments that was carved in stone kind of stuff. It's ... They're recommendations. They're not orders. So please don't panic if all of your lights

are not green. It is not the end of the world. There's never going to be such thing as perfection when we're dealing with writing. Writing is largely, writing is an art form, right? And that's why people can't ever truly be replaced by AIs because we have that level of creativity that AIs can't really replicate. They can mimic it, but they don't necessarily understand the context and the nuance in a way that would not give it away

that it was done by a machine. So please don't panic if you're not getting all green lights, especially when it comes to the sentence structure and complexity, because you might have a very conversational style to your writing. And sometimes conversational styles don't lend themselves well to grammatical rules and regulations. And there's not a whole lot you could do with that.

And I'd far rather you be true to your voice and be different and not sound like everyone else than get that green light and sound like everyone else because I think you're going to be more successful if you're letting your inner light shine. Yeah. It's such a balancing act and I think that's where it becomes important to really know your audience, know who's reading your content, know who you're trying to reach so that you are writing in a way that meets whatever they're looking for.

But I think it's hard too because you're hearing all these rules that people have set forth, whether it's through a plugin or just hearing what other bloggers are saying. And you're like, oh, you have to do this to be able to be shown in Google, to be able to rank in Google. You have to follow all these rules. But then you're on the other side. You're like, but this is what people really want. So how do you find that balance in making sure that your content gets seen, but it also gets seen by the right people?

There are very few situations where there are strict rules that Google issues where you have to, there is a thing you have to do if you want to be included in the index. For a while with news, you had to have a number sequence that was not a date in the slug, like very specific, but they'll tell you about that. They tell you about that. They tell you about that at Google search central. You know what? And again, I hate doing shameless plugs. Every month Alex, who's the other principal SEO at Yoast and I do a webinar where we go through all of the news updates from the world of SEO, anything that was announced. And we just,

we go through the headlines and we say, this is a headline, this is what it means, really nothing you need to know. This is a headline, this is what it means, this is what it means for you and here's what you need to do about it. So we just sort of, instead of just feeling overwhelmed by all of the changes and the things people are saying, because people come up with some crazy advice

on a regular basis. And so Alex and I will look at that and go, yeah, that's not a thing. So, you know, I get that this worked for this guy, but this is why there were all these different, very specific circumstances in which this worked, and it's probably not going to be applicable to 99% of you.

So, back to the figuring things out, which this worked and it's probably not going to be applicable to 99% of you. So back to the figuring things out, there's different patterns and things that work in different industries. So understanding what is working in your industry or in your vertical is going to be helpful. We know that in recipes, what tends to rank is lots of text, which means you end up with your life story and then the recipe at the bottom. There's a lot of people that were using very specific advertising and monetization programs and there's a lot of dispute, I would say, in that industry about whether or not those advertising programs

are good for you or not. And I would not tell you to demonetize yourself, but I would probably give specific guidance. Don't put an ad at the tippity top because that's a very technical reason. It's not even a Google reason. You can't control those ads. Those ads swap out all the time, and sometimes you get a dud ad. You get a dud ad at the tippity top, and the crawler comes down. And you have to understand that when Google's crawling your site, it starts at the top and

it goes to the bottom. If it encounters a roadblock at the top that it can't get around, it stops. It doesn't continue. Even if it comes back later and gets that content later, now it's later, and you weren't first out of the gate, and it knows that it encounters problems sometimes on your site, which is a bad user experience. So those aren't like Google rules though. That's a understanding how the search engines operate and making sure that you're not introducing

roadblocks into its path. So I don't know that that's a Google requirement. Google's requirement is make it so I can read your content. But then we start getting fancy, and sometimes our fanciness introduces stumbling blocks that cause problems with the crawl. And that's what we want to do is not cause problems with the crawl. So recipes, we know that life story recipe, and part of the reason that we do that, especially

now with AI, is that you can't copyright a recipe. So that recipe is fair game for anybody really. What's going to differentiate you from everybody else is what you write around it. So that's where you want to have your unique, this is what I did. This is why I made the substitution because my kid's allergic to X, Y, and Z. And my, my stepfather won't eat vegetables, you know, that kind of stuff. Life actually true story. Um, but doesn't eat any vegetables at all.

Iceberg lettuce in a bowl with ranch dressing. That's it. But, but so recipes have their own, their own specific thing. There are other industries that have... You'll see patterns in how people are writing their blog posts and how they're presenting their website because those things tend to rank well. And it's not necessarily that it's any kind of rule. This goes back a ways.

You have to understand that the computers don't see things the way we see things. They see numbers. So everything's reduced to numbers. Nobody's ever perfect. It's whoever's closest to perfect, I guess, is the way to do it. And perfect, though, is based on averages and averages for your industry. So if you take like the top 10 sites that are ranking

and reduce them all to numbers, it's whatever number is closest to what is perfect for that industry. This is very hard to do without charts. I feel like I need a whiteboard. The point is, what is perfect for each industry varies because the sites that are in each industry vary. So things are going to tend to cluster naturally. If you need to know what is good for your industry, go look at who the top 10 sites ranking are in your industry

and look for similarities in what they're doing. Look for things that maybe you could do better, but before you know what you can do better, you need to know what they're doing that you're not, if that makes sense. So there is some strategy to it. I wouldn't necessarily freak out that you're not doing this one magic thing, because generally if there's a magic thing, Google will figure out how to make that not magic anymore. Because they don't like tricks. They don't like to be fooled.

So if you find a thing, it's, oh my God, I did this. I rocketed up past all these sites that I shouldn't be ranking ahead of and Google's going to go, oh, hey, hey, you shouldn't be here. What'd you do? And then they'll look and they'll go, oh, I see what you did. Nope, you don't get to do that anymore. And that's, and that's where you get volatility in the rankings because people make changes. They'll find things or Google will make a change.

And they're just imagine you know the Wizard of Oz the wizard was behind the curtain and there was this machine and had all the little knobs everything they're back there and they're just turning knobs and sometimes they turn a knob and something goes really weird and like oh hey I'm gonna turn the knob back now and then it goes back to normal and like well maybe I'll try this knob instead they They're constantly returning the knobs. So I think trying to figure out, you know, some magic knob position that's going to rocket you to number one when you've

done none of the other work and you know, you're just coming out of nowhere. Basically you don't have that longevity behind you. I think that's probably a, you know, that's a wild goose chase. Are you thinking about starting a blog or wondering what we wish we knew when we first started? We have put together a brand new Spotify playlist that is filled with our best beginner blogging tips so you can learn what truly matters from day one. Whether you are just getting started or you want a refresher on some blogging basics, this playlist is packed with insights to help you move forward with confidence and you can listen to it on the go in less than two hours. It

includes four episodes that you can listen to when you're doing laundry, when you're running your kids, when you're making dinner, whenever you have the chance to just pop in an air pod and listen, this playlist is going to encourage and inspire you. We've put a link in our show notes where you can access the playlist on Spotify. And when you get there, we would really love it if you followed the Ultimate Blog Podcast on Spotify. And it would mean a lot to us if you could also leave us a rating. Your support helps us reach more aspiring bloggers just like you so we can all grow together. Now let's get blogging. Implementing keyword research and competition analysis into your content strategy is a surefire

way to improve your chances of people finding your content and we love how simple key search makes it to find keywords we actually want to use in our posts. Key search is a powerful keyword research tool that makes finding relevant low competition keywords for your blog simple and easy. If you think optimizing your blog and doing keyword research has to be hard, think again. Give this powerhouse tool a try and see how much easier it will be to create content for your again. Give this powerhouse tool a try and see how much easier it will be to create content for your blog. Not only is it reasonably priced,

even for beginning bloggers, but you can use our code for 20% off your subscription. Click the link in our show notes to learn more. I like that you encourage them to like look at other people in your industry and see, because I think what we can do is kind of chase success from someone and say, oh, that's exactly what I have to do to be successful.

And you might be in a completely different niche and it might not work for you at all. And I do think it is easier for some niches to rank versus others. I think it's easier. Like my blog's in the health and wellness and it just notoriously is just a little bit harder to rank being health and wellness because you're competing with medical journals and all of that.

And so you have to kind of get a little more creative. So in health and wellness especially, that's one of those, it's called your money, your life industries. And if you're in that, they do have, Google does tend to look for more authoritative sources because they're afraid of getting whacked by the government for misinformation and disinformation or bad medical advice.

So they're going to, they do have a tendency. And if you look at the sites that rank, they're, the people that are writing have their credentials attached to their author bio so that you can prove that this person knows what they're talking about. You're not going to take veterinary advice from someone who is an auto mechanic by trade. You're going to take veterinary advice from someone

that has vast experience with animals. So if you're an auto mechanic by trade, but you do have a lot of experience with animals. So if you're an auto mechanic by trade but you do have a lot of experience with animals, you need to say in your bio that I grew up on a farm and I raised, you know, 10,000 cattle over my lifetime and I know all these things and in my spare time when I'm not fixing cars, I'm traveling around to different farms and I'm fixing abscesses and cow hooves. I watch a lot out of those videos, don't ask me. I don't know how I got into that.

So you do need to make sure that you're properly identifying yourself for that EEAT, which is the expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness. Because now with AI overviews coming in, it is a lot easier for these engines to do meta searches on top of your initial query. So you look for something and normally it would go out and it would get 10 results, right? What it's doing very quickly is it'll take that 10 results, then it will look for a consensus answer.

When it finds the consensus, it limits that to just the ones that it's got consensus for. Then it goes out and it says, which one of these sites do I trust the most? And it's looking at who wrote it, how authoritative is the site that it's on? Have you written for other authoritative sites before or is this your first one? Do you have a body of work? It can look at all these things very, very, very quickly. And then it distills all that down into a single answer for people. So if you want to be in that list of citations,

you need to be authoritative on your topic. And to be authoritative on your topic, you do need to make sure that you've got your CV or your resume attached to something, that you've got your CV or your resume attached to something that you're showing off your credentials, that you are getting cited and quoted in other places that are authoritative. So like if you can contribute an article to a journal,

you know, an industry journal, something peer reviewed, something that's got authority, if you can get a link or a mention on in medical, let's say you'd want a link or a mention in medical, let's say, you'd want a link or a mention something medical, right? If you could get a hospital or a doctor to say, oh, hey, she's got good advice or, hey, you should read this article from this lady, we like it. That's somebody who is an expert recommending you.

All of those things are going to feed into whether or not the the engines perceive you to be an expert in your field. I think that is a really helpful advice for anybody. We have a lot of people in health and wellness and have that question and so thanks for just kind of sharing that because I think that's very insightful and it's helpful I think just for any industry to just always be asking yourself that question like like, am I being authoritative? And how can I make sure that I am reaching out further than just who's coming here to my site? But how can I possibly collaborate

with other people in my industry that can just essentially kind of rev up your own domain authority in expertise? You have to amplify your own signal to reach people to bring them into your site. So if you're just staying in your little bubble and saying, if I write it, people will find it. This isn't field of dreams. That's not happening anymore.

You need to get out there. You need to advocate for yourself and you need to advocate for your own expertise and make sure that you're amplifying that signal so that you're reaching a broader audience and building your traffic that way. You briefly mentioned this AI kind of summary and I want to circle back to that because it's something I've noticed, I mean, just really recently and I've noticed it a lot. So if anybody hasn't seen this, it's when you go in and you type in your search term in Google, and at the very top above any results, it's basically giving you the answer. And so you talked about kind of how they're pulling that together. So what

are you seeing in terms of impacts to website owners, writers, all of that? Is that going to hurt us in the future because people are going to click through less because they're getting their answer without having to make a click onto a website? It is. It 100% is. We already know that AI overviews are appearing on like 74% of the search queries and they're so big they push the organic rankings down well below the fold if not off the first page completely. So the way to be visible in that is to be one of the citations.

Now, I think who this is going to ultimately hurt are businesses that are solely built around ad models, where they're advertising. You're getting your only source of revenue is making money off people that are coming to the site and being shown ads. Because the quantity of organic traffic that you're going to get is going to decrease.

What I would say is, if that's your business model, you need to look at building a mailing list for the people that you do reach out to. You can put ads on your mailing list outreach that are probably going to be seen and clicked on more than people that are coming into your website because you're going to start losing that organic traffic and if that's your sole source of revenue, it's going to hurt. Any site that is not offering anything unique and your entire business model was built out

of I'm going to just regurgitate what other people are saying and repackage it into a specific collection of articles. If you're not saying any, if your voice isn't unique and interesting in the space, you're likely not going to get into the citations. If you're not in the citations, you're never gonna be seen. So it's just going to keep eroding away your information.

So you want to be a brand, you want to build a brand if you aren't already a brand. So brand building, even if it's a personal brand, even if the brand is you, you need to build that and promote that. Diversify your revenue streams so that you're not solely reliant on eyeballs because the eyeballs are going to stop.

Things happen. Buggy whips aren't the industry they used to be anymore either. I started my career as an ISP. I sold dial-up internet access. I don't sell dial-up internet access anymore because not a saying. Yeah, yeah, it's changing. And when I started, search engines weren't a thing. And now they are. But maybe they're not going to be the way we understand them much longer. So start planning on how you're going to diversify that revenue and compensate for the fact that your organic reach is going to diminish.

Figure out if I can get into these citations, if I can be a brand, how else can I make money? And what it's likely going to end up being is that you're getting people and you're building a mailing list and then you've got a mail that goes out that even if it's just maybe every time you post a blog post, it goes also gets mailed out to your mailing list. You can put ads around that. and maybe you're doing affiliate stuff. So you've got some of your eyeball ads, but you've also got some of your paper click ads or affiliate paper action.

I forget what they're called. But the point is you need to find some ways to diversify that revenue stream. A couple other things that regular bloggers might consider doing, e-books. You can turn your collection of blog posts into an e-book, and you could sell those. That'll also help with your branding. That'll help with your perceived expertise. That'll help make you an entity talking at conferences.

Podcasting is good. Videos are good. But diversification is what's going to really be necessary. Because if all your eggs are in the business model of ad good. Videos are good, but diversification is what's going to really be necessary because if all your eggs are in the business model of ad revenue and you're not a newspaper and you're not already a major brand, I wouldn't count on that to continue. I really don't see that surviving this revolution or evolutionary step in internet. Yeah. Sorry.

No. I think it's important. I mean, we can't like, we could either put our head in the sand and pretend like it's not happening and then play the victim or we can be prepared. And I think that that's a very, like if you're in this industry, I think one, using the word blogger, I find myself even like using that word less and calling myself a content creator because it is

not just about sitting down and writing an article on a website anymore. There is a lot more that goes into it and that's why we are very clear with who we are helping are people who are wanting to build a blogging business. This is not just, I mean if you want to have a hobby blog that's totally fine, more likely not the people for you because it is going to be a lot of work to get this up and off the ground and running and you're going to have to think about different ways to diversify your income from day one. And if you're solely relying on ad revenue, that's a really risky business model. And that's something that we have really honed in on,

I would say here in the last two years. We've gotten very clear ourselves, like that's kind of a risky business model. You need to be thinking outside the box and how you can be bringing in revenue in other ways. And email marketing is something we talk about constantly within the membership that we have and within the podcast, it's what we do.

And so once again, guys, if you're listening and you haven't started your email list, literally just go to sparkmediaconcepts.com, type in email, and you're gonna see everything that we have about email marketing. I think it's really important. I'm glad that you shared that, Carolyn. And somebody who comes from an SEO and Yoast background like that, like even you are like, you need an email list.

Like you recognize the importance of that. It is, it is just crucial right now to make sure that you are staying in front of the people who have opted in and said, I want to continue to see you and to see your content and learn from you. That's that they accepted the invitation. And so don't be afraid to continue to share content with them. Yeah. Thank you for everything that you have shared today. This has been such an incredibly insightful and helpful episode. We've mentioned Yoast a lot.

Yoast is a plugin, but I would like you to just share a little bit more about Yoast. It's a plugin that we recommend for everyone to download when they start blogging, but there's a couple of different options. There's a free and paid option. So Carolyn, I'd love for you just to explain the difference and the two. Okay, sure. So the free option is really what we started with. It's a WordPress plugin.

So if you're using WordPress, Yoast is available for WordPress. You can install it for free. It does a lot of things out of the box for free. What it doesn't do is it has more specialized schema available to you with premium. But the important thing is it's got the AI functionality that is only available in premium. And you might be saying, why are you holding that back from us? We're not holding

it back from you. It costs us money to run those queries for you. And we have to pay people. We have a business to run. So in order to fund the AI queries, we ask that you upgrade to premium. What we don't do is we don't charge you extra for the AI, which I think a lot of companies, that's the model that they have. So even with free, you can use their AI, but you have to buy credits to use their AI. So they're still charging you for it. Ours is really flat rate. It's 99, it's weird. It's it's it's 99. It's weird. It's like it's $99 or it's 99 euros or it's 99 pounds, but it's 99 everywhere So depending on the exchange rate, no, I won't say that But it but that's how it always is we don't we don't the price doesn't go up when you renew it's not a special Introduction rate. It's not like the cable company or anything like that people still get cable

It's not like I have cable Yeah or anything like that. People still get cable. It's not like that. We have cable. Yeah. So it's a flat rate, but that gets you the AI overview, or it's not AI overview, AI boost functionality. What it will do is it will help you, do you ever write a whole bunch of articles that are, I wouldn't say they're about the same thing, but it's the same kind of article. Like it's a review of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, or this is how I tried blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you get kind of tired of writing the same thing over and over again, but your brain just will not come up with alternate ways of saying that.

You can use the AI functionality to say, here, this is what I have. Can you write this in a way that doesn't look like my last 20 articles? And it will say, sure, here's five options. And it'll do that for your meta descriptions, your titles. It can help you. It can help you come up with a lot of things. And we have a lot more features on the roadmap that are coming out soon that will help you write, help you rephrase things. The analysis, the content analysis it does is also really more advanced in the premium where it'll say, you know, you've got five instances where sentences are really, really long and we want you to shorten those.

Instead of you having to go, I wonder which five sentences those are, you can click the little eyeball button and it will highlight for you each sentence that it finds offensive so you know exactly where to fix it. And you can highlight that and say, AI, fix this for me. And AI will go, okay. So it's just, it's really helpful and it's worth it. Plus if you upgrade to premium, you also get access to Yoast Academy where you can, I don't know if any, a lot of people haven't seen our Academy.

We have volumes of videos that teach you all about the different facets of SEO. They're easy to follow. There's little tests you can do. We have a certification course if you want to be certified in SEO. You get access to all of that Academy stuff with your premium subscription. So if you guys would like to sign up for premium, I would personally appreciate it. Oh, and at some point, I'm going to find for you the code because this is our 15th anniversary and we're giving people a 15% discount. So I will find that code for you and I'll get it to you. Yeah. And we will have that in the show notes for you if you're listening to this after the fact, but in 2025. And we just, we recommend Yoast. We always have. And Carolyn, you have just been so insightful today. So thank you for sharing

all about SEO where you see this all going and how we can basically arm ourselves for the future and be prepared and how Yoast can play a part in that. So thanks for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Ultimate Blog Podcast. If you'd like to learn more about building your blog, visit theultimateblogpodcast.com backslash newsletter to get signed up for our email newsletter. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love for you to share it with a friend, subscribe and leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts. Thanks for tuning in today and we'll see you next time.