Believe it or not, most people are googling their problems.  

SEO is the process of helping Google connect you with the right people (aka your dream clients)

Why you should listen to Melissa

Melissa is an Integrative Nutrition Health Coach, Squarespace web designer, and former healthcare marketing manager, making her a unique personality for our podcast and our industry in general.

Living and working on ‘both sides of the street’ makes it so much easier for us to get onboard with Melissa’s observations and suggestions around growing your business.

Wait, isn’t it all about social?

When you look around the landscape, and if you listen to the social platforms, that’s where you’re going to find the best return on investment and have the easiest time building your tribe.

Sounds familiar, right?  

Melissa and several other well-respected marketing experts tend to disagree.  Why?

First thing: Social is hard.  

Or, put more directly: doing social well is hard. There are so many different platforms with different algorithms and audiences that you could hire several people to manage all the different channels.  

Social Platforms are built around one thing: driving revenue for advertisers.  And many of the metrics they use to quantify value (impressions and engagement) and opaque by design. It’s hard to compare the value of a like or a re-tweet to something like a newsletter sign-up or website visit, and that’s by design.

If you’re not spending money on advertising, your just creating data to help advertisers optimize their spending.

There is no way to understand how you get in front of the right people on a social platform unless you pay for it.

Having a presence on social media is important, but don’t bet the farm on social to grow your business

Why SEO Is great for Health Professionals

For this conversation, Melissa and Kiki hone in on Google, the premier and most prolific search engine on the planet.  

What’s great about Google? So many things.  Well, at least many things when it comes to SEO :)

First off, Google’s job, and its goal, is relevancy.  

So, what that means is that Google is focused on connecting people with content that they will find relevant, timely, and helpful.  

How does it do that?

It’s easy, kind of.

Google has built a unique crawler system that crawls every bit of information on the Internet and sorts, categorizes, and grades the content.  

The crawlers work all day, every day, and repeatedly on all pages.  

So, when someone searches ‘Why do I always feel bloated after dinner?’, Google can quickly search, rank, and return results that it thinks will provide answers to your question. Okay, so what does that mean to me?

According to Melissa, it means that if you blog about reasons women feel bloated after dinner, or, better yet ‘how to fix post-meal bloating’, you’ll have a very good chance of being quickly matched with that person, who will most likely be interested in your perspective.

And, as Melissa puts it ‘If you’ve put the work into creating a positive and helpful experience on your website, you’ll be one step closer to a new relationship!

SEO is the process of letting search engines know how you can help so they can put you infront of the right people

At the end of the day, if you’re crafting valuable content that addresses questions your audience is searching for, and you’ve created a helpful and positive website, you’ll grow in relevance and rank better in Google searches.

How you can get started (or amp up your game)

Kiki and Melissa spend a good amount of time walking through SEO’s key aspects and how to get started or audit your existing efforts.  She touches on some great points, including:

• How a search engine ‘sees’ and ‘understands’ your content
• What’s the optimal frequency and length of a blog post?
• Tieing together your social efforts and SEO, what works (and what doesn’t)
• Building the right content to answer the right question

Make your blogs helpful, meaningful and focus on quality over quantity

Melissa also touches on timing and when you can expect to see results; this will help set your expectations and build a foundation for your efforts.

The most exciting thing? When you think about it, SEO is the PERFECT marketing strategy for Health Professionals like you.

Google's reward for connecting searchers with the correct answers is more searchers (and more advertisers).  As a Health Professional, you have the right answers!

It's a match made in heaven!

Interesting Story (sidebar):

At one of the last technology companies I worked at, we did several studies on SEO, which was our top marketing channel for leads, and we found that when we spent a little money on Google Ads (<$100 per month), we magically ranked better for our organic search terms.

About Melissa

As I mentioned at the beginning of this summary, Melissa is an Integrative Health Coach, a web designer, a marketer-in-recovery, and, starting very soon, a Coach for Health Professionals like you!

I help health coaches & other wellness professionals build profitable businesses that make the world a healthier, happier place.

Interesting fact: one of Melissa’s best ranking blogs is about Membership sites for websites!

To help you learn more about SEO and website best practices, Melissa shared a few links from her most popular posts; I encourage you to take the time to explore this topic in more detail.

How to Improve SEO on your Website

How to sell Programs from your Website

4 Important Details to Include on your Website

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