• Where to start with SEO
• What keyword research you should be adding to your website
• How podcasting can help with your digital PR
• Why starting with a blog is the best first step
• How to measure SEO success

Hack Your Own PR with Odette

Look in to SEO Minion

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Welcome to Take Control with Nicole, as business owners we experience first hand the fine line between our personal and business lives. During our conversations, we will look at simple hints and tips to create time, reduce overwhelm, and help you to navigate through your journey to where you want to be. If you’re looking for smarter ways to work, and create space and time freedom in your day, then you’re in the right place. All right, let’s go.

Nicole Smith
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Take Control with Nicole. Today I am speaking with the fabulous Remi Audette all about how SEO can support your brand. But first let me introduce you to Remi. Remi is a former corporate SEO lead turned agency owner who is passionate about empowering SMEs to take control of their SEO. Her passion for search engine optimisation (SEO) stemmed from her career working for major Australian brands like Officeworks, Kmart and Telstra. As an award-nominated search professional, Remi has seen the positive impact a holistic SEO strategy can have on a business first-hand and has helped numerous small to medium businesses across Australia in in a variety of industries to increase their online visibility through SEO practices.

Well, hello, Remi. Welcome. I am so excited to have you on today and talk about SEO. It’s an area that I kind of like peer over the fence, lots of times really curious on all about how it works and I’m really excited to talk with you about it today. So hello, and welcome.

Hi, thanks so much. I’m really excited to be here.

Nicole Smith
I always love to start with a bit of your journey and what actually brought you to starting your own business. So yeah, over to you. Let’s hear about it.

Remi Audette
So I actually started my sort of career, I guess, as a vet nurse, and I was studying Communications at uni and I was doing vet nursing on the side and I thought being a vet nurse was something that I really wanted to do. But then I just found communications super interesting. So I ended up getting a job at a small lighting business in Melbourne that then I moved into an SEO agency and then I was made redundant after only six months. So I was freaking out. But then I ended up getting a job at Officeworks as an SEO and brand copywriter and that was kind of the start of the journey that I’m on now where I went from being an SEO copywriter to being SEO lead. So I was the only person in the SEO team at Officeworks, managing all of that and then I moved across to one of Wesfarmers, other businesses, Kmart and I was the SEO content writer but really more of a content marketer. And then I had been freelancing for the last couple of years on the side being Remi Audette copywriter and I you know after I think a lot of people after COVID sort of realised that they didn’t want to work in corporate and they wanted to make sure that you know they enjoyed every single day and I just knew that working in corporate wasn’t something that I could do any longer. So I made the decision to quit and go into business full time and change from being a freelancer to an agency and to make that transition easier. I took a contract at Telstra as a content designer so UX writing and customer experience and then after that I went into it full time.

Nicole Smith
So exciting I have loved having you in my space over the last gosh it must be it’s not quite 12 months is it probably about six.

Remi Audette
March is my anniversary, business anniversary.

Nicole Smith
Happy birthday, so exciting. It’s interesting isn’t it that that moment in time when you realise corporate is not for me anymore. I don’t have the the freedom to be able to support the people to make the impact that I know is possible with these tools. Also stationery is really fun. So what a great place to start.

Remi Audette
Yeah, it was pretty good.

Nicole Smith
Yeah, share your your business name as well, because I don’t think we’ve actually said that yet.

Remi Audette
I am the owner of Sunday Best Digital. So it’s a funny story. I was racking my brain for the right name and of course, it’s very difficult to find a unique name and I ended up chatting to someone and I was describing you know, I wanted the name to be very unique, but also kind of like an idiom. So you could say the first part of the name without needing digital or agency and someone mentioned something about oh, what about Sunday crossword or something? Because a lot of what I was doing was to do with words and then Sunday Best just suddenly came to my mind and it wasn’t taken so I jumped on that pretty quickly and I think it’s a great descriptive word for what we do, because we want to make sure that websites are showing up in their Sunday Best for their customers.

Nicole Smith
Love that. Never made the connection. Yeah, this Sunday, you always wear your Sunday best, don’t you? Oh, I love that. Yeah. Fabulous. So, SEO, I know, when you sort of first start your business, you kind of hear the words, SEO, and you’re the first thing you’re like, Oh, I’ve got to get a website out there, I’ve got to go out and do the things right. So how is it part or a, you know, an important part of your overall marketing strategy? Because maybe a lot of people may not connect it with how it can actually support your brand building activities.

Remi Audette
Yeah so SEO is, I find is probably the most misunderstood when it comes to marketing and I think people think it’s, you know, a bunch of guys in a basement, you know, typing away in the dark. But SEO, it’s not actually that difficult and once you really understand what the point of SEO is, you can really use it to make an impact on your business. And I think people have always looked at it in this really robotic way of you know, put this keyword here to increase your rankings and we’ve always measured success of SEO through rankings, through organic traffic conversions, but to get the full picture of SEO, and to get the most out of an SEO campaign, we need to look at it as a brand building marketing channel, because that is actually what it is. And SEO can have an impact on a lot of other metrics that might not have been considered before and it really is all about increasing your online visibility to increase the quantity and quality of traffic, but you’re not only trying to appear for customers in Google search results, you’re also trying to change their mindset and their searches from generic ones like, you know, SEO Agency Melbourne, to branded ones like Sunday Best Digital, because when people are searching for your business name, the intent is really high, you know, it’s very unlikely someone’s going to click on a competitor’s search results, or ad, if they’re searching your name specifically. So while we want to show up for those generic keywords, we also want to make sure that people are thinking of you in relation to that generic keyword, and they search for you instead and I saw this a lot at Officeworks and Kmart, I think Officeworks gets like almost three and a half million searches a month for their specific name and they could definitely be more relaxed with implementing best practice SEO, because of that brand awareness. Whereas small businesses really need to invest in SEO, because they don’t have the luxury of relying on their brand name and what they should be trying to do, as well as you know, appearing for the services and products that they provide. At the same time, they should be using SEO to build up that brand awareness. So eventually, people will stop searching for a generic term and start searching for them instead.

Nicole Smith
It’s supporting that activity of becoming known in the industry, right? And where do we start, though? Like, is it as simple as just being active or looking at our websites? Or is social media a part of it, all the online words, connect in with it?

Remi Audette
So SEO isn’t just about showing up on Google, there’s also how they navigate your website, what content you have on it. So even if you’re using social media as your main marketing channel, you’ll still need to direct people onto your site and so you need to make sure that you’re following SEO best practice to improve the customer experience because SEO at the end of the day, it really is all about customer experience so that when they land on your website, they actually convert they don’t just leave.

Nicole Smith
Yeah, I guess that is supported so SEO yes, it’s the words, but it’s also the design of your website, the navigation, how you kind of create that flow on experience, and something early on and I’m going through a bit of a re website, the designers situation soon with my fabulous brother, who does all those things for me. So but one thing we did early on is you know how you got that link in you can do it in Instagram, I see a lot of like Linktree and third party providers, but something that I identified early on is well just create a landing page with some links for you. That’s the artisans.com I think it’s backslash links or whatever and that then I guess directs people through a little bit easier to your website as well right? Off the topic on topic. But SEO can be a big beast I’m imagining as well. If you’re like just thinking about starting, is there an easy thing to do? Or is it really come down to like many of these things, the foundations building up your strategy, creating with the knowledge of what’s important, what’s not important? Understanding what even a keyword is, like, what is the keyword? Like, where do I go?

Remi Audette
So I would say that keywords are probably the foundation of any good SEO strategy and keywords are what we type into Google. And when someone goes to Google, they have a mission, they’re looking to complete a goal. That goal might be to find information, it could be to buy something, it could be to find a specific brand, or just to do research. So once you have your keywords down pat, then everything else kind of falls into place. So you can get keyword research done by an SEO specialist, or an agency like us, or you can do keyword research yourself. But when you’re doing keyword research, the main thing is to not just go for the most generic high volume keywords, because those tend to be the most difficult to rank for, because they’re so generic, and they’re so popular. So for example, if you were to try and rank for dresses, you would be competing with huge brands, like, you know, Kmart, Myer David Jones and you also don’t actually know what someone is searching for if they just type in one word. So you know, are they searching for a wedding dress? Are they searching for a long sleeve dress or a dress with sequins? And many people make the mistake of trying to go for those high search volume keywords because they think well, the more people are searching, the more customers I’ll get. But if you don’t have a chance of showing up on the first page, it’s very rare that you’ll be able to get those clicks anyway. So focusing on a good balance of you know, medium to low search volume keywords to start with, where you have a better chance of ranking and a better chance of being able to create content that actually addresses the search intent is a really good place to start. Once you have those keywords, you can focus on making sure that they show up in your title tag and meta description. So this is the title and you know, two lines of text that show up in Google Search, which will actually help get people to click on you over a competitor and then also including them in your page content really tailoring your page to address what someone is trying to search for. So if you’re trying to rank for a keyword that has how to at the beginning of it, you’re going to need a longer more in depth probably blog article to answer that question. However, if someone’s searching for a product and has you know, cheap or affordable at the start, you know that they’re probably going to look for a category page or a product listing. Because they’re prime to buy. And, you know, the keywords that you choose can really determine what type of content you create because there’s all different types of keywords where you’ve got some that are purely informational, so people are looking for answers, you’ve got ones that are navigational, where people are looking for specific brand. And that’s where you want to try and be increasing, you know, the number of branded searches you have, you also have commercial investigation, which is they’re looking to buy a product, but they’re doing the investigation first. So these could be keywords like you know, reviews or versus anything that’s sort of comparative, and then you have purely transactional. So they’re definitely looking to buy and you know, those keywords are cheap, accessible online by delivery. And you can tell a lot about what someone’s looking for by the keywords. So you need to make sure that the content on your website is correct and targeting the right keyword and has the right intent because Google’s looking to show the most helpful, relevant, trustworthy content and that’s how you actually make sure that you’re fulfilling all of those.

Nicole Smith
It’s interesting as well. My mind just went to, I remember when I first started and I joined Suz Chadwick’s BBA programme, and she was talking about what type of brand do you want to be? Are you Kmart? Are you Chanel? And I can see how that would be really relevant in, regardless of your name, but if someone’s searching, cheap shoes, and you’re a luxury shoe brand, you don’t want your brand, well who knows they might get inspired to buy, you know those beautiful ones over there, but really you’re a luxury high end product or service and so we want to be able to capture our audiences by those keywords. Because if you’re searching for like, I’m staying in the city right now so if you can hear tram noises that’s what’s going on behind me, sorry, your ears, I wanted a luxury experience when I came into the city this time and so that’s what I was searching for, you know, otherwise, I would go for cheap hotels in Melbourne. And it’s really interesting isn’t it as a user, as a searcher, how we google and the words that we do type in when we’re looking for those particular services and products?

Remi Audette
Yeah, absolutely and that’s why it’s really important that if you are working with an SEO agency or specialist, that they really take the time to get to know your brand, because it’s no use trying to target a keyword where you know that the customer that is going to be searching for that keyword is not necessarily the customer that you want to bring on and you also don’t want to use words that you don’t want associated with your brand. So, you know, if you were a luxury hotel, you don’t want the type of person that types in cheap hotels into Google, that’s just not going to be your target customer. And, you know, even with I found with Sunday Best is I don’t necessarily want to work with someone who just types in SEO agency Melbourne, because that’s very broad. You know, I don’t really know what type of customer that is. But that’s why I am trying to and I have ranked very well for boutique SEO agency, because the type of person that is typing in boutique knows the type of service that we’ll be providing and I know the type of customer they are if they value that. So that’s another important thing is to not just choose keywords, because you might think you have a great chance of ranking, you really actually need to look at whether they align with your brand values and brand strategy as well.

Nicole Smith
Yeah, very, very solid advice there. I know for me, it’s something keywords. I’ve thought about them. But I haven’t really dive deep yet. However, when I do Google The Artisans, I do come up on the first page quite a lot. So I think organically my SEO is doing some things out there, which is pretty exciting. So, SEO in a friendly way. How do we do it?

Remi Audette
So a couple of different ways that small business owners can help to build their brand and also get the benefits of SEO as well. So the first one, which is probably my favourite at the moment is through digital PR. And I recently did a great course, shout out to Odette Barry, her Hacker NPR course was fantastic and digital PR is great because it reaches a broader audience than traditional PR, because you know, everyone’s moved online and the aim of digital PR is to make your brand more recognisable and improve your reputation and put your brand in front of your target audience by using these digital tools. So I recently have had two articles in SmartCompany, just by pitching and the great thing about digital PR over traditional PR is not only do I get all those PR benefits, but I also get a backlink and backlinks from relevant high quality websites are very important to build your brand because if you had two websites with you know great content, and you know, targeting similar keywords, when it comes down to it, the brand that has more authority is going to be ranked higher because Google really values authority because it wants to show the most credible, trustworthy websites. So getting that backlink from digital PR is going to help with your SEO but even just getting out there in front of your customers is really important too. The second way is like this podcast. So if you’re a guest on someone’s podcast, or you have your own podcast, you’re increasing your online visibility, putting yourself in front of your target audience and also increasing the links to your website, as well whether you’re a guest or it’s your own, and it also allows you to increase your online visibility for specific keywords because you can include them in your podcast name in your show notes, and even in the audio as well. So that’s a really great, pretty inexpensive, if not completely free way of getting some good backlinks but also some visibility as well then, like we talked about social media, although it doesn’t directly influence your SEO, it helps build your brand and blogs are probably one of the easiest, most important ways to build your brand as well. Because you know, if you’re talking about your your services or your products, you’re also helping your customers that’s going to build you up in their mind because they see you as an authority on a topic and Google is also going to see that as well. And so creating blogs or content hubs are a really good way to build your brand and they have amazing SEO benefits as well.

Nicole Smith
I have two questions. Backlink, can you just summarise for those that may not understand. What is a backlink? And how does one see it and make it work for you?

Remi Audette
So when I said that SEO is the most misunderstood marketing channel, backlinks are definitely the most misunderstood SEO strategy. So these are known as inbound links. So they’re links from one website to a page on another website and searching engines use backlinks as indications of the link to contents quality. So a site that has lots of high value backlinks will usually rank better than an equal site with fewer backlinks and this is because Google, like I said before, wants to show the most trustworthy results. So they can help increase your rankings. They also help with discoverability because search engines revisit popular pages more often than unpopular ones and you also can get referral traffic, because they’re clickable. So if you get a backlink on a site where your target customers are, then you can actually get the click through from that and you can get sales or inquiries from that as well. The thing that people get wrong is that they try and get backlinks wherever they can. So this was okay in the past, Google said, you know, we just want you know, the more backlinks you have, the more popular and credible you must be. But obviously, we know that it’s true. So recently, they very much updated their algorithm to consider spam backlinks. So they want you to get backlinks from really high quality relevant websites. So it’s no use me getting a backlink from a phishing website because my topic of authority, my website is not a phishing website so that’s ridiculous. It’s not going to help my brand. And in fact, Google might see that as something fishy, excuse the pun. So I wouldn’t be wanting to get backlinks from anything related to business and marketing, because that’s the industry that I’m operating in. So yeah, it really is important that if you’re trying to do link building, you’re only focusing on relevant high quality websites. Because, you know, if you get a backlink from a untrustworthy site that can actually put you at risk of being penalised by Google.

Nicole Smith
Yeah, it’s very solid advice there. Because I know, people try and rig the system, like with social media, buying followers and backlinks and like getting all this data that’s, you know, it really actually does detriment your brand and your website and your connections, right versus enhancing it.

Remi Audette
Absolutely and one other thing I would say about link building is that if you’re a small business, I would not be starting to really go all in on link building until you have optimised your website and you’ve started building some great content, because there are a lot of businesses that operate in industries that aren’t that competitive. So they actually don’t need to spend a lot of time going out to acquire links, they can actually just writes great content, and they will be able to grow their online visibility quite easily. But for those that are operating in more competitive industries, link building is definitely something that needs to be considered. It is time consuming, and it is a little bit costly, but it is something that you will need to do because SEO is not just about doing one thing, it’s about doing a whole bunch of things that all work together to increase your online visibility. So if you are a small business, and you know people are saying you have to do backlinks, you have to do this. Just make sure that you know that it’s actually going to be the right strategy for you and also make sure that if you do start, your website needs to be in good shape, because it’s it’s kind of like having an open for inspection for a house that hasn’t been finished renovating. You really need to make sure that you’ve done the solid groundwork first before you start doing anything on top.

Nicole Smith
Yeah, I was giggling because we’re just starting to go into house inspections and it’s really interesting because you read the descriptions and you see the images on the real estate.com and then you go to the house and where they don’t match it’s really very, very obvious. But yeah, fabulous. Thanks for sharing that because I think that’s really important part to note about when we’re looking at SEO and how you can start to sort of create those connections from, I loved the call out for your PR course as well with Odette. We’re happy to put links, talking about links there we go, it’s natural though, because you’ll hear me say, so how can we connect you we’re gonna put all the notes and things in the show notes. And when we’re creating this podcast, that’s one of the things that we do do is we have on the website, the podcast episode page that has the transcript of the episode downloaded with Otter.ai for that. And we go through and your names mentioned, as well, as we go through your your links are there all our links are there and we’ve been doing that for well, we’re over 100 episodes now, so that even though I haven’t yet started to do blogs on my website, that’s already helping, I guess, to start to build that up and that was going to be my next question. So we talk about how to use my second one. Blogs, how important is it to capture that information on your own website? Versus somewhere like say LinkedIn or another website hosting situation?

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Remi Audette
Yes, so when we’re talking about, you know, blogs, and creating content, as a business owner, it’s really difficult to know where to start because you should be doing a blog for SEO. But if your target clients are on LinkedIn, or social media like Instagram, or do you then try and write guest blogs for other people or do you go on platforms like medium, I would definitely start with your own blog, because that is something that you own. We don’t own social media channels, we don’t own you know, sites like medium. So it’s really important that you start at home. So an easy way to make sure that you’re getting the best use out of your blog is to write a really juicy informative blog on your site, and then pull apart that blog to find bits you can place on, you know, LinkedIn, Instagram, places like that. That way you’ve you know that you’ve covered the blog, on your website, you know, you’re helping to get more keywords onto your page, naturally, you’re helping to guide your customer through the customer journey. But you’re also using that blog to create content for other marketing channels. So definitely starting with a blog on your site is the most important thing.

Nicole Smith
We’re just about to revisit how we do marketing over here, because it’s starting to feel a little bit, a lot. So we’re actually working with Leanne and Chloe and my fabulous humans at Audacious to put together a proper marketing strategy, starting with a key point of content and we’re starting out with a theme for the month. And then we’re going to break it down. I think, we haven’t looked at the final strategy yet but this is where my mind go theme for the month. Then coming through to the podcast being our like core point of content. And then bringing that out to create blogs and social posts and all those sorts of things and then being strategic around our guests as well and how they place into the content strategy as well. So yeah, I guess that’s something that a blog could be your key point of content. And you could start to funnel out the information across your other social platforms linking it back in to your real estate.

Remi Audette
Exactly. Yeah. That’s a great way of looking at it. Yeah, amazing.

Nicole Smith
So when we’re doing all these things, and we’ve got some keywords happening, and we’re doing some of the backlink you do and we’ve got some blog stuff happening and content things linking back in, how do we actually measure that it’s working? How do we know it’s working?

Remi Audette
So brand awareness is notoriously difficult to measure. But if we’re looking at it from an SEO point of view, one way to tell if it’s working is through direct traffic. So if you look up Google Analytics, Google Analytics is free. So everyone should have their account working, you can look at how many people are actually coming to your website by typing your domain name into the URL search bar, because that just shows that they don’t even need to Google you, they don’t need to Google a generic search, they know exactly who you are. And then they know that they have a problem you can solve. So direct traffic is a great way of measuring it, we can also do branded searches. So this is how many people are searching for keywords that contain your brand name. And this might also present itself as an increase in organic traffic. So you might see that your brand name searches are increasing, but also your organic traffic is increasing as well. A general increases in traffic is a good indicator of brand awareness, whether it comes from direct or Google or other. Because just focusing on measuring organic traffic and keywords as an indicator that your SEO is working. It’s only a very small part, because a lot of people don’t actually come to your site and convert straightaway. They might need to see your brand. You know, I think it’s they need to see or interact with your brand, at least like I think it’s up to 30 times before they make a decision.

Nicole Smith
It’s crazy isn’t it, but when you think about it, you know, I know, when I’m looking to talk to someone, like we just had Emmett go out for a farm stay this weekend, right. And I looked and I went on the socials and I looked at the pictures, and I looked at the posts, and I spoke to the people and it was like, okay, cool. This feels like hey, now, like, I’m ready to let my baby go for a week, somewhere. So yeah, sorry, cut you off. But it’s relative isn’t. It’s crazy.

Remi Audette
And if you think about when you make decisions, you don’t just go to the first website, you see and make a decision, you go to a bunch and you might look at their socials, you might sign up to their email list. And so you might be getting a lot of traffic from what appears to be your social media channels. But you might have shown up in a Google search, they’ve found your website, read a few blogs left gone away, you know, then they see you come up a few times in organic social media, you know, a few more weeks pass, and then you have a Facebook ad and that’s what got them to convert. So even though if you have last touch attribution on in Google Search, which means they’re only looking at the last place, someone was before your website, it’ll say, well, that’s from social media, when in fact, your website and Google helps get that customer and this is why you need a holistic marketing strategy. And you need to use different channels and make them all work together because you can’t just rely on one channel, you need to have them all working in tandem, so that you’re capturing someone, wherever they might go on their computer, whether it’s social media, Google, you know, LinkedIn news anywhere, so that you can direct them back to your site. So that’s another great way of measuring that. And then, you know, getting mentioned on social media, or, you know, in Facebook groups shows that you’re getting your brand out there, and also just your conversions or inquiries. So especially for service businesses, you can easily find this out by including a how did you find us question on your enquiry form, and you’ll be able to see exactly where people are coming from. So that’s another really great way to measure it. But, you know, traditionally, SEO has been all about rankings and it really has evolved to be so much more than that. You can’t just look at rankings as a key indicator of SEO success.

Nicole Smith
It’s really interesting as well, you know about the where did you find me because even if you’ve had a lot of organic clients, you know, like word of mouth clients, I’ve been very privileged to have the majority of my clients come to me word of mouth. You get that like, and I’m at that point now where I’m like, that’s amazing but I want to really focus on building the other side up as well because as much as there’s a lovely humans out there in the world, at some point that may stop. And if we’re wanting to sustainably grow a business and be able to attract those people, you know, I’m sure even word of mouth clients I know if I’ve had a referral from an I’m looking to work for someone I go to the socials and I suss it out and I have a little peek through and see what’s going on. So it’s all that evidence as well out there but yeah, it all in all ties into that holistic way of of looking to create your brand and your marketing strategy. So I love it. It’s such an interesting topic, I’m sure we could sit here for days. Just say I’m ready. Like, I’m ready. SEO is a focus of mine for 2023. How do I know who I should be working with?

Remi Audette
So I like to joke and say I do a lot of SEO rehabilitation. So a lot of the clients that come to me have had really bad experiences with SEO agencies. So I have a few guidelines of what to look for based on what I know, and what I’ve had other clients experience. So any mention of guarantees is a major red flag and I don’t care how good they are, they could be the best SEO agency in the world, they could be really good at getting results from SEO, but no one can guarantee something because we are all at the mercy of Google and Google’s algorithm and no one knows Google’s algorithm except Google. We know, you know, there are over I think 200 known factors of what we know to be true about, you know, Google and the algorithm and what we should be doing, but no one can guarantee a first page ranking, because it’s just it’s not up to us. Even if you did everything right, Google could change the game. So avoid anyone that has any mention of guarantees and I know a lot of us marketers are really bad with, you know, working on our own marketing, like the plumber with the bad pipes, but I would really encourage you to look at their website and look at if it’s well designed, have they invested in good branding? Are they blogging themselves, it might be a little bit superficial. But I truly believe that if, if an agency or a specialist doesn’t care about their own brand, how are they going to care about yours, because it’s very easy to do SEO in a way that completely disregards your brand strategy, your brand values, how you want to be seen. And so you should be working with an agency that cares about how they’re seen, because the work that they do will most likely also take your brand into consideration and I wrote a blog recently about why, you know, an agency not ranking number one is still a good SEO agency. And I think, you know, you should be also considering how they’re doing SEO on their own site because you know, blogs are a great indication that they’re, you know, they’re interested in educating their clients, they’re also ensuring that, you know, they’re driving traffic to their site, they’re also positioning themselves in authority. And just because an agency is number one on Google, that also doesn’t mean that they’re the best, it could be that they’re just able to spend a lot of time on, you know, their own SEO, because they don’t have very many clients. So another thing I would encourage people to do is, how do they make you feel because SEO is an investment and because you don’t get instant results, you want to know that the person or the people that you’re working with are trustworthy, and you want to know that they will tell you the truth, that they will work with you. You just want to feel good and you should be feeling good when you talk to them. They shouldn’t make you feel silly for asking questions or like you shouldn’t be, you know, asking them they should be really forthcoming with information and they also shouldn’t be sugarcoating things. I’ve worked with a bunch of clients where their agencies have promised things because, you know, they didn’t want to say no, and I’ve had to re educate the client and say, well, actually, this isn’t the best way to do this, because of whatever reason, but they’ve been told what they want to hear. So making sure that they’re really truthful and trustworthy is also really, really important. But I think, you know, most people, if you trust your gut, you’ll end up choosing the right person and finally, case studies, examples of clients they’ve worked with, if you go into one of their clients websites, you know, you should be able to see exactly what type of agency they are, whether they’ve, you know, stuffed their copy with keywords, whether they’ve completely trashed their website design, for the sake of some, you know, arbitrary word count, and yet looking at the results they’ve gotten is also important.

Nicole Smith
I think the key thing I’m picking up is the transparency piece. It’s similar to what I’m doing within my space, a lot of the value especially at the front end, you don’t get a lot of tangible output to start with, because it’s okay, well, how are we working, what’s doing what’s working, what’s not working, where, where can we make improvements, what systems are actually supporting you versus, you know, causing some art in the way that you work. How’s your team structured? What can we change here? So a lot of it is that design I call it, yours would be strategy, right? I’m very open about that. And sometimes it is about guiding our clients to say, hey, this is normal. You will feel messy right now because we are in messy period right now but when we get through here, this is when we’ll start to feel, you know, and sometimes, depending on the size, your business, and what you’re trying to achieve, that duration can be small, or it could be a bit bigger than that as well. But I think it’s that openness to have those harder conversations and be like, hey, hey, let’s just take a breather.

Remi Audette
Yeah, absolutely. You might be working with this agency for a long time. So you want to make sure you like who you’re working with, and you want them to be almost a partner to your business. You don’t want them to sit, you know, and be in a silo and work without considering what everyone else is doing and I think the biggest thing I took away from working in corporate was, you had so many stakeholders to appease, and yes, it could be tedious at times. But just because you know, you’re a small business, that doesn’t mean that what an SEO agency does is not going to affect another part of your business. So it’s really important that they really do a deep dive into your business understand, you know, what they could be doing that might affect things and really work with you, not for you, basically.

Nicole Smith
That’s a key one. We’re working together with our clients. Anyway, you know what I mean, you said it articulately, much more than I’m going to. So amazing. Is there anything you’d like to leave us with? Some key focus areas or some considerations that if our listeners are sitting here seriously going this SEO thing is something that I’m really interested in looking and investing into this year, is there anything you want to leave us with?

Remi Audette
Yeah, I think the cost of SEO is something that gets talked about a lot. And I think, if you are a new business, just starting out, getting your SEO up to scratch at the start is going to prevent you from spending a lot of money later on. So I’m not talking about, you know, launching your website and then having an agency there with you month on month doing things I’m talking about very start before you launch your website, getting keyword research done properly, making sure your site hierarchy is properly, making sure you’ve got a great SEO copywriter writing your copy, that can set you up for success from the very beginning and so you don’t have to spend that extra money on an agency. Because it’s I just don’t think it’s needed. I think if you get it set up from the start, you can just do little things each month to maintain your SEO and a lot of businesses can’t afford an SEO agency. So it’s really important that you yourself learn skills about SEO, because eventually when you do grow your business, and you do hire an SEO agency or an SEO specialist, you want to know what they’re talking about. And they also want you to know, because, you know, the worst thing is to have a client who doesn’t understand anything and doesn’t want to because it means they’re more likely to end up unsatisfied, because they don’t understand. So at the start, I think from the very beginning, having doing an SEO sort of project, but you don’t need ongoing SEO, until you’re really starting to earn enough revenue for you to justify that because, like I’ve said, it does take a long time, it is a long term strategy, and you won’t be able to get instant results. So a lot of clients that I work with will start with Google ads, they’ll start with organic social media and then slowly as their SEO begins to build, they can reduce their Google ad spend. So I think that’s really important and yeah, just making sure that you do understand that while it isn’t going to get you instant results, it is really, really worth doing because in the end, it is free traffic. You might have to pay someone to do your SEO, but you don’t have to pay for the amount of traffic that comes through like you do with ads.

Nicole Smith
Yeah, that is something to consider it. It is like when you’re teaching a child to walk, you’re not going to think it’s going to happen instantly. You invest the time and then all of a sudden they know how to walk. It’s a long term strategy for you know the results that you you can experience when it’s done well. Amazing. Fabulous. So what we do here is we have three amazing questions that we ask all our fabulous guests. So are you ready to rock and roll? Okay, what is your go to app to create ease in your day?

Remi Audette
Or do I have to just have one?

Nicole Smith
No, you can have a couple if you’d like.

Remi Audette
Well, I obviously had you set up my ClickUp project management tools. So I do keep track of a lot of things in ClickUp, I have too much going on in my brain that if someone tells me something, it will instantly leave unless I write it down. So having ClickUp is really important for me to write down all my tasks, and to keep track of all the clients that I have on the go. But I also have Grammarly turned on all the time because even though I’m a copywriter, it just is an extra safeguard for any little mistakes that I might make. And then I guess the other one would be SEO minion, which is a great little free plugin that you can add and basically, rather than having to look at the page source for a website to find, you know, your title tag and meta description, and what’s the h1 tag, you can actually click on it, and it shows you instantly so that one’s really good for me, because it saves me a lot of time when I’m looking at client websites.

Nicole Smith
Sounds cute too, SEO minion. Maybe we should put that link in the show notes. Online, paper or hybrid to do lists lover? Where do you sit?

Remi Audette
Definitely hybrid. So like I said, ClickUp is great for tasks that I instantly need to write down but sometimes I get in a mood where I’m really sick of my computer, because I often there are so many distractions on my laptop, because it’s also my personal laptop. So sometimes I just need to write a paper list if I’ve got, you know, a short couple of things I want to knock out and I don’t want to have to touch my laptop to be able to mark them off. Plus the endorphin hit of taking something or crossing something out. I find is higher of any fewer. If you click, you know complete on on ClickUp.

Nicole Smith
Yeah, I do love a bit of paper for that, just tick, cross it. Yeah, love it. Awesome. Okay, finally, what would you do if you created more space in your world?

Remi Audette
I would probably spend more time on hobbies, you know, it’s working full time and freelancing on the side, you know, I was doing that for a couple of years and I really didn’t have time for anything else. So now that my side hustle has become my full time job, I need to find another creative outlet. So I’m going to be spending more time doing things that I love and finding hobbies that aren’t that I can’t monetize, basically, because I you know, I’ve got a business mind, I always think about, you know business things, but finding something that I can truly enjoy for me is what I really want to focus on, especially this year.

Nicole Smith
Yeah and I do I love our conversations, because you’re like Nicole I’ve had this new idea. I’m like, yes, you’re amazing and it is fabulous. But it is important to have a creative outlet, especially because as an entrepreneur, you are creatively minded and you’re always thinking about ways you know, different ways of doing things. But having a creative outlet that is just for you is so important. I’ve actually been looking at a local choir that keeps popping up. I am now on Instagram, and one of the rehearsal nights aligns with what’s okay for our family. I’m like this could be a thing.

Remi Audette
Even just trying things is really important.

Nicole Smith
Yeah, exactly. Oh, so fun. Well, thank you so much for joining me, I love this topic and it’s one that’s really, you know, important. If you can get on to it early as you shared with us, it’s just an amazing, and what I’ve heard is a really impactful way to you know, attract your humans into your world as well. Where can we find you? Where are you hanging about?

Remi Audette
So you can visit my website, www.sundaybestdigital.com.au I have all my services on there. I have a great blog on there as well and we are almost launching our Sunday Sessions which are SEO workshops to help you do your own SEO. So keep an eye out for that. You can also find me on Instagram @sundaybestdigital and I also am now spending a lot of time on LinkedIn. So you can follow @sundaybestdigitalagency page or you can connect with me directly. I’m just @remiaudette on LinkedIn.

Nicole Smith
Amazing. We’re going to pop all those links, including your new Sunday Sessions. Again, fabulous name. Just amazing. All of those are going to be in the shownotes. SEO, Remi ticked, approved. That’s what we’re doing. Thank you again. Thank you so much for joining me. For everyone else who’s out there today, listening, enjoy investigating SEO as a marketing tool for your business. Have a fabulous rest of your day. And enjoy creating space and time freedome. Bye now.

Well, there we go. Thank you so much for joining me today. It’s been such a pleasure having you on board. Have we connected on social jazz? If not, please come on over. Say hi, I’m on all the platforms at the artisan solutions. So I’d really look forward to seeing you over there. And if you enjoy today’s episode, don’t forget to tag me and I’d love it if you could leave a review. And of course, share this with others so others can come and join us next time. All right, that everyone have a fabulous rest of the week and until next time, see you then.