Episode 170: 3 Must-Haves to Boost SEO This Year w/ Laura Jawad
Struggling to get your website noticed? With all the changes in tech, privacy, search, and AI, learn the 3 must-haves for improving your SEO and driving more traffic in 2025 with expert Laura Jawad. This episode breaks down simple, actionable tips to help you rank higher, reach your ideal audience, and grow your business. Tune in for easy strategies that deliver real results!
Boost Your Small Business’ Online Presence with These 3 Essential SEO Strategies
Conduct a quick audit to spot easy fixes like broken links and slow page speeds.
Map out content pillars and clusters to build authority and create a clear strategy.
Use strategic PR to build backlinks and a broader online footprint, balancing relevancy and quantity.
Gain sustainable growth and better search visibility with these practical tips: audit your site for quick wins, structure content to enhance expertise, and use PR strategically for authentic backlinks. Optimize your business' SEO one step at a time—because starting, no matter where you are, is always better than waiting.
Product Businesses! Download my free HOW TO GET INTO A GIFT GUIDE/PRODUCT ROUND UP roadmap for free HERE to get more sales and traffic to your site this season.
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Resources Mentioned:
Join the PR Secrets Masterclass
Join the Small Biz PR Pros Facebook Group
DM the word “PITCH” to us on Instagram to get a pitching freebie https://www.instagram.com/gloriachoupr
Connect with Gloria Chou on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/gloriaychou
Join Gloria Chou's PR Community https://www.facebook.com/groups/428633254951941
Follow Laura Jawad on: Website: https://www.laurajawadmarketing.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heylaurajawad/
SEO Kickstart Kit: https://www.laurajawadmarketing.com/smallbusinesspr
Unlock 5 SEO checklists to help you optimize your website so you're bringing in more qualified leads and
customers on autopilot. Grab your free guide here.
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Transcript
00:00:00 Gloria: What's up, Small Business Heroes? Welcome back to Small Business PR where we make PR and marketing super easy for the everyday small business underdog. SEO, SEO, SEO. I could talk about it all day. To be honest, this is something that is a weakness in my business. And as we are evolving in today's world, we know that SEO is one thing we can depend on. Not Facebook ads, not Instagram, because it's going to give you that longevity.
00:00:24 Gloria: So today, we have my friend, Laura Jawad here. She is amazing. I actually just did a little SEO powwow with her where she audited my website. She is an SEO expert for female founders. If you know that SEO is something you probably have been delaying, but you want to work on, this episode is for you. So welcome to the show, Laura.
00:00:42 Laura: Thank you so much for having me, Gloria.
00:00:44 Gloria: So okay, I'm very guilty of this. But when I think about SEO, I'm like, oh my god, there's like so much to do. I'm so behind. So I don't do it. But then on our power hour, you gave me some like really simple things that I could tweak. And so at the time of recording, obviously we could talk on and on about SEO, but what I wanted you to share are, we are getting into a new year. We have so many tools. How can we set ourselves right on the right path? What are the simple things we can do to get ourselves ready to get better SEO next year?
00:01:12 Laura: Awesome, I love this topic. And I like it in particular, because I think that there's a tendency when we talk about SEO to get really intimidated by the techy side of things. And I think people get so overwhelmed by the concept of SEO that they just shut down. But in actuality, if we think about SEO instead as something as a tool that we're using to connect with searchers, to connect with people, as opposed to a thing that we're doing to just placate Google, it becomes a lot more simple.
00:01:42 Laura: Because we're making changes to our website, changes to our content, producing things for people, for the searchers behind the click, as opposed to just trying to hack a mysterious algorithm. So I like having this sort of people first approach. I think it simplifies things a lot.
00:02:00 Gloria: Oh, that's a really great way to put it actually. Thank you for that. That's a really good reframe. I appreciate that.
00:02:06 Laura: Yeah, so I'll tell you what the three things are that I've come with in my pocket. And then we can dive deeper into some of those, all of them as the conversation evolves. So one is gonna be to tighten up foundations with a quick audit. Now, I know this is the piece where I just said SEO is about people, you know, and like the tech can be intimidating, but some of this tech goes towards making your website a tool for people, right? And making it something that's easy to navigate, easy to recognize and search a pleasure to use.
00:02:37 Laura: So what I would recommend doing is running a quick audit, going to a tool like Uber Suggest and running a quick free audit and looking for those top areas where you can tidy things up on your website. And if we like, we can go a little deeper into what some of those probably are.
00:02:54 Laura: The second thing I would recommend is taking the time right now to sit down and map out a 2025 content strategy, a long form content strategy. Because just creating random pieces of content is not a strategy that's gonna bring in traffic to your website. And then the final thing is gonna be similarly to sit down and plan a PR strategy.
00:03:16 Laura: So a lot of this prep, these SEO tasks that you can do today to set yourself up for success. It's really thinking about strategy as opposed to one-time hacks or tricks that you can play and how can you really plan your content and plan your PR activities in a way that is going to support your website and help you become more visible in search.
00:03:42 Gloria: I love that you made it so simple because there's so many, oh my God, there's like so many like SEO scammers out there as well. And it's just inundated. And I think that's same thing with PR, right? Like a lot of people, the reason why they don't do PR is because it's shrouded in complexity. They make it seem very technical. And price ranges are insane.
00:03:59 Gloria: But what I love about what you're saying is like, it's an ongoing thing. And you're actually just going and doing these things and implementing it kind of like planting a garden. And I love what you said about PR because I'm all about those backlinks. So we're going to talk about that. We're also going to talk about in the age of AI when there's a lot of AI blogs, why PR is more important. But let's go back to what you said first is the number one thing we need to do is our foundation. So you said, you said Uber Suggest, right? And that's free.
00:04:24 Laura: Yep. Yeah. So it's a freemium tool. They give you, I think they give you two free searches or free audit a day. There's a limit, but you can use the tool for free. Um It will give you a great overview of where your SEO is at right now and it'll provide a number of low-hanging fruit opportunities to improve your SEO.
00:04:49 Laura: And the things that I would pay the most attention to right now are going to be things like broken links on your website. Broken links signal neglect. And they're also just a pain in the butt for your users, when someone comes to your website and they're trying to navigate and they're just constantly running into 404s.
00:05:08 Laura: So go and pay attention to those broken links. Pay attention to your SEO titles. That's the description that shows up in the Google search results. That's the blue link, the text in the blue link. Make sure you've got unique SEO titles for all your pages. And pay attention to your site speed.
00:05:28 Laura: Google prioritizes websites that load quickly because it provides a better user experience, not because they're just trying to be pedantic but they're trying to prioritize things that correlate with a better user experience. And so you really want a website that loads on mobile in between about two and a half and three seconds. So Uber Suggest will give you a quick read on your um page speed.
00:05:51 Laura: So it'll give you a lot of data. I would focus on those three if you're going and you wanna have some quick tasks to take care of. And if your page is loading slowly, then look at your images. Your images are probably large. So focus on optimizing your images, compressing them, trying to get them under 100 kilobytes.
00:06:10 Gloria: Yeah, and try to keep text out of the images because Google can't crawl that.
00:06:14 Laura: Yes, we just learned this on Gloria's Power Hour. So all of your text should be native in your website, meaning you don't want bad text in your images. You want that to be in the HTML so that Google can read it.
00:06:29 Gloria: So good. Such low hanging fruit, the three that you said. So let's jump to the next thing, content planning. Why is it important?
00:06:35 Laura: Yes. I love content planning. Content planning is so important because your content is what provides Google and cold traffic with an understanding of where your experience and expertise lie, right? It helps build your topical authority around to the areas where you wanna be known as an expert. And if you are just posting random topics here and there, those are not going to reinforce one another. They're not gonna build authority around a singular topic.
00:07:05 Laura: What I like to tell people to do is to think about like, what are those three to five areas where you want to be known as an expert? And hopefully it goes without saying, these are things related to the job you're doing, right? So for me as an SEO strategist, my content pillars, these three to five categories are gonna be SEO, WordPress, AI, content marketing, right? Those are things I want to be known as an expert in.
00:07:36 Laura: So define those, spend some time thinking about questions that prospective clients ask you related to those categories, questions that your current clients ask you, questions that people are gonna have before they even know you're the solution to their problem. Before people even know that they could hire someone to help them get sound on Google, what are their pain points that they're worried about?
00:08:03 Laura: So make lists of these questions, bin them into those categories, maybe star your favorite three to five, and then fill out those content clusters one at a time over the course of the next year, right? So right now you can spend the time brainstorming and categorizing, you can even put a timeline on it, right? If you wanna try to help yourself plan for a cadence that you're gonna be pushing out content.
00:08:28 Laura: But I do recommend completing three to five pieces of content per cluster, interlinking those together, then moving on to the next one, because it literally helps Google paint a picture of those areas where you're an expert.
00:08:41 Gloria: Yeah, it's so good. Let's talk about tools because you just told me that I can use ChatGPT to actually do all of this, to figure out the title, to figure out the meta description. Can I do it for what you're talking about here, about my content pillars to help me ideate that?
00:08:56 Laura: You can definitely have ChatGPT help you ideate it. I think with content pillars, most people probably know what these are. If you make a list of the topics that you feel comfortable talking about that you like talking about most. A mistake I see a lot is people will have like 30 categories in their blog. You're not an expert in 30 things. You don't need 30 categories. Maybe you can use tags for those, but like the categories we keep tight, right? These are the things, the broad buckets that you are an expert in.
00:09:26 Laura: If you're really struggling to figure out what those things are, you can absolutely go into ChatGPT and talk to it about the service you provide, the demographic and psychographics of the people you serve, the offers, the specific offers you have. You can talk to it about the different things you like talking about. If you already have a blog that you haven't organized in the past, you could provide a list of titles and ask it to help you come up with categories for that. So if it's a tool you need, I think it's a fine solution to supporting that.
00:10:00 Gloria: Yeah. I love what you said, which is like, don't get bogged down with the tech, right? Like, like don't buy every software for everything. Just use one tool, whether it's Google or ChatGPT, and that's, and just get started. Start fixing your title, start fixing your meta description. Start.
00:10:18 Gloria: So I love what you said about simplifying and it's not about the tool. It's just about doing those low hanging fruit things that, honestly, like I've had my business for a while and you told me that I had a lot of great backlinks and authority, but those like stupidly simple things that I should have done years ago, I just haven't done them.
00:10:33 Gloria: So I'm obviously so glad that we finally did this, but also to remind everyone that it's not too late and you can do this at any point. I'm still gonna be okay even though these things I could have done four or five years ago, I didn't. Well, I'm gonna do it now. So it's a good reminder to just start where you are. Let's go to the third thing, which is my favorite topic, PR and how it helps with SEO?
00:10:55 Laura: Yeah. So the way that we're talking about SEO today is very different from the way we talked about SEO a year ago and especially five years ago. Like because of the influx of low quality content into Google's index, like things to AI tools, Google's having a harder and harder time keeping up, it actually cannot.
00:11:17 Laura: And so it's trying to figure out ways to figure out, one, what content should get indexed and how to identify content that is truly helpful to people, that is being written by people with real expertise and real experience who deserve to be writing about the things that they want to be writing about.
00:11:34 Laura: One of the things, so they care about the author, right? Google cares about who's writing content. And one of the things that it's looking for is an online footprint, right? Because real people and real brands tend to show up in more than one place. And so it's a little bit about backlinks, but it's also being more, it's being strategic about those backlinks, right, in terms of building that online footprint.
00:11:57 Laura: And so, you know, online footprint can encompass your social media profiles, it can encompass your guest blogging, it can encompass media mentions, even encompass things like testimonials that you provide to other people's websites, right? Anywhere you show up on the internet. But it's really, really important because increasingly showing up in search is a reward for stuff that you're doing off your website.
00:12:19 Laura: So PR has to be a piece of that. And so just as you're gonna plan your content for 2025, so it's strategic, think about where you want to show up around the internet and think about what podcasts, what blogs, like what outlets you wanna get featured in that are going to be relevant to what you do, authoritative and relevant and make that wishlist.
00:12:46 Laura: And make a plan just like you do, just like you're going to do with your content strategy for your blog so that you have some sort of cadence. Like you're going to pitch like a certain number of podcasts per month or per week. Like set yourself up with some sort of expectation so that you're not leaving it to chance because these publicity opportunities, they're great for, they have a great short-term ROI, right? Like they put you in front of audiences, they help build brand awareness, you develop a relationship with the host. These are all wonderful short-term ROI things. And they help your SEO so much in the background.
00:13:22 Gloria: Yeah. A question just popped up, which is like, is it better to get on to like 10 podcasts that are not as high-ranking or famous versus like one article in like a Business Insider or like a TechCrunch or a New York Times?
00:13:39 Laura: For SEO, I'm going to say that it's better to get the 10 podcasts. If you had to put, if it was equal effort. Because the 10 podcasts are not only gonna give you those links and that SEO from the links perspective, but they're gonna put you in front of audiences that care more about, they're gonna give you brand awareness because they're putting you in front of the right audience. They're seeing a relationship with a human being with that podcast host that you don't get from having a media mention in the New York Times.
00:14:17 Laura: And a lot of times, like those Forbes features, those Business Insider features, like, they're great credibility markers, like they're great to put on your website, like, and it is a high authority backlink, like no doubt. But chances are the people reading that are not your ideal clients. Like you're really getting those mentions, in many cases for many small business owners, like it's for the credibility marker. For ROI in your business, for exposure, for the long term SEO, I think having 10 backlinks from relevant podcasts is gonna provide more value in the long run.
00:14:50 Gloria: Nice, or even like gift guides, right? Like if I make a product, if I'm in the Wirecutter, it's like directly the audience that's gonna...
00:14:57 Laura: Yeah, yeah, I mean, that would be, that's amazing if you can get into something like that. That's a ton, yeah, for both the links and the awareness. I mean, I think SEO, so I like to say it's like the bowie tie on all of our marketing activities. It's really hard sometimes to even like separate out like what's SEO, what's PR. There's so much overlap.
00:15:14 Laura: And I think that's a good example where, you know, getting featured in something like Wirecutter and a product guide. I mean, yes, it's an amazing link. It's a very high authority backlink that is going to send a lot of authority to your website. And that's like brand awareness that is priceless, right?
00:15:33 Laura: So you're kind of, you're getting both of those things. Like there's a short term like PR aspect and there's that long term SEO aspect and they worked hand in hand so well together. It's very hard to tease them apart even.
00:15:46 Gloria: Yeah. So my question is with SEO and backlinks with PR, would you say that it's more about like quantity and not quality? Because what I'm hearing you say is like you just want to have as many backlinks as possible.
00:15:57 Laura: No, it is definitely a balance. Like for me, a backlink from my mom's knitting blog is not going to be valuable.
00:16:03 Gloria: Let's say they're all like credit, you know, like vetted, right? So it's a podcast versus like, you know, in New York Times. But is it like you said, like the 10 podcasts is better than one New York Times feature?
00:16:15 Laura: Yeah. And I think to some extent, like, would I rather be on three top 1% or 0.5% podcasts that are in front of my direct audience and relevant to what I do, or 10 podcasts that are like brand new podcasts with a small audience? I'd rather be on the three big podcasts that have a relevant audience. It's fewer links, but it's better brand exposure. And probably the websites, if they're posting show notes, are gonna be higher authority websites and with smaller podcasts anyway.
00:16:51 Laura: So I think it's a balance, right? I think it's, and it depends where you are in your publicity journey and in your SEO journey. So I don't know that I can give like a totally black and white answer to that, but quality is important.
00:17:03 Gloria: But more backlink better, right? Because it's like you want to build up a critical mass. Not to random places, but you don't want to say no.
00:17:11 Laura: Yeah. Yeah. I wouldn't say no to a backlink if it's relevant to what you do.
00:17:16 Gloria: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's what we found from our SEO audit is that I didn't do a lot of the things that I should have done. But because I've been on so many different podcasts, it actually helps when everything else was just not right for the SEO.
00:17:29 Laura: Yeah. So there's really like four pillars of SEO. There's your keywords and content, the stuff you're doing on the page, the technical structure behind the page, your brand authority, and then user engagement signals. Different companies and brands will lean more or less heavily on those different pillars.
00:17:46 Laura: And so for example, you can look at some really big websites that have really strong brand authority, lots and lots of links, maybe like a Forbes. And from an SEO perspective, honestly, their website kind of sucks. Like there's pop-ups, there's like all this stuff going on, like it's not like the technically best website out there, but their brand authority is so strong that they can get away with having like a less technically sound website because they're Forbes.
00:18:15 Laura: For us, we don't have that authority yet. We have to pay a little bit more attention to those foundations and make sure our website does load fast. We don't have a ton of annoying pop-ups. And a pop-up, a newsletter pop-up is fine. I'm not talking about that. But you know what I'm talking about when you visit these websites and it's just you're playing like Whack-a-Mole with the pop-ups, and you're just like, oh my God, I only wanna read the content. We can't get away with that. We don't have the brand authority to make up for it.
00:18:39 Gloria: But you're saying like, unless you're like a Forbes, right? Like you should pay attention to the UX experience for the person.
00:18:45 Laura: Yeah, but I think, I mean, I think we were just talking about like, you know, links versus like the quality of links versus the number of links is where we started when I went off on that. Number of links definitely matters, quality of links definitely matters, but it's balanced.
00:18:59 Gloria: Yeah, love it. I mean, this is such a great reminder as we head into a new year of like, very simple things we can do at a minimum for everyone that's listening. Do the first thing that Laura said, get an SEO audit. If you have data, you'll know exactly what you can do. And the overwhelm becomes less because you realize that there's actually really simple things like fixing a title of a page that can really drive it. So thank you so much. Where can people find you and learn more about you?
00:19:25 Laura: Yeah, absolutely. So people can find me on my website, of course, which is laurajawadmarketing.com. And I will also share with your audience a resource called the SEO Kickstart Kit, which is a collection of five SEO checklists that are designed to meet you wherever you're at with your SEO journey and help you optimize your website so you're bringing in more qualified leads and customers on autopilot. And so I will have a link for you at laurajawad.com/smallbusinesspr, no spaces. And that'll take you to a place where you can sign up for that resource.
00:19:59 Gloria: Love it, and that's Laura, that's L-A-U-R-A J-A-W-A-D.
00:20:03 Laura: Yep, and I'm on Instagram, @heylaurajawad.
00:20:06 Gloria: Thank you so much, Laura, I really appreciate you. This was really the kick in the rear that I needed, and I'm just really excited to get into gear, because it's a point of making all this content if it's not being found the most optimal way. So thank you for being here.
00:20:20 Laura: I'm super stoked to see what you do with all the information.