149: Demystifying SEO — What Matters Today with Ryan Morgan

Ryan Morgan is an SEO expert. He is a 15-year plus digital marketing expert with a focus on SEO. He has led organizational and agency digital teams and has a history of driving growth for organizations using SEO. He currently operates the SEO Cohort- a contemporary SEO training program and digital content consultancy called Swell. 

Career Path 

He was a graphic designer and it morphed into web design. He got more interested in the web as the web evolved and started to get into digital marketing. He spent about 10 years doing digital marketing internally within an organization. Then he went to the agency’s side where he spent the last six years working within agencies, growing agency teams, working with clients on digital marketing. As of October, he has now started his own consultancy and is focusing on trying to help other people learn digital marketing and SEO. 

He’s now working with a really wonderful group of clients and loving the flexibility as a business owner. 

If I am a new business owner and wanted to start optimizing my blog articles, how would I start?

Agencies come in all shapes and sizes. A group of people offering services, a typical kind of digital agency, size-wise, is ranging between around 15 and 30 people, so smaller on the smaller size in terms of agency, but typically, what they’ll do is they will work with mid-sized organizations, small, to mid-sized organizations and offer outsourced digital marketing, or marketing expertise. Typically, you’ll have either a project manager or a strategist that will work with the organization and you’ll have a group of specialists that will help. It can obviously range from content writers to digital advertising specialists to SEO specialists, social media specialists, and so forth. Working with an agency can be a good example if you want to explore. 

Every agency is in demand for writers without a doubt and if you can find agencies that operate more in the healthcare space, they are always looking for writers and if they’re not looking for them right now, they’re always looking to build up a bunch of quality writers. The agency world is evolving. They are using a hybrid model of some full-time people and some independent contractors or freelancers.

SEO Tips

Good Content 

Honestly, content is the core of SEO. It doesn’t really exist without good content. Write good content that meets what your audience is looking for. If you’re doing that, you’re already so far along the way.

Originality and Uniqueness

We talked about high-quality content, but just to break that down a little bit more, you want to make sure that it’s original. The more you’re taking from other places, especially not paraphrasing or summarizing, or rewriting it, the less unique it’s going to be. Make sure it has that originality and uniqueness and it’s valuable. Create content that really comes from understanding the audience and understanding what they’re looking for. 

Write naturally 

Writers are very different from SEO specialists. SEO specialists want to hone in on the keywords and the research writers want to write about the topic for the audience. It’s why writers are ironically often a little bit better at SEO. It’s really important that every page should have a single purpose. When you think about something that is associated with a keyword or key phrase or a topic and when you’re doing this, it’s really important and valuable to understand that topic and keyword and understand how much search volume is behind that. There are great tools out there – Semrush, Ahrefs.

The two things that you would want to consider are the monthly search volume and the competitiveness. If you’re writing for a topic that has a very low monthly search volume. There’s a good chance that it may not be found because people aren’t looking for it. 

Doing some of that research beforehand will give you a sense of how this could perform in search and it might help you to actually potentially pivot to a slightly different keyword or topic or keyframes. When we talk about optimizing a piece of content, it’s important to have a page to have a single purpose. It also shouldn’t have multiple or too many topics or keywords that get diluted. 

Make sure that you’re writing naturally. Writers tend to be better at SEO from the sense that they write for people. SEO professionals often will have a tendency to go in and kind of jam in keywords here and there and not really write naturally. But Google wants these things to be written naturally and your audience hunts them to be written that way. You want to make sure that you have keywords that you’re targeting, they’re appearing in the title tag, they’re appearing in headers throughout the content. If you have images, you want to make sure you have all tags. 

Meta Description

Meta description does still matter in terms of keywords. It’s important to have the primary keyword that you’re focusing on for a piece of content appear in that meta title, as long as it can naturally, but think about the meta description more as copywriting.