Ever wonder how people find your website via Google?
What are people typing into the search bar to find your website?
What specific words or phrases are directing people to YOUR website amongst the billions of others on the worldwide web?
In this mini episode, I’m explaining how to figure out what your website is ranking for right now, or what your website shows up for in the Google search results. Plus, I’ll talk about the next step: implementing a strategy to direct your ideal clients to your website.
Looking for more tips and a community of like-minded peers? Join The Unconventional RD Facebook Community on Facebook.
Need help setting up your website? Join our FREE “How to Start a Website” tutorial.
Mentioned Links
Episode Transcript
This week on the podcast, I am changing things up a little bit. I am actually sharing the audio from a video that I posted on my Facebook page a while back all about how to tell what your website is ranking for right now. So this is a little bit of a shorter episode, but hopefully also a little more actionable depending on where you are in your business. So my goal with this episode today is to speak to the people who feel like they're at square zero with SEO.
And they're not even sure how to tell what their current website shows up for in the Google search results and where to go from there. So that's what we'll be talking about in this shorter episode today. And I hope you enjoy.
Hello, hello, welcome. My name is Erica in case you're not familiar. And I am the founder of The Unconventional RD, and I am finally popping in to do this video that I mentioned I would do a bit ago. Basically awhile ago I posted a prompt in The Unconventional RD Community on Facebook, my free Facebook group.
And I said, what's the funniest keyword that your website has ever ranked for? And people shared some really funny stuff like, “can you take a Chipotle burrito on the plane,” “diatologists near me,” really hilarious stuff where basically, if you don't know what this means, when your website ranks for something ranks for a keyword, that means that when someone typed that phrase into Google, your website shows up in like the first 10 pages of the search results. Realistically, you're not really going to get anyone clicking on your site unless you're in the first page or maybe the top of the second page of the search results. but that's what we're talking about here.
Like how are people finding you on Google when they type in something into the Google search? What does Google think your website is irrelevant match for? And that's basically the crux of SEO search engine optimization, which is what I like to talk about and teach on my podcast, The Unconventional RD Podcast.
And also my course SEO Made Simple. So if you're not familiar with those resources, definitely check them out and combined my podcast on iTunes, Spotify, wherever you like to listen. And if you want to learn more about my course, just go to seowaitlist.com, but basically that prompt, that I posted in the Facebook group brought up some interesting topics of discussion in the comments.
And there were a couple people who were like, okay, what are you talking about? And most importantly, how do I even know what my website is ranking for? What does this mean? Like, tell me more about how to find this information. I said, oh, I'll do a video in the group at some point. So that is why I'm here today to follow up on that promise.
As you may know, if you listened to my podcast, I am a new ish mom, so my son just turned eight months. So I can't really say that new anymore, but I'm still really busy and trying to. Find my footing in this whole working mom role. So it took me a little bit to get on here and do the video, but I'm here now.
So let me share my screen and I have a few things that I wanted to show you. So I'll just use an incognito window so that you can see what it would look like if you don't have an account for the tool that I'm going to talk about first. So let me just do a demo of what I'm talking about with Google first.
So let me go to Google. And what I'm talking about with ranking for a keyword is, how do people find you when they type things into the Google search bar? So here's an example. Maybe you work in the low FODMAP space and one of your ideal clients perhaps could look for something like low FODMAP snacks, and maybe your goal is to create an article about low-FODMAP snacks.
And you hope that you do it in a good enough way that it shows. On this first page of the Google search results. So that when your ideal client, who is the person who might be Googling low-FODMAP snacks, does that search, you show up at the top of the search results and they get to know about you and your brand, and you're providing a free, helpful resource for them.
And then you can sprinkle in some opt-ins in there, some calls to action to get them to join your email list, et cetera, et cetera. She can keep that relationship going and eventually perhaps pitch them to work with you or to buy something from you and sign up for a course, whatever. Or there's a whole nother business model that I've talked about in previous videos that I've done where you're not really selling anything.
And your whole business model is creating free, helpful content on your website. And you're monetizing with display ads and maybe affiliate links or something like that. So, depending on what you're trying to do, your strategy might be slightly different, but the idea is that you create content around different phrases that have to do with you and your niche so that you are discovered when people search for those topics.
So here's an example, low-FODMAP snacks. And I just randomly thought of this example, and it's really ironic because look who is at the very top of the search results, rbitzer.com. And this is a dietitian. Actually somebody who took my SEO made simple course and clearly implemented well because here she is at the very top of the search results.
And she is probably getting a decent number of people clicking to her website and reading about low FODMAP snacks. So she has a whole bunch of low-fat back snacks. You can see that she has ads on her website. So just by me, clicking on that result and going to her website, she's earning money right now because I have this ad open on my site.
So that's just an example. So when Rebecca looks at her stats for her blog, She should be able to see that she's ranking number one for the keyword phrase, low FODMAP snacks. And if you use certain tools, they tell you how many times that searched per month, and you can get an idea of kind of like what volume of traffic you might expect, if you are lucky enough to rank well for a high volume keyword.
Let's see who else is on here. So she's even ranking above the Monash website, which is amazing because their whole business is helping people select a low FODMAP foods. this is a functional medicine guy, fodmapeveryday.com. Here's another dietitian, Kate Scarlata, that's great. Another dietitian, dietvsdisease.org.
And then I'm not familiar with these other ones, so much. I don't know if they're run by dietitians, but, yeah. So your goal is to figure out. What are people typing in to find me right now? so if you've never done any sort of content creation strategically on your website, you might find that you're ranking for some pretty random keywords.
But the point is to figure out where you are now, when you're just starting out so that as you learn more about SEO and you can implement an actual. Real strategy to try to get people, to find you through your content. You can see where you started and watch your progress and your improvement as you go.
So if you're just interested, you're just like slightly curious and you just want a quick snapshot of maybe like your top 10 keywords right now at this very moment, one tool that I really love is Semrush. And this is a premium priced SEO tool, and this is what I use for my websites. I love it, but it is a little more expensive.
I think the cheapest plan is like $120 a month or so, but you sign up for a plan and it gives you a bunch of information about your website and allows you to do really, really good, quick keyword research. But you can also just create a free account and dabble around and they'll give you. You know, limited amounts of information.
So if you go to semrush.com and say you want to know about your own website, you could just type it in and click start now. And then they're going to prompt you to create a free account. so I do have a free account that I've created, just so I can see what it looks like for you guys, without who don't have, the paid account.
So I've created a free account. And then it allows you to see some overview information about your website. So this is a blog that, used to be doing super well, but I basically closed this business down to focus on The Unconventional RD. So I haven't updated it maybe in like two years ish now. so that's why the traffic started dropping off.
But let's see if you type in your domain, you can just scroll down here. To this section, top organic keywords. And if you click view detail, even if you're just on the free account, you can see your top. I don't know how many this is. Looks like maybe your top 10 keywords that you're ranking for. Right. And it will sort of sort it by how much traffic they think you're getting from the keywords. So that's how they rank it. So at this moment, they think that my best performing post is ranking for the keyword yellow 6.
And so the bottom of page one, then olive oil for constipation, my own brand functional nutrition answers. And I'm actually going to do a follow-up video here maybe in the next day or two about why. That's not really that great to be ranking, you know, at the top for your own brand, as one of your top keywords, red 40 blah, blah, blah.
So these are just some posts that I have on the site. And. These are what Semrush thinks are my top performing posts, but this is just a guess. This is just Semrush looking at what you're ranking for, and then using their algorithms to estimate how many clicks they think you might be getting based on the monthly search volume and how many people click through in each position on the first page.
So this is not an exact science and they usually actually underestimate the amount of traffic that you're getting to. So basically what you're looking at here is here's the keyword. So when someone Googles the word yellow 6, cause I have some content on my site about the different types of food dyes.
You can see that right now I'm in position number nine for that query. So the second to last on the first page, which actually doesn't get a ton of clicks, but it is searched 2,400 times a month. So, even though it doesn't get a lot of clicks, I could still be getting maybe, you know, like a hundred people or so I'm clicking to my article every month.
And here it's telling you how difficult it is to rank for the keyword. which I talk about more in my SEO course. But all you really care about at this point is what are you ranking for, for curiosity sake? so you know where you're starting and then as you get better at SEO, you can watch your, content that you're trying to strategically rank for rise in the rankings.
And we could do another one. Let's try rbitzer.com. The one that we just looked up for low FODMAPs snack. Oh, and you can see, wow. They think that that's actually one of her number one, keywords low-FODMAP snacks, low-FODMAP bread, different pastas pre-workout snack Starbucks drinks for diabetics, low sodium snacks, blah, blah, blah.
So she has a lot of like food and snack related stuff that she's ranking well for. So, yay. That's great. So that's An easy way to just figure out your top 10 keywords. If you're curious, you just want to know, like, what are people finding me through? Like, how are they finding me? That's an easy, free way to do it.
If you sign up for an actual paid account or the seven day free trial and then just cancel it. But I actually don't recommend doing that unless you know how to use Semrush so that you can get the most out of your seven day free trial. Maybe don't do the free trial yet, but if you ever sign up for a paid account, you can see a lot more detail.
basically you would see all of the key words. So see how it says she's ranking for like 22,000 keywords. if you have the paid account, you're able to see all of those and that can help you optimize your content as well. So the other tool that everyone.
Should have is Google Search Console. And this is free for all website owners. So you can just go to Google Search Console, click start now, if you don't have it set up, yet. It will ask you to set it up for your website. And if you need help, walking through that, definitely check out my course, SEO Made Simple at seowaitlist.com cause I walk you through every step.
But if you already have it set up, then you are able to look at your website. I'm in an incognito window. So it's making me log in. So once you're in, this is what you'll see, as your dashboard and just to see how you're performing with different keywords. you want to go to this performance tab and then this is data over the last three months, just for web searches, with how my website is performing just on Google search. So it doesn't tell you anything about
Any other type of search engine like Bing or Duck Duck Go or whatever. This doesn't give you any information about that. It's just how you're performing on Google. And just, on different types of searches. So you can look specifically on, you know, web searches, like a demo before image, search, video, search, new search, et cetera.
But we're just looking at the web and I do recommend clicking these boxes here so you can see all of the data. It tells you how many clicks to your website. You got over the date range. The default is the last three months. How many impressions you got? So how many people saw your results? Or you're listing in the search results.
Obviously a lot more people see your stuff been necessarily click on it, your average click through rate, across everything that's index on Google and the average position of your post. And obviously the lower, the number, the better, because you want to be towards the top of the Google search results.
And remember, this is a site that I'm not, well, I just started republishing a few things on it, but I haven't been working on this for like two years. So that's why it's basically stagnant and. It's doing fine for just a site that's sitting there with, like, it has maybe 20 articles on it. so to get, you know, 4,000 people to my site with that little amount of content, it's still performing decently well for like an abandoned nutrition site.
But it could be doing a lot better if I was putting my attention towards it. But same deal here. You could just look down here under queries and it tells you the keywords that you're ranking for how many clicks you got, how many impressions you got. And again, this is just from Google, the click-through rate and the position for that.
So here, you can see what they think are my top keywords. This is just, you know, the first 10 results, but there's up to a thousand here that you can see, and you can also see what your top performing pages are. So you can see which pages on your site are getting the most clicks, et cetera, et cetera.
And I will say if your site is new, or you don't do a lot of SEO optimized content, like here, I'll show you my. Other site, The Unconventional RD. I don't really do anything for SEO on that site. I'm more focused on my podcast, so I don't really have any great keywords ranking. All the people coming to my site already know my brand and they're just Googling my brand name or my name.
So you can see that that might be what your current results look like. If you don't have any SEO. Optimized content published on your site and that's fine. That's a place to start. It's not a great place to be, but it's a place to start. And that's what I'm going to be talking about in my next video.
But yeah, so if you're curious to see how people are finding you, this is what you should do, sign up for Google Search Console you won't have any old data. It only starts collecting data from the moment you set it up forward, but once it's set up. From then on it's collecting data and you can see for free how people are getting to your website and then monitor your progress as you implement an actual SEO strategy and see how.
So, yay. If you have any questions about this, definitely post them in The Unconventional RD community on Facebook. I can put a link in the comments for how to get to that group. but yeah, this is how people figure out what they're ranking for and that's how they were able to share their funniest keywords that they rank for, on that prompt.
So I hope that's helpful and I will be back, maybe in a couple of days with, a second video talking all about why it's actually not good. If when you look at your results, what you see is your name or your brand name at the top instead of queries or questions that your ideal customer might have. So we'll talk about that next and hope you have a great rest of your day. Bye.