Beyond Influential #25 Jordan Bosstick of Influencer SEO on SEO Strategy for Bloggers & How to Use Pinterest Like a Pro
Jordan Bosstick is the President & Cofounder of InfluencerSEO, a company that offers search engine optimization services designed specifically for influencers.
Jordan fell in love with all things related to growing a blog & earning authentic influence while working for Lauryn Evarts of The Skinny Confidential. She has a background in web development & project management, specifically with building startup social networks and Wordpress blogs. Through her company InfluencerSEO, Jordan works with dozens of Influencers to help them grow their blog traffic and income through SEO. She's an SEO wizard, and approaches growing blogs purely from a data driven, analytics perspective.
On this episode, we talk:
- All things SEO for influencers - Best practices for keyword research, post length, images tags, # of posts, link building, and more!
- What Google is looking for when it crawls your posts
- How to use Pinterest content to drive traffic to your website (FREE CHEATSHEET)
- RewardStyle vs. ShopStyle
- Good SEO vs. Common SEO Mistakes
Click here to download your free Pinterest Cheatsheet!
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SHOW NOTE TIMESTAMPS
1:54 - Jordan Bosstick is the president and co-founder of Influencer SEO, a company that offers search engine optimization services designed specifically for influencers.
2:57 - Can you tell the audience a little about your background and how you got into what you do now?
4:14 - When you were working for Lauren and optimizing blog posts, when did you realize you actually knew what you were doing and that it was working?
5:29 - To take a step back, for people who don’t know, can you explain a little bit about about what SEO is and why it matters?
6:45 - Even hearing you say that, it sounds obvious, it sounds easy, but if I’m just starting coming to you I wouldn’t even know where to start. So when people come to you, what part of the blogger journey are they usually on?
8:19 - I think you made an important point, too, that it’s not just bloggers necessarily, but it’s also businesses, it’s any kind of website. So SEO is something you should be paying attention to whether you’re writing blogs on food recipes or you’re an entrepreneur or you’re selling a product.
10:30 - Say you’re in the camp that you're getting most of your traffic from Instagram and your website isn’t getting the traffic. If I come to you, what’s included in an audit? What are the first things you’re looking at, where do we start?
12:03 - How do you find these keywords?
13:54 - So you mentioned that you use a bunch of tools to do your keyword research. Do you have a few listeners can take a look at to get an idea?
15:41- What are the components of good SEO if it’s not just keywords?
16:59 - Google is trying to pair the person asking the question with the person who has the best answer for that question. But the question is how Google registers that. You mentioned trust, authority, and relevance, how is Google, Bing, or Yahoo looking at these things?
19:45 - So, in that example, do you know what you’re looking for when you’re going through those top 20, or do you actually have to read through each component to look for patterns?
21:15 - So when somebody comes to you and they don’t have an SEO strategy, how are they normally coming up with their topics, titles, or ideas?
22:53 - So what do you do to really understand their brand?
25:58 - So you mentioned some technical things earlier, like what platform it’s built on, the word length of a post, image placement… Let's dig in:
So what’s the best platform if you are building a blog or website to build on?
29:12 - So what would be a good price to have someone move your site over to Wordpress from a different platform?
29:57 - So going back to talking about things that affect SEO, you mentioned ‘no big block paragraphs.’ What is the ideal word length, does it depend on the topic, how many paragraphs should you have… How is Google looking at that?
31:57 - So what is it about a bulk paragraph that turns off Google?
33:06 - So what about image placement? Are there certain types or sizes of images that perform better? Do you need a certain number of images?
34:15 - So when you post a blog post, how long should you wait before you start to drive traffic to it from other locations? Or, let’s say you post a blog post and you want to repost it on Medium or LinkedIn, what’s the appropriate amount of time to be posting there so that the blog article comes up before the other ones in the rankings?
36:08 - So is the SEO strategy then the same for Google as it would be if you’re trying to SEO a YouTube title vs trying to do it on all these different platforms?
38:47 - What are you doing to study SEO, what resources are you looking at?
41:06 - What should a person look for in an SEO specialist?
47:41 - I definitely want to hit the ‘affiliate’ topic. Can you go through the biggest affiliates in the space, especially for bloggers, and the pros and cons from a professional perspective?
50:12 - Do affiliate links dock you at all in the SEO perspective? Like, does Google know this is a paid link, so therefore, maybe it’s not as valuable?
50:41 - What’s a no-follow link?
51:53 - It’s the same principles applied there as in social media strategy and brand strategy. You’re not trying to push product on people all the time, but you need to add value. It’s about the post being valuable enough for people to want to click on it.
52:29 - So if someone has not been SEO-ing their stuff, and maybe their site’s a few years old, and now they want to go back, does it act like it’s a new post, or do you get credit for the old post and changing out the titles and all of that data?
53:55 - Regarding images on Wordpress, if it asks you for alt title or an alt description, should you always be filling out those things? What’s supposed to go in there?
56:01 - So it should be a short description?
56:17 - So what’s a meta tag and what’s a meta description?
58:01 - I hear from people who are big bloggers all the time that Pinterest is the #1 driver to their blog posts next to Google. So, can you talk a little bit about top drivers for bloggers and influencers to their blog posts? I’d also like to get into Pinterest a little bit about how to think about pinning if you want to promote your podcast, blog, etc?
1:00:11 - I’ll work together with Jordan and put something in the Show Notes so you guys can download a tutorial on creating a showcase.
1:02:39 - You work primarily with the typical bloggers and influencers. Do you think that Pinterest works as well for somebody who’s doing more the business thing?
1:05:43 - You’ve worked with a ton of influencers and big names and truly influential people in the space. Who are a few of the people you’re looking at right now who you think are doing it right?
1:08:06 - What are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making in terms of their SEO?
1:10:49 - Are there any other red flags people should be looking out for in terms of SEO or harming their SEO?
1:11:42 - Collaborating with influencers is pretty common advice. From the SEO perspective, how do you look at collaborations?
1:12:30 - How does consistency affect SEO?
1:13:17 - What do you think the secret to influence is?
1:14:31 - Where can people find out about you and Influencer SEO and all of your packages?
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