2 unpopular opinions I share with my website clients + 1 SEO myth busted!
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I’m gonna start off by telling you that since I went full-time in my business in 2020, I’ve done A LOT of sitting at my desk for HOURS on end… and even though I’ve not gained 5,000 pounds because of it, I definitely don’t feel any healthier. So, –new year, new office stuff!
I just got a standing desk & an under-desk treadmill this year, –and I am super excited to be able to stand up, walk and move around more while I work. 😂
So in today’s video, that’s exactly what I’m doing while I record: standing!
–Hey. It’s the little things. 🤷🏼♀️
Anyway, …
I work with a lot of clients doing either an overhaul of a DIY website, or designing a brand new one from scratch because my wonderful, empowered clients started getting into the weeds of this thing and they were like, “holy f*ck. I don't know what I'm doing here.”
A VERY BIG part of what I give to my one-on-one clients along with their new website, is strategy & business tips.
And inevitably I tell many of them these same two things:
❶ Where to start with Social Media Marketing
❷ How to Market their new website
❸ shatter a popular SEO Myth
But my opinions probably aren’t what you’d expect!
Take a peek at the video below, or keep scrolling to read through it instead.
Two unpopular website opinions that I tell my website clients ALL the time…
Opinion (Secret) ❶
You don't have to be on social media.
I'm just going to wait for the gasps.
I don't mean that necessarily as a blanket statement, what I actually mean is pick one.
PICK ONE thing that you enjoy doing; a platform that you like being on, whether it's blogging, whether it's YouTube-ing, whether it's TikTok-ing.
––Are any of these actually verbs now???
Whatever it is, it doesn't matter. Just focus on: where is your audience, or where do you think they are?
Look at the various platforms. Where do you think they’re hanging out?
If that's also a platform you genuinely enjoy being on, then it's okay to take on that platform.
What I don't want you to do is to also be on eight other platforms because you will wear yourself thin so fast, you will give up on everything and you will say, it's too hard. Your website won't get any traffic because you're not doing anything anymore, and then you'll go back to your day job.
Womp, womp, womp….
…Nobody wants that. 👀🫣
So what I want you to do instead, is to pick a single platform to start with, where you're pretty sure your audience hangs out, where you already like to be, where you're okay with having content on that platform. And just focus on that by itself and your website.
You also don't have to have different content for your website updates and for your social media updates.
Ideally it's the same piece of content that you can break up and share pieces of across your other platform(s).
“You can’t be everywhere providing and sharing good content in ALL of these places if it’s just you!”
So you write, or create, or record this thing that you can share on your website (ideally, so that Google sees that your website stays updated) but you can also piece that out and put it on your social platforms as posted content for Reels, Lives, Posts, Videos, Tweets, Stories, etc.
So don't overextend yourself.
It takes a lot of effort to schedule these posts and create a strategy around what you're actually posting.
Whether or not that's going to create/attract potential clients, bring them to your website, and get them to buy from you isn’t a guarantee. It’s a numbers game and one you have to play by each platform’s algorithm to win.
It's a huge amount of responsibility, right? So let's take that down a notch. Let's not put so much responsibility on our shoulders.
If you hate being on Twitter, ––then f*cking don't be on Twitter!
If you hate being on the platform, you're not going to use it. And when you do use it, it's not going to feel genuine or interesting to people who are looking at your posts because they can feel that you don't want to be there or that you aren’t putting effort into anything you share.
That comes through in the kinds of content that you're putting out.
–I speak from experience here! I did all the things at first, too.
I was posting to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Medium, Instagram, and –Pinterest!! Oh my God– Pinterest was a huge one. I was on BoardBooster scheduling countless pins to auto-post for me throughout the day… You probably don't even know what that is. Not even kidding—like 50 pins a day, every day for months on end, spending hours trying to read through all these articles and make sure that content I was sharing from other people was still of value & not just clickbait.
I spread myself too thin and then I didn't have time to do anything else.
That's the problem I find so many clients are wading into; they see these big companies, that probably have these massive teams or at least one dedicated social media manager, posting to all these different platforms and they think they have to do that too!
There's TikTok lives and posts, Instagram Stories & Reels & lives, Facebook lives, posts & Facebook groups, private communities, YouTube channels, LinkedIn profiles and company pages, Medium, Pinterest boards, ads on social and on Google, tweeting on Twitter, –the list could nearly be endless!
You can't be everywhere providing and sharing good content in ALL of these places if it's just you!
These big companies, Marie Forleo, Amy Porterfield, Jenna Kutcher, –or whoever you’re feeling intimidated by–– they have teams to help them do these things, and until you get to that place too, you really need to drill down on the one marketing method that you're going to pick to get your message out there.
If you don't want to be on social media really at all, like me, you don’t have to. Don’t bend to peer pressure!
Launch the Damn Thing™️ is on many platforms: Instagram maybe the most, Facebook groups, but never on my company page, I have a LinkedIn business profile and a personal profile, I’m on TikTok, Pinterest, Twitter, … –but when's the last time I posted on any of those platforms?
Just go take a gander…. I’ll wait. 😉
I'M NOT ACTIVE! 😂
Where I focus my effort is on my blog. This is my happy place! I like writing, teaching & creating content like this for you on this platform.
That's what I do best and it kills two birds with one stone.
While I'm providing valuable content that people come to my website specifically to read,
I’m also telling Google that I keep my website updated.
The fact that they (you) stay here to absorb my content (THANK YOU!), Google says, “Yeah, okay. You're doing a good job. I'll keep sending people your way.”
That is how I get clients. End of story.
No ads, no marketing, and basically no social media.
It is possible. So you just have to pick the method that you feel the best doing and go all in on that one thing.
You can pick up additional methods of marketing. When you start to master the initial set, you can definitely pick up more, but I would only pick up one at a time, mastering each one before you pick up another so you don’t spread yourself too thin.
So that's secret number one: You don't have to be on social media if you don't want to be.
Opinion (Secret) ❷
⚠️ Spoiler alert: the "build it and they will come thing." ... it's not a thing anymore. 😬
You have to talk about what you do. You have to put it out there ––and you have to put it out there a lot.
One of the worst mistakes you can possibly make is to launch a brand new website and tell no one, including Google, that it exists.
If you let it sit there and collect dust for two years and do nothing ever with it ever again… you’ve just wasted a bunch of time (& potentially) money.
"Build it and they will come" does not work anymore, and it hasn't worked for a really long time.
It’s a huge mistake (after not telling anyone that your website and your business exist) to pay all this money for a website and let it sit there and do nothing.
Google is not interested in doing an index of every website that ever exists or existed, –especially when they aren't being updated.
I mean, think about it from your perspective. If you do a Google search on something, you're looking for the most up-to-date information, especially if it's regarding technology or how to do something.
The people performing that search, most likely, are not gonna see your website pop up in their search results if you're not active on it.
“The best possible way to do that is to have some sort of content marketing system and that’s why everybody in their brother tells you to blog. ”
Google is looking for the most up-to-date content, the best website experiences, the keywords that websites are mentioning, and the types of keywords that people –real people, real human beings– are searching for on Google.
So if your website launches and you don't touch it again for two years, you are in trouble.
People are not finding outdated or stagnant websites, and Google does this on purpose.
In fact, if you launch your website and you don't connect it to Google Search Console by submitting a Sitemap to them, it may not even find your website, or ever know that it exists for an undefined amount of time. That could mean anything from months, years, weeks, or days of never popping up in search results –not even in the 1,000th page for your keywords. 😳
Google may accidentally stumble upon your little domain out there on the interwebs, but if you don’t tell it where to look, it WILL be an accident and it won’t happen on your timeline.
You have to tell Google that you exist when you launch it, and you have to keep reminding Google that you exist by updating content on your website, whether that's through updating galleries, adding blog posts, posting YouTube videos and adding those videos on your website WITH the video transcription (as I’ve done today), whether you have a shop and you're adding inventory––Google wants to see that your website is being regularly and consistently updated.
The best possible way to do that is to have some sort of content marketing system and that's why everybody in their brother tells you to blog.
Creating content that helps other people shouldn’t be content written for the sake of content. It also shouldn’t be long, boring research paper-worthy posts. It doesn't even have to be written long form at all.
It can be a podcast where you embed the player and put the show notes. Ideally, you have at least 2000 words in there, so put the transcription of the podcast.
The same goes for video content: if you're posting to YouTube, also put the content in written form in the blog post with the video.
You're actually aiming to help people in many different forms, so that people who prefer to learn by reading can do so, and those who prefer to listen or watch can entertain themselves too.
So if it's possible for you to produce good content, whether it's audio, video, or written, do as much of that as you can –within reason–, make sure it's keyword rich, and tell Google every time you post something new.
Luckily inside Squarespace, you can do this easily because it's a built-in feature! I'll show you how:
learn how:
Connect your website to Google Search Console
When you create a new post in Squarespace, you have an area inside that post where the post’s settings live. I've gone over this in a previous post, which I'll make sure to link below. You can access these settings from two different areas but it doesn’t matter where you update the info.
While you're inside the post, in Edit mode, up at the top of the post, you have the title of the post, and the post’s status (such as “draft”). If you click on that, it opens the pop-up for the settings for that post.
Notice under Share, you have the option to tell Google Search Console that you have a new post, and all you have to do (after Google Search Console is already connected), is turn the toggle on per post, in this spot, and it will give Google the title of the post automatically, and the URL when the post is published.
Even if you schedule this to post later, you can come in here and turn that on, then it will do the rest for you. It'll tell Google that the post exists, which is much easier than separately logging into Google and submitting a new sitemap every time, or telling it there’s a new page on your website.
If you're outside of the post, NOT in Edit mode, that would be accessed via the ••• (the ellipsis icon).
From there, it’s the same path though, go into Share, enable Google Search Console, and Save. Done!
If you haven't connected Google Search Console yet, that's an easy thing to do too and well-worth connecting right after you’ve launched your website.
Go into your Analytics and click on Search Keywords. There will be a black button there that says Connect to Google Search Console that will connect your website to Google so you can see your search engine results.
Then your Google Search Console will show up in your blog collection settings, per post. So that's a neat little trick, you might not have known that Squarespace does for you.
Also check out:
#10 in my favorite list of Squarespace shortcuts to speed up your workflow
Learn more about Blog Settings in How to Design & Organize your blog on Squarespace
Bonus!
Opinion (Secret) ❸
No platform –and I say this as a Squarespace enthusiast– no platform is better than another for SEO.
I know, I know I'm just going to wait for that wave of whatever-it-is-you’re-feeling to fall over you.
No, I'm just kidding.
I say that because, it 100% depends on the type of business that you run, what you expect your website to be able to do for you, and no longer is that dependent on the technology of the platform itself.
So WordPress is not better at SEO than Squarespace. Squarespace is not better at SEO than WordPress. And neither of them are better or worse than Showit or Shopify or Weebly or Wix or Webflow or any of the others, because it's simply a different tech stack.
They all are designed to have more or less the same set of sh*t that all of the others do. All that matters is what you do with the tools they give you.
Basically, you have to learn the tools in order to make them work, because like I said, build it and they will come does not work anymore.
There's too much competition.
There are too many other you's out there.
––And I mean that lightly. There are not a million other you’s or me’s, but there are a lot of other [insert your business type here] or web designers.
So, if you can use the tools at your disposal and use them to the best of your ability and do all the keyword research that you can and write down, what's working and what's not working and learn from your mistakes, you'll be golden.
Another of the worst things that you can possibly do, is to spend tons of money on a custom website or an expensive template, design it, launch it and tell NO ONE that it exists because you're terrified of what people will think about what you're doing.
Everyone has to start somewhere, including me.
I wish I had taken screenshots of my very first website!! And I say that because I have been a professional graphic designer since 2006. That was when I started taking my first class in college. I also got my first in-house design job in 2006 or 2007.
I had been in the professional design world for nearly a decade when I built my first website –and it was total sh*t.
I didn't know what the hell I was doing! I didn't know there was a strategy. I just knew that your logo is usually at the top, there was a thing called a header, and a thing called a footer and everything in between…? I had no idea what to fill that with.
We all start somewhere.
If that doesn't make you feel better, I don't know what to tell you.
SEO is not something that works best on specific platforms like WordPress. You can use Squarespace to have a great SEO strategy, even bringing clients in directly from Google and I know you can because that’s how I get all of my clients and have for several years.
I'm not going to tell you that my SEO is top-notch or perfect. –In fact, I’d feel much MORE comfortable telling you that it’s NOT perfect!
I've never hired anybody to do my SEO or fix it, though I think I’m nearing that point in my business where I’m ready to do that.
So I'm sure there's a sh*t ton of stuff that I could fix and it would be a lot better than it already is, but you know what? My DIY efforts have gotten me this far and I think that this can apply to you too!
Recap
So my three tips for the day are:
You don't have to be on social media in order to have a successful online business.
You have to have some sort of marketing strategy; it doesn't have to be social media, but it does have to be something.
and bonus! A great SEO strategy is not dependent on the platform your website is built on.
Any platform can handle basic SEO the same as any other platform, so don't let those myths scare you away from whatever platform you're leaning towards. Don't let people tell you that WordPress with Yoast is better than Squarespace without it.
The platform doesn't matter, because none of it handles SEO for you; it's all dependent on how you actually use the SEO tools you are given.
So basically it boils down to secret number two, again: if you don't tell people you exist, you won't get any clients or customers.
You have to do the legwork yourself.
final thoughts
That's just my thought for the day. I hope that was helpful & relieved some of your internal stress.
If you feel called out, leave your thoughts in the comments below. I would love to hear where you are in your journey and cheer you on because it is possible despite what you may feel. No one is an overnight success!
I once heard Tim McGraw on a podcast of all things (side note, not a fan of country music, but his interview was fantastic & I can't remember what podcast it was); he'd said a friend told him once that it took him 45 years to become an overnight success, and that stuck with me.
Just because someone suddenly seems like the newest, bestest thing since sliced bread, –it doesn't mean that they just got started the day before.
If you're feeling a little bit like “comparisonitis” is ruining your entrepreneurial journey, remember that somebody Tim McGraw knows said it took them 45 years to become a success overnight.
And you can do this A LOT faster than that.
