Ep 44 | Shondra Mattos on SEO

Annie: Well, Hey there, Leah.

Leah: Hey, Annie, how are you doing?

Annie: I'm great. How are you?

Leah: I'm doing well and I'm super excited about our podcast today because we have another Ask the Expert, which are my favorite. And today we're getting to talk about search engine optimization, which I like. need to learn more about. And I'm so excited that now we have this opportunity. Who are we talking to you today, Annie? Who's our expert?

Annie: Our expert today is Shondra Mattos. Shondra is an I. B. C. L. C. International Board Certified Lactation Consultant. She's a La Leche League leader, and she's the owner of Mattos Lactation, a location independent lactation practice. She also owns and operates SM Business and Marketing Consulting, which helps lactation professionals build a strong business foundation and develop strategies that lead to success. In addition to serving families and helping business owners, she helps established and aspiring LCs gain a deeper understanding of complicated topics relevant to the lactation field and offers one on one and group tutoring to lactation students. When Shondra is not nerding out on boob related science, she spends her time hanging out with her husband and daughter, watching YouTube and eating cookies. Shondra, welcome to the Lactation Business Coaching Podcast.

Shondra: Hi, thanks for having me.

Annie: We're so glad to have you because, you know, we do know you as an expert. Some of our listeners did your guts and butts course this summer, which was so good. And it's just so fun to know that you've got the clinical skills, but also this other business side of things, which really comes out when you read the blog posts that you write. Cause you just, you bring things together in such a really helpful, clear way that is good for professionals and for parents. So I just really love what you’re doing.
Shondra: Thanks. That's really reassuring, especially since I've had to kind of like fumble my way through by myself. So all of the business, all of like the lactation stuff, I've kind of just been like working hard and I guess here we are six years later and it's coming together. And so I'm, you know, it's really reassuring to hear that.

Leah: Definitely. I think it's so interesting how we all have a passion for lactation and helping families with their breastfeeding issues, but many of us have these little side talents that we get to interweave in. So how did you get involved in Knowing anything about SEO, was it just from building your own website in your own business?

Shondra: Yeah, so I'm trying to think back. Honestly, it started off with having no money, right? Trying to figure out how I was going to run this super successful practice without a big budget up front. And so a lot of my time when I wasn't studying for, to become an IBCLC, it was trying to figure out, like, What people do to be successful. And then everybody, especially even back in 2014 was talking about like SEO, SEO, SEO. I had no idea what it meant. So I just watched a lot of YouTube videos and downloaded a lot of free content, anything I can put my hands on and just kept trying to understand it because it's not. very intuitive at all. And then it just became easier, I guess. Like once you understand the principles and the concepts, you can kind of put everything together. And I guess it wasn't until I don't even remember how people started realizing that I was kind of good at it. I just kind of was like, Oh, I can do that. Do you need some help with that? And then I guess you're like, here we are. Here we are.

Leah: So what is, for anybody listening that's like, y'all keep saying SEO, and I feel like I should know what that is, but I clearly don't. What is SEO? Because that's how I felt in the beginning. I'm like, seems like an important term, but what exactly does it mean?

Shondra: Sure. In short, search engine optimization just is how Google or any search engine finds your website. In context, SEO is like the strategies and the tactics that one can use to let Google know that your website or content is relevant towards you or like for your target market. And so there's a lot of different factors into it, but really it's just kind of like how you can get seen by Google, if that makes sense.

Leah: Yeah. Yeah. So it seems like it's really important that Even private practice lactation consultants, we want to be seen. We want people to be able to find us. So it seems like it's really an important thing for us to know about. Would you say? Absolutely.

Shondra: Absolutely. Especially because it's common that we want to get searched for, for like lactation consultant or like lactation consultant near me, but because we're all. Hoping to get that search term, right? Like we get pushed down depending on like the location we're at and how many lactation consultants are around or where that person is searching from like actual physical location. And so absolutely we want to have our businesses be seen in the forefront as high as possible on the Google rankings so that people click on us. Clients, I mean, obviously they have a lot going on, but people in general often just want to see, like, if you're not on the first page, if you're not on the first four, you don't exist. And so the goal would be to get there for whatever the person is searching for.

Annie: So I know like this is a common question. That I know you and I have actually gotten when we've worked on websites together and done. And I've watched you do SEO optimization for people. And people want to know, you know, you hit publish on your website, you've got your perfect domain name, you've done everything correctly. And then the number one question that we get is, okay, how come I googled myself and it didn't come up? So why is that? Like, why? Why is it that happened? You know, you could Google, I could launch a website tomorrow that was, you know, antifrisbee lactation consultant and then Google it, this brand new website and Google antifrisbee lactation consultant and my new website might not come up. And sometimes people are finding they're Googling themselves and like some other person not even in their area, not even in their state is coming up. So why is it that you're not getting seen just because you exist like with your name?

Shondra: So there's a few different reasons being one. It takes time for Google because it has so much content to purse like parse through and to see it takes time for Google to know you exist, right? So any even from the time that you put your website up, even if you optimized it 100 percent perfectly, it may take a couple months, anywhere from 4 to 6 months for your website to really get some traction. Additionally, You have a website, but haven't listed your business on Google. Google's not going to show you your local business. And so you know how you can type in a business and like it shows on maps. That's a separate process than just putting your website up. And so Google. is smart. It only wants to show things that are relevant to the searcher. And so they on the developers on the back end have spent a lot of time working on finding ways that they can ensure that whatever they put forward is relevant. And you got to put some content on there. You got to load it up to let Google know. And you have to have a little bit of patience for Google to be like, Oh yeah, this is relevant to the person who's searching. Let me show them that.

Annie: That makes a lot of sense. So for somebody who's just starting out with their website or maybe has a website and isn't happy with how it's performing, what are some easy ways that you can improve your own website's SEO rankings and get seen by Google?

Shondra: Sure. So there's a myriad of things that you can do, but I would say for the basic person who may not even have a lot of website knowledge right to be able to manipulate their website and stuff. The first and most important thing to do is Deuce high quality content. And I know I talk a lot about that. And a lot of people are like, well, I don't want to blog. I don't want to really do anything more than just manage my website. And that's perfectly okay. You just have to make sure that the websites, like the pages that you have are high quality, meaning that when people come to your website, they get the answers that they have answered the questions that they have answered. Right. And a few other things that you can do that are a little bit more tactic wise is to make sure that you're updating your website regularly. Google doesn't want old news. And so if you have old content that you haven't updated in a year or so, It might be really helpful to go back through and just put a little update, add new content, add a new perspective. Other things that you can do revolve around making sure that your website loads quickly. And a really easy thing that people can do is to compress. their PNG files. And so I know a lot of people are like, what is a PNG file? Right. But you've got like high quality photos and then you've got like lower resolution photos. If you're using stock photos, let's say from Canva or Adobe, what is it? Adobe spark or picks a baby. Any of like the stock photo websites. Those are going to be super high quality that may benefit from a free compression tool so that what it does is it, it keeps the resolution, but makes it smaller. And that will lead to faster load times, especially if you have super like visual focused websites. I know we like to put a lot of pictures with our parents and babies and stuff like that. And so that's something you can do. And then formatting, just making sure that you put bullets and short paragraphs and those H1, H2 and H3 header tags actually mean something, right? So you want to have one H1 title tag that contains like the topic that you're talking about, which in theory would be your keyword. And then the H2 and H3 heading, those are just usually like you have the big, usually have the big letters, right? When you do your blog posts or your website content, that's like describing your site or your page. And then you've got smaller title tags. They kind of just look like They'll just be where you put headers at, I guess is the best way to describe it. And having those gives Google a clear idea of what your website's about. And so that is a quick way and an easy way to let Google know that you have good content and good relevant content. And that all of those things that I mentioned require no website knowledge besides knowing what a header tag is.

Annie: So that would be, for example, When you're typing the text onto your page, and there's the little like, like in Squarespace, a little drop down and it'll say like heading one heading to paragraph one, paragraph two, you're making that heading one other platforms like Weebly and Wix, they might say h1, or in WordPress, it's all going to look a little different. But that's the the back end code that you see is H1, H2, H3, but a lot of the website builders are going to make it easier for you.
Shondra: Yeah. And that really is just to kind of, we, we all see it, right. It will look kind of like bolded or bigger, and then you'll have like smaller texts in paragraph form. And really that's all we're trying to do is just make it visually easy to read and broken up. So you will want your body text to be in a regular normal font that you would do and just have Use the h1 h2 or h3 headers for Either big points or new thoughts or anything like that that helps the reader and google Really understand how the content is broken up.
Leah: I know over the years I've like tried to do my own research and I've, you know, watched some videos or heard something that somebody said and I've fiddled around and try to change this or change that or, you know, heard, you know, you need to, you know, describe your pictures. That's the SEO you need like this over the years. Probably wasted a lot of time on different things. And I would think that there are probably some very common SEO mistakes that people make when they're trying to like, DYI this. So could you save our listeners because I saved, maybe we can save others from the hours Spent probably doing useless, quote unquote, SEO work.

Shondra: Sure. I would say though, putting your keywords in your pictures is actually one of the notes that I wrote down, because it is an easy way, especially for people who don't want to do a lot of content, but still want to be relevant. Just go ahead and when you save your photos, when you're uploading it into whatever website you're having, or whatever website you use, instead of having it be like, You know, a whole bunch of numbers or whatever it was saved when you downloaded it, just put a name talking about maybe like. If it's a picture of a breastfeeding position, you might label the breastfeeding position great for new parents, right? And so when they Google that website, because of the image, having those keywords in that will pop up on Google images and may bring your site onto a, as an option for the parent to select, right? The website. Anyway, so that was not, that was not. pointless or wasted. Super great. I have three main common mistakes that people may be making that if you change this, this will help maximize your time. And the first one is a little bit more global. It's having a plan. So I mentioned at the beginning that SEO is both a strategy and tactics. And I think that most people come in wanting to do SEO, but they don't really have a strategy for what they're trying to accomplish and having a strategy for knowing who you're going to target and what you want that user to do once they get there will really help give you a frame of reference for wha keywords you want to rank for and also how you want that user to interact with your website to hopefully, I guess we're all trying to convert clients, right? And so having a plan would be the first one, even if you don't exactly know, you know, all of what you're doing, just having a general. goals and objectives. Like once they get to the site, this is who I want to come to my site and this is what I want them to do will be really helpful. A big thing that people are doing is they're just skipping putting the metadata in what metadata is or metadata is kind of like the description of what your website or what your web page is. It's that little when you do a google search, if anybody's listening to this and in front of their computer, Thanks Type in any keyword or search term like new shoes for jogging, for example, and you'll see like a title and a bunch of text underneath that to describe what the page or the sites about we have to manually put that in. And so if you're skipping that step. You're not only making it harder for Google to know that you're relevant, but people read that to see if it's pertaining to what they're asking in Squarespace. It's super easy when you add new content. They have like an SEO description box that you can put in. But if you're doing like WordPress or Wix, I know with WordPress, they have it integrated, but you can do plugins with Wix, I believe you just have to go to your specific page settings and do that. So putting something in there is, or not putting something in there is the first mistake, but. When they do put stuff in there, I see this all the time, people put their names in it. Nobody's like, unless your name is your brand, it's just taking up valuable space to let Google and the parents know what your site and what your page is about. You only have about 156 characters to really let people know before it's cut off. And if I say, you know, lactation services by Shondra Mattos, that doesn't do me any favors. If the page that I have is about my home visits, right? Like, yes, it describes what I'm doing, but it provides no information about who, what, where, anything. And so if we can just be like, okay, what is it that I would want anybody to know about this page? And who am I targeting? And just kind of brainstorm ideas and put that in there. It's going to be better than just all of your name, your services, and your locations. If you put your name service and locations, or even just your Services and location on every page. Google will think it's too redundant and not share that. So we want unique descriptions on every page and you don't have to be an expert. You just have to kind of just. Think a little bit more creatively about who you want to visit your site.

Annie: Like for that one, is it okay to kind of say the same thing, but just word it differently? So like if I'm like, I'm a lactation consultant in Queens and Brooklyn, and then on another page I might say Brooklyn and Queens breastfeeding expert or feeding specialist in, you know, whatever it is. So just kind of not having to really come up with some. Great piece of literature for each one that says something totally new, but just making sure the words are different.

Shondra: Sure. I would say on one hand, yeah, that's better than having just copying and pasting all of them in. I would go ahead and even say for your, let's say you have a, you're doing a description for your whole website. We might do, you know, premier lactation services in Brooklyn and whatever locations you're at, right? Okay. But instead of doing home, like for your home visit or your virtual visits, instead of focusing on the location because Google will already have that you can put your locations that you serve in your footer so that will already pop up. So now all we're trying to do for the page is explain to Google what this page contains, not necessarily where you serve because Google will already know that based on page description. Does that make sense? So you might do page description, lactation consultants serving Brooklyn, but for your home visits, you might do in-home lactation support for parents of multiples, right? Because if that's your target market of as multiples or adopted families, that's an opportunity to rank for people who are looking for lactation consultant adoption. In general, because not a lot of people focus on that, but also I need a lactation consultant because I'm adopting in Brooklyn. You're going to pop up even though you didn't put that location in that specific page descriptions. Does that make sense?

Leah: Definitely. I think I understand that. I know it's a little confusing, but it seems so much more complicated. It feels like it should be really straightforward. Like, can I just like tell Google, like, send everybody my way.

Shondra: I want to serve everybody. Right. I know I have. I don't have to tell them who I want to serve because I just want to serve everybody.

Leah: Right. Right. But it does make sense that you really have to help Google understand what you're trying to do because you're not actually talking to a human, you're talking to a computer and computers only listen to very specific things and recognize very specific things. So it's like kind of have to think about it in what would a computer see, not. necessarily always what a human would see, but make it both human and computer friendly. Exactly. Yeah.

Shondra: Yeah. It's just hard to do.

Annie: Right. So what's your third mistake that we've got to avoid? I'm, I'm, uh, I'm like hiding under the table because I totally ignore my photos on my website because I'm like, it's so boring to write up those captions, but I'm gonna, I'm not, I'm going to do what you say, Shondra, and I'm going to go in and do my photos and we're going to add. So what's our third mistake that we need to stop doing right now?

Shondra: So the third mistake that people are making is that they write their content and they leave it. So I know that this is a little bit of an inverse of what I mentioned about things that you can do to improve your SEO, but realistically speaking, if you are writing content on your web page and you're not updating it, that is not just not helping, but it also can hinder just because of relevance and you're missing opportunities for ranking for different search terms that might be relevant and that may be costing you clients.

Leah: Ooh, I have a question about this one. So, you know, I've been doing this for a long time and we have, you know, tons of blog posts, but a lot of them are really old, you know, like we wrote them way back in like 2012 or something. And so is there a way to. utilize old content and like maybe do something with that that would, would be, cause like, I want the content to stay there. So I think it's great content, but is there something that should be done or do you just leave that and be adding new stuff?

Shondra: Well, I'll definitely do something with that, right? So we always want to be going back at least yearly and finding opportunities to update our content. There's two recommendations that I have in this case. If you're using your date in your URL, so when you create a blog post, Google or the website platform, or you need like a direction list. to how to get there. So a URL is like Mattos lactation dot com forward slash five tips for pumping parents. Right. And that would take me directly to a blog page. A lot of times the default setup would be Mattos lactation forward slash Oh one Oh eight 2019 forward slash five tips for pumping parents. Right. My encouragement for everybody is to make sure there's no date. It's in your URL because Google will look at that. And then that way, when you go to update your posts yearly, all you have to do is edit, you know, this is what my thoughts are on it. Now I look back at this and I either completely agree or I disagree or edit, I've added five new tips. So now it's 10 new tips, right? You know, and so you can repurpose that same content and just add to it. Maybe you update your links. And so you can just say, you know, new links were added and you make a little edit. What will happen though is when you re save that, Google will see that that is updated content because they can see the back end of that. And so, and then what you can do kind of as part of your marketing strategy is re share those on social media. So now you're getting a new wave of people coming to see that and the traffic. Increase to that blog post will tell Google, Yay, this is super relevant. So it kind of all ties together. Your SEO is going to tie with your marketing strategy and just your social media planning, all of that stuff. But you don't have to just constantly be writing new content to stay up to date and relevant.

Leah: That's so good because I find it sometimes really hard to find the time to write. And I feel like Sometimes it feels like, oh my gosh, this is already out there, like a thousand times. Is it even worth writing? But I'm guessing that you would say it is because there's the content on your site, right? Right. Oh man. So I got to get to writing. Oh, okay. On the list. I put it on the list.

Shondra: And even if it's just like a post a month or quarterly, as long as it's just not never, right? Yes.

Leah: It's just, it can't sit stagnant and then Google. And it just ignores you because nothing's changing. Sure. Gotcha. That's such a good tip.

Annie: I'm skulking in the corner here because Shondra knows that I'm like, I'm not blogging for my private practice website because I, I put a lot of work into the blog posts I write for my paperless lactation site. And I'm like, I just like, Don't have anything left for poor old city lactation. And I'm like, every time I hear Shondra talk about this, I'm like, I know, I know. I'm sure I have something to say about these things. I mean, I know I do. I've just like, there's only so many hours in the day, but I really like given us some actionable tips that we can do things that are really easy to do. They're not going to take up a lot of time. So thank you for sharing your. Search engine optimization expertise with us. If you want to learn more about Shondra's SEO and website design services, you can go to paperless lactation dot com slash website. And if you're looking for Shondra's blog posts where you can learn more about clinical topics. And also have great resources to share with parents. Her website is mattoslactation. com and that's M A T T O S. We're going to put a link to that in the show notes for the episode. And lastly, I know Shondra would be super happy if you would join her Facebook group and you can look that up. It's Business School for Lactation Consultants and Birth Workers. So we just love what you're doing, Shondra.So as always, until next time, Leah.

Leah: Great talking to you, Annie. Thanks so much, Shondra. See you next time. Bye.

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