Because my own journey into SEO has been so eventful and rewarding, it’s always a pleasure to hear about how others have made their way through this dynamic and fast-changing field. My guest, Amanda Jordan, SEO Strategy Director at RicketyRoo, shares her unique journey into the SEO industry, from initially wanting to be an engineer to discovering her passion for search marketing through a friend’s suggestion.
Amanda is an expert at local SEO and shares the most common challenges faced by businesses struggling to compete with larger competitors due to content quality and topical authority. She notes that one common mistake made is to focus too exclusively on the lower funnel. Other common mistakes include having too much “thin content” on their sites and failing to optimize their Google My Business profiles.
Additional issues typically include duplicate content, internal linking issues, poor navigation, and indexability issues. As she notes, issues such as these are often hard issues to overcome, given that most small businesses do not have the resources required to produce content whose quality is high enough to be ranked well by search engines.
We discuss the importance of businesses having a presence on secondary sites like directories and review platforms to improve local SEO, with Amanda opining that it’s sometimes worth it to pay for listings on some platforms to increase visibility.
The discussion pivots to video, and how employees can often be effective content creators, especially in healthcare and related industries, as they may have more personal experience and knowledge to share than people at higher levels of the organization. Amanda acknowledges that there may be a learning curve for employees to become comfortable with creating content, but it can be a valuable way to personalize the brand and engage with customers.
I was interested in getting Amanda’s take on the GA4 migration, which has caused a good deal of frustration among marketers accustomed to the rich functionality of GA4’s predecessor, Universal Analytics.
Amanda sees big changes ahead in 2024 for SEO and believes that the best way to prepare for them is to put oneself in the shoes of searchers. “Don’t worry about Google. Do the right things for your customers, and you’ll likely be on the right side of whatever update comes.”
