MV TRAFFIC SUMMIT: Mikayla Taylor - Discover the Secrets of Driving Traffic to Your MemberVault Offers with Blogging and SEO

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Key Topics & Highlights:

Introduction to Blogging and SEO

• - Introduction of Mikaela Taylor as a blogger and SEO strategist
• - Passion for implementing SEO strategies to drive traffic to businesses
• - Emphasis on working smarter, not harder

Understanding SEO and How It Works

• - Explanation of search engine optimization (SEO)
• - Introduction to search engine spiders and their functions
• - Importance of indexing content for visibility
• - Significance of the Google search engine index for search engine library

Mikaela's Journey with SEO and Blogging

• - Mikaela's early experience with blogging and SEO in 2019
• - Her initial struggle with website traffic from SEO
• - Pivot towards focusing on the target audience's needs and pain points
• - Increase in organic traffic and monthly clicks from Google over time

Benefits of SEO for Member Vault Communities

• - Reduction of burnout from constant social media posting
• - Ability to promote member vault community effectively
• - Ownership and control of website content
• - Maximizing website traffic for member vault offers and communities

Leveraging Organic Clicks for Engagement

• - Understanding the value of organic clicks as real people
• - Emphasizing the need to serve visitors with valuable content

Implementing SEO for MemberVault Offers

• - Evolution of freebies and strategies for driving traffic to member vault
• - Linking blog content to member vault offers with strategic call-to-action

Search Engine Success Framework

• - Overview of the 5-step framework for optimizing a website
• - Understanding target audience and competitors
• - Creating a user-driven content strategy
• - Building authority with expertise
• - Optimizing user experience of the website
• - Tracking website performance and continuous improvement

Other Considerations for Website Optimization

• - Importance of mobile-friendly and fast-loading websites
• - Need for strategic calls to action in blog content
• - Maximizing member vault conversion through website optimization

Call to Action and Contact Information

• - Encouragement for tailored advice and continuing the conversation
• - Contact details for reaching out to Mikaela Taylor on Instagram and via email

Connect with Mikayla:

https://mikaylataylor.com/
https://www.instagram.com/bymikaylataylor/
https://pinterest.com/bymikaylataylor

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Full Transcript:

Hello friends. My name is Makayla Taylor. I'm a blogger and SEO strategist and I'm super excited to talk to you all today because I am so passionate about helping entrepreneurs implement search engine optimization strategies to bring balance and longevity to their business.

When it comes to online marketing and driving traffic to your offers, I'm a big fan of working smarter and not harder, especially as a wife, as a mom, and as someone who also works full-time. So I'm super excited to share the traffic strategy that is working best for me right now to grow my MemberVault community. Now in case you missed the spoiler alert in my introduction, I am a blogger and search engine optimization strategist. So my focus to grow my MemberVault community is with blogging and SEO.

Now if you've never heard the term SEO before, it stands for Search Engine Optimization. And this strategy is all about leveraging search engines like Google for organic traffic to your website. Before I get into how I've used SEO to grow my MemberVault community, let me share a little bit with you about how search engine optimization works.

Search engines like Google employ what we call search engine spiders. Now these are not real spiders, we can refer to them as internet robots with their primary function being to crawl and discover every piece of content that's out there on the internet. So what these search engine spiders are doing when you publish new content, they're first going to discover that content, say, hey, “there's a new piece of content out there, we need to check it out,” then they're going to crawl that content or look over everything related to the content on that web page. And if those search engine spiders, like what they see deem that content as user-friendly and helpful to a particular target audience, those search engine spiders will then index that content, which means they're adding it to Google search engine index or search engine library.

Now Google search engine library or index is the only content that gets pushed out to search engine results. And that's why this is important. And I think it's so amazing that Erin and Mike have been talking about the new community feature within MemberVault and how the free community if you're using that will be indexable by Google. And that's super important. Because if your content is not able to be indexed, that means that your content will not be pushed out by Google, and your audience won't be able to find the amazing things that you're sharing. So keep that in mind. As I talk more about SEO and search engine optimization strategy, it's really helpful to have that understanding of how search engines work.

Now a little bit about my story with using SEO to drive traffic to my MemberVault community. I started in the online space in 2019, and immediately started blogging about my personal journey, building a business with chronic illness. I also signed up for MemberVault in 2019 and I didn't have a clear strategy on how I was going to get people to the few offers that I had inside MemberVault at that time. I was blogging a lot about my personal journey and my personal story but I wasn't seeing a lot of traffic from SEO. It wasn't until I made a pivot in my content strategy to focus more on my target audience, the information that they're searching for and Google, and addressing their pain points in my content, that I started to see more traffic from Google and getting more organic clicks from search engines.

It was November 2022, when I was getting 15 clicks a month from Google, which was super exciting but fast forward to one year later with consistently applying these strategies, focusing a lot on my target audience and my community and what they wanted to learn from me and including that in my blog, that pivot made my website traffic skyrocket. And now I'm on over 900 clicks a month from Google. And some months, I'm not even putting out new content or new blog posts. Search engine optimization has allowed me to grow my MemberVault community in a way that works with my life, to where I don't have to burn myself out constantly posting on social media, or dealing with tons of different algorithm changes.

Now I know I'm not the only person out there who has changed their freebies around from time to time. But it's been great for me to use SEO to promote my MemberVault community. Because your website is something that is not a static platform. You are updating your site consistently based on what you're promoting at the time and how your brand evolves over the years contrary to social media where your platform could be deactivated for a policy violation out of the blue. Your website is a platform that you own 100% and you are in complete control of your content and the information that you are sharing with your target audience.

Now I'm sure you're wondering the specifics of how I've leveraged those clicks into real people that are engaged in my MemberVault community. And I want to emphasize that when it comes to marketing, analytics and metrics, whether it's followers, likes, or clicks, these are real people who are engaging with your content and your website and want to hear more from you. And I take that perspective into consideration when I think about the clicks to my website. These are people that were Googling something, googling a question, they read a short description in the Google search results, and clicked on it. And that was my website that they found helpful. So on my website, it's my job to serve them with valuable content that answers their questions, so that they want to stick around and be a part of my community.

Now, when I first started my MemberVault in 2019, there was not much going on there. And it took me a couple years for me to use the platform to my advantage and drive traffic to it using SEO. I also have changed my freebies over the years, I started off with a free subscriber hub, then switched over to a free challenge. My current freebie is a website audit PDF that I have a tripwire page that upsells people to a mini training that I have hosted inside MemberVault.

But regardless of the freebie that I'm promoting on my website at the time, my website is doing the work for me and driving traffic to my MemberVault offers and MemberVault communities because of SEO and because of me being strategic in my blog post and answering my audience's questions, and giving them that next step to take like, “you have this question, here's the solution that I have for you to better support you with your SEO.” And guess what, you can get started right now, in my free subscriber hub on MemberVault, click here to sign up, or in my free five-day challenge that I have hosted on MemberVault, click here to sign up and gain access.

And so regardless of the freebie that I'm promoting, the content I'm promoting, I'm always bringing back that call to action back to my MemberVault community, and back to the offers that I have hosted there, so people can continue on their journey. So I don't lose that conversion from a click. I know search engine optimization can be one of those things that sounds super complicated. But I promise it's really that simple. It's all about answering your audience's questions and serving them with the content that they need so that they want to continue being a part of your community and your world of what you have to offer.

Now if you're wondering how you can do this with your website, whether your website is through a platform like WordPress, or hosted through MemberVault, you can use search engine optimization to drive traffic to your MemberVault offers. It's all about following what I like to call the search engine success framework, which breaks down into five simple steps that are all about optimizing your website to rank on the first page of Google.

Now the first step is going to be for you to have a thorough understanding of your target audience and your competitors. Of course, when you're creating an offer for your business, you need to have a thorough understanding of your target audience who you're serving, what they need, and what solutions and transformations you are providing to them. But when it comes to search engine optimization, you also need to have a thorough understanding of your competition, chances are someone out there is already creating content around the keywords that you would be interested in in the questions that your audience is searching for that they would need to find you on Google.

Now just because someone's already doing it doesn't mean that you can't also do it and stand out. But that's why it's really important for you to know both your audience and what they're searching for, and your competition that's already ranking for those keywords. So you can develop a strategy to outrank that content, looking at things like how many words are in their blog post? How many images? What questions are they answering in their content, all those things will be relevant when you are creating a blog post that you want to rank on Google. So you can get those clicks and get those people to convert into your offers.

The second step of this framework is to create a user-driven content strategy that consists of understanding your target audience and competitors. with understanding your target audience, you want to make sure you are serving them the content that they need, and that they're searching for on Google. So if someone is searching for the best platforms to host an online course, your blog posts need to provide thorough information about all of the different platforms to host an online course and what you would recommend, and why.

Google's recent algorithm updates are all about ranking content that's helpful to end users, rather than content that's simply stuffed with a bunch of keywords with the primary goal of that content ranking on Google. So Google isn't ranking content that was written to rank on Google. Google is ranking content that's helpful to searchers and for the target audience that you are serving in your business, especially with all the AI tools that can be used for blogging, you need to fact-check and also infuse your own experiences to make sure that you're providing Google searchers and your target audience with the content that they need to get their questions answered.

The third step of this framework is building authority with your expertise. So with SEO, it's not all about content, there's on-page SEO, so things on your website that you can control, but there's also something called off-page search engine optimization, which is related to what are called backlinks.

Now, backlinks are links from external websites that go back to your website. And these are used to strengthen your website's authority, there are different tools you can use to check your domain authority. But as small business owners and website owners, we will all start at zero, particularly if you're using your own custom domain, having a low domain authority doesn't mean that you'll never rank on the first page of Google. But it is really important because it determines your competition for the keywords that you're able to target.

So thinking about step one, understanding our audience and competitors, over 8 billion searches are happening on Google every single day. So people out there and our target audience are asking tons of different questions on Google. And some of those questions will be easier for us as small business owners to rank for than others. Other keywords, there may be a lot of big-name businesses, big-name brands that are already ranking in the top spots, and these big-name brands have a higher domain authority, and Google is naturally going to look to them or boost them simply because they have more authoritative content. That doesn't mean that you can't rank on the first page of Google, you just have to be strategic about the keywords that you are targeting, and making sure you're going against competitors that are in your league. And on a similar domain authority level as you.

Now the fourth step of this search engine success framework is to optimize the user experience of your website. So many people right now are accessing content from their phones so it's very important for you to have a mobile-friendly website that loads fast for users. And that is a primary reason why those search engine spiders will decide not to index your content if you have a poor user experience, which means it won't show up on Google. So user experience is extremely important. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that search engine optimization is all about content. But that couldn't be further from the truth. User Experience is crucial to having a website that ranks on Google.

Now, our fifth and final step is tracking our website performance. And this is something that is going to be a continuous process. You will be consistently reviewing your metrics, reviewing your analytics, whether you're using Google Analytics or another platform to see what's working with your content, what keywords are you ranking for? How are people finding your website? What are they searching for to get to your website, so that you can make improvements, so that you can make adjustments to your content strategy. You can also use that to assess the user experience of your website, especially if you see that people are maybe leaving your website very quickly, or not engaging with your content, you can see if any user experience issues could be holding people back from converting into your MemberVault offers from your website.

Now, I know we just covered a lot. But I want you to keep in mind that search engine optimization is bringing your target audience to your website. But ultimately, your website, your MemberVault needs to be optimized for conversions, so that they ultimately want to make that next step to sign up for your offers. So if you're blogging on a platform like WordPress, Squarespace or Wix, you need to include strategic call to actions across all of your website and blog content to your Membervault so that people want to sign up and click over to your offers.

No matter where your website platform is hosted. Whether you're blogging and WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, or MemberVault, it's extremely important for you to include strategic calls to action in your content. Otherwise, all of those people that are clicking to your website from Google will have no idea what the next step is for continuing that journey with you. So when you are blogging, and you're blogging about how you can help them with the services or offers or products that you provide in your business, you need to make sure you're including a call to action to those services, whether it's a paid offer, whether it's a free offer that's hosted in your MemberVault so people know that is the clear next step into your community.

Well, it has been said so much fun talking to you all about SEO today. I could talk about SEO for hours. But I'm on a time limit here. So I'm excited to continue hanging out with you all in the MemberVault Collaborative and I would love to hear more about your journey with search engine optimization in your business to promote your offers.

You can always reach out for more tailored advice from me @ bymikaylataylor on Instagram. You can also email me at hello@mikaylataylor.com, or visit my website mikaylataylor.com. for more information.

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