Thanks for joining me in this 2024 workshop about SEO (search engine optimization) specifically targeted to Latinas in Tech and Latinas in Data. I’m Dr. Nutmeg, founder of The FACTory and a LatinasinTech.org mentor. I’m using my blog — TheFemmebots.com — and all its associated social media — TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn — to drive subscriptions to my 2024 Substack Feminist Zine while also promoting my mentee Edith Quintanilla, check out her Etsy shop!
My method for this 2024 SEO strategy specifically for TheFemmebots.com is based on work I did in 2023 for a nonprofit client that wanted to drive more traffic to an application button on its website. Like TheFemmebots.com, this client’s website had not been previously hooked up to Google Analytics, so we’re starting FRESH outta the oven! Better late than never, says CrazyBot, our comedian who will eventually appear on my Virtual Reality TV show.
Anyways, I digress! The point is the organization did not have a way to track a user’s journey from search engines, social media, or referrals — also known as backlinks — from other websites. Same for TheFemmebots.com, so here are the steps I followed:
1. The First Step: Create a Google Analytics 4 account and hook it up to your website or blog.
If you don’t know how to do this, I recommend this tutorial by ____, whose videos I devoured last year as I was migrating 2 client websites from the old Universal Analytics to GA4.
2. The Second Step: Audit the content on your website.
If you’re anything like me — a writer with ADD — you probably have a ton of both published and unpublished blog posts on your content management system (I use WordPress). My client also had quite a bit of un-optimized content, so I added all the posts with links to a Google Spreadsheet and estimated that the work would take about 10 hours to complete. Since I charge $100 per hour, and this was a nonprofit, I was forced to optimize my process by committing to optimizing 5 posts per day for 2 weeks.
3. The Third Step: Now that you have your spreadsheet set up, it’s time to research keywords using Google Trends and Google Search Console.
With the help of the client’s communications director, we determined which key phrases in her wishlist could be matched to content that already exists, and noted them in the spreadsheet.
4. The Fourth Step: Use Yoast SEO to optimize your blog posts.
Toast SEO integrates with most content management systems (WordPress has a plugin). Add the key phrase to the form for each blog post, and fulfill each of its criteria to increase chances of appearing higher in search engine results:
- Internal Links
- External Links
- Mention the key phrase at least x times depending on the length of the article, which should be at least 300 words.
- Fill in the search results description. While the title will help researchers decide to click on your content, it’s often the description you add to the search results preview field that will often seal the deal. Continue making tweaks until you achieve a green happy face. I can’t tell you how geekily excited I get every time I manage to switch the yellow face to a green face. To be honest, when I was doing this work for the client, even though the green face showed visual proof of optimization, I didn’t REaLLY know if their site would rise up to the first page of results. But within 3 months, we started to see results. It was amazing to see the line graphs increasing in web traffic, the increase in clicks to the page with the application button, and to see this traffic was coming mostly from search engines!
Step 5: Now that all the blog posts were optimized, we needed a way to track clicks on the application button.
I watched some videos on YouTube (see recommendations below) about Google Tag Manager. This was a whole day of work for me because the steps aren’t that straightforward and it takes time for Google Analytics 4 to start showing meaningful data. We waited a month and then I built a specific Events tracking report in GA4 for this specific page.
The numbers were rising significantly each month, especially in the summertime before the last application deadlines. See data visualization below:
Woot!! I felt like my work was meaningful in that moment. I believe in the mission of this organization, so I was excited to be a part of fulfilling it.
As for determining the conversion rates of clicks to applications received? That was the part that was unclear because I did not work directly with the program managers who were in charge of that.
So that’s why I am testing this process now on TheFemmebots.com. I can control the SEO strategy and track clicks to the Substack account. The goal is to subscribe at least 2,000 readers by the end of Q1. Like a telenovela, the subscription is limited to 2024, to watch the presidential election from a specifically female #LatinasinTech gaze. At least, that’s my idea as of the date of this SEO workshop on Jan. 11, 2024.
Thanks for attending this workshop. If you feel like you learned something, subscribe now to Substack to keep learning and growing with TheFemmebots.com.