The Website Success Show: SEO & Website Tips For Local & Online Businesses Who Want More Website Traffic & Sales

058: Optimising Beauty Websites: Simple Steps to Drive Organic Traffic - WEBSITE SEO AUDIT EPISODE for Beauty Business Mentour Katie Godfrey

Jules White Season 1 Episode 58

In this episode, Jules dives into a detailed website SEO audit with Katie Godfrey, exploring strategies for optimising multiple websites across different businesses. Katie shares insights into her journey managing a salon, training academy, and coaching business, all within the beauty industry. Together, they discuss the challenges of juggling SEO for multiple domains and uncover actionable steps to drive more organic traffic and simplify user journeys.

Key Takeaways:

  • Managing Multiple Websites: Learn why each domain needs its own SEO strategy and how interlinking can boost authority across sites.
  • Google Search Console & Analytics: Discover why these free tools are essential for tracking performance and identifying opportunities to rank for the right keywords.
  • Optimising User Experience: Explore how simplifying navigation and structuring website content like an English essay improves both user experience and SEO.
  • Small Changes, Big Impact: Understand the value of bite-sized tweaks, from increasing font sizes to optimising homepage headlines, to boost accessibility and rankings.

If you’re managing multiple websites or looking for simple ways to make your website work harder for your business, this episode is packed with practical tips and expert advice.

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AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT - MAY CONTAIN ERRORS

Introduction and Guest Welcome

Jules White: Hi, today we're diving into a website SEO report for my lovely guest Katie. Welcome Katie, it's so great to have you here.


Katie Godfrey: Hi, thanks so much for having me, I'm so excited.


Jules White: Yeah, so am I actually.

Jules White: I'm really excited about this episode because I think because you've got multiple businesses, we can just dive in and have a little look about how that affects your SEO strategy because you do have to think about things differently if you've got multiple businesses, multiple websites, multiple domains, there's other things to consider really.


So hopefully by the end of this episode we will have identified one or two sort of key areas to focus on to try and reach your website goals over the next six months. But before we start, if we were to meet in six months time and you were telling me about the amazing things that were happening in happening in your business, how would your website be helping and supporting you with that?


And I say website in websites, really? How would they be supporting that?


Katie Godfrey: Yeah, generally just more traffic. I mean, my salon website does bring us a lot of traffic. I'd actually say most of our new clients, whereas my coaching website is not everything's come through socials.


So I'd love to not have to focus on social so much and the website working more organically. That would be amazing.


Jules White: Yeah, that's really great. Actually, that's, um, I, I'm all about the not having to focus on social for so much. So I, I love that. Definitely.


Katie Godfrey: Oh it's exhausting isn't it!


Jules White: Often you put so much time into it and you don't get a very good return on investment with that, I think really. So, and you certainly, if you've got the brand out there, brand awareness is definitely there.


You've got an amazing presence. Um, it's just tying with that in and just bringing that back and making the most of it on your website or your websites. So before we start...


Current Website Performance and Challenges


Jules White: Tell us a little bit about your business or businesses and how your websites currently sit within your marketing activities.


Katie Godfrey: so we have the salon which has been going for 15 years.


That website we've literally had for 15 years, which I think is why I think you might think differently. Why the, um, SEO is quite good and we get a lot of traffic there. Um, it was always As well, the hub to create the other businesses. So when we started, for example, KG professional, which is the training product range, it actually started first on the salon website, and then we took it off there and then put its own domain there.


And then the same with the coaching as well. So, um, I've obviously got the podcast; the podcast runs alongside the coaching, which is another thing we have to focus on, but all, all businesses are within the industry. They're all quite similar, but they do have three different audiences.


Jules White: Okay. Yeah, of course. That makes sense, actually. And do you, do you kind of have a clear purpose for what each website needs to do within your business?


Have you thought about that in terms of, you've got your audiences, have you ever thought about, okay, what is this, what is the website doing for us? What does it need to do? What action do we need people to take from the website?


Katie Godfrey: yeah, so from the salon website, generally like people searching Google, what treatments they want are coming up easy to follow and then easy to book. With the training, it's a little bit more complicated because it's training on products.


There's a huge, huge national, um, you know, competitors are way bigger than we are with huge budget spends, which we don't have. So that's definitely our struggle with, with, with that one. I would love people to find our product more easily on there. And then, with coaching, I guess it's again, people going onto Google and finding us.


Are they, are they doing that or are they searching socials or seeing what pops up there? I'm not sure. Is that why maybe that's not as optimised as others?


SEO Tools and Basic Recommendations


Jules White: And do you track any of that? Do you track your stats or your Google Analytics in terms of your website stats? Do you see where people are actually coming into your website?


Katie Godfrey: I'm really uneducated in that.


Jules White: That's often a real problem that people don't even realise they can even have a look and see where people are coming from search and where people are coming from, um, from socials or from the podcast, even if you, you can actually even have that information in there.


So you can just understand what you are showing up for on Google and where people are coming from. And it's something that a lot of business owners, the majority of clients who come to me don't have their Google analytics and their Google search console set up. And they're just two free tools that you can use from Google.


Your websites are, they're all built on WordPress, are they? I think when I looked, yeah. So there's that, that's the things that you can even get a dashboard built into like, you can add that in as a plugin in your WordPress dashboard. So when you log into WordPress, you can see that analytics data there.


So it's something that I, I would say out of the two, if you're thinking about, okay, the priority is we want to get more traffic to the websites, look at Google search console first because that's something that you can set up and it helps you to understand how Google sees your website. So you can see what you're already ranking for. You can see what Google is already associating with your site.


Detailed SEO Analysis and Tips


Jules White: And when I haven't had a look, because I had to look at all three of the websites. Some of the basics, there are definitely some basic things that aren't in place on the websites that could make a difference. But when I was looking at the traffic coming through the websites and what, most importantly, what sort of keywords are being associated with those sites.


So definitely the salon is showing up for those local queries and that's a good thing. With having a location-based business, you can do that. I saw you've got a Google business profile. That's amazing. That makes such a difference. There's things you could do to optimise that, but it just helps you.


You're going to be showing up for those local things in the local area. It's just making sure that, that you're showing up for what you want for the treatments and things like that as well. So when I had a look, it looked like it was quite general terms that you were showing up for in terms of the salon.


And when you're showing up, you are showing up in some of the high positions and you've definitely, you've got a lot of keywords that are associated with the salon, which I would, you know, expect that if it's been there for 15 years, the businesses and in terms of the website has been there for 15 years.


One thing I would say it doesn't look like a 15-year-old website so they obviously did a really good job when they, when they first had it built they obviously did a good job of it being a modern-looking website anyway because most 15 year old websites that you look at they look like they're 15 years old.


Katie Godfrey: Oh, well, I update it constantly, but I'll try to anyway.


Jules White: Well, that helps. That in itself makes a massive difference, actually, because that's letting Google know that you are still, this website is still valid and still, you're still a current business and that you are updating your content. Google doesn't want to deliver content that's that is 15 years old.


It wants to, you know, it wants to deliver the best results for the people doing the searches. So that makes the difference actually, if you're updating the site. But I would, I mean, I'd say you've got quite a few keywords. You've got 400 keywords for a website that's 15 years old. I would like to see a lot, lot more keywords actually that you're ranking for that you are showing up for on Google. And probably you would as well, absolutely.


So, when we look at the business mentoring site. This is showing up your beauty business coach, Katie Godfrey, obviously we want, we want first and foremost, people that know about you to be able to find you. That's really important. And then beauty mentor or beauty business.


So that you definitely have got some keywords associated with you, with your business that you should be showing up for definitely, but it's just actually working out what people are searching for with, with SEO can be like, can seem really complicated I think people often don't start diving into it because it seems like it's so complicated, but all we're essentially trying to work out is what you want to show up for on Google, which page of your website is the most appropriate to show up for that.


And then we just do a few things to optimise that and actually help you to show up there. So I think that's something that a lot of businesses don't necessarily think about. I don't want to go and do loads of keyword research. I wanted to think about what, what, what do I want to show up for? What kind of things do I want to show up for like beauty business mentor?


Like, you know, in terms of the, the, uh, training business, what are the things that, that you are offering? Are you showing up for those kinds of terms? And firstly, as well, really say, I think that's probably the, the, the biggest thing is working out with each individual site and one thing to know with SEO is if you've got three individual sites, that is three individual lots of SEO that you need to do as well, unfortunately, but then obviously you're already used to that with the business that you've got. I think you've, you've got separate social accounts for each one.


Katie Godfrey: Yeah, and separate everything, so I'm used to spreading myself thin.


Jules White: But I think the good thing with this is that each of those domains can actually support the other ones as well. So you can do things like making sure that you are linking well between your own websites will help. It will help to the, it will help to raise that authority across the whole of the website or the whole of the internet rather. So you having a great online presence for the business mentoring side will also help obviously to raise the salon's profile as well. As long as you're actually talking about that on the salon site as well and then linking that to the website business mentoring site.


So I think that's definitely there's, there's a few areas that you could kind of focus on, but that would be one thing I would definitely say is thinking strategically about, okay, what, what is relevant to mention on the salon site that we could also then mention on the business mentoring site and on the LASH site as well. So, is there anything in particular in terms of, what I can dive in for you for now that would be really helpful?


Katie Godfrey: Literally anything at all. I mean, definitely coaching is my focus. Yeah. So if there's anything on that, that'd be amazing.


Jules White: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, that's probably one thing I would say is if you're, if you've got three businesses working out which one is, is the most important in terms of growing part of the business and, and in terms of the scalability of that as well. That's probably the one to focus on first because what you'll do, what you need to do on this site, it's going to be a lot of the same stuff on the other sites.


When I, whenever I look at a website, whenever I hear about any business, the first thing I always do is, oh, I wonder what their website's like. I wonder what their SEO is like. So I will always come in and use my little, one of my little Google Chrome tools that tells me how you're, what you've done, basically some of the stuff of what you've done in the back end of your website. So with looking at it without looking back end, the first thing I would say, there's, there's one real quick tip that I can give you that may or may not, it depends how your WordPress is set up, may or may not be a quick fix that you could do, but Google doesn't like font sizes below, um, 16 pixels.


I'm not sure what yours is but it looks like it's smaller than 16. The reason Google doesn't like that is it's an accessibility feature. So if we, I think we often think as well, when we go to mobile, we think of making our font sizes smaller, but actually they need to be a little bit bigger. Probably the opposite is here with yours.


If I go on to the responsive view of, actually, I think I've got this already loaded here. So no, it still does look quite small. And sometimes they do look a little bit different when you actually look at them on your phone. But essentially what we want to be doing is not making people have to get their glasses out to, uh, read our websites.


And from a Google point of view, if you are using under 16 pixels, then it will score you down on accessibility. And part of what Google likes to see is that your site is accessible. So I don't tend to recommend below about 18 pixels. So that's something you could essentially do. You could go in. It's a small tweak that might make a little difference, but it's something just from looking at your site straight away that what I can see there.


Katie Godfrey: Okay.


User Experience and Conversion Optimisation


Jules White: And then when you're looking at your pages or when we're looking at the sort of the navigation, think about if there's any way that you could streamline and simplify the navigation menu because there's quite a lot going on. When whenever anybody comes into our website, it's the first thing we want to see the top of the page. Ideally, we want you to them to know what you do, how are you going to make their life better and what they need to do to get it.


And if you can get that information here at the top of the page, if we look at it on mobile, again, the same sort of thing, there's quite a lot of information here. This is coming into your homepage and there's quite a lot of information here. How can we grab people's attention? Having the video in the background is, it is attention-grabbing, but whether it's that, whether it's the attention-grabbing in the right way, because what we want is the words, the other bit that's going to help people to just keep scrolling down the page.


With every section of your website, all we're trying to do is just keep them scrolling to the next section and then the next section and then the next section until they take the action that we want them to take. So I would definitely think about that a user experience and from more of a conversion optimisation point of view, rather than necessarily SEO.


Thinking about this top section of your site, how can you make the most of that? Because that's the most valuable place on your website, really. And I saw you've got this headline here. This is fantastic. I think that's really clear. Specifically how you're going to help people and what, who you're trying to help as well.


And when I look at the back end of your site, so with the, every page on your site has a page title and page description. And I think actually having that in there, in this page description, maybe having this specifically in there too. Take your hair, beauty and aesthetics business to the next level with Katie Godfrey could potentially be something you could change your description to something like that, really.


What you've got in there now is okay, but it's worth thinking about this page, what's the most important thing it shows up for on Google or in searches, and that's a place where you can add that in. Okay. And then when you're looking at the page, and this is something that I see on most websites I look at, if we think about the robot, so Google's bots or AI bots or whichever robot is reading your website and trying to work out what that information is on there, if we structure your website content in a way that makes sense, and it reads as you would expect, if you think about going back to school, and if you were creating an English essay, you'd have one headline, and then your heading, and then you'd have subheadings within that.


And if you think about the same thing with your website pages as well, that makes a difference. It helps Googlebots to understand the main thing this page is about. If I come over to this, this shows me the headings on your website. So ideally, what we would like to see here is one h1, which is your main headline. Normally that would be this thing in the hero section at the top of the website here when you first come in, just have one h1 heading that tells Google that this is what this page is about. And then underneath that, you would then maybe have an h2 or you'd maybe have like a few different h2s. So if we were looking at your website here.


Katie Godfrey: Mine's a bit busy, isn't it? Say again.


Jules White: It's a bit busy, isn't it? It's a little bit busy, but also because this is your homepage, having something on here about the different ways that people could work with you could be helpful. Or whether you then have, okay, the retreats, mini-courses and downloads, podcasts, having that information here on the homepage as subheadings could help Google to understand about your business, this part of your business as a whole.


Katie Godfrey: Okay.


Jules White: So that's something you could do. Just adding a little bit more information in here and sometimes it's taking a step back from that and even just writing it out on paper – okay, the main thing my homepage is about is what I specifically do in my business. And then within, we've got the masterminds, we've got the retreats, we've got those kinds of things, and have those as subheadings on the homepage, and that then links to those pages as well in your website.


So when people come into your site, there's a bit more on the homepage for them to explore, and a bit more for them to kind of look around, but also Google's bots can then understand the structure of your site and it makes it easier that way. And that's something that applies to all of the pages on all of your websites – if you can get that page hierarchy, like the actual structure of the content within the page, within those headings, that's going to make a massive, massive difference actually.


And this is a bit easier to do in WordPress than it is in other builders like, like Kajabi is a nightmare for trying to, trying to do this just purely because of the way that it's set up. A lot of website builders are set up, they're set up more from a design point of view where you use the different size headings to make it look bigger or to kind of style the page.


But actually when you think about it this way and think about how, what's the logical structure of the pages, that makes a massive difference, really. So that would be definitely my sort of main things to focus on, I think, is thinking about within each site, and maybe start with this site first. So start with the beauty business mentor site first.


What, how can we simplify it and what are the important things that you need to get across and each page, how can you then map it out as if it was an English essay – the actual structure of the pages, really? Does that make sense? Have I completely blown your mind?


Katie Godfrey: No, I'm like, oh my god, I want to get back on my website. Oh, I love that.


Jules White: I love that. So one thing I would say for that is definitely taking that step back because you have, there is so much you could do, taking the step back and thinking, okay, I need to get this done straight in my mind and straight on paper before you actually dive in and start making changes to your site.


Katie Godfrey: Yeah, because it was only actually last night I was up to whatever time o'clock in the morning, like I'm, it's just what I always do and I was working on my mini-courses and downloadables page because I straight away thought this just isn't user-friendly and there were different things that weren't working and I've had people working in it, but it still wasn't perfect, so then to products I was working on and the second product, but it was always like, was quite confusing when someone first lands on my page because do they click ways to work with me or do they click mini-courses and downloadables is and they've both got different services on each one. I mean, I think it's simple because I know what I'm talking about, but it's different, isn't it, for the user?


Jules White: Yeah, absolutely, and that's one of the key things I think, actually, if we can put ourselves in that user's shoes, that makes a massive difference because, yeah, we look at our websites all the time, and I think this is sometimes something that people will do is they'll actually think, I need to make my website more interesting and I need to add in, like, pictures or whizzing in texts, or I need to have the text appearing slowly or… and actually that's just because we're bored of looking at our website all the time.


And we think I need to make it more interesting. Well, it's actually, it's more important for it to be clear and for it to be simple for people to navigate. Nobody should come into your website and be confused about what to do next, really. And there are things you could add into your homepage to help with that.


I think thinking about the homepage is okay. This is the place where I want people to understand what I do, understand how I help people, understand how I have helped people as well, so that's where you can have things like your testimonials. I saw that you've got a whole page of video testimonials, which is amazing, but Google can't, it can kind of understand that from your YouTube channel.


But if you can grab some of those snippets of text out of that and just have that as little tiny bits of text on your website as well, that could be really helpful. So it's all about raising that authority, which you have, you have the authority, you've got your, you know, award-winning, get that here into your homepage here, because that can make a massive, massive difference.


But also showing people how you are that trusted guide, especially when you are doing the work that you're doing, you are helping people, you're holding people's hands along the journey. Getting that across on your homepage could be really, really helpful as well.


Katie Godfrey: Yeah, definitely.


Jules White: And you could even have something like, 'Start Here', you know, if you literally need to make it that simple – okay, thinking about the people that are coming into your website, what would they need to know to get started in terms of understanding what you do, then it could be as simple as doing that, really.


And that's something, maybe that's something you could look, think about doing. So if you were thinking about how do I dive into this, like, what should I be doing first, simplifying the user journey is probably the biggest thing to think about, really.


Katie Godfrey: I actually, recently was using ClickFunnels. Before that I was using Teachable and using all of their kind of landing pages. Then I moved everything over to ClickFunnels. So I have my website and I have ClickFunnels and all the other systems we need.


And I've just got rid of ClickFunnels and then built it all, all the products back in WordPress website. Was that the right thing to do to make it less confusing and help the SEO of the website?


Jules White: Yeah, I mean, anything where it's all within your own web domain. So if you can keep it there under KGBusinessmentor.com for this particular part of your business, then that is going to be helpful because I think a lot of people do that.


They'll build sales pages on a subdomain or on another domain. And then they put so much work into all that amazing content on their sales pages, but none of that information that's in there is then helping to support their own SEO. So I think it's something that's really, really common. A lot of people do that.


And actually, yeah, it's much better for it to be there in WordPress. I mean, the plus side but also the curse of WordPress is that we have so much flexibility there and you can do anything, but then that also doesn't necessarily make it easy to then keep it streamlined and to, you know, think about, okay, how, what do I want this to look like, how do I want to simplify this, really? Do you know what theme you're using


Website Themes and Technical Considerations


in your WordPress?


Katie Godfrey: Oh gosh, I’ve got no idea, no idea.


Jules White: Because that might be that it might also be worth thinking about, okay, is it time to think about a newer theme, especially if your website… how old is your business mentor website?


Katie Godfrey: Maybe like five or six years.


Jules White: Yeah, so things have come on with the themes now and there's so much more in terms of like the AI content you can use to generate themes or to generate content within themes. It might be worth even thinking about that and just thinking about whether it's time to simplify it and move to a different theme within WordPress that could then help just to make it all come together and make it a slightly easier sort of user journey, really.


Katie Godfrey: When you're changing a theme, is that changing the layout then?


Jules White: It changes the layout, also changes what you've got available. So the theme that you use in WordPress determines a lot of the functionality you've got available. So there are some of the big themes – Divi, Beaver Builder, Elementor. The one that I recommend, if people ask…


Katie Godfrey: I'm going to log on because it's going to bug me.


Jules White: I might actually, I might even be able to tell you. Let's have a little look because there is, we can have a look at what's… yeah, Avada theme.


Katie Godfrey: Yes, 7.5.0.1. Okay.


Jules White: Ah, so it's the number one selling product of all time on ThemeForest. Wow, that is a thing. So I don't know that one actually. But it might be worth thinking about. Again, it's not something you would, you wouldn't make that as a snap decision – okay, we're going to change the theme, because it does then involve, you know, changing the site and if you change themes, it will break your website a little bit.


So you need to, like, think about, okay, if we're going to do that, then that, you know, that is a business decision on whether it's worth doing that, but the one that I recommend is Kadence. That's a theme that's very lightweight, so it doesn't then slow your website down. It doesn't add a load of code in the backend that's going to make your website slow, which is bad for SEO.


But it's one that you've got lots of flexibility there. It's a drag and drop builder, so it makes it very easy to build things as well. But it's something that you, maybe it now is the time to get a developer to help you with that as well, because that is something you as the business owner and what you do, your time is best spent building it, or probably not realistically, you know, the strategy part of your website is the bit where you need to be doing, really.


And then obviously I do think it's important for business owners to understand how their websites work, but if it's spending a lot of time on actually changing the layout and making the website work for the business, then potentially that could be getting a developer in to help with that, really, which is, I mean, that's not something I do.


I'm not a web developer. I have built websites in the past, but I focus on that strategy and the SEO part of things, really. But it's certainly worth thinking about that, part of the bigger picture of, is it time to do that? Think about some tweaks, really.


Katie Godfrey: Definitely.


Jules White: Yeah. Any particular questions? Anything that sort of stood out from what we've talked about? I wanted to try and keep it simple, but I feel like we've dived into loads anyway.


Katie Godfrey: Yeah, no, I love that. That's so helpful.


Jules White: Yeah, I think there's so much potential there and probably there's a lot of potential for things that you could just make tweaks to as well. And it would help. So just I think a lot of the time we kind of ignore the base, or not ignore, that's not the right word.


Actually, we just don't realise that actually a few basic tweaks like changing that back end, page hierarchy structure can make such a big difference. It's just all about making it easier for people and for Google's bots to understand our websites. And it's powerful, you know, it really is.


If we can get people to your website, get them on your email list, and then just have that less reliance on social media and on paid ads, it makes such a difference, really.


Katie Godfrey: Definitely. So I guess I need to look at Google search console, don't I, and see where traffic's coming in and then heighten that area.


Jules White: Yeah. So, I mean, all that might do is it might give you some, like, it might just give you some insights in terms of, I should be showing up for this. And I'm not, like, this is the one thing that I know I'm really known for, but my website is not showing up for that. Okay. Which page of my website is the most appropriate for that? And just optimise that page, really. It might just give you a few quick wins, really, that you could save in.


Katie Godfrey: It's definitely amazing, thank you.


Jules White: Fantastic, you're very welcome.


Final Thoughts and Next Steps


Jules White: So yeah, I think just to kind of wrap up and think about the things to focus on – simplification and just really putting the basics in place as well, really. So, and actually having a plan before you just dive in and think, okay, I need to change everything right now.


Katie Godfrey: Oh, that's what I'm like though, that's the problem. I'll be like, now I need to change this, I need to change all the stuff on the front page.


Jules White: Don't do that, or if you're going to do that, get some support, get a web developer, get some support. Think about what you're actually trying to achieve with it. Think about what each page of the website, what is the goal, what do you want people to, what action do you want people to take from there, really.


I'm all about bite-sized SEO, and I think actually just what the small steps you can take to achieve that, really important. So your small steps that you can take today on bite-sized SEO is making sure that you've got your Google Analytics and Google Search Console set up. And that's something that will be massively, massively helpful, I think, really.


Katie Godfrey: Yeah, definitely. I will do that today for sure.


Jules White: Brilliant.


Conclusion and Guest Shoutout


Jules White: So we finish, I'd love you to give yourself another shoutout and just let everyone know specifically what you do and more importantly, where they can connect with you and where they can find out more about you.


Katie Godfrey: So you can find me anywhere. I'm very searchable. But I hang out on Instagram mainly, which is KG underscore Katie Godfrey. Obviously you've seen all my sites today. So KGBusinessmentor.com.


So yeah, my podcast as well. So if you want any free advice at all, it doesn't really matter what industry you're in. There's loads and loads of free advice on there, which is The Life of KG on any podcast station.


Jules White: I love the podcast as well. It's fantastic. Yeah. It's like, it's just, yeah, it's good. It's really nice. I listen to it when I'm out on dog walks.


Katie Godfrey: I love that.


Jules White: So if this episode has made you think more about your SEO and specifically, if you want to set up your Google Analytics for your own website and your Google search console, head to my website, have a little look at my course that I have there. It's just a short course on bite-sized Google Analytics and Google Search Console, and it talks you through step by step on getting it set up and just understanding the basics about how it works, what you can do, really.


So I will add all your links in the show notes as well, Katie, so people can find you there. But thank you so much for listening. Thanks so much, Katie, for being here and I'll see you soon.






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