Welcome to Day Two of The Intuitive SEO 5-Day Challenge! Watch the video above, and download the slides here, if you need them.

One thing I noticed from everyone’s responses to yesterday’s action challenge was that pretty much everyone needed to be even more clear and specific about what it is that they do. It’s hard to overstate how important clarity is.

Remember, if you’re still tinkering with your “elevator pitch”, it’s okay. We’re ever-evolving humans and our work is always going to be shifting and changing as we learn and grow, so your website copy will never actually be finished in the tie-a-bow-on-it-and-never-touch-it-again sense—and, you’ll need a few variations of this, as we’ll be discussing over the next few days. It’s just important to have something to use as a starting point for your brand new fresh-from-Google audience to get to know you quickly and understand what your website is all about.

Today’s lesson is that Google’s mission is connect people with high-quality, useful content that meets their needs (and keeps them coming back to use Google again and again).

It’s important to understand how Google works and what their agenda is so that you can work with them to help your ideal audience find you. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that Google is a business, and they make money from showing advertising to the people who use their free service.

So, what does this mean for your website? It basically just means that you need to be very clear in the language you use on your website what you have to offer and who it’s for (yes, I know this is essentially the same point I made yesterday—you’re going to notice a running theme ?). We’ll be building on this one core part of SEO today and throughout the week.

The action challenge for today is to download this search journal document and spend a few minutes thinking about how you’ve used search over the past week or so. The prompts will guide you to think about what made you click on one website that came up in the search results over another, and other factors it’s important to be aware of. You can keep this and add to it over the next month, if you find it helpful.

This exercise is something I encourage all my students in my workshops and courses to do as we start to talk about SEO, because it helps you to start looking at your website with a more analytical eye.

BONUS action step: If you have the time and inclination after that, I’d encourage you to Google your own website name/business name and see what comes up, currently. Beyond your own website, are there social media profiles, a LinkedIn profile, Amazon author bio, an Etsy shop, websites you’ve written for in the past, Goodreads bio?

Using the phrase you drafted yesterday, consider editing the bio and profile photo on any important platforms/social sites you show up in search results for, so that you have a more consistent online presence across all platforms. Don’t worry about your website for now—we’ll be tweaking that tomorrow. For now, just focus on everywhere else (that you can edit) where you show up online when someone Google’s your name.

Don’t overthink it! You can always tweak things later. The idea at this point is to make it as easy as possible for your ideal audience or whoever is searching your name/business name to find you and recognise quickly who you are and what you offer.

Okay, good luck with today’s challenge, and I’ll see you tomorrow for Day Three of the challenge…