Tools and Tips for EdTech SEO Success: A Conversation with Tatum Moser

Tatum Moser:

If you're trying to gauge whether or not your content will rank, they have this acronym called EEAT, which is experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. That's how they're grading your content and your site.

Elana Leoni:

Welcome everyone to our podcast, All Things Marketing and Education. I'm Elana Leoni and I've devoted my entire career to helping education brands build their brand awareness, engagement, and ultimately grow their lead. Every week, my guests who range from educators to EdTech entrepreneurs to experts in the field will all share tips, strategies and insight in either social media, content marketing, and community building. I'm so excited to be your guide to help transform your marketing efforts into something that's truly authentic and consistently provides value for your audience. Enjoy.

Hello friends. Welcome to another episode of All Things Marketing and Education. This week I'm so excited to share this conversation with my friend, Tatum Moser, about all things SEO, search engine optimization. With all of you. Tatum is the founder and principal at Moser Consulting Solutions, where she helps clients improve their SEO health scores. She's also a co-founder at Mindly Games, which is a fun free educational gaming site for K-3 students to level up their math skills.

Tatum is one of the most knowledgeable people I know with SEO, and she's also one of the few that complements her skills with SEO, with a deep background in education in EdTech. She was a teacher for eight years. She spent six years at the head of content at education.com before she launched her own consulting business and startup. I had the pleasure of collaborating so closely with Tatum when she was at education.com. And a bit of a fun fact, education.com was a client of LCG's for four wonderful years, and my team just loved Tatum so much. She has this thirst for knowledge that is just infectious. We knew our paths would cross again, and now Tatum collaborates with LCG to help improve our clients SEO presence and health scores. So I am so excited for this chat because SEO is something not talked enough about in EdTech, and it always gets pushed aside like, "Oh, it's not really going to help," or, "Oh, that's for this type of company."

But what I found is that in EdTech specifically, I have not met a brand that hasn't improved significantly and differentiated themselves from their competition using SEO. It is a game changer. So during this conversation, Tatum talks about all things SEO, and for those of you who think this might be a bit too technical over your head, I promise that Tatum has a beautiful way of breaking this all down in such an easy to understand way. We talk about practical ways to leverage SEO in your daily marketing and content efforts, and specifically, we talk about tips on how you can improve your SEO health score by doing things like conducting keyword research, optimizing user experience, and using some really cool SEO tools. So SEO isn't always easy, but if you do it right, it is contagious, it is infectious in a really cool, nerdy way, and it will completely change the way you approach your content strategy, marketing and so many things, so enjoy everyone.

So welcome to All Things Marketing and Education, Tatum. I'm so excited to have you on this show today and to talk about all things SEO, because when I talk about SEO, not only do you light up, but you get me so excited. So I am more than excited to talk to you about the wonderful magic of SEO, search engine optimization. Welcome to the show, Tatum.

Tatum Moser:

Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I do think SEO is pretty magical. I think some people out there think I'm pretty nerdy, but I get really excited talking about it too, so I am excited for this conversation.

Elana Leoni:

Yes, and you've shown me if you just do this and you do this, then you do this. And it's very much piecing the puzzle together to then make it all work. And in the world of social media and community where I have to deal with humans and algorithms, this is a beautiful alternative to that. I'm not saying SEO isn't hard, because it is, but I think what we're going to be talking about are some fundamental tips, tricks to increase your health, your SEO health score to make sure that you are ranking for the terms that you care about that are aligned for what your target audience searches for and all of the things in between. So to get started, Tatum, why don't you talk to the audience around, just how would you define SEO and then let's get into the role it currently plays or what you think it should play in EdTech.

Tatum Moser:

Yeah, so my definition of SEO would be very simple. It's what you see at the top of your Google search result. So anything that you put in to Google search box, those first couple of results, Google has deemed as doing the best job of meeting your intent for that search that you did. So that's usually the way I explain it to people. Yeah, that's again, search engine optimization. You're trying to make it so that you can be discovered and you're trying to make your content great.

Elana Leoni:

To clarify too, it's not paid. This isn't paid media placement.

Tatum Moser:

Yeah, that's true. This is free.

Elana Leoni:

This is all free, it's organic, and it's all about trying to figure out how you rank when people search for certain topics and things and names and brands. But how do those little crawlers out there rank you in all of the search engines? And we know that Google is the one that dominates.

Tatum Moser:

Yeah, definitely. It is free, but I think you will see in organic search marketing, there is a parallel to what you deal with in social media where a hybrid strategy is always the best, one where you're able to use search engine marketing and Google Ads in collaboration with your organic efforts. That's where you're always going to get the quickest return on investment, but the effects are so lasting. Once you've supported your organic efforts with a little bit of push from the paid side, it's not like that's not going to stay there. Oftentimes, your ranking, if your page really is quality in Google's eyes, it'll stay there. So the benefits just last for such a long time after that.

Elana Leoni:

Nice. So why don't we talk a little bit about search engine optimization, SEO, as it relates to EdTech. Do you feel like this industry is doing a decent job? Or what role does it play, especially as it's a long buying cycle in EdTech, there's a long period where districts and schools are just gathering information? So maybe let's talk a little bit about the role that SEO can, should currently plays.

Tatum Moser:

SEO plays a couple of important roles. Just to go through the different kind of roles that I've played and how SEO served my needs in those roles, I first got interested in SEO as a content developer. And I was coming from an educator background. And we would have the SEO team. They would come to us with these promising looking keywords, and that was amazing because SEO, in that sense, served as a proxy for user interest.

So if you're trying to decide what to build next, it's a really great practice for you to go and check, is anybody looking for this? If nobody's looking for it, do you really want to spend time building it? So again, that was always a tried and true method that we used as we would do brainstorms and come up with different ideas for initiatives that could come next in the pipeline, and then we would go and check. Again, search volume is a proxy for user interest. How many people are searching for this? How are they searching for it? What does the current results tell you about the intent of that search and what that person is looking for? So that was really, really great.

Elana Leoni:

So for the users that are very tactical like myself, they're genius, light bulb moment, search volume can correspond to user interest or buyer interest, but how do you do that? Maybe let's drop some tools really quick.

Tatum Moser:

Yeah, sure. There's lots of tools available. You've got Semrush and Ahrefs are two great ones. I used Semrush for a long time, but have recently made the move to Ahrefs, and I do really love Ahrefs, but you can go in and on their tool, they've got... It's actually a pretty robust tool that you can use in lots of different ways, but they have a tab that says keywords. So you're just going to go in and type in the keyword that you think. And again, if you're thinking from the user perspective, or you could even do this in user interviews before you even try to go look up keyword volume, you could say, "Hey, we're thinking of building X, Y, and Z. Have you ever looked for something like this online? If you did look for it online, how did you search for it? What did you actually enter in Google search box?" That's the easiest way to go about it right there. So Ahrefs is an amazing tool for keyword research.

Elana Leoni:

Great. And for those of you going, "What is she saying? I can't understand." Ahrefs is actually a pun on actually how you view code links, A-H-R-E-F. And so for any of you that were in HTML code like me way back in the day where you were hand coding stuff, that's what she's talking about. But we'll put all of the links in the show notes too. So you also talked about Semrush, SEOMoz and some other things. We'll put in the show notes, too, that people can take advantage of free and also paid tools. So jumping into keyword research is key before you even think of, "Okay, I've got this idea for content, but are people searching for it? And am I using the correct terminology?" Because in EdTech, one of the things we love to do in education is name one thing, five different things.

Tatum Moser:

That's actually such an important thing that you just mentioned. So I would say this, things are oftentimes rebranded over and over again in education. And sometimes when people are building products or starting marketing initiatives, they will intentionally want to say something a different way or a new way. I would put back to just question that because if nobody is searching for that new way that you're saying it, you're going to have a harder time getting it in front of users that are actually searching for exactly what you're making, but you're just calling it something different.

Elana Leoni:

Yeah. So we talked a little bit about some tactics, some tools and the general role that SEO plays, but within education, in particular, do you want to talk about how you see SEO complementing goals that EdTech companies may have?

Tatum Moser:

Yeah, absolutely. Just with marketing in general, again, this is free traffic. When you make this investment and you are creating quality content that really truly is going to highlight what you do as a brand, how you meet users' needs, that effect is lasting. If you are ranking well for that topic, if you have a lot to offer in terms of expertise and authority on that topic, you're going to be able to really have a conversation with potential users, people that don't know who you are yet. And that's really, really powerful.

And in terms of just the overall importance, I think, let's say for instance that you are a founder of an education company and you're doing really important work. You're really meeting some unmet needs of potentially disadvantaged communities. This is how you can get your important message in front of more people than you ever would've been able to otherwise. And it's not going to come at the expense of what might be draining your already small budget for paid advertising because we all know startups can just throw money at the wind with paid advertising, whether it be on social media or Google Ad words, but this is really an investment that you can make to get more people to see and be exposed to your content and to what you do and what you stand for as a brand and the problem that you're trying to solve in the world.

Elana Leoni:

And as you were talking, I was thinking about, oh, you know what SEO plays as a role too, is that sometimes we are trying to market towards people that are actually hiding from us, that we can't find them and they're intentionally ghosting us because the school year is tumultuous. They have a hierarchy of needs they're trying to serve, but at the same time, they have to stealthily be looking at other products and look at their unmet needs as they start planning for the future school year tech needs. But they're not ready to talk to people. And if they're on Facebook, there's no way to find... They will just kind of make sure that people cannot get a hold of them during that time where they are lights out, okay, here are my primary school needs, but I also need to start researching EdTech products.

SEO fills that need really well because they're gathering and searching on the web for information. They might be going to their PLNs or their PLCs, their professional learning networks and communities to get word of mouth, but it also helps, what's your website presence, like you said. Do they talk about the terminology? Do they feel like they look like they could be a thought partner in this and not just a vendor?

Tatum Moser:

Absolutely. I completely agree. I think that ability to be an researcher without having a sales team trying to hunt you down just because you did a search is a really great... Yeah, it's just such a benefit to the users who, again, aren't ready to have those conversations yet, but still are looking around. And it's important for you to ask when somebody is doing research, what are we doing? What are we doing? What are the things that are important that we are doing that we want to show up for? So that pre-conversation, I guess, that you're having is so important.

Elana Leoni:

And then to your previous point, what are they doing? What's their behavior? And then what's the search volume? Am I using the right terms and optimizing that? And once you have that, you can garner another channel of interest while you're trying to be value-driven on social media, listen to them on the communities, build up your email marketing, all of your press, all of those things. What I hear from you all of the time is that things can't operate in silos, and if they do, they're never as effective as they could be.

Okay, so let's get into a little bit more of the nitty-gritty. What are some things EdTech brands can do to understand their SEO and in particular, their SEO health score? And again, if you use any of those tools, we'll put in our show notes, they'll pop up an SEO health score. So Tatum is going to talk to you about what they can do to understand their SEO health score and just some really good quick hits that you can do to improve that score. So she's been able to work with a lot of brands now and built up a startup that completely rocks at an SEO. When you talk to her, I saw where they started and where they're at. And maybe if you want to talk a little bit about your journey at Mindly Games, Tatum, to start this out, then let's get into what are the things that brands can do to understand their health score? And then maybe some quick hits of if you just do this or this, or 90% of companies do this.

Tatum Moser:

Yeah, so just to talk about when you're trying to understand your SEO, it's really a great reference point if you understand what Google's looking for. What they're looking for, if you're trying to gauge whether or not your content will rank, they have this acronym called EEAT, which is experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. That's how they're grading your content in your site. So what you were just talking about is directly related to the user experience on the site. That's whether or not pages load. Well, that's whether or not when they come to your page, if it's actually aligned with the search that they did. Because sometimes when Google is testing what it should rank for a certain search term, your keywords actually might not be completely clear. Does your title actually match, say for instance, what that search term is and does the content that they come into contact with after they've clicked still reflect alignment with that original search?

So sometimes that can be really, really off. So if you're wondering, why am I ranking position 80 for this term that I'm going after, just ask yourself those couple of questions as a first line of defense in terms of how you're presenting your content. But again, experience, page load times, you can go on Ahrefs or you can go Semrush. There is another tool that my SEO coach recommends because of course I have a coach from Mindly that is just really helping us so much, and he uses something called Screaming Frog. And so oftentimes, what we are doing lately is we will compare and contrast the site health scores that we are getting from multiple different tools just so that we can see if anything was missed.

We actually have an example today where on my Ahrefs report, it didn't pull up anything about duplicate title tags, but when he ran his report on Screaming Frog, he got 80 of those. And that makes sense because we just published a bunch of category filter pages and we have specific skills on our site, like addition or multiplication or number sense, and then we have grade specific filters. So now you don't just have addition games, you have addition games for kindergarten, addition games for first grade, addition games for second grade. And so what was coming up is we had a bunch of pages that had duplicate titles because they were all derived from that first page that we had created. And he was like, "Oh man, if you go and fix this, this is really going to give you an amazing ROI on your time investment because these duplicate title tags really matter to Google." So just being able to look at those small things and see like, "Okay, hey, we're going to fix those."

And the example that you just used, which was, I think, looking at the actual errors that are on your site. So this is really impacting user experiences when you have, say for instance, links on your page that are going to pages that don't exist. So the user's interested, they're like, "Hey, I'm actually going to click in further and see what's going on here." And then they hit a broken page. So these tools will help you actually see if you have any of that going on on your site. And Google cares about that user experience. They want to ensure that the users are getting a good experience. And you have to differentiate, is the experience the same on the desktop versus mobile? So oftentimes, you're going to get different site health scores for your desktop versus your mobile experience, and you have to pay attention to both of those.

Elana Leoni:

I love when you talk about this, you frame it in a way for the content marketers listening and sales and marketing and even if you have a product that lives on your website and your website should, even if you have an app, should be able to be optimized to convert them to do your goal, whether it be a download an app, contact us, sign up for a demo, a webinar or whatnot, but you talk about why would you ever build on a broken frame? What was your analogy that you talked about?

Tatum Moser:

That's the foundation of everything. You don't want to build upon a cracked foundation, so you really want to make sure.

Elana Leoni:

You don't want to have a content marketing strategy and even have a content marketing strategy built on a cracked foundation, plus you're not being SEO informed while you're creating the content marketing strategy. But I was like, "Ding, ding, ding." If they have a low page load time and they don't even have a site map or whatever it may be, why even create content that no one's going to see?

Tatum Moser:

Right, exactly. Yes, absolutely.

Elana Leoni:

And I was like, "Ding, ding, ding, light bulb moment."

Tatum Moser:

Totally. And this is especially for the marketers that are certain that they approach the topic correctly. They're like, "Man, I wrote this thing and it's so good. It just matches the intent of this keyword so perfectly. And we interviewed experts, and there's just such good information here, and I don't understand why it's not ranking." This is when you look at the site health and you say, "Hey, is there anything going on there? Is our foundation cracked? Is Google going to not rank this because it takes over three seconds to load?"

Elana Leoni:

Tatum, that reminds me, would you mind talking to the audience about Google Search Console? And specifically I've learned from you is that when you launch content, being able to check and make sure that it's being indexed well and there's no errors being formed and things like that, that was new to me.

Tatum Moser:

Actually, again, I just met with my SEO coach from Mindly today, and he's an advisor for us, and we were looking at why does this page that we did not intend ranking for this keyword when we intended another page to rank for it. And so the example was it was like rounding numbers to the nearest 10 was the skill. And we have a page that's dedicated to rounding numbers, and we're like, "That's the page we want ranking." But it's an individual game and we don't want individual games ranking for that. We want the category page because there's so many games available for that skill. We want somebody to see all of them, not just the one game. And what turned out, he went into Ahrefs and he was like, "Oh my gosh, that's what's going on. This page didn't get indexed." So we use a tool that is an API where you can push updates to this tool and it should push all of the indexing to Google at the same time.

Well, this is a different content type and it looks like that's not happening. So we now need to go in and reevaluate how that API is handling the indexing for us. And so in the meantime, I think this is what you were getting at, there is a manual way to do this. So if you go into Google Search Console, you can manually submit URLs to be indexed by Google. And this is a really important step if you are trying to get a specific page to rank for a certain term. It's really also important if you have multiple pages that are dedicated potentially to that same topic. So it's okay to have pages that are dedicated to the same topic, but you want to make it really clear to Google what the hierarchy is in terms of the importance of those pages. So indexing the most important one first is actually a great strategy, and then waiting until that one is indexed before you index the supplementary or supporting pages.

Elana Leoni:

And for those of you that are like, "Whoa, I didn't understand half of what she said-"

Tatum Moser:

Sorry.

Elana Leoni:

No, and it was good because you're super technical and to be in SEO and do it really well, you got to be doing it every day and you've got to have this passion and curiosity. So I would say the term Google Search Console, we will put links to it in the show notes, but if you're a marketing leader or a sales leader, know that you should have access to it. You should know about it. It is a free tool. And it's all about really looking at how your website user experience is positioned and the foundations of what Tatum was talking about with SEO too.

I didn't know it existed about a year ago, and I started getting emails and it was telling me, oh, my mobile experience isn't as good, and things like that. So you might get emails if you're in your GA, for instance, as an admin or a content manager within Google Analytics for. But just to even back up on what Google Search Console is, it is a great tool. You should be aware of it. Your team, if you're creating content, should understand it. And it also creates those errors too, right, Tatum, that you can go in-

Tatum Moser:

It does. If you look under the section for Core Web Vitals, that's what it's called. So those are going to be actually your most important things to keep an eye on.

Elana Leoni:

Core Web Vitals?

Tatum Moser:

Mm-hmm. Core Web Vitals.

Elana Leoni:

Okay, great. So there is so much we can talk about with SEO. I hope those of you that are listening at least pause, whether you're sales, marketing, you're leading the entire company, a website is a huge part of what you do. I don't care what you're offering and people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on it. So what we want to get across to you is don't build on a bad foundation and make sure your foundation is solid. And how do you do that? You have to at least do an analysis.

We've given you some free tools. We'll put them in the show notes to start, but start there and be intentional and think about how you can be SEO-minded of what are people actually searching for. When are they searching for it? Am I coming across and providing information that people search for and not just talking about my product? Is there anything else you want to add to that, Tatum, to wrap up the cliff notes of this really practical and useful episode? I want to pick your brain so much and I know I can, but I want to highlight it out to the other people that I've had these light bulb moments, so I want to share it with others.

Tatum Moser:

Yeah, just that it's actually really fun. I feel like as a content marketer, someone who's just been producing so much content in my previous roles, it really is such an amazing way to be able to measure the effectiveness of your content. And sometimes that's hard to do. And that's why SEO, if anybody developing content or products that are attributed with specific URLs, you can actually measure whether or not it's resonating with people in such an effective way based on whether or not Google is ranking it. And the only reason Google will be ranking it is if users are responding to it. I love it.

Elana Leoni:

Awesome. Well, Tatum, as you know, we love to wrap up episodes with a fun question, a human question, beyond the wonderful world of EdTech. But I'm curious because you are such a curious person, you learn all the time, I've talked to you and you're reading and you're listening and you're doing things, what's one thing that you've read or watched recently that inspired you?

Tatum Moser:

One thing that I've read or watched recently that inspired me, so I'm actually reading the book of a really close colleague of mine that was just released, and it's called Do Your Lessons Love Your Students? This book, for anybody out there that is familiar with thinking routines, thinking routines come out of Harvard Project Zero and it's frameworks that you can use them with anybody. They're, of course, geared at students for the most part in helping teachers to learn how to use them, but you can use them anywhere.

I think she intended in the beginning of her book, she built a framework off of the word love. I just love it. I cried because she's actually a dear friend of mine and she's somebody that I loved learning from so much when I had the opportunity to work from her. So just the fact that she wrote a book and now I can learn from her again, I messaged her and was like, "Thank you so much for writing a book." It's so full of heart. I'm only at the beginning, so that's why I'm so excited about it. But everybody go out and check out her book. I love it.

Elana Leoni:

What's the author's name?

Tatum Moser:

Mariah Rankine-Landers and Jessa Brie Moreno. So they run an amazing group called Studio Pathways, and it's all about bringing equity and social justice to the work that we do as educators. And they're beautiful, amazing, mission-driven people that are just so inspiring. I'm very excited to be reading their book right now.

Elana Leoni:

It's funny. Leave it to you, Tatum. I say, "What are you reading outside of education?" And I know that you love education.

Tatum Moser:

Oh, no, I'm not. I'm not reading anything outside of education. I'm sorry.

Elana Leoni:

But that is awesome. And it also reminded me to give a shout-out to all the educators listening too. As we talk about technical topics like SEO, I know many of you are creating or thinking about creating and do not create blogs, do not create portfolios or really anything without this SEO in mind. So course creators, all of the things surrounding it, I want you to be intentional about what is SEO, especially for all of you educators, thinking about navigating into the workforce, into the technical workforce, into EdTech, got to be familiar with what SEO is, how does it help with one of these key marketing channels about getting that message out clearly and targeting your target audience through those keywords and key phrases that they are intensely searching for to get information on, right?

Tatum Moser:

Absolutely.

Elana Leoni:

Awesome. Well, thank you so much Tatum for coming on this show.

Tatum Moser:

Thank you so much for having me.

Elana Leoni:

It's such a joy to learn from you. And for those of you going, "Gosh, Tatum knows so much about SEO," know that she is self-taught. It's not like she went to SEO school. She just happened to realize that there's this beautiful marriage when it comes and it collaborates and the more you learn, the more you can do more. So for those of you thinking that you can't learn this, know that Tatum started at ground zero too. And that's what I love about her is that curiosity took over. So thank you, Tatum, for displaying that to our audience and sharing your knowledge. We'll put all of those tools and anything else that you think is valuable for our audience, we'll put them in the show notes as well. So thank you so much for coming on the show, Tatum.

Tatum Moser:

Thank you so much for having me. It was so great to talk to you, and I really appreciate being able to chat about these things.

Elana Leoni:

Great. Take care.

Tatum Moser:

Bye.

Elana Leoni:

Thanks again for listening to All Things Marketing and Education. If you like what you heard and want to dive deeper, you can find more episodes at leoniconsultinggroup.com/podcast. You can also continue the conversation with us on Twitter @Leonigroup or on LinkedIn. And don't forget, if you enjoyed today's show, make sure to subscribe to our podcast and leave a review. We're so appreciative of every single subscriber and review we get, and it helps us reach even more people that need help. So we'll see you next time on All Things Marketing and Education. Take care.

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