https://www.kathleenandersonross.com/

This website is a lifestyle blog redesign from WordPress into a Ruby on Rails CMS, site-ninja. Client goals: She wanted better SEO and less spam so site-ninja was a good platform for her. She felt REALLY nervous about the redesign because she’d received many compliments on the website. Adding more spam protection was easy. Regarding SEO, her blog had many healing, “holistic health” categories and inspiring quotes. Her slogan is, “Think Like A Healer™” and she does a lot of podcasts.

Before:

After:

Content management & SEO

For SEO consulting, you are looking at the content and how to structure it. I looked at other lifestyle blogs with 1 key topic, like “fitness.” She had many topics about feeling good. I asked her to narrow her blog down to 3 key categories. For SEO, those categories would be focus of the site. She also said 1 category, “living green” wasn’t doing well and that sadly, she hadn’t received many responses. “I guess people just aren’t interested in being eco-friendly,” she said. I didn’t think that was true. She’d been blogging for a long time. I knew if I rebranded the content with a modern catchphrase, it’d be popular. I did some keyword research. We changed the blog category to “sustainable living.” The categories are: well being, inspired living, and sustainable living. She loved it! Most lifestyle blogs only focus on 1 topic. Pulling 3 keyword categories onto the homepage made the SEO for her site more focused, and allowed her to reach a wider audience.

Integration

I setup site functionality so when the client posts to “well being, inspired, and sustainable living” the latest post shows up on the homepage. Setting up the blog functionality was KEY in this site redesign. Expanding her audience through social media and other channels was important too. She wanted to publish an e-pub so I setup a WordPress plugin and helped her export all of her images and blog posts into publication software. For Facebook, we setup a “supportive discussion group” to promote throughout the site. She was very active on Twitter so I embedded her Twitter feed. When a client wants “social media” it’s important to assess and focus on what’s right for them. For e-blasts, I setup mailchimp with a catchy title:

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I knew she was focusing on podcasting so promoting podcasts on the site was important. We added “upcoming interviews” so people could follow and subscribe to her. I added “online classes” to the main menu so people could sign up for her classes. I also added a Media page so people could invite her to their awesome events! When you’re focusing on lifestyle, integrating many channels helps a lot.