Keyword Research for Small Businesses: Roasting Sarah Raanan
A masterclass in small-business keyword research, roast edition.
On the grill this week
Sarah Raanan
Roasted by
Yaron · Ben
S130:25
In this episode
A solopreneur business coach asked for tips, so instead of just roasting we ran a live keyword research masterclass on her site.
The best section on the whole site, the pain points block covering impostor syndrome and self-sabotage, is buried so deep most visitors will never scroll to it.
Her lead magnet link teleports you off the website entirely. We begged for a popup.
We reverse engineered a DR 75 competitor live on air, filtering for keywords a DR 26 site can actually win.
We were too nice for a real score this time, so the official grade is A+ on effort.
The roast scorecard
Sarah Raanan
No grade issued on air
On the grill:Keyword strategy & mappingContent gaps & clustersTitles & meta descriptionsSite speed & performanceCTAs & funnelsHeading hierarchyInternal linking & anchors
Key findings
Mobile first contentful paint clocks in at 3.9 seconds when it should be under two, though desktop is fine.
Blog posts ship without real headings, structured data, or internal links, with long slugs, overlong titles and descriptions, and empty lines doing the job of CSS spacing.
The homepage title tag is a leftover from her photography days, and the meta description is far too long, so Google was picking its own snippet.
The site ranks for essentially nothing yet, but the lowest DR in the top 10 for small business coach terms sits around 25, right in her range.
The blog covers one-off topics, one ADHD post here, one Instagram tips post there, with no clusters and no keyword research behind them.
Top action items
1Build proper topic clusters around the pain points she solves, like 20 solid posts on ADHD for solopreneurs, instead of scattered one-offs.
2Bring the lead magnet form and the booking calendar onto the site as popups or embeds so visitors never leave.
3Run competitor keyword research filtered to a rankable DR, validate each SERP by backlinks and intent, then cross-reference existing posts for reoptimization wins.
4Fix the on-page basics: homepage title, real headings, shorter slugs and descriptions, and internal links between posts.
What we learned (steal these)
Keyword research is not finding keywords. It is analyzing every SERP for DR, backlinks, and intent before you commit to a single brief.
Quality beats quantity. A proper content brief takes two to three hours, so publish however many posts a month you can do well, not however many you can churn.
Never send visitors off your site to convert. Every external hop to a form or calendar is a place to lose them.
Signed and grilled by
Yaron · Ben
SEO Bros · S1
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