Ranking, Link Building, & Google Analytics

What a great week with so much new information!

Even though I don't completely understand link building and getting backlinks from others, I do understand what a helpful concept this is to my website and my business. I think I will begin with backlinks from social media that friends, family, and others share. This seems like a great place to start because I do know how to do that.

I absolutely loved the section on Google Analytics. I had a hard time getting the demo account to pull up even though I followed the instructions in the lesson as well as online. However, once I was able to get it to work, I enjoyed answering the questions for the Analytics assignment. I love numbers and math and coming up with answers like this. I am definitely a "hands on" person when it comes to learning. I don't know yet if all of my answers were correct but when I posted them on the discussion board, it seemed like most of my answers matched with those of other classmates so we are either all right or all wrong :).

I also appreciated looking at the stats on Google Analytics for my own site. I got a page score of 72 on my bath bomb page. There were only two recommendations to help it score higher with SEO, so I felt pretty good about that. This is such a great tool to track how my website is doing so that I can make changes and improvements to my site to help it perform at a higher level. I'm grateful to have learned all of this information ths week.

Social Media for SEO & Social Networking

This week was a great learning opportunity for me as we studied SEO for social media and I thought about goals for my business on social media. Some of these goals are:

• Get more views on Facebook. I've been posting to my business page, my personal page, and using stories. I'm going to try short reels to create another mode of "transportation" to my site. I like the idea of reels because I can do a fast-motion, short presentation of my products and the benefits behind them. Another option I am going to try is Facebook lives. This will allow my viewers to engage with me “face-to-face”, hear about the business, ask questions, etc.
  
• Create more of a presence on Instagram. Besides posting pictures of my products, I will link my page to Facebook as well as to my actual website.
• Make sure that my posts on both of the social media platforms I am using are easily shareable and encourage people to share them. This will start with friends and family because they are my best advertisers right now. However, they have different friends and those people have friends, etc. so I think this is a good way to help my social media SEO.

Some of my long-term goals are to:

• Have more followers on my social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram.
• See more visitors to my website.
• Have more conversions on my site.

Facebook and Instagram measures the engagement of viewers and the number of views to my pages. Ultimately, customer conversions will be the best measure of success for my business. This will mean that all of the effort put into marketing and advertising with Google Ads, Facebook posts, and Instagram posts is paying off. Higher revenue for the business will be the biggest success.

I appreciated the information this week regarding LinkedIn. I had not really thought about using this platform for my business because I have been thinking more about advertising and making sales. However, it was pointed out that LinkedIn is a great place to connect with others who have similar products/companies and/or are interested in similar things. This will be a great networking social media platform.

As I worked on and completed the project for this week, it was interesting to look back and see how the changes I made to my website and my Google Ads affected the metrics that I was measuring. While I did not have any conversions while my campaign was running, the changes did show a difference. I had some conversions/sales on my website before I officially started my ad campaign and then another one the day after my campaign ended. Hopeful that conversions will keep happening as I draw more people to my website.

Landing Page Optimization & Basic SEO

I appreciaterd learning about key items you can do to optimize landing pages, keywords, and entire site for search engines:

• 
  Update content regularly: This is a top indicator of a site's relevancy. Consumers don’t want to see old, outdated information, and search engines don’t either. Keep your site fresh with relevant information.
• Have a link worthy site: Instead of having "click here" links, write out the name of the destination. Search engines don’t understand “click here”. Using descriptive links by linking keywords not only improves search engine optimization, but also adds value to your readers, including those with disabilities or who are using screen readers.
• Use alt tags: Describe your image and other media using alternative text descriptions. They allow search engines to locate your page, which is crucial, especially for those who use text-only browsers or screen readers.
• Content and navigation are easily consumed/understood by consumer: Site is straightforward and links are easily found. There are a lot of sites with similar products/information, so quick and easy are important when a consumer visits your site. If they have to work to hard to navigate your site, they’ll click back and go to another site.
• Multi-device ready: Site is accessible on multiple devices, i.e., computer, mobile device, etc. Make sure you have scaled your images and condensed your content to fit on a mobile device and be easily accessible to consumers. The majority of consumers are on their mobile device when searching for items to purchase, learn about, etc.

When I was initially building my site, I could not figure out why it didn't show up on my mobile device the way it did on my computer. Once I discovered the "phone" graphic in my builder, it made all the difference to the way the site looked. I didn't really make major changes but instead just had to move a few pictures etc to fit the mobile. I'm glad I figured this out early on in my site building process because the majority of consumers are on mobile devices more than other devices when shopping.

As I have been analyzing my Google Ads campaign, my ads for bath bombs and bath salts are getting fairly significant clicks. However, I am not really getting conversions. As I reviewed the landing pages on each of these ads, I think the following changes would be beneficial:

• List the benefits of not only bath bombs, but our bath bombs
• Include actual customer testimonials

Many people think of bath bombs as only a “self-care” luxury when in reality there are real health benefits to skin, mood, etc. of bath bombs. Sharing these benefits on the landing page could help me to get conversions. I appreciated the information in the article, “6 Essential PPC Landing Page Optimizations.” It says, “There's really no better way to build trust with prospective customers than to have existing customers sing your praises.” I like the idea this article suggested of including testimonials even on the sidebar of my landing page. I know when I am looking for a product, I like to read the testimonials and/or reviews before purchasing to get an idea of what others think about a product.

I am hopeful that as I make these changes, more conversions (sales) will come from my site.

ROI & Optimizing Ad Performance

This week I learned about measuring profits, ROI (return on investment), conversions, and optimizing ads in Google. ROI will be a great conversion tracking measurement for my website. This will be the most measurable conversion for me to see how my ads are affecting the success of my business. Clicks and visits are great, but producing sales is what will help my business to grow.

My SHOP page will be my conversion page because this is where potential customers will become customers by making a purchase. The goal of having a website is to bring a wonderful product to people but also to have sales so I will point my ads to the specific SHOP page(s) to encourage customers to stay and buy once they have come to the site.

Since I just enabled my Google Ads campaign, I do not have enough data yet to really make a lot of changes to my ads. Some of the optimization tools I will use are possibly changing, deleting, or pausing keywords that are not effective. I could also add different keywords and see if they are more effective. I will look at making similar changes to the ads that I have under the campaign as well.

I have not been able to locate the 'Ads & Extensions' link from the left menu in my Google Ads, so I'm not quite sure what to do about that yet. I plan to reach out to other students to see if I can figure out if something is missing or I have missed a step somewhere.

Relevance, Quality Score, and Google Analytics . . . Oh My!

This week was very informational as I learned about Relevance and Quality Score in regards to my Google Ads. I have continued to refine my ads to obtain a higher quality score while still keeping my ads relevant to my actual business. I know Google is trying hard to help ads be relevant to the sites the ads are referencing but some of the recommendations didn't seem relevant so I chose not to use all of the recommendations.

I also learned about Google Analytics and the important role this plays in tracking the data of my site so that I can improve my site. Google Analytics will help me to have a more successful business because of the valuable data I will be able to track:

• Track online traffic.
• Analyze and understand user behavior.
• Get data reports and option to customize reports.
• Improve online ads with marketing analytics.
• Conversion tracking to track the required conversions.
• Segment the users effectively.
• Improve SEO and content marketing.

I will be able to measure how marketing, content, and products are performing compared to what consumers are searching for. Without these analytics, the only way I would be able to measure how my site, content, marketing, etc are performing would be when a purchase is made. Google Analytics will make it possible to measure each of the areas and adjust so that more sales will happen sooner rather than waiting to see how the site is doing based on sales so adjustments can be made quicker.

I think Google was pretty smart to include Analytics to help people in their online businesses. Google Analytics also allows the capability to measure how long a potential customer is on my site. I think this is extremely valuable information in knowing how engaging my site is but also how relevant my ads are to the site. Sometimes I click on an ad that appears relevant to what I am looking for but when I get to the company's site, it's not quite what I was expecting and I don't stick around too long. I think it's great to have this tool to help us improve our sites and build our business.

These topics are very relevant as I am continuing to build ads for my business and getting ready to run my campaign.

Google Ads and Ad Groups

This week was all about Google Ads and Ad Groups. I struggled some because the ad that I started last week didn't save everything I had entered. This caused me a little stress mainly because it was an assignment and I didn't want it to be late. However, I just started over at the point it hadn't saved. I'm not sure what I did differently but everything saved this second time of entering it. It may have been a blessing in disguise because I feel like the keywords and headlines I used were better the second time.

I have a few products in my business and was unsure exactly how to build the ads. At first I had all of the products in one ad but after this week's reading and video, I had the feeling that each product needed to be in its own ad group. I refined the ad group I had started with just one of the products and am continuing to build the ad groups for the other products.

I was grateful for the class meeting this week. Since I was the only student who attended, I was able to ask all of my questions regarding my concern about how to get all of the products into ads and not have to pay a ton of money at this point. I was unsure if the ad groups were all under one campaign and they were all on the same budget or if I would be paying for each ad group. Brother Scott clarified that multiple ads could be under a campaign and Google charges per campaign. We are only going to do one campaign for the course and so multiple ad groups could be under the campaign and therefore, the same budget. This was reassuring for me.

I was worried about writing an ad because, once again, I wanted it to be perfect. Once I got all my keywords and headlines entered, I realized it wasn't rocket science to write a description of the product. I'm hopeful that the ads for the other products will be as fun to write. Another suggestion Brother Scott gave me in our meeting was to include URLs for competitors rather than just my site to grab key words, which is what I did for my first product. I'm going to try that suggestion with the other products and see if I get keywords that are different but relatable to my products.

Google Ads and Keywords

It was great to learn more about Google Adwords and Keywords this week. When running an ad, a business obviously wants to reach as many people as possible. However, as I studied the aspects of ad campaigns, I feel that advertising to a broad area could be a costly mistake and the owner will spend money on the advertising that is wasted rather than working in their favor to build their customer base.

How great is it that we can advertise on computers and smart phones rather than having to use flyers, newspapers, etc. Most people, no matter their age, have a smart phone right at their fingertips so this is definitely a smart way to advertise and reach a large population of people.

I appreciated the information that will help me in choosing good keywords for my ads:

Characteristics of a good keyword include:

• Directly relate to ad’s theme
• Use similar keywords in ad groups
• Use words that you would use as a customer
• Not too specific/narrow
• Not too broad/general
• Keywords of two or three words

Characteristics of a bad keyword include:

• Too narrow or specific and rules out customer searches
• Too broad or general and gets clicks that will not convert
• Doesn’t relate to the theme of the ad

I hadn't really thought about having different ad groups so that similar keywords could be in the groups. Originally I had included the keywords for all of my products, bath bombs, bath salts, sugar scrubs, lotions, all in one ad. After this week, I am going to edit the ad and create ad groups for each of the products.