W13 Reflection: Ranking, Link Building & Google Analytics

I was excited by the idea of evergreen content over blogging. I am not naturally interested in blogging, and this seems like a better middle ground for me. I have a few ideas for content to develop, the limiting factor being available time and execution. I hope to focus my efforts primarily towards lasting useful content. As a supplement, I could incorporate a blog to review or explain industry tools. There can be a steep learning curve to the large brand businesses, and I think I can offer value by simplifying their tools in a more approachable way.

Guest blogging is appealing too but also feels awkward to pursue. I do not know when I would be ready for that or if I will even be an interesting addition to someone’s blog. I intend to become a credentialed genealogist. Having those initials after my name with help me with credibility among other professionals, but it will be a couple years before I complete the credentialing process.

Google Analytics is an interesting tool. I look forward to being able to implement changes from the data it collects. Currently, it feels more like a novelty and can be difficult to identify improvements. I do think that longer tracking history will lead to better data and make those improvements opportunities a little more obvious.

I am looking forward to building my business presence overtime as I complete my family history research degree and pursue genealogy credentials.

W12 Reflection: Social Media for SEO & Social Networking

This week’s information on social media SEO was really helpful. A few years ago, I worked as a digital marketing assistant for a Chinese herbal company and part of my job was creating and posting the ads for various social media platforms. My job wasn’t creating the marketing plan, I was given assignments to carry out, but now in hindsight I can see all the things that were missed and what could have helped that company even more. I’m excited to use what I learned from that job and what I am learning from this class to be more effective in reaching my target market.

I’m particularly interested to track the traffic sources and learn how to reach my market most effectively. That is something I know my old employer didn’t know how to do and wished they did. Part of me wants to send off a quick email to the owners to suggest using Google Analytics to track their social media advertising efforts would change their lives. If I can figure out a polite way to do it, I might—they were nice people, but we haven’t kept in touch.

I appreciated the emphasis in the readings and video on just taking the time to establish a plan, not to stress out about getting it exactly perfect but something to get you started and update periodically. I do best setting plans to a calendar and following a pattern so I want to use what I learned this week to develop a basic outline and fill in the framework from there. Once I have a manageable system with a pattern, I believe that I can maintain momentum in content creation and segmented, sharable content posts on social media.

W11 Reflection: Landing Page Optimization & Basic SEO

This week I learned about how keywords can affect your landing page and SEO. This was a really helpful week but also difficult to work my way through some of the reading. While full of great information, Rand Fishkin’s article on Keyword-Targeting and Landing Page SEO was a very slow read. Mostly because I wasn’t familiar with some of the industry lingo and acronyms that he used. I had to look several terms up separately and even then, it wasn’t always clear how to understand the information without more additional research. Several times I just wanted to give up, but I didn't. Although, I did have to take several breaks and come back to read more later. I’m likely not his target market but I appreciated the information. Otherwise, he spelled everything out really well and used a lot of great details, examples, and visuals.

I was surprised to see that Keywords are not as important in optimizing a page as they used to be. I hadn’t considered that algorithms were able to evaluate things like user experience (Or UX as I learned today. That one made sense, at least. I still think he made up KW for keywords, which took me longer to figure out than it probably should have). As an internet user, I can see how that makes sense objectively because I really hate it when I can’t figure out how to find things on a website or when they are just was too crowded. I hope to design a website that is really natural and enjoyable to use.

W10 Reflection: ROI & Optimizing Ad Performance

I found the reading this week really interesting but a little tricky to implement. Setting up conversion tracking was satisfying because I was able to figure out the best way to edit my theme safely and that has made these tracking features a lot easier to implement. I had done the header edit last week but this week I was able to figure out how to have it automatically populate in all the headers and then add code to only specific pages for the conversion goals.

I’m still a little stuck on setting the trackers to ignore my own traffic. I figured it out in one area, but it doesn’t seem to apply to the primary one that our class is using. I think I’ll have time this weekend to research that a little more and hopefully find the answer. 

I am currently wondering how to narrow the focus of my ad group to avoid people searching for specific family surnames. That was something I had not anticipated would happen but there are a few last names that populated my ad. These last names aren’t attached to any one keyword and those keywords seem to perform well otherwise. So, I’m trying to determine a way to limit the appearance of family surnames as a category. I’m also wondering if trying to eliminate this is actually a bad idea. I am not currently prepared to do so but I have been considering that instead of trying to eliminate a category (surnames/proper nouns), there might be a way to demonstrate that I’m useful to these researchers.

This week my other class, which is a family history research class, inspired another business niche idea that has been very distracting to me this week. Unfortunately it isn’t something I currently know how to do and likely requires a lot of coding knowledge. But I’m planning to incorporate it over time (sooner rather than later as it is a research tool that I would like to use in my own research and is a tool that I couldn't find anywhere else) and hope that it will be a useful tool to bring in traffic.

W09 Reflection: Relevance & Quality Score

This week has been interesting and gone a bit smoother. I really enjoyed installing and exploring Google Analytics, I can tell it will be a valuable and powerful tool. Plus, I love graphs and data, so this is right up my alley.

In terms of my ad campaign, I’m think I’m on track but I’m a little concerned about my keywords. I think I came up with a list that will be okay for a starting point but it’s hard to find a wide range of applicable words for genealogy. Especially when so many can be considered industry terms that beginners might not be familiar with and that are just plain trickier to spell.  Even I had to re-type genealogy two sentences ago and again just now. If I go any broader, I risk my ad appearing for completely unrelated searches from uninterested people. Any narrower and it’s unlikely to be triggered at all.

I appreciated Brother Beck’s recommendation to incorporate a blog into my website for traffic. I can see how this will help as I could focus on specific subjects and create ads around those posts. Thus solving my keyword dilemmas. I do worry that I won’t have anything new or interesting to say to draw in the traffic as the major brands already cover most topics really well. Although, I think I could compare and analyze the tools these websites offer effectively. Ancestry has a few shortcomings that I find frustrating and are amplified on their premium subsidiaries despite the high subscription costs of Fold3 and Newspapers.

I do have many different directions that I’m excited to explore with my genealogy business overtime, but I’m trying to limit my focus for the semester so I don’t end up overwhelmed and spread too thin.

W08 Reflection: Ads

I really appreciated the assigned reading from this week. On the “Edit you text ads” page, just after the intro, there was a mention of Google Ads Editor and verifying that it was updated. I’ve been thinking that Google Ads was not very intuitive, and I misunderstood this to mean a Chrome plugin or something that could need updating. Ultimately, I ended up downloading a program, which was unexpected, but I am glad I did. The Google Ads Editor was a lot easier for me to navigate and resize my windows. The web based one feels like it would work better if I had two monitors. 

The keyword insertion feature is also really interesting and I would like to explore it more in the future. I wasn’t confident enough to try it out this week. Plus, most of my drafts weren’t dynamic enough and would stop making sense with a few of my keywords. But I think in the future, I could have a more tailored ad group and try this feature out in an ad to see how it performs for me.

I sort of enjoyed creating my ad this week. It was strange to be both limited by characters but also struggling to fill the space. But as always, balance in all things is good and should be expected.

W07 Reflection: Google Ads & Keywords

I found the readings this week helpful. They provided an interesting way of considering keyword choices more thoughtfully than just a random assemble of synonyms. I particularly like the information on negative keywords. I have often searched for various things on Google where I needed to include the “-“ in front of a word because I was getting bogged down with the wrong kind of results. I love the idea that I can do the same sort of thing on the advertisers end to streamline my campaigns effectiveness.

Personally, I originally felt that marking the major brands as negative keywords would be helpful. Thinking that if a person is already specifically looking for FamilySearch then I don’t want to waste my money in those search results. However, I find myself turning this concept over in my brain, maybe eliminating these brand words isn’t the best way of narrowing the market in that it could be beneficial to leverage the brand notoriety.

As far as I can tell, I’m not exactly anyone’s competitor because I haven’t found anyone offering the same exact service. Mostly, professional genealogists are offering the actual research as their service. So, distancing myself from these companies might do the reverse. Now I’m leaning more towards the idea that these brands presences would help drive traffic my way because people who might want my service would likely be familiar with the main Family History brands.

Tomorrow I might switch back again but I really like the analytical approach to choosing keywords. It’s like an entertaining never-ending riddle.