Week 13 - Post 12 - Ranking, Link Building & Google Analytics

 This was an interesting but frustrating week. Luckily, I was confused early and finished up the week interested. All in all, I’m still not certain I understand link building. I mean, I get the concept and purpose, but I’m not sure the details and technical solutions are locked into my head yet. I found several good articles on Yoast and Moz so I’ll need to go back and review them. Also, I love the website auditing tool we used to check the SEO for landing pages. I've got that book marked for future use.

The most interesting part of the week were the Google Analytics exercises and quiz. If there has been a frustration in this class for me, it’s that all of the videos are from 2017. Google Ads and Analytics have both progressed and updated since then. If you get stuck, the videos aren’t very helpful (more in Google Ads than in Google Analytics). I spent more time on up to date support sites and Reddit boards than in the instructional materials. 

I wish I’d know the final project was going to be a video though. It’s not like a quality 3 minute video is easy to put together, I would have started preparing a couple weeks ago but the assignment was locked until recently.

Overall, this has been a great final couple of weeks. Google Analytics is very interesting - I wish we’d spent more time with it. It feels like we should only be halfway through the class, not in the last week.

One more week!

Week 12 - Post 11 - Social Media for SEO & Social Networking

 This week has been pretty interesting over all. I’ve become a believer that Social media marketing, in some industries, is more effective than Google. I feel this way for two reasons. 

First, social marketing platforms like Facebook provide targeted Ad placement based on interests, not direct searches. For example - let's say someone is interested in building PCs. They interact with posts about PC builds and comment on posts about it, but they aren’t actually ready to pull the trigger yet. They’ll still see my Ads because Facebook will present them. Will that inspire them to browse? Perhaps. In this case Facebook is more proactive than Google.

Second, Social media platforms provide a captive audience for businesses. People go to Google to look for things. They go to social media to hang out and spend much more time than on Google's search page. This is another important metric. It means that the odds a potential customer will see my ad multiple times increases because they are engaged with the page (and content) more often and for longer periods of time.

Google is a great tool, but it is pretty dependent on a specific action (searching) by a customer. Social media marketing (especially YouTube - which we haven’t really talked about in this course) is more natural and less dependent on specific actions from a customer. 

If I were to create a new business (especially web based sales or affiliate marketing) I’d start with Facebook and Instagram and then consider Google as a second option.