Lessons Learned and Unlearned

This week's topic was a little bit more difficult for me to grasp as someone who struggles to understand a lot of tech lingo, but I picked up some great tidbits of knowledge that will help me and my site to perform better going forward. First, I learned that I need to check up on my keywords and try to optimize them so that my site ranks higher on Google and other search engines. I need to be getting rid of keywords that do not work and focusing on the ones that do. I also want to embed keywords in my photos and videos so that people can be directed to my site when they search for things like "Mount Timpanogos Pictures" or other similar words. I think that will attract my target audience more than people looking specifically to buy products or find a hiking spot. I want to inform and entertain people rather than sell to them with my site. Then I can monetize more later through ads.

This week I learned a lot about how to optimize my keywords and ads in order to maximize the money I am paying for advertising now that I've started my campaign. I made a couple of changes based on the data I've received so far from Google about my ad performance. One of them was I removed the keywords "Grand Teton National Park" and "Yellowstone National Park" from my ads because they were limited by something in their performance. I still don't totally understand why that happened, but I made the change to get more clicks for my money. I'm not planning to generate a lot of revenue right now, but I hope to gain a following on my website in order to monetize my site later with advertisements. At that point, my ROI will increase and my investments will have been worth it. It may take a while, but once I start earning money, I will be able to run more serious ads with a larger budget, and my web business will be well on its way to a good profit!

This week I learned more about how to choose the best keywords for my Google Ads campaigns. I learned that my ads will be more successful if my landing page on my website is fast and effective. Customers are more likely to stay on the site if the landing page loads within two seconds from the time it is clicked, so ads will yield higher returns if landing pages are fast and well-designed. It is also important to make sure that the keywords are closely related to the things found on the website. It is easy yo create a lot of keywords that aren't closely linked to the site's content. CPC may decrease, but ROI will not. We want both of these metrics to increase, so it is best to choose relevant keywords that will bring buying customers to the site. Google Ads is an incredible tool, but it needs to be used correctly in order to get the results I want for my website.

This week I learned about Google Ads and their value to businesses. With a decent budget and proper planning, ads can drive large amounts of traffic to websites and social media pages, allowing for large amounts of growth sales for the companies that use them. I have learn from the articles and sites that I have used to research this week that ads should be carefully refined to be as well-made as possible before they are published. Descriptions and headlines need to be concise, clean, and helpful. If I create an ad, I need to make sure both of these aspects are refined and reviewed using keywords to make sure I have chosen the best words and phrases to drive as much traffic to my site as possible. The other important thing to keep in mind is that all of the budget information needs to be reviewed and double checked before publishing the campaign. Monetary mistakes can cause losses of hundreds or thousands of dollars, so I need to make sure I am not making any mistakes in that realm sin...