STATISTICS (7:30am EST)
30-Day Traffic: 889 (+48)
Yesterday's Traffic: 52 (-19)
Bounce Rate: 68.50% (+0.72%)
Twitter Followers: 1056 (+42)
Facebook Fans: 758 (+8)
Pinterest Followers: 2025 (+175)
External Backlinks: 57 (+3)
Citation Flow: 15 (+1)
Trust Flow: 9
Domain Authority: 1
Page Authority: 1
Spot in top 120 for keyword: #44 (-9)
Total Spent: $899.66
Total Earned: $4.65
Total Revenue: -$895.01
NOTES
Well shit. A few things went south.
1) I lost like ten spots in the rankings for my main keyword overnight.
2) I discovered that traffic takes a sharp nosedive when I am not churning out social media shit.
3) My bounce rate has been on a climb for a few days now.
I need to create value. I received a comment on one of my articles that was someone confused as to what the article was trying to convey. After stopping and really reading it, I completely understand what they are referring to. As a result, more article edits will be taking place. But first, I am going to spend a few days getting the automation end down and building some backlinks, as well as working on new articles and the long PDF guide. My top five goals for March:
1) Make social media hands-off except simple Pinterest posting (Hootsuite for updates to Facebook/Twitter/G+, VA for follow/unfollow)
2) Increase number of high quality backlinks via letting these SEO services do their thing and manual links of my own
3) Write at least 20 articles out, and stretch them out once per week, to make the writing hands-off for a while.
4) Finish the PDF guide completely, prep a beautiful PDF, start an email subscription section.
5) Skim through current articles, add more images, enhance article quality (some of the blurbs need another run though at least)
The mixture of these five things should allow for increased value and rankings by the end of next month. I will also be doing SEO-related work based on some mistakes I have made on this site thus far. For example, I haven?t done much in terms of tagging posts at all, and my categories suck. I plan to spend some time fixing these up and adding descriptions to categories, tags, images, etc.
HANDS-ON
First I went into Google+ and created a business page attached to the Google+ page to connect with Hootsuite. I filled it out completely, similar to the actual account Google+ vs the business page last week, and then joined ten related Google+ communities. Curious, I posted a link to the home page on one of the communities that had over 1 million members, and added the tagline, then +1?ed. Then I hooked the Google+ page up to Hootsuite and let it be for a while to do some other tasks.
I wrote a detailed, complete step-by-step guide for the new VA, who I am paying $25 per week to run a Twitter burst once per day and a Pinterest burst three to four times per day. Then I did a Pinterest burst of my own, and ran a complete unfollowing of all Twitter users not following me back blast on the entire account, bringing my total followings down to 726 from 4,000+. Then I took a few hours off to decompress, took a hike, out for a nice lunch, and a few other tasks.
I had 33 posts on the website. I decided to do a post self-audit to see where I needed to make serious changes. This consisted of making a spreadsheet with the following columns: Article Title, Link, Final Text Edit (i.e. is it completely ready), Old Keyword, New Keyword, Image Description (yes/no), New Images, Old Category, New Category, Old Tags, New Tags, Old Word Count, New Word Count.
Here is what I discovered:
1) Upon really reading through some of the blurbs that I got from Natasha Nixon, I realized just how badly written they were. All articles followed the exact same concepts and templates. I don?t know why I thought I could get away with posting these on my site as Blurbs, add some links and call it a day. The quality was terrible. But I should have expected that with $75 for 16 400 word articles. I should have never let these articles compromise the quality of my website. Shame on me. PLAN: Several of these articles can be combined and rewritten to make larger, more intuitive and informative articles (for example, one is [KEYWORD] Do?s, another is [KEYWORD] Don?ts. These can be combined as a Do?s and Don?ts post). That will be done. The rest will be removed from the site, edited, and used as guest posts or backlinks.
2) Eighteen of my posts have the same exact keyword. Eight more have another keyword. The rest have sorry excuses for keywords. It may have seemed proper when writing, as usually I had spent a good bit of time editing and was just ready to be done with the post. No. I need to really sit down and do some research and find some long tail keywords, and spin these posts to be about the long tail. Take over some smaller keywords so I can hit the big one. PLAN: Gather a long list of popular long tails, apply them to the current posts where applicable, try to have a different keyword with each post.
3) I have three categories for the posts on my site. One is my exact keyword, and is for longer articles. One is for shorter articles. The other is featured articles. That?s it. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Sometimes it feels like my knowledge of SEO was truly close to nothing. PLAN: Re-work my categories into applicable sections of the site instead of basing it on article length and overall happiness with the content. I was literally categorizing these posts based on my own level of laziness. Include proper name, slug, image, and solid, long, SEO?ed description for each category.
4) Tags. My god. I had one tag, total. It was my main keyword. That was it. For a span of eight articles, I didn?t include any tags at all. This is unacceptable. I must have gotten too wrapped up in the social media aspect of it, as I?m sure some of you were able to see. I liked watching the numbers rise a little too much. Glad I?m getting that off my hands so I can truly put some focus into getting this site up to par and competitive in this landscape. PLAN: Add tags out the ass. Relevant ones based on the articles. Much like the categories, include proper name, slug, image, and solid, long, SEO?ed description for each category.
5) Images. This needs some work. I had a featured image for each post. I was proud of these images. They were compressed and optimized, and then smushed to lower the size more. Each one was the exact same size pixel-wise. But guess what? People don?t want to read walls of text. I?m sure that has affected my bounce rate. What would you do if you found a site about something you were interested in, and every article was 1,500 words of drivel that had no exciting imagery. Shit. PLAN: Get some more images to add to the site. Add descriptions and captions to each image, and alt tags to match the posts that they are attached to. Do the same with the new images, and compress as well.
So. Where to go from here? What to do with a cluttered, damaged site? It?s easy to get 20,000 words on a site. It?s a different animal to get 20,000 relevant, exciting words. A detailed plan coming tomorrow, as well as hitting the bricks hard.
