Tag Archives: Content Creation

Analytical Adjustments

Process Post #10

A cartoon man and women stand, looking at large, colourful graphs and data.
Julie Joyce

As an up-and-coming blogger, improving my SEO or Search Engine Optimization, will have a huge impact on my website’s success, especially if I plan to monetize my content. Having a good SEO means your website is geared towards search engines, thus appearing higher up on the results page. Our readings this week emphasize the importance of building your SEO, to widen brand reach and website visibility, as most consumers don’t look past the first few results (Hollingsworth, 2021). Until now, I have been focusing mostly on creating content and finding my footing building a website–something I have never done before.

But, this inspired me to test my blog’s SEO. When looking up “Fridays with Frosty” directly in Google, my site came up first! Thanks family and friends for that boost. This is huge for my site, as our readings say, “If you’re not on page one, you’re not winning the click” (Hollingsworth, 2021).

A screenshot of a "fridays with frosty" google search. My site is the first res

But, when you change the search terms, even slightly, to something like “Fridays Frosty” I disappear right off the first page of results. It looks like I still have some work to do.

This week, I used google analytics to try to improve my SEO. It says that 92% of my site’s viewers come via a direct search and are located in Canada. (Shout out again to the fam jam!)

But, 88% of the viewers on my site come through desktop, something I wasn’t expecting. This posed a problem for the way I integrate videos into my blog. My site isn’t user-friendly enough when you are on desktop. This had to change, because good user experience improves SEO. Our readings talk about this, stating “Google has learned how to interpret a good or unfavourable user experience, and a positive user experience has become a pivotal element to a website’s success.” (Hollingsworth, 2021).

My issue is I have been making my videos on TikTok, then saving them to my computer before posting, rather than just embedding the TikTok directly. This means that on mobile, watching the videos is fine, as they are already sized to fit the screen. On desktop however, the video size and vertical proportions are too big for the screen. You can’t see the entire thing. You have to do quite a bit of scrolling to even get to the bottom of the video. It doesn’t making watching easy. So, I needed to fix this for my larger desktop audience and hopefully, it would boost my SEO.

I had to redo all my video blog posts and embed them directly from TikTok. I decided I could also improve my website’s marketability at the same time, by creating a Fridays with Frosty specific TikTok. Up until now, I have been posting on my personal TikTok account. Once I reposted all my videos to the new account, I uploaded them to my blog as TikTok’s. Although it was frustrating to have to post everything again, it was worth it. My site looks way cleaner, and I have a head start expanding my brand over multiple channels (Check out my plans for that here).

Learning about SEO made me realize that I may have been using tags on my posts incorrectly. I have been treating them like keywords, and have since learned they aren’t the same. I decided to enlist ChatGPT to help me improve this. I imputed my most recent post, about Caitlin Clark (She’s awesome, check it out here!), into ChatGPT and asked it to generate tags for me (and it came up with the tags for this post too). It came up with some basic stuff, like “Caitlin Clark”, “Iowa Hawkeyes”, and “women’s basketball”. But it also came up with a few things I hadn’t thought of, like “basketball records”, and “TV viewership”.

I’m anxiously waiting to see if AI can help improve the traffic to this post, and my SEO, through improved tags. If it does, I will be going back and getting it to come up with tags for all my older posts.

The readings did demonstrate a few things I have been doin well in terms of SEO. They say good SEO “offers users the information they are looking for in fewer clicks, quickly and easily,” and “builds trust & credibility” which a positive user experience is part of (Hollingsworth, 2021). By splitting up my content into written and video sections, navigation is easier, making content faster to find. I have also made decisions about comment modifications that will foster a positive user environment. Read about those decisions here!

In the future, there are many things I could do to improve my SEO, with the help of analytics, like improving code so my website loads faster. But, those changes seemed daunting at this point and I would be way out of my depth. If I continue my blog, it will definitely be something to think about. Until then, I’ll just keep telling everyone I know to check out “Friday’s with Frosty” and hope it boosts my SEO.

Works Cited

Hollingsworth, S. (2021, August 9). 15 reasons why your business absolutely needs seo. Search Engine Journal. Retrieved April 9, 2023, from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-seo-is-important-for-business/248101/#close

PRESS RELEASE

We finally did it! Time to cross into other platforms. Follow @SamAverage on Instagram for updates on weekly challenges! Share your version of our weekly challenges with the hashtag #AverageArtChallenge and Tag us on instagram to be reposted!! 🙂

How To: Fall in Love With a Book

These are usually the steps I take when I fall in love with a new book/series! Though this doesn’t happen with every book if you keep trying, I am sure you will find one you love. If you are in need of book recommendations, my blog is the place to start! I have a category of book recommendation posts here.

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