Lesson Info
7. Q&A
Lessons
Lesson Info
Q&A
Hey everyone, I'm anna and I'm excited to answer a few of the questions you've asked throughout the session today. And as usual, we received quite a few of them. So remember if we don't get to answer your question, we'll go back and answer all of them on the grow with google on our page below the virtual event. Shortly after it concludes. All right, our first question comes from George. George asks, what is the best CMS? And just a reminder. CMS stands for content management system. It's the tool that you use to build your website. And we get this question all the time George, it's important to understand that if you're doing all the work to build your website, you're not hiring somebody, you need to pick a CMS that allows you to be productive while getting the job done. So like the same said today, try them out and see which one fits all of your needs, the needs of your business. Um, and also falls within your technical know how some of them might be a little bit more robust technical...
ly. While some of them might be a little bit more user friendly, this is really important because moving from one CMS to another, CMS can be even more difficult. So if you get into the building of your website, you've done all this stuff and then you decide you need to move to another CMS. It can be really time consuming and challenging to do that as opposed to just really taking the time to figure out what is the best tool for me from the very beginning. The next question comes from Jackson Jackson Jackson asked, my website is not being correctly indexed by google. How can I fix this? Just as a reminder, something being indexed by google is essentially it being filed in a virtual card catalog so that when someone goes to search, they can find exactly what they're looking for based on those search terms. So a great place to start is by using what's called the google search console. We talk about that a little more in our workshop next week called Elevate your website with google tools. So definitely check that out. Google search console is a free tool that allows you to check when your website was last crawled by google and and that information indexed or if you've made significant changes to your website, let's say you've done a total overhaul and you don't want to wait for google to essentially stumble upon that website and then crawl it. You can always manually push google to crawl the site using the search console. Also, another fantastic thing about search console is that you'll receive alerts if google experiences crawl errors that might be the result of something like a broken page or even things as simple as maybe your images are too large your font is too small. So you're going to get really those up to date emails from google telling you what exactly you need to do to make sure your site is optimized for search? The next question comes from will we'll ask, should I add videos to my website, will it slow down my website now as we know, video has taken the internet by storm and is becoming one of the more important ways of engaging with your audience. So if you do decide you want to host videos on your website, which I highly recommend keep in mind that it can slow things down if you host that website or if you if you host those videos on the actual website. So really the best approach here is to host your videos on another platform. A great example is Youtube and then you would actually just embed that video on your website. So the actual um all that load that happen on your website is happening on a third party sites. It's not going to slow down your website specifically. Also if you decide to use Youtube, you're kind of doing killing two birds with one stone. This allows you to build out your presence on Youtube and get that all important video on your website simultaneously because you're uploading all of those videos to the Youtube platform. Okay, my next question comes from Donna Donna asked, can you switch a Wix website to google sites as I mentioned when someone was asking about content management, any time you move from one content management system to another, you're going to have to manually transfer your content to the new system. So if you've built out a really robust website with lots of pages on Wix and lots of content, it may make sense for you. Stick with that CMS to avoid you having to transfer the content and if you're still looking for a CMS, it's really important to make sure that you are really happy with your choice before you build out all that content on your website because it is really burdensome to make the make the shift. My next question comes from Michelle Michelle Ask in regards to analytics and keywords, is there a data set of words that we can be sure will work if only there were Michelle but unfortunately there is no specific set of keywords for each individual industry that you need to consider. It's all about what keywords people use to search for you and your type of business specifically. So to learn more about the keywords that people in your target audience might be using. Try google's free tool called google trends. You can also learn more about the keywords bringing the most people to your site specifically through your google analytics account, your google ads account if you're running ads or even your google business profile analytics. If you have a google business profile, it's important just to pay attention to the data that you have at your fingertips and then refine those keywords as your audience really shows you what it is they're using to search for you uh and to ultimately land on your website, That's going to be the best source of information. It's all about testing. My next question comes from jimmy jimmy asked, do I need a contact form on my website? Great question, jimmy. This really just depends on what the goals are for your business. If your goal is for your site to gather leads, then you're going to need a contact form so that they can reach out to you. But if your goal is to get more phone calls or to send traffic to your social or youtube pages, then a contact form might not be a great part of your game plan. Instead you're gonna want to think about what is the path that I want this audience to take once they visited my website and make sure that the things that you put on your website really support that next step in your customer journey. The next question comes from Shay, she asked, how can I use the website for membership access? So that certain products are only accessible to members of the site. Hey Shay, when you're considering your content management system, you may want to look for one that has membership password protected capabilities. This will allow this type of system allows you for you to grant access to specific people usually on the back end of the website, so you can have specific settings for that and this really supports a membership model. This is why it's so important to look at all of the capabilities of the content management systems that you're considering before you actually commit to one, even if you're not wanting to set up a membership site. Now, if that's something that you think you might do in the future using a website that has the ability to maybe uh integrate another system that is good for password protected membership sites or already has that built into their system themselves, then you'll be really set when it's time to actually deploy that. Okay, my last but certainly not least question comes from Smurfy Smurfy asked, hey, I'm a blogger, is there any tool that I could use to increase my blogs number of views when people search for them in google. Great question. We get a lot of questions from, and in this question actually applies to all different types of businesses, but blogs that offer timely relevant content to their target audience will gain traction quickly. It's really important that you not only offer great content, but you also understand what is your specific audience looking for? You don't want to be everything to everyone, because then usually you're nothing to no one, you want to make sure that you're looking at your audience, what they really want or what you have expertise and really narrow in on that niche? Also, the words and phrases that they're typing in when they're looking for you uh and the content you have to offer? You want to consider those. Are you making sure that you're using those keywords throughout your content? Your content is sticking to those themes. So you want to use these words and the titles of your articles to potentially help drive traffic to your blog. So thank you again for joining us at grow with google today. See you all next time.