Excel_Questions

Loads great for me. The whole site rendered within a second. Looks great too!

57 minutes ago, monocle.jasmin said:

I think your messaging needs some work--It seems very wordy and not on par with the vibe of a website meant to offer resources for help, but rather more of a lecture.

I suggest reading up on messaging and establishing a tone that goes along with what I think you're trying to achieve as a simple-easy-to-use resource. 

 

Ex: instead of having a video that says "play me for an introduction to excel questions" just say "Excel Q's 101" or "FAQ" or "Intro to Excel" or something of that sort.

I also felt bombarded by two giant black intruding cookie boxes. Hurts user experience.

Thanks, thanks and thanks some more!!!! That's the kind of feedback I was after 😃. Thinking about it, you are right on the tone. Its something I didn't attribute a strategy to and might well be the element I'm really making a mess of currently. It has got to be less assertive and more " here is a helping hand". I know my demographic and thinking about what they would be feeling and requiring from my site, I've got it all wrong! 

I will work on this with absolute priority. 

Unfortunately, I can't do anything about the cookie boxes, I have to cover GDPR here in the UK and Squarespace isn't offering control on third party cookies 😞. I understand your feedback on this and if I can find a better solution in time, Ill apply it as soon as I can.   

A few weeks down the line and I'm starting to get a lot more impressions. I can attribute them to a hefty blog post that I laced with keywords, as soon as google indexed that page, I started hitting search engines a lot more. I posted a second keyword rich blog post a couple of days ago and submitted via google URL checker yesterday along with updates to all my pages for keyword optimisation. It will be interesting to see which brings more traffic, the large keyword laced text or the keyword optimised content on the question pages. 

Ill also update meta probably next week and see what effect that has.

Funnily enough, my home page is not the highest ranking page. Maybe this is because of the nature of my site? the value in my site and where most of the keywords lie is within the content pages and not within the home page which is more of an overview. @Spark_plugin I wonder if your statement on ranking homepages comes from the fact that your sites just have more relevant keywords on the homepages anyway or whether there is a genuine bias in the search algorithm towards home pages? 

I love nut butter and I quite want to sample your products! Also, your site is clean and looks good. The only thing that bugs me slightly is your header colour which matches your body colour and looks pretty strange when it pops back up when scrolling up a page. 

Your shop page is actually really clear and nicely laid out, however, my opinion is the layout of your home page is a little disconnected. I don't really get  what you are about when I'm scrolling down the steps. I see buzz words like sustainable and organic but there is no journey and no demonstration of the value you are going to add to my life by buying your products. 

I'd personally start by rearranging to have the steps first, id add images and show the visitors what you will do for them through your steps. How you will make their skin glow, how you will make them feel better about themselves and a small amount of narrative to enhance their perception. 

Id then add the sections about sustainability and organic below that so when they've taken in your vision, they can be assured by your natural and sustainable credentials. 

 I'm in the same boat. Working to improve a home page to highlight the value of my site to my visitors. It's all a massive learning curve but I hope this assessment helps. 

1 hour ago, ednaw said:

Since I worked for a tech company, the main way of building an email list for us was mainly numerical. I won't get into the nerdy details, but we basically had a numerical criteria before we even considered someone / a business a potential partner or lead.

But the process is basically checking if they met our criteria (through ahrefs and other tools) and then looking up if the business had a page in Linkedin with employees, and sourcing their emails through anymailfinder~

So you'd vet them for domain trust, keywords, traffic etc? To ensure they were a worthwhile size and relevance to the company? 

1 minute ago, RasmusM said:

I like the idea😊

I also think you can do much more with what you show on the first page. Instead of explaining what Excel questions is, why not just show them? What I would do is to remove most of the text on the homepage and replace it with some examples and questions. Then the visitors can jump right in to the action!

Thanks Rasmus. Yes, I think you're right. I know I need to really sell the idea to the user as its something different and maybe showing rather than explaining is a better way to do it. Tonight's project!

Well I went for it anyway Matt and I far prefer the header now so thanks for that!

3 minutes ago, mattzarchy said:

I've done a quick overview of your site. It's a great layout, but  I would suggest changing the header fonts to a more readable font like Montserrat. Also, instead of having "excel questions", I would rather turn it into a header and add "starter, beginner, mid, and advanced levels" under one tab. Also, for better UX, I would 'simplify' the footer a bit more. 

Cheers for the feedback. Ill 100% look at the fonts. With the starter,beginner,intermediate etc, do you mean converting them into a subheading on the Header under a Questions tab?

Site URL: https://www.excelquestions.com

My site is three weeks old today and I'd really appreciate some feedback. I have never built a site before and built this after starting out on socials. 

My content is a library of Microsoft Excel questions. As an advanced Excel user, I realised there were thousands of resources out there that taught people Excel but no where that users could practice what they were learning. I and almost everyone else who is proficient in using Excel got good at it by solving problems and that is the premise behind my site. As I am doing something new, its absolutely vital that the idea behind my site is communicated well and thus my main question is, does the site convey this purpose clearly? 

I've tried to express interactivity and fun through the banner images to differentiate my site from the thousands of straight corporate sites that teach Excel out there but as the site has to handle lots of Excel screenshots, I've kept the colour scheme able to compliment those. Does this work or do I need to rethink?

Also, my main keywords will be scattered throughout the category pages and thus its highly unlikely any search users will follow through my site in a linear fashion. They are going to be landing all over my site. I've tried to keep my pages as stand alone sites in their own right for that reason so that users are not left clueless if they don't end up on my home page. Does this bulk out the pages too much and if so, is there a better way of doing this?

Finally, is everything coherent? I find working projects in my job, that when you are totally engrossed in something from inception, you can overlook coherency as you have a defined image of the design from inception. Whereas if you come into a project, you see it for what it is at a snapshot in time and can point out incoherent ideas or experiences.

Thank you very much for reading,

Tom

I think your site is great. The colour scheme works well, the logo works and the copy is engaging.

The only thing that "annoyed" me was the instant pop-up to go to the shop before id seen the site. As a visitor, id be turned off with an instant pop-up, to me its a little desperate. But, if I had a little time to engage with  the site first, I'd be happy to be invited to the shop afterwards.

You can change this to be on a timer or pop up when a user has scrolled over a certain percentage of the page. 

Really looking forward to reading the replies to this. I started my site three weeks ago and my socials two months ago. I feel totally lost like a tiny boat in an ocean of liners and cargo ships!  I know my site content lends well to networking as it synergises with a lot of businesses in the same niche however, I just don't know where or how to start.

9 minutes ago, GlynMusica said:

Congrats.

I would not wait for organic results, better instead to go and tell people with relevant websites  - education institutions come to mind - about your great resource.

Consider now that in many verticals a first place organic result is going to bring you very little in terms of traffic due to the fact that paid search results are pushing all the free traffic off the page. That doesn't mean there are not opportunities, and it might be that in your own area of the keyword web - I've not checked - you still have the opportunity to get free traffic. I'm not saying you won't get free traffic, typically we see as much as 50% of all traffic as being organic, it's just trying to isolate those results, that are now heavily personalized by users (yes you can remove this when doing search analysis) so make it very difficult to actually see growth and measure against specific keywords.

I'd say almost you should ignore Google as you have a resource that lends itself very favorably to off-search types of promotion.

In answer to your specific question, if the website is brand new then you can expect to see a stabilizing of your pages in 1-2 months, if you are re-optimising existing pages then you might have to wait up to 6 for them to properly stabilize.

Games work well on Social Media, I'd be looking at Facebook or perhaps LinkedIn if you can afford it.

Good luck.

G.

 

Thank you very much! 

Your response covers everything I needed and more.

Emailing out sounds like a great idea. I know my ideal traffic and will target sites that they will be interacting with. Might get a backlink or two too! I get all of my traffic from socials at the moment but that has drawbacks due to the nature of my site. 

As for organic, I have mindfully written keywords into my text and due to my angle on the niche I can target keywords that others can't. 1-2 months sounds a fair amount of time to wait. Ill keep my eye on the search console. 

Site URL: https://www.excelquestions.com

Hi all, 

So, i've built a site. Set up all the analytics and spent loads of time on google URL checker to get my site indexed and all the errors cleared up. I have SEO software. I have weaved some long tail keywords into my site and my SEO audit is saying my site is of good quality (not excellent but give it time!)

I started on Thursday the 1st. My site is crawled and everything I want to be indexed is indexed. Next thing I want is my keywords in the top 100. I have none yet and I want to know my starting point. I know the battle to the top 10 will be tough but I would imagine ill get some in the top 100 by fluke and some of the SEO ive done already? 

So my question is, how long on average does it take to start seeing your top 100 ranked keywords in the URL checker? 

Cheers,

Tom

On 4/10/2021 at 12:32 PM, bangank36 said:

You can track custom event using Google analytics, consider to hire a dev to do this if you are not familiar with javascript

Thanks, ive actually cracked this myself using tag manager 😃. Being file downloads I could just track the file name and it works a charm!

Tom

Site URL: https://www.excelquestions.com

Hi all,

I’m having a little difficulty with getting analytics on image block clicks. I run a site which provides Excel Questions for people to answer. I have downloadable workbooks on each category page of my site, these files are attached to images and I don't really want to use the standard black buttons. I previously used external links to Drop Box via tinyurl to track downloads but for SEO and making things cheaper, I moved it all into Squarespace. However, Squarespace doesn't provide analytics for image block clicks and I really need this data to monitor performance. Has anyone got third party suggestions to allow me to track the clicks on my content?

Thanks,

Tom