Five Things I learnt from my Google Workshop

I recently ran a campaign with Google, it was super cool and an amazing brand to work with. We were invited to a workshop at their offices on Monday, as a way to say thank you for taking part in the campaign.

Apart from them having the most incredible offices (that can accommodate both dogs and children and have food everywhere), the workshop was really informative and helped me to connect a lot of things and understand how SEO works a bit more as well as adwords.

There was a lot of information, so I am just going to share five of the things that stood out to me.

1. SEO is not as complicated as I thought it was. Obviously we didn’t really go into it very deeply but I am not sure, as bloggers we need to be super focused on it to be honest. One thing that was mentioned and I saw it mentioned somewhere else as well was page speed. Apparently google favours sites that load quicker, so perhaps that is something to look at if your posts are image heavy, try reduce the size of the images AND also check the mobile responsiveness.
2. We had a very heated discussion in one of our groups about duplicate content recently and so I asked about this. Basically if you copy and paste a post and share it somewhere else and that site is reputable and credits you saying “Laura wrote this, with a link back to your site”, google doesn’t penalise you. So it could be a nice way to repurpose old content BUT you need to make sure the site you are sharing it on is reputable and has a good ranking.
3. The more specific your keywords are the more likely you are to appear closer to the top of the page. So instead of trying to make “children’s parties” your keyword try make it something more specific like “how to plan a rainbow birthday party”. Yoast was mentioned, so if you are a WordPress blogger and don’t have it already I highly recommend you add the plugin. Also you don’t need to load your page with your keywords, space them out and focus on the content being high quality rather than repeating the words over and over.
4. Google AdWords, in my opinion, are not ideal for bloggers who do not have a product they are selling in conjunction with their blog but if you have a business then I can really see the value in it, if you run your campaigns cleverly and focus them well. 
5. Google SA have amazing offices and they really do seem to be very focused on employee wellness and look after their staff really well.

There was so much more that I learnt but I don’t just want to randomly share it without thinking it through first.

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