Google Black Publishers Summit

As a content creator and blogger, I attended the Black Publishers Summit offered by Google. Below are the notes that I took from the sessions that I attended.

Opening session

• discussed trends about how a number of people are using their mobile devices to access content
• g.co/marketingkit-blackowned

Set Your Site Up for Success

• average person checks phone 74 times per day; millenials are around 300 times per day
• 50 ms to form first impression; most users consider page speed to be important
• expected to have website load in less than 2 seconds
• AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a way to improve page speed
• page speed can include CTR and ad revenue
• improve images to use webp format; use jpg2000 format; remove unnecessary images and replace them with text or CSS; compress and resize images; remove image meta data
• remove unused CSS; defer loading CSS that is not used above the fold
• non critical CSS and JS files should defer their loading; minify files to remove whitespace and non critical parts of a file
• visit web.dev website
• Lighthouse bit.ly/get-lighthouse

Keep Users Coming Back

• users want to be engaged and delighted
• create a Moments Map; different touch points or experiences that users would have on your website; like purchasing a product, accessing specific content
• use a responsive layout; resizes based upon the device layout
• do calls to action (CTA); what do you want to get the audience to do? (e.g. sign up for mailing list)
• make it easier for users to find content
• menus short and sweet; make it easy to get to the homepage; mobile users can be impatient; hamburger menus are easily identifiable;
• improve quality per session; content shouldn't jump as the page loads; be mindful of how users of touch screen devices may accidently click a link
• use auto-suggest; autocomplete attribute; use fast checkout solutions; reduce time to complete these tasks; bit.ly/simple-checkout
• consider using web notifications; dont ask for permissions when user first visits website

• CRO course - winonmobile.withgoogle.com

• how to AMP pages - ampproject.org

• web vitals - what should be done for all websites in effort to improve user experiences; more info on web.dev

• find plugin for image optimization for content

Understand Your Audience

• use Google Analytics homepage metrics to determine when to post content, such as time of day; look at trends for other regions depending on where your content originates from
• highlight content through the main landing pages on your website
• source: determine the source of the content of your website; based on that, target them accordingly
• exit pages: use this to know what pages should not be targeted as it is the last point that people visit before leaving your website
• Geo: learn more about the international audience
• Affinity Categories: takes details of a users interests to better identify what your audience is interested in; use this to consider to expand content categories; in particular when topics can cross reference
• startup.google.com/tools-get-insights-analytics

Reach your audience

• organic search =/= google ads
• prioritize what pages should be crawled on your website using robots.txt file
• make sure that your pages add value to the user; do not publish existing or duplicate content

1) focus on users

• PageSpeed Insights
• Lighthouse

2) let's communicate more

• search console
• use the trainings and Search Console videos

3) get your website searchable

• search for your domain only; if you have content appearing, then it is good and you have a ranking problem
• one way to stand out, structure your webpage data and include images if they apply
• for those that apply videos on website, there are structured that can be included. This allows to allow for parts of the video to be skipped to; this is done automatically on YouTube
• developers.google.com/search
• use cross promotions; promoting the content of others that are in similar industries

Engage Your audience

• be strategic about posting with a content calendar
• start from the date you want the content to appear; then prepare
• repackage existing content to create new content; do posts each week and then a summary at the end of the month
• create evergreen content (content that is always relevant to your visitors)
• Google Analytics can be used to determine when the content should be posted
• NCI (news consumer insights); it will provide actionable recommendations
• RES (reader engagement score) - used from the also 30 days; the score is dynamic; used to show you the most valuable traffic sources

• goo.gle/datatools

• try to increase content organically; do things like improve the user experience, work with other creators to cross promote; more users you have, the easier it is to improve traffic to website

• Analytics can used to identified sources of traffic; from there, the earnings can be connected
• difference between GA and NCI - GA provides info regarding the site, older tool; need to have GA in order to use NCI, NCI takes data from GA to provide a different set of insights
• most dont use Analytics 360