I was on vacation a lot in July, so this one will be relatively brief.
The Site
Page views have remained steady at just under 200 per 4-week period.
More importantly, indexed pages have remained steady for almost two full months now. I haven’t had to fight a constant battle to keep pages up on the search engines which has been nice.
The other benefit of steady indexing has been impressions. Our posts are showing up in search results more and more frequently.
Granted, we weren’t showing up for much of anything previously, but we’re getting 40 to 90 impressions each day compared to 5 to 10 per day in previous months.
And the numbers are trending up which has been my primary focus since January.
This is still a very low volume of traffic, but it’s finally moving in the right direction. Even though I didn’t expect it to take this long for the search engines to warm up to the site I knew this would require patience.
Let’s hope the trend continues.
I don’t have a concrete explanation for why things started trending up in July. I do have a few guesses.
Most likely, the focused topic writing on Roth IRAs has started to set us apart in the algorithm as a Roth-focused site.
The reports I get from Google show that about half of our posts that rank best in search results are related to Roth IRAs and 401(k)s.
The momentum from those posts is beginning to pull other posts up in search results.
Another possibility is my completion of the Series 65 exam. I’ve listed that on my bio page in an effort to improve our site’s trustworthiness and authoritativeness.
These are both factors in the algorithm and, therefore, the search results people see.
I don’t think this was a major factor though because I only added that piece of information on July 7th. It would be unusually fast for the algorithm to grab that tidbit so quickly.
Finally, maybe we’ve been posting long enough now that the algorithm has decided we’re legit enough to begin recognizing our existence.
We never really get any feedback about what is or isn’t working so I’ll just have to guess for now, but I’m very happy to see progress since I began working on the site exactly one year ago.
YouTube
Okay, time for a confession.
I did very little (like almost nothing) for YouTube in July.
To begin with, I was studying for the Series 65. That’s all I did for the last week of June and the first week of July.
Once that test was over, I spent the next week updating the site and lining up posts for the rest of the month because we were about to leave for vacation.
And I wasn’t going to be working on the website on vacation.
Then we went to Colorado for a few days for a school project my son had been working on before returning to Alabama for 48 hours and going right back out the door to Alaska for 13 days.
It was awesome. Here’s a picture of me with a grizzly bear to prove it.
But, now that we’re back I have thrown myself into furiously editing video.
My goal is to begin loading videos by the beginning of September, but we’ll see. I have 10 videos shot and 8 ready to go.
I want to have 30 in the queue which means I need to do 20 more in four weeks to be ready.
That does not seem likely, to be honest, but never say never, right?
I’ll be posting a lot of videos about Roth-type accounts and financial independence in general because 1) I’m using the same focused topic strategy I’ve been using on the site, and 2) those two topics are searched often.
Odds are no one will binge-watch all the videos since they’re so closely related from a topical standpoint, but the goal is to get search traffic to build the channel.
Eventually, I’ll only make videos I want, but for now, I will continue to try and please the almighty algorithm.
Series 65
Now that I’ve passed the Series 65, I can submit paperwork to the state SEC to establish my own Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) firm.
But I’m going to wait a bit and focus on the YouTube stuff for now.
I’m not actually planning on advising individual clients. I’m only planning on setting up the RIA because 1) if I don’t do that my test result will expire in two years, and 2) I want to write about setting up an RIA myself.
The RIA stuff will appear on a separate page within the website but will be on a different YouTube channel in an effort to avoid confusing the algorithm.
Honestly, this component is like a choose-your-own-adventure story at this point. I have no idea where it will go from here. I just know I felt led to do it.
Conclusion
Thanks again for all your support and interest. I can’t tell you how much it is appreciated.
I’m still enjoying the journey, but this last month there just wasn’t much measurable progress.
I fully expect August to be much more manageable as we settle into a more stable pattern this Fall and I’m not spending copious hours studying for FINRA tests.
Reach out through our social channels and let us know your thoughts. We love getting constructive feedback.
Here’s me with another bear. Managed to get a lot closer to this one.
