It’s also your best salesperson.  The first impression a lot – if not most - of your clients have with your company.  Website analytics are a way for you to hold your site accountable the way you would any other member of your sales team.

The beauty of the web as a marketing tool is that almost everything is trackable.  Measurable.  Countable.  You can use Google analytics, for free, or pay services such as Omniture or WebTrends.

Here are five easy ways to use those website analytics.

1.  To measure your clearly defined marketing goals.  Before you start building your site, you need to define what exactly you’re expecting it to do for you.  Make sure you identify clear and realistic brand and business goals so that you have numbers to optimize against after you go live.  These goals can be simple (overall visitors, time spent on a part of your site) or more complex (increase brand recognition, client education about a specific topic).  They are easily tied to behavioral actions on the website and can be measured as such.

2. To assess your search engine positioning.  This is the easy one and probably the most familiar use of analytics.  You can easily see the search terms for which visitors are finding your website.  If you dig a little deeper, you can follow which keywords lead to behavioral events like filling out your contact form or requesting an online demo of your product.  You can also see if certain phrases lead to people spending more or less time on your site (indicative of whether those terms relate directly to what you’re offering).

3.  To make your site more user-friendly and navigable. Looking how how your visitors find you is important, but you can also use analytics to find out what they do once they get there.  If they’re going straight to the FAQ, you know you need to step up your content to start answering questions right off the bat.  If they are going directly from your homepage to your products page but then are detouring through your blog, you might want to figure out why they aren’t getting to the shopping cart.

4.  To track bandwidth usage and bad links. Your analytics can help you find out what functions and pages on your site are bandwidth hogs and where visitors are encountering bad links so that you can make internal improvements.  Now that Google officially uses site performance as a ranking factor, making your site faster is more important than ever.  Bad links on your site are an instant “see ya later” to your visitors as they rarely click back to find what they were looking for, so use your analytics to get those fixed.

5.  To plan your marketing campaigns. If you knew that all of your potential customers are at their computers at 1:30 pm every Tuesday, you’d likely want to send them your eblast at that time, right?  Or if people from Buffalo, New York tend to buy 3 more widgets from your site than any other purchasers, you’d want to spend a little more on PPC campaigns targeted to that region.  Your website analytics can help you see where your visitors are from and when they’re online so that you can target your campaigns demographically, geographically and by time of day.

If you’re lost when you log in to Google analytics or don’t even know if you’ve got them set up on your site, give us a shout and we’ll get you up and running.  Decisions are best made based on actual data, and analytics are a free and easy way to make informed decisions about your website.

If I told you there was a free, easy way to get listed in Google above most of your competitors, right on the first page within a couple days . . . would you believe me?

(You’ve probably heard it all before from the 20-thousand SEO spam companies that fill your company’s contact form every day, right?)

This isn’t snake-oil or a magic wand. It’s not going to make you famous overnight. But if you do what I’m about to tell you, your business will often outrank even top-performing national companies when someone is searching for your keywords. In most cases, you’ll show up around the 4th spot on Google’s first page of search results. Most businesses would be willing to pay for that position!

I’m simply talking about claiming your business on Google maps, through the Google Local Business Center. You’d be surprised how easy it is and how many small businesses overlook this awesome tool.

For instance, you’ll see when I search for “elevator interiors” from downtown St. Petersburg (Google recognizes my geo-location and tailors my results based on where I’m located), I see the following results:

The top three results are long-standing websites that have worked hard honing their keywords to claim that spot; but look who’s number 4? One of my clients, who just launched his website last summer and who claimed his Google Local map listing just this past October. (Don’t get me wrong – we’re working toward those top spots, but SEO takes time. This is a quick solution.)

Add Your Listing

Your business might already be listed on Google maps; in that case, you only need to claim it and update any erroneous information. If not, it’s really easy to add it at the Local Business Center. You can add your address and phone number, talk a little bit about what you do or sell, your hours of operation, and even upload a logo and some photos.

After you’ve set it all up, you’ll have to verify that you actually own the business, either by accepting an automated phone call or receiving a snail-mail postcard. Both options offer a PIN that you’ll enter at the Local Business Center that tells Google you’re really there. It’s quick and painless, and if you’re able to answer the phone, takes all of five minutes.

Once you’re verified, you’ll start seeing your listing show up in both Google maps and web searches whenever Google thinks it’s appropriate.

Adding Reviews

If you really want to harness the power of social media, start telling your customers and clients to leave you reviews on your Google maps listing.

If you already have some testimonials from your customers, ask them if they could write them on your Google Maps listing. Send them a link to your listing to make it easier. If you don’t already have testimonials from your customers, start asking for them. Ask them to put them directly onto your Google Maps listing, then you can cut and paste them onto your own website or other publications if you wish.

It’s easier to copy them from your Google Maps listing than to copy them to your listing.

Google Maps listings with at least one review tend to rank higher than those without any reviews. And of course, the reviews that you get should also help to turn those visitors into customers.

Additional Resources

Get to it! Go claim your listing or add your business to Google maps now.

• Google Local Business Center
• Local Business Center Users’ Guide

“I own companynameindustry.com and industrycity.com – which one should I use for my website?”

“Can we point industrybuzzword.com to my website?  Will it help with Google?”

Five Things to Consider When Choosing A Domain

1. Keep it short.  People will tend to type a short URL directly into the address bar, but they’ll forget longer domains and end up Googling.  Do not use dashes.  Nine times out of ten, a potential visitor will forget the hyphens and end up visiting your competitor first (the guy who got the same domain without the hyphens).
2. The domain should be the name of your website, if possible.   The company Facebook uses . .  wait for it . . . Facebook.com.  So should you follow in their footsteps.
3. .com is always better than, well, anything else (for businesses).  People will not remember any other extension and will end up at your competitor (again, who got the domain you wanted) or will end up Googling your domain with your city or some other identifying specific.  .net, maybe.  But .info or .biz?  Forget about it.  (.org is reserved, though truly only through an honor system, for non-profit entities and the others you’re probably familiar with, .gov and .edu are, well, pretty self-explanatory I think.)
4. When you’re able, buy an old domain.  Older domains are considered of a higher quality – even if you just bought it.  The age of a domain is more important to Google then pretty much any other domain-related item (like keywords in the domain or length of registration – both factors, but not as important as age).
5. Consider domain/keyword match.  A domain match can be very powerful. If you have a domain name that matches your keyword, you’ve got a huge boost in search rankings. Search engines classify an exact match to a domain as a navigation query. For instance, if someone searches for “catering in Tampa Bay” and your domain is cateringtampabay.com, search engines may classify this query as a navigational one, thus showing you as an authoritative listing.
   • A domain match is also known to increase search and pay per click CTRs.
   • Keywords in a domain are also great for incoming links (anchor text) – since most people don’t use actual anchor text and link the URL directly, you domain can work as anchor text.
   • If an exactly matching domain is in a non-competitive market, sometimes the name is enough to rank on the first page, coupled with a few links and some content. If, on the other hand, you’re entering a crowded field, expect to invest much more time and money in content and links. An exact match won’t produce magic in competitive market place, but it increases your chance.
   • The domain match strategy doesn’t work well with new domains. Regardless of keyword proximity, Google doesn’t trust new domains, so to really make the domain match strategy work, you need to find an old domain name.

In general, domains should be easy to remember and have no dashes. They must be easy for someone to type into the address bar (dashes complicate things) and easy to cite on the blog or a page. It should also be easy to convert a domain name into a brand, so the shorter the name the better.

Again, older domains are still going to outweigh new domains with keywords. Age is everything.

Long tailed keywords are those phrases that are 3, 4 or 5 words long that are very, very specific.   They’re generally used by people late in the buying cycle who know exactly what they are looking for – and are going to buy  it when they find it.   Such highly specific searches are far more likely to convert to sales than general broad-term searches that are usually indicative of consumer research in the early stages of making a purchase decision.

Most websites are likely to receive most of their search engine visitors through a variety of low-volume search queries (long-tailed keyphrases) instead of a handful of major keywords.

Let’s look at an example using one of our clients, a caterer in north Tampa.  Now, conventional SEO optimization would call for writing the website and paying for keywords like ‘catering’ and ‘caterer’ – which might work but will mean they’ll be competing in a sea of other caterers in the Tampa Bay area.   Not only that, but they’ll face direct competition from national chains and really, any other caterer in the world that has optimized for that term.

But, more importantly, people searching for ‘caterers’ or ‘catering’ are generally starting to explore their options;  seeing what’s out there; starting to plan.  They are probably not to the point of thinking . . .

“I’m looking for an affordable local caterer to serve a seated dinner with cocktails at my company’s holiday party in Brandon, Florida in December.”

See where we’re going with this?

When someone is ready to book a caterer for their holiday party (or wedding, or other event), their search terms become much more specific.  This is where optimizing for keyword phrases that are specific to what you’re selling becomes vital — these are the keywords that you can start ranking for and generating traffic and sales right away.

Some ideas for our catering company might include:

• corporate caterers in Brandon
• wedding catering Tampa
• formal corporate catering Tampa
• fine event catering Brandon

There is far less competition for these phrases (easier to get high rankings) and people using these terms are far more likely to actually make a purchase should they find one that meets their needs.

How do you optimize for long tailed keywords?  Content!  (Did you think I’d say anything else?)  Google love content – pages and pages of content.  So, adding pages that are optimized for your long-tailed phrases makes sense.   These pages don’t need to be completely unique – they can be variations on your main content pages with different H1 tags, titles, meta descriptions, and the content altered to fit your specific long-tailed niche.

Instead of focusing on just two or three highly competitive broad keywords, target the dozens or even hundreds of easy-to-rank-for long tail keywords.

Focusing too much on the long tail keywords can result in dried up traffic though – so beware.  Your site needs balance between less targeted pages for the high number of ‘browsers’ who are just starting their search and then a larger number of pages optimized for your long tail keywords that bring in the buyers.

Consider this:  would you rather be ranked for your one general keyword that brings 100 visitors a day searching for your general industry, or rank for 100 different keyphrases, half of which bring you 1 buyer a day who was searching specifically for you?

So how do you find your long-tailed keywords and then start developing the content for them?  It all begins with research – and that’s where we can help.

Read more about long-tailed keywords:

• How to Find and Target Long-Tailed Keywords for More Search Engine Traffic (Dosh Dosh)
• Keyword Research in the Long, Invisible Tail (SEOmoz)