Posts Tagged ‘Google’
Measure it! Five ways to use your website analytics
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010
Let’s face it. A well designed, thoughtful website isn’t cheap. It’s an investment in your brand, your business and your self. It’s a leap of faith.
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.
Tags: analytics, goal-oriented design, Google
Posted in SEO, Web Design | No Comments »
Instant SEO: Using Google Local Business Center
Sunday, February 28th, 2010
This article was originally published in Creative Loafing’s Daily Loaf on February 26, 2009.
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.
Tags: Google, local businesses, search engines, search marketing, SEO, small business
Posted in SEO | No Comments »