Tag Archives: keyword optimization
Running web analytics on your small business website is great, but let’s be honest – how many of us actually know what all those fancy numbers and graphs mean? If you’re running analytics simply for the sake of collecting data, what’s the point? Analytics are only useful if you take the data that’s generated and use it to create an action plan for your online marketing strategy. From traffic to conversions, here are four quick tips to help you make your analytics actionable.
1) Understand Your Entry Point
All of the popular analytic packages provide you with information on your top landing pages. If you haven’t taken the time to review this portion of your report, make time. Many small business owners assume that their homepage is the top performing landing page, but this is very rarely the case. If visitors are entering your page from the services section their experience will be slightly altered. If visitors are entering your Chatham-Kent website in an unexpected area, take some time to review that page. Does it contain enough information to convince people to stick around? Is your navigation clearly defined for easy surfing? Is your UVP (unique value proposition) clearly visible? Make sure your top landing pages contain all the right information to ensure a smooth experience for your potential customers.
2) Find Out Where Your Traffic’s Coming From
Make a habit of analyzing your traffic sources on a regular basis. Traffic will normally come from a handful of clearly defined sources: organic search traffic, paid ads, referral sites, and direct traffic. Traffic sources go hand-in-hand with keyword reports, so if you’re smart, you’ll review those stats at the same time. This information should help you discover:
- What your visitors’ expectations are: Traffic sources and keyword analysis should help you better understand what your customers are looking for when they find your site.
- What your visitors already know: A visitor that is searching for your company name or a specific product/service that you offer obviously knows more than a visitor who’s used a general search term to find your page. If you find that people are using specific keywords to find your site, chances are good these visitors are further along in the buying process. Are you providing them with a clear conversion path?
- If your visitors are finding what they want: How’s the bounce rate on your entry pages? Are visitors finding the right keywords on your entry pages? If visitors are finding your page with the right keywords, but quickly leave after just a few seconds of viewing, you’ve got some work to do.
3) What Happens Next?
The key to actionable analytics is being able to find patterns in your traffic. Once you find your entry pages, take a look at where you visitors navigate to next. What are the most popular pages on your website? Are these pages linked by prominent calls to action, are they listed in the navigation, or are they embedded in text? Why would a visitor navigate to that page next? What questions could possibly answered by surfing to these pages? Give it a little time and eventually you’ll start to discover patterns and persuasive pages will start to stand out. Are you making the most of your best performing pages?
4) Do Your Visitors Have An Exit Strategy
People are going to leave your site, the key is understanding where they leave and why. If your visitors are navigating away after completing a conversion, that’s great. That’s what’s called a planned conversion, and it’s music to a small business owner’s ears. Bounce rates, on the other hand, are the kiss of death. Bouncing is bad – it means that a visitor has rejected your website as a useful resource. If you have a high bounce rate on your homepage – eek! It’s time to make some major changes. An exit rate simply tells you how many people have exited your site from that page (visitors have likely navigated there from elsewhere on your site). If you find pages on your site that have a high exit rate, try and sniff out why. Look at the most popular entry paths to that page. What were visitors hoping to find by navigating to that page? What did they find instead? Was the link that lead to that page misleading or is your content too confusing? A few simply changes could change an exit page into a valuable stop on the way to a successful conversion.
Are you having trouble understanding your web analytics? Then give us a call – we can help you make sense of even the most complex data.
So, you want to rank on the first page of Google for a handful of targeted keyword terms. That’s great – so do about 13 gazillion other small businesses in the world. Not to worry, you say, you have a plan… a wonderfully terrible plan that includes a wide selection of black hat optimization techniques. News Flash friends – attempting to cheat at search engine optimization will get you no where. In fact, it’s the fastest way to get your website blacklisted from search engines everywhere. If you’re ready to start building optimization ideas into your small business website, here are five techniques you should definitely avoid.
Five Extremely Bad Search Engine Optimization Ideas
1) Stuffing Keywords into Invisible Text
Yes, people still do this. This includes text written in the same colour as the background, or text that is hidden behind the main area of a website via creative CSS designs. Search engines will find this and tag you as a spammer.
2) Purchasing Follow Links
Link building is, by far, my least favourite part of search engine optimization. Of course, it’s also one of the most important. So when you’re presented with the opportunity to cut corners and purchase follow links from another website, resist! Companies that sell banner ads or text links on a website must tag these links as no-follow in order to abide by search engine best practices.
3) Participating in Reciprocal Link Exchanges
In a perfect world, hyperlinks back to your company website should act as an endorsement for your site. These endorsements should be 100% natural and completely without benefit for the website that has created the link. When you link to a company in exchange for a link back to your homepage (commonly referred to as reciprocal linking) you’re breaking the law of unbiased linking. With that being said, not all reciprocal links are the kiss of death. Swapping links with a site that is highly relevant to your business can be a good thing as it helps build relevance with your online visitors. Of course, having a highly relevant site link to you without a reciprocal link agreement is always more beneficial.
4) Keep the Cloak Off
This is the practice of showing one version of content to a search engine spider, and a completely different version to your human visitors. Lying to a search engine is like lying to your mother – a sin punishable by drastic measures. When a search engine suspects a site of cloaking, there’s an excellent chance that the site will be banned for an extended period of time.
5) Doorway Pages
If you’re presented with a doorway page, always, always walk the other way. Doorway pages are simple HTML pages that are created with the sole purpose of ranking for a specific search term in a specific search engine. The doorway page is normally designed with a quick redirect or refresh that presents the human viewer with a completely different page of content. The purpose of a doorway page is to trick the search engine into giving higher rankings to a spam-filled page. Doorway pages just create useless clutter in search engine results, so save us all the hassle and stick to ethical optimizing.
My point: Don’t waste your time trying to figure out how to trick the search engines. Even if you do succeed and make your way to the front page of Google, it’s only a matter of time before the search engine police track you down and send your site into exile. It just makes sense to take that same energy and invest it into great content development and ethical online marketing practices.
What black hat seo techniques bother you the most? Leave a comment and let us know.
