Tag Archives: conversion

Advanced SEO Requires Good Analytics Information

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Good quality analytics (such as Google Analytics or another paid analytics software packages) provides good and very useful information. If you pay attention to it you could very quickly increase the overall efficiency of your website. You just have to look at the numbers and list to what they tell you. The proof is in the pudding as they say and if you ignore your analytics information you could be missing out on a great deal of potential business and traffic. Here are some basic areas for you to review in order to find any holes in your website and to help you decipher data that you learn from your analytics: Conversions: In case you don’t know, a conversion is a completed action on your website, such as lead, sign up, sale, etc.  The most important factor (I think) to learn from your analytics software is the conversion data.  Understanding and learning about how and where you conversions come from can help you make much more educated and better SEO, PPC and Social Media marketing decisions.  I can’t tell you how many people I still speak to think that the best goal for an SEO campaign is rankings or positioning.  Sorry to break it to you, but it is not.  Increasing conversions (and visitor growth) should be the starting goal(s) of your SEO and search marketing efforts.  I won’t get too deep into that as that is not the main point of this post J Bounce Rate: Whether you are looking at this overall or down to a single page if your bounce rate is really high try to figure out what is turning people off from that web page. It could be a variety of things depending on your business so take a deep look at your page. Is it too much info? Or a lack of info? Do you have too many ads on that specific page? It could also be a combination of all these items. It might just be that your page needs to have a serious over haul.  Bounce rates vary for each client and industry but understanding what yours is and try to improve your bounce rate is very important. Visitors: When you start to really get into advanced SEO techniques you will need to understand even more so where all of your visitors are coming from. Visitor quality is just as important as visitor growth. You never want to rely on just one stream of traffic because if that stream dries up so does your business. You have to understand where your traffic is coming from because often times it might be from an area that you least expected it to come from. Analytics information allows you to find new locations along with locations of where you might be able to place yourself to find new traffic. Keywords: Analytics information will tell you what keywords your website traffic is using to find your website. This is a potential to really open things up for you as you grow your business online. As new keywords develop you can capitalize by finding new variations on those specific keywords and using them throughout your website. You have to look at your analytics information very closely otherwise you won’t find those windows of opportunity to help improve your SEO and overall search marketing efforts. Analytics keeps your approach to marketing your website efficient and smooth. It is all about finding opportunities that could already exist right in front of you. Data and information that you can get from your analytics allows you to find those areas where you can really maximize your efforts in the online world. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Advanced SEO Requires Good Analytics

6 Ways to Optimize Your Site for the iPad

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The iPad is no Apple Newton. It truly is a revolutionary device. The whimsical blog of “Fake Steve Jobs” calls the iPad a “ life-changing, mind-altering product”. Although that may be an overstatement, the iPad is certainly important — to the computing industry, to computer users, and to online marketers. The launch of the iPad marks a significant step forward for mobile computing, and for computing in general: one’s productivity can finally be as high as when they are in front of their laptop or desktop computer. The iPad user can efficiently and effectively do their shopping, banking, email, YouTube video watching, and general web surfing. It is also surprisingly easy to use the iPad for more complex, input-intensive tasks, like writing term papers, building slide decks, and manipulating spreadsheets — particularly when also equipped with a Bluetooth keyboard. In fact, the iPad just may be versatile and powerful enough for the road warrior to travel with sans laptop. Conversely, smart phones and other handheld mobile devices, really only serve as a complement — rather than a practical replacement — for the user’s laptop or desktop machine. Technically speaking, the iPad’s operating system is the iPhoneOS, but practically the OS is the Internet. Just upload your documents into “the cloud” (e.g. MobileMe, Dropbox, Xythos) and you are off and running. For the multitude of Google Docs users this is an unnecessary step, as the documents already live in the Cloud, not on any local hard drive. The iPad will undoubtedly speed adoption of this trend towards Internet-based file storage. Overall, it looks like this launch is going to be a success and the iPad, like the iPod, iPhone, and the iMac before it, will gain significant distribution among consumers globally.  And, since it includes a browser with a different set of specifications from either the standard mobile devices, the question for advertisers becomes a practical one – “will my web pages come up on this browser?” With the iPad’s Safari browser, the Web generally looks and works like one would expect on any traditional laptop or desktop computer.  However, there are important differences in the browsing experience and these differences could thwart your web visitors, stopping them in their tracks. As a site owner, you must compensate for these differences, or risk losing the conversion, and more importantly, the customer. “Mobile-Friendly” Does Not Equal

5 Handy SEO Hacks for Google Analytics

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It’s fair to say that most of us are running Google Analytics on at least a few of the sites we deal with. Market share for Google’s traffic tracking platform was estimated last year around 75-80% in a few separate studies – here’s one from Ghostery . Let’s not get into the whole “Google knows too much” thing. The truth is, the platform is a pretty solid and user-friendly. (Even if it is the lure of an evil empire.) But from an SEO standpoint Google ANalytics definitely leaves some things to be desired. Luckily there are plenty of clever SEOs out there who take on complicated and difficult projects that make our lives easier. Here are five such supergeek gifts that hack Google Analytics into a killer SEO tool: 1. Ranking Tracking with Google

3 Best Practices of Conversion Rate Optimization

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Conversion rate optimization is “everywhere” these days, from Twitter, to publications, to conferences and beyond.  But while it’s gaining steam in the industry, it’s still a relatively new initiative for many marketers. So what exactly IS conversion rate optimization, you ask? Conversion optimization, often referred to as landing page optimization, is best defined as the on-going process of refininig and testing the post-click experience to optimize for conversion goals. It can be anything from testing a microsite against a landing page, to testing hero shots within an experience, to optimizing shopping cart forms. Conversion goals include a lead, purchase, download, social interaction and more. And as obvious as it my seem, conversion rate optimization is the most efficient way to generate more revenue & improve return on online advertising spend. So whether you are new to conversion rate optimization or already have live experiments up and running, here are 3 key best practices of conversion optimization to ramp up your online marketing performance : 1. Inject speed into your marketing culture The faster online marketing gets — from PPC, to banner, to social — the faster your conversion rate optimization programs need to be. So when you optimize your ads, you must optimize your post-click experiences with the same velocity. Whether that’s testing an image, changing a headline, or creating a completely new experience, speed doesn’t stop after the click. It must continue from the click all the way to the conversion. 2. Take a holistic approach to pre-click and post-click The disciplines of PPC, banner, and social media, should work in tandem with your conversion rate optimization initiatives — not in a vacuum. Whether you manage your PPC in-house or outsource to an agency, the driving strategy of your PPC marketing should be completely in sync with your conversion optimization strategy. Your keywords determine your ads, your ads determine your landing pages, and the learnings that you gain from optimizing each should be applied to your overall strategy. 3. Start with A/B testing, then refine with multivariate testing A/B testing is the best way to find page champions. MVT is the best way to refine those champions. A/B testing is a methodology that tests completely different experiences against each other to find champions — think apples to oranges. Multivariate testing optimizes one experience to find a winner — think Honeycrisp to Macintosh. Once you find a winner with A/B testing, you can further optimize it with multivariate testing. But don’t start a multivariate test until you’ve determined whether an apple converts better than an orange. Now, I’m just tipping the iceberg here with these 3 essentials of effective conversion rate optimization. Stay tuned for more posts where I will dig into more actionable how-to’s and tactics to apply to your online campaigns. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . 3 Best Practices of Conversion Rate