Understanding Analytics

In our last segment: About Search Engine Optimization III, we left off with a discussion about analytics and promised to help you understand what you can do with all this SEO information.

Traffic is what we are looking for when we talk about search engine optimization. But it’s more than just traffic to your website that we need to concern ourselves with; we want our internet marketing campaign to drive QUALIFIED traffic.

Bounces

If you activated Google analytics, you will see a nifty little statistic called “bounce rate.” Basically, a bounce occurs when a visitor to your website lands on a page and then immediately leaves, without viewing anymore content on your site. Obviously, the lower this number is, the better. If 80% of visitors are leaving your site immediately then that means only 20% are sticking around to read/view what you have to offer.

If we are going to be doing all of this tedious, search engine optimization stuff, then we want our visitors to stick around for a bit. If our bounces are high (over 50%), then we need to take a look at a few things:

• What traffic is bouncing the most, what source?
• Which pages have the highest bounce rate?
• What keywords are visitors who bounce using the most?

There are probably other things we can look at as well, but this should give us a pretty good idea where to start.

Traffic Source

In Google analytics, the first page you see is usually an overview of your website traffic. The default time period is for one month, i.e.: number of visitors, etc. for the most current 30 days. In the middle of the page you will see: Visits, Unique Visitors, Pageviews, Pages/Visit, Avg. Time on Site, Bounce Rate, and % New Visits.

These stats are a high level view of how the site is performing. For our purposes, we want to drill down a little deeper.

Click on Demographics and then on location (top left sidebar).

When you scroll down the page, you can see the country/territory that people are visiting from. Google also gives us number of visits etc., at this level. Don’t concern yourself too much with the foreign bounces, unless you are selling a product or service internationally.

Take a look at the summary bounces for the country in which your site is located. If the bounce rate is less than 40%, you might want to pat yourself on the back and resume the series with our next article: About Search Engine Optimization V.

Ok, so I guess your site is kinda bouncy and you want some answers.

Click on the Country that your site resides in.

Now you see the states, or regions and their specific traffic information. Pay attention here; if your site is optimized for local search, i.e.: ‘Orlando Internet Marketing,’ it might have higher bounce rates in states that aren’t local to that area.

Example:

Connecticut, New York, and California will likely have a much higher incidence of bouncing than Florida, if the site keywords and related internet marketing are optimized as above for ‘Orlando Internet Marketing.’

If we use the example above and we have a lot of bounces in Florida, then we have some work to do, since that is obviously the market that we are targeting, and somehow visitors aren’t finding what they are looking for.

We got more clicking to do:

Click on the state or region.
Now let’s take a look at a ‘Secondary Dimension,’ sounds scary right?
It’s not so bad,
Click on the secondary dimension button just above City.
Click Traffic Sources.
Click Source.

We’ve drilled down even deeper and now we can see bounce statistics, etc. for each source:

• Direct – visitor came to your site via bookmark or typing in your URL in a browser window.
• Google or Google.com – Visitor is either from a search result or paid advertisement with Adwords.
• Website name – This is a direct referral from another website. Note: if you have a high bounce rate for a particular source like this, it might be that the referring site isn’t using good anchor text on the link.

Again, we need to take a look at the bounce rates. Looking at the sources we might begin to see a pattern. If we are getting high bounces on any source other than ‘Direct visitors’ (People who have visited the site before), then we need to find out what they were looking for and why they didn’t find it.

Since we are already here, go back to the secondary dimension button, this time Click ‘Keyword’ under ‘Traffic Sources.’

Amazing isn’t it? We can see exactly how people found us. If the keyword indicated is “(not set),” this just means that it was from either a direct visit or a referral from another website with no keyword used.
So, now what? Well, if you see keywords that don’t make sense for your website, it is likely the cause of bounces.
For example:
Waterfordmedia.com does a lot of search engine optimization for the terms ‘Orlando Internet Marketing’ and ‘Florida SEO Service’; as a result we also rank for other terms like ‘SEO service’. And we will get visitors that bounce using search terms like:
‘SEO Services Portland Oregon’.

Obviously, some of this can’t be helped, and we will just have to live with the bounce, but someone searching for SEO services in a different state probably wants someone local to do their SEO.

There’s more to cover on this topic, but it will need to wait for the next article:

About Search Engine Optimization V – Optimizing Pages and Working with Keywords

Thanks for reading

Orlando Internet Marketing

SEO – What to do First

In our last segment, we ended with a discouraging point. Keywords are vital, but they are not an end-all to good search engine optimization. Without good SEO, a website is banished to the far reaches of the internet where sane men seldom travel. In this segment we will discuss some of the quick actions that you can perform to start getting your website visibility.

Submit your website to Search Engines

You may have already done this; if you haven’t, it’s possible that the omnipresent ‘Googlebot’ and other spiders have found your website anyway. Don’t rely on chance where search engine submission is concerned. You can do all the right things with your website, but if the search engines aren’t indexing it, then the site will remain undiscovered.
Submitting your website to search engines doesn’t have to be hard. First, do a web search for “free search engine submission.” At the time of this writing there were approximately 18,700,000 results in Google. You can wade through the 18 million results and pick one you like; or click on one of the links below to use one of our picks:
http://www.submitexpress.com/free-submission.html
http://freewebsubmission.com/
http://www.1-hit.com/free-search-engine-submit.php

Don’t be surprised if any or all of these sites try to sell you professional SEO services; they need to make money too.
Follow the onscreen instructions to submit your site. Some submissions will require that you verify via email. Make sure you give them a valid email and check it and follow the link to validate your website submission.
That’s it, you have submitted your website, but don’t expect your site to show up immediately. The submission process can take up to weeks before the spiders come crawling.

Set up analytics

Analytics is one of the most important first steps that you can take in your SEO campaign. How will you know how your website is doing without at least checking periodically to see how many people are visiting your website? Analytics tools give you this information and a lot more.
Google analytics is perhaps the quickest way to start tracking and understanding what’s happening on your website. Go here to signup:

http://www.google.com/analytics/

It’s pretty easy to setup your account; the hardest part is putting the tracking code on your website. The tracking code is used to keep track of what pages are visited, how long visits last, where people are coming from, and a whole lot of other stuff too!
Google analytics is not the only tool that you should use to track your SEO campaigns. Nearly all website hosting accounts have some kind of statistics program included. Sometimes you don’t even need to turn them on; they just start gathering information as soon as your website is setup. I can’t tell you exactly where this is located on all hosting companies, but many use a tool called Cpanel.
In Cpanel you can find statistics about a third of the way down the page, in the fourth segment titled ‘Logs’. I like AWSTATS, click on it and then the domain you want to view. Wow! Look at all the information. For now we will concern ourselves with just a few bites, of course feel free to eat the whole thing if you like (analyze away).

Here are a few things you can find:

Unique Visitors – the number of individual IP addresses that visited your website.
Total Visitors – This differs from unique visitors in that a single visitor may have visited many times!
Daily Visitors – The number of visits you have on any given day of the month.
Top 25 visiting countries – That’s right, you’ve gone global.
Robots and spiders – Sounds kind of creepy, but this is where you can see if Google and friends are actually seeing your website.
Keywords – This is the word or phrase that people have used to find your site.
And there’s more, including: keywords used to find your site, top visited urls…etc., etc.

Now that you have these nifty stats and you’re certain your website has the attention of Google et al, you might be wondering what to do with all the information. We will cover that in the next segment, for now it suffices to know that you are actually getting traffic to your website, and that the search engines know you exist.

Read More on Internet Marketing

Internet Marketing

How Do People Find My Website?

By now you have probably figured out that most people aren’t going to go to Google and enter your website name to find you.  So how do you get found? One of the answers to this question is with keywords. Any effort at SEO (Search Engine Optimization) must include proper use of keywords. Your website needs to be indexed by keyword in Google so that it knows where to send visitors who enter your keyword in their search page. After all, if you sell “widgets,” then it won’t do you any good to have people visit who are looking for “thing-a-ma-jigs,” right?

For example:

If you are looking for “SEO services,” you might visit google.com and enter “SEO services” into the search bar. What happens? Millions of results are returned.

You can wade through the pages looking for what you want, or you change your search to be more specific. If you are in Florida, you might change your search to “SEO services in Florida.”

In the scenario above the keyword is “SEO services” (a keyword can be a phrase of many words). If your website is indexed on Google for “SEO services” you will be somewhere in those million results. If your website is also indexed on Google for “SEO services in Florida,” then you would also be found in the narrower, more detailed search, other results were weeded out just by adding “Florida.”

Even when the search is narrowed down to “SEO services in Florida,” there are still a million results! Your website could still be way down the list. It’s not very encouraging is it? Being on page 100,000 or something is probably not going to get you any visitors to your website. In our next article we’ll discuss how to move your web page closer to the front of the line.
Pick your Keywords
The use of keywords on your website is the segment of search engine optimization that is referred to as “on page SEO.” Think about the keywords that people would use to find your website. Make a list of 1-word keywords, 2-word keywords, 3-word keywords, and 4-word keywords. These keywords and phrases should be very specific to your product or service. When you write articles for your website be sure to incorporate your keyword phrases.

This is a vital part of search engine optimization and internet marketing and you cannot ignore its value. However, there are many other things that you can do to move your website to the front of the line in the search engines.

Our next segment will discuss some of the critical first steps that must be done in order to get your website found in the abyss of the World Wide Web. The next article will explain search engine submission and analytic tools.

Read the Next Internet Marketing Article in the Series »

Orlando Internet Marketing

Waterford Media manages Google ad campaigns and many others. The process is known as sem or search engine marketing.
We can generate sales leads for your company right now, without waiting for organic seo.

As a Google Adwords Certified company we can find the best keywords for your internet marketing campaign.
We help you develop the ad, keywords, and monitor the results.
Best of all, you decide how much you want to spend monthly.

We will provide you with analytic reports and monthly performance summaries along with recommendations to ensure continued success with your internet marketing.
GET A QUOTE

SEO and SEM in plain english

SEO
Search engine optimization – Maximizing your web presence to Get search engines like: Google, Yahoo, and Bing to notice your website. SEO is making changes to your website that highlight the relevancy of your webpage for a given topic, and building a strong network of relationships with other websites ( known as back-links). Good SEO drives traffic to your website.

Keywords:
Keywords are the phrases that people enter into searches which help them find your website. Example: Building movers or Orlando Building movers or Florida building movers.

Back links:
Back links are references from another website back to your website. Back links are important to search engines in determining how relevant your website is and for driving traffic to your website.
Back links can happen naturally when a different website finds information on your website that is relative to their content. They might have an article about ‘house moving,’ for example, which lists your website as a good place to find a house mover.

We can help this process by actively searching for and obtaining back links thru directory websites like the open directory project.
Additionally, there are countless blogs and forums on the internet that discuss anything you can think about. A back link can be created by posting thoughtful replies on these websites with a link to your website.

Page Ranking:
Page ranking is the assignment of your websites relevance for a certain topic within search engines. A low rank means that the search engine does not give your website the credit it deserves with regard to search results. A high ranking means lots of traffic and potential sales!

Social Media
Twitter, Facebook, etc. are all websites that can help develop a web presence and drive traffic to your website. The idea is to create a social relationship on these websites which entices people to visit your website and hopefully purchase your product or service.

Twitter is a great medium for this. If you can leverage recent news and events to a short snippet that relates to your website, the people will come!

Sitemaps:
A sitemap is a webpage that tells Google and other search engines, as well as visitors, where to find things on the site. It is very effective in ensuring all of your pages are indexed and helping with website traffic.

Seo Services
Seo services are available in many different forms, from directory link submission services( Not recommended), to high-end on-page seo and internet marketing. Services which include quality back-linking from articles, forums, blogs and high PR relevant directories are usually the most effective.

Waterford Media offers the latter in seo services and welcomes the opportunity to work with your company to develop and outstanding web presence.

SEM
Search Engine Marketing PPC (pay-per-click).
Another method to increase web traffic is to pay a provider like Google for advertising on their search engine. An account is created with Google Adwords where you make a short ad, indicate your desired keywords, and set your budget. The budget can be as much or as little as you like. Basically, each click costs a certain amount, depending on the competition for the keywords you want.

Your ad starts showing up on Google almost immediately (once approved), and the traffic follows. At this point, traffic trends, click conversions, etc need to be monitored and adjustments made to ensure the highest conversion rates possible.

SEM is a very effective way to generate business leads.

Ready to get your website found?
We have SEO experts who can analyze your website and make the changes necessary to get your website the attention it deserves!
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing process which requires frequent updates to:

• Build back links.
• Create keyword rich content.
• Post Forum and Blog entries.
• Market through Social Media

Call us today!
407-965-5025 or email at: info(at)waterfordmedia.com