SEO Expertise

I’m pretty sure you know what a mechanical paper fastener is, we typically know it as a stapler. I thought I’d conduct a little experiment and see if I can get a web page to rank for the term mechanical paper fastener. I want to use the rank this page achieves in a future post about web page rankings. I’ll let you know how it goes.

UPDATE

It looks like I’ve successfully ranked my experimental site for mechanical paper fastener at #2 on Google within 30 days of launch.  Now that the site ranks well what does that mean for traffic?  It has translated into 6 visit in the last 30 days.

I set up this experiment to highlight the fact that ranking high isn’t in and of itself a goal of my search marketing efforts.  My goal is to get you qualified traffic that will lead to a conversion.

Start With Why is the title of a book written by Simon Sinek.  I recently purchased this book.  I’m 4o pages in and I’m enjoying it so far.  Why did I buy this book?  I watched a video of the author presenting his thesis at a TEDx event.  The video really got me thinking about how I present my services.  I won’t go in to the thesis of the book, that’s what the video is for, but I will say that because of the idea espoused by the author I will be rethinking how I talk about what it is I do.  I’m not sure how these changes will manifest themselves so stay tuned.

From an business perspective my experience is tangible proof that using social media is one way to broaden your reach.  I follow a blog called Presentation Zen.   I saw a link to the Start With Why video on that blog.  I watched the video and bought that book.  I have also signed up on the Start With Why blog to receive communications directly from the author, Simon Sinek.  Ask yourself how can your business use this kind of approach to grow sales.  Just remember to start with why.

One of the best things about marketing via the web is the ability to measure the results of your activities. Everyone has heard someone say “my site gets a ton of hits”. Let’s ignore the fact for a moment that hits are not a good indication of a site’s performance the fact remains that marketers can use services like Google Analytics to great effect. Whether it is measuring how pages, cities, devices or some other metric is affecting performance or just making sure the general trend is going the right way Google Analytics is an essential, and free, tool.

A couple of months ago I posted a Google Analytics presentation to Slideshare. The following are another four measurements Google Analytics can help you discover.

There are a number of reports in Google Analytics that can help the site owner determine visitor engagement.  A report I like to use for this purpose is the average pageviews report.  By monitoring how many pages a visitor looks at the site owner can get a sense of how engage the visitor is.  The average pageviews report can also indicate the presense of a navigation problem.  In most cases a visitor to a site needs to look at more than one page before they take an action.  How many pages they need to take isn’t always obvious.  From the average pageviews report the site owner can determine if their are too few pages being visited or too many.  Too many might indicate that users can’t find what they are looking for.

Pageview reports are an indicator of what is going on with your site but they don’t provide insight into what’s happening on specific pages.  Fortunately for the site owner Google Analytics provide several reports such as landing pages report and exit pages reports that shed some light on visitor behaviour.  Another helpful report is the navigation summary report.  With the navigation summary report you can see which pages were visited before the current page and which pages were visited after the current page.  Something I find interesting when looking at the navigation summary is to see how many visitors go back to a transition page in order to re-orient themselves on a given website.

Smartphones are all the rage but are people really using them to surf your website.  The short answer is yes.  Google recently added a report to Google Analytics that will show how many visits and from which type of handsets visit your site.   This report will give an early indication of whether or not your site should be made mobile aware.  The short answer to that question is also yes but with a little insight you can determine when to apply the resources to making your site more mobile friendly.

Okay, great, Google Analytics has lots of helpful reports but when are you ever going to look at them?  Unfortunately most site operators do not have an intimate knowledge of their site’s performance.  I haven’t done the actually analysis but my intuition tells me that 9 out of every 10 companies I deal with are not getting Google Analytics reports automatically emailed to them.   Click a button, enter your email address and Google will email you the requested report every month.  It’s really that easy.  Getting weekly reports can lead to report fatigue.  Who wants to look at the same report every week?  In addition to regular reports Google Analytics has a new feature that I think is indispensable.

Inside the new section of Google Analytics called Intelligence are tools that allow the site owner to create alerts for specific metrics.   Want to know if your visitor count spikes or drops?  Simple, create an alerts that let you know when visitors are 50% higher or lower today than they were yesterday.   Not all metrics are available via the alert mechanism but there are enough choices that you can build several reports to give you early warning of problems or successes your site is experiencing.

The types of reports I’ve presented here have been available in sophisticated and expensive analytics packages for a long time.  It’s amazing to me that Google offers this service for free.  The price is definitely right.   As with any tool it’s not always easy to master the tool such that you get maximum value.   I use Google Analytics everyday.  I can help you gain more insight into your site’s performance.

Please share this article if you find it helpful.  Be sure and check out my other Google Analytics presentation.

I’m reading a post by Lisa Barone about the Social Media presentation at SES New York.  One of the speakers, Gini Dietrich, points out that people want to see inside  a company, they want to get to know the people that work there.   I’ve believe this for a long time, even before we had the term social media.   I have frequently expressed this idea as “people buy from people”.

I’ll admit this might be a personal bias.  I spent 15 years on the road selling various products and services before I struck out on my own.  Buying from a website is very impersonal.   Online purchases work well for commodity type purchases that are usually driven by price.   As a former sales manager once said to me “sell on price, lose on price”.

The idea that people buy from people is important to keep in mind when you are developing your eCommerce strategy. Will your site sell based on price?  Will people be available to assist?  Have you posted pictures of people that work at the company?  Humans are a social animal.  We want to see “who” we are dealing with.

If the idea that people buy from people sounds like common sense you’d be right.  Unfortunately business owners do not always apply offline common sense to their online initiatives.

In the last month I’ve seen three blogs running on WordPress that have failed to take advantage of search engine friendly URLs.   It is incredibly easy to turn on search engine friendly blogs running on WordPress.   In less than two minutes you can go from URLs like this:

http://www.johnarobb.com/?p=362

To URLs that look like this:

http://www.johnarobb.com/school-caught-spying-on-students-webcam/2010/02/

Something to keep in mind is that if you can’t tell the subject of a page from the URL neither can a search engine.

There are a number of ways to turn on search engine friendly URLs in WordPress Here is one way:

1. Open the Settings menu
2. Select Permalinks
3. Paste this in the Custom Setting text box – /%postname%/%year%/%monthnum%/
4. Save changes

That’s it, you are done.  From now on your pages will have more search friendly URLs.