Does Google Analytics Affect My SEO
5/6/2009 17:29
Analytics toolsets have come along way since the early days of simply tracking the volumes of visitors to your site. These evolved toolsets can now track what visitors do once they get to the website and how your website caters to or meets their needs. Words like Conversion Rate, Landing Pages, Bounce Rate, etc are now as important, if not more so, than just measuring the number of visitors to the site. This need to understand in greater detail the degree to which a website meets its objectives has given rise to a whole new industry of Web Analytics toolsets.
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There are many website analytics packages available on the market. This article isn’t about reviewing those. I will focus on how you can use the outputs of such tools to monitor and improve your SEO efforts. I will lean towards Google Analytics as a toolset as this has the lions share of market. |
When first accessing Google’s Analytics tool and without customisation you are immediately presented with a summary page showing a whole host of information that can steer your SEO efforts. Your eyes are immediately drawn to the map of the world showing your visitors geographical location. We all love graphical and picture representations of data, it’s pleasing to the eye, especially when you’re tracking hits to your site. In addition to looking good, it serves an important purpose for your SEO efforts. This is called Geo targeting.
“Geotargeting” refers to using Analytics data to gain information about the geographical locations of visitors to your website. This information is crucial in deciding whether to focus on a particular geographic location for maximising growth and whether it will be viable to increase advertising in areas where the company has less visiblity.
Geotargeting can also be used to decide if there is any value in translating your website to cater for foreign languages. For instance, if research shows that a high number of visitors to your site are from China, it might provide fruitful to create a Chinese language version of the site to home in on this potential market. You will note that I use the words “create a Chinese language version of the site” and not use the phrase ‘translate your page’. Their are hundreds are translation software tools on the net, many free but even with the paid tools, the accuracy of language conversion is not 100%. If you are serious about targeting internationally, ensure your page is professionally translated. The equivalent of ‘Pigeon English ‘is not going to maximise on your opportunity.
Another important measurement that Analytics provides is Bounce Rate. “Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.”
The Bounce rate of a website can be used to measure the ‘Visit Quality’ of a visitor to your website. If the Bounce rate for your site is high, this suggest that the landing page for the visitor is not relevant or compelling enough for the visitor to explore further.
To reduce the Bounce rate, ensure that your landing pages match what was promised on the links to those pages or from links from your web ads. A high bounce rate will significantly reduce your conversion rate and if you are adopting a Pay Per Click programme, it will be costing you money.
Looking at your traffic sources is another important factor when planning your SEO. Understanding how visitors find your site, i.e. organic search, referring sites, Pay Per Click etc is essential when calculating marketing cost and effort in each of these areas. If your highest source of traffic is via PPC, then your efforts should be focussing on Organic search with the aim of reducing your PPC costs and improving free search traffic. If your site frequently refers visitors from partner sites than its essential that your partnership / linking agreements remain in place. You can then also start exploiting similar sites to these referring sites with the aim of increasing this source of traffic.
I have only touched on 2 elements of analytics and the list of benefits goes on. Off the shelf so to speak and without customisation you are offered whole host of data you can use to plan your SEO. If you would like assistance in interpreting your analytics data or if you would like to take it to the next level, please contact us for a no obligation discussion
How often should you link build
27/5/2009 7:48
Always, is the short answer? Link building shouldn’t be a stop and start exercise. Your link building efforts no matter what the scale should be continuous and consistent. This doesn’t mean that spurts of links are not effective when implemented correctly, but 500 new links or book marks in one day and then nothing for 12 months will be very obvious to search engines that actively look for such linking / bookmark patterns. Such patterns are quickly identified and will be simply discounted or removed.
What we say to many clients is that link building is not just about creating links to your site, its about getting your name out there and establishing business to business relationships with other businesses. Often an affiliation with other websites will bring much more than the just page rank link juice you seek to attain but targeted traffic to your site.
The link juice is however an important factor and establishing links especially one way from authority sites is crucial for maintaining high search engine placement. For more information on this, please refer to our previous blog post about how to attain authority one way links.
So link building should be an on-going exercise that you or a member of your business performs on a regular basis. Link building when performed correctly is time consuming and often de-motivating especially for new sites with no authority. Why not outsource your link building to us. Following a review of your website and your business goals, we can formulate a link building strategy adopting a wide mix of techniques that will drip feed links to your site over an agreed timescale. This is most effective way of attaining or maintaining a leading position on the search engines.
Please take a look at our Off-Site search engine optimisation services and contact us if you would require a bespoke link building strategy designed.
Guaranteed Rankings & First Page Placement
20/5/2009 9:35
In a word No, and anybody using white hat techniques should tell you the same. In our experience guaranteed first page placement from SEO firms often promotes Black Hat SEO. i.e. quick wins to get you ranked for the sole purpose of getting paid.
Getting on the first page of Google is not a difficult task when un-restricting techniques. Maintaining rank and high search engine position is the challenge and what you should be aiming to achieve. Don’t ever be tempted by the quick wins and promises. You may see results, but they will most probably be temporary and could result in your site being penalised and even suspended from Google’s and other leading search engines results pages.
It is fair to say that an established site that has not yet been optimised and operates in a low competition industry can be as close as you can get to a guaranteed result from our perspective. But here at the SEO-Authority, we still wouldn’t guarantee it. Why, Not confident enough? No. But a guarantee is a cast iron statement. Unless you have overall control of every competitor, every Google update and even the site that we are optimising, how can you offer this? So we don’t! No matter how sure we may be.
Google algorithms that determine website search engine placement are ever changing to ensure nobody; including SEO specialists can make such a guarantee. For info Google applied algorithm 450 changes last year. If Google lose the upper hand and control then it would start a downwards spiral for Google as we know it.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t master the field of SEO but it is a living formula and array of techniques as Google makes a point of changing things to protect their business and to keep everyone on their toes. This where the firms like the SEO-Authority add real value, as our teams are continually researching new techniques and validating existing techniques to ensure we can offer the most effective solutions to our clients.
Every online business may be different but all share a common goal which is attaining top listings on the leading search engines. Don’t get carried away by the flashy marketing, keep your search engine optimisation inline with your business objectives which for 99% of company’s will be for stable, long term growth and performance. The golden rule applies, if it sounds to good to be true then, well you know the rest..
Concerned About Online Reputation
20/5/2009 9:33
More so now then ever, you / your company’s online reputation is a huge factor in maintaining and establishing new business. Whether you have a website or not and even if you don’t trade online, it is essential to ensure your online reputation is portraying the image that you want.
When was the last time you typed your company name into a search engine search? Where you just checking to see that you were placed or did you actually examine all of the references to your company name.
With the increase of social media sites, blogs and forums at an unprecedented rate it is likely that a disgruntled customer, a competitor or in some cases just for the hell of it, someone has written something about your company that is less than flattering. Often all it takes is one or two bad comments to put a potential customer of buying your products and services. Negative reviews always outshine positive ones as human behaviour pushes people to read the bad before the good. It is amazing how much people do believe what they read and base there perceptions upon it.
As mentioned in one of our previous posts, spreading negative company perception is becoming an increasingly used underhand tactic by aggressive competitors.
Combating this problem can be tough especially if someone has a particular grievance against your company and has used a variety of forums to exercise there opinions. If you are not in this predicament now, our advice is why wait for this happen? There are a number of techniques you can employ to ensure that your website and positive references to your site will outrank current or future bad references to your business.
Take a look at our online reputation management services or contact us for me info.
However your current online reputation stands, be armed and ready…
How To Get Authority Links To Your Site
15/5/2009 17:17
So, you have found a few authority sites that often top the search engines for keyword searches relating to your business / industry. It is likely that the authority site will not want to link to the new kid on the block who may even be going into direct competition with them. Why would they, would you?
The authority sites do however link too many other websites for what ever reason, and this is where you target your requests. If you get a link from these sites, the high authority website will still have a positive influence on your own site.
This is what you need to do:
Find a high quality, high authority website (it should be old, have many inbound links and good rankings on Google).
Ask the high authority website for a link to your website. Don’t wait for a response though carry on with the next step.
Perform a link lookup of the authority site. If your not using a toolset simply do this by typing into a Google search ‘link: www.AuthoritySiteNameHere.com’ Visit the websites to which the high authority website links to and ask the webmasters of these sites if they want to link to your site.
If using a toolset to manage your links, a word of advice is NEVER use the default template often provided via the toolset. This very transparent and shows the webmaster you are contacting that you are not that bothered about the site, you just want the link. So you should personalise your message, look at their site, complement were necessary but don’t go over board. Ultimately they know and you know your driver is gain a link but don’t stop there. There are often other avenues of affiliation with a relating site that can be far more valuable to your business than a simple link.
Of course, these second-tier links are not as valuable as links from the top-authority site. However, they are still very valuable and chances are that they are more valuable than many other links that you can get on the Internet.
Go forth and link…..
