Marketing on Internet Road 

We have uploaded a new video to YouTube on titles “Google Analytics: Remove your Blindfold”(available also on our channel at youtube.com/wsieservices). As states in its name, the video is a running presentation we gave on Google Analytics.

The list of topics covered in the video:
- What is Web Analytics & Google Analytics
- Key definitions 
- The importance of Analytics
- Website goal, KPI’s and Analytics goals
- Best practices in account setup 
- Google Analytics Interface & Dashboard
-  Profiles, segments & filters: “Segment or Die” 

The heart of the presentation is an analogy of Google Analytics analysis with the roles of the Bookkeeper and the Accountant (following the statement of “Not analyzing your web analytics data is like not looking at your financial books”): 
In this analogy, the main reports in Google Analytics are presented in a view of the Bookkeeper and the Accountant, where the Bookkeeper view presents the data being collected in the repots (and presented) and the Accountant view shows the real analysis questions a website owner should ask himself when looking at those reports.

Take for example the “site usage” data. The Bookkeeper collects metrics such as VISITS, PAGES VIEWED, PAGES PER VISIT, BOUNCE RATE and TIME ON SITE. 

The Accountant will ask “What are the trends?” “What do peaks and slumps mean?”  “Pages/Visit & Avg. Time correlation: are they visiting more pages and staying longer on my site because my content is interesting, or is it that they are looking for something I don’t have or nor visible enough?”  “Is the Bounce Rate a concern? Do I want and expect my visitor to navigate to other pages once landed on my site or not? ” “New Visits or Returning Visitors – what is more important and how is my site doing?”

The Accountant will dive into detailed trends and analyze how the metrics look over the last few months and compare metrics between this month and last one as well as with the same period last year, mainly to examine seasonal trends. 

Hope you will enjoy this video/presentation on Google Analytics and that you will find it valuable.

Although Search Engine Optimization is still mainly for web pages, as Google is presenting different media types in the search results first page, there is a lot of value in optimizing other media files such as videos on YouTube.

Once you have your videos on YouTube (and hopefully you have created your own channel where they are hosted), the same core principals of optimization should apply. The following list describes the 3 main elements for SEO’ing your YouTube videos to get them to appear on Google’s first page for your keywords of choice:

Use the name of the video like the title of the web page: Just as the optimization of a web page starts with a well optimized title, you should use your main keyword in the title of the video. Unlike with web pages’ titles, you may want to consider adding your website name after the key phrase as you would like to generate traffic from the video to your web site (so the structure should be something like: “Main Keyphrase – www.yourwebsite.com videos”).

Include your keyword in the description of the video: The description is where your second optimization step should take place. Unlike with web pages – where the description tag appears only on search results – the description of your video will appear both on the search results as well as on YouTube as well. So use your keywords and related keywords in the description of the video. Don’t forget to put the full URL of your website as well (starting with http://) as this will create a live link from the description text to your website.

Include your keyword in the video tags: although the keywords Meta tag has no effect anymore in web pages optimization, they very much do on YouTube. Those are used as the main search method for visitors on YouTube and will help a lot with showing up on relevant searches on Google itself.

Build links to your video: again, just like with web page, the key is to have links pointing in to your videos. The more links there are to a video on YouTube, the more authority ranking it gets and more visibility. Since visibility is what we all wish to gain, invest in link building to your videos as if you were doing link building to your website.


To sum it up, optimizing YouTube videos is very much like SEO for web pages, only it is much more focused around the keywords.

Employing Internet Marketing strategies does not necessarily mean a new way of doing business. It is true that the internet and online marketing opened up a window for new and advance way of doing business, but it is also an online reflection of the way you do business offline.

Ask yourself the following question: “How do I get business today?” This answer should lead you in to the best main strategy you need to be using in your Internet Marketing portfolio.
If you are doing business by more than only one method, use more than one method online. Furthermore, extend your online marketing efforts to be using more than one main strategy. This way you can significantly increase your business while still being very efficient, be able to make constant changes and keep the costs low (surely when compared to your traditional marketing tactics).

Word of Mouth and/or Networking

With Word of Mouth the most important factor is referrals and positive reviews on your products and services. The best fit is with Social Media Marketing.
Depending on your exact type of business, choose your Social Networks: LinkedIn (mainly if you are in B2B), Twitter, Facebook and so on. Social Media is all about connections, referrals and experiences people on those networks experienced. This is literally the new way of Word of Mouth.
The complimentary Internet Marketing strategy to use is permission based Email Marketing: use your website and other online touch-points (like you page on Facebook) to encourage customers and prospects to subscribe to your mailing list. Then, send them timely newsletters to keep them engaged and further encourage them to forward your messages to others.

Cold Calling

If your business depends on Cold Calls or incoming phone calls, your strategies should combine Search Engine Marketing together with bought-list-based Email Marketing.
The Search Engine Marketing strategies of Search Engine Optimization and Pay-per-Click will ensure your phone is ringing. They are designed to get you found by your target market and potential customers exactly when they are looking for what you have to offer, where they are searching for it and in the way they are searching for it.
If you can purchase bought lists of your potential customers (watch out for legal aspects depending on your location and the vendor), this is a very close match to your cold calling tactics, only via the internet – much cheaper, more flexible and more effective.

Advertising

If you focusing offline on advertising, online you should put your focus on
-   SEO
-   PPC
-   Display advertising

As mentioned above, Search Engine Marketing tactics are the best ways in the online realm to reach your target audience. Done correctly, it should be much cheaper and much more effective than your offline advertising efforts. Consider allocating part of the traditional advertising budget to the online realm.
If your advertising budget is more substantial, explore the possibility of using Display Advertising: literally advertise your business (that is – your web pages) on websites that your potential customers visit. Display Advertising constantly improves and allows more capabilities of socio-demographic targeting to make your campaign more accurate and more successful.  

Face to Face

If your business depends on Face-to-Face meetings, make sure your “face” is visible online.
As this type of prospecting suggests you are in the B2B market, invest in your LinkedIn profile along with a professional profile on a Facebook page.
Furthermore, use YouTube to host videos on your business, your offerings and your sales representatives. Similarly, upload photos to Flickr and presentations to Slideshare.
Make sure to have a professional profile on each of those networks as this is one of the first things people will look at and will help them have a positive perception of your business.

The importance of Google Analytics to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) could never be underestimated. It’s not only one of the best ways to measure the results and the effect of the SEO strategy being implemented, it is an amazing tool for directing SEO efforts.

The main advantage of Google Analytics is that it shows data, hard facts, from your website. This is as accurate as data can be. It is even more accurate than ranking of your different web pages on Google, and this is why it should be analyzed at the beginning of any SEO implementation and throughout the project on timely intervals (usually months should be enough; otherwise – weeks).

The other good thing with Google Analytics is that in order to understand the basics there is no need for any expertise. Don’t get me wrong – Google Analytics certification is amazing and even critical for proper understanding of the online marketing realm. But for SEO purposes it is enough to look at some reports, understand what they tell you and act accordingly.

SEO-Related Data to Learn from Google Analytics

Some examples of what Analytics will tell you on your Search Engine Optimization:

• How many visitors are getting to the website?
• Which search engines your visitors are using to find your website?
• Which keywords are being used to land on your website? Which pages are your “Landing Pages” for the various keywords?
• Are most of your visitors finding your website by branded searches or non-branded ones (i.e.: searching for different versions of your name or for your products and services?)
• What is the Bounce Rate of the pages your visitors land on and why? Do they find the information there relevant to what they searched for or not?
• And more.

So don’t “fly blind”: instead of doing your SEO without learning anything on the results or knowing what’s working, what’s not working and what other opportunities are there on your main asset (i.e. – your website), dive in to your Google Analytics reports and spend some time understanding what it tells you on your SEO situation.  Your SEO results will show much improvement that way, granted.

Everyone knows that SEO is important. The main question being asked constantly is how much and what does it mean to have your website’s page on a certain ranking on Google search results page.

A new research from Citika analyzed the value of the different rankings on Google.

The main insights from the research were:

• Being on position 1 on Google is priceless. This position worth twice the traffic coming from being on position 2 (!)
• As we all know, the biggest difference is from page 2 to page 1: Moving from position number 11 (top of page 2) to number 10 (bottom of page 1) means a growth of 143% in traffic. Although some traffic is coming from page 2 positions, it cannot be compared with being on page 1.
• Positions 1 to 4 on Google drives 70% of traffic to websites.
• The number 1 position brought almost 35% of all traffic. This was almost as much as what positions 2 to 5 together drove. This was also more than the traffic positions 5 to 20 drove together .

The research and its findings shows that anyone should invest in Search Engine Optimization and make sure the web pages he/she owns get to the top position of Google search results pages for multiple keywords.