Marketing on Internet Road 

In the beginning of 2011 Google had introduced a major and substantial update to it search algorithm, known as the “Panda Update”. The update that started in North America in February was rolled out to all international English websites in April and is gradually rolled out to all languages globally.

What Does Google Really Want

The Effects of the Panda Update

What Google Signals with the Panda Update

What to do to succeed in the post-panda era?

Internet marketing strategies face a constant need to keep up with the recent changes that take place. Unless you are keeping a finger on the pulse regularly, you are facing the risk of carrying out redundant tasks and setting your focus on irrelevant tactics.

Although there are so many ingredients in this stew, we have collected several hot topics that we consider as Internet Marketing “do or die” as of today and listed them below (not in any order of importance).

Each topic below can be (and actually is) a topic for an article or an e-book. However, in order not to turn this post into one, we didn’t include anything related to each of the topics. Rather, the intention is to shed some light per topic to explain the main parameter and why this topic is important.

Segment your data

In the spirit of giving context to any analysis you are doing on your data (e.g.: your Google Analytics data), slicing and dicing your data across (your) various dimensions is a must.

Make sure to be aware of the risk of analyzing the average and referring to total figures and “typical” visits or visitors. Everything must have a context and the key for achieving context and ability to drive conclusions (and as a result of that improve the various marketing efforts) is with segmentation.

Some examples:

• Your online presence spans today over multiple places (and if not it should; see also down the list) and your traffic arrives from different sources.
• New visitors behave differently compared to returning ones. Getting back to the context issue – this depends a lot on your business.
• Visitors from different geographic places might or may behave differently.

If you wish to draw the right conclusions and improve your efforts, you must first know what should be corrected and/or what should get even higher investment. The only way to do that is with proper segmentation.

So, take a close look at all your traffic sources, your target market’s demographics and any other important aspect of your digital touch-points (yes, it’s not only your website) and segment your data accordingly. Never expect the same behavior from different segments, and even if you do – the only way to measure it is by segmenting.

Conclusion: prepare a list of critical segmented reports on your data and then add some whenever you see the need to dive in furthermore.

SEO your site(s)

Although Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a highly dynamic terrain and no one holds the secret to what it means, it is still the basics to anything else.

No matter what is “known” as the key factors for ranking well on search engines, there are fundamental things that should be dealt with in any case:

• Make sure your website is “spiderable” by search engines
• Make sure your website contains unique content (that is, no duplicate content on different pages of the site and no copied from elsewhere on the internet)
• Make sure that each page is optimized for one key-phrase where all the copy of this page is about this one key-phrase
• Make sure each and every page has its own unique title and description, and that they support the key-phrase each page is optimized for.

Add to that the bonuses you will get from Google and the other search engines for having a lot of content (arguably – 100 indexed pages and more) and fresh content, and you have the foundations set properly for anything else.

It’s worthwhile to indicate that in the last year or so, SEO can and should be done not only to your website but also to other places online where you have presence in (e.g.: YouTube, Facebook). It’s not the same as SEO for your website and there are different details for each. There are enough details for a separate post on each of them (will take on the challenge:-)).

Tip: register your site on the webmaster tools of any of the major search engines (Google’s one is https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools) to make sure your site is being crawled quickly and on a regular basis as well as to get indication on problems on your site that will hurt your SEO efforts.

Conclusion: take a close look at your website and make sure all the fundamentals are in place and aligned with the best practices of SEO.

Build Good and Long list of Links

We have already established the importance of SEO and the need to ensure that all the basic on-site elements are in order. The second most important aspect of SEO nowadays is related to link building.

What you need to be concern of from SEO perspective is your authority. That is, the authority of your website and your web pages. What used to be measured by Google’s Page Rank in the past is now being measured mostly by the links that are pointing to your pages.

From the perspective of links size does matter, so you need to make sure more and more websites are pointing at your content. But it’s not only the count, the type of sites that are linking to you is also important: The more authoritative sites sending links at your direction, the better.

The fact that we are referring to “pages” and not (only) “website” has a reason: the search engines index your web pages and not your website. Your website is a collection of your pages and although your website’s authoritative score is important, if you wish to rank with specific pages (and you do), you must ensure there are links pointing to each of those pages directly and not only to the home page of your site.

Another important point is the “anchor text”. There is a huge difference if a link to your page reads “read more” compared to a text that explains what the page is about. The best is to use variations of the main key-phrase the page is optimized for and not just general wordings or your company’s name.

Tip: although not the most important, internal links on your website also play a factor. Make sure to point at your more important pages from multiple pages on your own site and always use absolute URL (http://www.yoursite.com/pagename.html and not /pagename.html).

The top three ways to have links are:

• Submitting your pages to directories
• Ask other websites that are related to your industry and market to hold a link to your web pages
• Submit your web pages to various social bookmarks networks (e.g.: reddit.com, stumbleupon.com and alike). You can do this yourself, use a “pinging service” to help you with that, or outsource this service to one of the so many service providers that exist online.

Small word of warning: link building needs to be done on a constant basis and with no too big of peaks. That is, don’t aim at getting in one month 1000 links to your website. This will always look artificial and suspicious to the search engines and will be ignored.

Conclusion: place the amount and type of links pointing at your pages in the top list of important factors to measure, optimize your internal links on your websites to point properly to your most important pages and create a steady stream of links with proper variations of those key-phrases you are optimizing your pages for.

Have an active Blog

As a result of the abovementioned SEO and link building topics, having an active blog is really a must:
For one, having a blog will help you build your authority in your market. You are producing interesting information of topics related to your industry. The more often you do that with unique and interesting content, the more your target audience will know you as an authority in your field. Not bad for brand awareness as well.

This authority will project on your website overall authority since you will get more links for your interesting posts and more visits to your domain.

Regular posting to a blog will gradually make your website bigger and with fresh content. We already established that the search engines love those 2 factors, so you are holding a great opportunity to have so many great outcomes, simply by writing on what you do and what your know.

Your blog is also a great tool to create more internal links to your important pages. Simply make sure to think about key phrase optimization when writing posts and set a couple of links from any post you are writing to your website’s pages.

Tip: there is a general wonder how the blog should be set up from SEO perspective. Should it be yoursite.com/blog, blog.yoursite.com or a different domain all together? The online community is getting lately to the conclusion that the first option is actually the best. Nevertheless, if it’s not possible, the goal is still to have a blog, so don’t just give it up because of one or another reason.

Conclusion: create a blogging agenda and start writing one post per week. After about 2 months, Increase it to 2 per week at least.

Get (seriously) involved with Social technology

Coming from the (great) book of Scot Klososky called “Enterprise Social Technology”, Social Technology includes the following 3 elements:

• Social relevance (reputation management mainly)
• Social Media
• Social networking

All three are important and we are using them or being affected by in our day to day as users, but they are also very important for our business and online marketing.

Setting the focus on Social Media and Social networking, they contain great opportunities to promote your business today. We won’t be getting into too much details as for this topic you can really find a ton of resources (and Klososky’s book is a great example), but we will indicate that active participation in the social realm will enable you to connect with your potential customers and existing customers in levels that were the dreams of business owners since as long as businesses exist.

Coming back to the points made on SEO, link building and authority, Social Technology is the one place to be to get great values for those factors!

Conclusion: Set up your Facebook page, LinkedIn company page and personal profile, YouTube channel, Twitter account and more and start generating content on those platforms. Content could be syndicated from your website and blog whenever there is anything new there, as well as created specifically for those social networks.

Set goals to track your website conversion

For a very long time, the Internet Marketing community is debating if Google is using “click data” as one of the factors in its algorithm. Click data means data on how many clicks (and related aspects) a web page is getting.

Google is in a great position to look at this data with their access to their own Google Analytics platform that is dominating the analytics market online. For the sake of this post, we are putting aside the discussion on whether this is right or wrong, ethical or not.

A few months ago, one of Google’s top people hinted that Google is actually using this data, and if Google does, we should think of what it means to all of us.

The idea behind looking at the “click data” is to be able to determine not only which content is better on which pages, but also which pages are actually getting clicks from searchers and even more importantly – which of them end up with conversions! From Google point-of-view, if a web page is being clicked more and is achieving more conversions when people are searching for a certain phrase, it means that this web page is more relevant to this search query and should be promoted to make itself useful for more searchers. Make sense!

Assuming that you are running Google Analytics on your website already (and if not, leave this post now and do it), you must make sure goals are set up on your account and that your site is getting conversion for your top key-phrases. We actually noticed several examples in the last 6 months of web pages of our customers that went up in ranking simply when we set up proper goals and improved the conversion architecture of the web site to get more conversions.

Having said all of that regarding setting and measuring your website’s goals, don’t stop there: SEO, ranking and measurements are all nice things, but what you should really be concerned about are the conversions on your site. After all, this is what really matters. So, when you are tracking your goals, make sure to draw actions and improve your online results.

Conclusion: Set your website’s goals on Google Analytics

On last thing to point out:

Each of the 6 tactics listed above have their own value. But, if you take a closer look at the whole, you can clearly see that values gained from one tactics will promote your efforts on more than one topic.
This is for me one of the beauties of online marketing: the idea of one plus one equals more than the obvious two. How is that for an incentive to roll up those sleeves and get busy with internet marketing?


Questions, comments, remarks, praises and shared thoughts are more than welcomed :-)

PPC is an important strand of your web analysis. One of the cool things about PPC data is that you don’t need a lot of history to draw conclusions from it – a few weeks is enough time to give you an idea of how well a campaign is performing.

Google Adwords data is included in your Google Analytics data and includes metrics like click through rate (CTR) and cost per click (CPC). Google recently released AdWords API v201101, which allows you to more efficiently run reports, as well as implement campaign experiments and other recently released advertising features at scale.

But how do you track success after PPC visitors are on your site? What metrics should you investigate to ensure that you are getting high quality traffic and capitalizing on opportunities to convert?

For these types of performance metrics, you need web analytics! Here are 4 important metrics you should review on a daily basis to evaluate PPC campaign performance.

1. Conversions

It pretty much goes without saying that conversions are the best metric to determine how a PPC campaign is performing. You should have your web analytics set up to record both online conversions (newsletter subscriptions, content downloads) and offline conversions (phone calls, offline campaigns).

To track online conversions, configure your web analytics to record a conversion every time someone arrives on a specific URL. In the case of web forms, this URL would be something like a thank you or confirmation page. For downloads, you might need to add a piece of tracking code that will register the download as a pageview.

To track offline conversions, see one way of doing this in our previous post on Measuring Success of Offline Campaigns in Google Analytics. There are plenty of other solutions out there for tracking other offline conversions (e.g. by telephone) which will integrate directly into your web analytics program so you only have to access one dashboard.

2. Bounce Rate

 
A bounce is when someone lands on a site and leaves without viewing any other pages. Your bounce rate will vary for each campaign. A high bounce rate may be an indication that your content is not relevant or engaging to visitors.

3. Pages Per Visit

The interesting data comes from a very low or a very high number of page views. Very low could mean that visitors are not finding content useful or interesting, and have resigned to go back to search results to find a more relevant page. A high number of page views could mean either you are producing interesting and engaging content (look at time spent on page for engagement), or that the visitor cannot find the content they are looking for.

In both cases, review the relevance of the page content to traffic-producing keywords, and make sure the information people appear to be seeking is on the landing page, or a click away.

4. Average Time on Site

It goes without saying that a higher time on site is better than a low one. Extremely low (0-1 second) — There is no way to read a page’s content in this amount of time. If there are a lot of visitors spending less than a second on the site, it may be the result of one of two things:

• Invalid clicks – Check with your PPC platform to ensure you are not being charged for these.
• Slow site load time – May cause people to get frustrated and hit the back button before ever arriving on the landing page.

Low (less than 15 seconds) — Generally, those visitors who spent 10 seconds or less on a site quickly decided that they were in the wrong place. This may be because at a first glance they didn’t find any relevant information, see their keywords anywhere on the page, or were confused by the landing page’s layout.

Look at these 4 web analytics metrics and you will have a better idea of your PPC performance. Once you have gathered enough data to draw conclusions about which parts of your campaign work well and which don’t work so well, you can start implementing small changes and tracking the different outcomes. By taking this methodical approach you should be able to optimize your campaigns to get the best ROI.

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.

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.