I Do Web Marketing

This is a guest blog post written by Mark Barry of Integrity SEO Experts Ltd.

By now, 99% of the SEO and Digital Marketing community will be aware of Google’s latest algorithm update – Google Freshness – released early in November, as well as the potential effect it could have on website rankings.

Freshness may have been a bit of shock to the system for those who are somewhat hit and miss about optimising or updating their websites, but looking back through Google’s history, it was only a matter of time before it came about.

This latest algorithmic update is only one tiny part of a ten year ‘big picture’ created by Google in 2003 and patented as the “Document Scoring Based on Document Content Update.” Based on the original, hundreds of mini patents have been registered since then, Freshness being the latest.

Google has actually been scoring content freshness for quite some time now, years actually, although few people have realised this is the case. Now that Google have made it official it has certainly brought the fact to everyone’s attention.

As with everything Google does, Freshness has been analysed inside out by experts in such areas and conclusions have been drawn. Naturally, anything algorithmic is complex, so below is an ‘in a nutshell’ version for those of us who like their English as plain as possible! This will hopefully help everyone from SEO’s to E-commerce website designers.

Each page of a website is given a ‘freshness’ rating, based on its date of origination, i.e. the date it is first indexed by Google. Over time, the rating ‘decays’ and will continue to do so until new content is added. The rate of decay also varies according to the website’s purpose. A news site, for example, would be expected to update much more often than most others.

The amount of content that changes also has a bearing – the more that is changed, the more impact to the freshness. In the case of a popular blog, whole pages are added on a fairly consistent basis, which is what gives them a high score.

It has been suggested that adding around 25% of the total web pages keeps the score high, but this should not be at the expense of neglecting content on existing pages, which has the reverse effect.

Content that has been defined as ‘important’ by using <h1> to <h6> heading classifications within the HTML, is rated slightly differently – changes made in important areas will rate a higher freshness than others. Important content is generally above the fold and found in the main body text.

Inbound links are also rated in two ways and can affect the site. Firstly, those coming from sites which have a good freshness rating themselves can positively affect the receiving site. The opposite applies if any links are static or worse still, dead. Secondly, increases in link growth is seen as freshness, but beware using unscrupulously sourced links, they could easily be viewed as spam over time.

So there it is, basically the Freshness update is aimed at encouraging webmasters to be diligent in keeping their websites clean, tidy, relevant and fresh. Things have been moving that way for a while, but now the onus is on webmasters to keep a careful watch over those that they are linking to or from as well.

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Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

So, you have heard that the Internet is a good place to begin your retail business. No doubt it is. But you should know that it takes more than a website to actually sell your products. You must also set up a shopping cart, payment gateway, and other features to make your e-store user-friendly and efficient.

These are not all. It should also consist of tools that allow you to handle transactions and monitor user activities easily.

What do you need then?

For such purposes, the best solution is Google Analytics. If you are not too familiar with it, you can go through the other articles on this blog for basic insight. Now, what we are going to talk about specifically on this page is…

Setting Up E-commerce Tracking

Briefly put, it involves adding particular codes to help you obtain the following data:

• Transactions
• Conversion rate
• Total earnings
• Average order price
• Unique purchases
• Commodities sold and their quantity
• Income for each item
• Average product price
• Daily sales performance
• Everyday transactions

Through this information, you can determine which group of users provides you with bigger profits. In return, you can calculate your marketing return on investment (ROI) easily.

After knowing that you can acquire fundamental data from Google Analytics, let us proceed with the basic setup of e-commerce tracking.

1. Enable it for all reports by applying the following steps:

• Go to the top right section of your Analytics page and choose the “Admin” tab.
• If you are not directed to the “Account Administration”, go to the “All Accounts” link, which you can find at the top left and under the orange bar.
• Pick the account that you wish to enable and then, click your preferred Web property.
• Check out the “Profile” menu for your selection and tick the sub-tab, “Profile Settings”.
• Go over “E-Commerce Settings” and choose “Yes, an E-Commerce Site”.
• Tap your mouse on “Apply”.

2. Find out if you require cross-domain tracking too.

You know that you need it if your e-store’s shopping cart is on another domain. If this is the case, you also have to set up cross-domain customization. This step is generally applicable if you are using a third-party cart.

3. Adjust the tracking code to gather e-commerce transactions.

This step generally involves three methods, which consist of the following:

• Make a transaction object – Through this, you can store relevant data such as shipping fees, billing address, and order ID. These details usually pertain with the number of items purchased.
• Add transaction items – Through this, you can monitor each product in the customer’s shopping cart by looking into its category, price, stock-keeping unit (SKU), and number of orders.
• Send the order to the servers of Google Analytics – Through this, you can finalize the details stored in the transaction object and confirm the purchase.

As you go over these steps, you may think that they are complicated. Its complexity actually depends on your level of expertise over Google Analytics. If you take time to study its features and functions, you will realize that it is easy to use. Therefore, familiarize with it before starting your retail operations. Additionally, you have to learn about JavaScript and HTML. Finally, study your e-commerce software.

About the Author: Emma Tomlinson is the Head of Retail at Smart Traffic, a fast-growing UK-based private technology company providing professional SEO services to SMEs and major businesses.

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Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

This is a guest blog post by William Eve. If you are interested in writing a guest post for this blog, contact me.

Google Analytics is an internet website analytics program that keeps you up to date on how your website is performing with regards its marketing and traffic effectiveness. It is a powerful tool that is quite flexible and has very easy to use features. With Google Analytics you will be able to target your ads more precisely and build your marketing skills. This will result in you getting a better conversion rate on your website. The beauty of Google Analytics is that it is free and arguably the most effective reporting tool available.

In order to take you through how Google Analytics works it is best if we start right at the very beginning. This obviously is the actual logging in process. Once inside you will immediately see a list of all your web sites or blogs. This is because Google Analytics tracks all the sites you manage within your particular account. From here you simply click on ‘view reports’ for whichever site you are interested in, and you are taken straight to the dashboard.

Dashboard

Once you’ve brought up the dashboard you’ll notice images of all the various reports the dashboard contains. These will be such things as visitors, content, traffic sources, map overlay and more. You can customise these if you wish. Near the top you’ll notice a section labelled ‘Site Usage.’ Inside this section you’ll come across the following:

• Percentage of new visits. It is here where the percentage of new visits you get on your site are compared to all the visitors you’ve received. In this way you’ll find out how many visits are repeat customers and how many are new.
• Average time on site. This tells you the average amount of time visitors stay on your site.
• Bounce rate. The bounce rate gives a percentage of visitors to your site who left as quickly as they arrived, hence the term ‘bounce.’ This could indicate your site seemed too complicated for them to navigate successfully so they left. It could also mean they visited by mistake. If it remains high you will need to do something about it.
• Page visits. Simply the average number of visits to each page on your site.
• Page views. Similar to page visits but this one will give you the actual number of visitors who actually viewed each page.
• Visits. The total number of visitors your site attracted at any given time.

Google’s default setting will display the activity your site has enjoyed over the last month. You change this setting to suit yourself or to compare one period against that of another. This can be carried out by clicking on the ‘date range’ at the top right corner and making alterations to the ‘comparison’ drop down from ‘site’ to ‘date range.’ You will then be able to alter the dates to whatever you are seeking information on.

Reports

There are many reports you can glean information from, however for beginners there are five you should take particular notice of on a regular basis, these are:

1. Top content. This tells you the pages on your site that are most visited. It will give you an idea on why most of your visitors are attracted to your site. Pages that are rarely visited can therefore be deleted and pages that are regularly visited can be built up.
2. Keywords. An important feature that tells you what keywords were effective in getting traffic to your site. This is the way you will find which keywords are powerful and which are not. The report will actually give you detailed information on the effectiveness of each keyword you use. It also tells you how long your visitor stayed on the site, how many pages they looked at while they were there and if they converted their visit or not by purchasing something from you, completing a subscription, or interacting with you in some other way.
3. Referring sites. You will find this report under Traffic Sources. It tells where your visitors were before they came to your site.
4. Traffic sources overview. Where the referring sites report told you where your visitors had been before visiting your site, this report will tell you which search engine they used to find you, did they use your URL, or did they use a key phrase or key word. In this way this particular report lets you know exactly where your traffic is coming from.
5. Visitors’ overview. This is the overview that brings it all together. It tells you how much traffic you received, how many pages were looked at, how long visitors stayed on each page and, of course, your bounce rate. It will even tell you the size of the monitors your visitors are using and whether they are on broadband or dial-up.

In the left hand column on every report you’ll find an ‘About this Report’. When you open this link you get detailed information about the report itself.

This article was written by William from lifeinsurancefinder.com.au. Fisit Life Insurance Finder to compare life insurance.

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Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

In part 1, part 2, and part 3 of this series, we talked about how to measure your online marketing efforts and specifically what metrics and tools you should be working with for your SEO and social media campaigns. But in order for this information to be meaningful, you need a concrete strategy with clearly defined goals that will drive your marketing decisions.

Measuring return on investment in the online marketing world necessitates a clear understanding of what you expect from your efforts. The measuring we’ve talked about previously is really the final step of the process. Let’s take a look at what comes before metrics analysis in order to define success.

1. Define Goals

Of course, your big picture goals will be to attract customers and win conversions, but those aren’t specific enough to be helpful in the creation of your marketing strategy. Break these big goals down into smaller increments such as:

• Increase Twitter retweets by 2%
• Offer informative content to encourage retweets
• Create a new blog post each week

Notice how this list begins with the general goal of increasing retweets and funnels down to the specific, actionable goal of creating new content.

2. Create Content

Content creation is the proverbial horse that must come before the cart of social media or SEO promotion. Your promotion efforts will fail miserably if they’re not undergirded by solid content creation. Well written content places you in a position of trust and gives people a reason to keep visiting your site and recommending you to friends. Even Google understands the important of regularly updated content and will give priority in the SERPs to websites that update frequently. Start by researching keywords that your target audience is searching for and focusing on what problems you can solve for your readers.

3. Promote Content

With your content creation strategy underway, you can focus on promotion efforts through SEO and social media. Use search engine optimization and social media venues to keep your content in front of your target audience. Remember that the better your content, the more likely your followers will be to share it with their friends, generating greater interest and brand recognition for you.

4. Measure Success

This is where you come full circle and can begin to measure the results of your online marketing strategy. The metrics we talked about in previous posts will show you how effective your strategy is, giving you the information you need to make educated changes based on measurable results.

What do YOU think? Anything I may have overlooked? Feel free to share some of your own success stories!

Be sure and subscribe for the latest web marketing strategies and updates!

Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

Having discussed the metrics and tools best suited to understanding the success of your SEO strategy in Part Two of this series, it’s time now to turn our attention to social media. You can approach social media ROI by seeking to determine how well your customers are engaging with you through various outlets.

Social Media Metrics to Follow

The success of your social media strategy depends on how well your target audience interacts with you. You can get a feel for customer engagement using the following key metrics:

●      Facebook Likes—While it’s true that there are many ways to determine how effective your Facebook campaign is, the like button is a great place to start. If your customers “like” your page, that means they’re taking the time to read what you’re posting, they’re giving it some thought, and they’re expressing their approval.

●      Re-tweets—The re-tweet tells you that your Twitter followers have engaged with your content enough to share it with their friends. Overall, re-tweets are more important than the number of followers you have since they tell you who is engaging with your content.

●      Google +—Google + offers many of the same benefits as Facebook, but with a few new features. Google + enables you to create circles, segmenting your friend group so that you can designate particular content for particular circles. It also incorporates a video chat feature and content gathering option (similar to an RSS feed). While Google + is still very much in its infancy stage, marketers have already seen great potential for reaching a particular audience with a targeted message.

Start monitoring your Google + account by using Google Analytics to watch Google + generated website traffic as well as clicks and actions.

●      Overall Mentions—Keeping track of your overall brand mentions is the best way to determine how well your branding strategy is working for you. Find out what people are saying about your brand using the following tools:

○    Google Alerts—Setup brand related keyword and phrase alerts and receive a daily report of the overall mentions you receive in a variety of categories including news, blogs, web, and video.

○    HootSuite—A little more sophisticated than Google Alerts, HootSuite is a full social media management tool that allows you to monitor your brand mentions as well as organize them and filter them so the results are more usable, and you can also schedule post across various networks. Free version allows you to monitor up to 5 accounts!

Monitoring your social media metrics along with your SEO effectiveness will give you a good grasp of how well your online marketing efforts are reaching your intended audience. In the next post, we’ll take a look at how to bring all this information together as you formulate your best online marketing strategy.

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Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

As we discussed in Part One of this series, measuring the success of your online marketing strategy depends on understanding the differences between ROI in traditional marketing and ROI in the online world. When it comes to your SEO strategy, your ultimate goal is of course generating traffic that leads to conversions, but in order to truly gauge the effectiveness of your campaign, you’ll need to understand the dynamics that go into reaching that goal. Analytics programs offer a lot of data, but sometimes it can all be overwhelming. Let’s start by discussing what metrics you should be watching.

Metrics That Determine SEO Success

The most important metrics in determining SEO success revolve around rankings and customer interaction with your site. Keep an eye on the following metrics to see how well your campaign performs:

• Rankings—Keep an eye on rankings in all the major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) to determine whether your target audience can find you.
• Website Traffic—Monitor who is visiting your site and where they’re coming from to find out whether your SEO strategy is bringing people in.
• Bounce Rates—How many people enter and leave your site without ever clicking? Find out whether your SEO strategy is targeting the right audience by tracking bounce rate.
• Page Load Time—If your page takes too long to load, you’ll lose a significant portion of visitors before they ever see your site. Monitor your load time in order to tweak hefty site elements when needed.
• Pages Visited—Does your conversion funnel operate as you intend it too? Does your SEO strategy target the audience most interested in what you have to offer? Find out by watching which pages your visitors view.

SEO Analytics Tools

With your short list of SEO metrics in hand, the next step is to choose an analytics tool that will make it easy to monitor those metrics. Here are the best of the bunch:

Google Analytics—Probably the best free analytics tool available, Google Analytics lets you segment, customize, and track your website metrics in order to hone your online marketing strategy strategy.

Google Webmaster Tools—View reports detailing your site’s visibility on Google as well as your average search engine ranking.

Authority Labs—Follow overall rankings and keyword data with this fully automated tool.

In Part 3 of this series, we are going to look at some social media metrics you should be monitoring as well as some tools that will help with the management of your social media accounts.

Be sure and subscribe for the latest web marketing strategies and updates!

Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

Recently, I have been on a landing page generation machine. I recently launched 11 landing pages, and have another 15 in the works. I am in the process of creating content for these landing pages, while one of my teammates at SEORCHERS works on building them out. It can be a rather large and daunting task if you are doing it all, so I have become a huge fan of delegation.

As online marketing has become more integrated into company marketing strategies, many marketers have begun facing tough questions such as “How much revenue does this initiative bring in?” and “What results can you show me from the social media strategy we began implementing last month?” While these seem like straightforward questions from a big picture perspective, they can actually be tough to answer down on the ground. So often, the results we see aren’t couched in dollars and cents, at least not right away. That’s why it’s important to know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and whether or not it’s producing the results you want.

Let’s Dig a Little Deeper

In this series of articles, we’ll be taking a look at how you can get answers to the above questions. More importantly, we’ll discover what ROI actually means in the online marketing realm and how you can measure it concretely. For now, you just need to know that ROI for your online marketing strategy can take many different forms including conversions, leads, contacts, and customer relationships. In order to calculate these sometimes elusive metrics, you’ll also need to know how to gather data using analytics tools, what individual elements you should be monitoring, and what tools will give you the best results.

In Part Two of this series, we’ll discuss what metrics will give you the information you need for your SEO initiative and we’ll take a look at some of the tools available to keep you on track. Part Three will tackle social media metrics and tools. And in Part Four, we’ll talk about how to put all that information together to keep your online marketing strategy performing at its best.

What You Can Expect To See

The most important thing monitoring your metrics will do for you is show you whether you’re meeting your goals. Creating a website that brings in no traffic or a Twitter account that generates no leads does nothing for your company. That’s obvious, but what may not be so obvious is whether the methods you’re currently using are doing what you think they are. Knowing what metrics to watch and what tools will be your best eyes will help you keep your finger on the pulse of your online marketing strategy, enabling you to tweak what needs tweaking and scrap what needs scrapping. And if your strategy is bringing in more customers than ever before, you’ll have something concrete to celebrate.

This is the first of a four part series. I’ll be rolling out Parts 2 (SEO Metrics and Tools) and 3 (Social Media Metrics and Tools) next week and Part 4 (Bringing it all together) over the course of the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned!

Be sure and subscribe for the latest web marketing strategies and updates!

Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.