A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure leading a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Internet Marketing session for the team over at NPower Seattle.
NPower has a unique mission – to help Washington state non-profits use technology to better serve their communities. I was really excited to speak to the team because I believe so strongly in what they are doing. And they do it well. I am really impressed at how the NPower Seattle team is leveraging open source technologies, such as the Plone Content Management System, to build fantastic non-profit Websites at a low-cost. Plus, they “get” SEO and the sites they build are very search engine-friendly. NPower Seattle also offers non-profit technology training, non-profit network support, and non-profit database and CRM consulting.
As a FYI, NPower Seattle is the original organization that led to the creation of the larger NPower Network, which provides non-profit technology consulting across the United States (Washington D.C., Atlanta, Charlotte, New York, Austin, etc.).
So if you (or someone you know) needs a non-profit Website in Seattle or Washington, I recommend you contact NPower Seattle.
And if you (or again someone you know) needs non-profit technology help outside of Seattle, you can contact the larger NPower Network organization.
Google Analytics is a great service. It provides a ton of information about your Website visitors, and, best of all, it’s free.
However, it provides SO much information, that for people who don’t use it everyday, it can be difficult to sort out what is important and what isn’t within the Google Analytics reports.
We’re not going to provide a detailed Google Analytics tutorial, instead we want to highlight what we feel are the most important Google Analytics reports and metrics to look at on a frequent basis.
#1 Traffic Sources Overview Report:
This is by far our favorite Google Analytics report – the one we live in when analyzing client sites.
To get to the Traffic Sources report, log into your Google Analytics account, and then click ‘Traffic Sources’ in the left navigation menu. This gives you the Traffic Sources Overview report. This report is very helpful, it tells you where your Website traffic is coming from.
A few definitions of what you see on this page.
> Direct Traffic: Visitors that either typed your Website URL directly into their browser, or had it bookmarked.
> Referring Sites: Visitors that clicked to visit your site from another Website (other than a search engine).
> Search Engines: Visitors that came to your site from a search engine.
The rest of this overview page is pretty self-explanatory.
The one other thing that will help you quickly answer questions with Google Analytics is to become very familiar with the date range drop-down box in the upper-right corner of the Google Analytics page. With this box you can examine specific date ranges, but more importantly after you click the date range drop-down box you will see a check box called ‘Compare to Past.’ Clicking on this will enable you to select two date ranges. After you select the two date ranges and hit the ‘Apply’ button, Google Analytics then presents your data for each date range, and compares on a percentage basis the differences between the data in each date range.
This is really helpful, for example, when you are trying to determine why your Website traffic spiked up so much on a particular day. Just select that day, and then compare it to the same day of the week in the week prior, and you can then look for what traffic source drove the big increase on that particular day. Maybe a particular site wrote a review of your product, maybe your pay-per-click manager bumped up the pay-per-click budget a lot on that particular day. Using ‘Compare to Past’ you’ll have a great chance of figuring it out.
#2 All Traffic Sources Report
The Traffic Sources Overview report is great, but where we really spend time is the All Traffic Sources report. To get to this report from the Traffic Sources Overview report, click the ‘All Traffic Sources’ link in the left navigation menu.
By default when you go to this report, it starts in the ‘Source Medium’ view. This lists the visits you have obtained to your site, ranked in descending order by the source of the traffic. Sources such as: Google, Direct Traffic, Yahoo, Bing, etc. Next to the name of each source, you’ll see a forward slash and then another word – this will be what Google Analytics calls the ‘Medium’ – this is basically the category of source that it is. So, for your Google organic (or unpaid) traffic source, you’ll see it listed as ‘google / organic.’ For any Google pay-per-click traffic you get, you’ll see it listed as ‘google / cpc.’
We also like to look at this traffic source data broken out by the category of traffic it is. To do this, find the ‘Show: source / medium’ drop-down menu and click it and change it to ‘medium’, then you can see your Website traffic summarized into categories of traffic source types or “mediums” as Google Analytics calls them.
There are of course many other Google Analytics reports, but those are the top 2 that we by far spend the most time in on a day-to-day basis.
One final note – if you haven’t set up Google Analytics Conversion Goals, you are missing out on the true power of Google Analytics. More on that in a later post.
It’s official – Microsoft and Yahoo announced today they’ve received regulatory clearance from the U.S. and European Union to combine their search engine efforts.
What does this mean? It means by the 2010 holiday season (or by early 2011, MS and Yahoo are giving themselves some wiggle room on the actual date), when consumers do a search on Yahoo.com, the results will be delivered by Bing.com. They will be Bing.com search results.
Also, the pay-per-click ads that come up when a search is done on Yahoo.com will be delivered by Bing/Microsoft. For pay-per-click advertisers, if they want to run ads on Yahoo.com, when this transition occurs they will now manage those ads using Microsoft’s AdCenter platform (which advertisers currently use to only manage ads shown on Bing.com).
So the big Microsoft/Yahoo search engine deal has received regulatory approval, and it is full steam ahead for the folks at Microsoft and Yahoo working on implementing the transition.
Note: Microsoft and Yahoo have set up a Website to provide ongoing information about this transition.
You’ve seen it as you’ve done searches on Google – the Google Local box:
More and more, Google is inserting this box into Google searches. Typically it is inserted when someone searches for something locally, like ’seattle pizza delivery’ . Because this box often contains 3 (and sometimes 7!) local listings, all of the other organic (i.e. unpaid) search engine listings get pushed down much lower on the results page. This means that even if you did everything right in terms of SEO, and got your Website into the #1 Google organic listing, you would still only be in the 4th unpaid position (or 8th!) on the Google results page. And believe us when we say, the site visitors you get from being in the 4th position on the page are way fewer than the visitors that would come from the 1st position – and if you get pushed down the 8th position on the page, you essentially will not get any site visitors from that search.
This is why, for local businesses, and also for businesses with many locations, Google Local listings are extremely important for your Website traffic.
And here is the tricky part – there are a whole set of SEO activities that you need to do to try to rank high in the Google Local listings – and they are very different from the activities that are used to rank high in the regular Google (unpaid) listings.
Here’s a Top 5 Google Local SEO To Do List:
1) Claim (or Create) Your Google Local Listing
Go to the Google Local Business Center and either claim the Google Local listing that Google has already generated for your business, or create a Google Local listing. During this process, choose categories for your listing that describe the business you are in. Also, in the description of your business (the paragraph you can write) include keywords that people typically use to find your business in the search engine, including your city. Enter the accurate address and phone number for your business. Once you’ve updated your listing, Google will ask you to verify it. This consists of telling the Google system to call you on your business phone number (they give you a PIN and you enter it back into your Google Local account) or Google sometimes will mail you a postcard with a PIN instead. Completing this verification process is key – it helps Google establish confidence that you are indeed the owner of the business and it is at the location and phone number you’ve submitted.
2) Put Your Business Address and Phone Number on Your Website
We have clients put their business address and phone number in the footer of every page of their site. We also have them put it on their Contact Us page. For businesses with multiple locations, the strategy is a bit different, but you want to make it easy for the Google search engine crawlers to get to the addresses of all of your locations. Make sure you have a search-engine friendly locations section.
3) Submit Your Business with the Major Local Data Providers
There are a number of companies who collect data on local businesses. It turns out the search engines rely on these data sources quite a bit in ranking the local business search results. Here is a great list from David Mihm of the key local data providers to have your business listed in.
4) Get Customer Reviews
Encourage your customers to post reviews of your business to popular review sites such a:
- InsiderPages.com
- CitySearch.com
- Yelp.com
- SuperPages.com
Look at your competitors who are ranked above you in the Google Local results and see what sites they have reviews from. They may have reviews from other sites like JudysBook.com or DexKnows.com – if they do then you may want to encourage your customers to post reviews of your business there.
Interestingly, the current thinking is that is doesn’t necessarily matter if your rev hadsiews or positive or negative, but instead that you have a steady, regular stream of reviews being posted. Use your home page, emails you send to customers, your Twitter/Facebook activities, etc. to encourage customers to post reviews of your business.
5) Add Your Location to Your Website’s Page Title Tags
Each page on your Website has what is called a page title tag. It is defined in the HTML code of your site. The page title shows up on your Web pages in the very upper left corner of the Web browser window, next to the Firefox or Internet Explorer icon. You need to get the city or neighborhood that your business is in into your page title tags. This is just a good SEO tactic in general, and is an important factor for Local SEO as well.
Chair 10 Marketing provides SEO and pay-per-click services for businesses, including local SEO. Contact us if you are interested in our services.
For this article, thanks go to David Mihm, Mike Blumenthal and Shagun Vatsa for their ongoing great work in local search.
Clients often ask us, “Shouldn’t we just focus all our efforts on SEO, because once we get high organic listings then we don’t have to pay the search engines for those clicks?”
Well, if it was as simple as that, then Google would not be a $196 billion company.
It is true, the optimal situation to strive for is one in which your Website ranks in the Top 5 organically for all of the search engine keyword search terms that are important to your business. However, given the effort it takes to achieve a Top 5 organic ranking for most search terms (because of competition), and given the need of most businesses to start driving more targeted traffic to their Website sooner than later, most companies use a combination of both SEO and pay-per-click.
With pay-per-click advertising, you can quickly run your ads against thousands of keyword searches. Compare that to SEO, where you have to work hard to get ranked in the Top 5 organic positions for just a handful of keyword searches.
For our clients, we start out by understanding their business and target customers. Then, we do exhaustive keyword research to understand what people type into search engines when they are looking for their products or services. We use this research to come up with an initial list of keywords to target for SEO work. At the same time however, we recommend launching a pay-per-click advertising effort which will let us run ads against thousands of keyword searches that are potentially relevant to the business. Then, using detailed performance tracking, we measure which keywords produce leads and sales, and which don’t.
This data from the pay-per-click campaign then either verifies that the initial keyword targets for SEO work were correct, or that this SEO keyword target list needs some editing.
So in this way, pay-per-click advertising and SEO are complementary. Pay-per-click campaigns quickly give us data on which keyword searches are worth investing SEO effort into.
