Real-Time Report Cards For Your Online Business

Remember when you were at school, at the end of every term you'd get your dreaded report card, take it home to your parents and they'd discipline you to improve your grades. As we grew up we learnt to appreciate report cards and use the feedback to improve ourselves. This thinking applies to your business as well, successful business owners intuitively know that it's important to constantly measure and improve your performance.

The Top 3 Most Underrated Web Statistics

Let's imagine you're looking at your website's report card. It's easy to understand what visitors are, what your online sales figures mean and so on. But most business owners don't know that there are three not-so-obvious analytics that you should really be paying attention to.

1. New and Returning Visits. This comparision shows you something very important about your website - do people come back after they leave for the first time? You should be working to improve this ratio. The fact is that the more times someone returns to your website, the higher the chance they will buy. There is a high correlation between people who return to your site and people who actually pay for your product or services.
2. Top 5 Web Pages. Generally speaking, a list of your top 5 web pages will tell you the most likely path of users through your site. #1 is where they start. Those that click through will go to #2, and so on. Use this information to make sure that the most important information is on the right pages, and to make sure your customers are going in the right direction.
3. Top Search Phrases. How are people finding your site through search engines? This metric tells you exactly what brings people to your site. Use this information to optimize your site around those keywords to increase your traffic. Alternatively, you can use this to tell you which important keywords are under-used, and increase their usage.

A Centralised Reporting and Analytics Console...

Google Analytics has a completely centralized reporting console for your Online Business. From the one screen, you can analyze your online shop performance, your website, your web forms and your website's visitors.

With a wide range of reports at your fingertips in one central place, you've got the metrics you need so that you can understand your online business better than ever before.

Get in contact with us and we will guide you through implementing Google Analytics for your website

Google's Adword Auction

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is something that people feel quite wary about, nobody wants to over pay for their ad but at the same time underpaying will not produce results either. Very quickly a low cost PPC campaign will discarded because you will feel that you have had no return on your investment.

Google have produced a video which simply explains their PPC system and I'd recommend you spend next 10 minutes or so watching this video, it could save you a lot of time and confusion in the future

Search Engines and Your Website

SEO

One definition: Search Engine Optimisation is the process of streamlining the structure and content of a website to make it position well in search engine results.

Originally search engines were quite basic and you could do well for search phrases based just on the keywords that were on your website, nowadays with Google dominating, the ranking methodologies are far more complex and Google state there are about 200 factors that are considered by their search engine before you are given a placing in the results.

Some of these factors have more weight than others. Adjusting your website to take consideration of just one of these can create a positive outcome for your site in search placings. Combining all of them could mean that your website could jump from 60th place to 4th place or even 1st. It does all depend though on your competition and what they're doing to make sure they do well in Google too. As SEO becomes more popular, ranking sites does too but clever planning from the start will result in good placings.

Some factors to keep in mind:

Page Titles

The title of a page is the writing at the very top of a web browser. Google sees this almost like the title of a book. The more descriptive the title the better for Google results. Consider a book called "Dante's Inferno", it might be hard to decipher what the rest of the book contains; now compare this to "101 recipes using beef". One is far far more descriptive than the other.

Google puts weight into the title of a page and will point to the title when giving search results.

 

If your front page has a title of "Murphy's" then Google can't decipher much. If you have "Murphy's Crystal Goblet manufacturers" then they get more information. How many people will search for a company name in Google compared to a description of what they're looking for? This applies to every single page on your website, not just the front page.

The Title of each page can be changed in the source code of the page. This is what it would look like:

<title>Gastronom.ie - Food and Drink in Ireland</title>

Meta Description

A page's description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. Whereas a page's title may be a few words or a phrase, a page's description meta tag might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph. Description meta tags are important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages. Adding description meta tags to each of your pages is always a good practice in case Google cannot find a good selection of text to use in the snippet.

Like the Title attribute, you can change or add a description to your page in the source code. This is what it would look like:

<meta name="description" content="Gastronom.ie is your single source for all things Irish Food and Drink. Containing delicious recipes, restaurant reviews, world cuisine and all types of comparisons of wine, beer and everything else." />

Body of the page

The body of each page on your website will be examined by Google too. It will compare the content here to the title of the page. If they match/suit each other then it will consider that the page and content are well structured.

Headers

Headers on a page are also important, treat them almost like chapters or section titles in a book. If you can be descriptive of the content of the trailing paragraphs, it's good for readers and it's also good for Google

Links

Google excels at automating processes and removing as many humans as possible from the mix, yet if it wasn't for humans, Google wouldn't have done so well. Google changed search forever when it stated that a site or webpage that gets a lot of links should get more attention from them and rank better. A link can be seen as a vote for a page. The more links, the more it probably should be seen as valuable/worthy. Websites that get a lot of links do well in search results. On closer inspection it is more in-depth in that though.

Volume of links

The number of links is good. Most links are good. More links, if Google trusts them is good for your site and lifts the boat in a way. However, if the links are more focused with their text and come from very trusted sites, your site can do better again.

Linking text

The text in a link pointing to your website or webpage is very very important. Your website can actually do well for search results for certain keywords even if they are not in your page title or in the body of your page. This can be done by other websites linking to you with keywords in the text of the link. This is why the Irish Communications Regulator (ComReg) ranks first in Google for "telecoms poodle" or why George Bush was number 1 for months for the phrase "miserable failure"

Link weight

In addition, a well ranking website will boost you more than websites that don't rank as well. A blog that nobody links to might not impact your search rankings if they link to you but if Trinity College (for example) links to your site then you might get a boost that's enough to push you up a place or two in search rankings.

Age of website

The older your website, the more Google will see it as having some weight or credentials. With the ease of registering and uploading a website, a website can appear online within minutes of a news event happening with keywords about that news event. Sites like these spring up in order to act like traps for people who will visit and will be directed to click on sneaky ads and make the site money. Google realises this and so does not give as much weight (and many times no weight at all) to new websites. Your new domain could very well end up in the Google "sandbox" for weeks or months until Google begins to trust it. If your site gets links from credible websites, the time in the sandbox can shorten quite a lot.

Freshness

Google lives and thrives on content and especially likes new content. If you update your website on a regular basis, Google will come and visit you on a more regular basis. Google is now apparently visiting sites every few minutes and content from some sites will appear in search results within 15 minutes of the content being created. Keeping your website updated and fresh will get rewarded by Google but in addition it will get rewarded by people who will also come back to you.

Google.ie/Google local

You may have noticed (In Ireland) that you are redirected to Google.ie when you go to Google.com. Google wants people to use the local version of their search engines as they see local content as being of more value to people in that geographic location. A lot of what people search for can be addressed by local websites and local businesses. To make it more valuable, Google guesses as to the Irishness of a website. If you have a .ie domain name like supportsolutions.ie then Google says you are probably Irish. In addition if the machine/web server where your website resides is owned by a known Irish entity then Google says you or your site are probably Irish too. What Google does then is reward you in Google.ie search listings. You get an extra nudge in the local versions of Google. You are not punished though in the Google.com listings.

You can also tell Google you are Irish or even part of your site is Irish using the Google Webmaster tools which you install/integrate with your website. That way, Irish sites who have special Spanish or German sections of their websites can do well in Google.ie for most of their site and do well for the Spanish section in Google.es and well for the German section in Google.de We don’t go into Google Webmaster Tools here as that’s an entire document in itself.

There is no secret to rank well but...

Google themselves tell you that writing good and engaging content without using dodgy shortcuts is what will get you traffic from them and they're correct. In addition, links, the currency of the web are given out by people, You can write content that is loved by Google and it being a machine might not spot it's gibberish but a human will and may not link to it and may not visit it. A site that doesn't get links and visits might alert Google to it being not so valuable, despite appearing to the machine as being well structured and written. Of course Google is probably not far off being able to spot human readable content...

A guide to print off and read is Google’s own SEO guide available here:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

These are the basics, if you are already doing this and want to improve more it would be worth talking to an SEO expert.

This extract was first published by Damien Mulley of Mulley Communcations who kindly granted us permission to reproduce