StuckOn » Analytics

Website statistics: What customers don’t do can tell you what they do do

Carl Hopkinson — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 08:05:54 +0000

Some of the data from your site will tell you what your customers do. When you look even closer however, it will tell you what they don’t do as well. Both are important when it comes to search engine optimisation.

Spotting what your customers do do is a simple matter of looking at your site statistics, something that you should do frequently during SEO. Your statistics will tell you where customers go, how they get there and how long they stay there. Spotting what your customers don’t do takes a little voodoo. Or at least a little intuition, smart thinking and psychology.

How to see the gaps in your site statistics

The gaps in your statistics just take a little clever thinking to spot. It’s all about seeing what your customers don’t do. For example, if you’re appearing in the top ten for a particular keyword but are getting little traffic from that position than for other similar keywords, then this could be a silent signal that your listing for that keyword isn’t working. If you’re having trouble with a geographical keyword such as a Cheshire based one or a broad generic one, then you might want to think about refining it to a more specific location or keyword combination.

What to do with the information

Once you know what your customers aren’t doing, you can start to work towards getting them to do instead. The silent signals you receive will come with attached clues, usually in the form of successful competitors. Take these clues and work them into your SEO jobs.

Listen to what your customers aren’t telling you. It will help you to do that voodoo that you do so well.

How do I know how many people are looking at my website?

Carl Hopkinson — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 06:49:35 +0000

Before you even think about SEO for your website, you first need to know how many visitors your site is getting already, where they’re coming from and what keywords they’re searching on. Without knowing how many visitors your website is getting already how can you even put a value on any SEO services you might get, and how important increased traffic is to you now?

For example, you may be getting one enquiry per day from your website. You may be happy with that, but if your website is getting 500 visitors per day, then that one enquiry would represent a very poor conversion rate indeed. This would mean that your website needs looking at from a design and conversion point of view.

If however your website is only getting a handful of visitors each day, then one enquiry would be very good. You could therefore presume that, through some improved search engine optimisation, you could hope to drastically increase the number of enquiries or sales your website is generating.

Knowing your traffic levels is essential – and it’s information you can easily find out for free with Google Analytics. There are many companies online offering traffic reporting software, some at very high prices, but Google Analytics is completely free, and it will tell you how many people you’ve had on your website, what they’ve searched on to find you, where they’ve come, what pages they’ve looked at and, and this should be really interesting, even what towns they’re based in when they’ve been looking at your site.

With this sort of information you can better cater your website’s content to suit your visitors, and thus improve your conversions.

Of course, if you find Google Analytics confusing, or need to know what to do to increase your traffic levels and conversion rates, you could always ask the experts.

How many visitors does my website need to be successful?

Matt Jones — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 06:15:47 +0000

Most people consider SEO to be all about rankings. Where your website ranks in certain search engines, for certain keywords, is often considered the most important result from any search engine optimisation campaign.

This is of course utter nonsense. Where your website ranks for what keywords is only a small part of what SEO is all about. What is more important, for example, is how much traffic you receive from those keywords. There’s no point ranking at the top of Google for a search phrase if nobody is searching for it – it’s like having exclusive rights to a product that no-one wants.

So, armed with the knowledge that visitors are more important than rankings, how many visitors to your website do you need?

This is another of those open ended questions unfortunately, as it depends on what your website is, what your conversion rate is like and where your visitors are coming from. For example, if your website is a community website, with a forum, and you’re attempting to build a community whereby visitors sign up, make posts and interact with each other – 300 visitors per month is not sufficient. Instead you’ll be looking more towards the 30,000 and over mark.

However, if your website does nothing more than sell accessories for tarantulas, and your visitors are specifically looking for your product, then 300 visitors per month could be just what you need.

As mentioned earlier, the source of your visitors is also a factor. If you’re receiving a lot of untargeted traffic from casual surfers from Google’s Image Search, looking at the photos on your website from a curiosity point of view, then your conversion rate will be very low and, as such, you will require far higher traffic levels in order to be successful.

The long and the short of it is: it doesn’t really matter where your website ranks for certain keywords (because they may not be searched for in the first place) and it doesn’t even matter too much how much traffic you receive (as much of it could be irrelevant anyway) – what really, really matters is how many conversions you receive.

It’s just like business as a whole really. Rankings and traffic and like turnover and sales volume – it’s all very well having them high, but it’s profit that truly counts… and online, profit is conversions.

How to know when your keywords are wrong

Cheryl Mathews — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 06:49:10 +0000

When you start a new business, it’s important to first conduct market research into the potential business to see whether it is a viable enterprise. You need to look at the size of the market, the strength of the competition and whether you can make enough profit to warrant the time and effort. You wouldn’t just have an idea and begin the business without any research, as you could be wasting your time flogging a dead horse in what proves to be a very costly mistake.

So why do so many people do this with their SEO?

It’s an all too common sight in the field of search engine optimisation to see websites, often promoted by SEO agencies, being optimised for the wrong keywords. Businesses can spend a lot of money, often thousands or tens of thousands of pounds, targeting keywords that are of no use to them in any capacity, or ones they have no hope of ever ranking for.

Let’s give you a for instance.

Say your business is in the divorce industry, and you’re a divorce solicitor offering quick online divorces. What words instantly come to mind when you think of divorce?

There’s the obvious, ‘divorce’, for example. But how competitive is that to rank for? You would need a sizable budget to be able to rank for such a generic keyword, or an already very established website, and how many people who were looking for your kind of service would simply use the word ‘divorce’ for their search?

No, that’s not the keyword you should be investing your time, effort and money into optimising for – although you will find that by optimising for the correct keywords, your rankings for ‘divorce’ would improve anyway.

How about other keywords such as ‘marriage breakdown’, ‘break-ups’, ‘split’ and ‘annulment’?

These keywords are all relevant to your business, and they’re the sort of words that should be appearing on your website, yes, but again they’re not the sort of keywords that you should be optimising for as such. Imagine that you’re looking for the services of a divorce solicitor, one that offers online divorce – what are the benefits of that service? What words would you use to find a service such as that?

More relevant keywords would be ‘divorce solicitors’, ‘online divorce’, ‘quickie divorce’, ‘cheap divorce’ and ‘divorce advice’.

Notice how they all contain the word ‘divorce’ anyway, so by optimising for keywords such as these you would be optimising for divorce as well?

Remember, when choosing keywords you need to ensure:

Keywords are not too competitive
Keywords are not too generic
Keywords are relevant to your service
Keywords will convert

Facebook Insights

Carl Hopkinson — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 12:42:03 +0000

When you run a website, whether it’s a blog, a brochure site or an ecommerce website, you can track how many people access your site using stats packages such as Google Analytics. Analytics even tells you what countries your visitors came from, what counties or regions they’re based in and even what towns in some instances.

What Analytics doesn’t give you however is a breakdown on the age-group of your website’s visitors, and their sex. For this sort of information you’d need your visitors to register on your website and enter their full details – which is rare, and unlikely.

With Facebook however, when you have a Facebook Fan Page you can get the full details of your page’s fans, the visitors to your page, and their sex and age. This allows you to determine exactly how to cater your offerings to your audience in order to maximise the effectiveness of your page’s content.

This snapshot for example shows that the male/female split of the audience for the Fan Page is almost 50/50, with 54% male and 46% female. Such a high level of female members of any page is rare. The details also tell us that the most common age of visitors to the page is between 35-44, followed by 25-34.

Imagine how much help a page like this would offer you and your Internet marketing efforts.

Facebook Weekly Page Update emails

Carl Hopkinson — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 09:45:05 +0000

Internet marketing companies have been using Facebook for some time now to further promote their name, brand and the websites of their clients online. One of the best ways to do this is with the ‘pages’ section of Facebook, where you can make a ‘fan page’ for your website, your business, your club or even yourself (if you’re that way inclined).

Unlike websites however, Facebook doesn’t offer a lot of reporting with these pages, save for the few scant details you get in the ‘insights’ section of each page, which tells you things like how much post interaction you’ve had in the last week.

This week however Facebook launched a new service where it emailed brief stats to page admins for their Facebook pages. The details came out in a single email, complete with stats for as many Facebook pages that you act as an admin for. The emails offer basic information such as the number of times your page has been viewed in the last week, and how many new fans you’ve acquired that week.

The details also compare the stats with the previous week, so you can see if you’re heading in the right direction. It’s no Google Analytics, but it’s useful to know at a glance how your Facebook page has been doing, and whether it needs an extra push.

The email stats look something like this:

+7 Fans this week (535 total Fans)
11 Wall posts, comments and likes this week (30 last week)
580 Visits to your Page this week (503 Visits last week)

Do you have a Facebook page?

How can I increase my Google ranking?

Cheryl Mathews — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 08:25:11 +0000

It’s a question often asked online, but few websites actually tell you how to do it. Here’s a little tip you can use to help your website to rank a little bit higher in Google’s rankings, and to stand out from the rest.

Firstly, you need to be adding content to your website. This is a given. If you’re not adding regular content in the form of news, articles or blogs, begin now. You can’t expect to become the biggest and the best if you’re not putting the work in to your website.

Now that you are adding regular content, check your website’s statistics. Not your rankings, your statistics. This could be by using Google Analytics, AW Stats, or some other stats package. Have a look at your website’s current traffic and what keywords your visitors are searching for. You want to look for key phrases that are two or more words. This is called ‘longtail search’.

Now, this is the clever bit. Put those key phrases into Google to see where your website ranks for them. You’ll rank somewhere near the first page, or perhaps the second page, if you’re already getting a few visitors from them. If you find that you are on the first page of Google, near the bottom, or on the second page of Google for some of these phrases – and you know that your visitors are searching for these phrases, you can increase your traffic by using them.

Here’s what you do:

Write a new blog post, article or news story on your website
Use that exact search phrase in your post
Ideally you should use it as the title of your post
Link back to your original post or page than ranks for the phrase, using that exact search phrase as the anchor text

By following these steps you will increase your ranking for that phrase, and thus you will increase your traffic. Keep doing this each month with new phrases that appear in your statistics.

The more you write, the more your website will rank for, the more traffic you will receive.

Why your search engine rankings are unimportant

Matt Jones — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:14:25 +0000

When you hire an SEO company, or contract the services of an SEO consultant, what is the most important thing you’re hoping they can do for you?

If you said ‘to increase the ranking of your website in the search engines’ you’ve missed the point of search engine optimisation.

Now yes, SEO is about optimising websites so that they appear higher up the search engines. This is obvious. However, this doesn’t necessarily help your website to receive more traffic, or more sales. Your website ranking higher in the search engines is akin to your company increasing its advertising reach so that more magazines and newspapers carry your adverts; it doesn’t necessarily mean that more people will see them!

First of all, you need to get it right from the start and do your homework on your keywords so that you and your SEO company are optimising your website for keywords that people are actually searching for. Secondly, you need to make sure that the people searching for those keywords are doing so because they need your services. Thirdly, you need to make sure that your website is set up to capitalise on any traffic that it receives, so that you have a decent ROI (return on investment).

Your priorities should be, in this order:

Sales and Leads
Traffic
Search Engine Rankings

Your rankings are merely a means to and end, not an end in themselves. If you place all of your emphasis on attaining high rankings for the keywords that you have chosen, then what?

Never lose sight of what’s truly important, as a quality SEO company will include your website’s traffic statistics in your monthly reports, as well as your rankings, and will work with you to improve conversions on your website.