Google Analytics is a fantastic free service that lets you monitor your website performance and the activities visitors take on your site. Tracking your website performance is a vital part of search engine optimisation (SEO), but it can become even more valuable when you start to track your online conversions.
A conversion is an action you want someone to take on your site. There are a range of conversions that you might want to track – such as when a visitor downloads an ebook, registers for an event, signs up to your newsletter or makes a purchase.
When you create a goal in Google Analytics, you are effectively telling it what your desired conversions are. When you get down to the nitty gritty; goal conversion are really the primary metric for measuring how well your site fulfils business objectives.
Setting up goals is easy. We’ll take you on a step by step walk through of setting up a goal – this example goal will be tracking when people complete a Contact Us form. All we need to know is the URL of the page people are taken to once they have completed the form. For this example we’ll use www.SMEketing.com/thank-you.html. Most goal pages should be pages people only get access to once they have completed an action. So they’re most often thank you pages – thank you for signing up to our newsletter/thank you for contacting us, we’ll be in touch shortly/thank you for buying our product… etc. It’s important that you know the page/URL you want to measure and that visitors can only access this page by completing the desired action.
So…
1. Log into your Analytics account – on the Overview page, select ‘Edit’ on the right hand side:
2. Scroll halfway down and click on ‘+ Add Goal’ (your goals can be split into four sets, each with 5 goals = 25 goals in total overall. The image below is selecting to create the first goal in set 2):
You will then be presented with the following page:
Give your goal a name. For this example we can call it ‘Contact Form Completion’. Then select ‘URL Destination’.
Then enter in your goal URL, select if it is case sensitive or not, and then enter in a value for the goal. This is optional, but if you know that the conversion you’re tracking is worth a certain amount, it can help you get a better idea of the ROI you’re getting from your website.
If you have a specific sales funnel that you have created, you can set this up to be tracked also. For example, you may be directing people to a landing page (via Google AdWords or some other form of online advertising), they then click on a call to action button which takes them to a page with a form, they then complete the form and are taken to the thank you page. So your funnel looks like:
www.SMEketing.com/landing-page.html
www.SMEketing.com/landing-page-contact.html
www.SMEketing.com/thank-you.html
The funnel section is optional. Once you’re happy, you can click on ‘Save Goal’ and you’re done!
Tracking Goal Conversions
You’ll be able to track your goal conversions throughout Analytics. You’ll see a special ‘Goals’ section in the menu where you can see all the information and statistics.
You’ll also be able to track the goals on various other pages. For example
If you look at the Referring Sites report, you’ll be able to see how many goals were completed from traffic arriving from various sources.
Did Twitter send 100 people with 68 conversions? Then you know that you’re getting a good ROI from your social media.
Looking at the Browser report you’ll be able to see how many goals were completed by people using various browsers
Did more people using Firefox convert than Internet Explorer users? Maybe there’s an issue with your site in Internet Explorer?
Tracking conversions is an extremely important part of online marketing – if you can track what works and what doesn’t, how can you improve your marketing efforts?
As always with Google Analytics, this is a huge subject. If you have any questions about creating and monitoring goals, please leave a comment or email us on info@SMEketing.com.
I am organising a trip up to London with some friends in September. We’ve decided to save some money and use the MegaBus to travel from Southampton. Due to my love of all thing organising, I was put in charge of sorting out the costs etc. So first thing I did was to Google MegaBus. Now I was in a rush and my typing went awry and I accidentally typed ‘Meaga bus’. Without even really looking at the list of results, I clicked on the first link:
And this is what I was presented with:
So I had the quite reasonable impression that their site was down for maintenance. As an alternative I logged onto the National Express website to see how much their coaches were.
Once I had my information from the National Express I emailed my friends to tell them that I couldn’t get any information from MegaBus, but that the National Express seemed pretty reasonable and that we should just book with them. It was only then that my friend said she’d also tried the MegaBus site and was able to access it without any problems. So I went back to check and realised the error I’d made.
Even if you type ‘MegaBus’ correctly into Google, the maintenance page is still the third result. It would be interesting to look at their analytics to see how many visits this page gets; I bet it’s shockingly high.
A robots.txt is a file you can create in which you can list all the pages (URLs) of your website that you don’t want the search engines to index. There are many reasons why you wouldn’t want certain pages to show in the search results. This MegaBus maintenance page is just one such example. Other examples include:
Random pages such as your thank you or error pages
If you are in the process of building your website or new pages and don’t want your unfinished work to appear in the search results
If your website includes information that you don’t want people to find whilst searching online (such as member only information that isn’t hidden behind a password)
Any duplicate content you may have. For example if you had content in both a web page and in PDF format you would want to add one of those to your robot.txt file to avoid being penalised
The file itself is a simple text file, which can be created in Notepad. It must be saved to the root directory of your site – which is the directory where your home page or index page is.
You can find out more about robots.txt files and how to create them here http://www.robotstxt.org
Have you ever found any pages in the search engine results that you shouldn’t have? Let us know in the comments!
In our final post about Google Webmaster Tools, we explain what all the reports mean and how you can use some of them to help improve the performance of your website.
Dashboard
Tells you a summary of your key reports – search queries, crawl rate, keywords, sitemaps and links to your page
Site configuration
Sitemaps– this page will show you what sitemaps you’ve uploaded, how many indexed URLs it contains and if there are any issues with it.
Crawler access– if you’ve added a robots.txt file, this is where it’ll be. If you haven’t, this is where you can generate one. A robots.txt file is a list of URLs that you don’t want Google to index. This would be useful for private, out of data or duplicate content.
Sitelinks– sitelinks are links to a site’s interior pages. If you have any, you’ll be shown them here.Change of address – this page tells you what to do if your website is going to move to a new domain.
Settings – this is an important page. Here you can tell Google what country you are targeting which is important if you only work with customers in one country. You can also set what your preferred domain is: either http://www.SMEketing.com or http://SMEketing.com.
Your site on the web
Search queries- here you’ll see a similar graph to those within Google Analytics. You’ll see how many impressions your site had and how many clicks. You’ll also be able to see what keywords people used to find your site – how many impressions those keywords created and how many clicks resulted. You can also see your average position for these terms. It’s important to remember that this tells you how people are finding your site at the moment – if you are optimising your site for a particular keyterm, but are not yet ranking well for it, it’s unlikely to show up in this report. This report is useful in telling you where you can direct a little bit of effort to get improved results – if you are ranking 4 or 5 for a keyword you know converts well, with a bit of extra effort you could improve his rank and massively improve click throughs.
Links to your site – Here Google will tell you the number of links pointing to your site. It’ll also tell who what pages those links point to. Like most websites, the homepage will normally have the most links. Not all of these links will be great quality – link building is all about quality over quantity (although having a huge quantity of great quality links is the ideal!). This report will help you see if you have important pages with a low volume of links pointing to it – so you know where to direct your link building activity.
Keywords- If you’ve done your keyword research you should have a good understanding of what your website should be optimised for. This Keyword report tells you the most common keywords Google found when crawling your site. The terms at the top are those which are mentioned most often. These should match the terms you’ve optimised your site for. If there’s an important keyterm that’s not reflected in this list, you need to go back and amend your copy (although remember, no keyword stuffing!! Keep keywords to within 3-5%). If you click on one of these keywords, it’ll show you what pages of your website this term appears on.
Internal links – This report tells you the internal links you have to each page. Internal linking is an important part of SEO. Your most important pages should have the highest number of links pointing to them. The volume of links should go down for less important pages.
Subscriber stats – If you have an RSS feed associated with a blog, news page or any other page, this report will show you how many people are subscribed to them.
Diagnostics
Malware - Malware is a piece of software, such as a virus or spyware that can attach itself to your site. You should see the message “Google has not detected any malware on this site.” Call your IT guys if you’re not getting this message!
Crawl errors- This report tells you if Google has found any problems whilst crawling your site. The most common issues would be 404 pages not found and broken links. However, this report can often show pages/links that dont’ exist anymore. It’s not a great report in terms of accuracy. If you want to find broken links on your site, visit Xenu at http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
Crawl stats- This graph shows you your site’s crawl histroy over the last 90 days. It shows you the pages crawled, kb’s downloaded and the time spent downloading on a daily basis.
HTML suggestions – This is a useful area. It’ll tell you if Google has found any issues with the content of your site or with the title tags or meta descriptions (notice it doesn’t mention meta keywords here… that’ because Google doesn’t pay attention to them anymore!).
Labs
Fetch as Googlebot- You can request to see pages as Google bots sees them – without any snazzy design, pictures of any of that bumf! You can use this to check that Google is seeing your site in the way you want it to.
Site performance - Google is beginning to place more importance on the load speed of your site. People don’t to wait ages for a webpage to load, so Google is starting to place preference on faster loading sites. This report gives you a nice looking graph showing how your page download speeds have averaged over the last few months.
So that’s Google Webmaster Tools explained. It’s best if you spend some time clicking about and exploring the reports. It’s pretty easy to use and can give you some excellent information to help improve your site’s performance. Even though this is Google Webmaster Tools, making changes to improve your site will also help its rankings in the other major search engines.
If you have read our other posts on registering your site with Google Webmaster Tools, you should both understand the importance of this to your website SEO, and also now have an account and your website should be verified. If you still need to undertake these steps, read these last two blog posts:
There is a huge amount of valuable information that you can get from Google Webmaster, but you need to know where it is, and what to do with it.
Firstly, you should submit an xml Sitemap. This is basically a list of all the URLs in your website. It helps to tell Google about all your pages; including pages which for some reason or another they may not be aware of.
There are many reasons Google may not crawl every page on your site naturally, so this is why Sitemaps are helpful. Google states, that Sitemap’s are useful if:
Your site has dynamic content.
Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process—for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or images.
Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn’t well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.
To create an xml Sitemap:
Visit http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ add your site URL to the box (ignore the other boxes and options) and click on ‘Start’.
You will then need to save this and upload the file to your website.
Click on ‘Site Configuration’ and then ‘Sitemaps’
Click on ‘Add a Sitemap’
You will be presented with a box with your domain name with a field at the end of it – type in sitemap.xml and then click on submit.
And that’s it. Google will tell you if there is a problem with your Sitemap, but if you have followed these instructions you should have submitted it successfully.
Our next post is the long overdue explanation of what information Google Webmaster Tools can give you and how to interpret the data to improve your website.
If you found this information useful, but feel like you don’t have time to manage your online marketing, please get in touch. We’re online marketing experts and love nothing more than getting stuck into websites, helping our customers get more business from their online endeavours! Email us today on info@SMEketing.com.
Our previous post introduced Google Webmaster – what it was and how it can benefit your website in terms of its performance and how it can aid you with any search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts.
In order to get the benefits of Google Webmaster, you first need to register and verify your site with Google Webmaster. It’s a very quick and easy process. To find out how to do it, watch the video below:
The next blog post will outline what information you can get from Google Webmaster and how to use it to make your site perform better in Google.
One of the most basic, but important things you can do for your website (in terms of search engine optimisation – SEO), is to ensure that each and every page has its own unique, keyword rich title tag .
The title tag can be found at the top of your source code within the < title > and < /title > tags (on a web page, click on View > Source Code to view the page code).
Where will I see my title tag?
The page title will be shown within your site in the web browser here:
It is also shown within the search results here:
Because the title tag is shown in the search result pages, creating a well crafted title could also lead to an increased click through rate.
What should I include in my title tag?
We’d recommend a mixture of your company name and keywords. If you’re targeting a specific geographical area, include this as well. It’s important to remember that search engines only display a certain number of characters within your title. It varies between search engines, but if you aim to keep your title under 70 characters you’ll be fine.
For example, if you were an accounting firm in Fareham in Hampshire called Bill & Ben, you would may want to include your company name, your target area of Hampshire, as well as some keywords (which you would have hopefully researched already!). If you’re aware that the term ‘book-keeping’ and ‘tax returns’ are two of your major keywords, you could craft a title that looks like:
Bill & Ben Tax Accountants Hampshire
or you could have
Bill & Ben Book-Keeping Accountants Hampshire
However, you could try and fit it all in:
Bill & Ben Accountants – Tax Returns & Book-Keeping Hampshire
or
Tax Returns & Book-Keeping Hampshire > Bill & Ben Accounting Fareham
You can seperate or split the title using various characters. The common ones are: – > and |. There’s no “correct” one to use. Sometimes a ‘|’ might be better to split up different subjects such as ‘Tax Accountants | Book-Keeping’. Whereas a ‘>’ can be better when the next section follows on from the first, i.e. ‘Hampshire Accountants > Bill & Ben’.
You can use proper sentences if you like ‘Bill & Ben are Hampshire based accountants’ would also work well.
Try not to get into the trap of spending hours fiddling and obsessing over your title tags. Just make sure they make sense, conveys the content on the page well, and include your desired keywords.
If you’re ranking well for a particular search term, but you’re not getting a lot of clicks, it could be that your title tag isn’t compelling enough. Sometimes it can take a bit of testing and tweaking to get it right.
Our next post will be focusing on another important website tag – the meta description!
Until then, cheerio. If you have any questions or comments regarding your title tags, or if you’ve seen a vast improvement in your rankings because of changes you made to your title tags – let us know in the comments below, or email us on info@SMEketing.com.
SMEketing pride ourselves on being a full service, modern marketing agency, We offer a host of services to our clients, from traditional brochure design, copywriting, all the way to social media marketing and search engine optimisation. However, recently there has been a real trend for a specific service – website design.
For a small business, getting a new website, whether it’s for a new venture or redesigning an existing website, can be a very confusing, time consuming and expensive process. Small businesses need websites that are:
Inexpensive
Easy to update and maintain
Future proof
Make use of social media marketing, such as
Blogging
Twitter integration
Social bookmarking
Search engine friendly
Look credible and trustworthy
Supports their goals and objectives
Promotes them in line with their corporate standards
Procuring a website that meets all the above is difficult to say the least. We’ve heard enough horror stories to know that obtaining all eight points is near on impossible. So this is why we’re about to launch our new service; Your Social Business.
Your Social Business aims to do all eight points above and more. We’re creating a Social Business website for it right now, so watch this space!
In the meantime, if Your Social Business sound like it’s a right fit for your website needs, please give us a call on 023 8083 7271, or message us on the new Twitter account – http://twitter.com/YourSocialBiz.
With the majority of people (approx 80%) searching the internet before they purchase a product or before they get in touch with a company they want to work with, it’s vital that all small business have an online presence that conveys a feeling of trust and creditability.
Everyone has had the experience of clicking onto a website, only to get the feeling that it hasn’t been updated since the mid 1990’s! What do you do when you get to a site like that? Click the back button and go to the next search result that Google gave you, that’s what! Have a think about your small business website – what do you think people feel when they first arrive? Do they immediately trust your company? Trust that you can deliver a good product or service? Do they feel it’s worth the investment of their time to spend ten minutes browsing through your site? Or do they get a worried feeling and decide to leave without even reading what you’ve got written on your homepage?
However, ensuring your website has a feeling of credibility isn’t just about good design. Granted, that does make up a lot of it. In the same way that we all judge books by their cover (even though we know we shouldn’t), we all judge websites on that initial split second view.
I’ve been reading a report by BJ Fogg from Stanford University. He carried out a huge research study into exactly what makes a website trustworthy. You can view the report here, or browse through a presentation on the subject on SlideShare.
However, if you’re short on time (which to be honest, most small business owners are), you can just read the main points below:
Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site
You can build web site credibility by providing third-party support (citations, references, source material) for information you present, especially if you link to this evidence. Even if people don’t follow these links, you’ve shown confidence in your material
Show that there’s a real organisation behind your site
Showing that your web site is for a legitimate organisation will boost the site’s credibility. The easiest way to do this is by listing a physical address. Other features can also help, such as posting a photo of your offices or listing a membership with the chamber of commerce
Highlight the expertise in your organisation and in the content and services you provide Do you have experts on your team? Are your contributors or service providers authorities? Be sure to give their credentials. Are you affiliated with a respected organisation? Make that clear. Conversely, don’t link to outside sites that are not credible. Your site becomes less credible by association
Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site
The first part of this guideline is to show there are real people behind the site and in the organisation. Next, find a way to convey their trustworthiness through images or text. For example, some sites post employee bios that tell about family or hobbies
Make it easy to contact you
A simple way to boost your site’s credibility is by making your contact information clear: phone number, physical address, and email address
Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose)
We find that people quickly evaluate a site by visual design alone. When designing your site, pay attention to layout, typography, images, consistency issues, and more. Of course, not all sites gain credibility by looking like IBM.com. The visual design should match the site’s purpose
Make your site easy to use – and useful
We’re squeezing two guidelines into one here. Our research shows that sites win credibility points by being both easy to use and useful. Some site operators forget about users when they cater to their own company’s ego or try to show the dazzling things they can do with web technology
Update your site’s content often (at least show it’s been reviewed recently)
People assign more credibility to sites that show they have been recently updated or reviewed
Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g., ads, offers)
If possible, avoid having ads on your site. If you must have ads, clearly distinguish the sponsored content from your own. Avoid pop-up ads, unless you don’t mind annoying users and losing credibility. As for writing style, try to be clear, direct, and sincere
Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem
Typographical errors and broken links hurt a site’s credibility more than most people imagine. It’s also important to keep your site up and running.
If you want more information on creating a credible website, or if you want some help getting your website ranked well in the major search engines, come and talk to us. We’re a very friendly bunch and are passionate about helping small businesses succeed.
You’ll be able to track your goal conversions throughout Analytics. You’ll see a special ‘Goals’ section in the menu where you can see all the information and statistics.
Visit 
SMEketing pride ourselves on being a full service, modern marketing agency, We offer a host of services to our clients, from traditional brochure design, copywriting, all the way to social media marketing and search engine optimisation. However, recently there has been a real trend for a specific service – website design.
With the majority of people (approx 80%) searching the internet before they purchase a product or before they get in touch with a company they want to work with, it’s vital that all small business have an online presence that conveys a feeling of trust and creditability.
