Blog Of A Boston Web Designer.

Thoughts, Experiments, Processes & Insight.

Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Treat Your Website Like Your Fantasy Football Team, Use Analytics

The best teams in your Fantasy Football League have a range of analytical skills, see opportunities/weaknesses with their team and others, and react accordingly. They understand player stats to form a complete team with the best available talent. They are able to find the diamonds in the rough and continue on when players get injured. They even know when to cut players for a better piece to the puzzle. They understand their team better than the others and make changes week to week because of different matchups. They are constantly involved with their team and it shows.

Set It & Forget It Doesn’t Fly.
I see it happen all the time. Clients get setup with Google Analytics on their website and never leverage the information tracked. Though some may view the scheduled reports, rarely any ever read the tea leaves to take action. I also see many websites without any visitor tracking (if this is you, get Google Analytics installed, you’ll be surprised with the information you can gather) and are missing out big time.

Don’t Just View Analytics, Use Analytics.
The amount of information gathered from Google Analytics will surprise you. Here is some information that can be gathered from someone visiting your website.

• Length of visit
• Amout of pages visited
• Amount of visitors
• Keywords used to find your website
• Websites that sent a visitor to your website
• Screen size of visitor
• Bounce rate (if they came to a page and didn’t stay)
• Top pages visited
• Type of computer and browser used by visitor

Google Analytics

I’m sure you are all saying well that’s great but how can any of this help me improve my website. OK, well here are a few examples that can get your mind thinking.

1) You notice an increase in mobile phone users on your website trying to read your articles and contact information. You can create a simplified mobile version to help them get to the information quicker. Maybe even deliver coupons if they are within 15 miles from your store by utilizing the GPS in their mobile phone.

2) You notice a page on your website is getting many visits but nobody is staying on the page to read it (this equals a high bounce rate). This should tell you that the content written on that page is not what your visitors are looking for and you should change this page to keep visitors on your website.

3) You notice a big drop in Search Engines leading to your website. You need to figure out why this happened and fix it. You may have lost prime position in Google because of a change in Googles algorithm. Or, a competitor may have entered and surpassed your ranking.

4) You want to include a new cutting edge feature on your website. You notice that 60% of your users are still stuck on Internet Explorer 6 and your web designer informs you that the new feature will not work for those users. You can now make an informed decision whether or not to develop that new feature knowing 60% of your users cannot use it.

So, if you’ve got Google Analytics on your website and you’re just viewing the scheduled reports, consider this a push to really dive in and understand what is going on with your website and begin to mold it into the best website possible. Find your opportunities and fix your weaknesses!

Posted in Experience, SEO, Web Design • 2 Comments »
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

Rank First in Google Search with Local Business Center

Here is a technique to easily get your business listed online and rank first or at the top of Google’s search engine. This is a simple trick that will take about 10 minutes and can considerably increase the visibility of your business in the online world.

Requirements:
• Address or Phone Number to confirm listing
• Website is not necessary

Walk-thru:
There are 6 sections to fill-out to create your local business listing. You do not have to fill each section but it is in your best interest to do so. Completing your profile 100% will improve your ranking and provide more opportunities for you to insert keywords related to your business, its services or products.

These 6 sections include:
• Basic Information (company name, address, number, email, website, description and categories)
• Hours of Operation
• Payment Options
• Photos
• Videos
• Additional Details (parking, brands carried, other information you would like to include)

Example:
This is what your listing will look like when someone searches for a service or product. Google will automatically adjust the results for the map to fit the searchers geographical location. These local business results get pushed above the traditional search engine results in Google which makes getting listed valuable to any company.

google local business center

How To Improve Your Listing:
It is possible to achieve good results by quickly listing your business but it is also possible to achieve even greater success with a few easy tweaks. The first way to improve visibility is to insert keywords into your company name, description and the other available areas to broaden your reach in search engines. Keyword research is important if you want to gain the most from your listing or website. If you use Google Analytics for your website then you can see what terms people use to find your company and see what they don’t use. There are also sites that can tell you how many times a certain keyword is searched to see if it is a high-traffic or low-traffic keyword.

The second way to push your listing up the ranks is to have customers or clients write a review for your company. Your client or customer will need to have a Google account to write a review but with Google dominating the internet you should have no problem finding a few to help you out. Reviews have a strong influence on where your listing will appear. So if you find your business being lost in the many pages of other businesses get some reviews and you will notice you will move up quickly.

What’s good about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is that you can (and will need to) constantly tweak and build upon it to improve your rank. Search engines are constantly evolving their algorithms for results so it’s important to monitor how your website or business ranks to make sure your competition doesn’t pass you. There are a few applications that can monitor your sites rankings; you can also use Google Analytics and Local Business Center to view your stats.

Results:
Within one week of listing my business in Google’s Local Business Center I was placed within the top 10 of out of 389,608 local results for the term “Boston Web Design”. This was done by completing my profile 100%, optimized for the keywords I hand selected and with 5 reviews. You can see from the chart below that for the month of August I got over 2700 impressions (an impression is every time your business is shown) and 34 clicks to my website that I would have never gotten before my listing. You can view my local business listing here.

google-local-business-center-results

Get started today and create your business listing.

Posted in SEO • 4 Comments »