Keep ahead of your SEO with Google Intelligence

There is so much data that is generated from Google analytics to help you with your Internet marketing campaign that it can sometimes be overwhelming to most users. Google Analytics Intelligence will take the hard work out of monitoring your analytics and websites performance by checking for significant changes in certain variables that you set for your site.

You can set up intelligence alerts for different aspects of your analytics and have a list of alerts which are displayed in your intelligence report. The alerts for these significant changes can also be emailed to you to make life easier.
The way that the  intelligence reports work is that it assesses your websites analytics against its historical data for the  variables you set. An example of data it will generate is that it can show you if you have had a certain % increase or decrease in visits to your site or in a change in your bounce rate for example.

Google intelligence has two types of alerts, automatic alerts, which can be emailed to you or custom alerts which can be viewed in your analytics under the intelligence tab.

You can choose if your want to view daily, weekly or monthly alerts. The bar chart across the bottom shows you the alert quantity for each day and when clicked on a report, will  appear telling you details of the significant changes to the visitors behaviour on your site. With the data from these alerts  you can created actions  to ensure your business gets the best out of the website. For example a change in content on you home page may have caused a increase in bounce rate which tells you that you may have got things wrong. Alternatively you may have a sudden increase in revenue which may alert you to a current trend increase for a certain product you sell online. This could make you decide to promote that product further to increase sales even more.

A selection of what kinds of activity you can get alerts on are as follows: visitor type, city, keyword, Adword campaign data, source, medium, referal path, landing page,  exit pages,  Avg time on site, goal conversions, page views, % of new visitors, revenue, avg order quality.

The automatic alerts will track a selection of activities but additional important alerts that aren’t in the automatic selection can be tracked also by setting up a custom alert in google intelligence. To do this you click on set up a new custom alert and edit the form to make it represent the variables that you need the information on.  The example below shows the set up for an alert that will show if there is ever a 20% decrease in goal conversions for your visitors in the London Area. These can be tailor made to track certain new products, services and areas served etc.

Anychanges you make to you website may have effects on your website performance and how visitors interact with your site. Not only does Google intelligence keep track of this for you so you don’t have to but it will also keep you informed on trends. Being kept this up to date will ensure that you keep your website as current as possible maximising your performance and ultimately your web conversions.

Increase Your Traffic with Long Tail SEO

It is important when working on your SEO that you include the long-tail method of SEO into your strategy and not just focus all your attention on the home page keywords. This is a common mistake that many people fall into when working to get their website to the top positions in google.

Research has identified that for an average site that is optimised with the long tail method as well as homepage keywords (via blogs and articles for example), the home page draws in less than half of the traffic. This is because the site is being found through other keyword variations which Google are relating to the site.

The rest of the website then, is responsible for more than half of the entry to the site so its important that these pages are optimised too, so they can maximise the traffic that you receive to your site. If this is completed correctly then your website’s high ranking presence across the search engines will be maximised and will improve the level of visitors to your site.

The long tail method of SEO involves you taking your main keywords and using a keyword tool, you would then search that keyword and discover the variations or long tail versions that contain your keyword that people do type into to Google to find the service or product you are offering. An example of this is if your keyword was “marquees” you would find in your keyword tool that people type in “wedding marquees for hire” a longer version that is more specific and less competitive. If optimised correctly this will most likely rank highly. People who do search these long tail terms know more what they want and are more likely to convert to sales.

Using these long tail versions of your keywords as new pages of content within your site will open your potential visitors’ scope for finding you in Google much wider. By using these long-tailed versions of your keywords as blog titles and article titles and optimising each of these new pages with good keyword distribution, meta tags, alt tags and links etc your site will most likely perform on page 1 for these keywords much easier as the competitiveness is very low for most long tail terms.

Getting the maximum volume of traffic to your site is a very important part of your internet marketing campaign and even though conversions are important to your website, without visits there will be no conversions!

After the main website is built using the best SEO techniques and you have added extra keywords to your other pages you can then, using these main keywords periodically, add content to your site via the articles or blogs as mentioned before.

Gearing all of your additional content to everything around these keywords will bring a variation of content of the main subject from your website enabling you to capture the interest of potential customers in many different sometimes more informal methods. As these pages account for much of the entry to your website and they contain you main keyword anyway then you are opening the umbrella of opportunity for your websites visitors much wider which can only enhance the benefits to your SEO.

Benefits of PPC and SEO

When looking to promote your website with Internet marketing you may feel confused about whether Pay Per Cick (PPC) advertising or Organic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the right path to take to get visitors to your site and to maximise your sales conversions.

Both methods have certain benefits but you need to be clear on what benefits you can expect to receive from each aspect.

Pay Per Click

The clear advantages of PPC where you are essentially bidding for your position using certain keywords are as follows:

• Instant traffic to your website whilst your daily bidding budget lasts.
• Sales being generated quickly and easily
• You can test the effectiveness of your chosen keywords and see what conversions they bring to your website.
• It’s a quick and easy way to judge what keywords are more suitable for your website and industry to bring the conversions you want.
• You are in control of what cash limit per day you set to spend.
• PPC is easier for business owners to understand than SEO.

SEO

The impact that a long term SEO campaign will bring to your website and business are:

• Organic SEO is the natural way to get your site onto page 1 and once your site is there, as long as your SEO work is maintained then you will say on page 1 with permanent top level advertising.
• You receive as many visitors as possible at no additional cost to you.
• The natural search results are clicked more frequently by searchers than the AdWords listings so there is more potential visitors that will come to your listing.
• Ultimately for a campaign that requires long term success and that will be a continued means of advertising for a business then Organic SEO is certainly the way forward to ensure that you get a long term better return on your investment.
• SEO requires bringing each website’s architecture up to a certain standard and building good links across the Internet and ensuring the content within the site is optimised to a high standard.

Many people who want fast results and maybe don’t understand the full workings of SEO would opt to have just pay per click as the cost /result ratio is something they can see easily from the start yet with SEO patience and trust is needed for the interim whilst they wait for the continued SEO work to make the keywords perform.

However companies that use just PPC ultimately end up spending more money as it has no long term advantages the high cost to get clients will always continue and to get more visitors the cost on PPC will need to increase. You will also be charged per click even if it doesn’t turn to a conversion and once your daily budget is reached your advert won’t appear until the next day meaning you could potentially miss out on visitors who perhaps would have converted to a sale.

How to use both PPC and SEO together

A wise strategy for those wishing for the fast results of PPC but the long term benefits of SEO is to start by having an initial joint campaign of both.

A period of PPC with Google AdWords at the start of a campaign as a short term strategy could help you assess your keyword choice before you get too far into your link building for your organic SEO. This will not only ensure that your keyword choices get the right kind of visitors, but it is an excellent resource when you integrate your AdWords into your Google Analytics to see which of your keywords produce the highest level of conversions for your business. The statistics you can get filtered into your Google Analytics will enable you to make detailed comparisons on a number of variables which will assist your planning and strategies for your long term SEO enabling you to gain quick insight into which keywords will give your website the most success in terms of conversions.

Implementing an initial combination of PPC and SEO is even more beneficial to Internet marketing campaigns that have competitive national keywords that will take several months to perform on page 1.

When your organic SEO campaign is successfully working you can simply stop your PPC and maintain your strong established SEO campaign with the knowledge that the keywords that bring you the best conversions are at the head of your strategy.

How to set up Custom Reports in Google Analytics

You’ve set up your Google Analytics account so you can monitor your Internet Marketing but with the minefield of information that GA offers do you wonder where to go past the default dash board that is already present there?

Too much data without a purpose or a function is worthless so its important for you to decide what it is from your analytics that you actually want to find out.

For your SEO purposes you most likely wish to know if the keywords you are optimising for are actually bringing the traffic to your site that you expect. You will want to know about which keywords have been directly responsible for your goal conversions. Other important things you may wish to know when measuring the success of your SEO is which areas your visitors come from especially for local SEO campaigns and for e-commerce websites you will need to know the average value that each area or keyword has actually brought.

There are many variables which you can play with in custom reports so consider which are important to you and which results will enable you to create actions to improve your business and your SEO.

The main essential set up that I use for my clients is the Keywords Goals Report. You can set this up in a simple custom report which collates this information into one simple report. To do this you need to click on the custom reports tab and click to create a new report.

Within this set up you need to set the metrics which are to be reported and the dimensions on which they are to be shown against.

Type the metrics you wish to use into the search bar and when found drag and drop them into the correct box. For the Keyword Goals Custom Report use the settings in the image below. With this report the goal 1 has been configured against people visiting the contact page and goal 2 is where people have submitted an email enquiry and reached the contact process page (thank you page).

You can rename this report at the top by simply editing the date section and calling it Keyword Goals.
Click to save and then you will see the full report you have created.

The sources will be listed showing how many contact and contact process conversions there are, along with the contact process conversion rate. You can now click on the source to reveal the keywords that were typed to find your site under each source which brought the contact and contact process goals.

You can customise your report to suit your needs and make multiple reports in any one account. The great thing about custom reports is that once set up you can access the information your business needs to know about the performance of your website and your SEO quickly and easily without having to know how to navigate around the whole of Google Analytics.

To see the selection of variables you can choose from you can scroll the side bar to make your selection on the metrics and dimensions

The example of how to see which cities have brought the most traffic and the value of each visit is demonstrated below.

Planning before creating your reports is essential to ensure you create the right kind of reports for your needs and to make analysing your SEO a much easier task.

How Will A Mini Site Help Your SEO?

When looking at your internet marketing and ways to improve your SEO, considering the concept of adding a mini site to support your main site is a very useful approach.

Mini sites are independent sites that are used as extensions of your main site. These sites may target a particular large product or service that your company offers alongside your main service.

Look at your website and ask yourself if it fully supports all the aspects that you really want to perform well for as a result of your site. Does your site perform well for all your main keywords or do you have some distributed on your sub-pages that are quite competitive and are maybe not doing so well?

An example of this is a builder’s site that also offered the services carried out by a chartered surveyor. Both of these industries and the main keywords such as “builders London” and “surveyors London” are both quite competitive in the world of SEO.

Because of this, they would both really benefit from being the main keyword on the home page and in the title tags and meta data to have a really good chance at getting to that page 1 position and to receive a good conversion rate.

A different way to view this is that if the site was successful at getting all these keywords performing on page 1 whilst all being within one site, would the strength of the home page be good enough next to the competitors whose sites would most likely be targeting one or the other of these main keywords?

This is where the mini site comes in. By having a dedicated mini site for the more secondary side of the business will give this side extra strength and help it to perform in the best possible way bringing your business a higher rate of conversions from the internet. As each site is specific for each aspect of the business it will make your internet marketing more focused and website visitors will respond better to finding sites targeted to exactly what they are looking for.

Other benefits of mini site SEO is that you create another location on which you can build strong SEO back-links pointing from each site to the other. If you have sites which have achieved good page ranks these links will be viewed by the search engines as quality links which will directly help your websites to perform better in the search engine rankings.

Ensuring that your new site has an independent domain name and is registered under a different IP address and is not just an extension of the original page is essential to ensure this link supporting technique works to your benefit.

When carrying out an audit on your SEO as your business develops the concept of mini sites to help your SEO should be considered to ensure your internet marketing is working at its best.