I’ve been studying for the Google AdWords Certification Exam with their study guide and, contrary to my expectations, it’s been a great experience. I’ve discovered a lot of features and techniques that I didn’t know existed. Among them are the reports available under the (hidden by default) Dimensions tab. Through this type of reporting, you can slice and dice your AdWords metrics by week, month, hour of day, conversion action, and a number of other dimensions (see the full list below).
For our local business clients, the geographic report has been particularly helpful, as we can now refine our location targeting based on click-thru and conversion metrics. But I think the easiest one to start with — and potentially gain some efficiencies from — is the Day of the Week report. Here’s how to do it:
1. Add the Dimensions tab to your account by clicking the drop-down arrow at the far right of your existing tabs and selection Dimensions.
2. “Day” is the default view. Change that to “Day of the week.”
3. Choose the largest date range possible.
4. Sort by conversion rate (if you’re not using conversion tracking, this analysis won’t work for you).
In the example above, we saw enough of a gap in conversion rate between the top 2 days (Mon and Wed) vs. the bottom 2 (Sun and Tue) to justify using Ad Scheduling to increase/decrease our bids on those days. This allows us to get more clicks on our best-converting days and fewer clicks on our worst-converting days.
You can do the same type of analysis with a number of other dimensions. Have fun!
Back in October, we selected PhotoTour DC (previously PhotoTour Excursions) as the winner of our first SEO makeover contest for DC small businesses. We’ve had a lot of fun working with Lynford Morton during this process and, as we draw a close to this makeover, are happy to report some nice results. Below is an email I sent to Lynford a few days ago capturing the results and my recommendations for next steps to keep his momentum going.
—–
Hi Lyn,
Hope you’re doing well and gearing up for the spring tour season.
I spent a few hours today analyzing your Google Analytics data for the last few months, to see the impact of our SEO efforts so far.
I looked at the 9 weeks after our SEO was implemented vs. the 9 weeks before. Not apples to apples but good enough for our purposes.
For keyword groups I’m focusing on the keywords we identified in our keyword research back in October. Within Google Analytics I aggregate similar words together (e.g. everything with “class” or “classes” in it) which is how I end up with “keyword groups.”
By “conversions” I’m referring to the 3 goals we set up initially in Google Analytics — visits to your Signature Excursions page, visits to your Specialty Excursions page, and visits to your Calendar. These don’t tell us whether they signed up for a tour, but it is a good indication of interest and the best conversion metric available. (I originally was trying to track clicks over to the Eventbrite page but for various reasons we haven’t been able to track those consistently.)
While the numbers aren’t huge, we have seen a nice increase on a number of our target keyword groups. For instance, “workshop” related phrases had 0 conversions prior to SEO; after they had 36. “Photography” went from 32 to 101, “class” from 6 to 21. A few groups stayed flat and one – “lesson” – dropped.
Overall your conversions on SEO target keywords increased from 50 to 175 – an increase of 3.5x. Not bad for the first couple months.
Note that I did not include “tour” related words in the analysis. Because your brand name includes “tour” it’s too hard to tell the effect of SEO on these words vs. other marketing efforts like Groupon. It does appear that your Google rankings on top “tour” phrases have increased.
Based on the analysis, I don’t think you need to make updates to the body content of your site at this time. I’m confident that over time our optimization from the end of last year will continue to help improve your rankings. I do, however, think it’s worth updating your title tags at this time based on what I saw in the results to date. I’ve attached recommendations for updating titles on most of your main pages.
—
I’m marking this as the official end of our “SEO makeover.” Of course I’m happy to answer any questions you have, now or in the future.
I’ve set up an automated report for you in Google Analytics; you’ll receive it by PDF at the beginning of each month.
As for future steps, here are my recommendations:
1. Keep the target keyword list (keyword research) doc handy anytime you make changes or additions to the website. Integrate those keywords where possible, especially in the title tags, headings, and lead paragraphs of any new pages.
2. Ensure that the title tags remain intact anytime you make updates to the site. Those are critical for SEO.
3. Check your Google Places listing once a quarter or so to make sure the information is still accurate.
4. Continue to try to attract links from other relevant websites.
5. Continue to post regularly on your blog. Consider approaching photography experts to interview on your blog, to mix up the content. And consider approaching other local bloggers offering to post tips (or be interviewed) for their blogs.
—–
It’s been fun working with you on this. Keep me posted on how things are going with your biz!
On any SEO project, before you jump into core tasks like keyword research, content optimization, and link building, it’s important to learn as much as you can from existing data sources. This could be Google Analytics or another web traffic tracking tool, as well as AdWords or another search advertising platform.
Your goals with “pre-SEO analysis” are, in order of importance, to …
Identify anything that will help you do smarter keyword research and search optimization
Create a baseline against which to measure your post-SEO results
Gain familiarity with the site’s overall metrics and trends
Melete has had Google Analytics running since September of 2010. I spent about 90 minutes analyzing and summarizing their data, focusing on the traffic sources reports. You can read my pre-SEO analysis for Melete here. As I note in the report, to date they’ve had almost no search traffic from the types of target keywords we identified in our kickoff meeting brainstorm. The vast majority has come from brand searches (e.g. “melete foundation”), people searches (e.g. staff names), and generic searches related to songs mentioned in blog post titles (not a good match).
If I had found traffic from our target keywords, I would have tried to break those keywords into buckets (e.g. teacher-related phrases, volunteer-related phrases) and looked at their respective levels of engagement on the site (bounce rate, time on site). I would make a note of which keyword groups perform best and worst on these measures — information that would help us as we prioritize target keywords during keyword research, our next step.
In the absence of this kind of data, this exercise mostly serves to reinforce the need for rigorous SEO on this site, and to act as a baseline going forward.
Following our kickoff meeting, the next step in Melete’s SEO Makeover was to optimize their web tracking. Since measurement and analysis are key to the process, it’s critical that you set up and optimize tracking early on. In this post, I’ll share the process I went through to do this.
Fortunately Melete already had Google Analytics (GA), our preferred tracking tool, in place when I started working with them. When they set their site up on WordPress, they added a great Google Analytics plugin from Yoast and have been receiving data since September of last year. Still, there were 2 critical pieces we needed to ensure that our data is accurate and actionable: goals and internal traffic exclusion.
Goals
Our aim with SEO isn’t just more website traffic, it’s more high quality traffic that takes desired actions. The “goals” feature in Google Analytics — frequently called “conversion goals” — allows us to identify these actions and integrate them into our analysis. The most common goals we use are 1. a visitor viewing or hitting a key page on the site (e.g. a purchase thank you page) and 2. a visitor spending a minimum amount of time on the site before leaving (e.g. 2 minutes).
With goals in place, we’re able to say that a site had, say, 200 leads or 450 engaged visits last month, which over time is a lot more meaningful than just saying they had 1,000 visits (what most companies focus on). But the really great thing about goals in GA is that you can tie them back to traffic sources. This allows us to be much smarter when we measure SEO results using Google Analytics; we can see which keywords send traffic that converts and which ones don’t, and then focus our future optimization rounds accordingly.
1. Identify potential goals
When I met with Melete we identified two key desired actions on their site:
somebody signing up for their newsletter, which can done at the bottom of any page via a Mailchimp widget.
Since their site traffic is light right now, and there aren’t many people taking either of these two actions, I identified two other “soft” or intermediary conversion goals that are likely to get more data:
somebody spending 1 minute on the site
somebody spending 3 minutes on the site
I chose 1 and 3 minutes after glancing through the Traffic Sources > Keyword report and looking at keywords that had only 1 visit. This allowed me to get a sense of how long individual visits last (vs. just looking at averages which can be skewed by one really long visit — I’m sure there’s a better way to find this). I saw that not many people last more than a 1 minute on the site.
2. Set up easy goals
The time on site goals were easy to set up. To set up the “1 minute” goal, I just went to the GA Settings (entry) page and clicked Edit.
Toward the bottom of the next page I clicked Add Goal.
Then I made the selections and inputs below.
And then I followed the same process for the “3 minute” goal.
3. Set up tricky goals
One big problem with GA goals is they can’t be used to track clicks on links or submit buttons that take a visitor to another site – what are often called “outbound clicks” or “external links.” And for a lot of small businesses and non-profits that take advantage of 3rd party solutions for newsletters and payment collection, these types of “outbound clicks” are in fact the primary goals on their site. That’s the case with Melete. Their newsletter signup form takes the user to a Mailchimp-hosted page. Their “Support” button takes the user to a PayPal-hosted page.
Since goals don’t work for outbound clicks and submits, we have to use a different GA feature: event tracking. You find it under the “Content” section within GA. Events can’t be tied to traffic sources the way goals can, but they are still a useful metric to have in place. The problem is events are much, much harder to get to track than goals. Goals are set up directly within the GA interface; you don’t have to touch the website if you already have the main GA tags in place. With events, you have to add JavaScript code to the page at some precise spots and customize it properly. Google’s help documentation on it is confusing (and as of this writing, somewhat contradictory), so it’s easy to get it wrong. You have to be familiar with HTML, and you have to be persistent. Otherwise stick with goals.
If you do want to set up events, the best place I can point you is this thread on the Google Help forum which I initiated a few months ago when I was struggling to get them to work for another project. Now I just use the code and process that Joe from Blast Advanced Media was kind enough to provide in that thread. Since both of the outbound clicks we wanted to track for Melete were in effect form submissions (the “Support” button doesn’t seem like a form but in terms of HTML code it is), I used the “onsubmit” variation of the code he provided, which goes inside the <form> tag.
One last note on this: if the outbound action we wanted to track for Melete had just been on clicks on links, rather than clicks on submit-style buttons, all of this would have been much easier. That’s because Yoast has integrated the heavy-lifting described above and allows you to track outbound clicks by just checking a box (see below — found under the GA Settings in your WordPress account). But at least in our experience, this feature didn’t pick up “submit” clicks.
Internal traffic exclusion
Internal traffic is a common cause of inaccurate data in GA. Internal traffic for your site includes you and everyone at your company, as well as vendors and partners who are likely to visit the site often. Especially when you are making changes to your site, you visit it often to test the changes. If you don’t exclude this data, you can end up with a very distorted picture of your site’s performance. (Thought it’s good to wait until after setting up goals and events to add these filters, because you may need to do some testing that you want to see in the reports; e.g. making sure event tracking is capturing your newsletter signups.)
For Melete, as with all of our projects, we use two techniques to exclude internal traffic: 1) cookie-based exclusion, which excludes traffic from individuals’ computers, and 2) IP exclusion, which excludes traffic from geo-locations. Since neither method is perfect, we use both.
To get the cookie exclusion to work, you need to add a page to your site. Once I did that, I sent an email to the Melete team explaining what I needed them to do: click on the link that exclusion page (to get the cookie) from each computer they use, and send me their IP addresses from each place they work, which they can get at WhatIsMyIP.com.
Once I received their IPs, I went to the same place under Settings that I went to to add goals, and then added Marketade’s and Melete’s IPs.
Setting up goals and internal traffic fitlers are very hard to do in one sitting, since you’re often relying on other people to click things or test things for you. So the best way to approach web tracking optimization is to break it up into smaller steps and try to tackle it over a few days.
I just posted our first instructional video to YouTube. It covers an approach we use often to track and measure our SEO effectiveness.
If 12 minutes of this stuff isn’t enough for you, check out my companion article to the video.
Please let us know what you think of the video in the comments here or on YouTube. We hope to be doing more of these in the future and want to make them as helpful and interesting as possible.
DC apartment finder Urban Igloo was Marketade’s first real client, and we’ve had a great time growing with them. We’re excited to share a case study that discusses some of the keys to success of our partnership. Here’s the summary:
Marketade worked with Urban Igloo, a DC apartment finder service, to implement an online strategy that drove a 900% increase in customer leads — in less than a year with no paid advertising. How? By acting like a partner, avoiding short cuts, engaging with outsiders, embracing metrics, and focusing on conversion.
Marketade Announces SEO Giveaway for DC Small Businesses
Consulting company to give away $15,000 in Internet marketing services to DC area small businesses and non-profits.
Marketade, a DC Internet marketing company, announced today that it will give away an “SEO Makeover” to one local organization every quarter for the next year. Each winning company will receive $3,750 worth of search engine optimization (SEO) services that aim to increase its visibility on Google and other search engines.
The announcement comes as more and more small businesses use the Internet to level the playing field with larger competitors. With over 80% of consumers using search engines to find local businesses, SEO is increasingly the tactic of choice. Shrinking marketing budgets have further heightened its appeal; unlike most forms of advertising, SEO does not require major ongoing financial investment to reap long-term benefits.
“You rarely see a David beat a Goliath with traditional advertising … you see it often with SEO,” said Marketade managing partner John Nicholson. “But a lot of small businesses lack the expertise and resources needed to do SEO effectively.”
Over the next year, Marketade will share the tactics and results of its makeovers via instructional videos on YouTube. “The bigger goal here is to strip away SEO’s black box through real-world stories that inspire and educate others,” said Nicholson. “It’s a rewarding way for us to help businesses who can’t afford a consultant, and a great tool for showing our expertise.”
The DC SEO Makeover contest is open to businesses and non-profits in the DC metro area that employ 10 or fewer employees. Companies can enter the contest via the Marketadesite. Winners will be selected based on their SEO potential and the “wow” factor of their product or service. Marketade will work with each winning company over a 6-month period, providing a range of services including keyword research, copywriting, and web traffic analysis.
About Marketade:
Marketade is a metrics-focused web design and marketing company based in Washington, DC. Drawing on 8 years of combined experience leading Internet efforts at GEICO, Marketade helps small and mid-size businesses take advantage of Fortune 100 techniques in search engine marketing, social media, website usability, application development, and reporting and analysis. Learn more at www.marketade.com.
Inc.’s recent article How to Use Google to Improve Your SEO brings up a good point: chances are you’re already using Google to help you find what you’re looking for online–but are you using it to help others find your business?
The article opens with a summary of three fundamental SEO practices:
1) Getting as many high-quality sites to link back to you.
2) Making sure that the other sites linking to you contain relevant keywords that you would like to rank on. “If you want to reach a high search engine ranking for ‘Chicago tutors,’ for example, your best links would come from other sites that also rank well for that search term,” suggests Inc.
3) Posting keyword-rich content and integrating those keywords into your site’s title tags and meta descriptions.
If you’re new to the world of SEO, you’re probably wondering how to go about choosing keywords that are relevant to your business. That’s where Google AdWords Keyword Tool comes in. It will help you identify the terms that people looking for your type of business are searching on. The tool generates lists of keywords that allow you to compare search volume and level of competition for different terms. The article’s author, J.J. McCorvey, recommends complementing your keyword research by using Google Trends, which allows you to see the search patterns for a given word over time.
So, you’ve gotten a respectable number of incoming links, identified the right keywords and integrated these words into your site’s content and meta data–now what? How do you measure your newly optimized site’s performance? McCorvey points us to the metrics tool Google Analytics. It provides a plethora of stats such as bounce rate, or percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page, average time spent on site and more.
The other performance analysis tool, Google Webmaster, has a Diagnostics feature that can help you identify weaknesses in your site’s meta data, crawlability and more. Its Statistics arm, meanwhile, analyzes incoming traffic, including which search queries bring visitors to your site. This information enables you to go back and tweak your content so that it optimized on the best-performing keywords.
McCorvey goes on to say that the beauty of Google’s SEO tools (besides the fact that they are free!) is the ability to use them in conjuction with one another. As an example, McCorvey points to Google Analytics, whose data you can use “in conjunction with Google’s Website Optimizer, which enables split testing of modified pages. After you’ve made improvements to a page, you can set the Website Optimizer so that a certain amount of viewers see the old version of the page, and use Google Analytics to compare and analyze the results.”
McCorvey closes with a reference to the SEO mantra “Content is King,” the importance of which shouldn’t be forgotten as you get better and better at using Google’s optimization tools. If the Keyword Tool tells you that a given term gets a high number of searches and it “…isn’t extensively covered on your website, maybe it’s worthwhile to churn out a couple more pages on that topic.”
UPDATE: For a more recent (and better) post on the topic below, see my November 2010 post Track SEO with Google Analytics. It includes a video and a link to a companion article that demonstrate a much more thorough approach to using filters than what I describe below.
———
We’ve recently found the “filter” feature in Google Analytics to be a great way to measure effectiveness of our SEO and other internet marketing efforts for clients over time. In this post I’ll explain why and give an overview of how to use it.
The problem with unfiltered reports and totals
If you’re like most small businesses using Google Analytics, you spend a lot of time looking under Traffic Sources looking at the Referring Sites report and the Keywords (non-paid) report. These reports tell you much of what you need to know about where your traffic is coming from — and tracking their total numbers over time can give you a good sense of how well your marketing is working.
The problem is that your Referring Sites report will often be dominated by a small number of sites, and your Keywords report will often be dominated by a small number of keywords relating to your brand name. These sites and keywords are critical, but as you grow, your marketing and SEO efforts will focus more and more on traffic from new sites and new keywords.
Let’s say you’re an employment lawyer in DC named “Teresa Millbrook.” Six months ago, both your Referring Sites report and your Keyword report were very top-heavy:
Two sites – usalawyers.com and dclaw.com – were driving 95% of your referring site traffic
A handful of “brand” keywords (i.e. keywords related to “teresa millbrook”) were driving 95% of your organic search traffic
Since then, you’ve reached out to a bunch of relevant websites to boost your inbound links and optimized your website for non-brand keywords like “dc employment lawyer”. Now you want to know what impact your efforts have had.
If you’re like most people, you’ll scan through your reports to see what new referring sites and keywords pop up, maybe comparing back to your list of target lists. If you’re more advanced, you’ll compare the total visits from referring sites and search engines 6 months ago to today (e.g. October vs. March).
The problem with these approaches is they miss the long tail, which is the most likely place you’ve had success. Sure, we all want to see a new referrer or keyword sending hundreds of visits, but the far more likely scenario from SEO efforts is that a large number of new sites and keywords are each sending you a tiny number of clicks. In aggregate, these new sources of traffic may be sending you hundreds or thousands of clicks, but because many of them are only sending you 1-3 clicks a month, they’re easy to miss if you’re just scanning your reports.
You may notice the trend if you compare total referrer or search visits over time, but you’re doing an apples-to-oranges comparison. What if your traffic from usalawyers.com and dclaw.com dropped by 25% over the last 6 months? You might miss the increase from your new referrers. Or what if your traffic from brand keywords increased by 25% over the last 6 months? You might mistakenly attribute the jump in your total visits to your non-brand SEO.
How to use filters
The only way to get around the problems above — and gain a true measure of your SEO and marketing effectiveness — is to use filters. Filters allow you to do an apples-to-apples comparison of long tail sites / keywords before and after you implemented your marketing efforts.
If you’re Teresa the lawyer, here’s how you’d use filters in Google Analytics to measure your Referring Sites traffic growth:
Under Traffic Sources, click the Referring Sites report.
Select your “before” time period, let’s say it’s October 2009.
Click the Advanced Filter link on the bottom of the page.
Keep the filter on “Source”, change the drop-down to “Excluding”, and enter “usalawyers.com”.
Click “Add new condition”, choose “Source”, “Excluding”, and enter “dclaw.com”.
Click “Apply Filter”.
Write down the Total Visits number.
Select your “after” time period, let’s say it’s March 2010.
Repeat steps 3 through 7.
Compare the Total Visits between the two periods.
Then you’d use the same basic process for your Keyword report, filtering out keywords with “teresa”, then keywords with “millbrook”. If your brand name gets a lot of misspellings, include those too (e.g. “theresa”, “millbrooke”); in some cases, you can avoid having to include all of the variations by just shortening a keyword to a “base” version that includes many misspellings (e.g. “mill”). (Just check to make sure doing this doesn’t cause you to count traffic from non-brand keywords that share that same base.)
Final Thoughts
The next time you’re in Google Analytics, try using the 10-step process above. Hopefully when you’re done, you’ll see a jump in the Total Visits from “before” to “after” and you’ll gain new insights into what is causing the increase.
Keep in mind that the comparison this process enables isn’t perfect; there may be seasonality and other factors at work. But it is much more scientific than the more commonly used approaches: eyeballing and comparing totals of raw traffic reports. By using filters, you’ll gain a far more accurate view of what’s working and what’s not in your marketing efforts.
