ASM Development - taking websites beyond design

Do You Rely Too Much On Web And Analytics Tools?

You can use all the best optimisation tools in the business while recording statistics from the best analytics tools around, and still go broke overnight. There are some sections of the online community that treat these tools like gods with an unerring belief that the use of these tools can drive success.

There is no denying that search engine optimisation tools can help you to find some direction with your search and/or social marketing. However, they will never deliver success. There are for more factors involved than just finding a good set of keywords, for example. In fact, in many cases a good set of keywords could turn out to be a dud set of keywords if they don’t convert.

Some of the factors that need to be considered include:

the niche – some niches just don’t convert and when they do it is at a fairly low volume. Think babies’ nappies – you may find a great set of keywords, but in the end, mums and dads will still buy them from the supermarket;

your web page – if your web page doesn’t have appeal then no amount of tools will convert traffic into sales. Most online shoppers use a page’s look as their first indication of quality – poor website, poor business, they move on;

your sales pages – right keywords, attractive web pages, poor sales pages. Again, another turn off;

your reputation – if you have a poor reputation, especially if you have several unanswered reviews in local listings, then potential customers may not even arrive on your site, no matter how good it is;

your product’s reputation – ditto. If your product has a poor reputation, potential customers won’t be visiting and when they do chances are they will move on.

There is a big difference between using tools to help guide you through the online world and relying on those tools to do all the work for you. We see tools such as article or directory submission automation. Sure, they save hours of time, but those submissions are generally too poor quality sites. You would be better spending a little time submitting your site by hand to a few quality sites or article directories.

You could say the same about web analytics. This is useful information and can help you to identify pages that do (or don’t) attract traffic and convert. It’s no good just identifying these pages – you then need to do something about them. Tools are just that – tools. You still have to have the hard yards as a business person.

Web Analytics – If I Had To Chose One Free Tool

Web analytics are essential to the success of any website. If you cannot measure your performance and, more importantly, measure your progress then you are working blind in an environment where the smallest changes can make big differences. We also live in a world where time is at a premium so if you were pushed and had to chose just one free web analytics tool, which one would it be?

After careful thought, the clear winner from my perspective is Google Webmaster Tools. Twelve months ago I would probably have recommended Google Analytics but with the addition of search data in the Webmaster Tools site, it now stands out. Having data on how many visitors arrive on your site and where they come from is important. However, knowing where you are ranking for each keyword; knowing how often your keywords appear in different positions; and knowing what traffic is flowing from each position is even more important.

This data can be clearly tracked and provides an indication as to whether or not your search engine optimisation program is proving to be successful. One of the important statistics is that of average search position. This shows at a glance where each of your keywords are ranking. It also show where you are ranking for phrases that you may not have included in your original keyword list. These are often opportunities that, with further optimisation, could lead to even more traffic to your sites.

Other data that Google’s Webmaster Tools provides includes the number of pages indexed, problems that Google has encountered while spidering your site, and advice on which areas may need addressing. You can also advise Google through this tool as to which region you want various parts of your website to target, important aspects of SEO if your site targets multiple regions.

While there are many paid tools that do a good job, getting the data from the search engine itself is very handy. For a free tool, Google Webmaster Tools provides a wealth of information.  If you had to chose one free web analytics tool, which one would you select?

Add Bing Webmaster Tools To Your Web Analytics Toolbox

Bing Webmaster Tools has gone through a major overhaul. While Google have long held the search engine webmaster tools mantle, the latest version from Bing makes it a worthy addition to your analytics and SEO toolbox. Like Google’s version, it’s not just analytics, it also includes submission and URL blocking options.

Is it worth having both Bing and Google webmaster tools? Most definitely, especially when it comes to blocking URLs from the index and submitting preferred URLs. If you already have a Bing Webmaster Tools account then your account has already been upgraded to the new version. Like all new tools, we suggest you have a play with it and dig as deep as you are comfortable with – you will be surprised at what you can learn about your site.

What is particularly important to webmasters is whether or not the major search engines have found issues with your site, especially malware. This leads to pages (and sites) being de-indexed with re-indexing only occurring once the issue has been fixed and the search engine advised of the fix. Both Bing and Google have this feature and you should make it a part of your regular housekeeping – checking on the status of your sites using both of these tools – Google’s and Bing’s.

You should also be aware that Yahoo! and Microsoft are now preparing the way to move to the Bing search engine to power all their search windows. If you have been using Yahoo’s tools, then now is the time to move across to Bing. Microsoft are promising that a whole raft of features are yet to be added to the new Bing Webmaster Tool chest.

While you can have too many tools, Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, and Bing Webmaster Tools should form the base of any good SEO and web analytics tool box – especially if you want to keep your site search engine friendly.

Web Analytics: An Essential Part Of SEO

When talking to many web site owners, the concept of SEO seems to get lost in the flurry of finding keywords, developing content, then trying to amass inbound links. What is often missing from the equation is web analytics. Yet, at the end of the day, web analytics is the one essential set of tools that can help to verify your SEO work and at the same time give guidance to future direction.

The hurdle is often that analytics can simply fall into the too hard basket. And it can be true. Statistics are boring, can be hard to relate to and often simply don’t make a lot of sense. This is especially true if you have more than one tool and the numbers conflict. The key is to learn a little about how an analytics tool works, and what sort of data they collect.  Surprisingly, not every visitor is counted. This can be especially true for those that have browser settings that don’t allow cookies or clear cookies every time the browser is closed, or that have, for example, JavaScript turned off.

Despite this, you can still gain some very useful information. Free tools like Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools can tell you which search terms are being used to find your pages; what your bounce rate is; the average number of pages accessed and the average time on your site. You can also determine which country your visitors are coming from.

Google Analytics can be particularly useful if you learn how to include goals. If you have a blog attached to your site, you can find out which posts tend to deliver more traffic to your main site and then how many of them continue on to complete a transaction. How does this tie into SEO? Knowing which pages are converting traffic and which aren’t is important when it comes to running your business. Knowing which keywords are attracting traffic can help you identify new keywords while also identifying keywords where your SEO program is having little effect.

It’s the complete package today. To be effective, SEO needs data that shows what is and isn’t working. Without some form of web analytics, your whole business is shooting in the dark – and that is never good for any business.

Web Analytics: Tracking Your Visitors On Site

Hopefully your pages are well optimised and you are seeing steady streams of traffic coming into your pages, but do you know where they are going and what they are doing on your website? How many people have downloaded that free report you offer? This information is valuable to any business and a good web analytics tool can provide you with the data.

When it comes to web analytics tools, Google Analytics has to be one of the better free tools. If you learn how to use it properly, you will be surprised at how much information it can provide. Even if you only go through the basic data provided you can learn a lot about your visitors. Better yet, get your hands dirty and dig a little deeper.

By setting up ‘goals’ within Google Analytics, you can track exactly what many visitors are doing. If you are giving away a free report for example, you can track how many visitors download the report, how many visit the page, and how they arrived at the page.  Why is this information important? In this example, you can see what ratio of visitors download the report. If only 5% of visitors to the download page actually download the report – you can ask yourself why. If, on the other hand, you have a high download ratio, you know that the work you put into the page is bearing fruit – helpful for the next offering you make.

This is one example, and I could offer many others. The point here is to look at your web analytics tool and use it to provide information that is useful. That in itself can be an art. Many businesses flood themselves with information, much of which is useless to their day-to-day operations. Do you really care how many visitors use Firefox or IE7?  Your web developer may find the data interesting, but for you it only adds to the flood that you’re already trying to analyze.

In the offline world, do you want to know what sort of car your customers drives or what sort of products they need and what areas of your shop are most popular?  This the data you need to look for in any web analytics tool. Analyze that data and you will be in a position to make positive decisions about your business.

Google Webmaster Tools Takes Web Analytics To A New Level

If you haven’t visited Google Webmaster Tools for a while then I suggest you drop in and see them. They have introduced several new features that could get you a little excited. They certainly make web analytics a lot easier and visually easier to check your site’s progress.

The new changes are connected. When you first log in and select a site, you will see a screen that displays the site’s search results analytics. What you see is the query, the number of impressions (in organic search results) and the number of clicks. The query will have a plus symbol attached to it – click on the plus sign and it opens another set of analytics for that query.

This second set of results is quite revealing. It shows how many times your query was listed in each position, and how many click-throughs came from that position. On checking several sites I found that some received more clicks at position two or three than at position one. The percentage of click-throughs is also displayed along with the URL of the destination page. This is another important piece of data – are your clicks going to the wrong pages?

Data like this can be very helpful for fine tuning of your pages. If you do have clicks going through to the ‘wrong’ pages, make them ‘right’ by reworking them. If your pages are receiving impressions but low click-throughs, analyse why. Perhaps your META description is weak and not selling the page (if the description is being displayed in the search results). Web analytics are always useful when trying to determine what does and doesn’t work. Google Webmaster Tools have certainly made that task a little easier.

Using Web Analytics To Fine Tune Your Content

Owning an online business can be extremely frustrating at times yet there are web analytics tools that can help to ease some of those frustrations. One complaint that is frequently discussed is the number of visitors and the ratio of conversions. For example, some website owners find their sites attracting a lot of traffic, yet their conversion rate is in the minute range. Others have much less traffic yet higher conversion rates.

It should be pointed out that some niches just don’t convert very well. These niches tend to be those where people want information, not products. However, if you are in a niche that should be converting reasonably well, at least in the 4-8% range, yet you are seeing a 1% or less conversion, then you really do need to examine the whys and this is where web analytics can be particularly useful.

Your first step is to determine where traffic is coming from. Social bookmarking sites are notorious for low conversions. Search engines should provide a reasonable conversion rate while PPC should convert at even higher rates. I will leave PPC for another day and focus purely on organic search results. If they are not converting, why?

Simple web analytics like those found on your server or through Google Analytics are all you really need. If you are unsure about where to find your server based analytics data, ask your IT Support Services for help.

Examine that data to find out what keywords are driving traffic to your website. All too often you will find pages that rank well for keyword phrases that you hadn’t even tried to rank for. It can be these very keywords that are costing you conversions.

If your pages are ranking for phrases that are not converting, there is a simple solution – change the content, remove or reword those phrases so there is a stronger emphasis on the keywords you do want to rank for. It will cost you traffic, however. If that traffic is not converting then you may be better off without it, particularly if it is bouncing away very quickly.

Your second option is to change the page layout and try to find alternative ways to convert that traffic, even if it is to a newsletter sign up. Traffic is hard to get and every visitor is a potential customer, if not today then tomorrow or next week. Think carefully before losing that traffic. Web analytics can help you define your content to target keywords that are converting. Learn to use it well and your online business can thrive while your frustration levels drop.