I was complaining to my co-workers about this because the only way for me to check a site is to go through EVERY SINGLE PAGE of the site and check the html code to see if Analytics is there. This is, as you can imagine, incredibly time consuming. SEO-Browser makes this a bit easier because you can click through the pages of the site and it checks the html code for you.

Still though, you have to click on every link to every page of a site. Now you can imagine, this is no easy task if you are looking at a 100+ page site.

So while I was complaining, Jeff sends me a link to this great tool. I was skeptical at first but thought I would try it out. It is called SiteScan by EpicOne and it does just that – it scans any site and spits back a report letting you know if any pages are missing the code, and if they are, it gives you the URL of the page! Brilliant! The free version let’s you run 11 or 12 tests a day!

I have gone through all of my clients and checked. Luckily, there has only been one who had a bit of code missing. Phew! This tool saves me hours of time. Maybe it can help you as well!

He lists a variety of tools but the one that caught my eye was the Keyword Tree developed by Juice Analytics. To used the tool you need data in a Google Analytics account.

This tool combines the value of tag cloud and relationships. Very quickly you can see which combinations of keywords people are using to get to your site. The menu of keywords at the bottom of the screen show a list of all the keywords – it is so easy to use.

The Referrer Flow Tool is also interesting and valuable.

The purpose of this tool is to answer 2 questions:
a) What pages are visitors viewing?
b) Where are they coming from (referral page)?

The tool takes a bit of practice to understand but in about 5 minutes you can gain an appreciation for which pages are valuable and where referrals are coming from.

When you have a bit of idle time, try out these tools.

In online marketing the key is to gently coax website visitors through an evolution into website participants.  Whether we are talking about Pay Per Click platforms or ecommerce sites, visitors need to be participating – clicking – in order to increase the conversion rate and, hence, the ROI.  As evidenced by the 2 million Google Search results, this process is not a hard science with tried and tested methods – it is an art.  There are a lot of web users who are more than happy to simply be visitors – just hoping to pass GO and collect their proverbial $200.  After reviewing a few of the Google Search results and thinking of my own online experiences I have identified two key concepts that website owners should keep in mind when trying to entice visitors to take that first step toward earning the highly esteemed blue Participant ribbon.

• The need to participate:
  • In today’s fast paced world, people do not take the time to do things they do not need or want to do.   The end goal of the conversion must be valuable and secure for the visitor as well as for the website owner.  Nurture the desire to participate by clearly communicating the value of the conversion to the website visitor.  Encourage return business by adding an additional thank you page after the conversion step is completed.
• The ability to participate:
  • Expand on the concept of the Big Orange Button (BOB).  Keep the visitor on task by ensuring that the information, design and feel of the website are consistent from the landing page through to the actual conversion step.  Limit distractions, make the next step(s) obvious and encourage and enable the visitor to act quickly.

It is well recognized that higher conversion rates can translate into higher ROI and a few well executed website adjustments can help to increase conversion rates.  So, welcome to all visitors.  Now, ready… set…participate!!

- Jenn -

Guest post done by Jenn. It just so happens that Anduro Marketing offers what we call an “Increasing Conversions Session”. To find out more, contact us.

Simple diagram. Great descriptions. Easy to navigate. Clear. Well put together.

Enjoy!

Now this is obviously personal preference but there are real reasons why there should be a form on the contact us page – a short form that is, followed by a separate page with a thank you message.

There are a number of Analytics programs out there but for simplicity sake (and because I am most familiar with it) I will use Google Analytics as the analytics program of choice. It is free and collects really great, useful data.

Say you have a website, you have added all the Analytics code to the pages of your site and you are just sitting back, collecting data. Now let’s say you don’t have a form on your site. You can collect endless amount of data but at the end of the day, what have you learned? How many visitors are coming to your site? How long they stay? Which page they like the most? Which page they like the least? This is all great data but so what! Have they bought anything? You don’t know. Have they contacted you? You don’t know.

Of course, you can keep track of how many phone calls you received and how many emails Joe got on Tuesday but you have no idea where these leads came from. You know that you received 100 visits from Google Organic. OK, that’s great. But did any of these people contact you?

By simply adding a form to your site and adding a goal in Analytics, you take away a lot of the guess work. You will now be able to see where the people who competed the form came from, how long they spent on your site, which pages they enjoyed etc. etc. etc.

This is especially true if you are doing any paid advertising. Google AdWords, Facebook – all of these can be tracked in Analytics but you will only know whether your efforts are worth it if you can see conversions and how much you are paying for each conversion.

Forms are simple to add and you will get a lot of value out of them!

Please note the use of the word “appear”. While this obviously doesn’t apply to all clients and all accounts, I have come to the conclusion for some that simply because people aren’t converting right from Facebook, doesn’t necessarily mean the campaign isn’t working.

I just got off the phone with a client of ours who has us running Google Adwords and Facebook PPC campaigns. Internally, he has a Facebook fanpage. I just sent him a report with a bunch of numbers indicating which platforms are bringing in the most conversions. To an untrained eye, the report seems to scream, “Shut down the Facebook PPC NOW!”

But I walked him through the report and some of the numbers and came to the conclusion that even though people aren’t going straight through to buy his service, his direct traffic has almost doubled since the Facebook campaign has been turned on. This leads to the possibility that people are going there, having a look around, signing out, thinking about it and then coming back directly to the site to buy!

The point here is: make sure you look at all the numbers and factors before cancelling a campaign on any platform. You just never know what kind of traffic you are getting if you just look at one set of data.

Google Analytics is fantastic for this. Just make sure when you set up your Facebook campaign (and some others) that you use the Googel URL builder so Analytics can track it.

Questions about this or how to set up a PPC account? Just ask us!

Stefanie

As a challenge, I offered to set-up the website for the price of dinner. He agreed and the barbequed steak dinner was exceptional.

Our first step was to choose a platform for the website. We wanted a website development platform that was cheap, easy to use, quick to set-u, easy to change content, had functional template designs and would work with search engines.  We considered the following sites:
- www.siteground.com using WordPress
- www.kwiksites.com/admin/
- www.citymax.com

We reviewed each platform and selected CityMax for a few reasons:
- you can set-up a site first and pay later
- they had a template with houses on it that worked well for Gord’s business
- the price was  $17.98 per month for 6 months (cheaper for a year subscription)

The URL of the website is www.whiterockstucco.com.

What I didn’t know is if the site would be search engine friendly. Below are the steps that we took to develop the pages, optimize the pages, start a linking campaign and begin to market the site online.

1. Adding Content
The first task was to add content and images which Gord did. He was even able to switch out the images of the houses in the template and add images of his work on customer’s houses.

2. Tracking Visitors
To measure performance, we wanted to track the number of visitors to the site. CityMax uses HitLinks which looks fine but I prefer Google Analytics.  Once we set-up an account adding the JavaScript code for Google Analytics was pretty simple because we could edit the HTML code of the template.

3. Selecting Keywords
The third step was keyword research which we did using WordTrackers Free Keyword Tool. For now we are focusing on 3 keyword phrases: Calgary Stucco, Synthetic Stucco Finishes, and Stucco Exteriors. We will be adding more phrases later. We avoided phrases related to “how to” and “do it yourself” since neither will generate business for Gord.

4. Optimizating
Next, we wanted to optimize the source code of the site so that search engines could find keywords easily and index the site into their inventory. This was easy using the Easy Editor and HTML Editor in the CMS.

5. Creating In-bound Links
Everyone knows that you need in-bound links to a website in order to get higher rankings on the natural (organic) results. But getting links to a new site for minimal cost and effort can be tricky. Our approach for an initial linking campaign was to submit the site to a variety of search engines and business directories using online submission programs. www.freewebsubmission.com and www.evrsoft.com/fastsubmit/ were simple and easy. I doubt they will be effective to get top rankings but this is a start. We will do an aggressive linking campaign later.

6. Marketing Online
Next, we set-up an account with Google AdWords to start driving some traffic to the website. One limitation of CityMax is that the Contact Us page has been created using JavaScript, so there is no separate URL for a Thank You page. Typically, when using Google AdWords, we would add a little snippet of code to the Thank You page so that every time the form is filled out a “conversion” is recorded when the Thank You page is activated. Unfortunately, this is not possible with CityMax.

7. Testing
The final step was to test the coding of the site. We did this by looking at the text of the site using Anduro’s online tool called SEO-Browser. We typed in the URL, parsed the site and then reviewed details in Advanced mode. The site looks pretty good but there is still room for improvement.

Results So Far:
We set the site up last week and started the advertising online on Saturday. So far, we have spent just over $100 for hosting and we set the online advertising budget at $200 per month. To date we have had 10 visitors to the site.

Jeff Nelson