Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

Photo Credit: Catherine Jamieson

So you’re looking at your website’s stats from Google Analytics (or Coremetrics, or Webtrends, or whichever web analytics program you’re using) and feeling overwhelmed.  What should I look at?  What’s important? What does this mean?  But most importantly, what should I do now?!? Well, my friends, have no fear. I’ve got three easy metrics for you to look at and what you can do to take action and improve your website.

1. Keywords Used to Find Your Site

Over the past 6 months, what are the keywords that people typed into a search engine to get to your website?  Of course you’ll see the obvious variations of your company name, your url, and other strange anomalies.  Hopefully the words you are seeing most often are those that are already a part of your SEO campaign, but the focus here is to look at the words that are most commonly used.

Develop a list of the words that appear most often and look at them in relation to your website.  Clearly these are “hot topics” that people are searching for – are you providing your visitors with enough information on these topics?  Think about ways you can add more content by expanding on these keywords.  If you have a blog, great!  You’ve got some new ideas for blog posts.  If not, outline some possible new pages with content that focuses on these terms.

2. Bounce Rate

Here is a little refresher on what a bounce rate is: the percentage of initial visitors to a site who leave or “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.  Each individual page has it’s own bounce rate, since anyone can enter a website from different pages.  A low bounce rate percentage is the goal because it means that people are looking at more than one page rather than just leaving after landing there.

Take a look at each individual page’s bounce rate and organize it so you can see all of the pages that have a BR higher than 60%.  What can you do to improve those pages?  Is the content vague?  Make it more in-depth and specific. Maybe the picture is ugly.  Or maybe it needs a call-to-action.  It could be a number of things, so brainstorm ways to make those pages better and then put your theories to the test.  You’ll know they’re working if you start seeing the bounce rates for them go down over subsequent months.  If not, keep tweaking and testing.

I should note here that it’s typical for blog posts to have a higher bounce rate, as well as landing pages for PPC ads (if you didn’t already filter out paid search when you were looking at the page data).  Focus first on other pages with higher bounce rates.

3. Traffic Sources

It’s important to know how people are finding your website.  Are they coming to you directly by typing your URL in the address bar?  Is all your hard work on Facebook and Twitter paying off in the form of referral traffic?  Did you nail your SEO campaign and people are getting to you through your keywords?  All traffic is a good thing, but I’d like to stress here that you’re looking for a healthy mix of direct, referral, and search traffic.  If all of your traffic is direct traffic, you may have an opportunity to improve your search engine optimization or undertake a PPC campaign.  If all of your traffic is coming from search, maybe you should consider doing more link building and social media interaction.  Make sure that people can get to you through all avenues, whether it’s having your web address on all your offline marketing efforts, stepping up your game in SEO and PPC, or researching which social networks might be right for you.

I find it’s helpful to filter out any traffic that might be coming from you and your coworkers, so you can get a more “true” picture of what people are doing on your site independent of what you might be doing on there.

Looking at web analytics data from your website is a very important part of internet marketing, but just looking at it isn’t enough.  It takes time and effort to analyze the trends and assess what is working and what can be done better. There is never one clear answer, which is what makes the process so fun because you can constantly test out your theories.  The whole purpose of having a web presence is to interact with your visitors and build relationships, so by giving them what they want, you’ve got yourself a win-win situation.

“Email Links” are the links on your website that when clicked, open your local email client with the recipient’s email address pre-filled out in the message. Usually it is an address that is posted on your website and looks just like any other link on your site (just like this).

While this is a widely used method of contact on the interwebs, it is not the best option available to you. They are the simplest form of communication between a user and company, but when the cons of this method are introduced you can start to see why your other options are better.

1. Spam Scrapers are little robots that come to your website and look for email addresses they can spam. When you have “Email Links” on your site, that address is vulnerable to these attacks. Coding Languages like JavaScript can be used to hide this information from the Scrapers though.
2. Not everyone has a Desktop Email Client installed on their machine. “Email Links” use a locally installed Email Clients like Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird to send mail. If your user does not have one of these programs installed, these links will be useless to them, and will not work as you intended. This problem can create unnecessary support calls for you and your team about “website issues”.
3. Managing your Business Contacts is becoming more and more important in today’s fast moving business world. When using “Email Links” on your site, you have to manually add each new contact that you receive mail from into your Contact List or System. This process is cumbersome and time consuming.

The most efficient way for users to contact you on your website are using Contact Forms. Contact Forms are more specific, and give you the opportunity to ask specific questions of the user. The addition of required fields allows you to guarantee you get all the information necessary for you Contact List or System. Generally you want to keep the required questions to a minimum, as the more information you require, the more users will decide to not fill out your form.

Contact Forms solve a lot of the problems with “Email Links”. The use of a Captcha Field on a Contact Form allows you to fool most Spam Scrapers and Robots trying to spam your email address. Captcha Fields are the images of letters, numbers, and words you sometimes see at the bottom of forms you fill out when surfing the internet.

Contact Forms are processed entirely in your Internet Browser and do not require any third party software in order for the user to complete. The information filled in by the user is automatically emailed to the specified email address for that form.

Contact Forms also make it much easier to automatically update the user’s contact information into your preferred system. This information can be stored in a number of different ways including but not limited to: Databases, Text Files, XML Data Sheets, etc. Hall has created a product called Contact that tracks all of your email contacts on any form filled out on your website. All the data is stored in an easy to access admin section, with options to view or export data from all your forms or any specific form on your website.

Bring your website back up to speed by switching to Contact Forms. You will save yourself the hassle of answering unnecessary support calls, reduce the amount of spam you receive in your email inbox, and will have the opportunity to start collecting your client contact information automatically. It’s a win-win-win.

Photo Credit: Shenghung Lin

When you first got a CMS (content management system) it was probably really exciting to suddenly have control over your content! Or maybe I just think it is because I am into that stuff… Regardless, you probably did a lot of updates and added plenty of content at first. And then maybe you got busy with other things, and the updates happened less often. Now the CMS is lonely and the content on your website is getting old. What happened?

It is important to plan for the future when switching over to a CMS. Adding content is easy, but this flexibility goes hand in hand with time management. Here are 5 tips to help you make good use of your CMS and to keep your content fresh.

1. Schedule The Time to Update: With a CMS, updating your website is essentially a new job responsibility that you never had before. Make the time to add content on to your site by scheduling a block dedicated to your site content, whether it is an hour once a week to write a new blog post or 10 minutes at the beginning of every day to update products and add the latest news and events. Choose something realistic that will fit into your schedule.
2. Task Out Editing to Others: Most CMSs allow you to create multiple users who can have different permissions and access to certain parts of the website. Find people in your company who are interested in updating the website and give them an account that allows them to maintain a section of the site. Extra users can also be helpful for coming up with fresh ideas or for adding any content that you may have forgotten about.
3. Integrate Your Website with Traditional Marketing: Your website is an important element of your marketing strategy. Whenever you do any traditional marketing, reflect it into your website. For example if you send out a mailer, create a landing page and provide the link in the mail piece. If you put out a TV ad find a way to link to it or include it in you website.
4. Add New Photos: Start keeping a camera near by and take pictures around the office or at events that members of the company attend. These pictures will make a great addition to a news or event item and will also help break up content on your site.
5. Update With New Products and Services: This may seem like an obvious one but don’t forget about your website when you update a product or service. Make sure your website always has the most recent information on what you offer. Also, be sure to remove any old information so that viewers are not misled.

Utilizing your CMS to its full ability is not always as easy as it sounds. You need to make the time and effort to get new content up on your site. Just a couple of updates a week can make a big difference in keeping you content fresh and your visitors coming back for more!

Photo Credit: bayat

The days of the creative/marketing department living differently than the rest of the company are over. The creative department on staff needs to be intertwined in all aspects of your business; in business development, marketing, client relations, technology development, content creation et al.

Creative/Technology Department

The new creative department needs to work hand in hand with the technology department (if not be one and the same). Technology, services and content all become a part of your business’ marketing. Your marketing department doesn’t just need creative thinkers but they need to be tech savvy now too. They need to also be publishers. The role of a marketer is getting tougher, the price to participate in the new mediums may be cheaper but that may not make your bottom line any lower.

Being Creative is ‘Free’…

True, being creative is ‘free’, joining and participating in social networking sites are ‘free’ but these things take time and valuable resources (your staff and technology) and they are very labor-intensive. In Joe Burton’s, A Marketer’s Guide to Understanding the Economics of Digital Compared to Traditional Advertising and Media Services, he states “the high-volume, low-dollar, high-complexity nature of Digital programs makes it the most labor-intensive medium in the advertising industry”. So is the most labor-intensive medium really free? It actually costs you a lot.

There are shortcuts but remember it is hard to be genuine and produce good quality content with automation.

Engaging Your External Creative Department

If you do participate in social media for your company, have you ever considered letting your fans and followers be a part of the creative process? I have heard and been a part of lots of brainstorming/crowd-sourcing sessions where a company lets its brand evangelists do the creative work and then they bring back the ideas to their shareholders and associates. If you leave the conversation open to the public, they may come up with things that you may not have ever considered.

What All This Means for SMBs

This change in mediums and reliance on content and creative could actually be very good for SMBs. The playing field is more even, and with the right staff you can put out as much quality content as a larger company (please note I said quality content, not just content – the quality is what makes it valuable). When you are small and nimble you can react to the market and your consumers needs much easier than the big guys.