maine web development, web design, internet marketing

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.

photo credit: larique

Whether you’re sick or not, most people go to the doctor for an annual check up. Your doctor will check your eyes, ears, heartbeat, lungs, and discuss anything else you may have concerns about. Even though your website is not a living, breathing, organism, it does need to be an evolving, expanding, entity online to reach its full potential. Every now and then, it’s good to give your site a check up. Here is a five-point check up you can complete on your own website to make sure it has a clean bill of health.

1. Blog Posts
   Check to see how recently you have updated your blog. If your blog hasn’t been updated since 2009, you need to add a new post. Consistent weekly posts are suggested to create a steady stream of new content growth on your website. This is helpful to optimizing your site for search as you’re expanding and validating keywords on your site. Consistency is also important; it helps search engines build trust in your website.
2. Social Network Connections
   If you are marketing your business on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, you should ensure that your web traffic can connect to those outlets and vice versa. You can even connect events to Facebook using Facebook Connect. When people sign up for your events it posts a notification on Facebook’s News Feed. Attendees’ friends are then able to see the event and are more likely to attend.
3. Title Tags and H1 Tags
   First, check and make sure you have them (these are tags that tell search engines what your website is about and can be found in the source code of your site). Second, make sure they are unique to each page. These are the most important tags to search engines, they tell the search engine what your site and each page are about so users can find the information they are seeking. The tags should be keyword rich and in harmony with the content on the page.
4. Calls to Action
   Are there clear calls to action on your site? You need to ensure the visitors to your site recognize what you’d like them to do on each page. Whether it’s signing up for a newsletter or downloading a whitepaper, each page should include a call to action that stands apart from the other content on that page and draws attention from the user.
5. Website Analytics
   Make sure you are measuring your calls to action and that you have conversion goals that you are working towards. Gathering website data is so incredibly important; it helps you find out what pages your users visit most and least and what they do while they are on your site. It gives insight to what kind of content your users are looking for and helps you make informed decisions about updates to your website.>

There, that was painless right? How did your website fare? If the results of your site check up passed – that’s great! Be sure to schedule your next regular check up -  if you miss an appointment problems can arise and will get worse the longer it takes you to get them checked. Those of you that found you may be missing some of these elements, no need to worry, the doctor can prescribe a remedy for that (what I mean is, talk to your web developers and they should be able to help you out).

Regular check ups are important and taking a step back to review your site as a whole every once in a while helps you assess where you are in accordance to the goals you’ve set out for your site.

Bounce rate, a web analytic, is the percentage of single-page visits your website receives. A normal bounce rate threshold is between 40-60% and a higher bounce rate indicates that web users are not visiting any other pages on your site. There are many reasons why a user might not view additional pages on your site, but if you notice that your bounce rate is high you can take action to reduce it.

1. Improve Usability
Web users’ patience and attention span lessens by the day and website usability can be a big road block. Once a user decides to pursue a search and link to your website, they need to be able to use the site to find the information they are seeking. Things that get in the way are pop-ups, auto-play videos, slow load times, broken links, and general navigation confusion. A clean web design and clear calls to action can significantly improve usability on your website.

2. Enhance Relevancy
Think about what a user wants from your website – what did they search for to get to your site and did they find it once they got there? Search engines use keyword tags and keywords within the content on the site to help users find the information they are seeking. Your site may have a high bounce rate because users are not finding what they are searching for due to poorly selected keywords. Make sure your keywords are congruent to the content topics on your site and that you keep your user in mind when creating new content.

3. Promote Interactivity
Give your users something to do once they get to your website. If someone takes the time to seek out your site and they find the content relevant, give them different options to interact with it. Try offering educational documents to download, a webinar to sign up for, or the option to subscribe to an RSS feed of your blog. Writing blogs and consistently providing new and useful content encourages users to consume resources on your site. Strong calls to action to present other pages within your site will likely lead to a reduced bounce rate.

Simply having an online presence is no longer the purpose of having a website. A website should be a resource for users to learn and engage with. The bounce rate is a valuable analytic to keep an eye on because it indicates if a user finds the information on your website useful. Remember, user preferences will change over time and providing useful content and having strong calls to action on your website help keep your bounce rate within a normal range.

When I’m asked whether or not a website should have search engine optimization, I always say yes.  Why wouldn’t someone want to give their site a fighting chance to be found when someone performs a search related to their business?  This is what I do on a daily basis and I’m very passionate about it – it’s important.

But that isn’t the only thing a website needs to accomplish.

eMarketer’s “2010 Digital Marketing Outlook” surveyed senior marketers regarding which activities are their top priority in the digital space this year, as well as which measures of engagement on their company websites are most important.  9.4% of the respondents sited conversion and ROI as the most important website engagement measurement.

Only 9.4%?!

Your website is a marketing tool and conversion should be at the top of your list.  Merely driving traffic to your website with SEO doesn’t mean your work is done; you need to engage those visitors and encourage them to take some sort of action.  Conversion can be measured in the number of contact forms submitted by potential leads, the number of blog subscribers you have, how many newsletter signups you receive, etc.  The idea is to have visitors interact with your site and start developing a relationship with you.

Let’s review a couple of the metrics in the survey that trumped conversion.

Time on Site

The average amount of time that people spend on the site was the most important metric of engagement according to the survey. I agree that this is a good gauge of whether or not people are interested in the information you’re offering and it’s one of the things I look at when I view web stats.  However, if the navigation and layout of your website is confusing, then a high average time on site would also be applicable, as people are spending time just trying to get around.  Ask a friend or relative to act like a potential customer use your website and find a specific piece of information and get their feedback.  Did they have a hard time finding it?  If so, you may need to adjust the navigation of your site accordingly.

Pageviews

This metric was also high on the marketers’ lists.  A pageview is recorded when a visitor, literally, views the page.  So if someone looks at your “software consulting services” page 1,000 times, what does that mean?  It means that your “software consulting services” page was looked at 1,000 times. All you can really infer from pageviews is that a certain page may or may not be popular with visitors.  If that consulting page is consistently a very popular page but you aren’t getting many people contacting you for more information, then you may want to consider the possibility that you’re not offering enough information about it or not reaching out to people in the right way.

So all other web stats, other than conversion, don’t matter?

Conversion should be the top metric that you look at to determine whether or not you are engaging people with your website.  However, that does not mean average time on site, bounce rate, traffic sources, most popular pages, etc., are not important.  These additional statistics can provide you with the insight that you need to figure out what you may need to work on to get people to take that desired action (convert).

But My Keywords Are #1 in Google

That’s great!  Does it guarantee that someone will sign up for your newsletter once they click on your site from the results page?  Unfortunately, no.   The first step is being found.  The next step is engaging the visitors once they’re at your site, taking them by the hand and leading them to what you’d like them to do.  You may not be able to convert them the first time, but with an easy-to-navigate site, lots of relevant content written specifically for your target demographics, and prominent calls-to-action, you’re well on your way.  Monitoring your website stats and making adjustments based on them will ensure that you are focusing on the ultimate engagement: conversion.