How to know if your Website is beating the competition.

The recent launch of the Benchmarking service in Google Analytics is a major step forward in monitoring a website's performance and what I feel to be one of the most significant advancements for business owners in the area of website monitoring.

Ever wondered how your website is performing against the competition? Some of the most common question we are asked include:

1. Is my website successful when compared to others?
2. Are the users staying longer or shorter on my site when compare to my competitors?
3. What are the website users in my industry's normal pattern of behaviour?

These are huge questions with the smallest bit of insight into the answers revealing a great deal. So what is Benchmarking and how does it work in providing me with the answers to these questions?

Benchmarking is a feature which forms part of the Googles Analytics product. Analytics is a free service offered by Google to monitor your website traffic, and is by far one of the most powerful website traffic monitoring tools on the web today. Besides providing vast amounts of data on your users, when linked with other free Google products, the service becomes an very effective website performance evaluation tool. More information on analytics can be found on Wikipedia.

So what is Benchmarking?

Through the broad adoption of Analytics across various industry sectors, Google has been able to create the Benchmarking service which aims to share analytics data between website owners. Website owners have an opt in option to join the Analytics data sharing service which will add your website performance patterns in Analytics to the benchmark service. "Google will remove all identifiable information about your website, then combine that data with hundreds of other anonymous sites in comparable industries and report them in an aggregate form". Once opted in, you will have access to the benchmarking service which will provide you with industry yard sticks such as Length of Visits, Bounce Rate, Number of Page Views, Average time on set and New Visits.

In each instance the service will be able to tell you if you are ahead or behind in each metric. I have listed two examples from unrelated sites to demonstrate the end results.

A Poor Performance.

A Strong Showing.

These metrics are extremely powerful and although they provide some insight into the working of your site, interpreting the data is what will make the benchmark service valuable. Each website still has its own unique circumstance and this point should not be lost when reviewing the performance metrics.

Benchmarking was launch about 4 weeks ago and I believe that it will become a widely discussed topic on the web in the next few months. The biggest concern that any website owner and operator is whether anonymously sharing their performance data with a particular sector might be detrimental to their website in the long term. I am of the opinion that it would not, although with the service only being a few weeks old there is plenty of time for debate. Let's see how things unfold.

Why Use Googles Geographic Targeting Tool on your Website...

I recently discovered a new feature which has been added to Google’s Webmaster Tools called Geographic Targeting. The tool allows webmasters to specify their websites target market by providing fields where the webmaster can enter in the geographic location of their target market or audience. The fields allow you to specify the location right down to street level.

On face value there seems to be some obvious upside in targeting your website and thereby hopefully increasing your websites ranking in that regions SERP’s. But it was the potential downside that concerned me, in that it might reduce my website ranking to people outside of your targeted region (as people do occasional get enquiries from outside their main target region).

So I started to surf the web to find out more info on the actual workings of this tool. In typical Google style, the tool did not have a clear explanation of how it functioned and most of the explanations out on the web seemed rather cryptic. That was until I came across a posting from a chap by the name of John Mueller in one of Google’s Groups. He works for Google and has a pretty strong rating in the groups, so I think he knows what he is talking about. Here is what he had to say;- (Excuse the copying and pasting;-)

Specifying geotargeting information for a site will not diminish its value in other geographic regions. For example, should you decide to select "Germany" as your target market, it will not affect how your site is returned in search results outside of Germany.

So it seems that there is only a potential upside in using the tool. By extension, if two websites where servicing the same region and with all the other things being equal, except that one website was using the Geo-targeting tool, Geotargeting should push the one website higher up in the SERP’s than the one not using the service– right?

Well the upside for Google is clear here. They will be able to serve more relevant results in the various regions, with the webmasters carrot being the promise of better localised search results. In typical Google style it seems to be an obvious and brilliant thing to do. I’m looking forward to see webmasters comments on this service in the future and to see exactly how this tools as affect their SERP. The link to the Google Groups article where found this bit of info can be found HERE.

Any feedback on the performance of this feature would be appreciated.

Website Marketing Campaign Nett 19 000 Visitors in 48 Hours.

A recent website marketing campaign we developed has netted in excess of 19 000 unique users within 48 hours. At the peak of the campaign the target website was receiving a new user every 2 seconds. A fantastic result.

Well structured Traffic Driving campaigns are a very effective mechanism for generating huge amounts of traffic to your website. These campaigns have a varied Return on Investment depending on the type of business or service a company might offer.

Businesses that draw most of their clients from Europe and the United States, and where their website plays an integral part of the sales process are ideal candidates for this types of online marketing. While the traffic that one might receives is not of the same caliber as one would expect to generate through a SEM or Google AdWords Campaign, applying direct marketing response rates of anywhere between 0.5% to 1% and these campaigns start to look very achievable. This percentage applied to a traffic figure in excess of over 10 000 unique users, and things start to looks very appealing.

We hope to run more of these campaigns in the future and can only hope to repeat this level of success.

AdWords: Click Through vs. Conversion Rates

A common misconception for AdWords newbie’s is that a high Click Through Rate (or percentage) is a positive result. One has the sense that people are legitimately interested in your products and yes, business is going to boom soon.

That might indeed be the case in certain instances, but in most cases there are a few important calculation that when applied usually put matters into context. The litmus test is always the conversion rate; put simply, the number of people who actually end up buying your product. Since AdWords is really just a modern direct marketing (DM) tool, I find it worth while to apply the old school DM calculations.

First up, Cost per Enquiry: Your Advertising Spend divided by the number of Enquiries over a period of time. To over simplify; if you spent R1000 on Google AdWords and received 20 enquiries, your cost per enquiry is R50. This is an interesting calculation when comparing various media formats, but for me it is not really that revealing.

The real value lies in Cost per Conversion: Advertising spend divided by the number of sales concluded over a period of time. Using the same R1000 advertising spend, if only 4 of the 20 enquiries where converted to sales, the cost per sale would be R250 (R1000 divided by 4).

I mention these simple calculations to illustrates the importance of Relevance when selecting keywords. The higher the conversion rate, the more successful a business will be. Being specific when selecting keywords is a effect way of obtaining high quality enquiries and therefore achieving a higher conversion rate. A practical keyword example of this is “Accommodation in Cape Town” a string of keywords which covers many types of accommodation over a vast geographical area. It also happens to be a very competitive category with every new guesthouse thinking that paying for that number one ranking is going to launch them into the big time. With a campaign targeting the AdWords top spot for this search string, it will be very easy to achieve high click through rates, while running up a huge AdWords bill. Apply the Cost per Conversion formula and it will soon reveal that this strategy is not sustainable over the long term.

There are many factors that should be considered when determining the correct AdWords strategy to adopt. Staying with “Accommodation in Cape Town”, experience has shown me that it is much more effective to sponsor a particular type of accommodation in a certain suburb, and perhaps to even mentioning a price in the content to further assist in filtering results – if you see it as a big deciding factor. For example sponsoring “Self Catering Accommodation Camps Bay” would achieve much lower Cost per Conversion as it will attract highly relevant shoppers. While you might achieve far less clicks on your advertisement, they will be of a very high quality. This might be one successful permutation of a number of possible keyword options. Others could include "Rent Flat Camps Bay" or " Clifton Self Catering" as Clifton it is a relatively close suburb to the target suburb. This is how keywords with strong relevance are tested and over time their effectiveness will be revealed.

As new keywords are identified as being effective, it is important to continue trying new keywords and adverts in the ongoing hunt for the lowest Cost per Conversion.

SEO - The long-tail approach.

Thanks to Tanya for the invite to contribute.

I'm the former CEO of workzoo.com, a vertical search engine, and am the current founder and CEO of Seattle based LineBuzz.com. Running a vertical search engine, I gained some insight into how search engine designers think and the kinds of engineering problems they deal with.

Ironically, one of the things we did successfully as a business with workzoo was our own SEO. We received thousands of new visitors from Google every day. So I'm going to talk a little about what I think small businesses can do to get more traffic from search engines.

First, the glossary:
SEO: Search engine optimization. The act of promoting your website to search engines without spending any money.
SEM: Search engine marketing. Advertising on search engines using something like Google's AdWords. This costs money.
SERPS: Search Engine Results Pages. The higher you rank the better.
SE: A Search Engine

Rule #1: Think like a search engine software engineer

You don't have to have a PhD to figure out that Google is in the business of indexing new, unique and useful content in the hope of incorporating that content into a search results page that matches a users query as closely as possible.

If you have a unique and useful page of content on your website that isn't showing up in Google's SERPS, then Google isn't doing their job properly. That is why Google themselves tell you to promote your website by getting other related sites to link to your site. Because that's the easiest way for them to find and index your site without any additional work on their part.

As another example, if you have a website that has stolen content from another site and republished it, and your sites pages show up in the SERPS alongside the real owners pages, then Google is also not doing their job properly. That's the reason why there is something called a duplicate content penalty. If Google detects content on your page that has appeared on another page somewhere else on the web, you may get slapped with this penalty and be removed from the SERPS.

The rest of this post is drawn from my personal experience, posts I've seen on SEO websites and common sense.

Rule #2: Exploit the long-tail.
Don't optimize for individual keywords. You'll never get to page one for "real estate seattle" so don't bother trying.

Instead, exploit the long-tail.
Publish lots of content that is interesting to your target market. Then instead of getting a few hundred people a month who are googling a single term (like "real estate seattle") and happen to look at page 7 of the SERPS, you'll get tens of thousands of people who are Googling a wide range of long-tail terms, like "house with wooden shutters on a lake in seattle" and "brick home on a quiet street near a coffee shop in west seattle".

Rule #3: Unique Content is key.

Unique content is the most valuable SEO commodity on the Internet today - and it's how you exploit the long-tail. If you have a large database of textual data that can be formatted into web pages, you are already 80% of the way there. For example, 1 record in your database becomes 1 page. With 10,000 records in a product catalog you have 10,000 unique pages for a search engine to index. Not only that, but each record is different. So if you're an engineering company, one page might be about a "1 millimeter titanium copper plated washer" and another might be about a "two inch diameter hardened plastic pipe" all of which are very specific long-tail search terms that will bring someone looking for that specific thing to your website.

Rule #4: New Unique Content is 10 times better than old Unique content.

All things being equal, a search engine will rank newer content higher than older content because in all likelihood the newer content supersedes the older content. If you're a news site or a blog, you're in business, provided you have constant new and unique content. Don't forget UNIQUE.

Rule #5: Get backlinks, but Choose your Neighbours.

Links from other websites to your own site are important. But links from "bad neighborhoods" may actually decrease your ranking in the SERPS.

You want a handful of links from high-quality websites to your site. I've seen sites with just one high quality link from a highly ranked website shoot up in ranking in the SERPS. And I've seen others with thousands of low quality links stagnate for months.


Rule #6: Get the basics right

Now that you're thinking like a search engine designer, exploiting the long tail by publishing large amounts of unique and useful content, making sure you've got a constant stream of new content on your site and you have a few high quality backlinks, you need to make sure you don't screw up the basics. There are a ton of sites out there that will teach you basic SEO, but here are some tips:

• Make sure your pages validate reasonably well with the w3c page validator. They don't have to be perfect. Just make sure they're not riddled with errors.
• Make sure the title tag in the page header is something that describes the page itself and not your website.
  
• Good: "1 millimeter Titanium copper coated washer"
• Bad: "Mark's enginnering website"
• Use a descriptive URL the way blog platforms do.
  
• Good: http://example.com/1_millimeter_titanium_copper_coa.html
• Bad: http://example.com/page432.html
• Build a hierarchical link structure that looks like a tree. Your home page links to 10 parent categories, which link to 10 sub categories and so on.
• Have plenty of cross-linking in your tree structure. So pages in the hierarchy link to other pages that aren't necessarily above or below them in the hierarchy.
  
• Make sure each page has less than 100 links to other pages on your or anyone elses website.
• Keep page size under 100k.
• Make sure your pages load fast. That means under 1 second for pure HTML without images or other media.
  

My opinion:

I think everything I've written about so far is probably fact. Here are some items that are opinions of mine that you may find hotly debated in SEO forums:

• I don't use an XML sitemap. I prefer to see which pages aren't being indexed by Google because they don't have enough 'link-juice' and then fix my link structure - rather than manually guiding Google in.
  
• I don't use meta-tags. I believe SE's stopped looking at them a long time ago because they figured out webmasters are all liars.
• My approach of going after the long-tail vs optimizing for specific keywords is probably a little controversial, but the data I and others have seen speaks for itself.
  

A final tip: Use Google's webmaster tools to check for errors when Google crawls your website. Keep a close lookout for missing pages, page errors and slow page load times.

Mark Maunder
CEO - LineBuzz.com

Organic Traffic | Prospects or Window Shoppers.

No Internet business can succeed without generating website traffic. Internet marketing is all about building website traffic. People have to visit your website for you to have any chance of success in the online marketplace, no matter what business you are in.

It is important to realize however, that not all website traffic is created equal. While there is no such thing as bad traffic, the ideal website visitors are those who are likely candidates for purchasing what you have to offer. The best type of traffic, when you are looking at traffic from the perspective of converting website hits to subscribers or even customers, is organic traffic.

Organic traffic is the term used to describe people who find their way to your website because they were searching for a product or service just like the one you have to offer. Typically organic traffic is directed to your site as a consequence of finding your site on a search engine’s results page.

If your web site is properly optimized for search engines, your website will show up on the results page of the most popular search engines as the result of a very targeted search. When a person finds their way to your website in this manner, he or she is basically a pre-qualified lead for your business.

If I do an internet search for “management books” and I end up on a bookseller’s website, I’m more than likely going to buy one of the books I find there. Someone who ends up on the bookseller’s website as a result of browsing the Internet for Mother’s Day gift ideas might buy a book, but they might navigate away from the site is search of a different kind of gift.

Comparing organic website traffic to other types of traffic is like comparing serious shoppers with money to spend to window shoppers who are just browsing to kill some time in between appointments. As a website owner, which would you rather have, qualified prospects or window shoppers?

Search Engine Optimization Package

It is my intention to launch a new Search Engine Optimization package for existing and new clients shortly. The details of this package will be available on my site within the next few weeks. The key aspects of this service will include:

∙ Website SEO Review & Report
∙ Developing a SEO Strategy
∙ Implementation of the Strategy
∙ Monthly Tasks & Reporting

For anyone interested in this service (albeit forthcoming), please feel free to contact me to discuss how this service could benefit your website & business.

Your Website needs Webmaster Tools!!

One of the first few questions that all new website owners ask is how can they get their Website to the top of Google’s search results. And as anyone in the industry will tell you, unfortunately it is a long process with no real guarantees.

That said there are a number of cool tools out there to assist matters and my favourite one this week is Google’s Webmaster Tools. The toolbox is filled with a number of very valuable little features, with two that are particularly top of mind.

Firstly, the Crawl Rate Indicator. Yes we are all paranoid that the King of search might not be getting to our site often enough and we desperately need to know when they last popped in. Well the crawl rate reveals all: crawl frequency, number of pages crawled and the volume of data crawled. Very nice!

The second feature of interest is the Site Map tool. It’s a fairly simple process to set-up and once configured allows you to communicate to the Googlebot (Yes is seems they might actually be listening) the relative importance of each page on your site and the frequency with which each page is updated. These little bits of data are then used to guide the Googlebot back from time to time.

All very interesting stuff and worth taking a look at.