First you need to be clear about the goals you have for your site and second, you need to be measuring them. Only then can you see what’s working and what isn’t so you can take action.

What you need to do to get your site on track:

1. Define your business objectives for your website
2. Define goals and funnels in analytics to gather data
3. Define your KPIs and measure them month on month
4. Know what to do with the data you gather

Points 1 to 3 ahould be fairly easy but point 4 is where the gold is. If you know what the data is telling you then you know exactly what to do to to get better results. You need this business information to make informed choices otherwise you are just guessing so don’t do it, measure it and know for sure.

Let’s look at these points a little closer:

1  Define your business objectives for your website

This is probably very simple and most likely to be one or more of the following:  more sales, more leads, more visitors, better relationships with prospects/customers, brand building.

2 Define goals and funnels in analytics to gather data

You probably already have Google Analytics installed but if you don’t go do it now. Then set up your goals, analytics has a good help system to show you how to do it but first decide what your goals might be – these are likely to match your business objectives by measuring a successful completion. For example, you might have a goal for a completed sale, a completed lead form, a completed registration for a newsletter or download. Whatever your goals are they should mark something that you want people to do on your site

If there are several steps involved in a successful goal completion then set up the funnels too. If you have 4 steps in your checkout that people have to follow in order to buy something then make each step a stage in your funnel. When data collects here you will see if you have unexpectedly high fallout from steps in your processes. Making changes will allow you to measure before and after so wee if you can make improvements.

3 Define your KPIs and measure them month on month

You can set up custom reporting in analytics to produce a KPI report month on month. KPIs would include your goals but would also include other crucial measures. For example: traffic from organic search, traffic from specific referral sites, number of keyphrases used to find your site, total revenue, number of transactions. The idea of KPIs is that they are measures that should be increasing every month – no excuses (except for seasonality of course but definitely year on year!)

There are other measures you can use that are useful to track that will have thresholds and so won’t increase indefinitely but are worth keeping a close eye on, such as: average transaction value, conversion rate, bounce rate, average time on site, number of pages visited per session.

4 Know what to do with the data you gather

This is the key to making this work and this will make your website make you more money. Having all of this data available is crucial for you to be able to see what is currently working well for your site. Watch out for paralysis by analysis identify some key reports to watch. You need to know exactly where your sales are coming from and where you might have problems with your site that you can take action to fix.

Lets look at a few examples of what you can see now you have all this wonderful data

• See which key phrases are bringing the most traffic (easy)
• Looking at this same report but clicking on the goals tab will show you which convert best
• If you have an ecommerce site, look at the ecommerce tab & see which phrases make the most money
• Look at which landing pages are popular and have the highest/lowest bounce rates – why might they be high?
• You can see which phrases brought traffic to which page & then how well that worked out for you
• See which referral sites bring the best quality traffic, can you get more traffic from them or other sites like them?
• If you run PPC Campaigns look at the same reports for your PPC data – Adwords will show a conversion but analytics will show you the value of that conversion.
• Look at Funnels for you various goals – is the fallout disproportionate at any particule stage in the process
• If you see “problems” make an improvement on your site, make a note of the date then compare your data before and after that date.
• Analytics lets you compare this week with last week, September with June & this quarter with the same quarter last year – any time period you want.
• This is great if you have seasonality as you want to compare with last year, not last month.
• Note that not all data will behave the same way, for instance your bounce rate for direct traffic will be lower (better) than PPC traffic because people know your site & have bookmarked it or know exactly what they are looking for.
• Bounce rates for contact us pages could be high because people find the details they want quickly – that doesn’t mean the page is performing badly.

Get to know your data and your visitor behaviour so you can interpret your data to get the best results.

Strategy use these methods to define goals and measure success so that we can get the best results for our clients. By working together to define goals and set up KPI custom reporting on your analytics this provides transparency for the way we work. If there is anything you want to measure and you are not sure how, we will work with you to set this up.

In addition, we work on results so your success is our success. Find out more about our exclusive 100% Pay-Per-Results SEO Service and our new 100% Results Based CPA SEO.

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We were tasked with increasing traffic to their website so we started by getting a good understanding of the business objectives of the website, a clear idea of who the target audience is and collected a thorough briefing that we could refer to throughout our planning and strategy development. The main objective of this ecommerce website is increased sales so getting a top ranking in Google for their most popular search term has definitely contributed to this goal.

Oak Furniture Solutions sell beautiful ranges of quality yet affordable oak furniture for the home and home office. They sell pieces crafted from reclaimed oak and also other woods including Pine and Ash. By focusing on a range of very popular phrases as well as paying close attention to the phrases that convert well Strategy have been able to help this business go from strength to strength.

Because we take a strategic approach to SEO we identify where we want to go and develop a plan for how we are going to get there. This involves measuring success against efforts all along the way and evaluating the strategies we are applying for each client.  We also monitor the positions we achieve very closely so we can take action if a competitor gets aggressive about the top terms.

While we are striving for the number 1 slot if oak furniture ever slips we are all over it!

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Little glitches or errors will frustrate the user and more than likely turn them away; like a search function that doesn’t work properly or a slow loading page. Worse still, a shopping cart that fails to add the products or forms that have errors.

There is one particular tool that you may find very helpful for looking at how your visitors are interacting with your site and in particular handling your forms. Have a look at www.clicktale.com

Broken Links between pages or image links that go to the wrong place will not inspire confidence in the potential customer.

Poor Quality images of products will not show them to their best advantage or entice people to buy.

These are just some of the reasons visitors may exit your site and seek out your competititor. It is important to have your usability testing done by someone who is not already familiar with the site as they will pick up navigation issues for example. A new user will really tell you how intuative or easy it is to buy from your site.

Remember too that webusers can be fickle and unforgiving as they scan for the results they want. They also have increasingly high expectations making them harder to satisfy with sub standard websites. Don’t make them search too hard or make them fill endless forms or they will quickly loose interest. Website usability testing finds out how much time users might take to search for a particular product or item on your site; what are the difficulties faced by them while conducting the search; do they face any problems related to your website design and features, such as navigating from one web page to the other, opening up links, downloading images or content, and the like.

In a nutshell, website usability testing is an approach to calculate the ease-of-use quotient of your site. Here at SIM we have perfected a system of usability testing that has been invaluable to our clients. Give us your target audience demographic and we can arrange for comprehensive testing of your site with a full report.

Based on the website usability testing analysis, you can then apply the changes and correct glitches and errors in the knowledge that you will be improving your customer’s experience.

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This can be achieved by
• Supporting your product images with appropriate unique descriptions containing your keywords.
• Use keywords in your file names.
• Include product and brand names in the alt text which will help to optimise on Google image search.

An example could be a website selling original art where quality images are crucial to getting conversions on the website. We would recommend using descriptive key phrase rich text such as “Painting of a Tiger in Watercolour” for the alt text and on-page text description adjacent to the image, plus having a filename painting-tiger-watercolour.jpg. This would be much more effective to perform well for an image search that a filename called image1.jpg and no key phrases used at all.

The next ecommerce seo tip will outline the benefits of creating a resource centre on your website.

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Avoid Duplicate Content

Getting large numbers of products ranking in the search engines is a crucial component of e-commerce SEO. However, do not be tempted to copy the product specifications from the manufacturer’s website – if you do you will run the risk of duplicate content issues. Remember that duplicate content is a big problem on your own site, so if a product comes in 4 different sizes and you have 4 product pages with exactly the same descriptions apart from the one element of size, this will look like duplicate content to the search engines.

To get around this problem, rewrite the product description in an interesting and easy-to-read format. For increased SEO traffic, master the art of writing keyword-rich product descriptions and link your product pages with similar products. This strategy helps you to tap into long-tail keyword searches. You can also utilise blog posts to promote and sell your products.

If you must have repetitive content that appears on every page, place it in an iframe with an invisible border. This ensures that search engines do not penalise you for duplicate content.

Use Keywords or phrases in your Anchor Text

Use appropriate and highly targeted words for anchor text – these are the words that form the text in the hyperlink to another page. For instance, when you connect a product category page to its individual product pages, ensure that the anchor text is not limited to “View” or “click here.” Such vague terms do not help the search engines understand the theme of your website.

Our next blog post will be all about optimising pictures and images for SEO traffic; another important factor for ecommerce website owners.

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