R.O.I Media | Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Professionals » Search Engine Optimisation

Power of Reporting

Jacob — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:11:51 +0000

If you still think of a website as a “nice to have”, you need to get out of the 90’s. We have moved beyond that stage, we should have at least. A website should have a goal defined: “What should your website do for you?”

Don’t guess internet behavior based on your own – you’re wrong!

Define a goal

Every website has a goal, a reason for existence. The times of just being there for the sake of it are over. Even more so, your website’s goal should be supporting your integrated business model. In the best case scenario, you should define a multitude of goals. Even though not every business is suitable for the internet, keeping your finger on the wrist never hurts.

What is your website’s goal? Do you have an E-commerce site? It’s clear you that should know your conversion rate (which influences website visitors becoming customers), sales funnel, drop out percentage and returning visitors… But even if you’re not running an online shop, there are several metrics you should be monitoring that will give you valuable info, at no cost whatsoever!

Tagging

Before we look at the key metrics, what can we measure? By default free reporting tools will have standard metrics that share a lot of information. But did you know that with a few easy tweaks this tool can go far beyond your expectations? Common reporting tools have a code that is added to each page. It collects data from the visitor, such as language, origin, computer compatibility, popular pages and other data.

You can extend your arsenal however – you might have fancy pdf files that you’re offering for download; product and service descriptions, pricelists or anything else. Imagine the capability of having an overview of document download rates, allowing you to define your most popular products. It tells you how engaging your site is as well.Do you have an enquiry e-mail address instead of an enquiry form? Add a code to measure the number of clicks on your ‘mailto:’ enquiry. Compare this to the actual emails you receive through that referral. See any discrepancy? Act on it. Check the number of views your 404 error page gets. That will tell you something about site quality.

Key metrics

In Google Analytics you can go to these reports and click the “add to dashboard” button which allows you to see these at first glance.

Bounce rate
This is one of the most important metrics for your site. A high bounce rate (over 50%) will tell you that there’s a huge gap between what your visitors expect to find on the site and what you offer. Maybe you’re running a PPC advertising or SEO campaign. If you have a high bounce rate (1 page/visit), you’re throwing money out the window. Identify the pages with the highest bounce rate and improve them. Every website is different though, so evaluate this according to your website.
Average Time on Site
How much time are visitors spending on your site? Are you offering your extensive expertise? You even might want to divide long articles onto different pages to see how many people go to page two. It will show you how engaging your content is and how much visitors read this content.
Keywords
Which keywords (PPC vs. SEO) are pulling in the bulk of visitors? Why stop there? Check that metric in perspective and look at it cross-linked to your goals. Which keywords are converting? And which aren’t? You’ve got work to do.
Actions
Downloads and clicks on email links are by default unknown. Add a sample code to the link and see how engaging (converting) your site is, usually between 2%-3%. Identify the weak pages that convert poorly and optimize them.
Goal Abandonment Rate
Did you define a goal? Splendid. Now, how is your funnel abandonment rate, plainly stated, how many people are leaving your store with their wallets drawn? Identify your weak funnel pages and optimise these ASAP because you are losing money!Did you know that you can even check the progress of each individual field of an enquiry form? See how many people almost send you an enquiry but don’t quite get there.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rates are like missionaries in early colonies; how many people were converted to their belief? How many of your visitors are converted into prospects, clients or any role you define?
Map Overlay
Where are your visitors coming from? You probably have a good idea locally. But in times of expansion do you know where to turn?

Add value

Throw in a value for each goal you define on your site and you’ll see what’s going on for real. Define a real site value by working backwards. Let’s say for every 100 completed enquiry forms you make 25 sales. Each sale has a $20 margin. So $20 x 25 = 500 ÷ 100 = $5. In theory, each completed enquiry form brings you $5.

Online business compared to real life offers a priceless source of information about your customers. You would be unwise not to take advantage of that. Take that step ahead over your competitors and get smarter today. But remember, reporting is not the goal itself. It’s merely a tool to achieve your goals. So spend time where it benefits most, and you will soon start seeing the results.

Almost Famous

Steven — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 06:45:37 +0000

Fame is a deceptive beast. The allure of money, popularity and renown cannot be beat. Writing fills this aching gap with pages upon pages of well-constructed content that will hopefully live forever in the minds of your audience. SEO copywriting, unlike above-the-line copywriting, may not rocket my name into a glittering pantheon of stardom, but it will elevate any standard website, causing it to climb up the search engine rankings faster than my friend would climb up an oak tree to avoid the police. And like a drunken miscreant, this process takes times.

Writing is an art, SEO copywriting is a skill – sometimes you are painting a wall, other times you are designing a ten foot mural with ghosts and ninjas, or ninja ghosts. In essence, the search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com want decent content. They crave it and the absence of engaging, typo free, grammatically correct content will cause your rankings to plummet, if you are investing in an online marketing strategy. Did you ever wonder how a website such as Google remains the king of the hill? Relevant content that people can use keeps the punters coming back for more, every time. If there as an answer, Google can find a solution. Its fame is its relevance.

You can’t copy a great artist either. One of the biggest crimes for any website (SEO-wise) is to include duplicate content on your site. This includes stealing two fabulous lines from one site. Plagiarism in any form must be avoided, or risk your work sinking to the bottom of the rankings faster than Jennifer Lopez’s film career.

You can’t put a price on fame – so research the very best keywords before you begin ranking for arbitrary keywords that make little sense. If you own a car rental site, look towards the holy union of ‘car rental’ plus whatever city you live in. In time, your understanding of the keywords in correlation to your websites will improve – this is a priceless skill; for everything else, there’s Google AdWords Keyword tool. Keep your writing to the point, filled with the correct amount of keywords and relish in improved rankings and a steady growth. Your personal fame is a measurement of your creativity; continue writing and find success in your growth as an SEO writer.

Cyberworld without Search Engines

Germe — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 08:08:17 +0000

Imagine a world where there was no order; a world where everything goes and nothing needs any type of organisation. Like a University class list filled with names in non-alphabetical order, it would be chaos! Think of duplicate street names in one suburban area, think of houses all constructed in the exact same manner, how would you at the end of the day pick up that special package you got for a bargain deal through a classified ads bulletin? This is what Cyberlife would have been like without search engines. Through their rules and regulations, they ensure that all website owners implement Search Engine Optimisation practices on their sites to make the web a much better place to roam through.

Just as the real world needs proper organisation to function, the World Wide Web needs proper structure. More than 80% of all web users hunt for information on the internet using search engines. Like the legal laws of a country, so are the ranking algorithms of Search Engines, and without them being in place, it simply would have been a really massive pile of useless information. You can just imagine that if search engines displayed information that was not at all related to search queries, more than 80% of web users would have nowhere to go, no means to find the end to a heated debate between two mates regarding who won the 1992 Soccer World Cup. Oh the disaster! Cyberworld activity would diminish rapidly, and like dinosaurs, would only be referred to as a previously existent fossilized entity.

That is why being on the coveted 1st page of search engines is all that matters. Putting your time, effort and finances into constructing a website that is buried deep in the search engine results, will be like constructing a huge billboard for your business and then placing it in the middle of the desert. Unlike politicians making empty promises to win your trust, search engines will ensure that you reap the benefits if you ‘follow ‘them. In layman’s terms, follow their rules and you will be sure to benefit from the exposure of your top rankings.

There is a saying that goes ‘You are who Google says you are’ and that simply translates to the following fact: If search engines do not rank you in the top 10 for you industry related keywords, they do not see you as a formidable force in your industry (and web users will use the same analogy).

Ask yourself this, ‘Will you pick up and read a newspaper dated 1999 or one which was printed last night?’ The answer is quite simple. So say NO to copying content from other websites and receive fresh, never before crawled content. Say NO to meta data spamming and non-friendly search engine optimization practices. Say NO to harmful elements on your site that can give you a quick boost but will ultimately affect your site negatively. Say NO to digging your own site’s grave!

Be part of the online revolution! We offer services ranging from online business development, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to Pay Per Click (PPC). We will secure your ‘billboard’ on a spot next to a busy freeway, which is the only pathway to all major cities. Ensure your online success and say YES to R.O.I Media!

Importance of Internal Linking

stephan — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:05:54 +0000

We all know that links are extremely important when it comes to SEO and to get your site ranking for all those top industry keywords. We are so obsessed with acquiring those inbound links every month that many of us forget that the links you create internally between the pages of your site are also an extremely important element in Onsite SEO.

Internal linking is right up there as one of the most important Onsite SEO elements in my book. It’s amazing what a good internal linking structure can do for your website and individual page rankings. So let’s first have a look at why internal linking is so important.

Internal Linking serves multiple purposes:

To increase Page Rank of internal or ‘deep’ pages.
To build relevancy of a page to a keyword or key phrase.
To ensure that your site in its entirety is spidered, even those pages that are not referenced in your main navigation.

Increasing Page Rank of Internal Pages

Google allocates a value to every page of your site. For this they use Page Rank. Many refer to Page Rank as the “juice” allocated to each page and the website as a whole. Your homepage is seen as the most important page of your site and therefore the Homepage will always have the highest Page Rank value. This Page Rank is then distributed between the lower pages of your site as illustrated in the image below:

The links that point from your home page to internal pages are usually found in the Main navigation of the site. This allows your Homepage Page Rank to flow naturally to the internal pages that are being linked to. The ‘juice’ gets distributed evenly across the pages that are being linked to.

Building Relevancy of a Page to a Keyword

The first and most important step of any successful SEO campaign is without a doubt Keyword Research.
You have to have a very clear objective of which pages you want to rank for and for which keywords or phrases. When creating your internal linking structure you cannot just link to pages using any random text you feel like. You need to use the targeted keyword of the page you are linking to in your anchor text.

Links act like votes for the pages that they link to. So, if you link to a page using “click here” enough times, that page will start to rank for the keyword “click here” in the Search Engines. Go ahead and do a search for the poor guy who ranks NO 1 for “Click Here”!

Ensuring your whole site gets spidered and indexed

Making sure your website and all its pages are spidered by the search engines is in all probability the easiest thing you can do to increase your rankings. You see, the more pages of your site are indexed in the Search Engines the more content you have to offer the user. The more content you have on your site, the more keywords you will inevitably have in this content. And the more keywords you have the better the chances of ranking for those keywords.

So why would Search Engines not be able to spider all your pages without internal linking? Pages can be hidden from search engine spiders when linking is done in a way that the spider cannot read to follow those links. This would happen if your site uses a script-based navigation system for example. Also, image-based navigation may be crawlable or spiderable by search engines, but the search engines can’t see images and therefore can’t assign any relevancy from the image to the page that is being linked to.

Well that’s all I have for now. I hope you got all of that, but if you didn’t, don’t despair! Just give ROI Media a call and we’ll sort you out.

Quality Content Is King

stephan — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:00:04 +0000

Have you ever heard the saying: “content is king”? Well it is one of the most fundamental things you must do to your website if you want any exposure whatsoever. The World Wide Web is a collection of billions of web pages from all over the globe. This content can be accessed at the click of a button. There is all types that you will come across; some good, most bad and a lot very spammy. So to set yourself apart from the rest of the pack you should write quality content for your website that is unique and relevant to your industry. This is a key element of SEO.
Here are a few great tips to make your content work for you:

Know what your target market is searching for. There is no other marketing medium on earth where you actually find out exactly what words your soon to be customers use to search for your product/service. For this reason, proper keyword research is incredibly important to the success or failure of your online venture. At ROI Media we specialise in finding the top keywords in your industry and with our expert copywriters tailoring a highly relevant, well crafted, SEO friendly website designed for people with search engines in mind. This brings me to the next point:

Write for people AND search engines. This is a very vital part of your copywriting. Remember, what we are saying here is that quality content is king. Too many people write their content only for search engines forgetting that the real reason they are writing it is so that people will come to your website and perform a certain task. This is where the art of effective SEO copywriting comes in. Pages smartly tailored around your top keywords will help you rank for your key search terms.

Keyword Research

stephan — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 06:46:08 +0000

Keyword research is a practice used by search engine optimization professionals to find and research actual search terms people enter into the search engines when conducting any queries.

Keyword research should be the first step in any SEO campaign. Finding the perfect keywords for your specific niche or industry is a must.
Without knowing which keywords you want to target, you won’t be able to write any content for your website. When you write content first and then research your keywords second, you probably will have to plug those keywords into your written content, wasting your valuable optimization time.
Finding the right keywords to target can be quite a process:

Firstly, you need to research your industry and find out what keywords or phrases people are using to search for the products and services in your industry. Luckily for us, Google provides you with a free keyword research tool that will give you a pretty accurate average based on current keyword searches. When using this Keyword tool, you will also have to research which country or countries will be the target market for your product or service.
It doesn’t end here though. When you know which keywords and market will be targeted, you will have to refine your keywords to the industry and accommodate it with the product/service specific keywords. Targeting the key phrase “Cape Town Travel” when you have a Cape Town accommodation site simply won’t do. This keyword is too generic, and will not bring in the desired or potential client i.e. someone who is looking to book accommodation in Cape Town.
There are many more aspects to consider when researching possible keywords for your site such as:

Branding Perceptions – Many company leaders and CEO’s have their own interpretation of how they want their brand to be portrayed and ostensibly perceived online.

Existing Brands – If a company decides to sell Nike trainers online, the market is already highly competitive, and the Nike brand itself is predominant.

Geographic targeting – Depending on what a company sells or offers, overlooking the likelihood of the inclusion of geographical locations in the search query may be highly detrimental.

Long Tail Keywords – The long tail in keyword research is basically an expansion of a core, generic and high volume keyword phrase which includes numerous combinations and permutations of the keywords and their associated or relevant phrases.

Simply put, there is much more to keyword research than just choosing the keywords that you would search for and then hastily plugging that keyword everywhere into your site. So when you build your new site, Keyword research should be the first thing you do.