You are here: Home / Archives for analytics

10 Important Points to Consider when Redesigning your Website

April 30, 2012 By

Every so often, your website should undergo a face lift. It’s important to consider a site redesign every couple of years or so to maintain a fresh appearance for your company.

If you just put a site online and don’t touch its design for many years, it will appear that your company is behind the times. Since online marketing channels and SEO is constantly evolving, you have to stay current or risk losing your position to a competitor who’s on top of their game and has an updated site.

Other reasons like migrating to a new content management system or rebranding your company can also serve as motivation for re-designing your website.

When planning and implementing your redesign though, there are several things you need to consider. Continue reading for 10 important items you should be thinking about when doing this all-important task. These tips came to us by way of a recent white paper from our friends at Hubspot. For more detailed information into the following 10 points, download the white paper today.

10 Important Points to Consider when Redesigning your Website

1.    Analyze your existing site’s metrics

Before you even begin, evaluate your current site’s performance to see where you stand. Metrics to consider include – number of visitors, click-thru-rate, bounce rate, time on site, current SEO rankings and more.

2.    Develop goals for your new site

Have a concrete reason for re-designing your site beyond “it’s been awhile.”  Redesigning your site should be more about how your site works rather than how it looks. Tie your reasoning into metrics mentioned in #1 and be sure you clearly communicate this to your in-house team or agency.

3.     Account for your current site’s assets

Many designers fail to consider how a re-design can hurt more than it helps. For example, you may have a page on your existing site that does very well and has lots of inbound links. Losing this page could do great damage to your position in the search engines. Important assets you need to be sure you preserve may include – most shared/viewed content, most visited pages, best performing keywords and number of inbound links to individual pages.

4.    Look at the competition

While it isn’t wise to obsess about what your competitors are doing, it can be very helpful to understand where they may be outfoxing you. Run you and your competitor’s site through a tool like Marketing Grader so you can learn the strengths and weaknesses of each. Don’t copy your competition but instead use it as an opportunity to learn where you can improve your site.

5.     Develop your Unique Value Proposition (UVP)

Before you begin developing content for your new site, be sure you identify what makes you unique for your competitors and be sure that messaging is consistent across your entire website. It’s important you immediately answer why someone should contact you or otherwise stay on your site rather than flee to your competitors.

6.     Design your site around personas

Don’t make your site about you – make it about your customers. Use language they can understand and relate to. Segment your personas by demographics and identify their needs. Use this as a basis for developing your site’s messaging.

For example, let’s say you’re a hotel marketing manager trying to bring in new customers. In this case, you can target five buyer personas – an independent business traveler, a corporate travel manager, an event planner, a vacationing family, and a couple planning their wedding reception.

7.     Optimize your new site for search

Hopefully you’ve got all the bones there for building search engine rankings but it’s amazing the sites we run into who don’t. Anyway, be sure you inventory your existing site pages to find the ones with the most link juice and search engine value. Be sure you develop a comprehensive 301 re-direct strategy to ensure you don’t lose any of that traffic or value.

8.     Identify Calls-to-action

These are the elements in your site’s content and design that motivate a visitor to take action – be it to click ‘buy’ or simply provide their email address or download a whitepaper. Your website shouldn’t be static but rather should motivate someone to take action. Examples of good opportunities for conversions include: free whitepaper, contests/promotions, product purchases, free trial, etc.

9.     Have an ongoing content development strategy

As you know from reading our blog, we place high value on a consistent stream of valuable, informative content. Develop a strategy for building this content. Start a blog, develop press releases on important company news and think about landing pages you can develop that target important keyword phrases.

10.     Include extras

Any website built today should include basic elements like a homepage, product page(s), about us/FAQ and a contact us page. But go beyond this to really make your site shine. A blog for example is a great way to provide important information on an ongoing basis. You can also include landing pages for lead generation, add RSS capability and include social sharing buttons on all your pages.

This list of 10 things to consider when redesigning your website isn’t meant to be exhaustive. Each business and industry is unique. Much of what determines the success of a redesign occurs before you actually do the work. Many website owners get caught up in how the site looks rather than how it works.

Following these 10 recommendations though will ensure you’re well prepared to successfully re-design your website.

Many customers have come to us wondering why their site isn’t performing that well and we usually find something mentioned above that they’re lacking. Most of all, many businesses view their website as a singular resource when in fact it should “…integrate with other functions like social media, e-mail marketing and lead generation.”

Have you re-designed your website recently?

How did it work out? Are you satisfied with how your new site is performing?

Is there something mentioned here that you missed?

Remember, you can always go back and make changes – that’s the beauty of online marketing. You can always go back and make tweaks to boost your site’s performance.

Other Posts You May Be Interested In

Answer These 23 Questions to Understand What Google Looks For

3 Types of ‘Breadcrumbs’ – And Why You Should Include Them on your Site

10 Most Common Web Design Mistakes

34 Things You Must Do When Redesigning your Website

“Don’t Make Me Think” – A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (Part I, Part II, Part III)

Filed Under: Site Architecture, Tip of the Day, Usability Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

6 Basic Landing Page Optimization Techniques

February 7, 2012 By

In a broad sense, a landing page can be pretty much any webpage on your site. Taken literally, it’s a page a person ‘lands’ on from another website or from a search engine results page.

For example, if someone uses a very specific term on Google, they may land on an article in your knowledge center discussing the topic they’re looking for.

For our purposes here though, a landing page is also a web page that “…allows you to capture a visitor’s information through a lead form.” This is a definition provided by a recent e-book from HubSpot on landing page optimization and conversion.

Good landing pages will target a particular audience – traffic from an email campaign or pay-per-click ad for example. It’s important you create a landing page for each offer you have. For example, you can either build a landing page designed to promote downloads of a new e-book or you can build one designed for the visitor to make contact, provide information or signup for an offer.

Landing pages are important because they allow you to convert more visitors into leads since these pages make the process of receiving an offer much easier. One main reason is because site visitors don’t have to spend time navigating your site to find your offer.

Landing pages also eliminate visitor confusion on what they must do to receive your offer. They eliminate frustration for visitors, guaranteeing you will see more conversions.

Continue reading for 6 basic landing page optimization tips everyone should consider.

1.    Use clear title, description and layout to convey the value of your offer. Create a strong incentive for your visitors to download, contact or sign-up.

2.    Minimize disruptions on your landing page, including navigation links you may have on other pages. Keep visitors focused on completing your form or reading through to the call-to-action.

3.    Include social sharing links like Google’s +1, Facebook’s ‘Like,’ Twitter, LinkedIn and so forth. This allows visitors to easily share your page/offer with their friends.

4.    If you’re using a form, design and structure it with the user in mind. Only ask for what you need to follow-up and qualify the lead. Don’t make it too long or invasive.

5.    Have a Thank-you page that appears once the visitor finishes downloading your e-book or completing the contact form. Maintain engagement by suggesting other pages/offers they may be interested in or next steps they can take.

6.    Track conversion rates and keep testing to find areas of improvement. Use metrics and A/B test results to refine your pages so they continue to grow.

Point 6 is especially important in that testing and metrics lets you see what works and what doesn’t. Having this information in hand gives you a tremendous advantage in building landing pages that work.

Check back with us again soon for more information on A/B split testing, conversion metrics and other important items you can consider to help maximize your landing pages’ potential.

Other Posts you May Be Interested In

Hooking your Readers – 7 Approaches to Great Headlines

How Minor Tweaks to your Headlines Can Boost Conversions

Maximize Conversions by these 9 Tips for Writing the Ultimate Landing Page

Filed Under: Copywriting/SEO Content Development, Online Marketing, Tip of the Day, Usability Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

34 Things You Must Do When Redesigning your Website

April 21, 2011 By

Every so often, it’s a good idea to give your organization’s website a fresh new design. Doing so makes your company look active and dedicated to giving your customers the most advanced products and services.

But considering the fact many websites contain hundreds, maybe even thousands of pages, it can be a daunting task regardless of how careful you are. Proper planning helps ensure it all goes smoothly…no or very little planning can turn it all into a big nightmare.

Pages can get mixed up, deleted or otherwise not be available on the new site, which can end up costing your company thousands of dollars.

To avoid this calamity, you need to consider the following factors before, during and after. Continue reading to learn about all of these considerations you need to keep in mind when redesigning your website.

Before doing anything though, you need to get some baseline information and backup your old site just in case something goes awry. Load time, conversion rates, search rankings, bounce rates for your top landing pages and a list of important inbound links is information you need to have in-hand before you even get started.

Once you have all of this, it’s time to start your site re-design. Taking the following 34 steps during this process will ensure it all goes smoothly and you begin reaping the benefit of a new website as quickly as possible.

Prior to New Site Launch

1.       Have the old site available to put back online immediately if something goes wrong.

2.       Retain your existing URL structure if possible so you can minimize impact on search rankings.

3.       Address methods to eliminate duplicate content to prevent it from occurring in the first place.

4.       If you’re unable to keep existing URL structures, have a plan on how you will handle switching to the new file structure, including 301 re-directs, updating links, marketing materials and PPC ads.

5.       Keep a copy of the old site on-hand just in case.

6.       Use a link checker utility like Xenu to scan your new site and find any broken links.

7.       Take a moment to review titles and meta descriptions on your new site.

8.       Before launching, check your new site manually using multiple web browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome). Many differences exist between these browsers.

9.       Update XML and HTML sitemaps so search engines can easily crawl your new site.

10.   Verify all web forms and other interactive features are working properly.

11.   Protect your site from competitors and search engines during development. The best way to accomplish this is to develop the site locally and internally to your firm.

12.   Review existing RSS feeds

13.   Verify your new site will work properly with traffic tracking codes like Google AdWords and Google Analytics.

14.   Develop a plan to add current analytics tracking to your new site before launch.

During new site launch

15.   Did you back up your old site? If not, now is your last chance.

16.   Update your .htaccess and robots.txt files so any 301 redirects will work properly.

17.   Be sure AdWords and PPC campaign pages are updated and working properly.

18.   Update payment gateways or other important sites if your server’s IP address changes.

19.   Test all email address and make sure they’re working properly.

20.   Remove any temporary no-index tags, robots.txt and be sure any other robot control tags are updated in case you had something blocked off during the development process.

After new site launch – catching any mistakes

21.   Run your spider/link finder once again to catch any broken links you may have missed.

22.   Test your new site’s load time. Google has claimed load time is now a big ranking factor.

23.   Make double-sure you put tracking codes/scripts on your new pages

24.   Check server logs for any 404 or other server errors.

25.   Look at your Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster accounts to see if the search bots are spotting any errors.

26.   Update any broken inbound links at the source of the link or through a 301 re-direct.

27.   Verify PPC ads are still correct.

28.   Make sure your XML sitemap is up-to-date.

29.   Compare bounce rates for the new site vs. the old one.

30.   Monitor how newly indexed (…or re-indexed) pages are ranking.

31.   Now that your site is live online, test it once again with all web browsers and even a mobile smartphone if you’re able to.

32.   Manually test all web forms and other interactive scripts.

33.   Check where your site is in the search results after the search engines have indexed it once again.

34.   Go to Google and Bing and type “site:yourdomain.com” in the search bar to see if the number of pages indexed has improved over your previous numbers.

Taking these all important steps helps ensure your site transition goes as smoothly as possible. Also, they help you spot any errors and allow you to make those corrections before any negative consequences arise.

Double, perhaps even triple check your site to make sure everything is working properly. If not, you’re certain to suffer devastating setbacks in the search engines as well as eroding good will of your site visitors.

Remember what Thomas Edison once said – “Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning.”

Filed Under: Site Architecture Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

5 Tools You Can Use To Track Your Competition Online

October 26, 2010 By

If you’re in a very competitive niche or industry, you likely have someone you’re always vying for the top spot in the search engines with. A big part of remaining competitive online is effectively tracking your competition…watch what they do to maintain their position and perhaps match it so you don’t lose ground to them.

Staying on top of your online competition allows you to effectively deal with any changes that occur in either their website or the search engines.

Fortunately, there are a lot of tools out there to help webmasters and SEOs track their competition. These tools allow you to see who’s linking to them, what their social media presence is and even see what others are saying about them.

Continue reading for 5 easy tools you can use to track your competition and help ensure you don’t get left behind by any changes that improve their position in the search engines. Each of these tools covers different aspects of marketing a small business online.

1. Google Alerts

Free tool that allows you to enter a specific keyword and monitor activity for that phrase daily, weekly or even as it happens. You can enter a particular company’s name in quotations (i.e. “SEO Advantage”) and you will be notified by email when something changes with the competitor’s site. You can even enter keywords common to both your companies to see whose content is having a better reach.

Google Alerts will deliver a message via email that contains new blog posts, articles, news stories and more for the particular keyword you enter.

2. Change Detection

Another free tool that alerts you to any changes in your competitor’s website…kind of like a Google Alerts exclusively for site content. What Change Detection does is create a log file for the particular site in question and lets you know when changes in the page text are recorded.

3. HowSociable

Allows you to enter your competitor’s name and see how their brand performs across 32 different metrics, providing you with a “total visibility score.” Such metrics include a “Twitter Tweets Score” and a “LinkedIn People Score” among others.

4. SocialMention

Allows you to see what others are saying about your competitor across different social networks. SocialMention breaks down the comments by date, gives you an average sentiment and provides the top keywords associated with the particular brand you’re looking at. You can even separate this into different sources of comment (i.e. blog comments, images, news, etc.).

5. Majestic SEO

See who’s linking to your competition and even compare it against your own site. You can register and test the service for free and if it works for you, pay a low monthly fee. Seeing your competitor’s backlinks can help you identify untapped resources and provide insight into your competitor’s link building strategy.

These aren’t the only analytic tools out there but these 5 cover the important areas of marketing a small business online.

Evaluating your competition is vital to achieving and maintaining high search engine rankings. Each of these tools can send updates directly to you through email or you can subscribe to an RSS feed. Either one of these puts the information right at your fingertips so you can react quickly to any changes.

Filed Under: Online Marketing, SEO Technology, Site Architecture, Tip of the Day Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

3 Essential Components of SEO Reporting: Going Beyond Rankings

May 5, 2010 By

One of the best ways to prove enterprise-level SEO provides a strong, consistent return on investment is to provide ongoing SEO reports to your bosses or clients.

Many SEO professionals in the past relied on providing simple visibility reports that detailed the rankings for particular keyword phrases in the top search engines – namely Google, Yahoo and Bing. While this data can provide some excellent illustration of a project’s success, it is possible that reporting of this nature can be misleading or irrelevant when considering things from a conversion/revenue perspective.

Continue reading to learn about 3 essential components your SEO report should have so your bosses or clients can have actionable insight into how their SEO campaigns are progressing…please note that each client is different so you may have to provide modified/customized reporting formats.

1. Executive Summary

This summary provides a quick overview of the SEO campaign’s performance and describes what activities were performed since the last report. This section can also provide other metrics that apply to the client’s particular situation.

2. Visibility Reporting

When starting an SEO project, you collect a list of keyword phrases you intend to target, giving you a baseline ranking report for positioning in the search engines. Progress is measure against this baseline ranking on an ongoing basis.

A good visibility report provides the baseline ranking, the prior report’s rankings and the current rankings for your chosen phrases. It’s important that people who look at your report understand these rankings represent a snapshot in time, as they may not actually match when the report is actually completed and delivered.

WARNING: Unethical SEOs can manipulate this type of information, targeting easy-to-rank for keywords and making it look like the client is farther along than they really are.

3. Analytics Reporting

Analytics should be the primary driver for any actionable data contained in an SEO report. Any number of key performance indicators can apply, including:

  • Organic traffic (broken into branded and non-branded searches when possible)
  • Organic conversion percentage
  • Average order value
  • Revenue per visit

There are many ways you can present this type of information but the most important thing to remember is that analytics data should drive ongoing strategy and adjustments to an ongoing SEO campaign.

Many have a tendency to think that search engine rankings for a particular set of keywords are all that matter but realistically, conversions are what matter so don’t forget to include this type of information in any SEO report you provide clients.

Simply tracking organic results is doing a big disservice to them.

Filed Under: SEO Technology, Tip of the Day Tagged With: , , ,
Next Page »