3 Website Stats to Make You Look Smarter and More Attractive

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A pool full of metrics and you dive in it…yeah OK, Kendrick’s real song was not about website metrics but the haze of interpretation can be the same in both cases.

If you’re anywhere close to digital, marketing or IT, someone is likely to have thrust a Google Analytics report in your face and asked, “Is this good?” Instantaneously they’ve pushed you into the pool full of metrics, your clothes are sopping wet and you’ve got to make the best of it.

No one wants to look silly but its really easy when you look at the volumes of website usage data you can track in Google Analytics (GA) . If you can count the number of times you’ve looked at GA data on one hand (or no hands) then these 3 statistics below will help you turn the inquisition into a conversation.

1. Site Visitors

This is the total number of unique visitors to your website for the time period of the report. Essentially, how many different people took the time to visit the website because they were interested enough in the content.

So what is a good site visitor number? This depends entirely on whether the site is being actively promoted but also what kind of traffic can be expected for the topic and the time period.

Websites that are likely to have less than 1000 visitors per month:

  • Sheep Farmers Union of Invercargill
  • Knitters Guild of Kalgoorlie

It’s always possible a global revolution is being launched from these places but you probably get the picture, hyperlocal concerns that don’t change too frequently for an already small user base.

Websites that should have much, much more than 1000 visitors per month:

  • Australian Bureau of Meteorology
  • You Tube

Extreme examples yes, but the point here is that sites that provide everchanging information and/or entertainment for a wide audience should be in the millions of site visitors per month.

Once you’ve had a look at the Site Visitor number on the report turn it around and start asking questions like:

  1. How does that number compare to last month, last year?
  2. Have you been actively promoting the site?

Timing is everything, maybe the website is seasonal like truffles or has a increasing visitor rate compared to previous time periods then the news story is better or more normal than you might think.

2. Bounce Rate

This one is really important. It represents the percentage of users that visited the site and did not proceed to any other pages.

A bounce rate of between 26-40% is excellent, 41-55% is average, 56-70% is below average, and anything higher than 70% is poor.

A high bounce rate (56%+) probably occurs for one of the following reasons:

  • What they thought they would find on your site was not at all relevant to the reason for their visit
  • What they found on the site WAS related to what they wanted, but it was not sufficiently engaging to stay
  • It took so long to load your website that they just clicked off because they got impatient

Ultimately if the website does not have interesting, relevant content or performs slowly once the visitors arrive then you could just be giving a lot of people a really bad experience. An important lesson for big and small organisations.

3. Device Type

As web designers we think this number needs more attention than it gets now, if only to illustrate the importance of flexible responsive design.

Broken down into Desktop, Mobile and Tablet, if you have a Mobile and/or Tablet usage of 25% or more than you must have a site design that rearranges to look good and flow well on mobile and tablet devices.

It has been over two years since Google declared that websites must focus on the mobile experience first, ahead of desktop, an edict no organisation wanting to grow can ignore.

Looking Smart, Sexy and Delivering Value

It might not be in your job description to understand Google Analytics but giving customers, including yours, a good experience with value-added information is going to keep them in your good sted.

Just like reading your first word or first book, digital literacy simply requires you to keep taking one step forward at a time, one topic at a time.

SEO, so what?

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Why does this work matter and what happens if you don’t do it?

SEO means: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), if you pause to think for a second it very quickly sinks in that SEO is a very sensible thing to do. Why wouldn’t you want your site to appear at the top of a search engine’s list of returned sites?

So, before we get into how SEO works it is going to be helpful to know how a search engine finds results. Search engines are answer machines: ask a question and it searches its index to find the most relevant answers. The search engine has compiled this index using a “web crawler”, a program that visits each page on the web and all of its links, which stores a copy of the page and its URL in the search engine’s index. If you can find the page listed on a search engine then a crawler has visited it. Now, the part where SEO comes in: a search engine uses an algorithm to rank results in order of relevance to your search. These algorithms look at different elements to decide which sites come at the top of the returned list. SEO ensures that your site contains all the elements that a search engine algorithm is looking for and gets ranked highly. For example:

Title Tags (or Title Elements): are the highlighted titles that a search engine result page (SERP) displays (on Google they are highlighted blue). These tags tell Google, other search engine the main description of your site or document. They are very important and optimizing them is often one of the first SEO tasks.
Meta Descriptions: appearing under the highlighted Title Tag on a SERP. Although Google’s algorithms do not take Meta descriptions into account, since 2009, to determine a sites relevance they are essential to encourage users to click on your link, rather than a competitors.
H1 Tags: stands for Heading One and is the first thing a search engine like Google will look at to establish the relevance of your site after the title tag. With an H1 tag you are essentially telling search engines that this text, or heading is the most crucial.
Image Alt Tags: labels for any images on your site or document and Google, and others, use Image Alt tags to determine what the image is but also if the surrounding information is relevant an useful. Clear tags are very important for SEO.
Internal Linking: when a Google crawler finds your site it will also have a look at any links to see their relevance. If the link structure is unclear then it is possible the crawler may not even know the links exist. Many experts believe internal linking has a strong impact on Google’s algorithm and a clear pyramid shaped internal linking structure is key.

By using SEO your site will immediately have gained an advantage over any non-optimised sites on the web; people are inherently lazy and are most likely to click on one of the top five results, rather than any others. More people than ever are using search engines and SEO is becoming more and more common and is essential if you want to generate traffic on your site. Without SEO you run the risk of your site being buried deep in the search engine’s index and rarely read.

Your Google marketing plans, what now, what next?

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Once upon a time a big advertisement in the phone book was the new business investment that kept giving all year. Everyone used the phone book, at home, school, work and 20 years ago it was a good as being on the front page of Google.

Then 10 years ago this search tool called Google meant that you could ask any question, from any computer and get a list of results that were ranked by how relevant they were to what you had searched for. The opportunity to solve life problems with a few clicks, and get business the same way was an insanely powerful idea.

Implementing successful SEO strategies for customers even just 5 years ago required skill and strategy but most importantly it was financially viable for companies of all shapes, sizes and industries. Results were relatively immediate in comparison to today.

Then a few things changed in the SEO landscape in the last few years:

  • The sheer number of companies competing for the front page increase significantly
  • Google invested heavily in changing their search algorithms according to the  mechanics of how a website works, not just the content in the site
  • Everyone started using their mobiles for search, not just their desktops or laptops

 

The net result is that it takes more hours, more site tweaks and a larger investment than in past. It is still a great long term marketing strategy but in place of SEO as a single marketing strategy has come the targeted marketing on in places that make the most sense for your business.

If you need final confirmation on why you should be on social media, its because its where you can cost-effectively reach your customers. We don’t advocate a scatter gun approach, we think you should get on the platform that gives you the best opportunity to reach your target market.

Facebook – over a billion users, it is a fantastic place to reach the end consumer where they are, at the times that they will be thinking about buying your products

LinkedIn – More than 250 million business professionals, this is where you connect to the people you already know, so that you can connect to the people they know. There is no better place to get an introduction to a company by networking with one of their employees.

You Tube – The power of this personal video streaming platform should not be underestimated. We all use it and we are happy to view an ad for the sake of it being free so why not consider this opportunity to pull in customers.

These platforms don’t just allow you to create your own targeted ads, they allow you to sponsor content you have put together so the sales approach can be softer where it needs to be.

As a final summary point, Google SEO and PPC (paid advertising) are still incredibly powerful marketing strategies. But investing in advertising on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and others allows you to cost-effectively apply your marketing strategy and get quick answers on what works best and then refine and repeat.

DIY SEO Tips

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Excited and terrified by SEO at the same time? Are you wondering how to do SEO yourself? Are you just wondering what SEO stands for and really is? You have come to the right place!

A lot more people and companies are up to speed with SEO, or search engine optimisation, and are looking to drive traffic from the top ranks of Google (and Bing) to their website. A lot of that education is driven by Google themselves as their search algorithm (see techniques) changes are happening more frequently and forcing people to take action on websites that don’t make the Google grade.

In general Google’s intent has been the same over the years, to drive the most relevant and user-friendly websites to the top of a given search does benefit us end consumers.

But how can your business stay on track with what Google does without breaking the bank? Here are three important tips for staying up to date with SEO:

1. Read up, regularly – There is not enough space in this blog to list out all of the great, informative resources for SEO but we can get enough of Hubspot, Smart Company (especially Jim Stewart’s Thursday blog) and why not try Google themselves?

2. Give to Get – You may have an awesome website but in this day and age is about giving out information and tools in order to get business. In the biz its called inbound marketing based on knowing that customers will have up to 7 different points of contact with you before they choose you and you need to mix up that contact. A useful blog, a white paper giving them information and decision criteria, a how-to video, its all relevant and you should try and make it as personal as possible.

3. Continue (or start) investing in your social media profile – related to the points of contact but also to your search relevancy, establishing and marketing your business on relevant social media channels is a must. Customers and Google need to find you on more than just your website to attribute credibility.

As a digital marketers we couldn’t be happier that people are proactively seeking out information, wanting to get more involved. We also think it’s wise to remove full dependency on Google search entirely and consider customised paid advertising campaigns on relevant social media channels too, for more information click here.