Web Analytics and SEO for Startups

Amazee Metrics AG / Förrlibuckstr. 30 / 8005 Zürich / info@amazeemetrics.com

Dr. Laura J. Hornbake, Consultant Web Analytics Christina Meyer, SEO/SEM Consultant

8.2.2014

Analytics and SEO for Startups

Web Analytics

Goals

•  To communicate what web analytics can tell you and why you should care.

•  To help you avoid data overload by focusing on the insights you need and allow you to forget about the vanity metrics.

•  To provide you with some tools that can help you to learn more about your startup’s performance and to make data-driven decisions.

Audience

Audience

Who is visiting your site and what can you find out about them? •  Demographics •  Interests •  Location and Language •  Devices, Browsers, and

Operating Systems •  New vs. Returning •  Frequency, Recency

Demographics and Interests

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Browser & OS

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Mobile

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New vs. Returning Visitors / Frequency

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Audience: Implications

•  Do the actual visitors to my site correspond to my target market? •  Is my site ready for (or backwards compatible with) the devices and

browsers they are using? •  How can insights about my audience inform future development of

the site? •  What actions can I take to either better attract my target audience or

better serve this audience? •  How else might these insights require me to revise my strategies and

plans?

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Acquisition

Acquisition

How did your visitors find you? Which channels are bringing the most traffic? •  Channels: Direct, Search Engines, Referrals, Social, etc. •  Referrals •  Campaigns: Advertising, Newsletters, QR codes •  Social

Channels

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Referrals

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Campaigns

•  Whether you’re running low/no budget buzz marketing campaigns or have funding to spend on ads, you should be tagging URLs correctly to track campaign performance.

•  Example: Newsletter Campaign

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Social

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Acquisition: Implications

•  Which channels are working for me? Where might I try to improve? •  Is all that time I spend guest blogging, answering questions on Q&A

sites, posting on social networks, etc. producing any results? •  Are my marketing campaigns meeting my expectations?

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Behavior

Behavior

How are visitors using your site? •  Behavior Flow •  Content •  Most Viewed Pages •  Landing Pages •  Exit Pages

•  Events •  Interactions

•  Experiments!

Content

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Events

•  Event tracking can be as simple as recording how often users click a button or as detailed as registering how far down a page they scroll. •  Form errors •  Video engagement •  Interaction with maps, custom widgets, popups

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Experiments

•  Test variations of your site to compare whether the changes influence visitor behavior.

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Behavior: Implications

•  Are visitors doing what you want or expect them to do (register, subscribe to a newsletter, download a product brochure, etc.) on your site?

•  Which pages are really attracting visitors and getting them to further engage with the site?

•  Where are you losing visitors? Is there something you can clarify or make simpler?

•  Are you tracking the key events that are important to you? •  How can you use experiments to find the best performing version of

your content?

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Conversions

Conversions

How can you measure success at meeting the specific goals you define for your site? •  Goals •  E-commerce •  Multi-Channel Funnels

Goals

•  Which interactions have value to you? •  Sales, leads, engagement

•  Examples: •  User registration •  Page views > 5 pages •  Contact form submitted •  Event

•  Assign monetary values to events

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Multi-Channel Funnels

•  What complex paths do visitors take before completing a conversion?

•  Assisted conversions

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Conversion: Implications

•  Are you meeting the targets you’ve set for your goals? Do you need to revise them?

•  What can you learn about how visitors finally arrive at the interactions you’ve defined as goals?

•  Is the effect of certain channels more subtle than the Channels reports suggest?

•  How might this influence your strategies?

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Conclusions

Final Suggestions

•  Experiment with slicing and dicing data in different ways: •  Timeframes •  Segmentation

•  Make web analytics a regular part of your processes •  Be curious; be flexible.

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Take Away

•  Get beyond the first overview page of your analytics tool and dig into the data.

•  Web analytics can provide you with a lot of good data for your strategic decision-making.

•  Am I wasting time/effort/money or are the things I’m doing paying off in concrete, measurable results?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The Online Marketing Pyramid

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Natural search is the key driver of website visits.

© Amazee Metrics Source: http://www.conductor.com/blog/2013/06/data-310-million-visits-nearly-half-of-all-web-site-traffic-comes-from-natural-search/

Content marketing plays a crucial role in SEO.

Supplementary Online Marketing Tools

Market Share of Search Engines

http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2014/1/comScore_Releases_December_2013_US_Search_Engine_Rankings

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Market Share of Google in Switzerland

http://www.blog360.ch/marktanteile-von-suchmaschinen_396

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The Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

Paid search ads (SEM)

Paid search ads (SEM)

Organic Search Results (SEO)

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Where do people click?

www.seoresearcher.com

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How Search Engines Work

1.  Crawling 2.  Indexing 3.  Ranking

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Crawling

•  Spiders/Bots search the world wide web.

•  Goal: To find all web pages in the world.

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Indexing

•  Google indexes the discovered web pages and their content.

•  All the webpage data is organized and saved based on keywords.

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Ranking

•  Search engines rank the web pages based on their content and relevance.

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Ranking Factors

Ranking factors are criteria used by search engines to evaluate the content and relevance of a web page.

The web pages are ranked based on these ranking factors.

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Ranking Factors

Study based on 10’000 search terms for Google Germany.

http://www.searchmetrics.com/de/services/ranking-faktoren-2013/

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Step 1: Keyword Research

Keyword Sources: •  Your own website •  Competitors‘ websites •  Google Trends •  Google Autocomplete •  Google AdWords Keyword Planner

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Focus on high volume and low competition.

Step 2: Technical Optimization

•  Make your website accessible for search engines. •  Help search engines understand the content of your website. •  Achieve a high click-through-rate in the SERPs. •  Provide a user-friendly website.

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Achieve high rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages.

How Results are Displayed in the SERPs

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Title

Description

URL

Direct Links

URL Structure

•  Use important keywords in the URL: •  Search engines understand the content of your website. •  Higher click-through-rate higher ranking

•  SEO Best Practice: •  Separate words with dashes, no underscores •  Keep your URLs as short as possible (not more than 200

charachters) •  Do not use any spaces or special characters

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Geographic and Language Targeting

There are 4 ways to include geographic and language targeting in URLs: •  Top Level Domain: www.google.ch, www.google.de •  Subdomain: de.reuters.com, uk.reuters.com •  Subdirectory: www.zara.com/ch/de, www.zara.com/de •  URL Parameter: example.com?loc=de, example.com?loc=fr

•  SEO Best Practice: Subdomain or Subfolder •  Subdomain: Allows different server locations. •  Subfolder: Low cost (1 host) •  If you have different Top Level Domains link building must be done

separately for each domain. •  There is no good reason to use URL parameters.

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Title Tags

•  HTML Tag (HTML-Head): <title>

•  Use important keywords in the title tag: •  Search engines understand the content of your website. •  Higher click-through-rate higher ranking

•  SEO Best Practice: •  Not more than 70 characters long •  Place keywords at the beginning of the tag, the brand name at

the end.

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Meta Description Tags

•  HTML Tag (HTML-Head): <meta name="Description" content="Eine Beschreibung Ihrer Seite"/>

•  The meta description tag is a marketing text for your result in the SERPs: •  Does not affect search engine rankings. •  But: Higher click-through-rate higher ranking

•  SEO Best Practice: •  Not more than 160 characters long

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Heading Tags

•  HML Tag (HTML-Body): <h1>, <h2>, <h3> etc.

•  H1 is the most important heading tag for search engines and should include relevant keywords: •  Search engines understand the content of your website.

•  SEO Best Practice: •  Use exactly one H1 Tag on every page

(you can use more than one H2 tag).

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Internal Linking

•  Search engines crawl a website by moving from link to link. •  Internal linking is crucial for search engines: •  To recognize the structure of the website. •  To find all existing pages. •  Search engines understand the content of a link based on its

anchor text.

•  SEO Best Practice: •  Use 2-3 internal links on every page, but no more than 100 links

on one page. •  Use relevant keywords in the anchor text.

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Image Names and ALT Tags

•  Search engines and screen reader software identify the content of an image based on its filename and ALT tag.

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•  SEO Best Practice:

•  Use descriptive filenames for your images (no numbers or special characters)

•  Always define a descriptive ALT tag

http://pixabay.com/en/cupcake-cake-chocolate-icing-pink-163593/

Source Code Validation

•  Search engines use the W3C standard to evaluate the quality of a website.

•  Definition of W3C according to Wikipedia: „The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web“.

•  Check your homepage regularly with the W3C validator and correct

all errors and warnings: http://validator.w3.org/

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Page Load Speed

•  The page load speed of a website is an important ranking factor.

•  Google considers a page load time longer than 1.4 seconds as slow.

•  Use the recommendations of Google PageSpeed test to optimize your website‘s performance: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

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http://pixabay.com/en/running-cheetah-speed-animal-fast-48433/

Sitemaps

•  A sitemap helps the search engines understand the structure of the website and supports the crawling process.

•  Create an XML sitemap for your website and submit it to Google with Google Webmaster Tools.

•  Submit a new sitemap whenever you make changes on your website.

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Duplicate Content

•  Duplicate content is caused by identical or similar content on different URLs.

•  Duplicate content can harm search engine rankings: •  Search engines do not know which of the pages is the most

relevant for a search query. •  Search engines prefer to offer the user a variety of different

pages in the SERPs. •  If there is a lot of duplicate content search engines might think

that you want to trick them.

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Common Causes of Duplicate Content

•  URLs in www and non-www versions. •  URLs with uppercase and lowercase characters.

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Keep 1 version and implement a 301 Redirect from the other versions to this one.

Structured Data •  With structured data a markup can be added to your content which is

recognized by the major search providers. •  Common types supported by Google:

•  Breadcrumbs (links) •  Events (date, name and location) •  Music (links to songs or samples) •  People (name, job title, address) •  Products (price, availability, review) •  Reviews •  Apps •  Videos

•  Overview of all rich snippets: http://schema.org/docs/schemas.html •  The created rich snippets can be validated with the testing tool of Google

Webmaster Tools: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

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Structured Data Examples

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Events Markup Video Markup

Publisher and Authorship Tag

Publisher Tag: •  Relationship between Google+ company page and company website

Authorship Tag: •  Relationship between Google+ profile and blog posts

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Mobile SEO

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http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/online/almost-1-in-3-google-organic-search-visits-estimated-to-be-mobile-in-q4-2013-39235/

Make sure to have a mobile-friendly website. SEO Best Practice: Responsive Design

Step 3: Usability

•  Overall Appeal: Provide a readable, well-structured website

•  Navigation: Make it easy for users to navigate even if they access the website from the search engines, as opposed to from the homepage.

•  Information architecture: Provide consistency.

•  Content quality: Provide well-written, useful and fresh content.

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Step 4: Link Building

The relevance of a website is defined based on the quantity and quality of external links. Effective link building measures: •  Submit your website to company and industry directories. •  Contribute with comments to relevant blogs and forums. •  Submit your content to social bookmarking sites. •  Search for unlinked brand mentions. •  Identify broken links on websites.

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Content Marketing is the most important driver of links.

Content Marketing

Provide useful content which people are willing to share. Effective content marketing measures: •  Blogging •  Guides, ebooks and whitepapers •  Infographics and charts

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© Amazee Metrics

Social Media

•  Social Signals are a strong influencer of search engine rankings.

•  Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are the most important social networks for SEO.

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http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/services/ranking-factors-2013/

Take Away

•  Make sure that your website is visible in the Search Engine Results Pages.

•  Take SEO into account when building your website. •  Regularly monitor the technical performance of your website with

Google Webmaster Tools. •  A continuous effort for link building and content marketing is

important. •  SEO is an ongoing process – you will see results after a few months,

not after a few days.

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