The Maine SEO Blog

Ever come home from a conference, start sorting through your notes and think I know I learned something, but what the heck was it? Closely following will often be: Now I remember what I learned, what can I use to help my business?

There’s a lot of information in the SMX live blog recaps, a lot of which involves quick note taking and scattered thoughts. So in an effort to consolidate (in an admittedly very long post) and walk away with something helpful, here are my takeaways:

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Chris Bennett, Co-Founder, BLVD Status

What should you track?

• Traditional metrics
• Micro conversions (non traditional)
  - Outgoing clicks
  - RSS subscribers
• Indirect results (aftermath)
  - ROI

Traditional metrics

• Referring traffic
• Conversions
• Brand and search type
• Google Analytics
  - Visits and page views
  - Compare to average traffic for day/week/month previous
  - Visitor loyalty/time on site
• Referring sites/sources
  - quantity?
  - quality?
  - new? (leveraging future campaigns)
• Conversions occurring more?
• Identify top referring sources
• Surge in brand queries
• Increases in direct traffic

Micro Conversions

• Outgoing link clicks (RSS subscribers, Twitter, Facebook fans)
• Newsletters, opt-in list
• Google Analytics > Profiles settings> Goal settings > Head match, put onclick: java code in WordPress code

Indirect Results

• Backlinks
• Total search traffic
• Search keywords
• Conversions that come with search
• Keyword vitals – tool to keep track of stats

David Berkowitz, Director of Emerging Media & Client Strategy, 360i

David’s got a lot of great pictures and case studies, so here’s the presentation.

Augustin Vasquez, Analytics specialist, NVI

Case Study: Client Description

• Major men’s magazine, Cosmo for women
• Received over 10 million visits/month
• Target men 18-35

Goals

• Increase page view visits
• Increase incoming links

Other client info

• Multi-page articles= 3 x more average page views per visit
• Multi-page articles containing 2-11 pges

Problem? The social mob: negative comments on longer multi-page articles

Luckily, backlinks weren’t harmed because of negative comments.

Social Traffic vs. All Traffic

• All traffic drops off after 2nd page of article
• Social traffic to articles is much more steady than the rest of the traffic

Long term success threatened?

• Recruitement of new readers
• Brand perception and promotion of site: seen of drop of natural submissions to social plaforms

To calm the mob

• Find a reasonable length without compromising page views (3-4 pages for a normally 10 page article)
• Introduce existing fans to social media sites

Be creative with metrics

• Vertical of the article: sports, finance, science, etc. Benchmark with each other
• If pushed on a particular platform, try segmenting by submitter
• Effects on different platforms

Questions

• Helpful tools for social analytics? Twitalyzer, URL shorteners, Twitter metrics on followers, Omniture Twitter monitoring tool, Social Media Firefox plugin, Scout Labs, Radiant 6, People Browsr
• Determine sentiment on blogs? Very subjective, best done manually.
• Watch live what’s going on with Analytics if you’re in the middle of a campaign.
• Reddit likes business, world news, finance; Digg likes sports, science, health; StumbleUpon anything works in a moderate way

I work with a lot of small businesses. As such, small businesses owners typically don’t have a) the budget or b) the time to deal with A/B (or split) testing. Google Analytics Site Overlay of course can’t do what a comprehensive A/B test could, but it can convince a client to place links or call-to-actions above the fold, change keywords or link language, and more.

Using Site Overlay you can see where people click and, more importantly for this little experiment, where they don’t.

The fact of the matter is Site Overlay is extremely helpful when it comes to usability…and that’s half the battle! How do you balance SEO and usability?

Design

• Is your design graphically enticing, while not too overpowering?
• Does your site architecture make sense to search bots and humans?
• Do you have more than 8 elements in your navigation? [We recommend 7-8, max.]

Content

• Do you have enough copy? Are you saying everything that needs to be said?
• Are you going overboard with copy and blabbing on and on?
• Is your copy set up to promote reading? (Is it in one black and white blob without spaces, bold and italicized words, bullets, or headers?)
• Are there links sprinkled throughout the copy? Are they helpful? Do they make sense?

Call-to-action

• Is your call-to-action hiding below the fold where few will see it?
• Is there a big, bold graphic that attracts attention?
• How about some enticing copy to get readers to sign up/buy/etc.?

These are just a few of many recognized usability guidelines; many of which GA site overlay can help with. I think the best tip is: think of yourself as the potential customer. What would you be looking for in the website? What would you expect?

Nicki Hicks
SEO for Usability

As a rule of thumb, I don’t pay attention to Alexa rankings. Primarily, it’s because we deal with mostly small business, so their rankings aren’t going to land them under the 100,000 range. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

What does the Alexa ranking mean? Alexa measures your traffic (and popularity) by way of their toolbar (not unlike Keyword Discovery), and measures your site accordingly. The lower the number, the better. To give some perspective, the Maine SEO blog’s Alexa ranking is 1,051,645. Flyte has an Alexa rank of 140,350; CNN’s is 52, Google’s is 1.

Alexa also provides some Google Analytics-esque statistics which aren’t nearly as accurate, including: pageviews, bounce %, time on site, and incoming links.

I don’t suggest using Alexa because you can get more relevant statistics using tools like Google Analytics and Yahoo Site Explorer.

However, Alexa can be helpful if you’re comparing several large websites. Alexa makes it easy to compare popular websites to gain some quick insight on their differences:

And if you absolutely insist on using it…

• Remember that, like most search stat tools, these numbers are relative
• Realize that you can get far more accurate statistics using your Analytics
• Recognize Alexa rank is not unlike PageRank: where it’s easy to become too focused on where you are today compared to yesterday

Nicki Hicks
SEO Stat Scrutinizer – try saying that five times fast

Strange GA Issue #1

Today, I recieved the following email from a client:

Hi Nicki,
When I look at the web site with IE8 built-in developer tools, it shows the error  ‘_gat’ is undefined  when viewing on the script tab.

After brainstorming with some of the developers here, we soon realized the problem was with Google Analytics.  The page, it seems, is loading too fast!  That seems to be the bulk of the issue, coupled with the fact that Internet Explorer 8 has been released.  It might be a good idea to start dropping IE 6 for good, with two other versions of IE available.

Strange GA Issue #2

Last week, I met with another client to do some Google Analytics training.  One of my favorite GA tools is the site overlay: which shows how people behave on your website.

However, when showing the client just how cool site overlays are, GA decided against showing us the overlay.  All we could see was their website – no overlay.  Checking severall days later proved to bring up the overlay correctly.  I’ve seen this happen before with other sites – where GA is finnicky about what it shows.  What gives??

Nicki Hicks
GA Detective