Three Easy Approaches For Website Tracking is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

Try split testing for better website tracking

Remembering that we can’t improve what we don’t measure should make it very clear that website tracking is a critical component of any online business.

How do we do that effectively? Well, we examine three approaches below that should give you a great base to work from to monitor your website.

1. Install Google Analytics

Google Analytics is free to install. It allows you to check the number of visitors and where they’re coming from, as well as how long the visitors are spending on your page and what your conversion rates are.

You can set goals in Google Analytics – for example if you are after a 15% conversion rate from your visitors for your opt-in offer, it can let you know how close to this target you are.

By gathering this information you can begin to understand if you need to be doing more to improve your numbers; once you get used to the numbers, over time you can compare the effectiveness of different marketing campaigns and approaches.

2. Split Testing

Visual Website Optimizer is software that allows you to run tests to measure the effectiveness of different approaches with your website marketing.

For example you may want to check the conversion rates of two pages, one using plain text and the other using video; the software allows you to create two different versions of your site and to split traffic between them.

This should help you find methods of increasing time spent on page, increasing conversions and reducing the “bounce” rate away from your page.

There is currently a free trial version available to test a thousand visitors and a monthly $49 option for small business, allowing testing for up to 10,000 visitors a month.

3. Keep Spreadsheets

A lot can be achieved by simply keeping spreadsheets of your web site numbers.

For example, you can keep a monthly record of unique visitors, gross sales, the number of different buyers, your up-sell figures (if appropriate), your conversion total and your average sale; once you have this information you can work out your RPU – Revenue Per Unique (Visitor).

This is a particularly important figure as it tells you exactly how much each visitor to your site is worth. If you are considering running paid-for advertising campaigns then this helps you work out what you can afford to spend to generate the extra traffic, based on the average figure you will get back from each new visitor.

There is no substitute for knowing your web site “numbers” and using them to fine tune your present and future marketing strategies to generate more leads and improve conversions.

Knowing your base figures and what constitutes a successful or unsuccessful campaign will really help your future efforts.

Your website should be the centrepiece of your online business and website tracking should be an integral part of your marketing plan. Learn more about how to do this and plenty more through the Competition Crusher workshop. Just click here to find out about it.

5 Areas Of Website Analytics You Need To Focus On is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

Use web analytics to understand your site visitors.

Measuring results is important in everything we do in business and is one of the keys to constant improvement; so once you have your site up and running, what website analytics tools do you use to monitor its performance?

There are five key areas we have identified that you can focus your attention on – not only to point out weaknesses of your site, but to see what’s working well.

1. Number Of Visitors

The number of visitors you get is one determining factor of how successful your online business will ultimately be, as site traffic means leads – it’s the equivalent of people passing your high street shop.

Seeing an incremental increase with some welcome spikes in numbers now and again should mean that you are doing the right things, though obviously it’s difficult to be specific with numbers; if you are operating in a small niche you may be after smaller numbers of highly qualified traffic rather than mass numbers.

2. Who Are The Referrers?

Installing Google Analytics allows you to see where your visitors are coming from – who the referral sites are.

This is important as it can help you to identify where your optimization efforts are working best. For example you may see that most of your traffic comes from YouTube or Google organic searches; rather than focus on getting traffic from other sources, you may like to focus future marketing efforts on developing these traffic sources, encouraging even more traffic to click through from those referrers.

Often website owners spend too much time worrying about “plugging holes” and finding out where they are weak rather than using the areas where they are particularly strong to their full advantage.

3. Bounce Rate

This site analytics tool is a measure of the visitors who come to your site and then move quickly on, either finding it’s not what they’re after or clicking through by mistake. Essentially they may land on your page and then hit the “Back” button within seconds.

As a general guideline, if you are finding a bounce rate of over 40% then perhaps you need to be thinking about engaging your visitors more; you are not grabbing their attention and getting them to “stick” to your page.

4. Time On Page

This is also a good measure of how engaging your page is to your visitors. If the time is less than a minute then it’s not usually enough time to absorb your message; nowadays using video is a great way to grab attention and engage your visitor sufficiently so that you can drive the average time spent on your page upwards. Make sure your copy is sharp and compelling too – average online attention spans are short and getting shorter!

5. Conversions

Check conversion rates – both for opt-ins to your free reports/newsletters etc and for actual sales.

Think of ways you can increase conversion rates by improving copy/videos to make your message more compelling; a guideline target for opt-ins would be somewhere between 15-25% and for conversion to sales might be around 2%, but it really depends on your business and where your traffic is coming from/how prequalified it is.

As you can see from the above, website analytics can be used to closely monitor site performance and can help you fine-tune your site and marketing approaches for better results.

The Competition Crusher workshop is full of advice and tips like this for creating successful start-up online businesses. Just click here to watch it for free.

Does Google Use Google Analytics Against You? is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

Is Google spying on you?

To rephrase the question, does Google spy on you with their Google Analytics? Do they take this information and then potentially use it against you?

I think this idea comes from the conspiracy theorists who want you to believe Google is evil. Sure it’s true that Google currently dominates many utilities on the web: email, analytics and all of the others in Google Apps.

That said, Matt Cutts, an engineer from Google’s web spam team, has said on record that his team doesn’t get access to Google Analytics, and the Google Analytics team doesn’t have access to their information. So they don’t use Google Analytics against anyone. Who knows if he’s being truthful or not?

When all is said and done, I just don’t worry about it. We use Google Analytics on all of our primary money sites – their tools are just so valuable and better than most paid ones. We just make sure we don’t use sneaky redirects, cloaking or any aggressive blackhat stuff on those sites

If you’re going to use Google’s tools, make your website as good as you can, following all the guidelines that Google provides.

And here’s the philosophy we live by, don’t worry what others are doing. Focus on what you’re doing and that includes not worrying about Google.

For more great tips, including using Google Analytics correctly, how about you subscribe to our RSS feed?

SEO Tracking – Simple Tweaks Can Multiply Your Bottom Line is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

The final stage of any successful SEO campaign should be tracking. By using SEO tracking, you can monitor and analyze the results to make sure that your efforts – and the money you’ve spent on SEO – are on target. There’s no way to improve what you don’t measure.

I love SEO because if you do it right, it will pay for itself over and over again. And once you’ve had a taste of that success, you’ll want to repeat it more and more. And with proper SEO tracking and analyzing of the results, you’ll be able to not only increase your traffic – you’ll be able to increase what’s most important to you: your bottom line.

The best thing about SEO tracking on websites is that it’s very transparent and easy to do, and after you have a few years of experience tracking and analyzing this data, you’ll find that you’re able to make tweaks and minor adjustments that can have a huge impact on your bottom line.

Sadly, while this is the final and most important stage of any SEO campaign, it’s also the hardest to teach. Knowledge of which adjustments to make comes only with years of experience and learning exactly what to do to get the really big results.

At Melbourne SEO Services we have that experience. If you’re driving 1000 unique visitors to a website that has a 1% conversion rate, all you have to do is make a very slight adjustment and you can double that conversion rate. It’s the same amount of traffic – but double the profitability. And by knowing what to look for in SEO tracking results, we can help you determine which page is worth spending your time to improve.

Once you become a client of ours we’ll work with you to help you grow long term. We’ll assist you in identifying new keywords and new opportunities. We’ll analyze what your competition is doing so you can stay at least one step ahead of them.

We here at MelbourneSEOservices.com have a whole bunch of strategies we can quickly and easily apply to your website. See what we’re all about and how we can help you with those minor tweaks that could mean major breakthroughs in your bottom line. Visit our services page to see what we can do for you.

The Simple Way To Increase Your Conversion Rate is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

Getting a #1 ranking in Google is only a small part of winning the online war, yet it seems to be what most people focus on. The fact is, increasing your conversion rate can often be the easiest way to increase your bottom line.

It’s true all markets are different and often you’ll need to run split tests to find out what converts best for you and your market but here’s a few simple tips to get you started on the right track. Ready to learn more?

Where Are Your Visitors Eyes?

If you knew where the eyes of your visitors were looking, what would you do? I for one, would put your most important sales message in that space. The problem is how do we track where a customer is looking?

Short of doing eye tracking studies on your website, there’s plenty of data showing that  one of the first things that a visitor looks at are the images on that page – typically in the header. This “top left” position is a hot spot on most websites. First, your visitor wants to know where they are, second, they want to know what do to next.

So how can you take advantage of this? Simple… put your most important message in this space.

Effective And Alluring Titles

When I optimise a page headline, I am literally pull myself out of my own mindset, and place myself in the mind of the user and considering what it is they’d be looking for. How can you lead the visitor to take a desired action, such as purchasing a product, or signing up to the mailing list? Consider what it is that your visitor is looking for and how they want to get it. Don’t try to over-inflate titles with too much hype though, no one likes to feel like they’ve been sold.

Just give them what they’re looking for and make it as easy as possible for them. Tell them what they want (as long as it’s true), tell them what it will do for them, then tell them to buy the product. The same applies for every other kind of actions, whether it be an Aweber opt in form, buy an affiliate product, and so on.

Of course, there’s loads of ways to increase your conversion rate but simply addressing what the user is looking for is a great place to start.

Is My Google Website Ranking Accurate? is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

“Is my Google website ranking accurate?” is a question on the lips of many website owners. With the dance of the search engines (rankings bounce up and down all the time) well established, how can you be sure exactly where you are consistently ranking?

One other thing to be noted is whether you are logged into your Google account. See the thing is Google stores your search data as long as you’re logged into your gmail account. If you click on your own site to see the latest activity a lot of the time, chances are your site will feature higher up in the rankings. Let me illustrate as ever with an example and a few pics.

When I’m not an SEO consultant I also run a cricket website called World Cricket Watch that is attempting to rank for the phrase “world cricket“.  If I’m logged into my gmail account the SERPs look as follows…

Logged in

For a hyper competitive phrase such as “world cricket” the site sits at number 3.

But notice I’m signed in.

So to get the truest reflection of your Google website ranking, click the sign out button and test out your ranking again…

Logged out

You’ll see the site is still on the frontpage but finds itself in 8th position.

Search engine rankings will always fluctuate. A great way to get the truest reflection of your Google website ranking is to sign out of your Google account. But checking rankings is a very tedious undertaking, especially if you have a large e-commerce style site. There has to be a better way surely?

You’ll be pleased to hear there is indeed a better way. It comes in the form of Market Samurai. You can load all your keywords into market Samurai once and then whenever you have the need to check your rankings simply click a button and they’ll automatically generate. Furthermore, you can do much much more with Market Samurai. Keyword research, SEO competition and ranking checkers are just for starters. You can also track your backlinks and discover where you need to concentrate your energy to continually grow your web business.

2 takeouts from this are to sign out of your google account for truer rankings. And secondly if you have a big website it might be worth investing in one of the best SEO tools around – Market Samurai.

Stage 4: Website Analytics is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

Site Reporting & Ongoing SEO

Unlike many traditional marketing methods, with SEO you are able to get a very clear, measurable result for your efforts through website analytics. You are able to see where you appear on Google, how many new visitors this brought to your website and how many of these visitors went on to make a purchase. And that’s just the beginning…

Once you engage in website analysis and start to see the benefits of a successful SEO campaign (through website analytics), it can become very addictive. You’ll look to identify new keywords, bringing you even more visitors, and then improve the rate at which your website converts these visitors into sales. That’s why SEO needs to be a part of your long-term sales and marketing strategy.

The fact is, you can’t improve what you don’t track… and that’s why we suggest you track everything! If you don’t currently have any tracking on your website, check out a free service called Google Analytics – it’ll provide you with more information than you’ll know what to do with.

The key metrics we like to follow, include:

Unique Visitors
It’s important to keep an eye on the number of unique visitors to your website. Be wary of any webmaster that talks in terms of “hits”. Hits really aren’t a very good representation as to the number of visitors to your site – it can make things appear busier than they really are. Instead, you want to see your unique visitors increasing month on month.

*By following the right steps you can very easily see increases of 300%+ but it all depends on how your site is currently performing.

Actual Pages Visited
Seeing where your visitors go when on your website can identify some easy opportunities to increase profits. Knowing what pages are most visited then gives you the opportunity to improve the rate at which those pages convert. This is often overlooked by those new to SEO, yet it can give you one of the biggest returns. And here’s why…

*Increasing a page’s conversion rate from 1%-2% will yield the same profit results as doubling your traffic. That is to say, you’re converting twice as many visitors from the same number of visitors.

Length of Stay
Have you ever visited a website only to leave almost immediately? Most likely you didn’t find what you were looking for and so you didn’t make a purchase. By analysing how long your visitors stay on your website (along with a few other tests) you can identify what made them leave. Obviously you want to give them what they are looking for and the longer they stay, the greater the chance they’ll purchase your product or service.

What Customers Are Buying
Many people tend to focus on their weaknesses, thinking they need to become stronger in that area. The reverse is actually true. It’s important to analyse where you’re already successful and do more of that. By analysing what’s already selling, you’ll be able to build your website (and profits) faster than you ever thought imaginable.

Want to find out more about website analytics, watch this: