Jessica Bowman wrote a good piece today at SearchEngineLand detailing good ways to get SEO involved early on in the web development process. Folks that I work with know that I like to say “SEO is not some kind of chocolate syrup that you can pour on one day before a website launch.” It’s so true. The most successful websites I have developed or worked with have had SEO plans from the beginning. Because content and internal structure are so much a part of SEO success, they must be planned intentionally from the outset.
If I see a site plan that has pages 5 and 6 levels deep, I’m going to propose making the site more flat and explain exactly why. It’s a lot easier to do this on paper than it is once the site has been built, even if it’s still in early construction stages. Of course content is critically important, and should be considered for SEO purposes well in advance. I’m also always very concerned about the site’s navigation and URL structure. These all need to be planned before any design work starts.
There are also items that will be taken care of shortly before launch. My checklist always includes setting up the necessaril redirects, getting the robots.txt ready, and ensuring a page to URL ratio of 1:1 (no duplicate content).
Next time you consider an extreme website makeover, do yourself a favor and hire an SEO consultant to join the process. Your boss will thank you later.
Search Engine Strategies has about 3-4 large conferences each year. I was fortunate enough to attend the New York conference back in 2005, but even when I can’t attend I love it because so much happens. Not only can you virtually attend almost all the sessions thanks to Barry’s awesome coverage of the show, but inevitably, search engines wait until SES to make big announcements. Here’s a few more reasons to follow the coverage:
- Concentrated gathering of industry experts. The panelists are hand-picked very knowledgable.
- Nuggets of gold in the Q/A time after each session
- Sometimes search engine reps have a slip of the tongue and reveal too much!
I would encourage all of you small business owners to take a few minutes and read one or two of the sessions at seroundtable.com from this week’s show. Have some questions? Leave a comment, or email me and I’ll be happy to answer. I love working in the SEO / SEM industry, but maybe even more, I enjoy educated and training people to understand and utilize search engine marketing to benefit their business.
Avinash Kaushik wrote a great piece today about the usefulness of the bounce rate metric. As someone who analyzes web traffic for hours each day, I can honestly say that bounce rate is probably my favorite metric, and has been for some time. I’ve often been curious why more marketers and analysts didn’t utilize it, as I find it to be a great indiciation of the quality of traffic a website is receiving. So I’m encouraged that bounce rate is getting more positive press now!
One question I always get when training people with Web Analytics is “What is a good bounce rate?”. That’s kinda like asking “What is a good IQ score?”. Higher, obviously! Well, in the case of a bounce rate, the lower the better (you know, like golf). And while a 0-5% bounce rate is almost impossible, it’s not uncommon for well marketed sites to have bounce rates below 25%.
When evaluating bounce rate, it’s important to evaluate each segment of traffic differently. For instance, you want your bounce rate from PPC traffic to be lower than SEO, because you are paying for every PPC visitor. While a 45% bounce rate from organic traffic might be acceptable, the same percentage from PPC traffic could indicate a need for some negative keywords or ad refinement.
Finally, bounce rate can be used to discover e-commerce roadblocks. For instance, if you find that your bounce rate is very low, but your conversion rate is still poor, that might be an indication of price shopping. Consider lowering your prices, or hooking visitors in with a free shipping coupon or discount.
Bounce rate is a great metric that can be used to easily evaluate visitor quality. Almost every respectable analytics software has bounce rate metrics, including the free Google Analytics package. I would recommend you add it to your analytics dashboards and see how it can help improve your online business.
There comes a point in every search marketing campaign when traffic volume starts to level out. In many cases, the initial optimization of the site was successful, and site traffic surged for several months while new search engine rankings developed. Once a site has been established and ranks well for its top phrases, though, it is more difficult to show a steady increase month after month. While site traffic is leaps and bounds higher than before the program began, it quickly becomes decision time for the online marketer. Continue to stay the course while showing minimal gains, or change strategy in order to reach more visitors. This is what I call the end of the traffic gathering stage.
There comes a point where there just isn’t much more traffic to be had - either with SEO or PPC. Yes, a site can max out. The question becomes, how do I get more people searching for my brand or product? Where as before we simply had to reach the traffic that was already available, in this new stage, more web traffic must be created in order to continue to show increases. This is the traffic creation stage.
It really isn’t an easy thing moving from traffic gathering to traffic creation - the later stage is much more difficult and gets to the heart of how a business operates and markets itself. I’ll admit, for a while I was strictly a traffic gatherer myself. It was fun to work for large businesses and perform traffic gathering services like search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising and see their satisfaction when website traffic increased 300%. But I’m learning that I can’t be satisfied as an online marketing if I simply grab the low-hanging fruit. Traffic creation involves techniques that are creative, out-of-the-ordinary, socially cool (that’s hard for me!) and cutting edge.
As I gain more experience with all kinds of customers, I’m learning that online marketing is less about magic code and symbols and more about defining a strategy and executing. Sometimes my strategy doesn’t work as well as I’d hoped, but that’s OK. The great thing about the new web is you can be adventurous and try new things quickly and with minimal risk.
