July 2014 - OTR Web SolutionsOTR Web Solutions

Data Collection and Audience Measurement

One of the things that makes content marketing more scientific than traditional marketing is the fact that it provides a mountain of data. Most of this data can be obtained at low to no cost. Google Analytics is one of the best tracking platforms for your online efforts to find out how well your content attracts traffic. Various other tracking services can help you gauge your performance. Studying this data will help you determine your strengths and weaknesses at content marketing.

Google Analytics

There are many different services that offer audience measurement for websites, but Google Analytics is by far the most popular and it’s well respected due to its comprehensive detail. Analytics tell you how much traffic you’re getting, where it comes from and how visitors behave on your site. The research is designed for marketers and is divided into free and premium services. The basic free package tells you how many visits your site got in a given day, week or month, along with average session time and bounce rate, which reveals the percentage of visitors who exit the site after viewing one page.

One of the helpful indicators that Google Analytics provides is how users found your websites. Referrers such as search engines, social networks and websites are listed as sources that brought you traffic. You can use this information to share with referrers to let them know they provide you value. Another use of Analytics is finding out which geographic locations bring you the most traffic, which can help you determine if your branding messages need to be more universal or focused on certain regions. The main limitation of Google Analytics is that users can disable cookies in their browsers, which blocks data collection on how they use your site.

CrazyEgg

You can help improve your conversion rate by analyzing why people leave your site with Crazy Egg heat maps. The software shows you specific locations on web pages that visitors clicked before exiting. A scroll map shows how far visitors scrolled on pages, which helps you determine which parts of pages are most and least effective at holding people’s attention. The Confetti tool within the software helps you learn search terms that were used by people to find your site.

Alexa and Quantcast

Two audience measurement sites that can teach you a lot about web popularity are Alexa and Quantcast. Both sites rank millions of websites, using separate methodologies to measure web traffic. Unlike ComScore and Nielsen, Alexa and Quantcast publish their rankings for the public. You can even use them for free to find out how your website compares with competitors in traffic rankings. If you sign up for either service and paste their code on your web pages you can get much more detailed statistics.

Alexa, owned by Amazon, tells you how your site ranks globally as well as in the United States. If your site gets enough traffic it will tell you other interesting information, such as bounce rate, daily pageviews per visitor, daily time on site and heat maps for gender, education level, browsing location (home, school, work) and visitors by country. It will also tell you the percentage of visits that originated from search engines and the top keywords used from search engines. It will also give your site an SEO score on a 0-100 point scale.

Quantcast is useful for looking at income levels and other demographics of your users. Both sites provide much more information if you subscribe.Take the lead in content marketing by utilizing website Analytics, which will help fine tune your understanding of your audience.

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Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web Solutions a web development company building marketing websites since 2000 with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web is a Partner with HubSpot.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements

Contact OTR Web.

SEO – Improving Search Rankings

Search rankings will be responsible for a major percentage of the traffic that comes to your site if you use search engine optimization (SEO). Keywords, relevance, content quality, content quantity, popularity and authoritative reputation are the most essential components of this process for building an online community.

SEO Checklist

Here are several elements your website needs to strengthen its SEO. Keep in mind that search engine guidelines have been evolving for years and may be different in the future. The following are some of the more timeless elements that have survived the algorithm changes. Another reality to remember is no one can guarantee specific search rankings using SEO.

1. Create a sitemap that outlines your site, linked from the homepage.
2. Exchange links only with quality sites relevant to your site.
3. Use relevant web page titles that contain keywords.
4. Write unique quality content designed to improve the user experience.
5. Avoid creating web pages far away from the root directory.
6. Stay away from JavaScript, AJAX, Flash and Frames as much as possible.
7. Keep adding fresh content to your site as often as possible.
8. Use keywords for links within your site instead of “click here.”
9. Make your site as user-friendly as possible with easy navigation.
10.Avoid spamming keywords or other outdated black hat tricks.

White Hat vs Black Hat

Learn the difference between white hat SEO, which follows search engine guidelines, and black hat SEO,

which could get your site banned. Google and other search engines reward sites with strong useful content, while penalizing sites for thin and useless content or tricks designed to manipulate search results. As long as you keep in mind that all your content should be crafted for the user and not to trick search engines, you should not have to worry about getting banned from search engines.

Since search engines will eventually catch up with new deceptive gimmicks, it’s best to focus on developing quality content. A site can get banned for several reasons, such as links to worthless or malicious sites, overuse of ads or sites that share servers with banned sites. The best SEO advice you can memorize is to avoid all black hat schemes and pay attention to increasing your compelling content.

Focus on Content, Not Techniques

Even though there are several search engines, Google is by far the most popular and should be your main concern for SEO. But try not to get too wrapped up in the SEO game because it can distract from your goals of attracting customers with useful content. Spend more time on making your content as relatable and relevant as possible to your audience.

Not all SEO techniques work equally for all site owners. If you own an educational site, then links from .edu sites can help your search rankings. If you’re a local business then you should get listed in as many credible local directories as possible, such as Google Places for Business, Yelp and Zagat.

General Tips for All Sites

Getting +1’s in Google+ can help your search rank in Google more than Facebook likes. Keep your blogs at least in the 400-600 word range with keyword density below seven percent and never buy links.The content should appeal to influencers, such as expert bloggers, so that it has a chance of being reviewed by other sites.Images are best indexed when they include captions that relate to the content and include ALT tags.Take the lead in content marketing by sharpening your focus on the most important elements of SEO, which are quality-text, images and links.

Would you like to get relevant information such as this blog/article delivered to your mailbox? Join our OTR Web Newsletter now.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web Solutions a web development company building marketing websites since 2000 with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web is a Partner with HubSpot.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements Contact OTR Web.