Additionally, you can use Google Analytics to track data from your Site Search to help you improve your online marketing campaigns.  It’s not set up by default, but with just a little bit of work, you can get a bunch of great Site Search data from Google Analytics.

Find New Keyword Opportunities

By viewing the Search Terms report, you can get ideas of new terms to use in your SEO and PPC campaigns. If visitors are typing a particular keyword into your site search, they may be using that same keyword when they search in Google or Bing. If you see a lot of on-site searches for a keyword, you might want to try that word out in a pay per click campaign or add it to your list for SEO.

Get New Product Ideas

The Search Terms report in Google Analytics is a great place to research what your website visitors want, but you don’t offer. For example, a plastics supplier used this report to find out that a certain material was the single most searched keyword in their site search. It was a product they hadn’t previously offered for online sale. By adding it to their website, they can increase online sales and expand their product offering, making their site more valuable for users.

Improve Landing Pages

Whenever you see large numbers of searches, make sure you set the secondary dimension in Google Analytics to “Landing Page” to see which page visitors landed on when they typed in that keyword.

Now you can see which page visitors landed on for that keyword, and make adjustments to ensure visitors are getting to the best possible page of your website for that keyword.

Make Sure Visitors Can Find It

If users can’t see your Site Search, they probably won’t use it. Try testing the location of your site search to see if you can improve the user experience. For example, Freelin-Wade’s site search used to be below the fold, under the left navigation. In order to provide a better user experience, they moved it above the left navigation and saw a 77% increase in use of site search when it was above the fold!

Google has now announced that they are making these reports available to everyone, without having to modify your tracking code!

All local and regional businesspeople interested in staying on top of the latest internet marketing trends and strategies are welcome to attend. Our Internet Marketing Workshops will be presented by members of the Ecreativeworks team, who will share their knowledge and experiences in the world of internet marketing to help you make the most of your company’s online presence.

Our first Free Internet Marketing Workshop will take place next Tuesday, September 13, and will continue for four more installments through December 6. The full schedule is as follows: 

• Tuesday, September 13: Facebook Basics for Your Business
• Wednesday, October 5: Google AdWords Workshop
• Thursday, October 27: Social Media Workshop
• Tuesday, November 8: Google Analytics & Measuring ROI
• Tuesday, December 6: Advanced SEO Tactics

All workshops will take place at our offices in Plymouth, Minnesota. Click here for further information and to sign up for any or all workshops that interest you. RSVPs are required, so don’t forget to complete the form on the page linked above. We hope to see you here!

4) There are More Statistics than You Can Shake a Louisville Slugger At: In baseball, there are so many statistics that their study has become its own type of science, sabermetrics. Baseball statistical experts, or sabermetricians, seem to keep track of every possible statistic, no matter how irrelevant it may actually be: “McGrew is batting .398 this season against left-handed relief pitchers in the top half of innings of games played west of the Mississippi on even numbered dates.”

SEO uses many statistics, as well—so many that there are a vast number of different software programs to keep track of them. Google Analytics is perhaps the most popular (since it’s free) and well-known (since it’s Google). It works quite well, but only covers a fraction of the possible statistics involved in SEO. SEO statistics go plenty deep, just like baseball’s do, but unlike baseball stats, even the deepest ones have some relevance.

SEO vs. Baseball: The World Series of Acronyms

For fun and fabulous prizes* try to guess which of the following are acronyms for SEO terms, and which are acronyms for baseball stats. Some are fairly easy, others not so much. Some are alternate names for more well-known terms. For an added challenge, what do the letters stand for? No cheating! Answers after the baseball. GO TWINS!

1. PFI
2. WHIP
3. BABIP
4. PPCSE
5. FIP
6. SERP

Answers:

1. SEO. Pay For Inclusion: a program offered by search engines to ensure frequent indexing of a site or page.
2. Baseball. Walks and Hits per Innings Pitched: a measure of how many baserunners a pitcher allows, on average, per inning.
3. Baseball. Batting Average on Balls In Play: measures the rate at which batted balls land in the field of play as hits. Usually measured by individual batters, sometimes by whole teams.
4. SEO. Pay Per Click Search Engine: Google Adwords and Yahoo Publisher Network are examples. PPCSE listings are displayed at the top or along the side (or both) of organic search engine results.
5. Baseball. Fielding Independent Pitching: sort of a variation of a pitcher’s ERA (Earned Run Average), but counting only plays where the outcome cannot be affected by the defense being played behind the pitcher (i.e. home runs, walks, and strikeouts).
6. SEO. Search Engine Results Page: the results generated after searching for a particular keyword in a search engine.

How’d you do? Score one point for each correct answer.

1-2 correct—bunt single
3-4 correct—RBI double
5 correct—standup triple
All 6 correct—walk-off home run

* No prizes are actually at stake. I totally tricked you!

What I am getting at here is, I know that you are the best expert there is on selling xyz widget or manufacturing abc product.  But, do you really know how to market your business online, set up your website navigation, implement great SEO strategies, etc?   I am going to guess that this process would be best left to the experts.

Companies like Ecreativeworks,  pride themselves on being the experts in their industry (industrial website design).   Although, we also have experts within our own walls.  We have web designers who specialize in web design.  We have programmers and developers that each specialize in a different aspect of code building.  We have copywriters, who write a mean piece of copy for those sites.  We have SEO specialists who also are experts in different aspects (ecommerce, social marketing, video, blogs, the list goes on).  So you can see that we take our positions very seriously and want to help the industrial world make their mark on the internet the best we can.

Now “Let’s Build it Together.   If we can take your product knowledge/expertise and combine that with our website building knowledge we can have a great outcome.   You will be able to say that you have the best possible company working hard to build you a website that will function properly, gain visibility in the search engines and keep visitors on the site until they are ready to make a purchase, fill out a request for quote or contact us form.   Bottom line, you will have a site that converts well because you relied on the experts to take your industry expertise and apply it to the internet in a way that will be successful.

So, now that you know you need to hire a professional to redesign or build your website make sure you take one more step.  Talk at length with that company about what they plan to do for you.  Make sure it involves proper code building techniques for a great user experience, make sure they have great designers that will put your vision in great graphics, make sure they have SEO professionals that will work through your project from start to finish (not an afterthought), and finally make sure they have great project managers to see you through the steps of this exciting process.

 1. There are Rules, Rules, and More Rules: A friend of mine moved to the United States from Iran twenty years ago, at age eight, and so didn’t really grow up with baseball like I did. A few years back, this friend decided that, since our hometown Minnesota Twins were doing so well, it would be the perfect time to get into baseball and learn how the game works.

“Well,” I said, “the first thing you need to know is that you’ll never know all the rules.” I added that, even if one were to watch every game of a team’s 162-game regular season, and learned a new rule with every game, that would still only cover a fraction of the rules. Even professional umpires probably don’t know every rule of baseball.

SEO is no different. There are so many different aspects of SEO that, even by studying it and learning something new every day, you’ll never be able to create a definitive list. All you can do is keep learning and improving your game.

2. There are Scads of “Unwritten Rules” As Well: Even if you did somehow learn all the official rules of baseball, there are still dozens, if not hundreds, of unwritten rules that ballplayers live by. The “Baseball Code,” you might say.

SEO is similar, but more contradictory. Most of the “real” rules of SEO are spelled out in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, but there are some SEO procedures that are directly opposed to these Guidelines.

•  The Baseball Code says you should never, ever swing at a 3-0 pitch (make the pitcher throw a strike).
• Google’s Guidelines say you can’t pay for links, but Yahoo Directory links—which you can only get by paying for them—are very helpful for rankings.
• In baseball, the batting team’s players should never walk over/on the pitcher’s mound, under any circumstances, during an inning in progress (always go around).
• Google says nofollow links give no boost to rankings, but there are documented cases of nofollow links that do pass authority and improve site rankings.

3. Bad Guys Sometimes Succeed…: The New York Yankees are perhaps the most hated team in all of professional sports, for a number of reasons that time and space don’t permit here. But, they have won the World Series 27 times. Bryce Harper may be an immature punk, but he’s probably going to be one of the best players in the baseball—if not the best—in a few years.

We’ve all heard of Black Hat SEO companies that engage in shady practices to boost their clients’ search engine rankings. Meta-tag stuffing, hidden or invisible text, gateway pages, and other tactics can work to improve rankings. They just won’t work for long.

The Yankees don’t win the World Series every year—often times they don’t even make the playoffs. Harper may knock the ball out of the park and trot around the bases like a show pony, but he’s plenty likely to get plunked for it in his next at-bat. And, inevitably, a Black Hatted website will get busted down to Class A ball by Google’s or other search engines’ webmasters for those less-than-honest SEO tricks.

As these three comparisons show, SEO and baseball are more alike than peanuts and Cracker Jack. GO TWINS!

In order to use the new feature, you will need to have the new asynchronous tracking code and will need to make a slight modification to it.  Once the modification has been made, you will be able to view Average Page Load Time, Pageviews, Page Load Sample, Bounce Rate, and % Exit metrics in the Site Speed report. (When using the New Version of Google Analytics.)

You can use the data in this report to:

• Look at the load times for your most popular pages to make the biggest impact quickly.
• Track the impact of changes made to improve your site’s performance – if page views increased and exit or bounce rates decreased.
• Find browser-specific speed issues and make changes to address them.
• View load times for specific geographic regions and ISP’s if you are targeting a specific region.

What do you think of this new feature? Will it help you to make your website faster?

It’s important to understand that it’s not only your site that matters to Google, but also important to know which sites outrank you and why. Even if you don’t consider some sites to be ‘real’ competitors, if they outrank you, they ARE your competition for click-through from the search engines.

Let’s look at an example.

I have a client who wants their anti static brush page to rank for “anti-static brushes.” We’ve gone through the basics like using our keyword in the page title and meta description tags. The content is unique and relevant to the keyword and they have a good selection of anti static brush products. We’ve even got H1’s and H2’s with the keyword and have interlinked to it from other important pages on their site.

Google has recently indexed the page, and even comes back on a regular basis. But we’ve stalled out at position 9 in Google’s search results for weeks.

The first thing I like to do when I run into stalled rankings is to check out the competition for that keyword. Then I can look at what those sites are doing better. You can really dig deeply into this, but for simplicity’s sake, we’ll just focus on some basic data.

First, we look at the Google Indexed Page Count, or the number of pages Google recognizes for the site. The higher the number, the bigger (and more powerful) the site. As you can see, 2 sites – Amazon and Anglefire – are monster sites that probably carry a lot of clout with the search engines. It’s going to be tough to compete with them on size alone, but we’re bigger than all the others.

Next, we look at the external backlinks to the page and the site. Several of the sites have more backlinks to their pages than we have to ours. 4 of the sites have more domain backlinks than we do, but two of them are smaller numbers that we can conceivably compete with in the near future. Getting high quality backlinks will be an important tactic for us to gain rankings.

Finally, we look at the Cache Age, or number of days since Google indexed the page. This is important because we want to make sure that Google is frequently on our page to find any new information we have added. Only 3 of the sites have smaller cache ages than we do, which tells us that changes we make might get picked up faster than changes on some of the other sites.

Now, if you’ve really looked at the chart, you are probably asking, “What about Takk? They don’t have more pages or links and they haven’t been cached in twice as many days!”

Based on just this data, it’s true that they shouldn’t outrank us. Remember that we’re only looking at a handful of the 200 or more ranking factors that Google uses in its algorithm. Also, if they have higher quality backlinks, that could push them up, even if the quantity is lower. You can bet we’ll be digging deeper into their links to find out.

That gives us our quick list of “to-do’s” – gaining backlinks to the anti static brush page and the domain should give our ranking a boost. And digging deeper into competitor links will provide us with our next steps.

Google announced the release of Page Speed Online yesterday. It’s a great way to check the performance of your site and get suggestions to make your site faster. And the tool works for mobile sites, where load times can be even more important with users who are on the go.

We know that Google has been giving a lot of attention to how fast sites load, even announcing that page speed is a factor in rankings back in April 2010. Faster sites are better for users, so it’s no surprise that Google favors faster sites.

“Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.”

Here’s how the tool works:

Type in the URL of the page and click “Analyze Performance.”

You’ll then get a score, somewhere between 1 and 100, and a prioritized list of suggestions to make your site faster.

What do you think? Will this new tool help you to make your site faster?

And now, the thrilling conclusion of “Explaining SEO to My Grandma.”

Grandma: So if I want to buy wool socks, I write “wool socks” on the Google and it tells me to go to Penney’s?

Me: Yeah, but it will show you a bunch of other places that sell wool socks, too. So you can find the best socks and the best prices and whatever else you’re looking for.

Grandma: But I already know that Penney’s sell socks. Why would I waste time asking a Google?

Me: Uh… well, maybe you’re looking for something that’s harder to find than socks, then. I worked on one website for a company that makes custom touch screen keypads and stuff, like to put in tractors or manufacturing machines. Search engines will find a whole bunch of different websites that sell those, so we try to make it so our client’s website shows up first.

Grandma: And a search engine is a Google?

Me: Yeah. It’s the other way around, though. Google is a search engine. There are lots of different search engines. But Google’s the most famous one, I guess.

Grandma: Okay… So you tell the Google search engine to put your websites that you made first on the list?

Me: Kind of. I don’t actually make the websites, though. I mostly just do the writing for the actual words that show up on the screen. My company has a team of people who do most of the SEO research and stuff. I just write so the words sound nice. And we have a big team of developers and designers who actually make the websites. They’re super-smart with really computery computer stuff.

Grandma: Oh…

Me: thinking: Pleasedon’taskwhatdevelopersdo! Pleasedon’taskwhatdevelopersdo! Pleasedon’taskwhatdevelopersdo!

Grandma: So you just write the Google and tell them to make your website first?

Me: thinking: Whew! Then, speaking, Well, you can’t really tell search engines what to do, but you can sort of suggest that your website should go first. That’s why we use keywords and stuff. We try to put a lot of references on the website to the specific words that people will be searching for to find whatever the website is shucking.

Grandma: So if I’m writing a Google for wool socks, you make your website say it has wool socks?

Me: Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Or if the site sells hand-knitted wool socks, we’ll have it say “hand-knitted wool socks.” Or if they use some fancy kind of wool from a llama or whatever, it’ll say “fancy llama wool wool socks.” That kind of thing.

Grandma: But how does the Google know how to find the websites it finds?

Me: They use a specially-created algorithm which, drawing from over two-hundred different indicators, computes a recursive score for the site, based on a weighted analyses of assumed relevance and importance of the website itself.*

Grandma: brief blank stare, then Oh… Well, that sounds nice. Would you like some hot cocoa?

Me: I would love some, Grandma.

 THE END

 * Something like that, anyway.