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!

Yesterday, Google announced some new reports that will help you get a clearer view of how visitors move across your site. These new reports are based on aggregated data (no, you still can’t track a single person’s visit) and allow you to see the “most common” paths and fallout points on your website.

The visitors flow report lets you see how visitors enter, move through, and exit your site. For all of us who have dug far into GoAn to find this data in the past, well, we know how awesome this is. You can segment your data to see how visitors from organic behave compared to social media or paid advertising.

There is also a Goal Flow report. This one is super-cool because we’ve been able to set funnels in the past, but visitors don’t always follow the nice, neat paths we lay out for them. Now we can see the most common paths and fallout points, regardless of if they are part of our funnels.

Both of these reports let you do one of the most important things you can do for website success – get to know your website visitors better.

These reports aren’t available to everyone yet, so don’t panic if you don’t see it yet. Google did say they will be rolling them out over the next week to everyone. In the mean time, spend some time getting to know your advanced segments and multi-channel funnels.

You’re in luck. Kiss Metrics has a great blog post that lists 50 Google Analytics Resources for 2011.

I haven’t had a chance to read through them all yet, but I’m seeing some great posts on this list. I can’t wait to dig into the posts about Integrating Google Analytics with Youtube, Using Regular Expressions, and Reports & Personality Types.

Here are a few must reads – basics that you won’t want to miss out on.

Beginners Guide to the New Google Analytics

Measuring Social Media with Google Analytics

Using Filters to Keep Your Data Honest

11 Actionable Metrics

14 Awesome Features of the New Google Analytics

Which of the posts are you most excited about?

404 Page Not Found Errors happen any time a searcher clicks on a link for a page of your site that is no longer there. The page could have been removed, like when you discontinue a product.  Or, it may never have existed, like when you accidentally mistyped the URL in your email newsletter (oops) or is simply mistyped.

But why won’t they just go away?

• Google still has the page in its index. It can take search engines days or even months to update their index and remove that non-existent page. In the mean time, it’s still out there for people to click.
• Past marketing efforts, like emails, press releases or articles have a link to the non-existent page.
• People bookmarked the page because they wanted to come back to it later.
• Someone liked it so much they shared it through social media, and now their “friends” are clicking on the shared link.

So, how do you make lemonade out of these error lemons?

If there is a replacement or newer version of a discontinued product, or if you merely changed the URL, then you should 301-redirect the old URL to the new URL. Then, visitors will simply be taken to the new page.

If there isn’t a great replacement product, then allowing the 404, but maximizing the 404 page to be helpful to searchers is the best option.

Must Do’s:

• Customize your 404 page to include your website header, footer and navigation. That way, searchers won’t just get a plain old browser page that makes it look like your site doesn’t even exist.
• Make sure the message test is clear and offer to help in other ways. Whatever you do, don’t blame the visitor (or make them feel stupid) with text that says, “You’ve typed in a URL that doesn’t exist.”

Worth Trying (make sure to test):

• Consider adding a little humor and personality to your 404 pages. This is where knowing your audience comes in handy – it can be fun, but shouldn’t be off-putting. I know this can be challenging in the industrial sector, but why not do something that makes you stand out from the crowd?
• Add links to popular categories or products. Adding images with the links can help people visually decide what to click on.
• Add your phone number so it’s easy for people to call with questions. And, if you have a live chat feature, this is a great place for that too. Be as helpful as possible.
• Add another search box. Even if you have the search box in your header, try adding one in the content area so it’s even easier to find.

Failure to collect sales tax where applicable can lead to fines or a tax audit. Even if you do collect sales tax, but don’t get every decimal or tenth of a percent in the right place, you can be in trouble. Tax rates and codes change frequently, and keeping up with the newest laws and what-have-yous is nearly impossible, especially if your online business has customers all across the country. To further complicate matters, there’s also been talk of a nationwide online sales tax, and some states have already made similar moves at a state level.

Many ecommerce sites with proprietary shopping carts have some sort of system in place to ensure that they apply and collect the appropriate sales tax for all their transactions. But what about smaller online businesses, those without the budget or manpower to constantly update and manage the tax codes in their shopping cart programs?

Businesses in that boat should check out AvaTax. It works with most cart systems, including Open Source carts that many small online retailers use to run their businesses. Unfortunately, Zen Cart, one of the most popular Open Source cart programs, doesn’t independently support AvaTax. Ecreativeworks offers AvaTax for sales tax automation with all of our website development services, and can set it up for you on your site, even if it uses Zen Cart. It’s fast, easy, accurate, and gives your site complete PCI compliance.

There are plenty of other sales tax programs out there—even some free ones. But few if any offer the level of coverage that AvaTax does. Running your business is hard enough without having to worry about sales tax calculations for every transaction. Give AvaTax a try—Ecreativeworks will be glad to help—and make your business a little easier.

“The initial release will be a set of reports in Google Analytics using search data from Google Webmaster Tools. This includes query information, clicks, impressions, clickthrough rate, and average position. You’ll also be able to use Google Analytics advanced data filtering and visualizations with this data.”

This news is incredibly exciting for internet marketers, especially those who value the data they are used to seeing from PPC campaigns. Impressions, clicks clickthrough rates can provide invaluable data for optimizing title and meta descriptions and keyword effectiveness . Average position data can help us get a more accurate picture of our visibility, rather than relying on checking rankings at a specific moment in time.

Even though this data is available currently in Google Webmaster Tools, it will be very convenient to have it in one location, making Google Analytics an even stronger tool in your online marketing toolbox.

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?

When you have thousands or tens-of-thousands of products, updating product pages can seem overwhelming. You wonder if all that detailed, and sometimes tedious, work will pay off. Try starting with some of your biggest sellers, and if providing more information increases your conversion rate and impacts your bottom line.

Need more reasons to update product pages? Here are just a few to consider:

• There are plenty of places to buy online. If you don’t give visitors what they need, someone else will, and you lose the sale.
• Detailed product information can help you gain visibility for long tail searches, and long tail searches often convert better than general searches.
• You can use product pages to cross sell other products you offer, or to up sell to more advanced models.
• Information from your product details is used for feeds to shopping comparison engines, another avenue to market your products.
• Product pages are where you can outshine your competitors and where distributors can get a leg up on other distributors that sell the same products.

Here are a few things that can spruce up your product pages:

• Detailed descriptions give you great SEO benefit in addition to highlighting features and benefits. Use headings and bulleted lists in descriptions to make them easy to scan.
• Video lets you demonstrate how a product works and show off important features.
• Larger and multiple view images shoppers “see” what they are buying.
• Product reviews from other customers help shoppers make informed decisions. Why not provide customer reviews that help to solidify those decisions?
• Comparison charts can give shoppers a quick way to decide between complex products.

When potential customers are ready to buy, they need certain information to solidify their decision to purchase from your site. Are you providing them with that information?

First of all you need to take a step back from your internal workings of your company and try to think like your customers.  This is a good time to bring in your sales staff and brainstorm a little.  It is also not a bad idea to bring in a customer service rep or receptionist at this point also.    What you need to find out in this brainstorming session is what your customers search for when they want to find your product.  You may discover a term that you use is not even close to the terms your customers are using, this is a good thing to know for Search Engine Optimization of your website.

Second you need to discuss in depth which products or categories of your business are the most important to you, wouldn’t be a bad idea to write these down for other uses as well.  For example if product A is very important to you and you sell a lot of them we should definitely have some variation of that as a focus keyword phrase on your site.  Most of all be sure that you are listening to your customers, just because you call your product by the “brand” name your customer may be calling it by another name.

Third you need to demonstrate focus on your keyword phrases.  There should be a theme to where you are focusing on the site and as a business as a whole.    You don’t want to spread your focus across too many differing areas, as this will be harder to get rankings and conversions than if you are focused on a common goal.

Always remember that you are building and optimizing your website for your customers and not yourself.  Make sure that everything, including your focus keyword phrases are for your customers ease of use, this will always give you a better ROI both online and offline.

Industrial websites face plenty of challenges when it comes to the complex B2B buying cycle, especially when the purchases are costly. A whitepaper from GlobalSpec points out that the number of decision makers in a purchase is rarely made by one person; in fact only 7% make purchase decisions on their own. And the greater the cost, the more decision makers are involved in the process.

Because multiple people with varying roles are involved, your website needs to have multiple formats and multiple types of information to address their questions. Each one has unique concerns that need to be addressed, and none of them want to look or feel stupid.

Additionally, with today’s sluggish economy, many of the people involved in the purchase cycle are stretching beyond their normal work duties. With companies trying to do more with less, some decision makers are covering the workload of 2 or 3 people. And, with the lack of job security, the fear of costing the company money or losing one’s job over a poor purchase decision just adds to the challenge of gaining new business.

So how can you make sure to address both the informational and emotional needs of all these different players? Here are a few ideas that you can use to create trust and make it a “no brainer” for customers to choose you:

Decision Making Tools – Do your customers even know what questions to ask to ensure they get the best product for their application? If they don’t, try product configurators with guided questions that help them decide. You can also provide tools like RFP templates or checklists to help them ask the right questions when talking with sales reps.

Printable Information – Make it easy for customers to share information with the other buyers in the purchase process. Give access to printable data sheets, product specs and any other information they can use to help sell your product or service to the other members of their team.

Online Videos – Use short, informative videos to explain complex ideas or showcase product features. Make it clear why your product or service is a better solution to their problem.

Product Comparisons – If you have multiple products that have slightly different features or can be used for multiple applications, provide comparison charts that clearly spell out those differences.

Guarantees – Do you guarantee that your product will perform a certain way, arrive within short timelines or hold up under tough conditions? Tell potential customers about it. Let them know that doing business with you is not a high-risk situation.

Case Studies and Whitepapers – Show off the knowledge and expertise contained within your walls with whitepapers, research or real life case studies. This kind of complementary information can help position you as the thought leader or industry expert and give you instant credibility.