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!

Additionally, they created a timeline showing the searches…which will soon be printed and hanging at my desk, along with the SEO Table of Elements and Does Your Website Suck? infographics. What can I say? I love visual representations of information related to SEO.

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

Thanks to Search Engine Land for pointing out this video.

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.

Next up is the actual research.  Get this, I now get to learn everything I can about this client and their terminology.  I start by looking over their current website or just their initial phrases, if they don’t yet have a website (boy am I glad they found us if that is the case).  Then, I get to look at some of their competitors where I learn even more about what it is that this industry is all about.  I am having fun now, learning about semiconductors, extruded tubing, metal castings, etc.  Ok, I have to qualify that I worked for an Iron Foundry and loved it–I really like to know how things are made.  They even have a cable show that was written just for me (or it seems that way anyhow) called “How Stuff Works” and if you haven’t seen it, it is awesome.  Back to the topic, now I start my actual search looking for terms that are highly searched and yet have a lower competition in the search engines.  This is often the “hard” part.

Once I have found a sizable number of keyword phrases, I sort through them giving them a category, with the best ending up in my “top recommended” category.  These are what I can take to the client through my 1-2 hour presentation on my findings.  This is the “fun” part, especially when the client sees all the different variations and terms that they may not have even thought of,  but are being searched online.  This is often a surprise as they may not be the same “lingo” that is used inside the company.  I like to make sure that they are thinking “outside the box” when choosing their final keyword phrases.  This is also where I get them to focus their keyword phrases.  You see,  at the the beginning of any website project, you need to really focus in on a few keyword phrases for each page.  I generally will look at 1-3 to start off a project.  This is an effective way to focus the content on phrases that have the most potential to drive initial traffic to your just launched site.  The goal should be to drive more traffic and higher quality traffic to your site so your conversions can also increase and hopefully lowering your bounce rate.

Next up is working on your content and using the keyword phases in the most useful manner on the site itself.  But, that is a whole new topic that I will have to talk about later.  Hope you enjoyed the quick keyword research read  and maybe you will get excited about keyword research next time like I do.

For part B, nearly any content will do the trick. It’s certainly better if you can write something about your company or products, with a few relevant terms in it, but almost anything you write—as long as it contains actual words—will count as new content as far as search engines are concerned. 

However, while any new content essentially does the trick for search engines, the same cannot be said for the visitors to your site. Not only does your content need to be relevant and interesting to keep visitors coming back, it should be pleasing to the eye, as well.

Pleasing to the eye? Check!

Not necessarily visually appealing—it doesn’t need to “look pretty,” per se. But it does need to be appealing in a certain way for readers to want to read it. There are several considerations you can make while writing to entice your readers to, um, read.

 How to Make Your Blog Writing “Visually Appealing”

• Break up “walls of text.” Huge blocks of words, words, words can be quite intimidating, and make readers turn away. While what you’ve written may technically be correct in just two long paragraphs, try breaking them up into smaller paragraphs of three or four sentences. Smaller paragraphs = easier to read.
• Use bullet points or a numbered list. If people can see at a glance that you’ve got four points to make, for example, they’re much more likely to read all the way through and get all the info you’re trying to give them. If you’ve just got a pile of paragraphs, the “I’m in a hurry here” types will skim through or stop reading after the first few paragraphs.
• Add a picture. This is basically just another way to break up your wall of text, but it also plays into the old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Rather than spend nine sentences describing your company’s new deluxe widget, use a picture with just a few supporting sentences. It’s fast, easy, and is literally visually appealing.
• Use headers to break up your post. Think of them as new chapters in a book—everyone likes getting to the next chapter, so readers will be more inclined to read on through your “next chapters.”

Keep these tips in mind when writing new blog posts for your company’s website. You probably won’t be able to use them all in every post—sometimes none of them may work. But remember, what you write doesn’t have to be Shakespeare. Just make it relevant, interesting, and if you can, visually appealing.

It isn’t really about which is better – it’s about using them in the most effective way to make the most of every marketing dollar. Here are 5 ways you can use PPC and SEO together to get the best results:

1. Identify new opportunities for organic campaigns. You can cast a wide net with PPC advertising and see which terms perform well for your business. For example, one of our clients sells HDPE Pipe and other underground utility supplies. Although it wasn’t one of our original focus keywords for our organic campaign, it was one of the best performing paid terms for traffic and conversions. Now it’s part of our focus keywords and once organic visibility increases, we may be able to scale back on paying for that term.
2. Fill in the gaps on highly competitive terms. We all have our lists of keywords we want organic rankings for, and that’s great. The problem comes when the competition level is so high that we can’t justify the amount of time and effort it will take to get that organic ranking. PPC gives us another way to get traffic for that competitive keyword without all the work that organic involves. It’s critical to measure ROI, however: we don’t want to pay more for clicks than we can generate in profit.
3. Introduce new products. Organic traffic is great, but it can take the search engines days or weeks to index and rank our newest products. When we have a new, hot item, we can use PPC to get that initial traffic until organic positioning catches up.
4. Address seasonality. The industrial marketplace doesn’t always follow the standard holiday trends that B2C retailers do. There are still seasonal trends for some industries. For example, another client sells commercial pressure washers. Spring and summer, when there is a lot more outside cleaning to be done, are much busier than fall and winter. By allocating their PPC budget for pressure washer terms during this peak season, we can catch more of those searchers who are ready to buy.
5. Test landing pages. When redesigning landing pages or adding new product copy, it’s important to test how effective those changes are. The problem is when we don’t have high enough traffic levels to get statistically significant results in a short time. We can use PPC to send a relatively large amount of traffic in a short time. Now we don’t have to wait as long to check bounce rates and conversion rates to see if our changes have positive impact.

How are you using PPC and SEO in your online marketing?

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?

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!