Maintaining search engine position

Recently I have been working with a client that requested some search engine optimisation for their website because they had not been getting any sales enquiries. On further investigation, it became apparent that although their website was badly optimised it was ranking well and getting a lot of daily traffic. However, this was mainly due to their competitors having similar issues with their sites. Once the client realised that they were actually getting decent traffic, they questioned whether or not they needed to optimise their site, which is completely understandable.

However, although their site was currently ranking well, we still recommended performing some crucial on-page search engine optimisation to their website. This was to make sure that they maintained their current search engine position. If a competitor was to raise their game, it wouldn’t take much effort to start ranking above them in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Additionally, we recommended starting a monthly link building campaign (off-page optimisation) to their site as part of an overall strategy to continue ranking well for their chosen keywords.

Once the optimisation was complete, we recommended performing a full website usability analysis to address the issues with the navigation, and general site usability. These changes combined with modifications to the design increased the conversion rate of the visitors (sales enquiries). Although the key issue with the website was that it wasn’t converting visitors, it was important to make sure that they maintained their position within the SERPs. This is something that is often overlooked, but as a general rule with SEO, it is better to be proactive instead of reactive. Maintaining your position within the search engines is generally easier than trying to improve your position.

Comments (2)

Using Google analytics to find out your top traffic sources

We’re always being asked questions about understanding Google analytics, and as such we occassionally add some simple step by step guides to our blog. This week we’re going to go through another very simple process of finding out how to view the traffic sources for your website.

First of all, select the time period for which you would like to view. The default time period is one month, but you can choose your exact time frame by clicking the date, followed by a start and end date using the calendar. If you check your analytics data regularly (like me) you may only want to view the last day or so.  Alternatively, you may wish to view all the data for the last month, year etc to view which traffic source has the been the most beneficial to your site traffic.  Once your time frame is chosen, click the “apply” button, and your traffic graph should update accordingly.

In the navigation on the left hand side, select ‘traffic sources’. This will take you to the main traffic sources page, where you will see the total number of visits your site has received and a pie chart showing the percentages of your traffic sources. From here you can now click on “referring sites” to see which site has given you the most referrals i.e. for the last month a majority of our referrals have come from Sphinn and Twitter. You can also view your direct traffic, which is people that have typed the URL of your website directly into the address bar.

My favourite is the keywords people have used to get to the site. Here you can measure exactly how successful your organic campaigns have been by seeing the most popular keywords people have used to get to the site. For example Manchester SEO and Manchester SEO company both tend to rank near the top. Additionally, of you go to the end of your keyword list you can view all the random key phrases that have got people to your site (normally through blog posts), and it can give you a good insight into how people are finding your site.

For a more advanced technique, you can click on a referring site or keyword, and then choose a ‘dimension’ from the drop down menu. Dimensions include geographic location (i.e. continent, country, city etc), browser types, Flash version and many more. One of the options is “Network location”, which is the name of the network the user was on when they visited your site. This can also be very enlightening! Many big companies have named networks, so they may appear as i.e. Sony Corporation, BBC Manchester etc. You will also get named networks from public networks i.e. Starbucks Manchester etc.

So, have an experiment with Google analytics and see what interesting information you can find out about your site visitors. To find out more, simply contact Elevator and someone will be happy to help!

Comments (0)

ILQ (Inbound Link Quality) definition

ILQ is an acronym for Inbound Link Quality, which is a score calculated by the quality of links to a website. This doesn’t take into account all of your links, instead it simply focuses on Yahoo Directory links (worth 1 point each, but generally you get 15 links from a listing), DMOZ listings (30 points per listing), .edu listings (worth 45 points each) and .gov listings (worth 67 points each).

As you can see, the rating doesn’t take into account links from all kinds of high ranking websites, nor does it take into account the relevance of other inbound links. However, it can prove to be a useful guide.  Here are a few examples of different ILQ scores:

BBC: ILQ score: 1,928,870 | Y! 10,400 | DMOZ 1,920 | edu 39,700 | gov 1,110
CNN: ILQ score: 5,045,390 | Y! 5,190 | DMOZ 520 | edu 106,000 | gov 3,800
Ebay.co.uk ILQ score: 2,767 | Y! 15 | DMOZ 7 | edu 55 | gov 1
Play.com ILQ score: 2,796 | Y! 6 | DMOZ 3 | edu 60 | gov 0

Unsurprisingly:

Google.com ILQ score: 100,166,600 | Y! 600 | DMOZ 638,000 | edu 1,610,000 | gov 128,000

Comments (0)

Google maps tracks swine flu outbreak

Following the recent outbreak of swine flu, Google has started tracking the latest epidemic using it’s maps API. On the map there are a number of markers. Pink markers represent suspect cases, purple markers represent confirmed cases, yellow markers represent negative cases and markers without a black dot inside represent a confirmed death. You can view the map by using this link to Google Maps H1N1 Swine Flu.

The page was created on the 21st April 2009 and already had 65,348 views when I first opened the page. Approximately 5 minutes later after refreshing the page, the page had received 66,632. That’s approximately 250 hits per minute.

This is just one of many uses that Google has found for it’s maps API. Personally, despite the morbid feelings associated with this, it is quite interesting to view. It also shows just how quickly the virus has spread and gives a much more accurate overview of the epidemic. Although this certainly isn’t something that an online marketing company should look to capitalise on, it shows how much traffic can be generated if you were to create a link bait on popular world news.

Comments (1)

The importance of SEO and online marketing

During a client meeting today, I was suprised when one of our more ‘technical savvy’ clients said they didn’t know what SEO (search engine optimisation) was. Maybe when you become so engrossed in the minor details of a skill like SEO, and speak daily to 100’s of experts worldwide, it is easy to forget that the vast majority of people simply haven’t heard of search engine optimisation. More importantly perhaps, is that they don’t know the potential benefits!

So I talked more with the client, and discovered that they had a website which was getting direct traffic, only from people that knew of the company (as such they were averaging around 1-2 hits per day). I explained proper keyword analysis and optimisation, and the difference in traffic between being ranked in the top 3 and being on the second page of Google SERPs for these keywords. At this point their interest in the subject had increased, but they still didn’t fully see the advantage to additional traffic. This is because they currently didn’t get any business through their website, and had it simply because they felt they needed to because they were a professional company. This then lead to a much more interesting conversation around developing an online strategy for their business, but at the end of the meeting I realised I assume a certain level of knowledge for most clients which they don’t have. Don’t get me wrong, these guys are super intelligent in their own field but just haven’t been exposed to SEO and online marketing before.

After the meeting they talked briefly about marketing budgets and possibly replacing traditional methods with online marketing based on it’s effectiveness. Some people may find this surprising, but I actually completely disagreed with this approach. Online marketing shouldn’t replace traditional methods, in fact, it should compliment it. Online marketing can be much more cost effective and is very easy to measure it’s effectiveness and ROI, and during difficult times like a recession, a lot more people have been choosing it invest in it. However, it should play a large part of your overall marketing strategy. I would not recommend using only traditional online or traditional marketing techniques on their own, because you will be using an incomplete strategy.

Comments (0)