News

How Google Analytics can help your business

Introduction

There are simply loads of businesses that completely outsource their seo requirements to an agency, yet do not have access themselves to their own Google Analytics account.

Well, we don’t think this is a good idea, that’s because we think both the seo agency, and also the client should have access to the Google Analytics account.

The reason being is that Google Analytics offers a wealth of information on how well your website is doing.

Just like a dashboard on a car tells you all you need to know about how the car is operating, well your Google Analytics does the same, but for your website.

Now, if you’ve never looked at your businesses account, well you might not have the foggiest idea about what Google Analytics is, and why it is so important.

But do not worry, as this guide will not just explain how you can obtain such an account, but also some of the super neat features that it can offer you.

First things first, sign-up to Google Analytics

Setting up your businesses Google Analytics account is an absolute piece of cake. Head on over to Google Analytics page here, and they follow the step by step instructions.

Are you struggling to set up your Google Analytics account?

The most common problem that some people struggle with is setting up the tracking id.

This is basically a piece of code that allows Google Analytics to talk to your website.

Now, if your struggling to set this up, its worth talking to a website designer for help.

Yet, if you’re like us, and you’re a big fan of WordPress, well there’s a super easy way you can set-up Google Analytics on your WordPress website.

Just follow the link here, to this rather handy article that explains all you need to know on how to set up Google Analytics on a WordPress website.

All good to go?

Okay, we will presume at this stage that your all set up and ready to go, and now that you have a cup of coffee in hand looking at your Google Analytics account, we will get started.

So, while your sipping away on your espresso, you’re probably thinking what’s so good about this Google Analytics then?

Well, we will tell you.

Audience data

If you rely on visitors coming to your website, that’s in order to generate sales, then this data will be important to you.

For example, you should pay particular attention to the “sessions / users” data. This will inform you of how many people have visited your website.

So, whether your implementing seo yourself, or a local seo agency is doing all this for you, you will now be able to monitor if the number of users is increasing or not.

Bounce rate?

Imagine just for a second you have set up a restaurant in the heart of your city. Now, it’s the opening night and you expect floods of customers to start coming through the door.

Yet, what is actually happening is people are coming through the door, then turning straight around and exiting within a few seconds.

You would be asking yourself, what on earth is happening here, right?

Well, this is kind of the same as your website having a super-high bounce rate. Therefore, a high bounce rate means people are finding your website, then clicking on it, and then deciding to leave more or less straightaway.

So, a missed opportunity, right? Well, this is why your seo agency should get straight to work, and start working out why the bounce rate is so high.

For example, they should asking questions like is the websites navigation hard to use? Is the website loading correctly on smartphones?

The aim therefore would be for the business to decrease it’s bounce rate.

Acquisition

A buzz word for the 21st century is “ROI”- after all, everyone likes facts and figures. And this makes sense, if you’ve forked out a ton of money on online marketing, well your going to want to know if it’s working or not.

And when working out your return on investment, your going to want to know how visitors are finding your website.

For example, you may well be paying a digital marketing agency to take care of all your businesses online marketing. Yet you will still want to know how people are getting onto your website.

That’s to say, are they landing on your website via a social media advert, via organic business listings or they coming to your website through a promotion page, so directly, via a url you have published on flyers?

Well you guessed it, your Google Analytics account allows you work out how your websites visitors are finding your website.

User behaviour

It used to be the case that some seo companies were obsessed with rather simple seo tactics, such as placing keywords over and over again within the text of a website.

Well thankfully these seo methods are now dead. They have since been replaced with metrics that are far harder to manipulate.

For example, if users are spending longer on your website, well that’s a good thing, right? As if your website didn’t offer what the customer wanted, well they would be leaving straightaway.

That is why many leading digital marketing agencies watch their clients user behaviour closely.

For example, they will be monitoring bounce rates, average time spent on a website, and also how many pages on the website the average user has viewed.

So, let’s say for example you are a retailer of rather fancy designer trainers, and you have say a collection of 50 pairs of shoes that you retail.

Well, you wouldn’t want the average visitor to look at just one pair of shoes, then bounce off the website, would you?

No, you would want the average visitor to spend time browsing all what your business has to offer.

Therefore, you would want the visitor to look at as many shoes as possible, increasing the chances of your business making a sale.

As you can see Google Analytics offers some really useful information for any business owner. If your business requires help with its seo, then why not give us a ring?

May 23, 2019/by Mike Jones

4 great ways that you can improve your company’s old blog posts

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Introduction

So many businesses are now overly focused on creating new blog posts. That’s to say sometimes the old blogs are just left and never updated.

Yet, surely when all that information gets out of date, well, the blog posts will no longer be useful?

So what’s the solution, should businesses be devoting some more time to updating old blog posts?

Well, the simple answer is we think it’s well worth updating a business’s blog posts from time to time. And before you think updating a load of old blog posts sounds like a ton of work, it’s worth bearing in mind there can sometimes be a reward at the end of all this labour.

That’s because a reward can come in the form of an uplift in terms of organic traffic that your company website receives, that’s of course if you update the old blog posts correctly!

So, without further ado, as we sense your itching to get started, let’s have a look at our four top tips for improving your old blog posts.

Rome wasn’t built in a day!

It’s understandable that businesses today will want to improve their businesses SEO as much as possible.

However, as seo is often an ongoing process, and there are so many things that will need to be optimised at once, you have to be clever with you spend your time.

That’s to say before you take the strategy that every single blog post is going to be revamped, you should sit back, and think is that really realistic?

The answer for most businesses is no, no its not! The reason being is that most businesses simply have not got the resources to keep going over old blog posts, and to keep the information up to date.

So, what’s the solution?

We would therefore recommend opening your businesses Google Analytics account, and looking at which pages receive the least number of visitors. Then why not concentrate on improving these pages?

Perhaps the content marketing that isn’t getting read much only has a few paragraphs of text, so in order to improve, you could elaborate a bit more.

On the other end of the spectrum will be those pages on your website that receive the most visitors, why not also see if these could be improved? For example, perhaps some of the information is now up to date, so you could add a section which shows you are updating your company’s old blog posts.

If you haven’t got the foggiest of how to work out which blog posts you need to improve, why not have a look at this great article that has been written by Nick Loper.

How I Increased Google Traffic 65% in 6 Months With No Link Building: My Content Audit Process and Results

Don’t focus too much on the SEO!

You say what! We hear you- you’re thinking this business is an seo agency, yet they are stating don’t worry too much about the SEO!

Well here’s what we mean, sometimes some businesses concentrate too much on trying to improve their seo, that’s when writing their company’s blog posts. This can distract the writer from writing a really good piece of work.

That’s to say some writers are focused too much on placing keywords a set number of times throughout the article. So much so sometimes the article doesn’t flow correctly, and this sort of work may even act to confuse the reader.

Check your blog posts backlinks

You’ve probably already spotted that a lot of blog posts these days contain backlinks. Whether those backlinks lead to an internal page within your website, or externally onto another website, they can sure be useful.

Yet, if you’ve wrote your article some time ago, well its worth checking that those links still work.

For example, perhaps you are a large retailer, let’s say for example you retail bathroom items, so naturally you will have blog posts that talk about bathroom products.

Yet, as everybody knows products can stop being manufactured, or be replaced by another similar item. In which case the backlink may become broken.

So, whilst you are busy improving your businesses content marketing, why not have a click on all the blog posts links, just to make sure they still work?

Technical seo, it’s not something to be ignored

As most SEO’s will tell you, when you get a new website back from a design agency it can often lack the most basic of seo elements.

That’s to say the website designer may have been so focused on getting the homepages appearance right, there may well me no meta titles, meta descriptions, correctly labelled alt tags.

And this can mean that when it comes to adding blog posts, the author may well have followed the same approach. By this we mean none of the title tags have been added, and the meta titles are non-existent-so what you do?

Well, its always worth getting in touch with a respected digital marketing agency, who should be able to recommend ways that technical seo can be applied to old blog posts.

For more help and advice, why not give us a ring?

May 20, 2019/by Mike Jones

Can positive business reviews help to improve our SEO?

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Introduction

When a business owner sits down with their marketing agency for an update, well it’s easy for a lot of company owners to quickly get baffled.

Sure, well known marketing agencies like us we will spend the time to ensure our clients understand everything that they would like to know.

But still, some business owners can quickly get lost in all the technical seo jargon, such as backlinks, content marketing and offsite seo.

Yet there’s one thing that all business owners understand, and that is a happy customer, that leaves a positive business review can help to improve business.

Yet in this article we will take things a bit further, that’s to say, will all those positive reviews have any bearing on the company’s SEO?

Can positive business reviews improve our SEO?

Well in a nutshell, yes they most definitely can. But as with all things seo related, there are a number of conditions.

Such as, the reviews must be genuine. This means if you are a start-up business, well it’s not a good idea to start writing a load of reviews yourself.

The reason for this is rather simple to explain, that’s because Google, as well as the other major search engines have rather clever algorithms that work for them.

This means that built into the algorithms will be coding that will be working to fight spam. Any attempt to fool the algorithm can result in a penalty being applied to the businesses website.

And this is no laughing matter, the reason being a penalty, such as a Google Panda penalty can result in the website losing where it ranks, and sometimes the website get’s deindexed.

Deindexing a website basically means it wont be able to be found, not unless someone types the url directly into the browser that is.

So to summarise, genuine business reviews can help a businesses seo, yet for this to happen it’s worth following the next pieces of advice.

Where should my customers be leaving reviews?

You may have tons of customers that want to leave a positive business review, but are unsure where the best place would be to leave the review?

Well, if this is the case, then we would always recommend that you state to your customers that the best place to leave a review would be on your businesses Google My Business account.

This means if you were to search for a say a local pet shop, if the business has a Google My Business account, then they will appear in the local business listings.

You can then click the tab, which will display their Google My Business listing, which contains all the important business information that you need, such as telephone numbers and a link to companies’ website.

Some customers may not have a Google account, so they may want to leave a review on your businesses Google My Business account.

In this case why not ask them to leave a review on any website they wish? This way it also looks more authentic to other customers when checking out your business’s reviews.

The reason being is if you have reviews across multiple websites, well this can look more genuine than say if a whole bunch of reviews have all been written on one website over a short timeframe.

How should we go about asking our customers for reviews?

Google and the other major search engines want genuine reviews, and not reviews left on a website because someone has been paid to leave them there.

Also business reviews obtained by giving away something for free, well this we think is not a good idea neither.

The reason being is as already mentioned Google’s algorithm is mighty clever, so its not a good idea to try and think your seo agency can cheat the algorithm.

It’s far better to take a more straightforward and honest approach, that is whenever you gauge you have offered a good service, why not just write in an e-mail or correspondence whether or not the customer would be willing to leave a business review.

That simple sentence added to the bottom of an e-mail, well sometimes that’s all that is needed to prompt a customer to start leaving positive business reviews.

Does your business require quality seo?

If your business requires help with its seo, then why not call us today?

May 14, 2019/by Mike Jones

Does your website deserve to be on the first page?

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Introduction

Many companies have a go at implementing SEO inhouse, and sometimes this can work just great.

Yet more and more business owners are scratching their heads, and wondering why on the earth the competition are ranking higher.

In years gone by, you could run some checks on the website, like a check on its backlinks, and then its normally at this point it would become blooming obvious why a competitor has a stronger website.

But now things are all bit more confusing for business owners. The reason being is the metrics that they once relied on to compare competitors with, well basically they don’t work.

So we thought we would have our penny’s worth, and through some light onto the matter:

RankBrain and keeping your audience interested

Ever invested in SEO and taken the approach that more is better?

Well your not alone, a lot of business owners take the approach that more is better. Believing that more backlinks, more content marketing and more business are better.

And they are right more is better. However here is the big but you’ve been waiting for, more is only better if the quality is kept super high.

But in matter of fact, what often happens is as your agency offers you more and more, the quality will decrease.

You end up with content marketing that’s loosely connected to your company in some shape or form.

You end up with backlinks that are connected to low quality, spammy websites. Basically you end up with pretty rubbish seo.

That’s unless you have such a large seo budget that you can quite literally get tons of seo work, and there are so many people working on it that they are offering the very best of quality.

Now here’s the thing, there’s no fooling your audience. They know when the work is marketing rubbish, they soon get bored and leave your website.

Well the search engines know this through RankBrain, and this is why quality must be kept high.

Your audience must be engaged, they must be retained through offering high quality work.

Don’t go with companies that roll-out work like a set menu

Who likes set menus really? Normally people only go with a set menu at a restaurant because its slightly cheaper.

In return the kitchen gets to roll out its food on mass, saving it money and time. Well this is kind of like rubbish seo that’s offered in a set list.

Set lists don’t work, they offer a broad brush approach regardless of what your website needs.

Same, boring predictable work that’s rolled out each month, which is unlikely to help your businesses seo.

Now think of a different approach, an seo agency that spots what your website is missing. It doesn’t then just go overboard with plugging the gap, it instead takes it time, and offers quality.

This quality work then is really useful, and your customers read it for longer, then the search engines pick up on this. This is basically really good quality marketing.

In a nutshell, quality matters.

It all comes down to is the work better?

Imagine for a second you have decided to save a few quid, and you want to change the taps in the kitchen yourself.

Yet your unsure how this is done, so you turn to your smartphone for advice. Then you read two articles.

Article one is very boring to read, it seems like its just interested in promoting the business. So you read for say less that 2 minutes, you bounce off the website, and start reading article 2.

Article 2 is much better, it has a YouTube video explaining how to change the tap, the video is 7 minutes long and you watch it all.

You then follow the step by step written instructions below, this takes you the duration of fitting the tap, which takes you half an hour.

So in all, you spend 37 minutes on that website. Then your tap is working, you are very happy, you’ve just saved a good wedge of money.

Your so happy you click the businesses Facebook button, and you leave a positive review.

See why the quality of the work matters? 37 minutes on a website, compared to 2 minutes on another.

Google’s RankBrain and algorithms spot that thousands of people are doing the same, so guess which business is going to rank higher?

This is why quality seo works.

May 3, 2019/by Mike Jones

News

How Google Analytics can help your business

4 great ways that you can improve your company’s old blog posts

Can positive business reviews help to improve our SEO?

Does your website deserve to be on the first page?

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