Monday 30 April 2018

Daily Search Forum Recap: April 30, 2018

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

Search Engine Roundtable

8 Steps to Get Higher Rankings Using Google Analytics Data

Ranking higher on Google. A ceaseless rush to get authority for your website and lots of visitors to eventually turn them into clients. Search engine optimization doesn’t have to be the black sheep of marketing. You just got to understand how to use it. You can complement your SEO efforts with lots of other marketing forms, such as analytics data. It will stop you from bleeding website data. It really will.

 

How does it work? You need an account on a dedicated analytics product. Then, you need to get access to your analytics data, pull up your sleeves and step in using our analytics data kit filled with actionable tips.

 

8 Tips to Get Higher Rankings Using Google Analytics Data

 

  1. Search for Landing Pages to Transform Them in Link Magnets
  2. Hunt for Search Queries to Craft Audience Targeted Content
  3. Scour for Money Keywords to Optimize Your Content
  4. Track Best-Performing Third-Party Campaigns
  5. Channel Grouping for Better Targeting
  6. Evaluate Website Traffic from Search Engines
  7. Gauge Impactful Changes in Your Website’s Evolution
  8. Use Advanced Segments to Shorten the Conversion Path

 

For our experiment, we mainly used Google Analytics. Even though from time to time we felt that the data coming from here is not comprehensive, the platform provides lots of valuable features. 

 

1. Search for Landing Pages to Transform Them in Link Magnets

 

Knowing exactly which pages receive organic traffic is crucial. It will help not only your content marketers to make better decisions,  but it will also improve the strategy of your overall marketing campaigns. Organic search traffic is one of the first metrics on your list that needs to be tracked. Go to Behavior » Site Content » All Pages to view all the pages ordered by the highest number. In case you want to see the traffic only for some category of pages from your website, you’ll have to search for it. Below you can see an example of the Blog category:

 

Site content

 

The pages with high scores can give you a glimpse of indexation. Landing pages with a high number of unique pageviews mean that they are of interest, offer a better user experience, and are indexed better than the others. Thus, if the viewers like you, Google likes you, and that will bring the appreciation of other websites and turn the pages into link magnets. Improving those pages and optimizing them is essential to sprout your backlink profile.

 

Use those pages to link them to other relevant pages, because internal links have a strong signal of transferring value (therefore, you’ll improve your conversion rates, time on site and your traffic).

 

On the other hand, pages with a lower score (pages with a high bounce rate) mean they don’t offer what was promised from the title and meta description. Those users will always pogo stick away unless immediate changes are made.

 

2. Hunt for Search Queries to Craft Audience Targeted Content

 

Using Google data, you can see what your audience searches before accessing your content. All the hustle for searching queries and relevant keywords can easily turn into an easy and pain-free task. View the Google’s search terms from the amounts of data collected in Search Console. Access it through Acquisition » Search Console » Queries.

 

Search term from Search Console

 

Here you can find plenty of keywords data. You will find all that your users searched about you before they entered your website: your brand name, services you might offer, informational queries and lots of other mixed searches. In our case, I recommend looking for the relevant keyword phrases, that could have a chance to rank higher and bring more traffic to your website. To make the strategy work, you’ll have to filter the list by the average position.

 

What you should do is go to Advanced filter » include » Average position » greater than » (insert arbitrary number here). In the blank space, I would recommend inserting the number 10, which basically means all the keywords that rank below the 10th position (from the second page to the last one). Baby steps. Start with the pages that have a higher chance to be pushed to the first page rather than going directly to those in higher positions (greater than 80/90/100, etc).

 

Advanced filters in Google Analytics for search terms

 

Look for the queries that are relevant to your business, for that type of keywords that could push the user down the funnel to turn a lead, such as very specific keywords, not informational ones. Some specific examples might be: washing machine service in Perth, home cleaning service provider Minneapolis, but that really depends on the industry and type of business.

 

After you’ve gathered all the keywords, search for the pages related to each keyword. Up to this point, you have the easy way to avoid the headaches or the-long-phase-pain-in-the-neck journey. The first option is to use a dedicated tool or a plugin. Keyword Tool has an option to see on which position is your content for a specific query. Below you can see the rankings for “24-hour locksmith Sydney”. In the list, you see all the first 100 positions so you can easily search with “ctrl + f” and find your site.

 

social media monitoring

 

The hard way would be to go to the search engine you use, such as google.com and search for that particular query, manually.

 

After you found the page, copy-paste it into Content Assistant and optimize it. Transform the low-hanging fruits into best-performing pieces of content. We’ve crafted a step-by-step guideline, if you need any help.

 

Content Assistant optimizations for searched keywords

 

Make sure you don’t rank already for a highly competitive keyword for the same page, otherwise you risk messing around your actual rankings. I know Google is working on a complicated and dreadful-algorithmic situation. For that, you’ll have to return to Acquisition » Search Console » Queries search for the main keyword. In our case, it would be locksmith and see which similar phrases you have there and their position.  

 

3. Scour for Money Keywords to Optimize Your Content

 

There are some triggers in analytics that could lead to financial outcome, if you follow a well-planned strategy. Following a similar path as we talked about in the query hunting at point 2, we can look up to money keywords 💰 (All I see is dolla’ signs, dolla’ signs).

 

You have two options to scour for money keywords in Analytics. In the first case, you can find money keywords that would convert by looking into Google Adwords campaigns, which can be accessed through Acquisition » Adwords » Keywords.

 

Adwords -keywords

 

A bit of keyword research and analytics SEO never killed nobody. Order keywords by cost, then select the ones that have a higher cost and lots of clicks, because those are the most successful ones.

 

In the last case, you can see the search terms from your own e-commerce website/ online shop. Go to Behavior » Site Search » Search Terms. If you have an e-commerce website, I bet there are lots of people that might search for something else, once they’ve entered your website. You can find what they were looking for and try to use those search terms to your advantage, such as creating new content, optimizing product pages for those specific keywords or other similar pages.

 

Usually, when navigating an ecommerce website, visitors search for a category of products, a specific product, color or even an SKU (stock keeping unit – the identification code).

 

After you’ve gathered all the keywords and made a list of them with the corresponding page, you can start optimizing the content you already have, as we discussed previously or you can create new content.

 

4. Track Best-Performing Third-Party Campaigns

 

If you want to see data from the various third-party campaigns ran by you, you can use Analytics. Look at all the campaigns you have through Acquisition » Campaigns » All Campaigns.

 

This analytics tool category includes promotional campaigns created on other websites that point to yours through dedicated landing pages, discount codes, articles and so on. All the links from each campaign must use a UTM code to make it easy to track in Analytics. A UTM code is attached to a custom URL that can be used to track a source, medium, and campaign name. You can also use it for email campaigns.

 

All the data gathered from third-party campaigns can help you understand which website performs better and can bring lots of clients back to your site. We all know that links bring a lot of value to your domain. The more powerful, the better. Links are a strong ranking signal, so make sure you take advantage of what you’ve got.

 

Select the keywords that are grammatically correct and relevant for future articles or actual keywords optimization ideas for published content. Priority goes to keywords with lots of users.

 

Another interesting strategy would be to look at the keywords that bring traffic to your website, which can be accessed by Acquisition » Campaigns » Organic Keywords. You can use those in your optimization process to generate new content ideas. They have a strong indicator of quality search.

 

Search money keyword Search Console

 

5. Channel Grouping for Better Targeting

 

It is critical to know where your visitors are coming from. Think of it this way: it’s like when you have a defined profile, with all the attributes and metrics highlighted and a group with all sort of unfiltered, uncategorized, unstructured data with lots of inconclusive info. Which one would be easier to go through?

 

Jeff Sauer, Google Analytics consultant, explains how the journey of the user and how channel grouping can help over-simplify the traffic coming to your website:

 

Channels represent the paths visitors take to arrive on your website. Some visitors type in your URL, some search your brand name, others search by topic and find your content.
Jeff Sauer Jeff Sauer
Founder of Jeffalytics

 

Analytics allows you to see some of the default channels at first, but they can be easily customized in order to view detailed categories. It is best to use the channel grouping feature from Google Analytics: Acquisition » All Traffic » Channels.

 

Channel grouping in Analytics

 

In the example represented above, you can see a list of channels. There is a variety of channels you could create. You just have to make sure all of them are relevant and useful to your business.

 

If you don’t know where 15% is coming from, that’s a problem, right? Using granular channel grouping will ease up your decision-making process because this way you’ll have an accurate view of your data.

 

Paul Koks, Analytics Advocate at Online Metrics, points out the benefits for customizing channel grouping to get an accurate view of your marketing performances:

 

Goals are crucial to analyze the performance of your landing pages, channels etc. A proper structure and suitable naming conventions for your goal sets are extremely helpful for you and other people that have access to the same reporting view.
Paul Koks Paul Koks
Analytics Advocate at Online Metrics
 

6. Evaluate Website Traffic from Search Engines

 

Traffic has a high connection with high rankings, but they are also in a constant battle, at the same time. You shouldn’t focus only on one or the other. Tracking keywords that send traffic to your site is one of the most important pieces of the pie. In Analytics, you can view the organic search traffic for all the searched terms in a specific period of time. Go to Acquisition » All Traffic » Channels.

 

Track organic search in analytics

 

Once you get here, you need to click on Organic Search and a new list of search terms will load.

 

Track organic search terms in analytics

 

Here you can view all the keywords that are successful and bring a lot of users. Gauge your website’s performance in terms of search traffic (visitors, sessions) and opt to use only those that can bring a significant amount of traffic for content that you’re under-optimized for.

 

Make sure you avoid seasonal keywords and seasonal periods (Christmas, Easter and other local events and celebrations) that potentially could spike the traffic because they are in demand only at that specific time.

 

7. Gauge Impactful Changes in Your Website’s Evolution

 

Besides all the data analysis methods, Google Analytics can provide some shortcuts to your reports and historical data. Annotations are a great feature you should use to keep track of your changes. They are some notes you can add to mark important events.

 

If you want to add annotations to flag any important changes, you’ll have to go the graphic you’re interested in and click on the small arrow to expand and create your annotation.

 

Add annotations in analytics

 

Before starting to create new annotations, observe the following tips:

  • Give a relevant and specific name to make it explicit.
  • Keep it short, to avoid overlapping with your other annotations and make it harder to read.
  • Record all marketing campaigns that run online and offline or other events that could potentially influence the traffic.

 

Farid Alhadi, an analytics expert, performed lots of experiments and analytics researches and saw the value in annotations. They are best put to use to avoid breaks and irregularities, but also to take advantage of all the natural spikes from the website’s results.

 

These “sticky notes” might seem insignificant, but can often be a life-saver, providing insight as to why your data sometimes looks the way it does, especially anomalies or outliers.
Farid Alhadi Farid Alhadi
Sales Director at E-Nor
 

8. Use Advanced Segments to Shorten the Conversion Path

What’s SEO success if we don’t create segmented audience? How will we know on which type of client we should focus our attention more, or for which we should interfere in the funnel to convert them? Segmentation will provide you with lots of insight data on your audience to get a deep-dive into everything that happens with your website. Advanced segments in Analytics can help you get deeper information for isolated groups established through parameters.

 

Dave Chaffey, co-founder at Smart Insights, has an interesting story about the overall behavior when it comes to Google Analytics usage:

 

The best marketers put effort into understanding their customers’ behaviours, characteristics and needs, so at first glance, Google Analytics can be frustrating to use to help marketing since there isn’t an obvious report about customers. The closest we can get is the visitors report, but these seem anonymous and undifferentiated.
Dave Chaffey Dave Chaffey
Co-founder and Content Director of Smart Insights

 

He rather said an honest and hard truth:

 

If you’re using Google Analytics and not using Segments, you might as well not bother using Google Analytics other than for trend reporting.
Dave Chaffey Dave Chaffey
Co-founder and Content Director of Smart Insights

 

To create segments, you need to go to your property, where you’ll find a button that says Add Segment » New segment.

 

Add segment in Analytics

 

After that step, you get to the point when you have the option to create conditions or sequences. Conditions are best out to use in situations when you want to understand how something on your site influences the visitor, for example. Let’s say you want to find how your blog impacts the revenue.  

 

Advanced segments in analytics

 

You should use sequences if you want to measure which users took specific actions in a certain order on your site; the evolution, the journey of the user on site. For example, create a sequence for users that go to a specific page and then they click to create an account and convert. That way, you could analyze the aggregate data regarding user behavior and the differences that appear from the other ones.  

 

Sequence segments in analytics

 

Getting the SEO analytics you specifically need can turn into a “light-bulb” moment.

 

Kunle Campbell, an e-commerce growth consultant, points out in a few words the main goal of the advanced segments and the high-driven value it can bring to a website:

 

Advanced segments are good at determining acquisition channels that drive quality traffic to your site. You can also create segments for different demographic groups, to see what pages they visit most and how long they stay on your website. You can segment users and sessions with specific keywords you are targeting. Custom segments are available for importing and sharing with others. In short, advanced segments is a powerful tool for investigating important sets of website traffic and for revealing weak areas in your site, to address.
Kunle Campbell Kunle Campbell
Founder of 2X eCommerce

 

Conclusion

 

Let me tell you a short story I know from my grandma about three countryside brothers from a small village. All of them were raised by a single dad who had an orchard. One day, their dad was hit by a rare disease which weakened him day by day. Knowing that he didn’t have much time left, he wanted to see which of his sons is ready to take over the orchard. Each one of them received one bean.

 

They were told that the first one who manages to grow a leaf from that bean will take over the family legacy – the orchard. The first one put it in the ground and watered it every day in the evening. The second one placed it in a glass of water on the porch to receive light. The last one thought of doing something different. First, he gathered more information on how to grow it and he found out that the best way was to put ii in a glass on a piece of wet cotton wool or a sort of wadding and place it somewhere when it can receive light, watering it from day to day, always checking the piece of cotton. Days passed, the first started to rush and put a stick to attach the beanstalk to be prepared when it  grows. The second one drowned the bean and it never grew. The interesting part of the story is the fact that the third son always checked the bean and kept track of what was happening to it, keeping a note with what he did and what happened.

 

After a few days the first leaf appeared. The third son was ecstatic. The father was happy and the orchard had a new owner. The interesting part I was trying to point out through this story is the fact that in order to make something work you need to search, make the right steps at the right time. Don’t rush into things, like the first son did. Don’t try to do your job just one time and forget about it like the second son did, but try to track the evolution, analytics data, keep reports and establish goals like the third son did.

 

This article is not a guide to Google Analytics, nor a list with Google ranking factors or an SEO checklist. It’s a list with actionable steps that you can take in order to improve your marketing strategy and get the most out of your current marketing campaigns by using the data you already have.  Also, this blog post will not guarantee you SEO success but it will surely help you with your conversion rate optimization, with your SEO rankings and will ultimately improve your organic search traffic. 

As analytics data is the first insight you get about your business and the audience. It can bring a lot of value to start mushrooming your SEO strategy.

The post 8 Steps to Get Higher Rankings Using Google Analytics Data appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.


SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies

Criteria for Google Mobile First Indexing is Matching Content Not Mobile Friendliness

Google has officially begun sending out email notices to site owners confirming their change from desktop indexing to mobile first indexing.  And we do have some clarification on mobile friendliness being a criteria or not for sites changing over. Some people had speculated that a way to prevent mobile first indexing was to have a […]

The post Criteria for Google Mobile First Indexing is Matching Content Not Mobile Friendliness appeared first on The SEM Post.


The SEM Post

8 Steps to Get Higher Rankings Using Google Analytics Data

Ranking higher on Google. A ceaseless rush to get authority for your website and lots of visitors to eventually turn them into clients. Search engine optimization doesn’t have to be the black sheep of marketing. You just got to understand how to use it. You can complement your SEO efforts with lots of other marketing forms, such as analytics data. It will stop you from bleeding website data. It really will.

 

How does it work? You need an account on a dedicated analytics product. Then, you need to get access to your analytics data, pull up your sleeves and step in using our analytics data kit filled with actionable tips.

 

8 Tips to Get Higher Rankings Using Google Analytics Data

 

  1. Search for Landing Pages to Transform Them in Link Magnets
  2. Hunt for Search Queries to Craft Audience Targeted Content
  3. Scour for Money Keywords to Optimize Your Content
  4. Track Best-Performing Third-Party Campaigns
  5. Channel Grouping for Better Targeting
  6. Evaluate Website Traffic from Search Engines
  7. Gauge Impactful Changes in Your Website’s Evolution
  8. Use Advanced Segments to Shorten the Conversion Path

 

For our experiment, we mainly used Google Analytics. Even though from time to time we felt that the data coming from here is not comprehensive, the platform provides lots of valuable features. 

 

1. Search for Landing Pages to Transform Them in Link Magnets

 

Knowing exactly which pages receive organic traffic is crucial. It will help not only your content marketers to make better decisions,  but it will also improve the strategy of your overall marketing campaigns. Organic search traffic is one of the first metrics on your list that needs to be tracked. Go to Behavior » Site Content » All Pages to view all the pages ordered by the highest number. In case you want to see the traffic only for some category of pages from your website, you’ll have to search for it. Below you can see an example of the Blog category:

 

Site content

 

The pages with high scores can give you a glimpse of indexation. Landing pages with a high number of unique pageviews mean that they are of interest, offer a better user experience, and are indexed better than the others. Thus, if the viewers like you, Google likes you, and that will bring the appreciation of other websites and turn the pages into link magnets. Improving those pages and optimizing them is essential to sprout your backlink profile.

 

Use those pages to link them to other relevant pages, because internal links have a strong signal of transferring value (therefore, you’ll improve your conversion rates, time on site and your traffic).

 

On the other hand, pages with a lower score (pages with a high bounce rate) mean they don’t offer what was promised from the title and meta description. Those users will always pogo stick away unless immediate changes are made.

 

2. Hunt for Search Queries to Craft Audience Targeted Content

 

Using Google data, you can see what your audience searches before accessing your content. All the hustle for searching queries and relevant keywords can easily turn into an easy and pain-free task. View the Google’s search terms from the amounts of data collected in Search Console. Access it through Acquisition » Search Console » Queries.

 

Search term from Search Console

 

Here you can find plenty of keywords data. You will find all that your users searched about you before they entered your website: your brand name, services you might offer, informational queries and lots of other mixed searches. In our case, I recommend looking for the relevant keyword phrases, that could have a chance to rank higher and bring more traffic to your website. To make the strategy work, you’ll have to filter the list by the average position.

 

What you should do is go to Advanced filter » include » Average position » greater than » (insert arbitrary number here). In the blank space, I would recommend inserting the number 10, which basically means all the keywords that rank below the 10th position (from the second page to the last one). Baby steps. Start with the pages that have a higher chance to be pushed to the first page rather than going directly to those in higher positions (greater than 80/90/100, etc).

 

Advanced filters in Google Analytics for search terms

 

Look for the queries that are relevant to your business, for that type of keywords that could push the user down the funnel to turn a lead, such as very specific keywords, not informational ones. Some specific examples might be: washing machine service in Perth, home cleaning service provider Minneapolis, but that really depends on the industry and type of business.

 

After you’ve gathered all the keywords, search for the pages related to each keyword. Up to this point, you have the easy way to avoid the headaches or the-long-phase-pain-in-the-neck journey. The first option is to use a dedicated tool or a plugin. Keyword Tool has an option to see on which position is your content for a specific query. Below you can see the rankings for “24-hour locksmith Sydney”. In the list, you see all the first 100 positions so you can easily search with “ctrl + f” and find your site.

 

social media monitoring

 

The hard way would be to go to the search engine you use, such as google.com and search for that particular query, manually.

 

After you found the page, copy-paste it into Content Assistant and optimize it. Transform the low-hanging fruits into best-performing pieces of content. We’ve crafted a step-by-step guideline, if you need any help.

 

Content Assistant optimizations for searched keywords

 

Make sure you don’t rank already for a highly competitive keyword for the same page, otherwise you risk messing around your actual rankings. I know Google is working on a complicated and dreadful-algorithmic situation. For that, you’ll have to return to Acquisition » Search Console » Queries search for the main keyword. In our case, it would be locksmith and see which similar phrases you have there and their position.  

 

3. Scour for Money Keywords to Optimize Your Content

 

There are some triggers in analytics that could lead to financial outcome, if you follow a well-planned strategy. Following a similar path as we talked about in the query hunting at point 2, we can look up to money keywords 💰 (All I see is dolla’ signs, dolla’ signs).

 

You have two options to scour for money keywords in Analytics. In the first case, you can find money keywords that would convert by looking into Google Adwords campaigns, which can be accessed through Acquisition » Adwords » Keywords.

 

Adwords -keywords

 

A bit of keyword research and analytics SEO never killed nobody. Order keywords by cost, then select the ones that have a higher cost and lots of clicks, because those are the most successful ones.

 

In the last case, you can see the search terms from your own e-commerce website/ online shop. Go to Behavior » Site Search » Search Terms. If you have an e-commerce website, I bet there are lots of people that might search for something else, once they’ve entered your website. You can find what they were looking for and try to use those search terms to your advantage, such as creating new content, optimizing product pages for those specific keywords or other similar pages.

 

Usually, when navigating an ecommerce website, visitors search for a category of products, a specific product, color or even an SKU (stock keeping unit – the identification code).

 

After you’ve gathered all the keywords and made a list of them with the corresponding page, you can start optimizing the content you already have, as we discussed previously or you can create new content.

 

4. Track Best-Performing Third-Party Campaigns

 

If you want to see data from the various third-party campaigns ran by you, you can use Analytics. Look at all the campaigns you have through Acquisition » Campaigns » All Campaigns.

 

This analytics tool category includes promotional campaigns created on other websites that point to yours through dedicated landing pages, discount codes, articles and so on. All the links from each campaign must use a UTM code to make it easy to track in Analytics. A UTM code is attached to a custom URL that can be used to track a source, medium, and campaign name. You can also use it for email campaigns.

 

All the data gathered from third-party campaigns can help you understand which website performs better and can bring lots of clients back to your site. We all know that links bring a lot of value to your domain. The more powerful, the better. Links are a strong ranking signal, so make sure you take advantage of what you’ve got.

 

Select the keywords that are grammatically correct and relevant for future articles or actual keywords optimization ideas for published content. Priority goes to keywords with lots of users.

 

Another interesting strategy would be to look at the keywords that bring traffic to your website, which can be accessed by Acquisition » Campaigns » Organic Keywords. You can use those in your optimization process to generate new content ideas. They have a strong indicator of quality search.

 

Search money keyword Search Console

 

5. Channel Grouping for Better Targeting

 

It is critical to know where your visitors are coming from. Think of it this way: it’s like when you have a defined profile, with all the attributes and metrics highlighted and a group with all sort of unfiltered, uncategorized, unstructured data with lots of inconclusive info. Which one would be easier to go through?

 

Jeff Sauer, Google Analytics consultant, explains how the journey of the user and how channel grouping can help over-simplify the traffic coming to your website:

 

Channels represent the paths visitors take to arrive on your website. Some visitors type in your URL, some search your brand name, others search by topic and find your content.
Jeff Sauer Jeff Sauer
Founder of Jeffalytics

 

Analytics allows you to see some of the default channels at first, but they can be easily customized in order to view detailed categories. It is best to use the channel grouping feature from Google Analytics: Acquisition » All Traffic » Channels.

 

Channel grouping in Analytics

 

In the example represented above, you can see a list of channels. There is a variety of channels you could create. You just have to make sure all of them are relevant and useful to your business.

 

If you don’t know where 15% is coming from, that’s a problem, right? Using granular channel grouping will ease up your decision-making process because this way you’ll have an accurate view of your data.

 

Paul Koks, Analytics Advocate at Online Metrics, points out the benefits for customizing channel grouping to get an accurate view of your marketing performances:

 

Goals are crucial to analyze the performance of your landing pages, channels etc. A proper structure and suitable naming conventions for your goal sets are extremely helpful for you and other people that have access to the same reporting view.
Paul Koks Paul Koks
Analytics Advocate at Online Metrics
 

6. Evaluate Website Traffic from Search Engines

 

Traffic has a high connection with high rankings, but they are also in a constant battle, at the same time. You shouldn’t focus only on one or the other. Tracking keywords that send traffic to your site is one of the most important pieces of the pie. In Analytics, you can view the organic search traffic for all the searched terms in a specific period of time. Go to Acquisition » All Traffic » Channels.

 

Track organic search in analytics

 

Once you get here, you need to click on Organic Search and a new list of search terms will load.

 

Track organic search terms in analytics

 

Here you can view all the keywords that are successful and bring a lot of users. Gauge your website’s performance in terms of search traffic (visitors, sessions) and opt to use only those that can bring a significant amount of traffic for content that you’re under-optimized for.

 

Make sure you avoid seasonal keywords and seasonal periods (Christmas, Easter and other local events and celebrations) that potentially could spike the traffic because they are in demand only at that specific time.

 

7. Gauge Impactful Changes in Your Website’s Evolution

 

Besides all the data analysis methods, Google Analytics can provide some shortcuts to your reports and historical data. Annotations are a great feature you should use to keep track of your changes. They are some notes you can add to mark important events.

 

If you want to add annotations to flag any important changes, you’ll have to go the graphic you’re interested in and click on the small arrow to expand and create your annotation.

 

Add annotations in analytics

 

Before starting to create new annotations, observe the following tips:

  • Give a relevant and specific name to make it explicit.
  • Keep it short, to avoid overlapping with your other annotations and make it harder to read.
  • Record all marketing campaigns that run online and offline or other events that could potentially influence the traffic.

 

Farid Alhadi, an analytics expert, performed lots of experiments and analytics researches and saw the value in annotations. They are best put to use to avoid breaks and irregularities, but also to take advantage of all the natural spikes from the website’s results.

 

These “sticky notes” might seem insignificant, but can often be a life-saver, providing insight as to why your data sometimes looks the way it does, especially anomalies or outliers.
Farid Alhadi Farid Alhadi
Sales Director at E-Nor
 

8. Use Advanced Segments to Shorten the Conversion Path

What’s SEO success if we don’t create segmented audience? How will we know on which type of client we should focus our attention more, or for which we should interfere in the funnel to convert them? Segmentation will provide you with lots of insight data on your audience to get a deep-dive into everything that happens with your website. Advanced segments in Analytics can help you get deeper information for isolated groups established through parameters.

 

Dave Chaffey, co-founder at Smart Insights, has an interesting story about the overall behavior when it comes to Google Analytics usage:

 

The best marketers put effort into understanding their customers’ behaviours, characteristics and needs, so at first glance, Google Analytics can be frustrating to use to help marketing since there isn’t an obvious report about customers. The closest we can get is the visitors report, but these seem anonymous and undifferentiated.
Dave Chaffey Dave Chaffey
Co-founder and Content Director of Smart Insights

 

He rather said an honest and hard truth:

 

If you’re using Google Analytics and not using Segments, you might as well not bother using Google Analytics other than for trend reporting.
Dave Chaffey Dave Chaffey
Co-founder and Content Director of Smart Insights

 

To create segments, you need to go to your property, where you’ll find a button that says Add Segment » New segment.

 

Add segment in Analytics

 

After that step, you get to the point when you have the option to create conditions or sequences. Conditions are best out to use in situations when you want to understand how something on your site influences the visitor, for example. Let’s say you want to find how your blog impacts the revenue.  

 

Advanced segments in analytics

 

You should use sequences if you want to measure which users took specific actions in a certain order on your site; the evolution, the journey of the user on site. For example, create a sequence for users that go to a specific page and then they click to create an account and convert. That way, you could analyze the aggregate data regarding user behavior and the differences that appear from the other ones.  

 

Sequence segments in analytics

 

Getting the SEO analytics you specifically need can turn into a “light-bulb” moment.

 

Kunle Campbell, an e-commerce growth consultant, points out in a few words the main goal of the advanced segments and the high-driven value it can bring to a website:

 

Advanced segments are good at determining acquisition channels that drive quality traffic to your site. You can also create segments for different demographic groups, to see what pages they visit most and how long they stay on your website. You can segment users and sessions with specific keywords you are targeting. Custom segments are available for importing and sharing with others. In short, advanced segments is a powerful tool for investigating important sets of website traffic and for revealing weak areas in your site, to address.
Kunle Campbell Kunle Campbell
Founder of 2X eCommerce

 

Conclusion

 

Let me tell you a short story I know from my grandma about three countryside brothers from a small village. All of them were raised by a single dad who had an orchard. One day, their dad was hit by a rare disease which weakened him day by day. Knowing that he didn’t have much time left, he wanted to see which of his sons is ready to take over the orchard. Each one of them received one bean.

 

They were told that the first one who manages to grow a leaf from that bean will take over the family legacy – the orchard. The first one put it in the ground and watered it every day in the evening. The second one placed it in a glass of water on the porch to receive light. The last one thought of doing something different. First, he gathered more information on how to grow it and he found out that the best way was to put ii in a glass on a piece of wet cotton wool or a sort of wadding and place it somewhere when it can receive light, watering it from day to day, always checking the piece of cotton. Days passed, the first started to rush and put a stick to attach the beanstalk to be prepared when it  grows. The second one drowned the bean and it never grew. The interesting part of the story is the fact that the third son always checked the bean and kept track of what was happening to it, keeping a note with what he did and what happened.

 

After a few days the first leaf appeared. The third son was ecstatic. The father was happy and the orchard had a new owner. The interesting part I was trying to point out through this story is the fact that in order to make something work you need to search, make the right steps at the right time. Don’t rush into things, like the first son did. Don’t try to do your job just one time and forget about it like the second son did, but try to track the evolution, analytics data, keep reports and establish goals like the third son did.

 

This article is not a guide to Google Analytics, nor a list with Google ranking factors or an SEO checklist. It’s a list with actionable steps that you can take in order to improve your marketing strategy and get the most out of your current marketing campaigns by using the data you already have.  Also, this blog post will not guarantee you SEO success but it will surely help you with your conversion rate optimization, with your SEO rankings and will ultimately improve your organic search traffic. 

As analytics data is the first insight you get about your business and the audience. It can bring a lot of value to start mushrooming your SEO strategy.

The post 8 Steps to Get Higher Rankings Using Google Analytics Data appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.


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See The Landing Pages These Shopify Merchants Used to Scale Ad Revenue 33X

Year round Liz and Bill Farrell, a husband and wife team, work the dirt at Fat Stone Farm in Lyme, Connecticut with their two kids.

After making the move from cubicles to the great outdoors, the Farrells realized they loved growing fresh food, and creating healthy, farm-grown products ranging from elderberry apple shots to their own maple syrup.

Now—when you think of a typical farmer’s marketing strategy—you might picture a hand-painted sign at a local market, but Liz and Bill run a digital elderberry empire.

The couple started as Shopify merchants and then partnered with digital agency Webistry to take their business to new heights. They wanted to see better return on ad spend, and prepare for winter (their best sales season of the year).

It was a perfect partnership from the start, but nobody could predict that a combo of Unbounce landing pages, popups, a Shopify integration, and near obsessive audience building and retargeting on Facebook would:

  • Lower cost-per-acquisition from $ 145 (at its highest) to just $ 1.55(!) for the company’s Elderberry Apple Shots and DIY Gummy kits.
  • Increase return on ad spend for their Elderberry Apple Shot campaigns from 1.66X to an incredible 33.12X.
  • Deliver a cost-per-lead for a sweepstakes campaign of just $ 0.51.
  • See sweepstakes conversion rates from ad click to entry of up to 79.55%.
  • And garner Facebook relevance scores of 8s and 9s.

Overall, with Webistry’s help, Fat Stone Farm tripled ROAS in just five months (December ‘16–April ‘17), and—via continued optimizations—reached returns of 33X over a year and three months.

Here’s their epic ecommerce story, and the paid media tactics that could work for you too.

Winter is Coming

Historically, sales of Fat Stone Farm’s Elderberry Apple Shots go up in winter to help fight off flu season. So in early winter 2016, Bill and Liz approached Jonathan Naccache, Co-Founder at Webistry to prep some advertising.

The agency discovered that they couldn’t look to AdWords for a huge win. The search volume for elderberries or related products wasn’t super high, and this approach simply wasn’t scalable. Instead, they needed to generate extremely targeted custom audiences on Facebook (which can be difficult because prospects on Facebook aren’t necessarily screaming about their love of elderberry – these prospects need to be uncovered).

In Webistry’s approach, each ad campaign would target a group of interests that could coincide with elderberry products. They’d target Facebook users who’s interests included: alternative medicine, natural remedies, homesteading, or those engaging with popular health blogs like Mother Earth News and Wellness Mama.

It took a lot of research, and as Jonathan says this is where the agency advantage comes into play: “having access to several strategic minds, resources and thorough research gets you a significant edge right off the start.”

The First Ad to Shopify Landing Page Combo

From December 2016 to January 2017, Webistry ran campaigns on Facebook targeting each of the audience segments they’d identified might be interested in the elderberry shots.

Here’s an example of some of the ads (corresponding to fall and winter seasons):

Pictured above: the ads Webistry ran to the associated landing page.

All elderberry apple shots ads led to this Unbounce-built PPC landing page, which converts at 4.7% (lifetime average conversion rate). A conversion in this case was a purchase via the ‘add to cart’ button):

Notice the benefit copy from the ad headlines is carried through to the Unbounce landing page. Click to see a larger version.

And while the orange ‘add to cart’ button on the page looks deceptively simple, it’s actually where the magic happens. Instead of redirecting prospects to the brand’s Shopify store, Webistry fashioned custom javascript to make the button integrate seamlessly with Shopify and offer a slick, on-page checkout experience:

Interested in adding a Shopify cart to your Unbounce landing pages? Webistry shared the custom Javascript in our community. Head over, grab the script, and drive purchases on your own pages.

Two months into this campaign, return on ad spend was 1.66X, and cost-per-purchase was fluctuating between $ 19 and $ 145. Jonathan knew they could improve upon these early results and began targeting audiences of vegetarians, vegans, healthy eating affectionados, and homesteaders.

And so, in April 2017 the agency launched a new landing page campaign for smoothie lovers.

The idea was to position the elderberry product as the ideal ingredient to add to a smoothie. Here’s a sample ad used to launch this campaign:

And of course, the landing page this ad pointed to:

This beautiful landing page converts traffic to purchase at 9.44%

Beyond driving sales, the agency realized there was potential for lead capture here too (as a means of remarketing to especially interested prospects later), so they added an on-exit popup to this page. It offered up a free smoothie recipe book and integrated with a Mailchimp autoresponder.

With an 18% conversion rate, here’s the popup built in Unbounce:

The smoothie campaign helped drop cost-per-purchase down to ~$ 9.65, and Bill and Liz saw a return on ad spend of 3X from their initial investment after just five months of executing this strategy.

This was great, but Webistry wanted to help Fat Stone Farm stay present in their potential buyer’s world year round. They could lie low waiting for winter again all summer, or they could start developing highly refined retargeting and lookalike audiences to reach all year long.

The Sweepstakes That Raised the Stakes

In May 2017, continuing in the off-season, it was time to start preparing for their next winter. Fat Stone Farm was seeing major benefits from refined Facebook audience targeting, so Jonathan and the team extended this strategy with sweepstakes.

They used weekly sweepstakes as a means to gauge and track prospect’s interest in the products, then later in the winter, they created Facebook lookalike and retargeting audiences to get in front of similar groups of interested people regularly.

As Jonathan shares, this allowed the team to generate even better target audiences:

“Our goal was to create campaigns that helped us measure different levels of interest, and to identify these audiences by tracking every event with a pixel. We had a drip campaign setup, and non-winners of the first sweepstakes were given access to a second sweepstakes.”

That is – those who didn’t win each week were offered access to another sweepstakes prize (either the breakfast pack or gummy pack product). This helped introduce prospects to other Fat Stone Farm products and gauge interest for these versus a complementary offering like smoothies.

Here’s a sample ad for the sweepstakes:

And here’s the first landing page touchpoint:

Click the image above for a closer look.

If you didn’t win, you might be sent a second offer in the sweepstakes, with a chance to win an Elderberry Gummy Kit via the landing page below:

Click the image above to see the full landing page.

Of the people who clicked through on the Facebook ad and reached the first landing page above, 18.79% converted. Moreover, of the people who did not win the first sweepstakes, but clicked through the email announcing the second sweepstakes, 79.55% converted via the landing page.

Hot tip: Webistry embedded a third party tool called ViralSweep on these pages. It’s a sweepstakes application to help manage entries, select a winner at random, and allows people to win bonus entries by referring friends via social.

Not only did this campaign collect over 15,000 relevant leads that Fat Stone Farm could remarket to year long with terrific offers, but it reduced cost-per-lead down to a mere $ 0.51.

Which brings us to…

Winter Season, 2018

After all the ad testing, landing page alterations, and lessons along the way, Webistry re-launched the sales campaigns using six months of audience-segmented data.

They launched the gummy kits as a standalone product landing page (vs. the sweepstakes page) and continued to sell the Elderberry Apple Shots. The best part? From January to March 2018 Webistry achieved the highest return on ad spend for Bill and Liz since starting to work with them: a whopping 33.12X.

Additionally, this season they saw the lowest cost-per-acquisition of just $ 1.55.

As Bill Ferrell says of the partnership with Webistry:

“These guys are worth every penny. Excellent results (very high CTRs, good CPA, [and] lots of new customers!). The Webistry co-founders are hands-on, creative, and keep tweaking throughout. Their attentiveness to the campaigns and my crazy ideas have exceeded my expectations month after month.”

Berry good results indeed.

Unbounce

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