by Nevin on February 6, 2012
Mobile SEO growing in importance as web economy set to double by 2016
A recent sudy indicates that by 2016, there will be 3 billion Internet users around the world, and the global Internet economy will reach $4.2 trillion. Mobile devices such as smart phones will account for about 80% of all broadband connections. From an SEO perspective, this means that all businesses need to get to work optimising their sites for mobile users.
Bonus link: U.S. Mobile Ad Spending Forecast to Exceed $2.6 Billion in 2012
6 Different Emails Every Marketer Should Consider Sending
Should you nurture your subscribers with weekly newsletters? Are dedicated sends better at optimizing your sales and marketing funnel? What about email digests? These are all valid questions that marketing professionals should consider when selecting the right format to meet their email marketing goals. This blog post discusses the different types of email marketing communication and their respective advantages and disadvantages.
Valentine’s Day 2012 Ideas for Marketers
For marketers looking to take advantage of the holiday, Google and Microsoft adCenter have provided several ideas based on what users are already searching for. Learn more about the top products on Valentine’s Day, and an optimization checklist for your campaign. Click here to read more.
Five marketing questions to ask to grow your business in 2012
Asking yourself key marketing questions can help decide what programs and strategies worked, what didn’t, and what changes you need to make in 2012. Here are five questions to ask.
Why, and how, you should collect customer data
It’s argued that a customer database and purchase history is a must-have for every small business. It’s well-known that it is a lot more effective to sell to the customers you already have than to find new ones. But if you don’t know who they are, how to reach them or what they have already bought and like, you will just have to wait. – and hope. And that’s no way to grow a business. Not only will leveraging customer info support sales every day of the year, but your customer database will be a valuable asset when you sell your business. Read more here.
JumpStartWeb publishes Monday Marketing Madness each week to discuss mobile SEO and other online marketing topics.
by Nevin on January 23, 2012
Usability vs. search engine optimization
Many people believe that SEO is simply optimizing a website for search engines. In reality, SEO is optimizing a website for people who use search engines. Likewise, many people believe that website usability is simply making a website easy to use. Easy to use for whom? The developers? Website owners? Web searchers? SEO professionals? Check out the fundamental building blocks of web usability to help become more visible to search engines, and hopefully help get more customers. Read more here.
5 tactics to get more customers
Keeping the funnel full is a challenge facing every local business. In a hyper-competitive marketplace, the company that fills its funnel full of opportunities is the one that manages its lead generation strategies most effectively. Here are 5 tactics to get more customers.
Improving the online customer’s journey from click to payment
A 2010 Forrester survey found that 88 per cent of online shoppers abandon their shopping baskets. This doesn’t have to be so - here are a few steps that can help cut the number of shoppers who abandon their carts and convert them to paying customers.
Most people rely on search engines to find local businesses
60% of adults say they get news and information about local businesses other thanrestaurants and bars. When they do, 47% say they rely most on the internet, including 36% on search engines, and 16% specialty websites. Read more here.
How to find your social media stride
What steps should a social media maven take in order to avoid running out of steam? These five steps can help you put things into perspective:
7 ways to use social media for instant feedback
Another use for social media: collecting critical feedback that advances your business objectives quickly. Here are some of the ways you can leverage social networks beyond your typical posts and updates. Read more here.
21 tactics to increase blog traffic
It’s easy to build a blog, but hard to build a successful blog with significant traffic, and more traffic means – ideally – more customers. Here are 21 tactics that can help everyone from independent folks, to those seeking to monetize, and marketing professionals working an in-house blog from tiny startups to huge companies increase traffic: read more here.
JumpStartWeb publishes Monday Marketing Madness each week on search engine optimization and other topics.
by Rob on January 20, 2012
Just getting started with Google Analytics? You’ve come to the right place!
Google Analytics, the free analytics tool from Google, can be confusing when you first dive in.
Fortunately, once you get familiar with the basic terms, it becomes easy to use and opens whole new worlds of insight regarding your web traffic.
In this first post, we’re going to start at the start and have a look at the Standard Reporting Audience Overview (or “Visitors Overview” as it’s often called). This is the first screen you generally see when you log in and looks like what you see below:
So… what are we looking at?
- The date range is shown in the top right and can be changed to any range you like by clicking on the drop-down arrow.
- The line graph you see represents the number of visits by day and can be changed to include other metrics (although we’ll leave that for another post).
- The Pie Chart at the bottom right shows the proportion of New Visitors (people who Google has not tracked as having previously visited your site) versus Returning Visitors, who as the name suggests, are visitors that Google has tracked as having visited your site previously.
Note that your Returning Visitor stats are likely under-reported in practical terms as visitors who come to your site from multiple different computers or browsers will be shown as New Visitors.
The metrics shown on the left side of the interface are defined as follows:
- In “#### people visited this site, “people” refers to Unique Visitors (below).
- Visits refers to the total number of visits to your site. Many visitors will come to your site more than once, which is why Visits is virtually always significantly higher than Unique Visitors.
- Unique Visitors refers to the total number of visitors from the same computer/browser. For instance, if you had 400 Visits from 200 Unique Visitors, this means that your Unique Visitors visited the site an average of 2 times each.
- Pageviews refers to the number of individual pages that were viewed during your date range.
- Page/Visit, as the name implies, is an average of how many pages were viewed on each visit to the site.
- Avg. Time on Site is the amount of time (in minutes) that were spent per visit to your site. In this example, visitors spent an average of 1 minute and 59 seconds on the site.
- Bounce Rate refers to the percentage of visitors who landed on a single page on your site and left the site without navigating to a second page. In general, bounces are considered “bad” although in some cases (i.e. if someone is looking for your phone number and finds it on the first page), it isn’t necessarily a negative thing.
- % New Visits refers to the percentage of visits where the visitors where not tracked as having previously visited the sites.
Upon reviewing these stats a lot of folks wonder what their stats “should” be. My typical answer is “there is no right number as every business is different.” What I usually recommend is that folks look at which stats they can work on improving and try to bump up the numbers in those areas. For instance, if you improve your site to make it more “sticky,” you’ll hope to see a corresponding increase in the Pages/Visit.
There are any number of examples like this but we’ll save them for future posts!
In our next post we’ll have a look at the Traffic Sources Overview page (which is possibly the most important section of all!).
by Nevin on January 16, 2012
What is “Search, plus Your World”
Last week, Google once again made a major adjustment to its search feature by launching “Search Plus Your World”. It’s a feature that integrates activity from Google+, its new social network, into everyday search results. What this means for your business is that it may be a good idea to be on Google+! Read more here Bonus link: What the merging of Google+ and Google Search means to SEO Yet another bonus link: Google “Search Plus” impact on Local: limited so far
4 tips to keep your website ahead of the curve in 2012
2012 is heralding a new wave of innovative web technologies and design, and a page that stays in step with these trends is bound to pique interest and lower your bounce rate. Here are 4 tips to keep your website ahead of the curve in 2012
11 ways to use content to build online authority
Being an online authority essentially means you’re not only a thought leader on a specific topic, but that you’ve also taken the time to translate that knowledge in a meaningful way online. Becoming an online authority helps you generate customers and revenue; people do business with the people they trust. So,
here are 11 ways to use content to build online authority.
How To improve site credibility through Search & Social Media
Today, SEO and social are inseparable. Customers can just as easily find a company through Twitter as they can Google — and those social media links are busy boosting a company’s SEO signals. Read more here.
6 lead-nurturing emails every business should send
Only 25% of your leads are sales-ready. In addition, a whopping 50% of your leads are qualified but
not ready to buy from you. So, what do you do with those qualified but reticent leads to turn them into customers? According to the marketing gurus at HubSpot, “lead nurturing”, of course!
Read more here.
