google analytics

Adjusted Bounce Rate – A Behavior KPI

Use Adjusted Bounce Rate To Monitor User Behavior

Ever wondered how many visitors really pay attention to your site before departing the page? Many of these visits are completely useless, but how many aren’t? When using adjusted bounce rate there’s finally a way to monitor this! Bounce rate in Google Analytics is one of the major key performance indicators that can help to assess the quality of your traffic. A bounce happens when the visitor left the site from the site landing web page, without going to any other page. That is a superb indication on how applicable the content was for the user and how engaged they had been with your site. Bounce rate does not always account for user behavior though, some may use the web page for and address or phone number or simply read the content and leave.

adjusted bounce rateWhile working ideal for web sites, there are groups of websites where this metric isn’t enough. For stated by Google, they apparently doesn’t use pure bounce rate as a rank signal, but that does not mean it isn’t an essential metric to monitor as a relevance signal. Nevertheless, as Google notes, it is more useful for some forms of sites compared to others. As an example, imagine you are promoting a post that explains all the advantages of your company; the visitor may read the entire post and remember your business and really good products – and they may immediately go to hunt for your product or service on one of the search engines straight away.

Since that visitor just looked at the one page they’ll be recorded as bounced visitor. Another example when you have a service description value proposition on the web page, along with your telephone number on the exact same page, the visitor could study the description and then call you for more information and again, that visitor will be registered as a bounced visitor, as only a single page was seen. There are a lot examples, and even traditional web sites can benefit from the adjusted bounce rate KPI described below as compared to the standard unadjusted bounce rate.

Adjusted Bounce Rate Is The Answer

The solution to this issue is something referred to as adjusted bounce rate. You implement a small tweak to your Google Analytics code, which executes an event when a user has spent over a certain amount of time on the webpage. Depending on the website, the time can range from 10 seconds to few minutes – you should decide for yourself the amount of time you consider the user to be sufficiently engaged with your website or product or service.

Once the event is executed (past the time frame) the visitor is no longer counted as bounce even though no additional page view is recorded. This will mean your bounce rate will show users who have not spent a required minimal time on your website compared to the ones who have truly bounced.

Here is the adjusted bounce rate modification to the Google Analytics code that you need to make (on the example of the latest, asynchronous code):

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push([‘_setAccount’, ‘UA-XXXXXXX-1’]);
_gaq.push([‘_trackPageview’]);
setTimeout(“_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ’20_seconds’, ‘read’])”,20000);
(function() {
var ga = document.createElement(‘script’); ga.type = ‘text/javascript’; ga.async = true;
ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://ssl’ : ‘http://www’) + ‘.google-analytics.com/ga.js’;
var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();
</script>

The setTimeout function is the one that requires the adjustment, and you can set it up to whatever delay you wish (in this example, it is 20 seconds).

Now that an event is created after the time expiration (the 20 second lapse), you can create a goal, here defining this event as a goal in Google Analytics, and even import this goal as a conversion to AdWords, provided all of the parameters are met.

Adopting adjusted bounce rate allows you to better understand how people engage with your website. This small code tweak will allow you to track and understand the users’ behavior and quality of the traffic coming to your website more accurately, and help you make more informed business decisions.

social media

6 Simple Steps To Grow Social Media Presence

6 SIMPLE WAYS TO SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE GROWTH

These social media giants; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, and Pinterest have over 2 billion users collectively. As such, they’ve become the perfect platforms for marketing products and services. Brands and businesses realized that people cherish personal experiences. And social media provided an excellent environment for creating these personal relationships with the customers. However, growing a robust social media presence can be quite a daunting task if you don’t possess fundamental social skills.

social mediaHere are a few simple ways to increase your social media presence.

1. Know your audience and identify when they’re most active.

You must first seek to engage your followers regularly. And you can only do that if you know as much as you can about them. You can then use what you’ve learnt to create a more engaging and personal experience with your fans.

You should also find out when your audience is most active. You can then know the best times to interact with them. There are various tools to use to determine when your audience is online i.e. Tweriod (for Twitter) and the ‘insights’ section of the Facebook dashboard.

2. Try to help people rather than just selling to them.

People will naturally gravitate toward things or individuals who add value to their lives. If you concentrate on providing value to people, they’ll instinctively seek to provide some form of value to you too. You won’t have to woo them to buy your products, because they’ll have already cultivated trust in you.

3. Expand Your Social Media Presences – Go visual.

Research by the Buffer-app found that Tweets with images receive up to 150% more retweets. Visuals easily capture peoples attention and also add to the essence of the message. Thanks to free tools like Canva, you could easily overlay text onto images or create unique graphics to share with your fans. Alternatively, you could create engaging videos or vines for your followers.

4. Provide Q and A’s On Social

Your fans need to feel a human connection with you. By regularly providing Q and A’s, your audience gets an opportunity to learn more about the person behind the screen.

5. Promote social media contests.

Social media contests are an awesome way to engage and reward your followers. You can reward your fans for following, and sharing or liking your posts.

6. Monitor your social media presence progress and find what methods work best.

Testing new ways of engaging your audience should be at the top of your priority list. However, you should observe which methods work best and use them more, while ridding those methods that do not work as well.

To truly supercharge your social media presence, you need to be consistent in your posting schedule i.e. try to engage your audience on a nearly daily basis with interesting quality content of all types.

google analytics

4 Ways To Forecast Your SEO Investment

4 Ways To Forecast Your SEO Investment For Business

Internet search engine optimization is one of many digital online advertising approaches a business can choose to concentrate on. Email, ppc, display and affiliate internet marketing are all in many companies advertising approaches, and while the cost per visitor for natural search is zero, in order for you to achieve success within the SERPs, grassroots SEO investment is required. You can forecast SEO impact on your business with a few simple steps.

Black Hat SEO strategies like purchasing links, keyword stuffing and cloaking used to work for all those seeking to get visibility within the search results page. Artificial Intelligence and machine learning like Google’s RankBrain, have caught many of these bad tactics, and now a more human way to on-page optimization, content advertising and connection is required to rank for extremely popular search terms. Consequently, in order to get investment and buy-in for search engine optimization it’s not surprising that marketing leaders demand a sound SEO forecast on how search engine optimization will be pursued.

How to forecast the size of the SEO prize?

Before you can start constructing the tactics for search engine optimization, you should identify the opportunity for organic performance. To do so, carry out an audit of your web site and use your web analytics to comprehend what natural search is presently contributing to the domain. By understanding how much value search engine optimization now contributes with respect to visits, conversions, leads and revenue, you may start to understand where you now are and where improvements can be made.

Building the forcast for search engine optimization investment

free-seo-toolsOnce you’ve completed an audit and so produced a baseline to measure against, you can start putting together a case, with numbers, to exemplify improvements to natural search by using Search engine optimization may affect the company.

There are 4 ways to forecast your SEO investment:

1. Concentrate on Google – for the time being

According to any and all industry metrics, Google remains the largest portal for internet searches.  Google supplies more organic web searches then the next two search engines combined . While it is important not to become too myopic and build your site around only one internet search engine, it is wise to recognize Google as the current market leader in the search area. Start with the biggest opportunity for SEO improvement.

2. Estimate potential search quantity for top terms

Assuming you’ve already conducted a gap analysis that is keyword to identify the terms most applicable to your site, the next issue is to estimate the prospective search volume to the top search terms you want to optimize for using Google’s Keyword Tool or similar keyword research tool. Take every one of the primary important phrases and drop it into the tool. The output from this activity will give you an indication as to the number of searches especially for those phrases each month.

3. Estimate Google Click-through rate percent

You’ll be competing for only a share of the number of searches from the Google Keyword Tool activity we looked at above. So the next task is to determine what percentage of those monthly searches you have the potential to get to your web site.

A great way to do that is to calculate the click-through speed from natural listings on page 1 of Google. An Optify study showed a position 1 ranking attained 36.4% click-through rate, over a 2.4% higher CTR than position two. At the mean time, SEOMoz released research showing average click-through rate percentages for brand, product and general searches, indicating that web sites ranking in position 1 had a 52% CTR.

Additionally, iThinkMedia, provided statistics based on research they conducted having a vast assortment of clients, which suggests comparable results to the studies above with the exception of position 1 rankings. The 18.2% click-through speed for position 1 is definitely more conservative than SEOMoz’s 52% and Optify’s 36.4% but that’s not a bad thing as it’s better to under promise and over deliver when making predictions like these. And definitely there are numerous other reasons to be aware of for example, this strategy fails to contemplate the impact of universal search, local search, mobile search, search intent or the result of rich snippets on CTR. Nonetheless, the concept of potential Click-through speed based on where you rank on page 1 of Google and is a fantastic place to start for anybody considering the effect of rankings on visitors to their web site.

4. Forecast possible traffic and sales from SEO

The final step is to put the data together in a format in which one can show what visitors can be obtained from appearing 1-10 on Google and how this translates to visitors and sales. This last piece in the puzzle is to calculate every primary phrase converts. This is something which may be done when carrying out an audit of your website’s current SEO performance. Working out the speed of conversion of particular sets of phrases will enable you to determine the potential traffic and earnings return by ranking in positions 1-10 for the maximum volume search terms.

Finally, once you know the speed of conversion, you can forecast SEO results when you multiply your ordinary lead or order value to give you a rough indication of how sales may be impacted by improved natural search traffic to your top key generic search phrases.

Business Benefits Of SEO

Business Benefits Of Search Engine Optimization

Being on-line or a business web site isn’t enough to reap maximum advantages from your online business. Internet search engine rankings for your web site play a major part in determining your visibility on internet. You must look in most key elements to enhance your visibility on-line and realize the critical business sectors to work on. The business benefits of SEO are far reaching and long lasting.

SEO Start With Keywords.

Right number of keywords, fresh, distinctive and informative content could create a path to better internet search engine rankings and good traffic to your web site and in addition to it adequate back-links which will boost up your ranking in search engines. These are examples of some of the benefits of SEO done well.

Fresh Frequent Content.

benefits of SEOMany other activities like Social bookmarking, Article submission and blogs too play a vital role in SEO rankings. New business listings or new content is added regularly to almost all business directories which make them search engines favorite stuff, crawlers come regularly to visit and because of this your business might appear on top of search results.

To discover how grassroots SEO can really help your business, some people begin with a SEO professional consultant, which is very important.  The insights from an internet search engine optimization expert is necessary because internet search engine optimization expert can only do in depth analysis and competitor analysis and will develop an efficient internet search engine optimization strategy for your website based on current web trends.

Every business owner should not dismiss the benefits of internet search engine marketing and local business listings that are the best source of popularity with search engines. Except numerous reasons, some numerous reasons are there, like business directories list all kinds of business with no cost for a particular area. Some essential things whenever you add your company listings into any local business manager is business information and contact information, that should be accurate, ignoring these essential things, might lead to lose your prospective customers.

content marketing

4 Simple Steps To Keyword Optimization

4 Important Keyword Optimization Tips

After choosing your most profitable keywords, you need to carefully position them in and around your article. The goal of Google and other search engines is to deliver relevant, high-quality and up-to-date information to readers. The following keyword optimization tips will help you create the desired content.

keyword optimization

1. Create Interesting Content

Any interesting content will capture the eyes of the readers. Part of what will make your content interesting is to provide relevant and current information. You can make any topic interesting by being creative in your writing. Think about the questions and problems that your readers may be having and provide real solutions and answers. Do not get a great keyword and just write your content with it. Instead, write with a purpose and aim at helping your readers. This will give them a reason to continue reading your article and visit your site again.

2. Focus on Long Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords are key phrases that are longer and more specific. Even though these keywords receive less traffic, they have a higher conversion value because they are more specific. They are also good at pulling targeted results in the search engine results pages. It is also easier to rank for long tail keywords than common keywords. Long tail keywords are a guarantee that your content will be more relevant to readers. As a result, your site will get more targeted and quality traffic.

3. Use Keyword Variations

Potential visitors will use different keywords and key phrases to search for information on the internet. In order to target many visitors, use variations of your keyword in and around your article. You can use the singular and plural form of your keyword. In addition, synonyms are other keyword variations that you should utilize. Semantic keywords and semantice keyword phrases are critical for grassroots search engine optimization.

It is important to write keyword focused articles so that each page has a dedicated keyword. This will ensure that your content is relevant to more people and also eliminate the chances of having repetitive content. Writing keyword focused pages is important because it helps search engines to rank your pages based on subject matter, instead of just on keyword density.

4. Be Consistent

Keyword optimization and SEO in general is a continuous process. You should analyze your keywords consistently to ensure that they remain relevant to your visitors. Search engines keep on growing and changing their strategies and therefore your site should adapt to such changes. Similarly, you need to remain relevant all the time because people change the way they look for information on the internet.

The above keyword optimization tips will help you optimize your website for search engines. Implement them together with other SEO factors and you will realize an increase in your site’s performance. Your organic traffic will grow steadily and your site will get higher rankings in search engines.

content marketing

What Is Internet Marketing

Definition of Internet Marketing

Internet marketing is also referred to as online marketing. Internet marketing refers to advertising and marketing efforts as a process of promoting a brand, products or services over the Internet. Internet marketing is very broad in scope referring generally to promotional activities that are done via a digital medium or “online”. Internet marketing strategies are typically used in conjunction with traditional types of advertising such as radio, television, billboards, networking, newspapers and magazines. Internet marketing added complexity in consumer engagement moving away from a linear marketing approach with one-way brand communication to consumers to a newer non-linear marketing strategy referred to as Omni-channel. Omni-channel marketing moves beyond one-to-one information exchange to one-to-many or one-to-community information sharing.

internet marketingAn example of omni-channel internet marketing can be applied to a professional services vertical like legal. Legal consumers often research their legal options online well before contacting a law firm. These legal consumers are increasingly using the Internet to research into laws, legal resources, legal aid, and do-it-yourself options before researching the types of law firms that can help them. Once they understand their need is best served by hiring a law firm, these consumers then look up law firm rating and reviews, seek legal information from their social networks, compare local legal options, and search for law firms near them.

The Different Channels of Internet Marketing

Effective Internet marketing commonly deploys multiple channels to reach the most audience as possible. The objective is to place your brand and value proposition in front of many potential clients in the places where people spend their time online. There are multiple online marketing channels available in the legal space namely;

  • Display Advertising – Online Display Advertisement highlights promotional messages, value propositions, or ideas to the legal consumer on the Internet. Display advertising can be found on a wide range of digital properties like advertising blogs, interstitial ads, legal directories, and ads on the search engines.
  • Email Marketing – While email marketing in comparison to other forms of digital marketing is inexpensive, this channel of communication may be perceived by recipients to be intrusive and irritating especially to new or potential customers. This is an older channel for digital marketing.
  • Search Engine Marketing – also known as “pay-per-click” or PPC. This channel primarily focuses on text ads displayed along side relevant organic content. PPC can also include visual display, click to call, mobile ads, and local ad display within maps. When used in combination with social media and organic optimization, paid search can deliver effective results.
  • Social Media Marketing – social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, etc.) are closed ecosystems, users must proactively join and the information is usually only viewable when users are signed into one of these social networks. Users typically provide the content that makes the channel what it is. One example is Pinterest, which is an image channel known for food and fashion. People “PIN” (add) pictures of their favorite food or recipe and share it with others. The more content a user ads, the more engagement they drive to their page. Facebook and Twitter are prominent in the legal space. The ability to effectively create a user profile for paid promotional targeting is the primary reason social media is valuable.
  • Search Engine Optimization – also known as SEO is a method of optimizing content (text, images, voice) to improve relevance for search engines with the objective of having that content display more frequently and prominently is search engine results pages. Since SEO is process of refinement over time and the results do not require payment to a search engine, search engine optimization is considered free or “organic”. SEO is not free, the best SEO companies and services often bill thousands of dollars per month or more to firms that engage with their services to increase performance. The primary benefit of SEO is that each action (click) is not billable by the search engines, so once a web page is fully optimized, it can drive value for an extended time for no cost.
  • Press Releases – PR, or press release is a content marketing method of communication directed at members of the news media for the purpose of announcing something considerably newsworthy. A press release is typically written and delivered electronically via email, but can also be done as a video release.
  • Video Advertising – digital video is an increasingly popular medium for online marketing. The format is widely used in social media as well as stand-alone channels like YouTube because video is readily available to be shared by the viewers, adding to the attractiveness of this platform. Video can be a highly engaging format for brands, however the quality of the video and the style of the message are critical for success as this type of advertising is considered disruptive to normal viewership. Video advertising that has entertainment value is more likely to be shared, as pleasure is the strongest motivator to share videos.

The most successful online businesses use as many channels as possible to reach out to potential clients and customers. It is increasingly important that your business reach consumers where they are most often online, and Omni-channel marketing offers this opportunity, as it’s “always on, everywhere”. Businesses that seek this long term communication relationship by using multiple channels and using promotional strategies related to their target consumer as well as word-of mouth marketing are the one that will grow their presence and revenues.

The Digital Ecosystem

Without proactive Internet marketing, a website is not much more than a digital billboard in a desert. In today’s digital ecosystem, a website acts as a conversion platform, a place where you send your audience to view your value proposition and engage with your brand. By itself, a website is nothing more than passive marketing. In legal online marketing, a firm’s website acts as a validation of legal credentials and a list of potential legal services offered with multiple ways to communicate with the firm (via email, phone, chat, and social media). To reach the maximum audience, proactive marketing channels need to be used to drive traffic to the website.

digital-ecosystem

In the digital ecosystem audience acquisition can come from paid and organic channels in content marketing, premium publishers, social media, and traditional marketing. Content marketing examples include articles, press releases, or blogs posts. Premium publishers in the legal space include directories like FindLaw, Super Lawyers, AVVO, and state bar associations. Local includes chamber of commerce, better business bureau, local city and county bar associations. Social includes posts in Facebook, Tweets in Twitter, and paid social advertising. Paid includes PPC text and display ads, and inclusion in content networks. Traditional includes networking events, speaking engagements, radio, T.V., magazines and newspapers. Technical includes SEO, code platforms, https, semantic markup, and conversion rate optimization and page speed enhancements. The acquisition channels may vary, but the impact is measurable with website analytics.

While there are many ways to increase traffic to your website, the two principal ways to acquire and drive potential consumers to the website is with paid promotions or organic marketing. Both of these channels require investment of time, effort, and money, however organic traffic is more commonly viewed as a source for long term sustainable growth. In business verticals that are highly transactional in nature, paid search marketing is one of the best ways to ramp up business success online.