The 3 “Must Know” Supporting Metrics for Web Success

In our last installment (which can be found here) of SEO Analytics covered the basics metrics Visits, Bounce Rate, and Conversion Rate. These are your core metrics and should be the first thing you look at when checking your site’s performance. What we’d like to cover this week are your website’s supporting metrics.

New Visits & Return Visits

New visits are your lifeblood and tied directly to your SEO results and probably the reason you hired LinkFool. You need new visitors, new customers, and this is the metric that monitors it. Return visits are important too and are related to SEO as many visitors tend to search for your company name instead of typing it in exactly. If you don’t rank first for your brand terms, you may lose a potential customer. Make sure you do. Most visitors will shop around before choosing your product/service/website for their solution, so expect to see multiple visits before they convert.

Pages per Visit & Time on Site

These 2 metrics are what you look at to see how visitors are interacting with your website. Pages per visit lets you know how deep your visitors are going. Each case is different and you’ll need to determine what’s the best for your site, however, these seem to average in the 3-5 pages per visit as being good target. Too few pages and they aren’t interacting, too many and they may not e finding what they are looking for. Time on site is self explanatory and measures the same thing in a different way.

Page Load Time

How long is it taking for your website to load when a visitor comes to it? More than 2 seconds and you may be in trouble and not just from a user experience stand point but also from an SEO standpoint! Yes, load time is a Google confirmed SEO variable and a very important metric for analyzing your website performance and usability. Ideally, your site should load in under 2 seconds, and be no larger than 1 MB. If you haven’t setup page load time in your analytics account you can always use tools like Pingdom.com to test your site for free. Cut down on your image sizes and use free tools like CloudFlare to further improve your speed.

Analytics is the measurement of your website. It is the future of online marketing and a basic knowledge necessity for anyone in the marketing function and business owners and executives. To help you on your way to better understanding your website we’ve put together a short description of the 3 most important metrics for your success online.

Visits

Visits is the most commonly referred to and easily understood metric for website. It is the measure of the number of times your website domain name is loaded. It does not count each time a page is loaded after the initial visit, that is counted as the pageview metric. Although seemingly simple there are some important nuances to understanding the visits metric, the first of which is the difference between visits and unique visits. A unique visit is a measurement of the computers that viewed your website, if a computer closes your website and comes back, the return view is counted as a visit, but not a unique visit. A visit will expire out after 30 minutes and a unique visit will often expire around 90 days. These timeframes are customizable via your analytics code.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is an often misunderstood and underused metric. If visits is used to measure the volume, bounce rate is used to measure the relevance of the content to the visitors. A common way to think about bounce rates is that they are the measure of customers who came to your site, they saw your site, and they left immediately. It is the measure of relevance to what your visitors are looking for. The higher the bounce rate, the less relevant and helpful your website’s information was to the visitor. Bounce rates have a wide range, but in most cases a rate of 30% or less is the ideal goal. To improve bounce rates you’ll want to understand what it is your visitor was looking for and find a way to provide it to them or to target an audience that is more receptive to your content.

Conversion Rate

What’s the ultimate goal of your website? Is it to sell a product? Inform an audience? Capture a lead? These are all conversions and can be measured via your analytics platform. Conversion is the ultimate metric and the top key performance indicator for the best performing websites. Google analytics in particular allows you to measure conversions in a variety of ways including eCommerce and Goals, then assign dollar values, and understand the ROI of your web traffic.

Read “SEO Analytics Part II“

1. Search Engine Optimization is much more complex than it was 10 years ago
2. The Penalties for bad SEO are much more severe today than they have ever been
3. Offsite SEO still must exist for accurate organization of rankings.

What happened over the last decade is that a new billion dollar industry arose, online marketing, and out of that industry came SEO. The ability to move a site from invisible to visible without purchasing actual traffic. For a marketer, it’s the most ideal situation in the world. You rank high in the organic search rankings and without paying for a click you get free relevant visits to your website.

With SEO came skilled tacticians, they gamed the search engines, suddenly SEO wasn’t so pretty anymore and neither were the SERPs. Search rankings contained junk, sites that offered little or no value to the searchers. So Google began pushing updates to make the results more accurate and it became a tug of war. Many of these junk sites, whose motivations were usually based on the draw of easy money, improved their tactics and they would continually beat Google.

This last move, targeting websites with bad links has suddenly opened up the playing field. Opportunity for SEO has never been greater!

1. The learning curve for new SEOs is too high
2. The majority of bad SEOs that were gaming the system are leaving the game altogether
3. Professional SEOs, the ones that are providing actual value are getting the best results ever

These services and tools do serve a purpose in certain link building strategies; however, when not used properly they will only cause a temporary lift in your website’s rankings. The long term outcome can be your website disappearing from the search engines, Google sandboxed, buried, banned… you name it, this is a dangerous line to walk and should only be done by professionals. Not to mention the ethical repercussions of spamming and building useless information around the web.

I would wage that 1 high quality contextual backlink from a site of influence is significantly more effective in building your website’s rankings (SERPs) than 10,000 low quality backlinks. The effective backlink strategies that employ the 10,000 backlinks, never link directly to your site. They are used to support the direct backlinks by increasing their value, but even then should not be done in mass quantities. If a website whos homepage has a PR of 7 and your backlink obtained from that site is on a page with a Page Rank of 2, it’s very easy to lift that PR, thus increasing the value of your backlink.

LinkFool.com employs only high quality link building strategies that have long term positive effects for your website’s ranking and value.

So why did we title this blog “How to Choose the Wrong Keywords!”? Well, it’s unique, and there’s plenty of other sites that will tell you how to choose the right keywords. They all fail to first inform you what to avoid. So here we go.

Assume

Assumptions at any part of this game are going to kill you in the long run. Never assume, you may think you’re taking a short cut, but you’re not… it’s going to cost you.

• Don’t assume that your primary keywords will generate traffic! (analyze potential traffic volume)
• Don’t assume you’ll be able to rank well for your keywords! (review your competition)

Estimate Traffic using Broad Match

If you’re using Google’s keyword tool (which we do recommend), don’t rely on the default results… look deeper, analyze exact match and phrase match. They tell a lot. A general rule of thumb is to focus on keywords that have greater than 1000 exact match searches and less than 500,000 search results. This still does not guarantee anything, but once you review your competition you’ll have a better shot at understanding what you’re going up against.

Use only 1 Keyword Tool

We recommend Google’s keyword tool alongside MSN adcenter tools. SEOmoz and Market Samurai also provide a variety of quality free tools.

In summary, avoid these three pitfalls and you’ll be off to a great start.

Well, thanks for reading and let’s get this game on!