CHAPTER 9

Driving Traffic and Measuring Success: Search Engine Optimization and Analytics

No discussion of online marketing would be complete without talking about search engine optimization (SEO) and website analytics. Both areas can be confusing, yet both are powerful tools for your firm and its marketing strategy. This chapter will examine both.

Let’s discuss SEO first.

RANKING HIGH: SEO

Put simply, SEO is doing certain things to your firm website that will increase its chances of showing up in an organic, or unpaid, web search. Sounds great, right? Of course you would like your firm to show up above your competitors when potential clients are searching for the services you provide. The challenge comes in the “doing certain things” part of that definition. What exactly are these “things” of which I speak?

The Evolution of SEO

Nearly as long as there have been websites and search engines to help us find them, people have been trying to figure out ways to ensure that their websites show up near the top of the list of search results. Depending on who you talk to, it’s either a smart strategy to get the most from your website investment or a way to game the system. At first, the search engine “spiders” (a program that “crawls” the web finding and indexing websites for search engines like Google and Yahoo) could only “see” the text on a website, so websites that had the most searched-for words on them would get ranked highest. It didn’t take long for SEO experts to realize that the more you repeated a particular word or phrase, the better you’d rank. This led to what is called “keyword stuffing,” which was simply repeating the same word or words over and over and over. It was not uncommon in the early days to see a row of keywords at the bottom of pages, and some even still use this long outdated strategy today. This is to their detriment because search engines have become smarter and will now punish sites based on these sorts of maneuvers, but we’ll get to that later.

Some sites went beyond these obvious tactics in their efforts to trick the search engines. Two such tricks include hiding text on the site and cloaking. Hiding text was really pretty easy to do. Site builders would simply create a long list of keywords and phrases and then “hide” them on the site by making the text color the same as, or very similar to, the background color of the page. So what a visitor might just see as white space on the site would actually be a ton of hidden words that the search engine spiders would see and count. Cloaking was a bit more difficult and involved creating two sites: one for the spiders and one for humans. The site would recognize who was accessing it and show one site to the humans and another to the search engines. Obviously, companies like Google and Bing weren’t pleased with this trickery and would punish sites that used these wily tactics. But don’t think that only unscrupulous companies were doing this sort of thing. In fact, in 2006, both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany were caught and removed from all searches as punishment. It didn’t take long for both companies to apologize and eliminate these practices.¹

In time, the search engines recognized what was happening and changed the algorithm to catch the sites that were trying to outsmart the engines. In the late 90s, they started putting much more stock in links, particularly incoming links. The more links your site contained, the more legit it looked. The idea was that if recognized sites were willing to be associated with your site, then it must be a good site. For example, if someone at your firm had written an article for a highly read and respected online publication that then linked back to your site, this was SEO gold. Many saw this as an opportunity to yet again try to pull one over on the engines and began linking to all sorts of sites, including ones that had nothing to do with their business. This practice may have worked for a while, but the ruse was uncovered. Eventually, the algorithm was changed once more to recognize legitimate links versus fake ones.

As you have probably figured out by now, SEO is little more than a game where the search engines try to ensure that the best sites with quality content show up in searches ahead of sites based on fluff and efforts to trick the search engines. It’s important to know that although some are definitely just trying to game the system, not all SEO experts are crooks. True SEO professionals have an excellent understanding of the latest algorithms and can show you how to properly optimize your site to help you rise above the noise. And with such a multitude of legitimate websites now available to internet users, it’s important that you give some attention to implementing honorable but effective SEO strategies.

Improving Your SEO

There are several ways to improve your site so it ranks higher than those of your competitors. These “white hat” strategies can really make a big difference in your site ranking by using legitimate methods that are meant to endure and make your site stand out. These techniques typically take more time and need to be updated regularly, but the efforts will return results over time.

The buyer needs to beware, though, of those “black hat” SEO methods that attempt to trick the engines for a quick bump in ranking. In many cases, these methods do deliver results faster than white hat SEO, but they are short lived. Once the engines figure out what is happening, they will quickly punish your site by removing it from the rankings entirely. It takes a good deal of effort to come back from this sort of penalty, and no firm wants to be associated with shady business practices, particularly a CPA firm. Any service provider who promises to get you at the top of a search in a hurry should be avoided.

By no means do I share this information to scare you or attempt to make you avoid SEO as a marketing strategy, but you do need to be careful who you hire. If you are considering hiring an SEO expert to work on your site, do your research and get references. In fact, Google itself recognizes the importance and legitimacy of proper search optimization, and the company recommends that you ask the following questions when vetting SEO experts.² By the way, I highly recommend you read the entire article when you get a chance:

• Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?

• Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?

• Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?

• What kind of results do you expect to see and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?

• What’s your experience in my industry?

• What’s your experience in my country (or city)?

• What’s your experience developing international sites?

• What are your most important SEO techniques?

• How long have you been in business?

• How can I expect to communicate with you?

• Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?

Once you start doing your research, you will quickly uncover the fact that there is a vernacular around SEO that can be confusing. I encourage you to do some additional research, but the terms below should help you get started and not feel like a total dunce when talking to SEO professionals.³

Table 9-1: Essential SEO Terminology

The definitions in table 9-1 simply scratch the surface, so if you really want to become knowledgeable about SEO, it pays to do your research. Keep in mind that Google changes the rules daily, making between 500 and 600 changes in any given year. This means that on any given day your site might rank 10 for a particular search term at 2 pm and 15 for the same words at 3 pm. It’s a moving target, and what works today might not work next week or even tomorrow. This means you may need to take these tips with a grain of salt. With that in mind, here are my SEO 101 tips for accounting firms:

• Make sure your page titles are descriptive. Pages titled “homepage” or “welcome” are no longer indexed by Google and won’t show up in a search.

• Create alt tags for all images used on your site. It improves your ranking but also gives vision-impaired visitors who use text-to-speech software to access the internet the information they need when they come to your site.

• Do not use duplicate content. Sites that repeat information from their own, or other, sites will often be eliminated from search results. Google tries to give credit to the original source of a particular piece of content and doesn’t include those that are repeating the same information. This includes canned articles or blog posts that are purchased. You can try to avoid being kicked out of search results by revising content that shows up on other sites, but this is no guarantee, and there is no “rule” for how much needs to change.

• Renew your domain and make sure it is reserved for a minimum of 12 months, ideally more. The closer it gets to expiring, the more wary Google will become of your site and its longevity.

• Using keywords and phrases is a great way to help optimize your site, but they need to fall naturally in your copy. In other words, write for humans and not for search engine spiders.

• Have an active social media presence. It’s not only a great way for you to gain visitors and reinforce your firm’s branding, but your active presence on these sites also helps optimize your online presence. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are high traffic sites, and the search engines like to see your firm interacting with your audience because it shows that you are a legitimate business. Additionally, Google now indexes status updates, which increases your overall optimization.

• If you are going to have a blog, build it into your website rather than on a separate platform for the highest SEO results.

• Finally, and I can’t stress this enough, make sure the content on your site is well written and updated regularly. Believe it or not, Google will penalize you for grammar mistakes and poor writing. On the flipside, it will reward you for adding good content to your site on a regular basis. When the spiders go out looking for information, they look for new content first, so sites with blogs or other pages that are updated on a consistent basis will rank higher than stagnant sites.

As you’ve probably surmised, SEO is a moving target but can be a valuable weapon in your online marketing arsenal. Once you’ve built your website and optimized it, how do you tell what is working, what is not, and what needs to change? Here’s where analytics come in to play.

A PEEK INSIDE YOUR SITE: ANALYTICS

Would you like to know how well your site is performing? Curious what pages get the most visitors or which ones get read the most? How about which external online sources direct the most visitors to your site? Or even the age range of most of your visitors?

All of this (and so much more) is available to you by reviewing your site’s analytics. Different analytics programs exist, but by and large, Google Analytics is the most used because of the access it has and the fact that it is free. If your site doesn’t have Google Analytics installed, run, don’t walk, to your webmaster and tell her to install it now. The sheer power of the information you can get from this free tool is incredible, and I’m often surprised to find that few firms have it installed at all, or those that do don’t regularly review the information it contains.

Reading the Numbers

Now that you have your website analytics at our fingertips, what do you do with it? Each analytics program varies a bit, but most are pretty similar. Because Google Analytics is the most common, I will use that as a point of reference for the rest of this chapter.

The best way to get to know Google Analytics is to jump in and start clicking around. It can be overwhelming at first, but the amount of information this tool contains is truly amazing and often enlightening. It tells us all kinds of things about our site that we would not otherwise know. And it’s not biased in any way. Unlike people, who may have different motives and opinions, your analytics are simply an unbiased report of activity. Nothing more, nothing less. Members of the accounting profession usually love to have access to the numbers that describe the performance of their website, even if they don’t necessarily like what those numbers may say. So what can you learn?

The first page you come to when you log in to your analytics account is an overview of your site activity as shown in figure 9-1. Illustrated with colorful graphs and charts, this page offers you a lot of information at a quick glance. The chart at the top of the page shows you the number of sessions that have occurred over the last few days, weeks, or months. You can even get the information down to sessions per hour if you choose. Sessions are the same as visits in Google Analytics and are a count of when someone comes to your site. Regardless of how many pages the visitor goes to, or in what order, it counts as one session. This overview shows you the days that your site is visited the most and how it has changed over a particular period of time. For example, if your firm adds a new blog post every Tuesday and you notice that your visits spike on Tuesdays, this is a good indication that your blog is drawing more traffic to your site.

Figure 9-1: Analytics Overview Page

You can change the dates that are shown in this histogram or the parameters based on what you are looking for. Besides sessions, you can view reports and charts for the following:

• Users. Previously called “unique visitors,” this is a measure of individual visitors to your site over a defined period of time. The more users, the more people who come to your site.

• Page views. The number of times visitors show up on the pages of your site, measuring the pages that are the most popular.

• Pages per session. An average of the number of pages site visitors view per visit to your site. The higher this number, the more pages they are viewing while they are on your site.

• Average session duration. The average amount of time each visitor spends on your site per visit. The higher this number, the better.

• Bounce rate. The percentage of sessions where a visitor only views one page of your website before leaving. The lower this number the better because you want users to go to more than one page in most cases.

• New versus returning visitors. A new visitor is someone who has never visited your site or hasn’t been there in a long time. Thus, a returning visitor is someone who has been to your website before. There is no hard and fast rule for how this ratio should look, but you definitely want both new and returning visitors to your site.

As you can quickly see, no single measure paints a full picture of your site traffic. Also keep in mind that this is just the first layer of information available. Although there are some general guidelines listed, these rules are not set in stone. Let’s dig a bit deeper now.

In the left column of the analytics site, you’ll notice a number of reporting options you can peruse. We won’t spend time talking about all of them—that could be a book unto itself—but I do want to discuss a few of the more popular and informative ones.

Audience

Have you ever wondered who visits your site? This report will give you that information. It does not tell you exactly who has been there, but you can learn a lot from the information it does tell you.

Under Demographics, you will see a breakdown of the gender, age, and interests of your visitors. By reviewing this information, you can learn the demographics of the people who like your site and to whom it appeals. If you are targeting young women but find that it is old men who are visiting the most, it’s time to take another look at the design and content of your site.

Clicking Geo will give you information about the location of your visitors and the language they speak. Most firms are surprised to find that they have quite a few visitors from countries outside of the United States and who speak other languages.

Next comes the Behavior category. This tells you what people are doing on your site in general. You can view deeper information on your new and returning visitors, including how long their sessions were and how long they stayed on your site. Frequency versus recency measures the number of visits and how long it’s been since a returning visitor has been to your site. Engagement measures how much your site occupied your visitors. On this page, you’ll see session duration, the length of time they stayed on your site during a particular visit and page depth, how many pages they clicked on your site, or how “deep” they went into it. Both of these parameters are visible for sessions and page views, so you can really start parsing visitor information by careful review of these numbers.

Technology provides details about the browsers or operating systems that visitors use to access your site as well as their internet provider. This might seem like superfluous information, but it is often interesting to find out that more users access your site via Chrome now than Internet Explorer. It’s important to know that many sites were not built with browsers other than Internet Explorer in mind. If your site is more than a few years old, you may want to test it on these newer browsers to make sure it looks as it should and navigates properly. If not, it’s probably time for an update.

Much like technology, Mobile gives you information about how people are accessing your site. The overview shows you percentages of visitors from desktops, mobile phones, and tablets. Devices goes into additional detail about the type of mobile phone or tablet that is used. As we mentioned in the chapter on websites, this number is consistently increasing. So if your site isn’t built to be mobile responsive, it might be time to make it more friendly to those accessing it with mobile devices.

Have you ever been curious to see how users travel through your site? User Flow will give you that information. This section shows you just that: where they enter, where they go next, and so on. This is very valuable to see if there are particular pages or posts that bring in more traffic and if those who come in through that gateway tend to leave quickly or stay and click around for a while. You can spend hours looking at all the information contained in these visual displays, and it will give you useful insights for enhancing your site.

For example, one firm we worked with started reviewing their analytics and noticed that most of their traffic was coming to their site via their blog posts, which were placed on their social media pages, but leaving immediately after reading them. To encourage them to explore other pages within their site, they started adding links to the bios of the blog authors and links within the post to the services pages that were pertinent to the information being shared. This gave readers an easy way to click through to learn more about what the firm offered and about the partners. Another firm noticed, not surprisingly, that the bio pages were the most read on the site (other than the home page). To encourage further site exploration, they added links to the services that each partner provided as well as a list of the blog posts and articles that a particular partner had written. Both help those who want to learn more do so much more easily.

Acquisition

This main section is all about where your visitors come from and what they do when they get there. You can tell a lot on the Overview page of this section, including your top referral channels for new versus returning visitors and the bounce rate, pages per session, and average session duration for visitors from each referral source.

Diving deeper, Channels shows you the percentage of visitors that come from an organic search (searching for keywords or phrases that bring up your site), direct (those who type in your domain directly), referral (those referred from another site to yours), email (those who came to your site by clicking on your link contained in an email or e-newsletter) or social (those who arrived at your site through a social media page). I don’t have to tell you that knowing how people get to your site can help you better allocate your resources in ways that bring more results.

All Traffic goes a bit deeper to show you exactly where the traffic to your site originated, including search engines, social media pages, and other referring websites. All Referrals eliminates the search engines from the listing and focuses only on the referring sites. It is interesting to note that firms are often surprised to find out that the referring sites are not what they expect and may even be sites that they have never heard of.

Behavior

This section tends to focus more on your visitors’ activity within your site once they are there rather than how they got there in the first place. The histogram at the top defaults to show page views over a period of time, but you can also take a look at average time on page, bounce rate per page, and percent that exit from that page. You can see which pages get the most views on your site and thus determine what type of information is most interesting to your readers. You can also see how many people are using your in-site search feature if you have one.

Within the Behavior section, you’ll see Site Content first. This goes into greater detail about the most read pages within your site and includes average time, bounce rate, and exit percentages from each of those pages. You’ll also see that not everyone comes to your site through your home page but quite often through another page that gets a higher ranking.

Beyond that information, you can view how fast your site and its individual pages load and get suggestions for improving load time if it is not as fast as it should be. Load time is more important than you might think. Be honest: have you ever been on a site that took more than a few seconds to load and you just decided “To heck with this!” and clicked out because you just didn’t have the time? You’re definitely not the only one who refused to wait for a slow-loading page, so work to ensure your website is accommodating people’s increasingly busy and fast lives.

Believe it or not, we are just scratching the surface of the type of information you can glean from Google Analytics. The more you click around, the more you’ll be surprised at what you find and what you can learn. In addition to viewing the information online, you can also export pages in a variety of file formats or even set up automatic emails to send you the information you want to see on a regular basis. One note on use: you must have a Google email address to access the system. This includes a gmail.com address or a Google-hosted account. Many people have to create one just for this purpose, but it is more than worthwhile for the intelligence it will provide. Don’t let it overwhelm you either. Consider reviewing a new section each time you visit, slowly expanding the information you access. Knowledge is power, and with the knowledge you can gain here, you’ll be able to reap the full potential from your firm’s online activities. See exhibit 9-2 for a guide to getting started.

¹ www.seochat.com/c/a/search-engine-news/beware-the-google-death-penalty/

² https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35291?hl=en

³ http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/6080/40-Essential-SEO-Terms-Marketers-Should-Know-Glossary.aspx