How Do We Measure Your Website Strategy?
Experimentation is really the only way we progress as a society.
Developing a hypothesis, creating an experiment and testing what needs to be true for your assumption to be correct. That’s what we do here at Strategy Lab; experimentally making things better.
Simply put; what’s your end goal? Every month what are you doing to achieve that goal? What’s holding you back from achieving that goal? So far how have your marketing efforts impacted your website?
What’s the overall goal of your website?
No one just has a website for the sake of having a website, it’s to inform people, to get the word out, to attract leads, to get your phone to ring, your website should be working for you.
Website measurement doesn’t have to be complicated, defining what you want people to do on your website is the hard part, getting more people to it is easy, we can help with that.
Your contact us page is one of the easiest pages to focus on to increase traffic to.
How do you know where people are going on your website?
Google Analytics can help you with this. We can set up a custom report for you so you receive a monthly update as to where people are going on your website. Once you know the “type” of content your audience likes you can create more of that style of content for your readers. Creating web pages and blog posts might seem like an art form but there’s a lot of science that can help you make better decisions about what you’re publishing.
Google Analytics top ten pages report May vs April 2014
How do you know where your traffic is coming from?
Again, Google Analytics is going to help you with this one. Another part of the monthly report that could be sent to you via e-mail. The report below shows the top ten traffic sources to the Strategy Lab website (the month of May vs April). Once you understand where your traffic is coming from it’s much easier to focus on the sources that matter.
Google Analytics top ten traffic sources report May vs April 2014
How do you increase your traffic?
Get social, acquire links, optimize.
Get social
For most organizations being social isn’t easy, either the employees aren’t trusted to be themselves or the people running the accounts don’t go far enough with the engagement level and content they’re sharing. It’s difficult to recommend a one-size-fits-all solution for social media. That’s why we try not to focus on it as a main marketing tactic. If you understand social you also know it’s terribly difficult to measure success. And where I come from, you must be able to measure what you want to improve. Let’s focus on other tactics to increase traffic, shall we?
Acquire links
Many people would disagree but the most powerful indicator of value to Google rankings is websites linking back to yours. Google tracks over 200 signals to come up with the rankings that result in what you see on the front page. By using Moz’s Domain Authority, we’ve tracked a lot of websites over the past three years. We’ve found a correlation between a websites Domain Authority and the amount of websites linking back to it. Listen to what other people say or test for yourself. I’ll take the latter.
Optimize
You have to optimize your website pages properly. Remember, Google crawls pages not websites. You don’t want to create a bunch of pages competing for the same keywords terms. Moz can help you with that. They use a 36 point measurement system to tell you how well a specific page is optimized for a specific keyword. Here are three examples of on-page grades for the Strategy Lab website.
Pages optimized for specific search terms have a much higher chance of coming up in Google search even with a comparably lower domain authority, you can outrank a large site based on optimization plus other factors.
You can’t improve what you aren’t measuring
One of the most valuable things we do is develop a measurement dashboard for your organization. We try to focus the efforts of your website and marketing strategy on measurable tactics, goal orientated strategy and a long term vision of what we’re creating. Every week or month you can receive a report like this one below on your very own website.
Competitive research
When we set up your website measurement, you get to pick up to 200 keywords you want a weekly report on where you come up for in search. That’s right, we can measure how our SEO efforts are actually affecting your website every week. Not only that, we set up your website alongside three competitors of your choice so we can benchmark against your closest competition.
Every week we receive a report of where in Google search your website comes up, as well as 3 of your competitor website rankings for up to 200 keyword searches. Here’s an example of a small set of keyword search terms for Volleyball in Regina.
How we can help
We would rather teach you about competitive online strategy than do it for you. But we do have several packages that may help your website rank higher in Google, optimize better for your audience and Google, as well as provide you with invaluable information on what your audience cares about, is interested in, and what they like to share.
Understanding why your competitors are receiving more Google traffic than you are and implementing specific tactics to outrank them for certain keyword phrases is exactly what we do. We can get the competitive intelligence, do you want to be the number website in your market? Contact us soon, we’re always interested in the next challenging project.
