by Marianna Muscat | Oct 5, 2009 | Online Marketing
Google Analytics is a web analytics solution that can provide you with insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Google Analytics is flexible and has easy-to-use features that let you see and analyze your traffic data. Google Analytics can help you track visitors from all pay per click traffic sources, organic search engines, website referrers, keywords, content, visitor funnel visualization, tracking of business goals among other things. Here are some features of Google Analytics and how they can help you improve your marketing effectiveness.
- Map Overlay – This feature will tell you exactly where your visitors are accessing your website from. This feature will highlight the exact countries or cities where your visitors are coming from. By knowing where your consumers are coming from you will be able to geo-target your marketing efforts.
- Keywords – This will present the actual keywords that your website visitors typed on to the search engines to get to your website. Knowing such keywords can help you prepare the right content for your website.
- Bounce rate – This is the number of people who visit a website and leave within a few seconds without doing anything on the site. A bounce rate above 50% is not good. Content on pages with high bounce rates should be changed.
- Goals – Google Analytics Goals measure conversions on a website. A conversion occurs when a visitor does something you want them to do. This could be subscribing to a newsletter, purchasing online or watching a video. Knowing such information will help you calculate your return on investments.
- Funnel Visualization – This report outlines the click paths that your website visitors took. This report helps you to see which pages result in lost opportunities and where your would-be customers go.
- Dashboards – Google Analytics will let you create custom dashboards with all the information you need. These dashboards can be set up to be e-mailed to you or your other team members.
by Marianna Muscat | Sep 30, 2009 | Online Marketing
Rather than writing their own content, websites are pulling from the feeds of other sites. This may get you some more search engine links, but they are just going to lead people to other websites. Instead, you should be writing your own articles and pursuing a ‘content marketing’ strategy and letting other sites syndicate your content. At the very least, it’s low-cost advertising.
Depending on the nature of your business, there may be a limit to just how much information you want to provide for free. If you are selling products then tutorials on using them are a good idea to have available. But if you are providing services such as consulting and training, you obviously aren’t going to put everything on your site for free. Even if this isn’t the case, maybe you just don’t know what to write about. So what can be done in these cases?
Consider the industry you are working in. Whatever it is, there is probably news on a weekly basis that is somehow connected to it. Take advantage of news as it happens by writing reactions, spinning current events into something that benefits your business. For example, there generally is a lot of media coverage for topical events in business and if it’s relevant to your business or service and you can explain it in a way that clients could follow or understand better, then you are providing added value.
An excellent reaction piece for anyone to write is “How will this affect your business?” A short article or white paper, could explain what this means, what the impact will be, and how your business could help. Just because your business website isn’t a news service, it doesn’t mean you can’t react to news as it happens. Before long, you will develop a large library of content without really doing all that much work. All you are doing is selling your business and putting it into context for potential customers.
Selecting one or two relevant subjects in your industry per months and writing or have an expert SEO copywriter produce them as articles quickly adds content to your site. Your goal should be to reach the 100 page mark in order to become a Google ‘Resource’ site and receive better ‘organic’ rankings and subsequent increased traffic over time, thereby reducing your dependency on pay per click advertising generally used tactically to drive immediate traffic
Should you wish to discuss your on-line marketing strategy in more detail or discuss how we can assist you as WSI Internet Marketing Consultants drop me a mail at jamie@wsioms.co. or visit us at www.wsioms.co.za
by Marianna Muscat | Sep 23, 2009 | Online Marketing
Online competitor analysis allows you to compare your website’s performance to that of your competitors. An online competitor analysis is an extremely useful research tool, which can provide you with an insight into your competitors’ online marketing strategies. Conducting a competitor analysis on a regular basis will definately give you an edge in the cyber environment.
Benefits of a competitor analysis
A competitor analysis will help you understand your Competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Strategic use of online business intelligence will strengthen your competitive advantage and will improve your business decisions. Benefits of a competitor analysis include:
- Learn the organic keywords that competitors are targeting and the rankings they are achieving
- Identify their paid search strategies, keywords, ads and landing pages
- Work out your competitors estimated monthly online marketing budgets
- Identify your competitors email marketing campaigns
- See which of your competitors are doing social media marketing
Some factors to consider when conducting a competitor analysis
- Backlinks – The number of external links pointing to your competitors webpages
- Domain age – Check the age of a domain
- PPC – Always check for the keywords, landing pages & ads that your competitors are using
- Website Traffic – www.compete.com can give you an indication of what your competitors are getting
- Inbound Link Anchor Text – This will tell you the type of keywords your competitors are trying to promote for their website
Some useful Competitor Analysis Tools
Here are some of the tools you can use to analyse your online competitors
- Google insights – This will show you keywords that are popular and most popular regions of interest
- Google trends – gives you an estimation of the amount and type of traffic to a particular site. It also offers a listing of search terms used to reach that site.
- SEO Elite – this tool will tell you the number of links that are pointing to your competitor’s websites.
by Marelise da Silva | Sep 23, 2009 | Online Marketing
Getting targeted traffic to hit your website is one challenge Internet Marketers face, however, keeping this traffic on your website is another challenge that needs to be addressed. The question one should really ask is “How can I ensure I keep people on my site long enough to turn them in to customers?”
A few things you can do to decrease your website’s Bounce Rate
First and foremost, endeavor to keep your website’s content fresh and up-to-date. When people are looking for information about your products or services they are looking for honest information that is going to help them make a purchasing decision. If your content is too little and unsubstantiated, it will affect your bounce rate as people move on to more trustworthy sources of online information.
Product reviews and/or testimonials are always very helpful when it comes to building trust and credibility between you as an online business and your customers who you will most probably never meet in person. Allowing people who visit your website to rate your products and services will also give you a good idea as to what is working for your business and what is not. With this information you can tweak your offerings accordingly in order to provide an improved service.
If you want sales conversions in the online environment then you have to have a secure online shopping and payment facility for people who want to purchase items from your website. Identity theft is a harsh reality in the online environment and sophisticated security features on your website will help give your customers peace of mind and decrease Bounce Rates from your website.
Avoid flashy banners and ‘Pop-Ups’. Nowadays these do little to build credibility. People who know the Internet know that excessive banners and pop-ups spell trouble and are usually associated with an untrustworthy source of information and they will be quick to move on to a more reliable-looking website.
Build a lasting rapport with your website visitors by having a newsletter that they can subscibe to, an RSS feed, or offer them a free eBook. These applications enable you to keep your customers up-to-date on developments in your industry, new products and service, and they show that you are abreast of your business.
Keep navigation simple on your website. If it is easy for people to find their way around your website without issue then it is highly likely that they will stay. Create a sitemap (you are able to do this for free online) so that you can get a clear understanding of where your website stands in terms of navigation.
by Marelise da Silva | Sep 21, 2009 | Online Marketing
Analyzing your website statistics can provide you with valuable information regarding your presence on the web. It can show you the amount of visitors browsing to your website, which pages were viewed, country, keywords and how they got to your website. Website statistics packages are part of most business hosting plans.
Find a list below on how you can utilize website statistics for your website.
- Visitor Activity: This is the number of visitors that visits your website/blog each day, week or month. Most statistical applications can show the visits and unique visitors for each month. Unique visitors are first time visitors while visits include new and returning visitors. You can see how many pages were viewed and what days of the week and month that visitors came to your website.
- Location: This is the location your visitors are coming from. This will show you a list of countries where your visitors are. With Google Analytics you can view the exact location in the country where your visitor came from.
- Robots/Spiders: You can see which search engine spiders are indexing your website and how often they are returning. Spiders and search engine robots crawl popular websites often.
- Navigation: You can see how long your visitors are staying once they arrive, which pages they viewed, entry pages and exit pages.
- Source: Track which search engines are sending visitors and see which keyword phrases are being used. You can see which websites are referring visitors to you.
The main purpose to analysing these statistics is to understand your website and to see potential problems on it. Maybe you need to adjust your keywords or you need to navigate your visitors in a certain direction on your website. Website statistics is essential to an internet marketing campaign.
by Marianna Muscat | Sep 14, 2009 | Online Marketing
Ecommerce website marketing is one of the important aspects for an on-line business. To insure your website gets top Google ranking, it is recommended you build not only a visually appealing website but one that has easy navigation and WSI (We Simplify The Internet) can assist in providing a structured approach to identifying different persona’s for your target market. Who you should address and how to present to them is vitally important and gaining in-depth knowledge of the market that your products or services are aimed at will assist with your marketing effors. Our team of experts will partner with you in your journey to develop your business through our proven digital marketing strategies.
As a premier ecommerce Internet marketing company that aims to ‘Simplify The Internet’ we provide pure ethical on-line strategies with 100% delivery satisfaction and guarantees. We also offer unique ecommerce marketing strategies, competitor analysis and Integrated Digital Marketing plans that will dovetail with your overall marketing strategy and make your website visible to major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN.
We have a talented group of business people who would have experience which spans across most industries. So if you are looking for the best website marketing company that provide a range of unique services, then WSI Internet Marketing is your best on-line solution.
As you know there are numerous companies providing digital marketing, but our USP is to provide a full menu of services that can be matched to your available budget or built over time and includes Internet Marketing strategies, Search Engine Essentials, Link Building, Search Engine Positioning, PPC Set Up & Management, Content Marketing, Website Building nd Maintenance and Hosting to name a few and all at affordable rates.
Check out our website at www.wsioms.co.za for more information
