Many of us rely on website analytics like those from HubSpot, Google Analytics and others to help us understand what keyword phrases are driving visitors to our websites. A recent change at Google is compromising that, at least by a little. If a user is logged into any Google account, Google will now use the secure version of the Google home page (the “SSL-enabled” version) to provide search results.A search done through the secure version of the Google home page protects the user’s search terms, which means your reporting tool can’t see the search term he or she used to find your website.

Google claims that this will affect less than 10% of searchers that find your website. That’s because many people are not logged into a Google account (Google AdWords, Google+, and so forth), and even for those people if they do a search outside of the Google homepage (like from a search box in their browser or on the Google toolbar) they don’t get redirected to the secure Google site for the search.

For those visitors who’ve been redirected to the secure version of Google, you can expect in your website analytics to see a new item in the list of search terms visitors have used: “unknown search” or “unknown keyword”.

So far, it looks as though Google is right: very few searches are being done through their secure website. It remains to be seen, whether that will change over time.

What’s a bounce rate?

It’s the percentage of visitors to your site that bounce. What’s a bounce? It’s a very simple but important concept. When someone arrives at your website, takes one look and leaves without visiting any other pages — that’s a bounce. At a recent symposium, one presenter summed it up like this: “They came, they puked, they left.”

If lots of visitors on your web site bounce away, you’re losing them as customers. Clearly, lots of bounces are visitors who weren’t really looking for you, but for something else. When they bounce, they don’t represent lost sales. But when a real prospective customer bounces, they’re going to do business with one of your competitors. And that’s never good.

How do I tell my bounce rate?

Many hosting companies provide site analytics that display your bounce rate. Failing that, install the free Google Analytics on your site, and you can track the progress of your bounce rate over time very easily.

What’s a good bounce rate?

That may depend on your business. Retail websites typically experience about a 20-40% bounce rate. Well optimized content websites normally have a bounce rate in the 40-60% range. If your bounce rate is over 60%, you should be concerned. If it’s over 80%, you have a major problem.

How do I improve my bounce rate?

First, make sure your bounce rates aren’t because people are finding you by searching for stuff you’re not optimized for. If they find you by accident when they’re really looking for something else, those bounces are fine. But if people find you by searching important keywords, those are the bounces you want to improve.

Make sure it’s immediately obvious when someone lands on one of your pages by searching a relevant keyword phrase that the page makes it immediately clear that they’re in the right place. You have no more than 8 seconds to convince them your page is really all about what they searched for. Check your main above-the-fold headline and any other above-the-fold sub-headings.

Then make sure your web page isn’t turning them off. Check the copywriting and make sure you have appealing content. Dierdre Rienzo wrote in the MarketItWrite blog about common writing mistakes that contribute to a high bounce rate and which you need to avoid.

Make those changes and watch your bounce rate. If it doesn’t improve, look for other ways to keep people engaged on your site. Link to related content, use call to action links, and give your visitors what they’re looking for.

A Cautionary Tale

We often explain to our clients why SEO done properly results in rankings that remain relatively persistent for months and years with no need to re-tweak your web site of change on-page optimization techniques. While that’s true, rankings do fluctuate, and there are circumstances where your rankings may drop rather permanently.

A client of ours had terrific visibility when we optimized him five or six years ago, and he may have taken us a little too literally about his rankings being persistent. For the past five years, he hasn’t checked his visibility in the search engines at all. And for awhile I guess that was alright.

When we spoke a few months ago, though, he told me business was quite slow, and he blamed it on the economy. I ran one of our Keyword Status Reports to take a look, and his visibility had plummeted to only one tenth what it used to be. Now he’s not so sure if business is slow because of the economy or because customers can’t find him when they’re searching for his services. What happened?

His business flourished so much after he was optimized that he decided to give his website a facelift. His web designer had moved to the west coast so he found another local web designer to redesign his site. Now I’ve said in this blog in the past that most web designers are clueless about SEO and explained why that is. This was a classic case in point. His new web designer had undone all of the optimization on his web site. The only way anyone could find him on the web was if they already knew his company name!

His web site had been like that for years, and he’d been getting referral business from previous customers. But that slows down over time and the customer base needs to be refreshed by new customers coming from the web. That just wasn’t happening.

If we had fixed the problem shortly after his site was redesigned, his rankings may not have dipped perceptably. But after three or four years we have a lot of time to make up.  That’s why I always encourage our clients to watch the rankings for all of their important keywords on a regular basis.

Our SEO Monitoring service does that, with online rankings reports that show keyword rankings, ranking trends over time, comparison to competitors and more – all updated monthly. Graphs make it easy to see at a glance if keywords are holding steady, improving, or declining. And we send an email letting our clients know each time an updated report is ready.

While our service is inexpensive, you can monitor your rankings manually for free, given the time and discipline. Discipline is usually the operative concern. Just like backing up your computer, you need to have it on an automated schedule so that over time it doesn’t get neglected like our poor client who lost all his visibility by neglecting the health of his rankings..

We all have them, but too few of us use them. Web Analytics, site logs, web site statistics … whatever you call them, they’re usually provided free of charge by our web hosting company. And if not, you can easily add free Google Analytics to your web site.

Why bother? Some of this stuff might be hard to understand. Sometimes it results in information overload. Some of the reasons people don’t use their web analytics are:

• It’s too confusing
• Information overload
• What am I supposed to do with all this data?
• Won’t all this tracking be expensive?

To address the last concern first, many web analytics packages are free. And if you focus on the really important items, it’s not so tough after all. Adam Singer wrote a primer on six things to focus on in your web site analytics. Here’s a quick list, but check out Adam’s article for the real meat on this.

While organic rankings achieved ethically often tend to be stable for months and years without further attention, they aren’t permanent. As your business changes, you’ll update your website and may inadvertently de-optimize parts of it. As competitors rise in their ability to compete for rankings, your visibility may drop. A former client of ours had achieved a visibility score of about 50% (which is actually much better than it sounds) when we last checked his rankings five years ago. At the time, he was so busy from the SEO we did that he was reluctant to do anything further lest he be unable to keep up with the business. Now it’s five years later, and he’s blaming his slow business on the recession. But a quick check showed that as a result of changes to his web site that partially de-optimized it, his visibility had slid to only 6% over the past 5 years.

It’ll be much harder to get his rankings back now than it would have been if we’d attacked the problem in a more timely manner. That’s why our SEO Monitoring  program checks your rankings in a detailed report every three months. If you don’t want our rank reporting program, you need to at least check your important rankings manually on a regular basis so you’ll know if you start to lose visibility and need to take corrective measures.

Site Pro News has a nice article about Google Analytics. If you’re unhappy with the site log analysis reporting offered by your web host – or if they don’t offer any at all – then you should consider Google Analytics. It’s free, but you do need to insert some code into all of your web pages for it to work. It’s worth the effort.

4 Reasons to Use Google Analytics

1. The Map Overlay

Essentially, this feature brings up a map of the world, highlighting the countries your visitors come from. Clicking on a country produces a close-up view, along with a geographical breakdown according to the region and/or city from which visitors accessed the site. This tool is particularly helpful if your site focuses on a specific region.

2. The Site Overlay

This allows you to navigate your site and see exactly how visitors travel through it.

3. Goals and Funnels

This allows you to set up specific goals for your site, like tracking a visitor to the “Thank you for your inquiry” page. It also lets you set up specific monetary values for each goal, and track your site’s financial performance and profitability.

4. Graphical Representations

You can choose among views on many of its reports, allowing you to work with the view you’re most comfortable with. Some of us prefer line graphs, some pie charts, and others tables. You can set it up to work they way you think.

Much more in the Site Pro News article.

All the search engine optimization in the world won’t help your business if you don’t follow through. Traffic is the end product of SEO. Converting that traffic to sales is the responsibility of your web site … and YOU. Read these sad excerpts from the newsletter of Softcast Marketing, a terrific paid search consultant I know:

We lost a client recently because our client told us they had not closed a single deal as a result of the work we did for them. They were a large networking company and if they had even closed a single client, it would have more than made up for the modest cost of their campaign. We monitored their account and we knew they were getting leads. We asked about their follow up. Their response was shocking. If leads came in via the telephone and a rep happened to be around (which was seldom) the lead would be answered. If not, it was written down and put into a drawer. Leads that came in from forms or emails were sent to a data file but they had not assigned lead follow up duties to any specific employee. As a result most leads were followed up days later or not at all!

…

If you get a lead the strategy should be to stop the prospect from searching. If you don’t follow up quickly, the prospect will find somebody else and your hard work and advertising budget will have been wasted.

You’ll find their full newsletter here.

Well, here we are, starting a blog. I feel like we’re somehow behind the curve, not having started one sooner. What do we hope to accomplish here? Well, I’ll be posting information about Internet marketing that should be helpful to you, whether you’re a client of ours or not. I hope to provide some interesting links and some general commentary.

I attended the  Search Engine Strategies Conferencein NYC last week and picked up some neat new information that I’ll be posting here.

Tip:
How to tell where your visitors are coming from>

If you’re requesting links and want to be able to tell which people visit your site as a result of those links, simply add a little extra code to your website address in the link. For example, this link: used Cisco switches will go to the Warwick Data Systems home page, but the actual link address is this: http://www.warwickdata.com/?RankMagicBlog
so that when Alex, the owner of Warwick Data Systems checks his web log, he’ll be able to identify how many visitors arrived using that URL. Do the same thing for pay per click (PPC) ads through Google’s AdWords or Overture and you can see which individual ads are bringing in the most visitors.

Please come back and visit us frequently for more tips and discussion of topics you can use to grow your business from your web site.

Cheers!
Bill