NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE – We spend a lot of time at Sinai Marketing discussing SEO, and that’s no surprise since we’re striving to be the best SEO company around. However, the truth is that ranking our clients at the very top of Google is only part of the battle. Businesses want to be number one on Google for one reason only: to increase their sales.

We provide SEO services for many different types of companies, including dental practices, orthodontic practices, e-commerce websites and law firms, and each client has the same goal. Each client wants to know how much their business has grown since they signed up to work with us. Let’s take a law firm as an example. For a lawyer, SEO success may bring him many more inquires than he had before, but how can our lawyer tell if these inquiries are leading to new, paying clients? Does increased traffic always mean increased business? We understand we must not only track how well our customers are ranking on Google for specific keywords, we must also track how much business is being converted because of our SEO campaigns.

“It’s important to have a measuring system to see how many leads and how much business we bring to clients,” says Sinai’s CEO and SEO expert Ali Husayni. “If your site doesn’t convert traffic to leads, or worse, it’s getting the wrong kind of traffic, then ranking well on Google is meaningless.”

Tracking Conversions From the Web
It may be relatively easy to track conversions using Google Analytics if your business is coming only from the web. You can use specific tools to track how many users reach a download page, assuming your business sells something downloadable. For instance, if you’re selling an e-book, you can track how many people reach the download page, therefore conversions are easily monitored. With Google Analytics, you can even see the keywords that eventually led customers to download your e-book.

While this information can be helpful, it doesn’t provide a complete picture of how you’ve converted your customer. He may have searched “mystery e-book” on Google, which could have led him to a forum on Goodreads, a popular social networking site for avid readers. Your buyer could have read about your book there and decided to visit your website to finally purchase your book. He may have visited Facebook or Twitter before his purchase. How can you track this chain of actions that eventually converted him?

Google Analytics shares a fantastic video about the steps it takes to make a final conversion using the analogy of a basketball game. The player who shoots and scores gets credit for the goal, but other players were integral to the entire play. You can use the Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels to see how your customer behaved 30 days before he finally purchased your book. This gives you a complete picture of how your marketing efforts have paid off, and it takes the focus off solely the last “player,” if you will, to score the goal. Last-click conversion isn’t as helpful to marketers as viewing the entire chain that sent a buyer to his final destination.

You want to see how your customer has interacted with social media outlets, organic search results, emails, newsletters and banner ads before they decide to purchase your product. This insight is an invaluable tool that lets you see which marketing channels are most effective for your target market.

Tracking Conversions from Places Other than the Web
Many searches occur online that lead to conversions offline. This happens so often that there’s a term for it: ROPO. This stands for “research online, purchase offline.”

Conversion tracking gets trickier, however, when visitors are finding information on the web and then calling businesses for appointments. New customers could have found your business through Google Maps SEO efforts and then visited the business in person for an appointment.

So how do we effectively track how much business we’re bringing you if customers aren’t necessarily visiting your site? Not many web-marketing companies are able to capture conversion rates effectively and scientifically. Sinai Marketing aims to be one of the best marketing companies for tracking new business conversions.

Jellyfish, a UK digital marketing company, agrees that tracking offline purchases is difficult, but the more online exposure you have, the more likely you are to gain new business.

“Third party reviews for your company or brand provide independent endorsement which may strongly influence their decision to purchase,” say Jellyfish marketers. “You may not be able to track whether or not they have seen the recommendation, but by casting the net wide you will certainly leave an impression with the customer.”

While tracking offline conversions may be hard, it’s not impossible. For businesses that provide services, such as dentistry practices and law firms, we can use contact forms to see how many inquiries are coming from the Internet. From these inquiries, the SEO client will know how many new clients they’ve gained in the past month, the past quarter or the past six months.

However, many of us still like to pick up the phone. It’s not realistic to expect our clients to ask their potential customers how they found their website. Even if they did, this isn’t really an accurate or scientific way to measure results. For instance, if you are running an AdWords campaign along with an SEO campaign, more often than not, your customers cannot tell you whether they found you on the Ads or on the organic results pages. We can provide traceable phone numbers on your website, and these phone numbers allow us to accurately count how many new clients are coming from the Internet, even if they’re picking up the phone for an appointment without visiting your site.

This is a hot topic in the SEO world right now. Keyword reports are becoming less important as clients want to know exactly how much new businesses is generated from their increased rankings on Google. And that makes sense, right?

We are currently using Marchex, which is a very user-friendly phone tracking and phone-recording software used for this sole purpose. We can track and record every single call that goes to our clients’ business and provide them with a back-end administrator panel that they can see all the calls, where they were generated from, how long the call took and even listen or download the call.

We can also monitor where the calls are coming from including organic, direct or pay-per-click advertising. We can even track the success of a specific post.

For now, what methods have you used to track conversions for your SEO clients?

NASHVILLE, TN – So many factors go into Web ranking, and once you’ve set up a solid foundation of clear navigation and relevant content, sharing your information helps people find you.

There are many ways to share, but they’re all basically the same: advertising. You must tell your customers you have a website. You’ll have a Facebook page, maybe a Twitter account. You might pay for a radio ad or a printed coupon in a magazine. All of these are advertising.

Social networks are some weird blend of word-of-mouth advertising and clear self-promotion. The best way to have potential customers find you and trust your content is to act organically. Be educated in your field. Find a connection with your customers between your product and something else they care about.

I was browsing on Google+ when I saw a public post from Google on March 20, 2011. The post, linked to their Google Analytics blog, announced a new way to measure your social media efforts through Google Analytics. These new measurements show up as social reports.

“The Overview report allows you to see at a glance how much conversion value is generated from your social channels,” Google’s Group Project Manager Phil Miu writes. “The Social Value visualization compares the number and monetary value of all your goal completions against those that resulted from social referrals – both as last interaction, and assisted.”

Last Interaction Social Conversion means that through a social media channel, a customer has found your website and converted without straying from your site. Assisted Social Conversion means that someone converts who had visited your website earlier through a social channel.

This will mean that businesses will know where their most loyal (and highest purchasing) customers are coming from. Social media results will be clearer, and your efforts can be spent on the mediums that drive the highest results.

One interesting thing I read discussed the Activities Stream, which lets us know how our content is being shared and discussed on other social websites. The downside of this is that four of the biggest players – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest – aren’t part of the Analytics Social Data Hub, but you can see how frequently users on sites like Google+, Meetup, Digg, Reddit, TypePad, AllVoices, Blogger and Delicious are sharing and discussing your content.

Why Optimizing Your Business’s Website is More Important than Ever

Google Analytics project marketing manager Adam Singer writes a post on the Future Buzz about the latest social analytics features. Singer believes that these statistics will show how important your individual website really is compared to saturated social networks.

“We’ve been arguing at the Future Buzz that your owned presence (like your website or blog) should be where you focus activities for years,” says Singer. “External social communities aren’t where conversions happen anyway. It should be pretty obvious, but we have to say it again because some people are still confused or looking in all the wrong places: your website or blog (a place where you control the templates, Calls To Action, etc.) is where the most possible users convert and where your business is best poised to capture value.”

You may have 50,000 likes on Facebook or 20,000 Twitter shares, but those numbers don’t show how many fans or likes lead to actual conversions. And in the end, it’s all about results.

SEO specialists like the ones here at Master Google can optimize your business’s website for search engines, increasing exposure and driving potential clients to your doorstep. Master Google’s CEO, Ali Husayni, believes that companies should be proactive in their SEO efforts.

“You cannot just sit and wait for others to link their sites to yours,” Husayni says. “That simply won’t happen. In a world where there are thousands of new sites built everyday, your prospective site visitors have no way of finding you to read your content.”

With an all-inclusive SEO strategy and inclusion of social media, Google Analytics will show you how your efforts are paying off with real results. Contact Master Google today to see what our SEO team can do for your business.

NASHVILLE, TN – Optimizing your site for search engines is one thing, but how do you know if all of your hard work is paying off? Google offers a free service – Google Analytics – to marketers and webmasters that tracks visits in multiple ways. Many large organizations, including Costco Travel, the American Cancer Society, and CKE Restaurants, use Google Analytics to track their web traffic.

While marketers may receive more benefits from keeping up with in-depth statistics provided by Google Analytics, individuals that manage their personal or business websites can also use these tools to better understand what drives people to their sites.

Courtesy of Google's http://Analytics.Blogspot.com

Learn the Dashboard: There are tons of reports you can view through Google Analytics, but those will take more time and more in-depth coverage to learn. For now, get acquainted with your Dashboard. This is the main page, the starting point, for your Google Analytics information. Here, you’ll see a 30-day graph for total visits; the time period shown is customizable. You’ll see a snapshot of Site Usage, including statistics for Visits, Pageviews, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site, and Percentage of New Visits. Further down the page, you’ll see a map, which highlights where your views are coming from. You’ll also see a pie chart containing information about how visitors are getting to your site. Are you visitors coming from search engine results? From referring sites? From direct traffic? This information can quickly clue you in to your strengths and weaknesses.

On the dashboard you’ll also be able to see your top content. Adding fresh content in the same vein as your top performing content will give your repeat viewers some new material and will likely draw more unique visitors to your site.

Know Your Visitors: It’s important to know who is visiting your site. Are your visitors first-time viewers? How long are they staying on your website? How many pages within your website are they visiting? How many unique visitors do you have? With Google Analytics, you can see a detailed version of this information.

If you learn that most people stay on your website a very short amount of time, try to find out why. Is your design pleasing and simple, or is it cluttered and hard to read? If you discover that the majority of your visitors have visited your site before, then you know you’re doing something right. Having repeat viewers is just as important as bringing new, unique traffic to your site. You can also customize the information you’re gathering by taking advantage of the Premium Analytics feature Extended Custom Variables.

To evaluate if the SEO steps you’ve taken are working (although that’s a hard thing to measure just with a few clicks!), try downloading a plug-in to enhance your Google Analytics. Here’s one from Juice Analytics that gives you data on your new referring sites and your keywords with 50% higher traffic over the past week.

This doesn’t even cover the tip of the iceberg that is Google Analytics. To really be well versed in the GA scene, you’ll need to spend some time clicking around, browsing forums, and viewing different reports. Different data will be helpful to different users, so learning what you can do on GA will open your eyes to a whole new way of tracking your web traffic.

For anyone interested in doing business online, knowing how many individuals search for a specific keyword is crucial. If I’m selling kids shoes online and only 100 people search for it on Google, then most probably I’m not going to succeed – even if my site is ranked at the top. I’ll be lucky if 10 people out of those 100 buy my shoes.

To know how many people search for a specific keyword, there are many tools available. But the most trustworthy one is Google’s Adwords Keyword Selector Tool. Because it is pulling the data from its search engine.

In the SEO community, it is common knowledge that Google’s Adwords traffic estimation tool is at best inaccurate. But no one really knows how Google measures these numbers. According to Google, it is “averaging” each month’s search volume across its search engine platforms. But for a long time I’ve been suspicious that these numbers are not real. So, finally I decided to conduct a test.

I selected six websites that we have access to their Analytics data and are ranking within the top five positions on Google search results – world-wide – for somewhat competitive keywords. The tables below illustrates my findings.

The first table are the keywords in Exact format. Which means we’re only looking at Google’s traffic for these keywords when the exact phrase is searched for as well as the traffic for the same keyword:

The following table are for the same keywords but this time using the “Phrase” selection. In other words, the searcher could have used the same phrase in conjunction with other words:

As you see the number of people visiting the site is much less than the number of monthly search volume (Traffic Estimate) regardless of whether we searched for “Phrase” or “Exact” keywords.

It is less likely that less than 10% of those searching for any given search querry are going to visit the top ranking sites.

Therefore, my conclusion is that the Traffic Estimate is blown out of proportion. 

But by how much?

Looking at the numbers, we can say that these numbers are blown out of proportion by 3 times and up to 100 times depending on the search query.

Where is the success in SEO?

Another important factor is that we’re able to generate a few times more traffic to our clients’ sites than the total search volume for their main keyword(s). For example, doctorjennifer.com’s main keyword is Minneapolis Orthodontist. But this keyword only receives 58 searches each month (if that was accurate). On the other hand, the site is receiving over 1,000 hits through organic search results. The reason is that we are not just focusing on the MAIN keyword. We work on a pool of different keywords related to each site/business. Doctorjennifer.com for instance has over 100 keywords we’re targeting.

For those clients that care very much for having that top ranking placement on Google for their main keyword I have to say that that is not so important compared to being ranked for many of their keywords that may not be as popular.

In other words if our client is not ranking at the top for Minneapolis Orthodontist, they’re just losing a very small fraction of the search volume; however, there are 50 other keywords (Minneapolis Children Orthodontist, St. Paul Invisalign, Best Orthodontist in Eagan, etc.) that the client has a top five ranking. The site is going to get traffic and business from Google generated through secondary keywords.

We measure our success by the number of targeted visitors who find our clients’ sites using their keywords – main keywords as well as secondary keywords.

For about two months we’ve noticed a (Not Provided) item on Google Analytics traffic reports under “Traffic Sources/Google Organic” section. This is an article that has done a good job explaining it. The basic answer is that the keywords surfers used to find this particular site were not shown because the searchers were logged into their Google account when conducting the search.

Google wants to further protect their users’ privacy by encrypting their search results pages (through https://www.google.com).

In Nov. our site received 1,144 visitors from organic Google search which their search keywords were not shown (see below). This is 19.6% of our total Google organic search traffic.

For many years, we have considered a Web page’s loading speed as one of the on-site optimization criterium used by Google spiders. The faster a page loads, the better rank it will have on Google.

This was proven a day ago when Google announced that it is going to add “site speed” to Google Analytics results. Site speed will measure and report how fast each of your Web pages will load (on average) when someone visits your site.

But why is loading speed is so important?

We know the sites that have sophisticated designs, such as FLASH sites, or sites that are image or video heavy, load slower. On the other hand, sites that only have text and very minimal navigation (except through text-links) load the fastest – but text-only sites are boring.

With the Internet speed growing in average households, you’d think sites that are more beautiful should get more credit by Google, but not so fast. It is true that we now have faster Internet speed around the world compared to a few years ago, however, as Internet users, our patience for loading pages has also diminished. We leave a page quickly if it doesn’t load within a few of seconds. Or, if we really want to visit the page, we become increasingly frustrated as we wait for its content to load.

According to Pear Analytics, In 2007 Amazon conducted a test to see how the speed of your page loading affects losing traffic. The results were astonishing. For every second that your site loads slower, you lose roughly 1% of your site’s traffic. This means if you have a FLASH site and it takes 20 seconds to load, you lose 20% of your site’s visitors before they even see your site. In sales numbers, losing 20% of your potential customers is HUGE.

So, our recommendation to you is to make your site load as fast as possible to increase your page views, traffic and, consequently, sales.