All posts tagged business

Sphinn traffic August 08

Almost 3000 Sphinn visits from August 6th until September 5th

August was a very successful month for this blog, especially as it was during summer when many people are on vacation. Business blogging is one of the key methods of reaching an audience for an SEO company. SEO firms can’t rely on the major social sites like Digg, Reddit or even StumbleUpon as the audience there often is wary of SEO already due to the elusive nature of SEO: You only recognize bad, spammy SEO unless you are a search marketer yourself.

So what audience is a “target audience” for a SEO blog or more broadly for business blogging?

  1. High profile experts of the trade?
  2. Your peers in the industry?
  3. Bloggers and social media users, in other words multipliers?
  4. Advanced web users and webmasters?
  5. Main stream internet users?
  6. All internet users?

You have to ask yourself who the people are you want to reach before every post you write. I hate the term “target audience” as I’m not gonna shoot at anybody, I rather say “preferred audience“.

In August I had the unique opportunity to support the very successful SEOptimise blog team with 4 larger lists that go beyond the usual top 10 of this or that. Keep in mind that this blog is one of the most important SEO blogs in the UK according to the Google ranking at least, which in SEO circles speaks for itself. Also internationally it’s more often in the top 10 for “SEO blog” than not. Moreover the blog has more than 1200 subscribers. So it has undoubtedly already an audience.

Nonetheless I was able to reach much larger audiences, 5 to 30 times larger depending on the post. In this post I want to focus on the question why some posts “only” get 5 times as much traffic while others 10, or 30 times.

I experimented with my audiences this month. Although you can’t separate the above mentioned groups in such a clean manner you can decide beforehand which one is your preferred audience. Number 1 is the most narrow one, number 6 obviously the most populous one.

Addressing an audience is often as simple as naming it in the headline/title. Consider these three examples, they could represent the same list. Just the “target audience” differs:

You might want to change the description of each resource slightly but overall you can use the same resources for all three of them. When you use a very exclusive term (in the sense of excluding people) like “SEO” you will end up with a much smaller but probably more targeted audience in contrast to e.g. using “Search”. Which post is more relevant for general users:

“The Future of SEO” or “The Future of Search”?

Again, both can deal with the same topic, the first one will get a few hundred people to read it, the second one can reach thousands or more.

Beyond the headline there are of course other considerations: Do you take acronyms like “SEO” for granted or do you use terms that everybody can understand? Do you explain in a manner people outside the industry can relate to or not?

Blogging for the SEO industry is more difficult than for most others as explained above but still you have some places to reach out to: Niche social news sites for marketing, especially Sphinn for search marketing and beyond. Then there is Delicious representative of the larger web developer, webmaster and advanced web user crowd. SEO tools and resources can get popular there if they are useful enough for more than just the tiny SEO community. In fact most SEO tools and resources are but they fail to make the people believe they need them by disregarding the advice I gave you above.

Call it web tools and you get more people to use them than just the SEO tools.

In some cases you are better off by ignoring some audiences, you can’t satisfy everybody and some people just do not want to be content with your content ;-)

Nothing exemplifies that more accurate than the bizarre reactions of some “experts” to my last post on SEOptimise. This post gained 76 votes and had the same number of visits from Sphinn alone but multiplied with 10.

While the headline expressed that the post is about the “easiest” not the most advanced methods of getting links, these people were not satisfied with this explanation and repeatedly argued that the list is “stupid”, “basic”, “not fitting on a social news site” etc. The only thing that was stupid here was that I wasted my time trying to react to them. The sheer number of people approving of the post proved them wrong.

This post was both the most popular submission of mine in votes during my one year of participation on Sphinn (and I’ve been numerous times on the Sphinn fp), the most popular post written by me on Sphinn ever and the most popular SEOptimise post on Sphinn ever. It ended up on top of page 4 of the Sphinn “Greatest Hits”.

So you really have to decide, are you targeting these 5 people whom you can’t satisfy as they want to be “bigger experts” than you are, the 50 peers on Sphinn who approve of your post or the 500 visitors. Beyond that you might want to address the 5000 Delicious and/or StumbleUpon users depending on your topic.

All of the posts got what they deserved, a dozen authority links from blogs too. To be honest I also targeted the real experts of our industry and I got them too :-) So you also can decide for both, 5 and 5k.

Most website owners rely on quick website tweaks and the right tools for measurable website success. That’s not wrong but that’s also not enough. Being serious about business, a webmaster must get links to get additional exposure via search engines, of course predominantly Google.

Google still judges a website mostly based on the number and quality of links pointing to it (backlinks). So even today you got to get links, be it via outstanding content, viral campaigns or just conventional link building. Still most people do not take all the measures easily available on the Web today. Some have been around for ages, others just popped up recently. Check the 30 easiest ways to get links and exposure.

    Instant Link Building

  1. Submit to paid web directories free ones are often low quality lately
  2. Submit to a few quality article directories
  3. Send out a press releases via a few online services
  4. Answer questions on Yahoo Answers etc. and in forums
  5. Add resources to user generated content sites like Zimbio, Associated Content or others
  6. Ask your friends, family, employees to link to you
  7. Add your link to your profiles on Web 2.0 services like MySpace, Twitter (in the Bio) or Propeller

    8. Common Linking Incentives

  8. Get a Delicious badge, and display the number of bookmarks as well as the tags
  9. Offer a badge of honor, something like “a carbon neutral site”
  10. Offer a button for voting to install on other websites & blogs
  11. Offer a widget for bloggers, something useful that will spread by itself
  12. Stage a contest, it should be fun and the prizes should be worth it
  13. Organize a blog carnival choosing a topic that matters for many people
  14. Link out plenty, especially to bloggers, some will link back others will bookmark, some links will appear directly as ping and trackbacks
  15. Contact people who might link to you (I do not mean a reciprocal link request)
  16. Mirror a popular high traffic site, all the webhosters do it that way
  17. Give away content with a creative commons license, especially if you can offer images or music (or other audio)
  18. Let people translate your content and republish it for free

    19. Link Bait Ideas and Practices

  19. Praise experts in your area who have blogs
  20. “Pull a Calacanis” – Say something stupid to stir controversy (like “SEO is bullshit” or “Web directories are Web 3.0″)
  21. Be the first to break a story, indeed check original sources first before just recycling news
  22. Write a useful list, “100 ways of something” always get linked
  23. Give away a real freebie, a fee version of your product, should be valuable for users
  24. Use images of barely clad ladies, sorry I mean beautiful women to illustrate your point
  25. Support a cause, like Blogcatalog does
  26. Write something unbelievable, intriguing or that “strikes a chord”
  27. Do something useful for the Linkerati, a list of Digg users who blog for instance
  28. Create something for the lowest common denominator, best topic is cute cats
  29. Declare something alive and kicking dead but in a way it makes sense
  30. Say something funny like “SEO is Dad” ;-)

Please not that I intentionally did not include some not entirely ethical grey hat methodes like “submit to social bookmarking sites” or “comment on dofollow blogs” as these tend to become spammy in the wrong hands.

How to measure website success when rankings, Google PageRank and sheer traffic have gone the way of “hits”: All these older metrics become more and more meaningless in the current web environment.

  • Why measure rankings when they differ from location to location and from computer to computer due to localization and personalization efforts by Google and other search engines?
  • Why look at a site’s PageRank when Google itself admits that it’s only one of 200 signals that determine the assessment of a site’s authority in Google and sites with PR 3 outrank PR 7 sites?
  • Why brag about traffic when you can get hundreds of thousands of people visit you via Digg and the likes just to make’em run away in an instant?

The good old days of primitive measurement of website success are finally over. Business people demand more than just traffic and rankings, marketing professionals get more web-savvy than 12 year old kids who almost were born on the Web and new web analytics tools finally make it possible to consider far more and specific metrics than ever before. So check out these 33 website success metrics instead of rankings, Google PageRank and traffic:

Business Metrics

People doing business online, be it with eCommerce sites like Shops, publishing companies, consulting firms etc. do want to see results in Dollars, which in most cases makes sense although blogs for instance do offer ROI which is not easily measurable though. Often it’s more brand recognition, reputation building etc. For most commercial websites measuring revenue is the best possible was of determining success.

ROI
ROI means Return on Investment. If you spend 1000$ on your website and earn 2000$ your ROI is 200%. So calculate the cost and the financial benefits and compare both. There are whole books about that.

sales
ROI sometimes gets difficult to define. What is the investment exactly, is the time spent on social media e.g. an investment or only the work on the site? Thus measuring sales, especially for shops, is much easier. Higher sales = good website optimization of course.

leads
You do not sell directly on your website? You do want users to contact you via your site insetad? Measure leads. A SEO campaign that brought 100 leads is better than one which brought a million page views but no new potential clients.

conversions
OK, you do not sell anything directly and you do not sell services either, but you want people to join, participate in a survey, recommend your site or simply subscribe to your email newsletter? Measure conversions. You should do it for sales and leads too but even without these conversions make a very reliable website or marketing campaign success metric.

subscribers
While subscribers can be referred to as conversions you can count the sheer number every site should by now offer RSS and track RSS as well as email subscriptions like blogs do. Your subscribers are the most important users of your website, even if they do not buy anything. So if you don’t have an RSS/Atom or whatever kind of feed get one now.

Usability metrics

While not every site’s success can be measured in revenue, sales or leads you always can and should measure the sheer usability of your site. Many sites today still concentrate on being pretty, “having a bigger logo” and some special effects like Flash or AJAX, sound or video. While this might look good in most cases it’s not the most important factor that decides whether your site is going to fail or to succeed, usability is.

returning visitors
This is obvious, only returning visitors really like your site. So the more come back the better, the more successful you are. One time search visitors and casual social media visitors are not the backbone of your site. The subscribers and returning visitors (often the same people) are.

pageviews per visit
While measuring pageviews is sometimes futile as bad websites where you have to click more can have higher numbers of pageviews the number of pageviews per visit often will tell you a whole lot about how much your visitors like your website. A 1 to 1 ratio is bad unless they all click the buy button instantly.

time on page
The time spent on a page can be read in manifold ways but you can deduct from it whether people just skim your content or read your whole article among others.

time on site
It’s not always the longer the better but 5 minutes is in most cases better than 30 seconds, especially for a publishing site or simply a blog.

bounce rate
The bounce rate is one of the most important usability metrics and thanks to Google Analytics or Woopra easy to follow nowadays. 100k visitors with a bounce rate of 95% means that in the worst case only 5.000 actually visited your site while the others just fled. So a site with a much lower visitor number AND bounce rate can be much more successful than a “stupid traffic” site with huge traffic numbers. Targeted quality traffic is key for a successful site.

form/shopping cart abandonment rate
Forms are the most important parts of most websites in business terms, be it the contact form, or the shopping cart which technically in most cases is a form. Now imagine a super market where half or more of the customers abandon their cart in the middle of the checkout process or while perusing the market. Count these people and try to make them stay. The simplest way of checking the shopping cart abandonment rate is by sending a message to customer support each time a cart or other form gets abandoned. Sometimes you might be able to get back to the potential client with the incomplete data he entered.

next pages
To make people visit more than one page on a site we use internal links. Some of the links are links that we really want the people to follow. Checking the “next pages” from a particular landing page we can determine whether the readers followed our advice or wanted to see more of it. When on your home page the next page is in most cases the search or the sitemap page you’ve got a problem.

links clicked (heat maps)
Modern “Web 2.0″ web analytics solutions sometimes offer heat maps views or at least a site overlay way of checking clicks. This way you can determine where your visitors click or try to click (to no avail sometimes in cases of not linked logos or underlines words which are not links). Do people click where you want them to click or not?

eyetracking
Even better than heat maps of click behavior are heat maps of actual eye movements. You need more than a web analytics package to check that you need real people to take part in a study but if you are large company depending on your website you should check this for sure. Do people look at your main message at all? Do they actually see the “buy now” button?

internal searches
Are most of your visitors clueless or targeted? You’ll find out via the analyzing the internal searches. There is even a widget to do just that. Google Analytics also allows that.

SEO metrics

SEO experts love to measure. They loved measuring PageRank, rankings and traffic and they still need something to follow this urge. Well, there still is a lot to measure beyond strict business or usability metrics. Old school SEO still makes sense in lots of cases, especially with backlinks which still determine above all your success in Google search. I’d concentrate here on Google, but on the US market it still also make sense to check these with Yahoo and others. Also, checking backlinks with Google is not fun (only a fraction of data is released by Google unless you check your own site in Google Webmaster Tools) so you’re advised to measure them with Yahoo tools are tools that measure it using Yahoo data.

number of backlinks
You still need to know how many people or rather pages link to you. especially if this week more or less do it. The sheer number may be meaningless if you have 10.000 links from one site though. So focus also on domain popularity (links from one domain counted as one).

quality of backlinks
Getting a ton of links may mean nothing in comparison to one link from the NYT. So determine the quality of links: Has the linking page many other outgoing links? Has it PageRank? It it an old authority domain etc.?

Google cache date
Many SEO specialists resort to checking the cache date in Google (Google saves most pages in a “cache”) for determining the quality and success of a website in Google. If the cache date is older than one month the site is either dead (no fresh content) or has a very low authority with Google. Of course you always should check whether a site has a cache at all. Not cached sites probably get de-indexed (penalized) by Google.

Google bot visit frequency
Your cache might be one week old, but if Google bot visits daily it’s OK in most cases. You can check with most server side web analytics solutions, those relying on server logs or PHP.

Last time Google bot visited
This is almost the same as above but only almost. If you have a new content page and the bot visited yesterday and you’re still not in the Google index something might be wrong (like duplicate content problems)

Pages indexed
It’s seldom as simple as “the more pages indexed the better” but for small sites it often is. If you have 50 pages online but only 20 indexed your site is not successfully spidered by Google. A site:yoursite.com search in Google is enough to find out.

PageRank “pass rate”
While I argue that looking at the actual toolbar PageRank does not make much sense nowadays anymore you certainly want to take a look at the pass rate of PageRank. Google PageRank is passed via the links on your site. A home page with PR 5 should have subpages with PR 4 or at least 3, otherwise you have too many links or your internal link structure is broken.

Alexa Rank
While Alexa is not really reliable or never was many advertisers use it to check your traffic numbers. Also the Alexa traffic estimates can be compared to other sites, other time periods (more or less trafic this year than last?) and to other traffic estimation tools.

Compete Rank
While Compete is said to be more reliable than Alexa it only is for US traffic. This is both good and bad news but at the same time allows, e.g. compared with Alexa, to see where you’re heading. If you server the US market, take a close look at Compete.

Social Media metrics

In the age of social media, user generated content you can’t rely solely on bots and other automatically gathered numbers to collect data on your website success. You have to find out what your users like and what they actually say about you, or at least how often. There ale plenty of ways to find out, these are the most obvious:

bookmarks on delicious
A site or page with a few hundred or thousand of bookmarks on Delicious can’t be that bad, can it? On the other hand a site that has none can’t be that successful can it?

bookmarks elsewhere
While it is not that hard to pay some “SEO India” service to submit you to Delicious etc. It’s still far more likely that a site is a good one if it’s only popular on Delicious but also has bookmarks elsewhere. I’m sometimes surprised how many people bookmark my articles on sites I do not even think of.

social media shares
Do really think getting tens of thousands people visit your site is the ultimate proof of being popular? In contrast the number of submissions and shares tends to allow a better assessment unless of course the “SEO India” service is at work. When not, you can see that popular pages get shared all over the place. Every SEO knows that. The number of shares/votes by real people on Facebook, Reddit, Tumblr counts though.

tweets (Twitter mentions)
Being mentioned or recommended on Twitter is truly a success because here people communicate with their peers and fans and only links pages their truly recommend. Being linked more then 2 or 3 times means you are huge. It means 2 or 3 people telling 200 or maybe 200 other people that you rock. TweetBeep will send you email each time.

niche social sites’ votes
Being successful on niche social news site means recognition by several experts and traffic from a few hundred highly targeted visitors. Each niche has by now it’s own niche social news site, be it YCombinator for startups and tech, Design Float and Design Bump for, you guessed it design or DZone for web development and programming. Here you get visitors and readers who really care and their opinion really counts.

number of “thumbs up” on StumbleUpon
Other than the almost US only elitist crowds on Reddit social discovery site StumbleUpon is populated by the general public from all over the world. People voting for you on StumbleUpon “like you” if you can offer something for the John Does out there. Other than that you only get a limited number of votes. Whether you have “mass appeal” in the positive sense of it you will find out here. My own SEO blog has been very popular on StumbleUpon for years and still gets stumbled. Likewise does SEOptimise.

StumbleUpon reviews feedback
People who review you StumbleUpon really care for you, the StumbleUpon community or the subject. So listen closely. getting 10 or more “awesome” reviews on StumbleUpon means a lot if you want to determine the overall popularity of your website or particular page.

Technorati Blog mentions
A page often mentioned on Technorati is truly popular in the blogosphere. You are part of the conversation if you get linked often by other blogs. The Technorati authority is not reliable though as a metric. It’s based largely on Technorati bookmarks which bloggers can game easily.

Google BlogSearch Links
While the main Google search doe not show you many links the Google blog search is good at it. It’ll show you the legit links by other blogs, not the scraper blogs. Watch out for these, the simplest way to monitor them is by using Postrank.

Some of you might assume now that all this is far too complex for them but it isn’t. Freely available tools like Google Analytics allow every webmaster to find out much more about a website than just a few years ago where we were the obvious numbers of PageRank, rankings and traffic had to suffice. The real web metrics experts will laugh this list off probably as advanced SEO and web analytics starts in most cases beyond the ways mentioned here.

You are certainly much better off checking these 33 web metrics instead of Google rankings, PageRank and sheer website traffic.

 

Last updated: March 14th, 2011 – Fixed several links, changed the text in some cases.

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