small business marketing – Page 13 – Small Business Odyssey

October 17, 2011

Do You Know Where Your Web Traffic is Coming From?

I recently added Google Analytics to my small business blog and now I have a much better idea of where my web traffic is coming from and what is influencing this traffic.

You can access Google Analytics if you have a Google account (e.g. Gmail). All you do is identify the site that you want Google to monitor and then add some code provided by Google to the coding of your site.

The “Traffic Sources Overview” above for one month of web traffic to my HR Consultancy business site shows that 63% of web traffic is coming from organic search engine results, 21% from sites that have a URL link to my small business site (backlinks) and 16% from people who access my site directly by using the business web address.

Google Analytics provides considerably finer detail on visitor sources and visitor behaviour. The following screen image shows a breakdown of primary traffic sources:

This more detailed report gives you a clearer indication of the search engine traffic sources and identifies the primary sources of referral traffic (people visiting via links on other sites).

In relation to visitor behaviour, Google Analytics tells you how many pages visitors access per visit and how long they spend on your small business site. The more fine-grained information provides this visitor behaviour analysis in relation to each primary traffic source – so you can see what traffic sources provide the more “sticky” traffic and which sources result in the largest “bounce rate”:

So in the above analysis for visitors to my human resource consultancy site, you can see that the different traffic sources (shown in the previous image) vary across a range of variables:

how many pages are viewed per visit
how long a visitor spends on the site
the percentage of visitors that are new (“unique” visitors)
the bounce rate (the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the landing page – in other words, viewed only the page they landed on).

From the above information, I have developed a chart to compare four sources of traffic and the behaviour of the traffic from the different sources:

From this analysis, you can see that traffic from Yahoo spends an average of 33 seconds on my site, views 1.44 pages and has a bounce rate of 77.78%; in contrast traffic from Google search results spend 3.07 minutes on the site, view 3.71 pages and has a bounce rate of 53% – overall much better quality of traffic from Google than from Yahoo.

Critical information in relation to traffic behavior is the high quality of LinkedIn traffic – which is to be expected given that our business is in a professional arena – provision of human resource services. The LinkedIn traffic spends 11.52 minutes on our site, visits 10.58 pages and has a bounce rate of 25%. LinkedIn is clearly a valuable source of traffic for our business and we need to put more energy into developing this traffic source.

A number of key points come out of this basic analysis:

not all traffic is the same in quality
the number of visitors is not the primary measure to be considered for small business marketing
small businesses need to focus on the primary sources of quality traffic to their website/blog
social media can provide an increasing percentage of traffic if cultivated.

The “numbers game” will vary in significance according to the nature of your small business. For example, for our human resource consultancy business the value of one sale can vary from $50 to $10,000+ – varying from a single registration for a one hour training workshop to a public sector client commissioning a series of tailored, in-house training sessions or a number of recruitment exercises.

So core considerations in relation to web traffic analysis are the nature of your business, the type of customers you want to attract and the purchase behavior of your ideal customers. Gross traffic numbers is a very poor indicator for planning your small business marketing and this is why Google Analytics is an essential tool for small businesses.

Google Analytics also gives you information about the primary keywords that people are using in searches that result in access to your site. Other useful information includes what pages visitors are landing on, together with an analysis of traffic behavior for each page accessed – time on page, % unique traffic and bounce rate. There is also a map showing visually the countries that are the major sources of your traffic.

Google Analytics is a key tool for small business marketing – it tells you where your traffic is coming from, provides information about the quality of the traffic and gives you the basis for informed marketing decisions.

October 15, 2011October 15, 2011

Backlinks: To Buy or Not to Buy, That is the Question!

Backlinks are one of the core measures that Google uses to evaluate a small business website/blog and determine where the site will appear in search engine results.

Unfortunately, many small business owners have been convinced by some Internet marketers to buy links to build up the ranking of their websites.

Matt Cutts, speaking on behalf of Google in the video above, makes the point that buying backlinks is contrary to Google’s quality guidelines and will not add value to a website in the final analysis. Elsewhere, Matt Cutts has stated that Google is improving its capacity to determine whether or not backlinks are artificially generated. While you may experience a temporary surge in rankings on Google by buying backlinks, you will suffer in the long run.

Recent history shows that Google eventually enforces its quality guidelines. For example, for a long time Google had been warning about duplicate content (information on websites copied from elsewhere) and many sites enjoyed a temporary benefit from using this approach. However, early in 2011, Google punished the sites that had ignored their duplicate content guidelines:

Google’s response to Poor Quality Sites

I predict the same will happen to websites that have created backlinks artificially by buying large numbers from suppliers who have little concern for the quality of the small business website being promoted or for the relevance of the backlinks being offered at a price.

What Google really values, as Matt Cutts explains, is organic backlinks – backlinks that occur naturally because of the quality of the content on a website. Matt argues that if you create great content then people will not only visit your site more often but also create backlinks to your articles/blog posts by mentioning them on social media sites and their own blogs or websites.

Here is a perfect illustration of this principle of organic backlinks which occurred in the last week. A French Chef, Alain Braux, created a blog post about his Raspberry Souffle which was picked up by a website with a high page rank and this created a quality, organic backlink for his Healthy Chef Recipes blog site:

http://www.celebrations.com/blog/?p=4969

Alain Braux’s site, which draws on his cooking and nutritionist background, offers French recipes that are easy to make and healthy to eat. His attractive and informative site was designed by my friend and business partner, Anne Corcino, of SEO Praxis.com. Alain offers many recipes on the site as well as his healthy French recipe books.

As Matt Cutts argues, in the final analysis what is important for a small business blog/website is to offer quality, relevant content that will generate organic backlinks from people who value what they read.

October 9, 2011October 10, 2011

Small Business Marketing: A Personal Odyssey

Merit Solutions Australia — Human Resource Consultancy

Our small business was created in 1996 and following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008, we found that we had to become actively engaged in online small business marketing.

Up until the GFC, our gross income had been growing at around 20% per year and we did not have to actively market our small business. Most business arrived by word of mouth through the professional services provided by our HR consultants.

However, with the GFC, our business income dropped by 50% in six months. So we had to look at ways to improve the income from our small business.

We decided to do three core things:

expand our service offerings (e.g. include training)
broaden our client base
actively engage in online marketing for our small business

In 2010, we engaged Anne Corcino to redesign our static website into a dynamic WordPress website. Anne’s website services are offered through her small business, SEO Praxis.

The new website design became a real platform for our online small business marketing. Our HR consultants were proud of our site and our clients were suitably impressed. Because the site was built on a WordPress platform, it has SEO embedded and is easy to update and add value. Our RSS feed from the blog is an important aspect of our marketing.

What I will report here is my own experiences and ideas in marketing our small business. So this blog is very much my small business odyssey – my journey into the challenges of small business marketing.