The SEO Success Pyramid

John Wooden, the greatest basketball coach ever, never talked to his teams about winning. He talked to them about preparation and about the process of becoming a great team.

Wooden’s philosophy on coaching (and life) is summed up in the “Pyramid of Success,” which beats the tail off all that Self-Help Guru junk you see peddled in books, on blogs, on daytime chat shows, and on late night TV. I was lucky to hear Coach Wooden speak about the Pyramid of Success while I was a student at Pepperdine University; to this day, it’s one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard. (Seriously, if you don’t know what his Pyramid of Success is, visit CoachJohnWooden.com.)

What’s all this have to do with SEO and online marketing? Well, the best SEOs don’t talk to their clients about rankings; they talk about the process of making great web sites that earn traffic and convert visitors into customers. They talk about the process of creating great content that attracts links like bees to honey.

I would never compare myself to John Wooden, but I do like teaching others about online marketing. So, with that in mind, and inspired by the great coach, here is the….

SEO Success Pyramid

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Please feel free to write about this SEO Success Pyramid and/or link to this post, but please don’t offer the print version for download from your site/blog. Thank you!

What’s It All Mean?

Commitment: Every successful project I’ve ever worked on has involved a client whose team is enthusiastic and engaged. Whether you’re big or small, one uninterested department or person can sabotage everything.

Planning: Success in any pursuit begins with setting goals and developing a plan to achieve them — detailing the strategies and tactics you’ll use, the people and resources needed, and so forth. Search marketing is no different. Read: Planning an SEO Campaign

Product/Service: Although you can fool some people into buying crap for a while, real long-term success involves a product or service that people want or need. There’s no substitute for quality.

Education/Information: You’re a business owner; you don’t need to become an SEO expert. But you’ll succeed faster if you have access to great information. And as fast as the search marketing industry changes, ongoing access to intelligent information is critical.

Patience: True, there are exceptions every now and then, but for the vast majority of companies big or small, search marketing is a process that takes time to implement correctly. There are no short cuts, no quick fixes. Success almost always takes many months, if not a year or more.

Design & Usability: Yes, there are some ugly sites that make lots of money; but there are more that don’t. Your best bet is to have a web site that’s attractive and easy to use. Get out of your customers’ way and let them do what they came to your site to do.

Keyword Research: If you target the wrong keywords, you’re doomed to fail. You’ve heard that a million times, I hope. More than that, you also need to know what to do with your keywords.

Analytics: How will you know you’re successful if you have no way of measuring what you’ve done? Measure, analyze, adjust strategies and tactics as needed.

Tools: Having access to appropriate SEO tools can give you an advantage over the competition. Of course, more important than the tools is knowing how to interpret the data they provide.

Crawlability: A search engine cannot index pages that its spider cannot crawl. Be careful with the Flash movies, the complicated DHTML and javascript, the robots.txt file, etc. Here are 5 common crawlability mistakes you need to know about.

Content: This can take many forms: a blog, articles, videos, a FAQ page, or even user-generated content like product/service reviews. When you get this one right, you’ll have an easier time getting…

Links: Your great content isn’t going to rank well without links, preferably from relevant, quality sites. I brain-dumped (almost) everything I know about links early last year.

Social/Local Findability: Let me explain this since I might be inventing a new term. Social Media Marketing and Local Search are musts. The size and scope of your company may dictate which you emphasize more, but neither should be ignored. Local SEO is a must for most small businesses, but social media can work, too. Bigger companies that target an audience more than a location will find social media offers a lot of opportunities. In either case, the goal is findability. You want customers to be able to find you as easily as possible, and you can do this on social media sites that make local networking easier.

Reputation Management: It’s imperative to know what people are saying about your company. This isn’t just for Big Business, either: An old client of mine runs the only roller skating rink in our area, yet is probably losing business because they have a couple negative reviews on a certain Local Search site. Given the growing influence of user reviews, knowing how to manage your reputation is a must.

Trust: In my first post of 2007, I said trust is the No. 1 factor, and nothing has changed since then. Trusted domains are powerful domains. When you have trust, from users and search engines, you’re on the way to search marketing success. Don’t miss this more recent article: Why Trust Matters & How To Earn It.

As you climb the pyramid, you’ll find buzz/word-of-mouth marketing or maybe community helping you along. To a large degree, these are two sides of the same coin. It’s the people factor, the human element that often separates the winners and losers in search marketing. Get people talking positively about you, whether it be one-to-one conversation among friends or in the larger setting of an online community, and you’ll climb the pyramid that much faster.

Event Tracking 101 For Google Analytics

Setting up Analytics accounts has evolved beyond installing “generated” scripts on pages and calling it a day. What started with the advent of software that told us how many “hits” we got a day has evolved into a sophisticated decision assistance engine, and keeping up on the new and cutting edge offers full time employment for many people across the world.

As part of our website designs, many of us feature various graphic “buttons” or images on our site that either link to interior pages, booking paths, or even lead users off-site.

We embed video, or have image links to our social media profiles. Clicks on these images are not recorded well in Google Analytics. We can see that the navigation path went from one page to the next, but how the visitor got there, and which option they took to travel that path, is hidden.

We have issues proving how an orange button on a blue site would receive more attention than a blue button on a blue site. There is no denying the website visitor’s chosen action. If we can use our Analytics to glean that intention, then we can have more insight into what makes our guests buy from our websites, and what stands in the way of those purchases.

Enter: Event Tracking from Google Analytics. By adding a simple piece of code to the link for each image, tab, button, graphic or even text link – we can run easy to read and understand reports on how our visitors are interacting with our websites.

There’s no need to change your scripts, or set a section up in your Google Analytics dashboard. All you need to do is add code to the link, and it automatically starts tracking within your dashboard.

Here’s the code you’ll need to customize to add event tracking to a text link on your site. The elements you’ll need to change are in ALL CAPS.

This code would be used to add event tracking to an image, banner ad or button-type element on your site:

Some vocabulary is probably necessary so we can define how to turn the code above, into event tracking on your site. Let’s define the different elements of event tracking.

Category – A required element, the category tells you what type of object you want to track. This could be “Videos” or “Book Online Button”:

Actions – Sometimes, the guest’s action doesn’t necessarily take you to a page on your site, it might play a video, open your availability calendar, or open a widget to let you sign up for the email newsletter. An action might be “Play” or “Click” or “Click on a Button” versus “Click on a link.”

Labels – A third and optional field, the label can help you further identify where the event took place, or the type of event that took place. If you want to know how many people clicked the Book Now button on a particular page – you’d use the label to indicate the page you’re tracking in the event. It would look something like:

You could also use the Label to indicate what color button was clicked, or its placement on a page.

Once you have event tracking setup within the code on your site, the data will automatically start pulling into the “Events” section of your Google Analytics dashboard.

Under the “Content” section in the left-hand column, find “Events.” Below events, you’ll see the different types of event tracking reports available to you.

Choosing “Overview” gives you a look at the data your event tracking makes available. You’ll see the event Category report here. This is where you can start drilling down into what does and does not work on your site.

Click on “view full report” and choose each event category to drill down into the actions and labels under each Category. You’ll see a total of how many times each button, image, link, or ad was clicked on, along with a second metric, Unique Events.

Unique events are important because one user might click back and forth on the same element a few times. Pushing play and pause on a video, or tabbing through some options on a product page would be examples.

Unique events will show you how many visitors triggered a particular event.

• Is the orange button at the bottom of your page receiving more clicks than the blue one at the top?
• What would happen if you turned the button at the top of the page orange?

Using event tracking to help you discern which elements are working for your website visitors, and which are being ignored can help you increase your bottom line.

Streamlining your conversion funnels from entrance to payment receipt makes your visitors more likely to use your site again, and more likely to recommend your site to their friends and acquaintances. Event tracking can be the answer.

What functions are you using in Google Analytics to see how your visitors behave on your site, and what actions are you taking to help them along the path from search to purchase? I’d love to hear your ideas!

A Beginner’s Guide To Setting Goals In Google Analytics

When I first started using Google Analytics, my “goal” was to not run away screaming. The intense amount of information, seemingly disconnected, made understanding what I needed so overwhelming.

In my last article,we talked about the basic reports you should watch as a beginner. This week, we’re going to work on how to make Google Analytics work for you via Goal setup and configuration.

The first thing you need to do after login is find where to setup goals, which is not where you see the goal results. In reality, most of the setup in Google Analytics happens behind the sprocket in the upper right hand corner:

Once you’re in the right spot, you’ll see the “Goals” tab below where you choose the profile.

A note of caution, you’re allowed 5 sets of goals with 5 goals in each set. You don’t get to delete a goal and set something new up – so be choosy about what you put in here.

I’m going to show you a way to set up goals that will allow you to see a lot of information for one goal, so it’s not necessary to get extremely granular in your setup, to begin with anyway.

Before I start my setup, I boil down the ultimate “goal” of my pages. In e-commerce, these are generally 3 things:

• Did the visitor search for something?
• Did they add it to their cart?
• Did they buy it?

As I work in travel – a “shopping cart” is not really used, but there is valuable information to be found in how a user navigates your site through a date search, or as we call it “quick search.” My first goal is going to be an inquiry into how many people complete a quick search. Then, we’ll set up a goal for conversions.

First, name your goal something recognizable, so you know immediately what the end result of this Goal should be. I used “complete quick search.”

Next, set the goal to “Active” and give it a goal type. I use URL Destination. Although you can use Time on Site, Pages per Visit, and Event – those setups are a tad advanced and best left for another day.

Under “Goal Details”, enter the ultimate URL you want your visitors to hit in this goal funnel. I used the URL given when a quick search is completed. If you use session IDs and parameters in your URLS, you may need to use wildcards to see the goal. More on setting those up in the Google Analytics Help for Match Types.

If your URLs are case sensitive, check that box, and if you don’t run e-commerce, but are a lead generation site, you can set a value for every user that completes the goal. I don’t recommend this to start with, your numbers will be a tad wonky and confusing.

You then want to set the funnel for reaching your goal – so you check that box and you’ll see the boxes for the funnel to appear. This is where you copy in the steps a user could take to reach the goal. I recommend setting this up fairly simply – homepage, content page or two, goal page.

You’ll still see every entrance and execution of that goal as long as you don’t check the “Required Step” box!

Once you’re happy with the goal – click save and watch for results.

Because we didn’t click “required step” when entering our funnel urls, you’ll be able to see entrances and exits from your goal funnel that don’t follow your prescribed entry.

If you don’t have a “thank you” page to track, and this does happen via fancy JavaScript booking processes and the link, then you can set up virtual pages that will help you track reservations. That is a tad more advanced, so if you’re not technical, find a good consultant to help you with it. If you want to give it a try on your own, here are the Google Analytics instructions for virtual pages.

Seeing how users are interacting with your buying process is the key to fixing issues, making your guests more efficient in their choice, and finding room for improvement. Following these simple setup steps can get you a long way towards finding out more about your website, your buying cycle, and your selling process.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

How To Analyze Your Content Performance In Google Analytics

Google Analytics is divided in five main categories:

1. Visitors
2. Advertising
3. Traffic Sources
4. Content
5. Conversions

In this post, I want to talk about the Content category. I will not discuss all the reports available, but the ones I use most frequently.

If you click on Content it will expand to the sections below:

Overview

The overview gives a quick overall view of your content. You can see metrics such as pageviews, unique pageviews, avg. time on page and bounce rate. By using the date range option on the top right corner, you can select your date range and also easily compare to past dates.

In the overview you have the option to click on page, page title, search term, event category or Adsense page. You will get a summary of the report and with one click you go to the full report.

Site Content

Site content reports consist of:

• Pages
• Content Drilldown
• Landing Pages
• Exit Pages

Pages

If you want to know which pages are visited the most on your website, this is the report for you. Below a screenshot of the top bar in Google Analytics when you click on Pages. These metrics you get for every page.

You can easily change the appearance of your data by using the view option.

There are five different views. Data (this is the standard view), Percentage, Performance, Comparison and Pivot.

I really like the Comparison view, because it’s easy to compare page performance against the site average. It’s great to get quick insights about which pages are performing well above or below site average regarding metrics such as Avg. Time on page, bounce rate and % of exits.

Landing Pages

In the landing pages option, you can see which pages are the most popular landing pages for your website and their performance. You can click on every page and by choosing secondary dimension you have many options to filter.

If you e.g. want to know which traffic sources are bringing the most traffic to your homepage, just click on the homepage and select source. (see screenshot)

Great thing about this report is that E-commerce data is included, so you see which pages bring you transactions and revenue.

Site Speed

In May 2011, Google announced the site speed option in the new Google Analytics interface. You can measure this by adding the line _trackPageLoadTime(); to your tracking code. Click here for the detailed instructions.

In this report, the average page load time of your pages is shown. Google has officially announced that site speed is a signal in their search ranking algorithms, so I definitely recommend to start measuring the speed of your pages. After all, nobody likes slow loading pages.

Site Search

If you have a search engine on your website which visitors can use to search the site, you can measure the usage of this feature. The results you can find under the Site Search category in Google Analytics.

Site Search consists of:

• Overview
• Usage
• Search Terms
• Pages

Overview

In the overview, you see the percentage of visits with and without site search. Also some other metrics such as % search exits, % search refinements, time after search and search depth.

Usage

Usage also provides you with the percentage of visits with and without site search, but you have more options to filter your data through secondary dimension. Also, you have the view option to change the appearance of your data which I mentioned earlier in this post. And there is an E-commerce tab that gives you transactions, revenue and conversion rate data.

Search Terms

This report gives you the search terms people use to search your website. It’s a great way to find out what people are searching for. This report also provides you with the metrics % search exits, % search refinements, time after search and search depth for every search term.

With this information you can analyze the top search terms. For example, you can compare the % search exits for a particular search term to site average. If it’s very high, maybe your search engine is not giving the best results for the query.

Events

If you have event tracking enabled, you will use this report to see the results of your events.

The events category consists of:

• Overview
• Top Events
• Pages

With event tracking, you can measure all kinds of activity on your website such as PDF downloads, printing pages, interaction with a slidehow, watching videos and much more.

If you want to implement Event Tracking you can click here for all the details. I recommend first to decide all the things you want to track on your site using event tracking. This will help to create a clear report in Google Analytics after Event Tracking is implemented.

The Content category provides so many information about the performance of your website to keep you busy analyzing it for a long time. It’s a great place to find new insights and take action on it.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.