Information on some technology we’ve been trying out + we announce relaunch of the Coffee & Croissant Club
Over the past four or five weeks we have been experimenting with some new technologies on the NewsBusiness website Continue reading
Do you have a nagging feeling that your website is just not performing? There are ways to find out how it’s going – at NewsBusiness we use a couple of tools to assess how a website is performing. Here are the main ones we use:
First stop of course are your website’s statistics – which you can generally access through your web host’s control panel. These will normally give you an idea of eg:
There is often some confusion about ‘hits’. Each page that is viewed will normally generate multiple hits, and so you can’t take the number of hits as the number of visitors! A hit just records a file that is requested from the web server, and most web pages comprise a number of files, such as image files, stylesheet files and the html or php file for the page itself, so hits will always be a much higher figure than real visitors.
Unique visitors is a more helpful statistic, as each person (via their computer’s IP address) that visits the your site in the month is only counted once, even if they visit multiple times in that month. It’s comparable to number of ‘readers’ for print publications.
The Google Analytics system – if you install it on your site – gives you much more detailed stats than your website stats. A useful statistic is what’s called the ‘bounce rate’ for your site or for individual pages on the site. Bounce rate measures the proportion of visitors that visit one page of your site and then leave the site without clicking through to any other pages on your site. The higher this figure, the less likely it is they will complete the action you want them to take. In other words they haven’t found your website interesting enough to stick around and see more of it.
There are a number of factors that determine where your website (or – technically – each page) appears in the search engine rankings in Google, but one of the key metrics Google measures to determine where a page should rank, is how many other web pages link to it. A link building strategy is outside the scope of this article, but it’s easy to find what links you already have. Go to www.yahoo.com.au and type into the search bar:
link:www.yourwebsite.com.au
then choose ‘inlinks’ and then ‘except from this domain’ and ‘entire site’. You’ll then see a list of all sites that link in to your site. As a guide, if you have any less than 25 links, your site is not really getting any benefit from links in and its Google rank may be suffering as a result. You can do the same thing with a similar Google tool, the difference is that Google won’t give you all the sites linking in, just a selection. Yahoo gives you all of them.
If you’re not number one in Google for your business name, you either have a very common name or something is seriously wrong!
The trouble is, most people searching for what you do on Google don’t know anything about you, let alone your name. So you need to rank highly for important keywords or key phrases relating to what you do. Working out what people will type in to Google when looking for your product or service is an art by itself.
Finding out your website ‘rank’ for your important keywords and phrases used to be a laborious process of manually checking position (I used to give up if I couldn’t find the site in the top ten pages – top 100 results). Now there is a great free tool that automates the process:
www.seobook.com – Rankchecker
Rankchecker is a free download from seobook – it lets you list any number of keywords or phrases and then find out where you list for each one on Google (global and Australian version), Yahoo (global and Australian) and Bing.
The great thing about this tool is it circumvents ‘personal results’, which is where Google skews the search results based on sites it knows you have visited before – Google will rank a site you’ve visited before higher than it would do for someone else. That’s why just using Google yourself to find out where your site ranks can often give you a ‘false positive’ of your ranking – it may appear to you that your site is ranking highly but no-one else will be seeing it there!
Your stats or Google Analytics results will tell you how many visitors you are getting, but won’t tell you how you’re doing in relation to your competitors. This information can be pretty hard to come by, since your competitors are unlikely to share this with you, but there is a tool that can at least give you an idea. That tool is
Alexa is a US based service that ranks websites around the world by ‘popularity’. It’s a complex formula based largely on monitoring sites visited by millions of people who have installed the Alexa toolbar. Unsurprisingly the top sites in Australia are google.com.au, Facebook, google.com, YouTube and Yahoo.
To use the Alexa tool just type your URL into the search box and it will give you your website’s traffic rank globally and in Australia.
Alexa admit that the accuracy of their list declines the lower down the list you are, but it is a good general guide. As a very general rule, if you’re in the top million your site is reasonably popular, if it has ‘no rank’ then it has not been picked up at all by Alexa. Once your site has been picked up by Alexa, it can then give you an idea of whether your site has become more popular or less over the previous one month and three month periods – a green arrow is good, a red arrow bad.
David Bateson
David on Google+
If you’re in business, you should have! But are you saying it, and are you being heard?
It never ceases to amaze me how many businesses have their websites set up to put news stories on them, but then either don?t put up any news at all, or the ‘news’ is over six months old – not really ‘news’ any more. And just putting up news stories on a corporate website is really not enough – news is meant to be spread, and email is the best way.
The main problem with putting a regular email update or newsletter together is actually setting the time aside to think about what to say and then to write the update itself. And of course it needs to be interesting and engaging and – subtly – include a sales message.
There are really two challenges – one, actually deciding what to write about and what exactly to write and two, mastering the technology of setting up the email and sending it.
At NewsBusiness we spend a lot of time talking to businesses about doing this, and we actually produce and send newsletters and updates via email for many of our clients as part of our PR marketing services. But we are so convinced that this strategy is vital to all businesses to drive business and sales, that we have just launched a new service which actually does all that needs to be done to produce and send this email.
Called ’Something to Say‘, we help you to decide what topics to cover, we interview you to find out what news your business has, we write the articles, and once you have approved them, we load them up to your website and create and send an email to your database for you. If you don’t currently use an email marketing system, we can recommend a few (they are very reasonably priced), and if you don?t have a mechanism for loading news stories to your website, we can also recommend one. And unlike other copywriting services, we?ve made Something to Say a fixed price service.
For more about Something to Say? jump on this page on the main NewsBusiness website, or call us on 07 3103 5764.
PS We’ve written before about how to decide what to write and how to write here:
The Art of the Start* (or how to put pen to paper to write that newsletter!)
David Bateson
David on Google+
This post now appears on a blog on publicity and public relations on our sister site, Bateson Publicity.
Read it here.
This post now appears on a blog on publicity and public relations on our sister site, Bateson Publicity.
Read it here.
Just read this post by “New Rules of Marketing & PR” author David Meerman Scott on the dangers of using stock photography on your website – everyone uses the same images. In the article he refers to the image of one particular person that crops up on a number of websites – and I’m sure you’ve noticed this too – we have! Why not use photos of people that actually work at your business? I’d be interested to hear any comments on this.
Here is David Meerman Scott’s article:
Who the hell are these people?
This quote, from chief Executive of WebDynamic Dominic Gamble, on the importance of getting people to your site over and above just building it.
Interestingly, none of the points in the article talk about what is said on a website – the words. Do web developers assume this is part of the brief – or do they assume the client will come up with the words?
Read the whole article on smartcompany – 10 things your web developer must have
Seth Godin, the marketing author and guru, recently posted an article on his blog, “Things to ask before you redo your website”. He thinks people are generally asking the wrong questions (or at least not the most important questions) when they are contemplating a website revamp. Perhaps the most important question he says is “what is the goal of the site” ie what exactly do you want the website to do?
Read his full post here:
Things to ask before you redo your website
Just reading an item from the smartcompany website by founder of RedBalloonDays, Naomi Simson, on why the ‘About Us’ page on a website is so important. Couldn’t have put it better myself:
http://www.smartcompany.com.au/get-out-of-my-way/20090327-old-lessons-for-the-new-world.html
Why it?s important to keep your website content fresh, relevant and up-to-date
Humans like their information to be fresh and up-to-date. If this wasn?t the case all TV stations, radio stations and newspapers would be out of business. There might be a couple of magazines left.
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Search engines like fresh information too and are biased towards those sites that update their content regularly. This is why search engines like blogs (see this post on blogs). And why an oft quoted motto on getting good search engine rankings is ?content is king?.
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So if your business has a website that hasn?t been updated in a year or longer, not only is it unlikely to be ?crawled? (ie visited) that often by search engines, which will probably result in lower search engine rankings, but the humans that visit your site will probably notice too and won?t be very impressed. They might even wonder if you?re still in business.
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But if your site is obviously up-to-date and filled with information that your clients (or prospective clients) would find useful, not only will they appreciate that, but the chance of them returning soon will increase dramatically. And who knows, on their third or fourth visit (or seventh or eighth) they might buy something from you, or pick up the phone to enquire.
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But putting fresh, relevant content up on a website on a regular basis is hard. You need to have something new to say and you certainly need to set time aside to do it.
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At News Equals Business we?ve been on both sides of the table – working in-house with external web designers who were waiting for us to provide content for a new website, and on the other side waiting a long time for the client to put together the content for their website.
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An added complication when putting content together for a website is that it needs to satisfy two masters at the same time – the human visitors and the search engines. And on top of that it needs to give human visitors a reason to stick around for longer than 8 seconds before surfing off somewhere else.
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One of the areas we help our customers is in developing compelling copy that works for humans and search engines, and then helping them keep their websites fresh, up-to-date and relevant. We?re about to launch some web-based services in this area and we?ll let you know when we do.