For those who are not able to embark on a new website design this year as a New Year’s resolution mentioned in a previous post, there are other places where you can focus to keep your online marketing performance on track.  A great place to start when analyzing your marketing performance from previous years is your website’s analytics data.  If you weren’t tracking anything in 2009, then there is an easy New Years resolution for you!

If you have been tracking your efforts, what trends are you seeing?  Where has the majority of your traffic originated from: organic, paid, direct traffic or referring sites?  If you see that most of your traffic came through paid efforts, this might be a sign that shifting some of your focus to search engine optimization (SEO) to improve rankings may be valuable for you.  Over time, as you monitor your analytics, you may start to see an opportunity to pull back on the paid traffic and rely more heavily on organic traffic, which is free!

Within your analytics, continue to dig deeper beyond the source of the traffic to see the behavior of your website’s visitors.  What do visitors do when arriving at your site?  Do they simply leave after viewing only one page (also known as a bounce)?  In this case, look into where they are landing. There is a great report in Google Analytics called a Top Landing Pages report (particularly the Comparison view) which will enable you to have a quick and easy look at the landing pages that lead to a higher bounce rate than others. Or, perhaps you see many page views during visits, but very few conversions.  If so, think about the user experience and the calls to action throughout the site.  If you have an e-commerce site, perhaps it is the checkout process that is losing your visitors.

This year, strive to analyze your online marketing as a whole and source your analytics frequently. Within your analytics platform, it may be easy to look at a high level view of the traffic, but don’t ignore the detailed information available to you as well.  This can shed light into ways to reduce costs, such as by possibly making a shift from less paid traffic to more organic traffic.  Also use Google’s free tools, such as Google Analytics, Website Optimizer and Insights for Search to name a few.  These tools can help you to analyze your website’s data, perform tests to continue to make improvements, and identify search volumes and patterns over time that may be relevant to your website or industry.

Have you ever conducted a search for your company’s most popular keywords and wondered why your site doesn’t rank very well for a particular keyword?  The next time you come across this situation, take a look at the domain names that actually are ranking well.  What do they look like?  What you might find is something like the image below:

Do you see a theme?  Notice that for the search “bicycle tires”, the keywords bicycle and/or tires are located within the domain name. When keywords are within URLs, especially the main domain name, the search engines can more easily determine that the website as a whole is about that keyword. 

This is why including keywords in your URLs is so important from a ranking perspective.  It may even make the difference between being on the first page of the search results and being hidden a few pages deep.  If your website’s main domain name does not include keywords, keep this principle in mind as you build out new pages. Where possible, include the targeted keyword(s) in the URL. For example, www.example.com/bicycle-tires

Having keywords within URLs is only one of the many components of search engine optimization (SEO).  A few of the other important aspects include making sure that the search engines can crawl your website, that there are highly relevant sites with links to your site, that are no technical issues, and that there is enough content on the site’s pages.  When focusing on SEO, it’s important to note that there isn’t one thing that you need to do; it is all of the components combined that will provide the greatest results.

Let’s face it, social media is everywhere.  When listening to the radio or watching the nightly news, it is hard not to hear about the wave of social media.  Many businesses are jumping on the band wagon and dipping their toes in the social media water.  While this can be a great marketing strategy, it is also important to note, that social media channels are not the “silver bullet” of online marketing.  Many times marketers will neglect one aspect of their marketing campaign to try another one. 

As a business, moving into social media is a great idea, but not at the expense of your Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  It is important to make sure that you do not neglect your website as you move resources to developing the various channels necessary to have a strong presence in the various social media outlets.  When moving into social media, it is important to have a plan to keep your website updated and relevant for the users.  This will also help to support your social media effort.  Below are some things that you should always be working on with your SEO alongside your social media campaigns.

Title and Description Meta Tags – Does each page of your site have unique meta data that is relevant to the page content?  If not, work on this to ensure that every page of your site has a chance of ranking for the keywords that are featured in the content.

Keyword Research – When was the last time you researched the words you are going after?  Keyword research is something that should be done on a continual basis.  As search trends change, you need to update your keyword lists so you can target the words that your customers are searching for.

Linking Strategy – What is your linking strategy?  Do you have one?  Building backlinks is one of the most important factors when it comes to boosting search results.  Having a strategy to build high quality links to your site should be on the top of your list for things to accomplish.  Links can come from directories, blogs, authorities in your industry and other websites.  Create a plan and stick to it.

Web Design – Is your web site still the one that your cousin created for the business in 1996?  A well thought out optimized web design can be the difference between conversions and a 90% bounce rate.  If your site is not appealing, you will lose customers once you get them to the site.  Now may be the right time for an updated look and feel, or a complete redesign.

Social media and SEO go hand in hand.  It is important to make sure that you have the bases covered in both and are creating content in each to give your customers new and interesting information, so they will have a reason to continue visiting your website and your other social media channels.