Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimization’ Category

4
Aug 2012

Competitive Analysis

Posted by Steve  >  Search Engine Optimization, User Interface Design
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Understanding how your competitors have succeeded online can help you avoid the costly trial and error of testing strategies that do not work.In our analysis, we typically analyze a minimum of three competitor web sites. This analysis plays a critical role in creating a custom web strategy that will serve as your map to online success.Our competitive analysis reports include the following information:

Search Engine Optimization Analysis
How well have your competitor’s web pages been optimized for search engine rankings?

We review their home page and other major pages in their web site to determine what they may have done correctly to assist their success or lack of success for areas you can capitalize upon.

Off Page SEO
Off-Page SEO includes all the things your competition does to promote their website outside the design of the website itself, such as getting more inbound links to a site, registering with directories relevant to an industry, and getting more pages into the search engine indexes.

Link Popularity Analysis
How the number of links pointing to your competitor’s website(s) may or may not have contributed to their ranking success. In addition, we will provide additional commentary should something of particular interest arise.

Backlinks are links that are directed towards your websites, also knows as Inbound links. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

We evaluate the quality of the links you have received to date according to your historical link building records, compare that to the expense and prepare recommendations for ongoing strategy. Additional link building strategies or tweaks to the current campaign(s) may be recommended.

Web Site Architecture / Structure
How search engine friendly is the structure of your competitor’s web site? Have the search engines found a large percentage of the pages that actually exist on their website(s)? If so, it could be that their web site structure is helping them win online.

Keyword Analysis
What keywords are your competitor’s focusing their marketing on? Using a variety of analytical and statistical methods we will put together a comprehensive list of the keywords which your competitors are working with to focus advertising dollars.

Competitor Summaries
The findings for each competitor will be revealed in this section, from which we will be able to set relevant strategy for your web site.

Summary Recommendations
The competitive analysis we provide will include summary recommendations for your website based on the effective tactics discovered.

From there, we begin planning an annual online marketing strategy for your web site.

6
Sep 2011

Metrics to measure…

Posted by Steve  >  Analytics, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization
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As more and more companies move from “old marketing” or “outbound marketing” (tradeshows, print advertising, direct mail, telemarketing) and embrace “modern marketing” or “inbound marketing” (using the Internet to make it easier for customers to find you using your website, SEO, Social Media, Blogs, etc.) a lot of people wonder what metrics they should track to measure their success and progress.

Here are some ideas for the 5 marketing metrics you should track… in my opinion.

1) Website Grade - The great thing about this score is that is it very easy to understand (who doesn’t comprehend a 1 to 100 score?), and it compares you against your peers (currently over 70,000 other websites), and it is based on a number of different metrics so it summarizes data to save time.  Without fail, this metric really allows me to show clients positive development.

2) Website Traffic – This is the total number of unique visitors to your website over a time period, usually a month or a year.  This gives you a sense of the overall interest in your business, and if the marketing programs you are doing are working or not. This is a great metric to watch as you can create tactics quite easily to cause spikes in traffic… such as e-newsletters. We’ve done work with Partymart and sent a series of newsletters leading up to their most popular season, Hallowe’en, which increased their visitation and sales dramatically.

3) Leads - This is the next step in the sales funnel, and is the most important metric for measuring your marketing efforts. Integrating a newsletter sign-up form allows you to keep track of the conversion sign-ups and generates ‘qualified’ leads.

4) New Customers - “How many sales did you close this month?” is probably the most important question you should answer for your business.

5) Customer Acquisition Cost – Many businesses don’t compute this on an ongoing basis, but knowing the total sales and marketing cost for each new customer is important.  It gives you a good sense of how your business is going, and if it is getting easier or harder to grow.

So, that’s a few ideas on metrics I like to look at monthly.

 

3
Sep 2011

Case Study: Angel Solutions Website Re-design

Posted by Steve  >  Branding, Search Engine Optimization, Web Design & Strategy
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Angel Accessibility Solutions website re-design by The Steve Roper Group

When I began working with Angel Solutions in 2009, their website was grading quite low – 22/100 in optimization effectiveness. Over the past eighteen months, we have created them a modern highly optimized website and increased traffic to their website by over 5,000%.

The website www.angelsolutions.com now ranks 213,002 out of the 3,788,369 websites that have been ranked so far. While that may seem to be a low number, this website now ranks within the Top 2.85% of all websites globally. There are a lot of great people out there in cyber world doing some excellent work and achieving a grading within the top 2.85% is a very good achievement.

A website grade of 94/100 for www.angelsolutions.com means that of the millions of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 94% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness.

This now represents an improvement of over 450% from November 2009 when I began working with Angel when the website was grading at 22/100… so all in all, I am extremely pleased with how well the website is now performing.

Visitation to the website is up 836% over the past year.

What analyzing websites like this allows me to do is see what is working and what is not and incrementally tweak a website to move higher and higher up in online rankings, which means people searching for certain terms pertaining to a certain business find the website faster, with more credibility.

To see of our other website designs, visit The Steve Roper Group.

15
Apr 2011

CVS Cruise Victoria Website Report…

Posted by Steve  >  Search Engine Optimization, Web Design & Strategy
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Of all the websites we have created over the past ten years, possibly no one company has benefited more than CVS Cruise Victoria, whose website graded at an extremely low 9/100 when we began working on it. Unfortunately, we do not have an example to show you and even doing a search on Wayback does not show anything ever existed before we re-designed it but there was a web page…

With only a small budget available, the design was constrained to an html site and evolved only slightly visually over a three years period.

However, today the CVS Cruise Victoria website has a grading of 89/100, which means that of the millions of websites that have previously been evaluated, the algorithm we employ to measure these analytics has calculated that this site now scores higher than 89% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness.

As mentioned above and because I want to make sure I state this clearly, this is an increase from 9/100 from the date we began optimizing and working on CVS Cruise Victoria in June, 2008. An increase of almost 900% in less than three years.

Visitation to the web site has increased by 66.50% year over year and the bounce rate is down by 25.38%.

CVS Cruise Victoria did not have a Blog, and after several suggestions, we finally talked the management into creating a Free Blog on Blogspot, even though it is not as good as virtually any other option, it does work… and was implemented in a fashion that the client could update on their own. Now, when we analyze that Blog, we find that their Blog now grades globally at  37.13 which is based on a measurement of the traffic levels to the blog and the number and quality of links pointing at it.

Optimizing that content from the Blog to assist the overall ranking of the website was a key step in achieving the higher grading, by allowing the maximum exposure of the valuable content every website has – which provides the best chance possible of drawing traffic from the web and web searches. In essence, this is about maximizing your ROC – return on content.

After coaching the management at CVS Cruise Victoria over a three year period, the site managed to collect a total of 328 inbound links to the website, from an initial total of 7.

One of the most important measures for a website is how many other sites link to it. The more links the better. Having links to a website from authoritative resources on the Internet helps that website rank higher in search engines since these links are an indication that your website is trustworthy and contains good content.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a standard way to easily deliver content to visitors after they’ve left your website but they’re still interested in your subject. RSS is commonly used with blogs, news feeds, and other formatted news or other sources of information, so when we included the Blog and linked it to the website, CVS gained the integration of this feature, driving MORE traffic to the website.

Alexa is an online service that measures traffic for millions of sites on the Internet in a similar way to Nielsen television show ratings. When they crawled the website in late 2010, they found that the site had increased to rank within the top 11.68 % of all websites.

When we began work on this web site, the site ranked 73.46% of all web sites, which is quite a low score – which means we increased the sites online visibility by 61%.

So, overall, although this company would not share their sales figures with us, we think it is fair to state that with the overall success of the website, that we have helped them increase sales significantly over the past three years.

What does bother me, although it is every clients right, is that the client decided they could now update it themselves and this is one of the areas I do take exception with… we try very hard to become partners with our clients but every now and then it does not work out as we hoped and this is one of those occasions.

We wish CVS Cruise Victoria Good Luck.

—

A note added on September 1, 2011. We just checked the grading of this website and it has now declined to 77/100 from a high of 89/100 and has fallen below the Top 14% of all global websites… that’s a fairly substantial fall in grading over a period of less than a year and goes to show how much maintenance is needed on a website.


11
Apr 2011

How effective is your website?

Posted by Steve  >  Analytics, Search Engine Optimization, Web Design & Strategy
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Your website is your virtual storefront… and accessible worldwide. There is no other communication vehicle which provides such a wide range of access to potential customers.

It becomes your brand identity, your voice to the world.

And unlike print material, your website is a dynamic vehicle through which you have the opportunity to provide timely information for all your customers. A good website uses this leverage to engage with customers, extend the reach of a brand and – most importantly – sell more product.

Your website has the luxury of being able to host as much content as is relevant to your brand, your customers and your business objectives and a good website provides visitors with detailed information about your product, your company, your story and how to contact you. And of course, you want them to discover whatever information they are seeking or provide them information on how to reach you to answer their questions….

Over the past few years with the explosion of social media and WordPress, there are now additional ways to update your website with relevant content far more efficiently than just a few years ago.

Creating a website which fully integrates social media, WordPress and RSS Feeds, allowing one post to be multi-purposed, optimized content across a broad spectrum of media and be 100% trackable, unlike print media or television, is the way to go today and we believe this requires the skills of an experienced marketer and a well thought out marketing strategy.

Using the full power of your website integrated with social media allows you to get your message out quickly and efficiently and retain the analytics to track return on investment.

Of course, there are strategies which work more effectively than others and optimizing your website by giving visibility to your best selling products and providing an easy path to purchase those products on your home page is key to converting visitors. A great website asks for the sale by including a compelling Call-to-Action up front.

Our goal with our website design is to helps companies make the most of their websites by creating a thoughtfully designed site map which is goal oriented and ensures that the site is driving and attracting new traffic, converting visitors to buyers, increasing sales and extending the reach of your brand.

We provide full reports on websites for a nominal fee to give clients a snapshot of what they are doing right and what areas they need work on. If you would like to know how your website is doing and in what areas it could use some assistance, drop us an email at steve@stephenroper.com or visit our website to check around for yourself.

6
Apr 2011

Swan Lake Re-Design…

Posted by Steve  >  Branding, Non Profit, Search Engine Optimization, Web Design & Strategy
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A couple of years back we were asked to re-design the Swan Lake Nature Sanctuary website. Above we have provided a snapshot of what the original site looked like and our re-design.

We are very pleased with the results of the new design.

Here’s some of the stats regarding the new design and what it means to the Swan Lake Nature Sanctuary.

Visitation over the first year of the new design increased by 78% and a full 65% of those are New Visitors.

For a non-profit organization, reaching new markets is critically important as anyone who has received a direct mail package from most non-profits knows… you cannot keep going back to your membership for more funds to support the organization time and again… non-profits MUST find new members and offer them something which they find compelling enough to support.

The re-design of the website positions Swan Lake Nature Sanctuary for the future… integrating a variety of social media options including Facebook. Considering the increase in visitation and our 216 Facebook Friends, we’re pretty pleased with the results as well.

The Swan Lake Christmas Hill Nature Sanctuary consists of two distinct areas;

  • marshy lowlands surrounding Swan Lake
  • rocky, oak-forested highlands of Christmas Hill

Swan Lake
The marsh around Swan Lake provides good habitat for many birds and small animals, including muskrat, river otter and mink. They make their homes in the rock walls, marsh grasses and cattails beside the lake. Swan Lake’s water comes from a large watershed to the north and the east, which includes Blenkinsop Lake. The water drains west from the lake into the Colquitz River and drains into the Pacific Ocean at Portage Inlet.

Christmas Hill
The highland environment of Christmas Hill is in marked contrast to the lowlands of Swan Lake. The glacially moulded rock faces, the vernal (seasonal) pond and the majestic view from the hilltop are of special interest to visitors. The meadows surrounding Christmas Hill bloom with a sea of wildflowers in the spring. The Swan Lake and Christmas Hill sections are connected by a trail corridor. A 2.5-kilometre loop trail, that includes two wharves and a floating walkway, provide access to the lake area.

Swan Lake History
The lake was formed 12,000 years ago when the last glacier receded. Swan Lake was rescued from oblivion just a few decades ago. During most of its recent history it was a dumping ground for raw sewage, dairy farms and a winery. Cleanup began in the 1970′s and today the lake is a rich habitat for a variety of wildlife.

The Nature Sanctuary Society
Swan Lake Christmas Hill Nature Sanctuary is a nature education centre. It is a registered charitable organization run by the Swan Lake Christmas Hill Nature Sanctuary Society. The lands and facilities are owned by the Corporation of the District of Saanich, and the Nature Sanctuary Society operates through a land management agreement with Saanich since June, 1975.

15
Mar 2011

Lisa Williams web site…

Posted by Steve  >  Search Engine Optimization, Web Design & Strategy
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We have now had a year of tracking on the launch of the web site we developed for Lisa Williams, which generally provides us with a good indication of how well we’ve done with a re-design and our search engine optimization.

So, this morning we went in, did some digging around and put together a one year overview of how well we did.

We started with creating a comparison jpeg of the original site we had to work from and the new site we designed.

Then, we checked the overall grading.

When we began, the site was grading at 36/100… so well below average. How well have we done with the grading? This morning the site is grading at 86/100, so an increase over over 225%. This provides us with a good base to incrementally increase the optimization without having to worry about that huge catch-up we had to do over the last year.

Then, we checked visitation stats… Year over year visitation is up 591% !

Over the past twelve months, we have driven tens of thousands of new Visitors to Lisa’s new web site.

The Bounce Rate if Visitors is a mere 19%, which means when people are referred to the site by search engines, they are getting what they expect, and in our experience, 19% is unusually low.

What does this mean? It means that people searching for Lisa Williams, the Victoria Realtor for waterfront and luxury homes are finding her much faster than a year ago and staying on her site for over 3.5 minutes per visit and that means they are finding what they are looking for and probably contacting Lisa.

Lisa is the agent of record for some of Victoria’s most prestigious waterfront luxury homes and you can check out her web site, (which we are obviously proud of)  at www.lisawilliams.ca

6
Dec 2010

Metrics…

Posted by Steve  >  Search Engine Optimization, Web Design & Strategy
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The Steve Roper Group uses the following metrics to track SEO/SEM success.

Referring Domains

Top Referring Keywords

Click Paths

Paid vs. Natural

Geographic Referrals

Visiting Trends

Top Landing pages

Bounce Rate

Conversion Rates

Referring Domains

Who sends your traffic?  Major search engines often make up a large percentage of traffic for many sites.  However, you should also pay attention to what other sites send referrals.  Your referrals can help measure link building success and find new possible link relationships by cataloguing site themes and verticals that you may be able to generate buzz through.  Knowing your audience is one of the first steps in linking campaigns.

Top Referring Keywords

There are millions of people that are using search engines each day.  That means that there are searches that will never cross your mind to target that you just naturally speak to.  We search your logs to find these frequent keywords that may help you expand your visibility and better focus where you point your campaigns in the future.

Click Paths

If you see many people end up in the same section, or page, of your site within a few clicks, it would indicate that there’s an opportunity to engage people more effectively by creating more targeted content for that theme.

Paid vs. Natural

If you are seeing more that 30% of your traffic from paid search, you should be looking into driving traffic in other ways.  Paid search is great for measured ROI and immediate pay off, but it lacks the longevity of referral and search traffic.  On the other side of the coin, a paid campaign can help you collect data on long-tail searches more quickly and jump starts your SEO campaigns by putting immediate visibility on your new content.

Geographic Referrals

For marketing campaigns that include offline advertising, geo-targeting is very important to establish the results.  You can pair the airing (printing) of offline promotions with changes in traffic by region.  When you section out these groups you may find opportunities to create region specific promotions (landing pages or service offerings) to maximize your value.

Visiting Trends

Tracking seasonality is an often overlooked metric.  Your visitor trends should be looked at in relation to expected changes in your business.  You should compare current trends with past trends, search trends and economic trends to get the most value.

Top Landing Pages

The first step in determining your top landing pages should be to sectionalize your data.  Look at organic, paid and referral traffic as separate.  Landing page should also be paired with click path if you are creating common paths.  You should be looking at how to improve customer experience along that path, or by better targeting the path end in your organic/paid campaigns.

Bounce Rate

This metric is how many people arrive on a page and immediately leave.  Good bounce rates vary greatly depending on your vertical and traffic source.  What is important in determining this value is to pair bounce rate with another metric.  Find a connection so you can make a clear assessment of what aspect of the page is losing the customer.  It may be that users can’t find what they want, that some portion of your page is broken, or a number of other issues.  The important information you get from bounce rate is largely in conjunction with another metric.

Conversion Rates

A conversion rate is a measurement, also often referred to as a metric, which is defined as the percentage of visitors who take or complete a desired action. This is probably the most important metric you can measure.

1
Dec 2010

Increasing Visitation…

Posted by Steve  >  Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Web Design & Strategy
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For the past five years, we have been actively working on increasing the visibility and success of Partymart.com.

This company has always held a special interest to me since I developed their identity for them in 2004. For a year or so, we went separate ways and in 2006, we reunited and it has been a successful partnership ever since.

Here are a few metrics of just how successful.

In 2007, Partymart received 120,086 visitors annually.

In 2008, with a variety of tactics, that visitation number increased to 387,001 Visitors

In 2009, with much more aggressive tactics and strategy, that increased to 810,771 Visitors

In 2010, by aggressively producing micro-sites and newsletters designed to drive traffic to the site, we will have increased that number to over 1,000,000 Visitors while decreasing our ad spending.

16
Oct 2010

Backlinks…

Posted by Steve  >  Search Engine Optimization
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What are Backlinks and why are they important?

Backlinks are links that are directed towards your websites, also knows as Inbound links.

The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website.

Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of QUALITY inbound links to that site. So when looking for backlinks, you should not be satisfied with merely getting inbound links, it is the quality of the inbound link that matters.

A search engine considers the content of the sites to determine the QUALITY of a link. When inbound links to your site come from other sites, and those sites have content related to your site, these inbound links are considered more relevant to your site. If inbound links are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant.

The higher the relevance of inbound links, the greater their quality.

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