How To Increase Website Traffic

You have just got your new website and now you find yourself waiting for the influx of traffic followed by all those new leads or orders.

Unfortunately, a shiny new website is no guarantee of any sort of traffic to your website.

So how do your drive high quality traffic to your website. Read some of our top tips for increasing your website traffic to make the process a little easier for you.

1.       Set up Google authorship. Google authorship is up there as one of the top traffic strategies of 2014. Sign up to Google plus with your personal profile and then create rel=author on your own website. This will help your articles gain authority in the search engines.

2.       To get immediate targeted traffic to your website consider investing in Google Adwords. This is Google’s advertising platform and is a sure way of bringing in targeted traffic to your site along with increasing sales as a result. Keep your Adwords campaign very focused in order to get the best results.

3.       Ensure that you have social media profiles set up for your business. Now, before you rush out and sign up to every social media platform out there. Pick the most suitable platform for your target customers and start with this first. It is better to have one social media platform active and performing well rather than spreading yourself too thin across too many platforms.

4.       Content. Writing great content is a must in 2014. Create a guide, an infographic or post from an expert such as a guest post.

a)      Do your keyword research and make sure you target relevant search terms.

b)      Optimise the post including an image, Meta tags and H1 tags.

Make your activity a habit. Start slowly building your profile and engagement with your target market. Be focused on your target terms and you will start to see results in your rankings within Google. At WebResults we have helped many businesses from SME’s to multinationals implement their digital marketing campaigns successfully. Contact us now to find out how we can help you on 01 2071872 or email info@webresults.ie.

Content Marketing in 2014

Last year we learned that content was a big deal in order to rank in Google search and this year nothing has changed. In fact, it has become even more important. We see that Google is ranking content that people are sharing and discussing. So when you are devising content, ask yourself is your information compelling, interesting, helpful – will people pass it on to others because they think it will bring benefit to their connections?

How do you create an effective content marketing strategy for your business.

1. First of all, if you have a website but no blog it might be a good time to implement a blog. Think about how a blog can add value to your web presence.Will a blog on your website bring more benefit (e.g. blog.yourwebsite.com or http://www.yourwebsite.com/blog) or should you set up an external blog on a blog site e.g. yourcompanyname.wordpress.com. If you have a news/info area already on your website where you can add new content, then an external blog will drive traffic into your website and create valuable links for the search engines. If on the other hand, you don’t have an updateable area on your website, you can attach a blog to your website to build out the content on you website. With any activity be clear about your objectives and what you want to achieve from that activity.

2. Make sure you know your audience. What are they looking for? What are the problems they need solved? What can you do to make their life easier? It is important that you help your prospective customers by giving them information that they will find useful. It is about holding the interest of your reader and putting yourself in their shoes.

3. What sort of content are you able to offer your potential customers – will it be text articles, pdf downloads, videos, eBooks etc .Maybe you can create a nice infographic about changes within your industry? Or maybe a downloadable eBook of tips and trends for your particular niche. Can you use images, ask questions. What type of content will engage with your target market? Make sure your content is always unique and that it is speaking to your customers.

4. You now need to plan your content around specific dates of the year relevant to your business. Have a content calendar in place and decide who in your organisation is going to write each article and what content piece will be written for that time of the year. For instance, Valentine’s Day is coming up soon and if you have an ecommerce store that sells gifts, flowers, trips away etc it is now time to start planning your content around these areas. Consider outsourcing article writing to a third party content marketing provider if you won’t get around to it. The key is to build a schedule and a routine and stick to you. Once your followers expect content, don’t let them down. The search engines will reward you for regular, relevant content focused on the keywords that are important to your business.

5. Adapt your content to the right audience. If you are sharing your content across various channels, be sure to customise it to suit the audience in question.That infographic we talked about earlier will not get the same reaction on Facebook as it would on Twitter for instance. So create different types of content for each internet platform.

6. Finally, a vital part of your content marketing strategy will be the tracking of activity around your content. How many people clicked that article link on your website? How many people viewed that video on Facebook? How many times was that whitepaper downloaded on Twitter? Did any of this traffic become a customer for your business? Which platform drove the highest quality visitors to your website? ……You get the idea.

At Webresults.ie we identify the right digital marketing strategy for your business in order to achieve maximum results for your business and increase your online revenue.

We can work with you through our outsourced services or if you would like to bring the skills in-house find out more about our Web Mentor Programme where we guide you and ensure your time is focused on activities that will drive results.

If you would like to grow your business through the web in 2014 contact WebResults.ie now for a Free audit of your website. We will identify any weaknesses that exist and offer some pointers on how you can drive your business to its full potential on the web.

What Bitly can do for Your Business

Bitly For Business:

 

Twitter is a great tool for any business with an effective digital marketing strategy. However with only 140 characters available to you, it is important that you make every character count when conveying your message. This restriction the amount of characters available becomes particularly problematic when including links in your posts. Bitly is a great tool for shortening these links as to not take up as many characters in your post. All that needs to be done is to post Link A into the Bitly Tool and the result will be Link B.

Link A:

• https://webresultsblog.wordpress.com/2013/09/16/why-businesses-need-to-listen-to-what-is-said-on-social-media/

Link B:

• http://bit.ly/1951omo

This isn’t the only function Bitly has to offer, with a range of stats, apps and shortcuts available for free.

Monitor Your Stats:

When you shorten a link through Bitly, each link is automatically saved to your personal account, these are called bitmarks. Within your account the stats tab enables you to view each bitmark’s popularity and performance. With this you can see how many clicks each link received and from which source. You can also breakdown the time of each click and view the country from where each click was received.

Purchase Personal Bitmarks:

If you wish to purchase a short domain you can have your bitmarks start with a personal beginning. Ellen DeGeneres has her bitmarks start with ellen.tv/ rather than bit.ly/.

You can also change the arrangement of letters at the end of a bitmark to be more relevant to the subject. This can be done for free by clicking on the pencil icon situated next to the bitly link. The difference in each link can be seen below.

• http://bit.ly/1951omo

• http://bit.ly/social-listening-wr

Bundle Your Links:

The option to bundle your links is a way of categorising your links and having them grouped together. This can form an easy to use archive of bitmarks for future use. People can also view these bundles so it is a good way for people to browse similar links that you have to offer.

App and Plugins:

Bitly has a free app for Iphone where you can create links and check your stats on the go. There is a helpful plugin available for chrome which is very handy for creating links quickly and another available for WordPress which can automatically create a bitmark for each blog you post.

Where your business is focused on inbound marketing activities, Bitly is a useful tool for tasks associated with content creation and link building.

If you have any questions about using Bitly or any other digital marketing tools and applications, then please contact us.

How connect with influencers of your industry on Twitter

How to connect with Influencers on Twitter:

 

Twitter is a massive open forum of conversation which ranges with every topic and subject matter possible. Anyone can have an input in any given conversation; however some people’s opinion is regarded higher than others. There are some Twitter members who voice their opinion and share information regularly on specific topics and gain a huge following based on their insights. These people who have a large amount of followers and have their content constantly shared and retweeted, are known as influencers and can be found in any market.

 

When producing content based on your area of interest, you should always keep these influencers in mind, as they have the ability to spread your content to a very similar audience, sending traffic your way and ultimately effect the buying decisions of others. Here are some tips in connecting with your industry’s influencers in an attempt to have your content shared.

 

Follow them – This is an easy step and can show that you are interested in what they have to say.

 

@Mention Them – This is a good way of appearing on their activity feed. Try to engage the influencer, ask for their opinion on a particular topic.

 

Avoid Direct Mailing Influencers as these days the DM is constantly used for spam and a lot of users don’t even check their Twitter Mail.

 

Retweet their updates – Retweeting is a great way of getting on the radar of influencers, whilst also sharing good content for your current followers.

 

Reply to their questions – Some influencers actively seek to engage with their followers, so if they do ask for input on a certain matter, be sure to reply with a good tweet.

 

Share their content – People love to have their work recognised, so share their content whilst mentioning them as the source. This again will have you appear on their radar.

 

Recommend content to them – As well as sharing their content, try to create your own content relevant to them and suggest they read it. Also suggest good content from other sources so that you appear helpful rather than pushy.

 

Connect with them through other social networks – If you begin to add influencers on different networks, they may begin to recognise you, especially if your profile picture and branding remains consistent.

 

Why connect with influencers?

Connecting with influencers can have your content reach a wider and more lucrative audience. Extra merit is added to your content by having influencers share your content. These influencers can also produce good content from which you can learn and get ideas from.

If you have any inquiries as to industry influencers or any other social media topic then please contact us, as our team of highly trained digital marketers will be more than happy to reply.

Google’s New Keyword Planner: Positives & Negatives

Google Keyword Planner

 

The once useful and efficient Google Keyword tool is no longer in use. It has now been reincarnated as Google Keyword Planner. This has earned a mixed response from its users, and there are both positives and negatives to be found with this new Keyword Planner application.

The Keyword Planner function is a combination of the Keyword Tool and the Traffic Estimator, which aims to give you results for both through one platform. Here is a breakdown of the positives and negatives of this new Keyword Planner.

 

 

Positives of Keyword Planner:

• A major development in the Keyword Planner is its ability to provide the volume of a keyword search at a city level, which enables organisations to segment their audience to specific geographic locations for optimum results.
• Users can now upload up to 10,000 keywords from their own list to get performance data.
• The Keyword Planner also allows users to categorise results by ad group, landing page, among others.

 

Negatives of Keyword Planner:

To use the Keyword Planner, users must now login to a registered AdWords account.

The Keyword Planner doesn’t offer the following;

• Match type data for search volume.
• Global vs. Local monthly searches.
• Device targeting.

Are you having problems with the new Keyword Planner?

At WebResults, we have a team of Adwords experts who know how to best use the Keyword Planner tool for optimum results. Please contact us, and we can help you set up an effective Adwords campaign, among our many other services.

News Metatag: What is it?

News Meta Tagline : What is it?

 

Last year Google launched a “news keywords” metatag for news publishers. This came about due to news publishers struggling to get their content found as their headlines didn’t contain certain keywords or phrases.

This was introduced as it sometimes proved difficult to incorporate  all the keywords or phrases into a headline which would read well and grab the attention of someone browsing that topic.

These news metatag’s have a similar format to the normal  keywords metatag, in that the news keywords metatag allows publishers to specify a collection of terms that apply to their news article. Here are some guidelines to follow when incorporating a news metatag into your piece.

 In the above article from the New York Post, the headline reads “The Butler” cleans up. This headline makes sense to the reader when considering the overall piece is about a film entitled “Lee Daniels’ The Butler”. This however does not make sense to a Google crawling device, tracking and storing information. On the basis of the headline alone, the device does not know this is an article about a film and will not show it up on results regarding terms such as film news.

In a search for “the butler film”, the New York Post’s article does not appear in the results, this is down to its ambiguous title, here are the results given;

A metatag would greatly aid this headline when it comes to the search results. A metatag for this piece would look something like the following;

 

• <meta name=”news_keywords” content=”Lee Daniels’ The Butler, Film, Box Office, Forrest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey”

 

This will ensure this article gets shown for searches containing terms such as Forrest Whitaker and Box Office.

 

How to use a news Meta tag for your piece:

A traditional meta keywords tag is started with

• <meta name=”keywords”

Whereas the news Metatag is started with

• <meta name=”news_keywords” content=”

Within the content section of the tag, you can enter up to 10 keywords or phrases.

Each word or phrase is to be separated by a comma. These commas are used as a delimiter for keywords. Spaces have no relevance within the tag.  

 

The following is an example of a metatag for an article about the 2013 All Ireland Gaelic Final;

• <meta name=”news_keywords” content=”All Ireland, Croke Park 2013, Mayo vs Dublin, gaelic, football, GAA”>

Each word or phrase within the tag is of equal value, meaning that the first word/phrase is not considered more important than the tenth. In this case, “GAA” will be just as relevant as “All Ireland” when Google shows up articles regarding this search.

 

If you are experiencing any difficulties with the news metatag, please contact us. At WebResults we have an experienced team of experts who can help with any needs or enquiries you have regarding metatags, metadata or any other aspect of SEO. We also offer a wide range of other services for your digital marketing needs.

An Overview of Mobile’s Importance in Digital Marketing

Rise in Mobile: An Overview

                                                                                                                

Mobile is growing faster than any other technology before it. Smartphones are quickly developing with 47% Irish people currently owning one (Mediascope, 2013). Smartphones are the perfect medium for those wanting to access the web while on the go enabling people to always stay connected. Approximately 1.2 million Irish people go online using a mobile device (Mediascope 2013). This creates an ideal opportunity for marketers to attract those browsing the web on their phones through mobile marketing.

This means companies must make their websites mobile responsive so these potential customers can access your site through their phones. Those browsing on their phone do not want to have to pinch and grab their way through a site. On clicking through to a site on their mobile, they should be brought to a site which is fitted to suit the size of their screen. Once set up correctly this will be done automatically.

Google have also been quick to consider mobile devices when delivering search results. If Google is aware that a search is being conducted on a mobile device, then it filters search results to cater for those on the go. This is particularly effective for those with paid Google Adwords campaigns.

Tablets such as Ipads are also constantly growing in use with 12% of Irish people currently going online on a tablet device (Mediascope 2013). These devices are known to be used more frequently at home, particularly in the evening time for browsing the web.

This rise in mobile should also be considered when using email as a component of your marketing strategy. In research done by Litmus, they found that email opens on smartphones and tablets have increased 80% over the last six months. People who are opening emails on their phone are unlikely to download any image attachments which accompany emails. This means that your email campaign should aim to get its information across textually without relying on fancy imagery, as to accommodate your mobile audience.

Why use Mobile Marketing?

Reach a wider audience:

When using mobile marketing as a part of your marketing strategy, you can now reach a wider market of consumers who are constantly on the go. This is a very specific type of consumer, but also a vital type.

Stand out from the competition:

Mobile marketing is growing fast however a majority of sites are unresponsive to mobile; it would therefore be refreshing for a mobile consumer to come across your page which caters to their needs. A small improvement such as this can reflect well on your business.

Bridge the gap between Offline and Online:

Mobile marketing is unique in that consumers can instantly react to traditional advertising campaigns. If a person where to see a poster advert at a bus stop, by placing a QR code on that poster, then the customer can scan it and be taken directly to a specific area of your site.

If you have any enquiries about mobile marketing or any other digital marketing services, please contact us

The Importance of Link Building

3 Key Factors of Link Building:

 

Link building is a task combined with creating good content. Within your content there should be links to certain areas of your website. If you are talking about web services in your content piece, why not promote your own web services with a link.

A key aspect of content creation is that if it’s good, then it will get shared and linked freely by those who liked it. This is where Social Media comes in helpful for sharing content easily with your audience. You can’t however rely solely on other people linking your content so here are the 3 key aspects of link building you should incorporate into your content;

 

1) Anchor Text:

The anchor text is the textual representation of a hyperlink, for example the anchor text for this link is “this link” with the hyperlink being “www.webresults.ie”. Anchor text is important because most major search engines use it to determine what keywords are relevant to a page. For example, if you want to rank for the term “coffee shop,” then you should try to get as many links as you can with “coffee shop” as the anchor text.

 

2) Authority of Linking Domain:

The ultimate goal in link building is to get as many inbound links to your site as possible. This is important for your SEO strategy as it shows search engines that your page is of importance and offers valuable content. The more inbound links you have, then the more likely you are to rank for a certain keyword.

Having a lot of inbound links is all well and good, but having inbound links from domains that have a high authority is even better. Having inbound links from sites with high authority such as The Irish Times, is much better than having links coming from your mate Dave’s blog.

You can check the authority of a page you wish to apply an inbound link on with tools such as moz.com

 

3) Focus your links on specific pages within the website:

When building links to your website, you should focus bringing the readers to a very specific page of your website, otherwise the link is pointless. If in your content piece you are talking about a new coffee bean which will blow both your mind and taste buds, then maybe you could place a link within this piece to a page on your website explaining the variety of coffee products you have in your cafe.

After a while you will begin to see which pages on your site are getting the most visits or showing up for searches, once you see which is doing the best, continue promoting them and building more links to have it climb the rankings.

If you have any enquiries about link building, or any other digital marketing services, then please contact us.

How to Solve The “Not Provided” Problem in Google Analytics

Google Analytics: The “Not Provided” Problem

Google analytics is a fantastic tool for viewing visitor trends and behaviour. It helps you to figure out what your website is doing right or wrong, and to see how effective your current SEO strategy is performing.

The one problem many people have with the service is its organic search terms report. In this report, you can see what search terms are giving you the most visitor traffic. However throughout this report the term “not provided” regularly appears and the content is not accessible to the business, although this information is available to those who have a paid premium account.

Why is this data hidden?

 In 2011 Google updated their privacy settings, focusing on protecting those with a Google account (Gmail, Google+ etc). If a person conducts a web search through Google whilst they are logged into a Google account, then their search is conducted over a Secure Socket Layer (SSL), therefore the referral data relating to that search is hidden.

This referral data contains some very useful information, such as the keywords used to perform that search. This data is however only viewable to Google and those with a premium analytics account.

There are ways around this for you with basic accounts. One such way involves analysing landing page results. This involves mining through Google Analytics for other information that will reveal more about who your visitors were and what they were doing on your site. This involves 3 steps;

1. In your Analytics account, head to Admin, then Profiles.
2. Click the name of the profile you want to work with, and select the Filters tab.
3. Create a new filter in your Analytics account and follow the guidelines in  the image below:

After applying this filter, future keyword reports while provide some more useful information. Instead of “not provided” appearing in the report, it will be presented as

 “np – / landing page”.

 While this doesn’t reveal the actual search term used by the visitor, it does show you what page within your site appeared in their search result. This can give you the information  of which pages within your site are appearing on search results. This new data will only be presented like this for future reports.

Why use Google Analytics?

Measure Your SEO performance:

With Google Analytics you can analyse your current SEO strategy and see what keywords are working for you. It will also show which pages on your site are most popular. You can assess the amount of traffic coming into your site, and quantify goals and conversions. If you have any questions regarding Google analytics, please contact us.

Measuring SEO Success

 

Having put a lot of time and effort into devising a SEO strategy, it is now time to measure how effective it actually was. To do this there are three key performance indicators (KPI) to look at; 

• Rankings
• Traffic
• Conversions

The information gathered from these KPIs can be used to both measure the success of this campaign and provide valuable information for future campaigns.

 

Rankings:

Keyword rankings are a key component of the SEO process with the websites who are listed on the first page receiving up to 92% of the traffic share (Searchengineland.com, 2012). Over time a business can track keywords and see how effective each are with the ability to change them at any time. Keyword analysis involves some trial and error as a business might find out overtime that a keyword is just too broad and competitive for their business to rank high for.

 

Traffic:

Having your site appear on the first page of a search engine isn’t enough to classify a SEO campaign as a success. The traffic volume and quality of a search term must also be analysed. Traffic volume should be measured based on the number of visits that come from organic search. With a successful SEO strategy, there should be a significant increase in organic search traffic over time.

How much traffic you should expect depends on the size of your target audience. For example, a successful SEO campaign that targets people who are looking for a nationwide online retailer will deliver significantly more organic search traffic than a successful campaign targeting people who are looking for a local hairdresser.

Within this volume of traffic, the quality of the traffic must also be analysed. Some areas of interest when determining the quality of such traffic include, pages per visit, average visit duration and bounce rate. You are essentially looking for a high average duration with a large amount of pages visited whilst keeping your bounce rate low.

Conversions:

Through web analytics you can determine what you consider to be a goal or a conversion. This could be something like a visitor completing a subscription form or contacting the business. When these conversions are set up by you, you can use Google Analytics to track and record each conversion as it happens. You can even track each page a visitor viewed leading up to the conversion to see what links they clicked on etc, this can be done with tools such as mouseflow. Sales aren’t essential from first time visitors, it is good to make them aware of your brand and have them complete some form of conversion which will keep you in their minds for future reference. After analysing your conversions you can also pinpoint which keywords from organic search results attracted each visitor.

Conclusion                                                                                                                                                

Tracking these KPIs will not only allow you to measure your SEO campaign’s current performance, but it will also provide you with vital data to help ensure your next campaign is a success. For more information on measuring SEO or any other marketing activities, please contact us