Whether it’s upgrading hosting, improving your URL structure or simplifying information architecture upgrades to your web presence are inevitable for every company.
As more companies reach the limits of their current web investments, many are worried that significant change will impact their organic listings and SEO performance. I’ve even seen a company maintaining two websites, frightened that merging would reduce their organic rankings, even though it was near impossible for users to find anything.
Whether you are an in-house marketer or an agency specialist, in my experience if you are able to plan ahead and factor in SEO migration tactics to your project you will find a smooth transition. Often the very fact you engage with the search engines can provide improved rankings on the other side.
In this article I look at 5 tactics to help you in the event of a large scale migration or upgrade.
Benchmark your current performance
Befriend your search engine
Cherish your most valuable links
Limit the impact
Manage the bounce.
Step 1 – Benchmark your current performance
Sounds obvious but do you know exactly how visible your site is currently? To effectively establish your current … » Read our full article
Richard Pentin (of TMW) has done some sterling work by teaming up with the IAB Social Media Council to tackle the hottest digital marketing potato; measuring and benchmarking social media ROI. Well, more specifically measuring social media activity that in turn impacts ROI.
Despite the very serious sounding name of the IABSMC, we feel that this provides some great thinking that in a framework could well help us all to formalise a way to manage, measure and compare social media performance.
The SlideShare presentation talks through each step of the process from establishing your intent, assigning the most relevant KPIs around the 4 As – Awareness, Appreciation, Action and Advocacy – and references other benchmarks in order to draw meaningful comparisons.
What do you think are it’s strengths and weaknesses? It would be great to hear your feedback and ideas.
When I’m running a training course on digital strategy it’s always an interesting starting point to ask do you have a digital strategy? Of course, on a course, you would expect many attending not to have a specific digital strategy, but it still seems surprisingly commonplace.
Last week, in this post, I ran an informal poll to see how widely used formal digital strategies are. Well, the results are now in…
Thanks if you took part! We had 75 responses, so not a scientific sample, but large enough to identify a pattern amongst visitors to Smart Insights who expressed a preference…
So, what can we conclude?
Using digital marketing without a strategic approach is commonplace. I’m sure many of the companies in this category are using digital media effectively and they could certainly be getting great results from their search, email or social media marketing. But I’m equally sure that many are missing opportunities or are suffering from the other challenges I’ve listed below. Perhaps the problems below are greatest for larger organisations who most urgently need governance. There’s arguably less need for a strategy in a smaller company.
If you’re like us, you love using Google Analytics for its ease of use and insights, but still, you will find yourself wasting time completing the same actions again-and-again as you review the performance of your site each day.
Bookmarklets (check out other useful bookmarkets for digital marketers) provide a quick way to save time through shortcuts for these repeated actions. Here’s my top 5 saving which allow you to go straight to the report you want even if you don’t have GA loaded! They all work through a standard URL query string for each report .You will need to set them to the profile id you’re currently working with otherwise you’ll just see the first profile in the account. I’ve saved the best for last.
By default you start with the previous day, but when customising Google Analytics you often need to check the latest data collected to review new profiles or customisations.
Question: I wondered whether you might be able to point me in the direction of some info on web behaviour?
We’ve recently been looking at “drop off” rates for some of our online content and seeing if we can compare it with external sites to help gauge whether the behaviours we are seeing could be considered as ‘typical’.
The metrics we’ve been looking at include time spent on a page (0-10, 10-20 seconds etc) and would like to compare to external websites such as BBC, YouTube, etc.
Do you know how it is possible to obtain this data, or any external websites who may have it?
We measure it, but have no external reference as to whether it is good, bad or indifferent.
Nicola
Smart Insights Expert Answer: Yours is a familiar problem for all analytics users. We hear “What does good like”? “How do we compare”? questions often. So, you need some context. I recommend two approaches, but first let’s review the main short-term engagement measures. This is the “Advance” step or our RACE framework for improving and improving online marketing. You want your visitors to advance on their journey, connect with … » Read our full article
