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6 Statistics to Track on Your Google Analytics

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You’ve set up your Google Analytics account, but now what? There are so many statistics to track, it’s hard to know where to start. What’s important for you to track is going to depend on your organization, but there are some basic statistics that are going to be important for every entity to take note of, especially when they first start. We’ve got a guide for you outlining the top six statistics you should be looking at in your Google Analytics reports.

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1. New/Unique Visitors vs. Returning Visitors
Getting new visitors is just as important as having recurrent visitors. Make sure to keep track of both of those statistics. Knowing what types of visitors you are attracting (new vs. old) can clue you in to what kind of information you need to be promoting on your website to make sure you are still attracting new users, but also getting people to come back for more.

2. Traffic source/channel
Just as important as knowing what types of visitors you are attracting is knowing where you are attracting them from. This allows you to focus your efforts on the right things to gain additional visitors. Are you getting most of your visitors from Facebook? Great — you can focus more on that platform now. Or maybe you need to improve your search engine rankings through SEO to attract more search visitors. Basically, knowing where your traffic is coming from, helps you adjust your digital marketing tactics.

There are three types of traffic channels:

  • Social: A user found a link to your website on a social media channel and clicked it.
  • Direct: A user directly typed your URL into the search bar.
  • Organic: A user found your website through non-paid for methods.

3. Bounce Rate
The bounce rate in Google Analytics refers to how many users leave a page on your website without completing any actions. Ideally, you want your bounce rate to be low. You want people to stay on your website for a considerable amount of time, and you don’t want them to leave without completing an action. An action can mean filling out a form, submitting an email address, making a purchase, or a slew of other things that require the user to interact with your website

4. Page Views
Page views tells you where users are gravitating to on your site. Checking your page views helps you understand what information people are looking for and which pages are making the most impact.

5. Exit Pages
Exit pages are where the consumer is leaving in the process of conversion. Tracking this information will clue you in to understanding where you may be losing consumers in the conversion process. This can be helpful in your understanding of how to adapt your landing pages and maybe simplify your process.

6. Lead Generation Costs (Cost Per Conversion)
This is important to track when you’re doing a form of digital marketing, like Google AdWords. Your lead generation costs should be lower than your income from your website (you should make more than you are spending). Your cost per conversion should remain low while your conversion rates and value per visits should remain high. If you’re not getting the return-on-investment that you should be from lead generation, it might be time to switch tactics.

If you’re looking for help with tracking your Google Analytics statistics, contact Cabedge today. With our team of Google Analytics specialists, we can help you take your website to the next level.

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The Basics of Google AdWords

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Cabedge is a dedicated design and digital strategy organization. Having one foot in each world, Cabedge employees have a pretty good grasp on how to make your website beautiful and functional and how to promote it to the World Wide Web. Google AdWords is a handy tool that can be used to promote organizations for an adjustable fee.

What is Google AdWords?

Google AdWords is a way for companies and organizations to advertise online to connect with customers through the Google Network. AdWords makes it easy for businesses to set goals and budgets and connect with intended audiences to increase awareness of a product or service or to increase sales. Google AdWords has a bunch of features and services that patrons can use to better promote their organizations. Let’s take a look at some of those now:

  • AdWords Express: Automates managing keywords and ad placement for businesses to make AdWords management easier.
  • Google Partners: Allows users to become certified in Google AdWords. Certification is not necessary to use Google AdWords, but it teaches the fundamentals and best practices of the tool to help users utilize it best.
  • Remarketing: Enables businesses to show advertisements to users that have previously visited their website. Remarketing allows users to further segment audiences to better display advertisements.
  • Ad Extensions: Google AdWords allows for a variety of extensions that can be added to a business’s ad to better serve it’s consumers. Some extensions include a clickable phone number, the ability to leave reviews, price displays, and more.
  • Keyword Planner: Estimates the amount of traffic per-month for selected keywords and offers alternatives.

Benefits of Using Google AdWords

Google AdWords is not required to run a successful business, but it does help at the end of the day in attracting new and existing customers. Here are some of the biggest benefits of using Google AdWords to promote a business online.

  • It’s measurable. The biggest benefit to advertising through Google AdWords is that it is completely measurable with price-per-click metrics. Businesses can accurately attribute consumers actions to AdWords campaigns.
  • It’s flexible. Businesses can make AdWords applicable to any need. Users can easily add extensions (talked about previously), specify keyword matches, narrow the audience scope for an ad, and more.
  • It pairs well with SEO. While businesses can’t just completely forget about SEO, AdWords works alongside SEO to improve engagement and reach. It’s not a quick fix to get more sales, but AdWords will inevitably reach a wide range of people for a cost.

AdWords can’t do all the work for you, and it shouldn’t, but it does have it’s positives when it comes to engaging a target audience.

Cabedge prides itself on its knowledge of SEO and Google tools, including AdWords. If you’re looking for help starting or managing your AdWords campaign, look no further. Reach out to Cabedge today to talk about your goals.

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Why Video Creation is Essential to Your SEO Ranking

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In 2018, users are going to increasingly be looking for video content to give them information. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, and more and more people are searching for videos now than ever. Video content is growing in popularity as a way to virtually teach lessons and share information to a wide audience, which is more often than not an international audience.

Video content made specifically for YouTube has the ability to increase SEO rankings for your organization because Google owns YouTube. Therefore, if you are creating content for YouTube, it means that content will get double the attention from Google. Google is already displaying videos as search results for general searches and image searches with 55 percent of search results containing a video of some sort.

YouTube viewers can also turn into website visitors or patrons. It’s easy to click on a YouTube video, listen to what a creator has to say, and click into their description box to find a link to their website or to products they were talking about. YouTube, like other social media platforms, serves as an advanced form of generating viewers for your other, targeted content.

Additionally, you can embed videos in your written content to boost SEO rankings and views and encourage users to stay on your page longer. The added work of creating and editing video content will pay off when your written content soars through the rankings in 2018 due to your improved SEO.

Looking for some help creating video content or in utilizing your current video content to promote sales of your product? Reach out to Cabedge today to get started!

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How to Make Friends and Influence Link Earning for Better SEO

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Link building has always been important to a website’s SEO, but now more than ever, the practice is about engagement and relationship building. As Google’s machines get smarter, they can realize when links are disingenuous, and then stop giving those links as much credit in their SEO formula.

That’s why it’s crucial to build relationships with people before asking for a link. It isn’t easy, but nothing worth having ever is. To build relationships with potential linkers, start with engaging on their platform — blog, website, social media, etc. This shouldn’t be hard since anyone you’re reaching out to for links should be writing/producing content you’re interested in. Guest posting is also an important way to cultivate links and relationships. Because guest posts are give-and-take (you’re giving content and taking a link), others are more likely to work with you in the future. And, if you have the ability, try to meet people in person. Reach out to get coffee or meet over lunch. It can be intimidating to meet people offline in the digital age, but it could lead to a very beneficial relationship down the road.

Paying for links and leaving links in comment sections is a thing of the past (the very, very long ago past). Search engines are smarter than that now, and they are increasingly looking for genuine links and relationships between link givers. Put in the time to build relationships with people in your online community, and the links will come organically.

For help growing your link building community, look no further than Cabedge. With years of experience in SEO, Cabedge can help you come up with a personalized strategy and link building plan to help improve your organizations SEO.

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The Age of Voice Assistants: How to Get Noticed

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You might have gotten used to calling Alexa for your every waking need, but Google is still trying to figure out how to rank these searches properly.

Voice searching is on the rise with gadgets like Alexa and Google Home. Searching is a whole different ball game than it was five years ago, and SEO is changing because of it. Elements like search terms, keywords, and mobile-friendliness change how people are searching with their voice, and therefore, how Google indexes those searches.

One of the biggest changes, is in picking up on human’s natural speech patterns. Typically, when a user searches for something on their desktop or mobile device they are using different syntax than they do in their normal language. For example, say someone is trying to find out if Domino’s is open on Thanksgiving. If they are typing in the search they might try, “Domino’s hours,” but, if they were to speak the search, they are more likely to use full sentences, “Hey Google, is Domino’s open today?”

Because of the need to pick up on varying syntaxes and search words, things are changing for SEO rankings. To appear in a voice search now, it’s important to be featured on the first page, and it helps if you’ve got a featured snippet. Featured snippets look like this:

And they sit at position zero on a search page. This featured snippet would be the first thing a Google Home would read out to its user in an answer along with the website name.

Along with featured snippets, elements like long-tail keywords, mobile-friendly sites, and including a question/answer format in web pages are growing increasingly important with the rise of voice searching.

One thing is for sure — with changing technology comes changing SEO practices.

If you or your organization need help staying up to date with SEO trends, reach out to Cabedge! With years of experience and an understanding of how swiftly SEO practices are changing, Cabedge can help with it all. Contact us today, and we can get started on a plan personalized to your needs.

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Google’s Mobile-First Index to Launch in 2018

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Over the last decade, more people have turned to their mobile devices to perform searches than ever before. In 2017, mobile searches accounted for 55 percent of all traffic. With the increased use of mobile devices to find answers to user’s questions, Google is working to release its mobile-first index in 2018- an index that has been highly anticipated for years.

According to Gary Illyes, a webmaster trends analyst working for Google, at the SMX Advanced Conference in Seattle in June the mobile-first index should launch sometime in 2018. This index is different from how Google is currently indexing content in that it searches mobile sites first, therefore if a website gets searched a lot from a desktop, but doesn’t have a mobile website, this index might hurt its rankings. The good news is that if you’ve got a responsive website design, mobile-indexing shouldn’t affect your traffic all that much.

Illyes emphasized that Google is committed to making this transition as seamless as possible, so it may take a bit of time for the index to be fully completed. He even noted that Google is trying to create this index without hurting non-mobile-friendly sites — a feat that seems hard with a mobile-first index, but time will tell. Google is also being very thorough in its communications with publishers about the launch so there are no surprises when it’s finally released.

No matter how prepared Google or publishers are, this mobile-first index is sure to shake things up for SEO rankings in 2018.

If you’re organization is looking to compete in this mobile-first era of indexing, reach out to Cabedge. With years of experience in SEO trends and responsive website design, Cabedge can help with all your needs.

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The Knowledge Box Takeover

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Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are constantly changing — becoming smarter to show users exactly what they are looking for. When this happens, it means fewer people are actually clicking through to websites because they can find the answer they are looking for right on the SERP.

In 2012, Google introduced what are known as Knowledge Boxes.

Knowledge Boxes (also known as Knowledge Panels or Knowledge Graphs) are quick blurbs of information answering search questions from users. Typically, these excerpts come straight from Wikipedia pages and make searching easier and faster for users. These knowledge boxes are increasingly taking over for Featured Snippets.

A featured snippet is an excerpt of information from a website other than Google and serves as position zero on a SERP.

Featured snippets used to be a great way for websites to increase their click-through-rate, but with the takeover of Knowledge Boxes, they are slowly becoming a thing of the past. To improve SEO rankings in the age of the Knowledge Box, users need to be working earnestly to link build, promote, and ensure their sites are on page one or two of the search results.

Knowledge Boxes are not the end of the SEO world, but they do mean users need to adapt. While Featured Snippets haven’t gone away entirely, content creators need to work with intent to ensure their content is seen around these large information boxes.

If you’re looking to improve your SEO in the age of the knowledge box, contact Cabedge — a digital marketing firm that understands the intricacies and trends of SEO to help your organization get to the top of the rankings.