A Guide to Digital Marketing Part 3 – Increasing Traffic

9 July 2008
Part 3 of a three part guide to digital marketing. An invaluable guide for anyone looking to initiate an online marketing campaign or those who wish to improve their current online offering.

Increasing Site Traffic

Competitor Analysis

Another important part of the analysis stage is measuring a site’s performance against that of its competitors. Competitor analysis is slightly more complicated online than it is offline. Taking the example of two hotels in Inverness, Scotland, they are offline competitors but are they online competitors? There’s a good chance that they might be. If they both have optimised websites then there is a good chance that they will be competing for the same search terms. However, when typing the search term “Inverness Hotel” into Google.com, it immediately becomes apparent that our hotels in Scotland are competing with “The Inverness Hotel & Golf Club” in Denver Colorado!

It is therefore important that all competitors are detailed. This means that for our Inverness hotel we will not just be looking at other hotels in Inverness but also any site that competes for the keywords and phrases that the site should be optimised for.

Once the main competitors have been identified, analysis of their site and content should start to shed light on why they are doing well for any particular search term. In the section dealing with Organic SEO a number of factors are highlighted as the main reasons as to why sites rank well. Observing the reasons why other sites do well and adjusting your site accordingly will often provide the best lessons in Organic SEO.

Planning

Once all of the initial analysis has been carried out, a strategy can then be decided upon. The main aims of the defined strategy will be to:

Increase the visibility and awareness of the targets brands, products and services relative to the identified competitors.

Maximise the share of search in comparison to the identified competitors.

Increase the quality and conversion rates for site visitors.

Increase the average order value or lifetime value of visitors.

Minimise cost per outcome such as a lead or sale.

A search strategy will essentially be a balance between natural listings, paid listings, content networks and affiliates. However, the strategy as a whole will often relate closely to other offline communication tools such as print, TV, DM etc. From there the types of search and key phrases can then be decided upon.

Regardless of the type of site being assessed, a set of clear and realistic goals has to be set. These may be:

Position based (100 top ten places)

Visitor volume based (to achieve 500 new visitors each month)

Outcome based (to achieve 500 new sales from SEO leads generated)

Increase market share (achieve 20% market share of search within 12 months)

Cost based (SEO / PPC cost must be less that £40 per sale)

Value based (generate £200,000 from SEO)

A realistic plan will often consist of a combination of these goal types. As a project progresses, the targets will also become more specific.

Organic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

When viewing the average search results page on Google, it has been observed that click through rates (CTR) will be between 10-30% for organic listings with 4-6% for banner sponsored links and 1-2% for side navigation sponsored links.

If you want your information, services and products to be found online it’s important that your site is found within the organic search results within search engines. Recent studies have found that search engine users are increasingly associating high organic results with brand importance. With this information, it seems that sponsored links are being used for tactical offers and “calls to action”, whilst organic results are building the brand.

It’s important to note that when users are looking at search listings, 93% of users will not go beyond the second page. Instead for going through large numbers of results pages, the user is far more likely to change their search terms.

There are three main areas that are key to increasing the organic search listings of any site;

• Index Coverage
• On-Page Optimisation
• Link Building

Index Coverage

Index coverage is about monitoring how your site and individual pages within your site are ranked and viewed by the relevant search engines. The first stage of this will be to ensure that the main search engines currently index your site. As discussed in the previous section this can be done by running a search engine report.

For most established sites search engines such as Google will index the homepage. Although Google does have a site submission page, it is not necessary to use this when submitting a site or page. Speculation even suggests that Google does not even manually submit sites submitted in this way.

Google views the web as a series of linked files. This means that the robots will moves through the linked pages within a site and then move on to any other sites that these pages link to. So in order for Google to index a new page, there just has to be a link from a page that is currently indexed by Google.

A useful tool for determining how well a site is indexed is Google Sitemaps). This tool allows webmasters to manage their individual relationship with Google. By allowing users to index content quicker than normal, Google gets the advantage of not having to waste resources indexing archived content. Google sitemaps also offers information on the most commonly used search terms for your site.

Using the Google Sitemaps tool you will be able to evaluate the Index Inclusion of any sites that you manage. This means that by measuring the number of pages currently indexed as a percentage of the total site page, you can benchmark and measure future progress of a site’s index coverage. In most cases, it is hoped that the higher the index percentage, the higher the number of visitors to the site will be.
Some other factors that should be taken into consideration when monitoring index inclusion are:

Geolocation

If the site that is the subject of an SEM project has targets in a number of geographical markets it is important to ensure that the domain location is correct for these markets. One example of this is that if the target market is the UK, search engines will place more weight on sites that have the .co.uk domain and have a server IP address located in the UK. This will also involve reviewing and updating Whois records. For larger sites it is also monitor for potential domain hijacking on a regular basis.

Time Effects on Index Inclusion

It is often the case that when indexing new sites or micro sites, that some search engines may take months to prominently feature the site that has been added. In order to avoid this problem, domains should be registered as soon as possible and as part of the planning stage of SEM this should be taken into account by running a PPC and online advertising campaign to increase initial site traffic and prominence.

Updating of Content

Search engines will give high ranking to new and relevant content. It is therefore important that site content is refreshed on a regular basis. Encouraging blogging and discussion forums will increase the number of times that any given site is visited by search engine robots. All site content should also be properly labelled with dates of when it was published and when it was last edited. A practice of monitoring content popularity over time will also give a good indication of what should be kept and what should be revised.

Dynamic Content & Session IDs

These are common problems that when sites utilise Content Management Systems’ that do not produce “clean URLs”. As search engines are reluctant to index pages that have common ASP and Apache characters such as “?”, it is important that a system of URL rewriting is put into place when creating or reviewing a site. If this important issue is not addressed, all dynamic content will essentially be invisible to the search engines. Session IDs can also cause a similar problem and steps must also be taken to ensure that search engine robots are allowed to index content that is subject to session IDs.

On-Page Optimisation

On-page optimisation is vital to achieving high ratings by search engines. When planning and carrying out on-page optimisation, the aim is to create pages that will be seen as being highly relevant to a particular search term. This does not just mean that the content of the page is relevant, the structure and code of a page should also be optimised to attract a user’s search term.

Content Creation

Content should be either created by an SEO specialist, or optimised by an SEO specialist after its creation. As the latter is the more common situation, it is important that a content creators work closely with SEO content reviewers to ensure that clear and logical content is published that relates well to the chosen key phrases for the site.

Selecting Key phrases

A clear and comprehensive keyphrase selection strategy is a key factor to achieving SEO success. Key phrases should be selected for both the site in generals and for specific pages and content categories within the site. As highlighted in the previous section, these key phrases should then relate clearly and logically to the content within each section or page.

A multi-tiered approach should be made to selecting key phrases for any given site. This should include a balance of broad key phrases, with a number levels beneath becoming more specialised and concise. The number of key phrases selected and the number of pages that they are included within will depend upon the target volumes for the marketing plan and the number of searches that each key phrase currently attracts.

Key phrase Inclusion

Once the key phrases have been selected they must then be included within the content of the site. There are several factors that must then be taken into consideration at this point, these include:

Key phrase frequency and density
Key phrase positioning
Key phrase synonyms (and therefore synonym frequency and density)
Use of misspellings where applicable

Finally and most importantly key phrase relevance, particularly within the homepage must also be applied.

N.B. Relevance is probably the most important factor in attaining good results in an SEM campaign. The fundamental aim of Google and other search engines is to return content that is the most relevant to user’s search term.

Page/Document Mark-up factors

As well as including key phrases within the context of the site content, it is also important that page mark-up factors are also taken into account. This will include:

Adopting key standards
Title tags
Meta tags
Headings
Keyword formatting
Hyperlinks
Restructuring pages with HTML code
Reducing content by removing code to separate files
CSS tricks
Optimising Flash sites
Noscript tags
Framed sites

For key phrase factors at the document level there are a couple of factors that should be taken into account. Although these are relatively unimportant, it is still best practice to observe these:

Where possible, try to have your keywords within the URL
Try to make the document names relevant to the keywords or phrases.

Link Building

Many search engines use the principle of Page Rank to order the relevance of pages; this system was pioneered by Google and places a very high significance on the link popularity. The following strategies should be employed to build up external links from third party sites.

Increase the number of inbound links

To increase the Page Rank of a page it is important that a structured link-building program is undertaken. This should target not just the homepage of the site but also other pages. Very few pages will have a Page Rank of 9 or 10, as these will typically be the reserve of media owned portals and sites such aswww.bbc.co.uk. Most commercial sites will have a Page Rank of between 4 and 7. It should also be noted that creating backlinks too quickly could have a negative ranking factor. Importance should be placed on creating links from quality sources as 1 link from a site with a PageRank of 9 will be more relevant than 10,000 from sites with a PageRank of 0.

Linking to pages with large numbers of outbound links

The volume of links on the page where the link originates is a factor that is taken into account within the Google PageRank algorithm. This means that although links from directory sites, although they may be important, they will increase a site’s overall PageRank unless the site itself has a high PageRank or good relevance. It is therefore advised that reciprocal linking sites should be avoided unless their fee is low enough or relevance is high enough to justify inclusion.

Managing outbound links

Having too many outbound links within a page can also have a detrimental effect on the originating link page. Care should therefore be taken to ensure that external links are minimised on high PageRank pages of your site. If you do not want a robot to follow a link (e.g. spam links on forum) a “nofollow” tag can be added to the code.

Site structure

There are some basic principles that can be applied to the structure of a site to increase the PageRank of the site. A simple example of this is linking back to the homepage, or to a page is referenced by an important external link. Pages should be linked back and forward like a chain with relevant inbound and outbound links where possible.

Links from pages in context

As well as having links from pages with a high PageRank. Search engines will also place importance on the context of the page where the inbound link originates. It is therefore important that any inbound linking pages have content that is relevant to the key phrases within the site it links to this is called Link Context and can be equally as important as PageRank.

A basic example of this is the phrase “click here”. This brings back Adobe because of the principle described above. It’s also worth noting that the phrase “click here” doesn’t appear anywhere in the Adobe page that’s returned!

A process for external link building

It is important that a strong process is put in place for external link building. The aim should be to steadily build up a flow of important and relevant links from trusted sites with content relevant to the site that it links to. As mentioned previously, 1000 links from paid for link farms will be of less value than one link from a trusted and highly relevant site. There are therefore some principle elements that a link-building plan should observe, this includes:

Look at building links from relevant news or blog sites in a natural and organic way.
There should be a steady build up of links, as static periods will be penalised.
Produce quality content, this will attract sites that wish to add value to their sites without having to request a link.
For B2B sites creating content that will attract users from a reference point of view is a good way of building up links.
This may be harder for B2C sites but some tactics such as product reviews, producing buyer guides; opinion pieces, news or a blog will attract more links.
Non-context based approaches such as online communities; competitions, clubs and loyalty schemes can also be employed.

After attempting to get inbound links, reciprocal linking can then be employed. This produces less gains but obviously more gains than no links at all.
By using the link syntax within a website it is possible to see who currently links to a site and by looking at site competitors it is also possible to see where their current external links are coming from and formulate a similar plan.

Setting link building objectives

As with any plan it is important to set objects and timescales and work towards these. Some example objectives for link building may include:

Increase the PageRank of a site to X
Generate Y links from sites with PageRank X or higher
Generate Z more visitors from links
Increase conversion rates from third party referred visitors

Buying Links

It is possible to buy links and although some argue that sites can be penalised for this, it is still and option when looking at building up outbound links. Three method for doing this include:

Buying links from a directory
Buying links direct from another site
Buying links from a link broker

However, it is worth remembering that if sites use the “nofollow” tag, Google will not take the PageRank influence of the link into account.

Links can be purchased from directories for a fee. Sites such as Yahoo and business.com will provide these services but there are not many companies who do..
There is also the option to buy links via Google Adsense, Yahoo/Overture and Miva. These links however will not increase SEO PageRank for a site.

Links can also be purchased from a link broker, this will cost a significant fee and can be seen as taking a risk but there are sites that will provide the service.

Online PR

This is a good and healthy approach to take although it may require considerable time and effort to get significant results. A higher proportion of journalists are now using blogs as a reference point for articles, hence this can be a good place to start in any online PR campaign.

It may be worth looking at specialist services for SEO press releases, there are many on Google.

Websites

The old man of the Digital Age! The first website went on-line in 1991 so its only 15 years old!

More than 150 websites with addresses ending in .uk are set up every hour, according to Nominet. There are currently around four million .uk websites, with about 110,000 new sites being set up every month.

The vast majority of UK businesses have a website – even if it hasn’t been updated for a while – or since launch! The Internet is changing all the time and it is vital that British business focus on how they can effectively compete for business using the Internet.

Conclusions

With the digital age now truly upon us, all businesses must adapt to the changing nature of their customers. Understanding how your prospects and customers communicate and consume their media is vital to ensure progress and prosperity in business.

Developing a two pronged strategy focusing on how your business should communicate and interact via the Company website and implementing a broad digital marketing plan that will drive your prospects and existing customers to your business online.