The goal of any business website should equal quality sales leads and customers. The first step to convert traffic to leads is to craft your offer. The offer is the answer to the question: “Why should I fill out this form? What’s in it for me?” It’s basically the value you are offering in exchange for the visitor’s self-selection into your sales process.

Think through the offers that will appeal most broadly to prospects and visitors who find you online.

However, not every webinar/video needs to be behind a form, you may want to have your most valuable assets behind a form…show them the value by explaining the reason you have it behind a form via a landing page…provide that teaser or incentive and then watch the leads flow.

In addition to video the following are good offers too:
# Whitepapers
# Some type of free consultation
# Access to a tool or resources
# Research/studies
# eBooks
# Sign Up for event, or even something as simple as a newsletter
# Trials and samples
# Contests
# Offers of free stuff, service, or savings on a purchase

What are offers that convert well for you? What have you tried?

Image Source: collegescholarships.org

Whether you are preparing for a monthly performance report or doing a more in-depth review quarterly you have to examine your KPIs and understand what’s beneath the surface. If you have an SEO company doing work for and they do regular reporting I recommend to insist on seeing more than just where your keywords rank. Rank alone does not tell you anything.

Web Metrics Every Marketer Should Use

1. Go beyond rankings -  look at referrals, conversions and revenue (closed loop).
   You want to paint a complete picture and get a clear overview of your sales funnel – the traffic from your website and what campaign it came from, the leads that resulted, and the number of customers you acquired.
2. Go beyond indexation – look at link popularity, reach, and source
   Pages come and go out of the index…they won’t necessarily stay. Take a look at what pages are being linked to and what sources are bringing those links, what sources are bringing traffic and ultimately what your reach looks like in terms of online authority among the linkarity and social media as well.
3. Check trend lines for your competitors
   When comparing yourself to your competitors use specific metrics. Compare link growth and quality. Tools like SEOMoz’s MozRank. Other tools to help you with traffic comparisons are trends.google.com/websites, www.compete.com, www.quantcast.com, and www.websitegrader.com.
4. Track and measure health of long tail keywords
   70% of searches online use long-tail keywords. These keywords typically have low search volume, but that’s okay – They are highly qualified, targeted, and you can get to the top of the results quickly. Analyze your traffic producing keywords and plan to create more content with them.
5. Compare % of search traffic  and conversions for brand and non-brand keywords
   What percentage of your natural search comes from brand keywords versus non-brand keywords? What does it mean if your keyword curve is dominated by brand terms? While branded keywords drive the most valuable traffic, it’s important to know how many unique keywords are used by people.
6. Look at how much content is added on a monthly basis
   It’s quite simple really. You can’t expect results if you are not putting the work into it. Have a plan if you or your team is not happy with your results.
7. Use what’s working
   Look at visits per keyword is there an opportunity to create more content, add new pages to your website, publish more via your blog, add more offers and landing pages. Also look at what works then rinse and repeat.

These are just a part of metrics which in my opinion should be used. They are certainly more useful than just the standard “keywords ranked”, “number of page views” or  “average time spent on site” which don’t tell too much about a specific case. I hope it’s also a good starting point for more advanced analysis in the future.

Here is the step by step on how to track a subdomain in Google Analytics. This will work for anything like blog.domain.com etc which may be set up for strategic purposes.

How to add a subdomain as a new profile:

This is the easiest way to track a subdomain. Creating a separate profile for each subdomain allows you to track traffic in Google Analytics for each subdomain separately.

1. When you are in the analytics overview/profiles section (where you see your URL, view report option and some overview stats) there will be an option (within the gray area) on the right to click “+ add a new profile” … choose that
2. Add a Profile for a new domain and enter “subdomain.example.com” as the domain. (note you do not want to add www. for a subdomain at all)
3. Just copy the new code that is then provided into your HTML footer.

How to track a subdomain within your existing Google Analytics profile:

This option is to track subdomains within the same profile as the domain. (this is more complex) In order to do so, you’ll need to add a line to the tracking code on each page of your site. The instructions below assume that this profile was set up with the primary domain as the listed website (e.g. .example.com)

1. Add the following line (in bold) to the tracking code on all pages of your subdomain and your main domain:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
try{
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-xxxxxx-x”);
pageTracker._setDomainName(“.example.com”);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}
</script>

It’s easy to get caught up in bad SEO advice or to start a website and have the best of intentions and follow some common misconceptions and before you know it you have been maintaining a website for years just to find out you are no better now than you were 4 years ago.

Here’s a quick list of what you do want to focus on:

1. Have good on-page SEO practices. It’s simple. Just follow the rules.
2. Quality inbound links. Links from spam sites, or generally low quality sites are not good. On the flip side you want to get as many quality inbound links as you can. This is not a numbers game, so more is not necessarily better but quality is indeed the key. Learn more about quality inbound links here.
3. Extend your website registration. Spam tends to set up a site and own it for a year or two and then never use it again and then do the same thing over with another domain. Ideally you want your website/domain to be registered for 3 years or more.
4. Don’t stuff keywords. Again, by following on page best practices you will avoid this, but I always get asked “how many keywords should I have on a page,” or “how often do those need to be repeated.” It’s not about the keyword density but it’s about the quality of your content. So instead of frequency and repetition of words focus on the quality of the content and the relevance to your business.
5. Register with Webmaster Tools and other free improvement tools through sites like Yahoo, Google and Bing all of whom have their own variation of a webmaster tools.
6. Sign up with local and larger directories such as Google local, better business bureau, chamber of commerce etc.
7. Provide social media links and other sharing abilities. Allowing people to share your content. Spam is less likely to be featured on a popular network for their niche and less likely to have content shared, so make sure you are giving yourself a chance.
8. Add Location and contact information. Make it clear where you are located and how people can contact you.
9. Don’t have page after page with outgoing links. No pages should have 100 or more outbound links.
10. There is value in your domain. Have a clean professional name…so don’t have it be too long and don’t buy domain after domain and redirect them to another in hopes of picking up ranking, it won’t do anything.

Interested in how you are doing?
Find out for yourself …
Have your website graded today!

Ever wish that you could ever so gently nudge some of visitors to comment or promote your content? There have been many instances where someone will email me or mention in passing that they really liked my blog post on “such and “such” and when I then go to check they never left a comment…hmphhhh. It’s like thanks for the feedback but a comment would be much more helpful…well guess what…there’s a tool that can help you.

At HubSpot, my place of employment, we constantly talk about the importance of “nurturing your leads”. That is absolutely an important component to ensuring that those you engage with you continue to stay engaged. In a similar manner this wordpress plugin, WP Greet Box, allows you to stay on top of with your returning visitors. Why not nudge someone who returns to your site…they are obviously interested so nurture them by keeping them engaged and in the process giving others a chance to become engaged.

Are you intrigued? So here’s the deal…”Greet Box” allows you to set customized messages to certain audiences. So if someone comes to your site via Stumble Upon you can encourage that visitor to Stumble your content. Pretty cool huh. I haven’t used it yet myself but as I find time I will let you all know how’s it going. You can see more details, screenshots etc through WordPress.

Let me know if you try this yourself, or if you are employing similar ways to engage your loyal followers and fans.