Google Analytics, or any other tool that measures yoru website’s performance, are vital for success in search engine optimisation:

• Go to Google Analytics and log in with your Google account. In the dashboard you can see a weekly or monthly overview, or any date range you choose.

• In the site usage area you can see the number of visits, page views, pages per visit, bounce rate (when a visitor didn’t look at any other page, just the landing page), the average time on the website and the percentage of new visits. Anyway you can choose the period of time you want to check clicking just above the graphic.

• You can also check the traffic sources overview (if they come from search engines, direct traffic or referring sites).

• In Visitors section (left menu) you can also check visitor trending, location, browsers they used, language or loyalty.

• Clicking on absolute unique visitors you can check how many people have visited the website.

• In Traffic Sources – Keywords (left menu) you can check which keywords people have been searching for to get to your website.

However, Google Analytics do not limit themselves only on the above. If you are looking to learn more about this amazing free online tracking tool, visit: http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity

Background

As one of Ireland’s largest and longest established Canon dealerships, Office Technology (irl) Ltd have been selling and servicing photocopiers since 1992. In 2009, having built a brochure-type website which was not delivering sufficient number of sales leads, they decided to upgrade their online presentation and start getting quotation requests 24/7.

After a thorough search for the best online marketing company in Dublin that would help them get more online leads as a strategic partner, they decided to hire 3R Sales & Marketing.

Methodology

After setting up goals and agreeing on the primary focus areas for the first year, 3R started with extensive research in the industry, aiming at the competitors of Office Technology. With their 4 main departments (photocopiers, office furniture, IT support and document management), 3R then suggested a complete redesign of their website, adding a very strong call to action – requesting a quick quote. Good quality content had to be developed as well, so that Google would pick up the website as a valuable and reliable source of information.

Applying the expertise in search engine optimisation, paired with the management of their newly created Google Adwords account, enabled 3R to build a powerful lead generation tool, delivering results within a few months since the cooperation started.

Results

“We started to work with Simona from 3R Sales & Marketing as our online marketing consultant in 2009. From redesigning our website, to successful promoting it in Google with search engine optimisation and Google Adwords management, we are now confident in saying that our online leads increased by at least 100% which is a direct result of the work 3R has been doing for us. We have found Simona to be professional, friendly and an expert in her field. We would have no issues in recommending Simona or 3R to any company and hope to do more business with her in the future.” Pat Duffy, Managing Director, Office Technology Ltd.

About 3R Sales & Marketing

3R Sales and Marketing (http://www.3r.ie) is an Irish sales and marketing consultancy founded in Ireland in 2004, providing clients with proven sales, marketing and business strategies that are strongly based on business growth.  Key services provided are online marketing, sales and marketing strategy, customer service training and business English courses for non-native English speakers.

An ebook, or, electronic book, as it is called, is simply a short or longer book you can view on the screen of your laptop, or even on your iPhone.

Don’t feel daunted by any technicalities – it’s a simple document, usually saved as a pdf file, which you can email your clients or prospects, or it can be available on your website for download.

Even if you are an expert on your, it sometimes might be a challenge to know where to start and how to approach writing this masterpiece. Remember, on every single page of the ebook you will put your contact details, so you better make sure it will only enhance your company image – so the quality must be excellent.

You can come up with free tips for your and give them out as a gift when somebody signs up for your newsletter or just use it as an introduction to your company. Make sure you make the use of all content you have already created – you can even put together your newsletter articles etc.

It is very important to make sure that your ebook has these items:

• Value adding content
• Contact details to your company
• Call to action – eg. “if you need more advice, call us now”

To promote your ebook, here are a few hints:

• Mention your ebook on your website and your blog
• Submit it to ebook directories
• Email your related websites about it and ask them to promote it
• Offer it as a free gift to your customers or prospects

After you have succeeded in bringing customers interested in your to your website, and maybe got them to read a few of your pages, in order to bring them to the next step, which could be for example contacting you about a particular product, you might need to keep in touch with them and make sure that they keep you in mind.

One of the options of involving visitors into happening on your website is to invite them to join your mailing list, so that you will be sending them a monthly online newsletter with free your tips – with links back to your website.

Writing a newsletter is an excellent way to stay in touch with your customers and to keep them updated on your special offers and news.

1. Write an article and create a special offer for the newsletter
2. Setup http://www.getresponse.com account
3. Create newsletter template and put together your first online newsletter
4. Upload your contacts, who will get a verification email with a link to confirm that they agree to be included in your list
5. Setup a sign-in form and send the code to your web designer who will put it to the website – preferably to every page to the upper half
6. Broadcast your first newsletter
7. Create a tracking sheet for the newsletter
8. Write up newsletter articles, broadcast monthly and track responses

Here all general rules for writing content apply, so don’t forget about using benefits, testimonials and irresistible calls to action as outlined earlier in this chapter.

Unless you are an online marketing consultant or at least have some experience with online marketing, you might realise one day that there are abbreviations that marketing people use every day but nobody ever explains them clearly.

This is what we think are the vital “must-knows” of online marketing:

• SEO = Search Engine Optimisation
  Any aspect of online marketing that is aimed at improving your ranking in search engines, such as Google or Yahoo.

• PPC = Pay per Click
  An online advertising campaign run by search engines like Google or Yahoo, where you pay only when somebody clicks on your ad and gets to your website; ad impressions are free unless anybody clicks on them. Google Adwords are an example.

• CPC = Cost per Click
  How much you pay for one click on your ad in a PPC campaign.

The first step of your SEO (after you have optimised your website for customers) is to make the best keyword list possible. A keyword is a word or a phrase people who are looking for products type in Google. For example, one of your keywords may be “your”.

However, it is better to focus on specific key phrases that will get more highly targeted people to your site. That means, do not use just “your”, as there are many people searching for this word, but many of them might be actually looking for a job in your, for example. Also, the competition is usually much stronger with these words, so it will take more time to get ranked on the first page.

Instead, go for longer keyword phrases and combinations such as “your [YourTown]”, “your company” etc.

Moreover, I would advise you to apply the following methodology to choose the right key words:

1. Organize a brainstorming with your co-workers, business partners, friends, relatives or even customers to find keywords relevant to your your business. Focus on the needs of customers, what they would type in when looking for products.
2. Check out your competitors’ websites for ideas. View the source HTML code and take a look at keywords in their meta tags (you will learn below how to do this). They could be a good tip for yours!
3. Try to make a list of 100 keywords minimum. It’s recommended to use a search term suggestion tool (such as Google Adwords Keyword Tool). It will give you an idea what your phrases have been searched for recently. Just make sure that you pick the appropriate location.

Many your website owners do not make it easy, clear and secure for people to contact them – if you want customers to contact you directly from your website, keep the process simple.

In general, over 60 percent of online shoppers abort the ordering process once they’ve entered the shopping cart. It’s a pity that after gaining their attention, interest and desire you can still lose them due to a complicated, unclear or unsafe contact form. To prevent this, try to follow the advice:

• Tell your visitors upfront about what they should do in order to get in touch with you.
• Make sure that your contact pages and forms are easy to understand. Test them with your customers or relatives even if they don’t browse the Internet very often.
• Make sure that your contact page shows an understandable notice if the customer forgets to enter the email address or any other required field.
• Make sure that your contact pages work in every geographical area you target. Some countries don’t have postal numbers or their regional structuring can be different from yours.
• It’s very important that your contact pages are secure.
• Test your contact pages regularly in order to make sure they work.
• Also make the contact form easier to fill in – in most cases, all you probably need will be name, phone, email, and the comment field – they don’t need to be mandatory.

After you implement the above steps, you might see that your online marketing has moved to the next level.

While many online marketing handbooks would start with telling you how to drive lots of visitors to your website, we chose a different approach. There is no point in driving millions of visitors to your web pages, when nobody will do what you would like them to do – either contact you, or sign up for your newsletter or do anything else you want them to do.

Therefore we think the first step is to focus on optimising your website for customers, with relevant website content writing, and then you can look at how you can use search engines like Google, to bring more visitors to the website.

Google offers a great free tool for measuring your website traffic success – Google Analytics. Go to www.google.com/analytics, set up an account, add a special code to the web pages you want to track and start a great adventure of monitoring your website performance.

Google Analytics gives you handy reports on the following issues:

Content Analysis

Visitors Analysis

Traffic Sources

Goal Conversion

Among these tools you will find an answer to every question regarding your website performance. I would recommend that you create monthly reports in Excel spreadsheets (as described below) which will enable you to compare the results over time.

Specifically, you should keep an eye on these data:

Visits

Page Views

Pages/Visit

Average Time on Site

Bounce Rate – how many people left immediately after they came to the page

% New Visits

Google Page Rank – you can see this on you Google Toolbar

Goal Conversions Total

Keywords – what keywords were our website visitors looking for?

Traffic Sources – where did visitors came from?

However, the ultimate statistics talk about the VALUE all your website optimization efforts and online advertising have brought to your company.

To apply goals and tracking in online marketing, you first need to gather some data upfront, so that you will be able to estimate the value your your website is delivering every month:

• Average Sales Value – What is the value of an average sale?
• No. of Products Avg. Client Buys – How many products does an average client buy in their lifetime?
• Sales Conversion Ratio (%) – What percentage of leads will turn into sales?

When you get these data right, it is then easy, with all the online tracking tools available, to measure the real value your website is delivering every month. We recommend to measure the initial state before you start any optimisation work – since then you will be able to say how much your marketing activities have delivered.

Again, it might be worthwhile to confirm we are on the same page re these definitions:

• Absolute Unique Visitors – How many people visited your website in a particular month
• Visitors from Non-paid Search - How many people came to your website from organic non-paid search in Google
• Visitors from Google Adwords – How many people came to your website from Google Adwords
• Online Leads (Enquiries) - How many people contacted you through the website
• Estimated Lifetime Sales – How much lifetime sales did your website generate, based on your average sales value and no. of products an average customer buys in their lifetime
• Cost of Online Marketing – How much did you spend on online marketing
• Estimated Gross Profit – What remains in your pocket after you deduct Cost of Online Marketing from Estimated Lifetime Sales

Since not all leads come through the website forms, it is probably a good idea to track all incoming calls and other leads. To get the most value from your tracking, we recommend using a simple call sheet which will track all incoming calls.