Analytics
Analytics: Do the Math
Check your analytics on a typical day and you’ll see numbers like 5.87, as in traffic is up 5.87% and 62 as in 62% of traffic came from search. You might see numbers smaller than that — like visitors spent an average of 1.85 minutes at your site — or larger, as in 32,564 pageviews…
Sinister Google Analytics?
A client shared an article with me. The writer, who apparently curates business directories, was encouraging his readers to visit his competitors’ websites. Once there, he said, they should right click and use the “View Page Source” option (you could also choose CTRL+U) to look at the page’s HTML code. Then they should search for…
Google Analytics: Benchmarking
In your Google Analytics settings, you can choose whether to participate in benchmarking. If you agree, you’ll share your data — in the aggregate, with no identifying information — and allow Google to use it in benchmarking reports. In return, you’ll get to see how your website compares with other websites like yours. What’s a…
Down Time at Your Website
If you’re a retail outfit, especially one with a brick and mortar presence, you’re probably too busy or too exhausted to be reading this. Otherwise, you’re probably just about to have some down time at your website. Not time when your website is down — that’s never a good thing — but time when the…
Negative SEO
What is negative SEO? It’s a type of attack on your website that makes you look like you’re using black hat SEO techniques to improve your rankings. For example, your arch enemy could buid lots of questionable links to your website, hack your site and delete your authority pages, or introduce duplicate content. It looks…
Sorting Paid and Organic Traffic
Traffic is a useful metric for almost all websites. A healthy, well-optimized, managed website will see traffic growth over time, whereas a site that has just been launched and ignored won’t. But what if you’ve been relying on paid search — Google Ads — for your traffic? How can you tell if new SEO and…