How Startups can use Web Analytics and SEO.

1. Amazee Metrics AG / Förrlibuckstr. 30 / 8005 Zürich / info@amazeemetrics.com
Dr. Laura J. Hornbake, Consultant Web Analytics
Christina Meyer, SEO/SEM Consultant
8.2.2014
Analytics and SEO for Startups

2. Web Analytics

3. Goals
• To communicate what web analytics can tell you and why you
should care.
• To help you avoid data overload by focusing on the insights you
need and allow you to forget about the vanity metrics.
• To provide you with some tools that can help you to learn more
about your startup’s performance and to make data-driven
decisions.

4. Audience

5. Audience
Who is visiting your site and what
can you find out about them?
• Demographics
• Interests
• Location and Language
• Devices, Browsers, and
Operating Systems
• New vs. Returning
• Frequency, Recency

6. Demographics and Interests
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7. Browser & OS
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8. Mobile
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9. New vs. Returning Visitors / Frequency
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10. Audience: Implications
• Do the actual visitors to my site correspond to my target market?
• Is my site ready for (or backwards compatible with) the devices and
browsers they are using?
• How can insights about my audience inform future development of
the site?
• What actions can I take to either better attract my target audience or
better serve this audience?
• How else might these insights require me to revise my strategies and
plans?
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11. Acquisition

12. Acquisition
How did your visitors find you? Which channels are bringing the most
traffic?
• Channels: Direct, Search Engines, Referrals, Social, etc.
• Referrals
• Campaigns: Advertising, Newsletters, QR codes
• Social

13. Channels
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14. Referrals
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15. Campaigns
• Whether you’re running low/no budget buzz marketing campaigns
or have funding to spend on ads, you should be tagging URLs
correctly to track campaign performance.
• Example: Newsletter Campaign
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16. Social
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17. Acquisition: Implications
• Which channels are working for me? Where might I try to improve?
• Is all that time I spend guest blogging, answering questions on Q&A
sites, posting on social networks, etc. producing any results?
• Are my marketing campaigns meeting my expectations?
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18. Behavior

19. Behavior
How are visitors using your site?
• Behavior Flow
• Content
• Most Viewed Pages
• Landing Pages
• Exit Pages
• Events
• Interactions
• Experiments!

20. Content
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21. Events
• Event tracking can be as simple as recording how often users click a
button or as detailed as registering how far down a page they scroll.
• Form errors
• Video engagement
• Interaction with maps, custom widgets, popups
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22. Experiments
• Test variations of your
site to compare
whether the changes
influence visitor
behavior.
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23. Behavior: Implications
• Are visitors doing what you want or expect them to do (register,
subscribe to a newsletter, download a product brochure, etc.) on
your site?
• Which pages are really attracting visitors and getting them to further
engage with the site?
• Where are you losing visitors? Is there something you can clarify or
make simpler?
• Are you tracking the key events that are important to you?
• How can you use experiments to find the best performing version of
your content?
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24. Conversions

25. Conversions
How can you measure success at meeting the specific goals you define
for your site?
• Goals
• E-commerce
• Multi-Channel Funnels

26. Goals
• Which interactions have value
to you?
• Sales, leads, engagement
• Examples:
• User registration
• Page views > 5 pages
• Contact form submitted
• Event
• Assign monetary values to
events
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27. Multi-Channel Funnels
• What complex paths do visitors take
before completing a conversion?
• Assisted conversions
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28. Conversion: Implications
• Are you meeting the targets you’ve set for your goals? Do you need
to revise them?
• What can you learn about how visitors finally arrive at the
interactions you’ve defined as goals?
• Is the effect of certain channels more subtle than the Channels
reports suggest?
• How might this influence your strategies?
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29. Conclusions

30. Final Suggestions
• Experiment with slicing and dicing data in different ways:
• Timeframes
• Segmentation
• Make web analytics a regular part of your processes
• Be curious; be flexible.
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31. Take Away
• Get beyond the first overview page of your analytics tool and dig
into the data.
• Web analytics can provide you with a lot of good data for your
strategic decision-making.
• Am I wasting time/effort/money or are the things I’m doing paying
off in concrete, measurable results?

32. Search Engine Optimization
(SEO)

33. The Online Marketing Pyramid
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Natural search is
the key driver of
website visits.
© Amazee Metrics
Source: http://www.conductor.com/blog/2013/06/data-310-million-visits-nearly-half-of-all-web-site-traffic-comes-from-natural-search/
Content
marketing plays
a crucial role in
SEO.
Supplementary
Online
Marketing Tools

34. Market Share of Search Engines
http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2014/1/comScore_Releases_December_2013_US_Search_Engine_Rankings
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35. Market Share of Google in Switzerland
http://www.blog360.ch/marktanteile-von-suchmaschinen_396
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36. The Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
Paid search ads
(SEM)
Paid search ads
(SEM)
Organic Search
Results (SEO)
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37. Where do people click?
www.seoresearcher.com
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38. How Search Engines Work
1. Crawling
2. Indexing
3. Ranking
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39. Crawling
• Spiders/Bots search the world wide
web.
• Goal: To find all web pages in the
world.
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40. Indexing
• Google indexes the discovered web pages
and their content.
• All the webpage data is organized and
saved based on keywords.
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41. Ranking
• Search engines rank the web pages
based on their content and relevance.
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42. Ranking Factors
Ranking factors are criteria used by search engines to evaluate the content and
relevance of a web page.
The web pages are ranked based on these ranking factors.
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43. Ranking Factors
Study based on 10’000 search
terms for Google Germany.
http://www.searchmetrics.com/de/services/ranking-faktoren-2013/
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44. Step 1: Keyword Research
Keyword Sources:
• Your own website
• Competitors‘ websites
• Google Trends
• Google Autocomplete
• Google AdWords Keyword Planner
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Focus on high volume and low competition.

45. Step 2: Technical Optimization
• Make your website accessible for search engines.
• Help search engines understand the content of your website.
• Achieve a high click-through-rate in the SERPs.
• Provide a user-friendly website.
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Achieve high rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages.

46. How Results are Displayed in the SERPs
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Title
Description
URL
Direct Links

47. URL Structure
• Use important keywords in the URL:
• Search engines understand the content of your website.
• Higher click-through-rate higher ranking
• SEO Best Practice:
• Separate words with dashes, no underscores
• Keep your URLs as short as possible (not more than 200
charachters)
• Do not use any spaces or special characters
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48. Geographic and Language Targeting
There are 4 ways to include geographic and language targeting in URLs:
• Top Level Domain: www.google.ch, www.google.de
• Subdomain: de.reuters.com, uk.reuters.com
• Subdirectory: www.zara.com/ch/de, www.zara.com/de
• URL Parameter: example.com?loc=de, example.com?loc=fr
• SEO Best Practice: Subdomain or Subfolder
• Subdomain: Allows different server locations.
• Subfolder: Low cost (1 host)
• If you have different Top Level Domains link building must be done
separately for each domain.
• There is no good reason to use URL parameters.
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49. Title Tags
• HTML Tag (HTML-Head): <title>
• Use important keywords in the title tag:
• Search engines understand the content of your website.
• Higher click-through-rate higher ranking
• SEO Best Practice:
• Not more than 70 characters long
• Place keywords at the beginning of the tag, the brand name at
the end.
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50. Meta Description Tags
• HTML Tag (HTML-Head):
<meta name="Description" content="Eine Beschreibung Ihrer Seite"/>
• The meta description tag is a marketing text for your result in the
SERPs:
• Does not affect search engine rankings.
• But: Higher click-through-rate higher ranking
• SEO Best Practice:
• Not more than 160 characters long
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51. Heading Tags
• HML Tag (HTML-Body): <h1>, <h2>, <h3> etc.
• H1 is the most important heading tag for search engines and should
include relevant keywords:
• Search engines understand the content of your website.
• SEO Best Practice:
• Use exactly one H1 Tag on every page
(you can use more than one H2 tag).
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52. Internal Linking
• Search engines crawl a website by moving from link to link.
• Internal linking is crucial for search engines:
• To recognize the structure of the website.
• To find all existing pages.
• Search engines understand the content of a link based on its
anchor text.
• SEO Best Practice:
• Use 2-3 internal links on every page, but no more than 100 links
on one page.
• Use relevant keywords in the anchor text.
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53. Image Names and ALT Tags
• Search engines and screen reader software identify the content of an
image based on its filename and ALT tag.
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• SEO Best Practice:
• Use descriptive filenames for your images
(no numbers or special characters)
• Always define a descriptive ALT tag
http://pixabay.com/en/cupcake-cake-chocolate-
icing-pink-163593/

54. Source Code Validation
• Search engines use the W3C standard to evaluate the quality of a
website.
• Definition of W3C according to Wikipedia:
„The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international
standards organization for the World Wide Web“.
• Check your homepage regularly with the W3C validator and correct
all errors and warnings: http://validator.w3.org/
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55. Page Load Speed
• The page load speed of a website is an important ranking
factor.
• Google considers a page load time longer than 1.4 seconds as
slow.
• Use the recommendations of Google PageSpeed test to
optimize your website‘s performance:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
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http://pixabay.com/en/running-cheetah-speed-animal-fast-48433/

56. Sitemaps
• A sitemap helps the search engines understand the structure of the
website and supports the crawling process.
• Create an XML sitemap for your website and submit it to Google
with Google Webmaster Tools.
• Submit a new sitemap whenever you make changes on your
website.
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57. Duplicate Content
• Duplicate content is caused by identical or similar content on
different URLs.
• Duplicate content can harm search engine rankings:
• Search engines do not know which of the pages is the most
relevant for a search query.
• Search engines prefer to offer the user a variety of different
pages in the SERPs.
• If there is a lot of duplicate content search engines might think
that you want to trick them.
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58. Common Causes of Duplicate Content
• URLs in www and non-www versions.
• URLs with uppercase and lowercase characters.
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Keep 1 version and implement a 301 Redirect from the other
versions to this one.

59. Structured Data
• With structured data a markup can be added to your content which is
recognized by the major search providers.
• Common types supported by Google:
• Breadcrumbs (links)
• Events (date, name and location)
• Music (links to songs or samples)
• People (name, job title, address)
• Products (price, availability, review)
• Reviews
• Apps
• Videos
• Overview of all rich snippets: http://schema.org/docs/schemas.html
• The created rich snippets can be validated with the testing tool of Google
Webmaster Tools: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
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60. Structured Data Examples
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Events Markup Video Markup

61. Publisher and Authorship Tag
Publisher Tag:
• Relationship between Google+ company page and company website
Authorship Tag:
• Relationship between Google+ profile and blog posts
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62. Mobile SEO
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http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/online/almost-1-in-3-google-organic-search-visits-estimated-to-be-mobile-in-q4-2013-39235/
Make sure to have a mobile-friendly website.
SEO Best Practice: Responsive Design

63. Step 3: Usability
• Overall Appeal: Provide a readable, well-structured website
• Navigation: Make it easy for users to navigate even if they access the
website from the search engines, as opposed to from the
homepage.
• Information architecture: Provide consistency.
• Content quality: Provide well-written, useful and fresh content.
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64. Step 4: Link Building
The relevance of a website is defined based on the quantity and quality
of external links.
Effective link building measures:
• Submit your website to company and industry directories.
• Contribute with comments to relevant blogs and forums.
• Submit your content to social bookmarking sites.
• Search for unlinked brand mentions.
• Identify broken links on websites.
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Content Marketing is the most important driver of links.

65. Content Marketing
Provide useful content which people are willing to share.
Effective content marketing measures:
• Blogging
• Guides, ebooks and whitepapers
• Infographics and charts
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© Amazee Metrics

66. Social Media
• Social Signals are a strong
influencer of search engine
rankings.
• Facebook, Twitter and Google+
are the most important social
networks for SEO.
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http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/services/ranking-factors-2013/

67. Take Away
• Make sure that your website is visible in the Search Engine Results
Pages.
• Take SEO into account when building your website.
• Regularly monitor the technical performance of your website with
Google Webmaster Tools.
• A continuous effort for link building and content marketing is
important.
• SEO is an ongoing process – you will see results after a few months,
not after a few days.
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