The latest news and views on what is happening in Search Engine Optimization and Online Marketing
I, like most people, used to use the Ecommerce Sales Performance report in Google Analytics to get an idea of which channels were generating sales … until I realized the data is mostly useless. Oddly it was a new feature in Analytics itself which proved it.
Today I’ll show you how to check if your Sales Performance data is worth the pixels it is displayed in and how to find the real source or your customers or goal converting visitors.
Your bounce rate might be high but that could be just fine!
It’s one of those metrics so many webmasters fret over and it has generated endless blog posts about how you should reduce it in the name of SEO but should you even be giving it the time of day?
Here I’ll cover why bounce rate matters if you understand what it really is, how to know if your bounce rate is real, what a ‘bad’ bounce rate really is and how to handle the dreaded increasing bounce rate!
I’m not a web hosting expert by a long mile – my job is to rank websites high up on search engines and that alone is full time. For over a decade, I haven’t had to think about it because Webfusion provided a solid solution time and again.
Unfortunately recent changes at Webfusion (the termination of their VPS service) and the meltdown of the Heart Internet data center (Webfusion’s recommended replacement) has meant I’ve needed to do a little homework.
Website hosting isn’t my specialty, SEO and online marketing are. The great thing was I didn’t have to be … until Heart Internet went pear-shaped. If any of my client’s rankings were suffering due to their host (slow response, lots of downtime, etc.) the answer was always simple – move them to Webfusion. For larger sites move them to a Webfusion VPS.
I’ve used Webfusion VPSs since the 10th of whenever and it was one of those services you didn’t have to think about – it did exactly what it said on the tin. For the occassional headache you could pick up the phone and have issues resolved in real time.
When you lose a valuable position in Google’s search result there is understandable panic and a desire to ‘do something’ – anything. But there are circumstances when you should consider doing nothing at all!
Google is not infallible. It is not beyond making mistakes of its own and there have been a fair amount of these in the past. Here’s an actual story from one of my own websites.
OK – I don’t work for Heart so this isn’t an excuse but when it comes to VPSs there is a reason they are being so slow that I am aware of. Applications like WordPress, X-Cart and many others aren’t designed to behave well in a crash situation and strange things can happen.
As far as I can see the database servers went down at Heart before the main servers meaning many applications behaved in a very wierd way and it takes ages to find out what. In one example of mine an error log file ballooned to 40GB making it impossible to restart the server.
Much is often made about Google’s 90% share of the search market but is it really what it seems considering the rising number of ways there are to find information that don’t involve it, Bing, Yahoo or the ‘usual suspects’?
Google dominates doesn’t it? Well the European Union seems to think so and has hit Google a number of times because it sees the search giant at abusing its near monopolistic position in Europe.
Your website is an oil tanker in an ocean of rankings. Selecting reverse gear right now will change nothing for quite some time.
So you hired a company to improve your rankings or you beavered away learning about on-Page SEO and link building and put your knowledge to work.
The changes have been made but your rankings haven’t changed yet so how do you know if the right edits have been carried out? How do you know if you are on the right path?
There has long been a mantra that ‘content is king’ banged out by many in the SEO world which causes website owners to rush off and blog or write articles … but does it work?
I will just point out the obvious here, we are talking about creating quality content, not some generic drivel that is on offer from thousands of sites providing articles for a few dollars.
Google has been working hard to whip up hysteria in the SEO community. Before April is out your rankings might be affected if your site isn’t mobile friendly … or so they say.
The exact wording was “Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results.“
