7 Things Often Overlooked When Designing A Website

When you create a new website, it’s easy to look for aesthetics rather than practicalities. You want it to look nice for your visitors, and while that certainly is important, you may be ignoring essential elements. Here are 7 of the most overlooked features on websites:

Meta Data

The meta data of a website is usually hidden in the underlying HTML code that makes up the page and allows it to be visible in a web browser. However, this data is vitally important as it is read by the search engine spiders to affect your rankings. The meta data of a web page includes the page title, the description, page headings, and subheadings. Understanding these important elements of search engine optimization will make your site more competitive online.

Google Analytics Tracking

This is an online analytics and tracking service that is freely available to all, courtesy of Google. You need to set up a Google Analytics account (http://www.google.com/analytics/), and then simply follow the easy on-screen instructions to analyze your web traffic and know where each visitor came from, and more. You can also set up dashboards for at-a-glance information and have your most important data emailed to you on a regular bases.

Mobile/ Responsive Design

Mobile use now accounts for more than half of all Internet access, so it is very important that your website has a responsive design, and not a static design. You need to have an HTML template that can respond properly with no sideways scrolling on even the smallest screen size, if you want to do business online. Services like MobileEasy are helpful for a small business without a large budget for a website overhaul.

Clear Calls-To-Action

Just having a great sales page is good, but it isn’t good enough. People might be convinced that your product is just right for them, but if you don’t have a clear call to action, they probably won’t buy from you. Tell them clearly and distinctly to buy now!

Testimonials

It’s all very well for you to say your product or service is great, but it’s much better when other people say it too. Always try to get satisfied customers to provide you with a testimonial, and display it proudly on your website.

Security (SSL Certification)

Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, is essential if you do e-commerce. In short, SSL encrypts sensitive information. If you accept credit cards on your site without an SSL Certificate, for example, it would be possible for someone with the right equipment to harvest the credit card numbers.

Contact Information

All too often a website doesn’t make it easy for their visitors to make contact. Always have a prominently displayed contact page. Include an email and phone number at the very least, if possible. Having contact information on your website increases visitor confidence.

What's Missing? Four Things Every B2B Website Must Have

When consulting with a new B2B client, we often begin the process by reviewing their existing website for the things that are missing - those website components necessary to turn a cookie-cutter website into a robust lead generator. If you're a B2B marketer looking for ways to enhance your online presence and positively impact your key performance indicators, then make sure you have these four elements in place.

Strong Calls to Action
When visitors land on your site, you need to provide clear direction on what you want them to do. Is your goal to get more contact forms completed? Do you want them to download your free e-book? No matter what your primary objective may be, you need to place your call to action (CTA) in a prominent location (above the scroll line) on your page.

When writing your CTA keep it around five to six words, and focus on conveying a sense value and urgency. For example, "Schedule my free consultation now!"


Testimonials

The power of social influence cannot be denied, and nothing gives you online cred like a testimonial from a past or present client. Make it a habit of always asking your clients to put in a good word. If your position isn't client-facing, then reach out to someone on your team who is, and ask them to make the request.

A good rule of thumb to follow is not to create a dedicated page for testimonials on your site. More times than not these pages will be passed over. You're better off sprinkling them across your website for a stronger impact.

Blog
Your website needs a fresh, steady stream of content. Otherwise all you have to offer is a glorified e-brochure. A blog provides a platform to showcase your expertise, it helps position your organization as a thought leader in your industry, it gives your website an SEO boost, and provides new ways for your business to be discovered online. Sure, it will take some resources to produce the content, but either you take center stage online or your competitors will.

Tracking

Data is the key to understanding your customers journey through your website. Google Analytics is an in-depth platform often overlooked as the valuable resource it is. The data is provides helps you learn what content resonates most for your site visitors, and which areas need improvement.

Aside from the top level metrics this tool provides, you can set up conversion goals to measure the success of online campaigns, see which social media outlets are providing the most referral traffic to your site, and discover where people are dropping off in the sales purchase funnel.

Get Help with Google Analytics.

Need assistance with strategic planning for your website? CC Communications has over 22 years of experience in the industry and we're ready to help you take your B2B website to the next level. Contact us today to learn more.

Corrupted Data: How to Detect and Remove Referral Spam

There's a rampant issue impacting the Google Analytics account of nearly every business. It's called referral spam (a.k.a. ghost spam) and any marketer tasked with reporting online metrics should know how to detect and remove it from their data. Using Google Analytics to make data-driven decisions is important for any small business, but if you're only looking at the top level metrics, then you may not be getting an accurate picture of how your website is truly performing. 

What is referral spam?

Referral spam is a black hat SEO tactic, in which bots are used to send send multiple fake visits to your website. These visits are recorded in your data and falsely inflate your site session metric. What do spammers get out of this? Extra visits to their website. Every curious data collector who clicks on a link automatically provides traffic to the offending site. Sometime this means they can charge more for advertising on their site due to the falsely inflated site visitation, and other times they can serve up Malware so be cautious about clicking on unfamiliar links in your data!

How to spot referral spam?

The majority of these top 10 referral sources are spam. 

1. Login to your Google analytics account and navigate to the reporting tab.

2. On the left hand menu click on Acquisition.

3. Then select All Traffic.

4. In the dropdown select Referrals. Here you'll see a list of any site that has sent traffic to your website during the time period selected. 

What to look for:

- Visits with a 100% bounce rate.

- Sites with an average session duration under 1 second.

- Unfamiliar URLs, often worded to entice a click. 

What's a small business marketer to do?

Google is well aware of the issue and has been silent on any pending solutions. There are some great blogs that discuss advanced solutions for creating valid hostname and spam crawler filters. These strategies are a bit complex for the average marketer with no coding experience, but they are helpful in preventing spammer data from invading your metrics. Essentially you tell Analytics what constitutes a real referral for your site, and which ones should be blocked. This is a solid option for larger sites managing a ton of data. Need help setting it up? CC Communications has experience so contact us to learn how we can assist.

If your site only receives a modest amount of traffic each month, then it may be easier to filter the data and do the math yourself. It's a manual process, but once you get the hang of it, you'll be able to do this rather quickly. Here are the steps:

1. In the referral section of analytics make note of the total number of session being reported.

2. Above the data and to the right is the word advanced. Click that and a new filter section appears.

3. Select the following criteria.

- In the first dropdown choose Exclude.

- In the second dropdown choose Site Usage and then Average Session Duration.

- In the third dropdown select Less Than.

- In the field next to that type 1 (one). 

It should now look like this:

This filters out any site visits that were less than one second and provides you with a cleaner list to review. Keep in mind that this scrubs a lot of the spam, but not everything.

4. Next go through and identify which referrals are real. Add those session numbers together to get your actual number of legitimate referrals and then adjust your overall website session metric accordingly.

Hopefully this type of data corruption will soon be eradicated, but until it is, marketers must remain diligent to ensure accurate data is being reported. If you have any questions or need assistance contact our team at marketing@cccom.com.

How to Streamline Your Google Analytics Experience

Simplifying and Customizing the Complexity of Google Analytics to Realize its True Power.

Google Analytics can be overwhelming. The best way to understand it fully is to organize the data in a meaningful manner. Luckily, the program has a number of built-in ways to easily achieve that. These features are designed to provide clarity to your metrics so you can ultimately make data driven decisions.

Setting up a Dashboard
A dashboard is a single page view where you can display information about your website. Widgets placed in your dashboard view display predetermined data. You can have up to 12 widgets in a dashboard, each one pulling in its own segment of information of your choice. A widget might provide an overview of your audience, your active visitors, their locations, the ratio between new and returning visitors, their traffic sources, and much more.

The Dashboards link in the menu on the left side of your Google Analytics offers two options: the Private link is a dropdown that gives you My Dashboard, your default dashboard. The +New Dashboard link lets you create one from scratch, and choosing the Starter Dashboard from the popup box, gives you something tangible to work with and refine.

Setting up Goals
Goals are things you can set up to track certain visitor behavior patterns. Suppose you have a new page set up with a special promotion, which you heavily promote from your home page. Your Goal could be to track which visitors successfully land on that page. For example, the Goal you set up might tell you that you've managed to convince 85% of your home page visitors, on average, to click over to the desired page.

Older versions of Google Analytics require you to click Actions on the top menu, then choose Edit, and in your profile settings you'll see a column marked Goals. There are four possible sets, and each can hold five goals. Select the set most applicable to you and edit accordingly. New versions of Google Analytics require you to select the "gear" button, top right of the page, then choose your account and website. This will take you to the correct section containing Goals.

Using Shortcuts
Shortcuts allow you to save your customized settings to a report so that the data is always viewed exactly as you wish. Shortcuts are easy to set up. Choose a regularly used Custom Report or Standard Report. Segment the report, filtering the data to appear as you wish, then simply click the Shortcut link above the report. Give your Shortcut a meaningful name and click OK to save it within the Home tab where you can access it later.

Need assistance? Contact CC Communications online or call 1-704-761-4676 to learn how we can help organize your analytics account to provide actionable insights for your businesses.