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With the cacophony of information available to us these days, it is hard to know how to use that information to make good decisions. That’s definitely the case with website analytics. Even though I do this all day for a living, I sometimes look at the stats for our site and think, now what? To combat data fatigue, we identify questions we can answer with data, as well as patterns of data analysis we can use to answer the questions.

Here’s an example: is the organic search engine traffic to your site coming from people who already know about you, or people who are discovering you through search? There’s different value to these two types of website users, and they have different information needs. And if you don’t have much of the latter, you may be missing out on business opportunities.

People who know your business and use Google or Bing to search for your brand, product name, or the names of your key staff have already been introduced to you: that last trade show you attended, the magazine ad you took out, or your reputation and years in business are paying off. These users want to narrow in on what you provide and how to reach you. They’re closer to buying, and you need to do less to convince them. These search keywords and the website visitors they produce are sometimes referred to as “branded”.

People who don’t already know you may find your website by searching for keywords related to the product or service you sell. These folks might never have heard of  you, and don’t know if you’re right for them. They take a little more cultivating to become purchasers, but they represent new business opportunity for you. We’ll call these searches/visitors “non-branded”.

With 15 minutes in Google Analytics, you can see where you stand by using Advanced Segments. We’ll take a look at your site’s visitors and see what % of these users came from branded keywords vs. non-branded keywords.

From the Dashboard page, click on Advanced Segments.

Click “Create a new advanced segment.” Next, from the left column, under Traffic Sources, select keyword and drag it over to the “dimension or metric” space.

Then for condition, select “contains”,  and type in your business name. Click “add ‘or’ statement”, drag Keyword over again, select “contains”, and type in other words unique to your business–product names, key personnel, and misspellings of those.

When you’re done adding conditions, down near the bottom, enter a name for your advanced segment like “Branded Keywords” and save the segment. Follow the same process to add a second advanced segment for “Non-Branded Keywords”, except: for each keyword, click “add ‘and’ statement” and “does not contain” instead of “contains”.

To use the segment from any report, go to the Advanced Segments button and click on “Branded Keywords” and “Non-Branded Keywords.” Start with the dashboard, and you’ll see the visitors from each segment in your time period. If you are seeing more users from Branded Keywords than Non-Branded Keywords, most of your organic website visitors probably already know who you are. This means you have an opportunity to get more traffic from non-branded keywords describing your product or service category. Good next steps to do that are to optimize your Google Place Page and optimize your website for keywords related to your business topics. (Note that Branded Keywords and Non Branded Keywords will never equal 100% of your traffic, since you get traffic from places without keywords, like when people directly type in your website URL.)

Are there reports you’ve created to better understand your web traffic? We’ve love to hear about them below.

(Cool arrows copyright ThinkDesignBlog.com.)

Online reviews help prospective customers make decisions about which companies with which to do business. Reviews are essential for companies selling to consumers, but they’re also helpful for B2B enterprises. Here are a few of the reasons getting continuous online reviews is great for your business:

• Online recommendations strongly influence people who are making purchasing or vendor decisions.
• The number and quality of reviews of your business factors into your Google local ranking.
• It’s a helpful way to get feedback about your business. You’ll see how your customers view your business so you can identify and address problem areas.
• Having a proactive strategy of consistently asking customers for reviews is a great way to hedge against the few who complain about the service they got. A lot of positive reviews will drown out a few bad ones.
• Positive reviews can be used in your own marketing efforts. Prospective customers want to hear why other customers think you’re great.

With all these benefits, it makes sense to have a proactive strategy to always be encouraging new reviews.

To-Do List

1. Identify the best 4-6 places to get reviews.

First, get an idea for where consumers are already publishing reviews in your category. Do a Google search for your business category and location.

Note the number of reviews that some of your competitors have. Click on one of the businesses’ “## reviews” link to see their Google Place Page. Scroll down half way, and you can see some of the sites where the reviews are coming from.

If you serve consumers, the best review sources are likely to be CitySearch.com, Yelp.com, InsiderPages.com, YellowPages.com, and SuperPages.com. Look out for any vertical review sites for your business category, for example Zagat.com for restaurants, GreatSchools.org for schools, HealthGrades.com for doctors, and DoctorOoogle.com for dentists.

If you serve businesses, focus on YellowPages.com and SuperPages.com. Then check for vertical review sites for your business category, for example Avvo.com for lawyers.

Also, check for review sites specific to your city (from a local newspaper or magazine, for example). Your goal is to get fair coverage across several different review sites, so you get the most exposure to potential customers.

2. Ask customers for reviews.

   When to ask:

   • Think about when the customer feels the value of what they’ve purchased, and when they are in a position to evaluate. In the case of a caramel apple, it’s pretty close to when they purchased. If you’re selling gym memberships, though, customers might better see the value in a few months.

   Where to ask:

   • In person, when they complete their purchase with you
   • On invoices or sales receipts
   • In email newsletters
   • On your website
   • On the checkout counter
   • On the door as customers leave

   How to ask:

   • “Reviews help our business grow. Please take a moment to review us on your favorite review site, like Yelp.com or CitySearch.com.” (Rotate the sites you mention every few months.)
   • “We’d love your opinion. Please post a review on a site like YellowPages.com or you favorite review site.”
   • “We love reviews! Review us on Yelp!”

   Don’t:

   • Pay for reviews
   • Add a review yourself
   • Ask a family member or colleague to add a review.
   • Trade reviews with another business. (“I’ll write one for you if you write one for me.”)
   • In general, avoid tactics that result in fake or artificially biased reviews. Review sites want impartial opinions, and they’re getting pretty smart about identifying when any of the above happens

   The goal is to remind people that reviews are helpful for your business. Most people who had good experiences are happy to share those experiences. Be careful not to badger customers, though. Work with all of your customer-facing staff trained to ask for reviews.

3. Monitor reviews

Of course, you’re also really interested in hearing what your customers have to say about your business. To keep track of this, use a monitoring tool which will let you know when you’ve been reviewed and alert you to other mentions of your business (say, in the press). We describe several here: 5 Great Free Reputation Management Tools for Local Business

Additional Resources

How Businesses Can Respond to Criticism on Yelp (Inc. Magazine)

Responding to Negative Reviews – Your Prospects are the Real Audience

What strategies have you found helpful for getting more customer reviews? Tell us in the comments below.

Many customers I’ve worked with over the years chase short-term SEO gain–to rank higher–without understanding how SEO really fits into the business of acquiring customers.

At its best, search engine optimization bridges the gap between how users search online and how website content is presented. As SEO expert Danny Sullivan says,

SEO is not about tricking search engines, nor spamming links, nor ruining web design. It’s about building good content, understanding the ways people might seek it — including the words they might use — and ensuring the content is search engine friendly along with being human friendly.

Good SEO is part following the rules and part behavioral analysis. There are specific ways to format your site and its content so search engines can easily read and index it for keywords that are relevant. This is something SEO experts with thousands of sites under their belts have tested and seen results with. Google also publishes guidelines for good SEO. So SEO best practices are not just someone’s idea of what it might take to rank well. But the best SEO doesn’t stop there. A long-term SEO strategy starts with understanding the behavior of users searching online in your topic areas. This deep understanding of users’ interests, and how they search over time to satisfy that interest, generates strategies for how to present website content about your business to capture the widest range of interested users.

It’s an undeniably complex subject, which is why it’s a good idea to bring in some outside expertise when planning your website, or when your organic traffic isn’t meeting your expectations. But to get you started, here’s a list of some common basic SEO mistakes we see pretty regularly:

1. Important text can’t be read by search engines. Search engine spiders are just programs that look at your website–and they can only read text and follow links. Reading the text tells the search engine what your website is about, and if it can’t read key pieces of your site, they don’t really know what your page is about. You can view your site like the Google spider sees it by searching Google for your url and clicking on the “cached” link next to the listing, and then click on “Text-Only version”.Here’s a very limited list of things a search engine spider can’t read. If you have these elements in your website, you should make changes immediately.
   • Text presented as images. Those page headings done as images so the words can be in that special font? Convert them to text.
   • Search boxes as the sole or primary form of navigation. Navigation that’s embedded in JavaScript is also risky.
   • Text or navigation embedded in Flash. Google says they can read content in Flash, and they can, but in general we find Flash content ranks poorly if at all.
2. You don’t have any/many links to your site. The number and quality of links from other sites into your site significantly affects your potential to rank well in search engines. How do you get other sites to link to you? Some ideas: Include your web URL in free profiles on local directories. Build interesting content on your site that people want to link to–blogs are great for this. Create press releases. Get stories about your business published in local news media. Sponsor and speak at events. Include your URL in membership listings of professional organizations.
3. You aren’t paying attention to how people search. You’ve probably gone to some lengths thinking about how you want to talk about your business, products and services, but how well does this match how your prospects think? Let’s say you sell running shoes. What process do prospective customers go through when considering a purchase?

To match up with prospective customers at various points towards their purchase, your website should include content about shoe models (i47-b), shoe types (road vs. trail), and guides on making shoe purchasing decisions. Including content across a range of subjects helps you rank for more keyword phrases, which helps you get more traffic.

It’s also important to talk about your products and services in ways that consumers do. There’s little value in saying you offer “office paper” when most users are searching for “printer paper”. Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool can help you get some insight into keywords and related terms people are actually using. It’s a little tricky to use: this article describes the basics.

Dying to know more? There are excellent guides on search engine optimization on the web, perfect for self-study:

• SEOmoz’s Beginners Guide to SEO
• 21 Essential SEO Tips & Techniques

Or contact Two Octobers. We’ll review your site and put together a recommendation that combines short-term tactics with longer-term strategies for organic search engine ranking success.

So you’re thinking about launching a Facebook page for your business, but what could you possibly talk about? The good news is, you probably have more to say and share than you realize. A Facebook page is a great place to share your passion for your business area with a group of people who are also passionate about that topic. And an informal, conversational style works great on Facebook. As opposed to the buttoned-up marketing copy and well-styled images on your website, the Facebook page can and should be a place to let your passion and personality shine through. Just make sure you stay on topic for your business area.

Most of the time you’ll be creating text updates, sharing links, and uploading photos and videos. Here’s some ideas and examples.

1. Make updates about your company
Promote real-life events. Upload a snapshot of a new product that came in. Introduce a new employee. Mention a great interaction with a customer you had today. If you have a blog, post links to new articles (this can be automated).

2. Share
Share topical articles, videos, or other links. Share tips and advice. Share information about your business partners, neighbors, and customers’ successes. Don’t make it all about you.

3. Ask questions to get business feedback
Considering longer hours? Wondering whether A or B will sell better?

4. Make offers
Studies show one of the top reasons people follow businesses in social media is to get access to promotions and coupons. Help your followers feel special.

5. Interact
Facebook is an interactive medium. You want to add content, and you want your community to respond and add their own content. How do you do that? Ask users to tell stories about their challenges & triumphs, their use of your products, or something recently in the news. Ask users to post photos. When fans create content on your page, they’re endorsing your business. And don’t forget to think of how you’ll incentivize people to contribute. (But be careful of contests, which Facebook regulates.) And plan to respond to every wall comment users make and answer most questions posed.

Work towards learning about which posts resonate with your fans and cause them to interact with the page more. People like to be where there is activity going on. Your followers may learn as much from other followers as they do from you. And you will hopefully learn from your followers, building better business relationships.

Business pages on Facebook are a great way to stay connected with customers. Have any additional tips or know a local business who has a great Facebook page? We’d love to hear about them in the comments below.