Renegade Search

With two full days of speakers and knowledge, there was much to take away from SearchLove this fall. George (@gzlatin) and I were able to visit Boston and attend the conference, so we've summarized the multitude of things that we learned and heard at the event. You'll note that the "Keep it Real" comments from the speakers are missing most of the important words as these are supposed to remain "attendee secrets" for the next 30 days.

Yes, I know this list is long (it's supposed to be), so I've summarized it into the following categories to make things easier on you. (side note: within each category, the individual items are ordered from when they were provided throughout the event)

CONTINUE READING »

Google Analytics is an amazing program. Some people think it's limited, and some conspiracy theorists think it gives Google too big of an insight into our internet activity. But for your average business or online store - Google Analytics (a.k.a. GA) is simple to use... and that is the problem. At face value GA looks like an extremely simple piece of software that is easily navigable - and it's not. By default Google Analytics gives you a 30 day window of data, and this just isn't enough time to determine if your SEO campaign is exploding, performing as expected or completely stagnant. But by taking a few steps you can see exactly how far your SEO campaign has come with just a few clicks.

CONTINUE READING »

What happens to your Google Analytics data if your business is building a new website on a new domain? Are you able to keep your old data and continue tracking visitor data as if your site never moved? The answer is 'Yes!' It's very easy to do and this post will show you how to do it in the new version Analytics.

CONTINUE READING »

Here at Digital Third Coast, we take providing measurable value to our clients seriously.  So seriously, in fact, that it's the first thing listed on our Core Values. We recognize that one of the biggest challenges facing businesses is figuring out a way to evaluate if their SEO campaign is successful. Ultimately, the only factor that determines success is the bottom-line; like any investment, we do not think that our services are truly successful unless we can provide positive ROI.

At the same time, we recognize that SEO is a long-term investment, and it simply isn't possible to provide positive ROI right out of the gate. So with that in mind, we usually focus on three distinct indicators of SEO success:

Keyphrase Ranking Improvements
Non-Branded Organic Search Traffic
Conversions

At different stages of our campaigns, we tend to focus on these indicators to varying degrees. Because search engine rankings tend to improve relatively quickly to quality SEO, we can use rankings for individual keywords to measure our earliest efforts. Later on in the process, the additional data that trickles in over time allows us to evaluate success based on organic traffic and conversions.

CONTINUE READING »

I tend to find that most Google Analytics users are primarily looking at how people reached their website and hoping that the traffic graphs get bigger over time. George wrote a great piece last month on setting up goals so that you can see what actions users performed once they reached your website - this is very important! This can show you the value of the traffic coming to your website and how well your marketing is working for your business. All the upward trending graphs and thousands of visitors don't mean much for reporting purposes if you don't know what actions those visitors took. Now the next step is figuring out how the users interacted with your website and one great way to understand both user action and user intent is through the Site Search reports.

CONTINUE READING »