SEO & Analytics - 2012 Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education

Google Analytics & SEO
Presented to: 2012 Symposium for the Marketing
of Higher Education

About Kelly Cutler

Kelly Cutler is the CEO of Marcel
Media, a Google Certified
interactive marketing firm
specializing in Search, Social and
Analytics.

Kelly’s achievements include
serving as the first woman
president of the Chicago
Entrepreneurs’ Organization,
instructing at the University of
Chicago and DePaul University, and
speaking on industry topics across
the country.
@kfcutler
And two kids.
/in/kellycutler

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About Marcel Media

Marcel Media is full service interactive marketing agency specializing
in Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

We partner with organizations to provide creative and customized
marketing solutions including Search Engine Optimization, Paid Search
Management, Custom Facebook Applications, Social Media
Marketing, Conversion Optimization, Website Development and Web
Analytics.

@marcelmedia

Facebook.com/marcelmedia

www.marcelmedia.com/blog

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Solutions

• Search Engine Optimization

• Paid Search

• Conversion Rate Optimization

• Social Media Marketing

• Analytics

• Web Development
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About Marcel Media: Sample Clients

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The Marcel Media Difference

Focused + Dedicated Account Team = Results

We are a Google certified partner in website optimization, analytics, and
paid search. Combined with our client-focused approach, these
certifications empower us to create customized programs that deliver
results.

 Expanded key-word universe by 105%
(one of the nations top 10 medical systems)

 Increased non branded organic traffic by 196%
(luxury goods eCommerce retailer)

 Increased organic traffic by 26.83% and conversions by 23%
(eCommerce retailer of personalized gifts)

 Increased organic traffic by 110%
(national insurance retailer)

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Today you will learn:
1. The key factors of Search Engine Optimization and Web Analytics
2. The key components of a strong SEO program: on-site and off-site
3. How to update and manage key elements of an SEO program
4. How Web Analytics can drive your SEO programs
5. The right questions to ask before diving into your digital marketing
strategy
6. How to navigate Google Analytics
7. GA’s top reports and key performance indicators
8. Tools & Resources to use in the future

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Agenda
Introduction to SEO & Web Analytics

• What is SEO & why it is important
• Why Google Analytics is the best tool
• How SEO & Analytics work together

SEO

• On-site SEO
• Off-site SEO

Web Analytics

• Intro to Web Analytics
• Navigating the data
• Identifying the most relevant traffic
• The next level of analytics

Other Tools

• SEO & Analytics Tools
• Competitive Insight Tools

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Search Engine Optimization: SEO

Key Benefits:
• Targeted traffic
• Increase visibility, sales, and ROI
• Long term positioning
• Cost-effective
• Measurable results

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SEO is the marathon of Search Marketing

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Google Analytics: The Most Effective Tool

Key Benefits:
• Custom dashboard
• Segment web traffic based on
geography, demographics and
actions
• Gauge keyword performance
• Optimization
• Track Key Performance Indicators
(KPI’S)

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Web Analytics helps connect the dots

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The Partnership

SEO Analytics

Combining the why (intent, motivation, and so forth) with
the what (clicks, visitor counts) has to be the cornerstone of any
successful actionable web analytics program.

-Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist in Web Analytics An Hour A Day

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Search Engine Optimization
On-site & Off-site Tactics

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SEO Basics: On-site Strategy

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On-site SEO: Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
Title tags are used to define the text in the top line of a Web browser.
They should be unique to each page, brief, and use a “Keyword Portion
|Branding Portion” structure.

Meta descriptions are optional page summaries that further explain the
content of the site. These are often used as the description in the search
results.
Title Tag

Meta Descriptions
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On-site SEO: Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
Why they are important?

• Helps increase the percentage of users who see your website.

• Informs searchers what your website is about.

• Guides search engines in
determining what the content
of your site is about.

• Attract relevant traffic to your
site.

• When written well, title tags
can decrease the bounce rate
of your site.

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On-site SEO: Site Structure

Site Structure is made up of 3 components:
• Navigation

• URL Structure

• Sitemaps

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Navigation:
• Plan out navigation based on homepage
• Help users navigate by leaving them
“breadcrumbs”

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URL Structure:
• Use words in URLs
• Simple directory structure
• Canonicalize the site around the WWW version

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SEO Basics: Off-site Strategy

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Sitemaps:
• Use mostly text for navigation

• Two sitemaps:
o HTML: users
o XML: search engines

• 404 pages

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On-site SEO: Optimizing Content
Consistently create fresh and unique content:
• Easy-to-read text

• Relevant

• Keeps the users in mind, not the
search engines

• Embed links into copy to drive
users to other areas of your site

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On-site SEO: Optimizing Images
• Filenames and ALT Text
• Supply ALT Text when using images as links
• Supply an image sitemap file

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On-site SEO: robots.txt

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Off-site SEO: Link Building

• Quality over quantity

• Content is king

• Target keywords

• Google Standards:
• Is it good for the user?
• Is it transparent?
• Is it credible?
• Is it authoritative?

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SEO Benefits of Blogs

• Crawlable URLs • Fresh Content
• Inbound Link Magnet • Active Community

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SEO Benefits of PR

• Help your message go viral • Increase Interest
• Build Ranking • Protect your brand

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Social Media and the Impact on SEO
Social media has become a major influence on search engine optimization
(SEO). The value of social media for online businesses cannot be
undervalued.

Benefits of social media for SEO:
• Social Media Posts and Profiles are included in the Search Engine Ranking
Pages.

• Each time your content is shared by others, a backlink is created. The
more backlinks your site has, the more authority it has as well.

• Social Media is an additional platform for content

• Fan Pages help generate leads

• Customer Engagement and Involvement

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Any Questions?

SEO Analytics

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Take A Break!

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Web Analytics: Getting Started

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First Steps…Defining

1. Objective - Answer the question: Why does your website exist?
2. Goals: Specific strategies you'll leverage to accomplish your business
objectives
3. Metrics - Numbers: Typically appearing in a column of a report
4. Key Performance Indicators: A metric which defines how you are
performing against your objective
5. Targets: Pre-defined indicators
of success or failure
6. Dimension: An attribute of a visitor
to your website (source, medium)

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Google Analytics: Capabilities

What Analytics Can Do:
• Filter out internal traffic

• Track across multiple domains

• Easily tag for all online marketing (including email and display)

• Track e-commerce

• Define goals and attached $ value

• Track outbound links, PDF downloads
and form submissions

• Identify how marketing channels impact final
conversion points

• Set up conversion funnels and track
abandonment points

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Key Reports

1. Audience Overview
2. Mobile – Device, OS, App
3. Traffic Sources
4. Content – Sources and Drop off points
5. Goals & Conversions – Visitor value

Help is always near

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Welcome to Your Dashboard

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Google Analytics: Dashboard
• Customize dashboards by user

• Quick access to most important data

• Add Widgets for KPI’s

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Understanding the Sidebar

• Audience • Content
• Advertising • Conversions
• Traffic Sources

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Google Analytics: Dashboard
Analytics allows you to change the timeframe and compare analytics of
previous dates.

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Understanding your Dashboard

Understanding the Sidebar
• Dashboard: Use this to get back to your main
Dashboard

• Visitors: Use this to find out more
information about the visitors to your site

• Traffic Sources: Use this to find out where
your visitors are coming from so you can
adjust Ads

• Content: Use this to find out about your
content, what’s working, what’s not, etc.

• Goals: Use this to set goals to see how well
your site is measuring up to what you want it
to be doing

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Settings

When you click on the Admin button, you will find your settings.
This is where you can:

• Set custom alerts
• Schedule emails
• Add Users
• Create Goals
• Create Filters
• Update Profile Settings
(Update URL, time one, etc)

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KPI’s – Key Performance Indicators

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Key Performance Indicators
• Pages per Visit: the average number of pages viewed per visit to your
site.

• % New Visits: The percentage of visits from first-time visits (from people
who had never visited your site before).

• Bounce Rate: The Bounce Rate is the percentage of bounced visits to your
site.

• Visit Duration: The average duration of visits to
your site for the selected time frame.

• Conversion Rate: For the selected goal ,
this metric shows the percentage of visits
that resulted in a conversion to that goal.

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Analyzing Traffic Sources
Direct Traffic: Comes from people that type your website address directly
in the browser or click on a bookmark

Referral Traffic: Traffic sent from other websites. This means that you have
a link on another website, or you post a link or an article on another website.

Search Engine Traffic: Traffic the website receives from search engines.
This will show non-paid traffic or paid traffic. Paying for Paid Search and
knowing what paid keywords sent you traffic and what the bounce rate was,
can be useful.

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Analyzing Visitors
Differentiate between new and existing users

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Analyzing Visitors: Flow Visualization
Track the visitors journey through the site

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Analyzing Content
• How visitors entered the site

• Which pages are the most popular

• Insight on how to keep users on your site longer

• Highlight a call to action

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In-Page Analytics
Review the internal links on your site and their performance

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Reporting

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Custom Reports: Filters

Customize your analytics reports and clean up & define your data.

2 Types of Filters:
• Predefined Filters
• Exclude all traffic from a domain
• Exclude all traffic from an IP Address
(usually company traffic)
• Include only traffic to a sub directory

• Custom Filters (3 main parts)
• Filter types (6 different types are available
in analytics)
• Filter field
• Filter Pattern

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Advanced Segments
Analyze subsets of your traffic that include only a specific set of criteria

Advanced Segments vs. Filters:
• Advanced segments can be applied to historical data; filter profiles will only
filter traffic moving forward.

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Google Analytics Annotations

Make comments on graphs regarding events specific to that day

Make comments here

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Advanced Analytics

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Tracking Goals & Conversions

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Goals
Understanding Goals in Google Analytics

Common Examples
Business Visitor Success
Objective Action Measure

Generate Leads Complete Contact Form Form_submitted.html

Drive Loyalty Sign up for Newsletter Subscription_confirmed.html

Drive Revenue Complete a Purchase Thankyou.html

Raise Awareness Whitepaper Download a Download_redirect.html

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Creating Goals
Step 1: Enter Goal Information

Goal Name:
Make it obvious so that you know what it refers to

Active Goal:
Set to active for goal information to be collected

Goal Type:
This is usually the default of the URL destination, such as the thank you page

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Creating Goals
Step 2: Goal Details (most important)

The URL Destination Goal Type (as shown above) allows you to tell Google
Analytics that a goal has been completed when a visitor on your website
lands on a specific page.

In the above example, if you have a thank you page for subscribers when they
sign up for your mailing list, then that URL would be the Goal URL for a goal
showing a completed mailing list signup. The URL Destination Goal Type also
works great for a thank you page for a contact form submission.

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Actionable Data from Goals
Once you have set up goals, you can peruse the following areas of your Google
Analytics to discover more about those that are completing goals and conversions
on your website.

• Under Audience > Demographics > Location, see what countries, regions, and cities
lead to the most goal conversions.

• Under Traffic Sources > Sources > All Traffic, see what traffic sources bring the
highest converting visitors.

• Under Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic, see what keywords converting
visitors use to find your site.

• Under Content > Site Content > Landing Pages, see what landing pages lead to the
highest conversions.

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Tracking Conversions
Conversion Funnel is the path a customer takes from entering your site through
the checkout process and finally the end goal being the purchase or signup
confirmation page.

Step 3: Tracking Conversions

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Conversion Funnel Overview
With a conversion funnel, you can visualize the number of people who have
started using your checkout system, how far into the process they go, where
they exit, and the overall percentage of completions from start to finish.

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Actionable Data from Conversion Funnels
Once you have set up a conversion funnel, you can ask the following questions to
begin working on an action plan to increase your conversions.

• Where do the most amount of people exit during the checkout process?

• What pages do people go to when they exit?

• Do people exit the checkout process to visit your return policy page?

• Do people go back to the same product sales page from which they entered the
shopping cart?

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E-Commerce Tracking

Transaction information is sent to the Google Analytics and tracks specific
referral sources to a conversion.

Items that can be tracked:
• Product purchased

• Sales revenue

• Conversion Rate

• # of times people visited your
site before purchasing

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Multi-Channel Funnels

Provides the following:

• How and when different channels had an impact on conversion.
• Time lag
• Path length
• Top conversion

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Multi-Channel Funnels: Conversion Paths

These paths track actions that lead to a conversion.

Sample paths include:

• Paid and Organic search

• Referral sites

• Affiliates

• Social Networks

• Email newsletters

• Custom campaigns

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Multi-Channel Funnels: Conversion Visualizer

.74% of conversions came to the
site through direct, organic
search, and referral sources
before converting.

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Google Analytics: Mobile

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Google Mobile Analytics
Benefits:
o Determine the quantity of mobile
traffic and top devices / OS’s.

This can help with decisions:
o Mobile resources & budgets -
Technical and Marketing

o Mobile Site (responsive design)
vs. Mobile App

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Google Analytics: Mobile
Track mobile traffic and their interactions

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Google Mobile

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Google Mobile App Analytics

The Google Mobile App Analytics feature is currently in beta testing

The reporting metrics that will be available include:

1. Number of Installations of the App
2. Devices and Networks used
3. Geo location and languages spoken by visitors
4. In-App purchase totals
5. Customized tracking of special content (i.e. Video)
6. Number of screens per visit and the order in which visitors
move through these screens

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Google Analytics: Social

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Google Analytics: Social
Track social activity through:
• Google +1 clicks
• Facebook “Likes”
• Twitter “retweets”
• Del.icio.us bookmarks

Questions Answered:
• What are users saying about the brand?
• Who is talking about your website?
• What content is being shared?
• What are the top social networks?
• How much is social media affecting your bottom line?

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Social Analytics Report

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Tools & Resources

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Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts joined Google in
2000 as a Software Engineer
and is currently head of
Google’s Webspam team.

His blog advises the public
on how to get better
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
visibility in Google as well as
webmaster issues in general.

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Avinash Kaushik

Avinash Kaushik is the best
selling author of Web
Analytics: An Hour A Day.

He is the Analytics Evangelist
for Google and the Co-
Founder and CEO for Market
Motive, an Internet Marketing
Online Certification Site. His
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/
blog Occam’s Razor is a great
resource for Web Analytics
and Reporting.

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Google Analytics Blog
Google Analytics Blog offers daily posts about different reports, functions,
and features within Google Analytics.

Example Posts:
• Multi-Channel Funnels: Webinar, Checklist,
Tips & Tricks

• Automating Google Analytics Reporting

• Tracking Adjusted Bounce Rate In Google
Analytics

• Understanding And Using Page Value

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Google Analytics Blog

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Search Engine Land
www.SearchEngineLand.com is a great resource for news and
information about search engine marketing, optimization and how
search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

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Other Analytics Blogs

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Google Analytics: YouTube Channel

http://www.youtube.com/user/googleanalytics

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Google Keyword Tool: www.google.com/sktool
Benefits:
• See the most relevant search data from the original Keyword Tool and the Search-
based Keyword Tool.
• Search for keyword ideas using any combination of keywords, a URL, and
categories.
• Save specific keyword ideas while you search for new ones, by adding stars to your
results.
• Download starred keywords, all keyword results, all keywords for certain queries,
or keyword ideas in bulk.

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Google Keyword Tool: Finding Keywords

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Google Insights for Search
Compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time
frames and properties.

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Compete: www.compete.com

Compete provides digital insight and data from online consumer behavior

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Google Webmaster Tools
Webmasters can:
• Submit and check a sitemap
• Check and set the crawl rate
• Generate and check a robots.txt file

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Website Grader: www.websitegrader.com

Use this tool to do a quick site
analysis.

• Does it have SEO problems?
• How popular is it in Social Media?

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SEO & Analytics: Recap

SEO Analytics

A Partnership:
• SEO established ranking & builds traffic
• On-site SEO tactics
• Off-site SEO tactics
• Analytics guides the SEO decisions
• Analytics allows users to: Filter traffic, Define Goals, Track visitors, etc.

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Thank you!

Kelly Cutler

Stay in Touch
kelly@marcelmedia.com
Twitter: @kfcutler
Linked in: /in/kellycutler

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SEO & Analytics - 2012 Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education

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