Your Website’s Average Session Duration And Why It Matters

Wednesday, September 07, 2016 -- 08:28 AM

The purpose of looking at your website’s analytics is to examine how your website is performing and review where you can improve. With that in mind, I would like to introduce you to a key metric, which is your website’s Average Session Duration, and put it into perspective so that the numbers can have actionable meaning.

You should know that this is a metric that search engines factor in to their results. They’ll match a search sequence to Average Session Duration and determine if they want to serve you up to the next searcher or bury you further down the page. So this is a metric that you want to pay attention to and set goals toward continuous improvement. Not just for the sake of SEO, but also for the sake of your bottom line.

I find that analogies can be helpful to simulate an experience that helps explain a concept or idea. So, I humbly offer the following analogy to start the dialogue on a Website’s Average Session Duration.

Watch people walk down a street lined with...

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Which Social Media Sites Are Hot and What Should I Post?

Monday, August 29, 2016 -- 07:58 AM

We want to know what’s hot and what’s not and while we look at our own performance, we can’t help but ask ourselves – ‘what else should I be doing?’ or ‘where else should I be doing it?’

Social Media is a pretty fast paced, evolving world and while experts tell us what we should do and how often we should do it, where we should do it and so forth, it can be helpful to see how the rest of the digital experts are looking at things.

This first chart shows what kind of content is performing the best. I offer a note of caution that the definition of ‘performing’ was not clearly identified. But experts in the social media field are loving the results of video and images most of all. Offers, promotions and articles are next in line with the ‘lovin’ it, with reviews and infographics lagging behind. This may or may not reflect what is working in your social media universe. Nonetheless, it might make you take a second look at your publishing calendar to see what kind of...

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How Do You Know If Anyone Is Reading Your Blog?

Tuesday, August 02, 2016 -- 07:14 AM

Keeping up with a blog takes a lot of work and at times might even feel like a major stress point. You may have anxiety attacks over your next blog topic, even if you’ve subcontracted someone to write for you.

Given this level of effort, time and cost commitment, wouldn’t you want to know if anyone is actually reading your blog, and are you experiencing conversions of any kind as a result of your blog?

You have your subscribers list from which ever service you’re working with to send out your blog, such as Feedburner or Feedblitz, which are just two among many. Within these services there are typically metrics available that are helpful. Knowing how many new subscribers, how many unsubscribed, how many opened or even how many clicked through to something offers valuable insights.

When you post your blog, your blogging platform triggers your blog distribution service to deliver your notification to your subscribers through email or RSS. You might even have it set up to post on...

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Your Website’s Navigation May Be Causing High Bounce Rates

Tuesday, July 26, 2016 -- 06:46 AM

And let’s face it – high bounce rates are not a good thing.

Have you looked at your website’s analytics lately?

Within the Google analytics you’ll see ‘bounce rate’ and your bounce rate is a pretty important indicator of how your website is set up and a pretty good indicator as to the efficacy of your marketing. Not to mention that search engines take bounce rates into consideration to help determine relevancy among other ranking factors.

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who landed on your site and left without going to any another page.

Also time on site is a big clue here as to how well you are doing but we’ll leave that for another post.

I actually wrote about Bounce Rates back in 2013 – funny how some things don’t change all that much.

High bounce rates can be the result of several things:

• The keywords you are ranking for are wrong for your site – leading someone who is not your target or what they would be looking for to your site and...

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Your New Website Might Look Good, But You Still Need To Do An Audit

Tuesday, July 19, 2016 -- 07:54 AM

Getting that new website project done was a big job, you’re exhausted and just happy to have it launched. I don’t want to bust your bubble but you aren’t done just yet.

Building a website is a big job, it is hard, it takes up a lot of time, there are a thousand or more things to coordinate and complete, to get approvals for and debugging can take on a life of its own. So, it is no wonder that all the things that can’t be seen or you’ve become numb to what you are looking at, leaves another to-do list undone.

If part of the project was to have an SEO Optimized Website then you might want to consider the following list in your site testing pre or post launch. An SEO Audit is the only way to be certain that the site is really optimized and not just looking good.

First, please check EVERY single form, signup widget, subscribe here button or whatever is on your site, wherever to insure that all is working as intended and the data is going where it should. Likewise, if you have a...

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