Google Goals and Google Analytics - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 40

Hi, and welcome to the Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. Welcome back. Thanks for joining us. We'll have another fun-filled edition of SEO information. This is podcast number 40, so we're so glad that you joined us today. Let me go turn off my speaker because I can hear that in the back. That feedback from the speaker is going to be a little distracting. This is podcast number 40. We really appreciate you guys who are out there on Ustream joining us today. Come on, step on by there, Paul. And for those of you listening to our podcast, we really appreciate you listening to our podcast. You can find us here on Ustream every Friday at 9.15, give or take three or four minutes. Central Standard Time. Central Standard Time. That's a good point because we've got listeners all around the world. Oh, we picked up a new listener. A brand new listener in Singapore, I'll tell you. Jeanette Nunn. Jeanette Nunn. Yes. All right, Jeanette, thank you for joining us. This is podcast number 40. If you are interested in contacting us or having one of your questions answered on our podcast, all you have to do is... Send me $20. Hey, man. All right. You left the wide open, so... $20, yeah. And a check made out to me. Yeah. And that's really funny because of a previous podcast, so go back and listen to that. Really, you can send us an email at podcast at e-webstyle.com. There's lots of ways that you can stalk us. You can stalk us on Facebook. You can stalk us on Twitter. You're probably already stalking us on Ustream. Ustream, yeah. Here's to you. That's awesome. To find us on Facebook, the easiest way, because I don't know the URL on Facebook, it's all long and discombobulated, is just go to e-webstyle.com slash Facebook. That'll take you to our Facebook page. Automatically. You can find us on Twitter at twitter.com slash e-webstyle. Well, there is no dash in the e-webstyle in Twitter on that one, so I know it's a

little confusing. No, it's actually really easy. There's no dash in Twitter. There you go. There you go. Works for you. And our domain works on both, so e-webstyle.com and e-webstyle, but we do prefer for emails, podcast at e-webstyle.com. If you go back and listen to some of our previous podcasts, you will realize that we actually answer your questions. If we don't know the answers, we actually appreciate those a lot more. Because we'll go out there and we'll research them. We'll talk to the people that we know in the industry and we'll get that question answered for you and we'll give you, you know what, the only people who can guarantee you first page placement on Google or any of the search engines is the actual search engines. So we're talking with the experts and the experts who do the best they can and we're going to give you the best answer that we can. We are world class at what we do and we don't own Google, so there's a little nuance there. Yet. Yet. We're on our way. And the only reason we want Google now is because we're really impressed with Google Wave. Oh, yes. You know what? Last week I was kind of pissed because they stole our links. They took a bunch of links away from us. Google took our links away, yeah. But we got an invitation to Google Wave and I... All is forgiven? Yeah. I'm not going to say all is forgiven. At least for the week. Yeah, I want my links back. Yeah. And if you want to know what Paul's talking about, yes, we lost a bunch of links. If you go back to our previous podcast, that's podcast number 39, you can find it. Actually, our podcast is hosted. You can find it on our website. Just go to our blog. You can also find it. We're on Podomatic. So, just go e... There's no www. ewebstyle.podomatic.com. That'll take you directly to our podcast page on Podomatic. So, go back and listen to podcast number

39. Some of the other things that we talked about last time. Well, we got started with Google Goals. Okay. We'll wrap that up a little bit. We talked about backlinks and just a little bit about how we're running some experiments on duplicate content and backlinks. So, go back and listen to that podcast because it's a really good podcast. We got a little bit of news. Every day, we want to cover a little news. Give us some relevancy. Give us something, kind of food for fodder for the rest of the podcast. Here's an interesting something that we found last Friday after the podcast. For all you car enthusiasts out there, if you know what a Bugatti or Bugatti, I don't know how to pronounce it is, but it's a million dollar car. I think the one that was in the news cost about 1.6 or 1.2 million dollars, right? It's funny how 1.2, you kind of forget the two, but two represents $200,000. That's probably a $400,000 difference. Come on. So, this guy, right? He's driving down the expressway going to Galveston, Texas, which is a little small island outside of Houston, and I don't remember what he was doing, but he drove off of a bridge into the bay. He drove a $1.2 million car into salt water up to the doors. You can actually find a video of them pulling the car onto a flatbed tow truck. And he didn't just kind of weave off and get in the water a little. He was like 100 yards. He was fully into the bay. A full football field into the bay. So, Google it. You will find it. It's kind of entertaining and relevant to Houston. That's cool. I don't know if that's a positive thing about Houston. It happened in Galveston. At least we have people who own $1.2 million cars here. I'll take that. Well, he's actually from Lufkin, isn't he? Yeah. Which is even worse. What else is in the news? Are you ladies out there? Oprah is ending her show, and

I'm not even going to go more into that because I don't watch her show at all. But you did have a good point, and I think this is absolutely true. The way that Oprah works, the only possible reason she could be ending her show is to do something bigger and better. They're saying that she is possibly going to start her own TV network. The whole network. Like, one show is not enough. I'm CNN now. Yeah. I got my own news. I got everything. Welcome to the O channel. Maybe she'll buy Overstock because that makes it. O? We put the O back in your day or something. That's pretty funny. One more interesting piece of news. I found a guy in California that filed for disability with the state of California, and he was found a few weeks later on a home improvement TV show working in home improvement. What a retard. Come on, man. Weird news. I mean, I don't even know what to say to that. That's pretty crazy. That's pretty crazy. So don't be surprised that you got caught. All right. Today, Google Goals. What is a Google Goals? You know, when you told me earlier today, our topic today, you said goals, and I heard gold. I'm like, what are we talking about gold for? What's the price of gold? Are we going to invest in gold? Well, remember, for most of our websites, this is going to be a little corny, so prepare yourselves. Okay. Google is gold. Let's be honest. I'll take it. First page of Google. This is the gold standard right there. Google, being on the first page is gold. We did mention last time that Google upped their amount of goals that you can have, and this is in Google Analytics. And we've done previous podcasts on Google Analytics, you know, the things to look at on Google Analytics, the things that you want to be tracking on a regular basis on Google Analytics. And we didn't really talk about goals at that time. I think we

probably mentioned that they exist, and you should be doing stuff with them. We decided, especially because Google upped the ante, they used to only have four goals. Now they've got 20. 20 goals. What that means is you were able to set four goals in Google Analytics, in your normal Google Analytics account, and now you're actually able to set 20. And as before, you would have to create a duplicate account, and then you could set some more goals, and then another account if you needed more than eight. So now, just a little bit more user-friendly for, a lot more user-friendly for the end user. Well, and you also, you know, one of the things that this points out, if you're in Google Analytics, and you're looking at it on a daily basis, and you're happy with what Google Analytics is providing you, when Google says, you know what, four goals isn't enough, we need 20, that's kind of a big warning flag. You know, the sirens going off. I don't know if you watch The Simpsons. Is that a good siren? Yeah. Homer, have you ever known a siren to be good? This is, in fact, a good siren saying, hey, look, you know, if Google's saying four is not enough, 20, we've got to give at least 20 to the people who are using Google Analytics, then that should tell you, you need to be using Google Goals. Yeah. And maybe you should expand your current goal. If you are using them, yeah, let's work on different ones. And if you're not using them, today is the day that you should start. So there's lots of, today, now, as a matter of fact, you should start using Google Goals. After the podcast. After you watch the podcast, then you should get started. Or after you listen to the podcast, because you don't want to get distracted. So what are some of the things that we could track on Goals? You can track, well, I'll tell you. You can track, well, now or later. I mean,

before you, I'll say, we'll talk about now. What can you track now on Google Goals? You can, let me see, let's go some goal types. There are time-based goals now. So now you can track how long someone stays on your site or how little someone stays on your site. So if, obviously, you want more traffic to your website, you want people to stay longer, you want them to go through more pages, and you can track that as well. You know, Paul, I've got to be honest. What's that? I'm looking at this, and I'm like, wow, that's really cool. I'm not going to say, I'm not going to lie. That's really cool. And here's something I, and here's what I thought was really cool from my notes. Why would you want to track how long someone stays on your site? Let's say you get into a situation where people, a lot of people come on your site, and then they bounce, or they leave after like a minute or so. You can actually look at, you can set up these goals. So now you can say, hey, now 97% of my traffic spends less than one minute on my website. That's an important piece of information that you can grab from those goals. And, you know, I've got an example where you can actually take it and apply it immediately, because that's important, right? 97%, if this were a statistic, 97% of our traffic stays for two minutes or less. You know, that's valuable. You want to start reevaluating. How about if by setting these goals, you realize that when people come in from a certain set of keywords, either on pay-per-click or on organic, and they stay for 10 minutes, because they came in through those. I got it. So these keywords, they stay for this amount of time, and these keywords... And everything else, they stay for less than two minutes. For two minutes, awesome. Now, guess what you're going to do to your pay-per-click campaign? You're going to focus... You're going to spend

a lot more money on the keywords that are getting people to your website. And, you know, this is all, this is all, you know, there's a lot of phases to pay-per-click. There's, okay, I want these keywords, and then my ad typically has to have the keywords in it. And you ask why? Why? You're just very good. Because if I type in, we'll just say, Internet Marketing Houston, and I'm a person who's inclined to do pay-per-click, and we subscribe that most people aren't, but there are some who are, and you look over there, and you, all the ads, none of the ads say Internet Marketing Houston, you're probably not going to click them. Exactly. If they say online advertising, well, you know, maybe I know the nuances between Internet Marketing and online advertising, or maybe I realize that they're the same thing. Okay. But if I don't see those keywords I was looking for, just like when you're searching for anything, when you look at the results and you're searching for Bugatti Galveston, if it doesn't say Bugatti Galveston, you don't click the link. I probably wouldn't click there. Because it's not relevant to my search query. You assume it's not there. So that's the first step is, okay, we've got to have those ads there. Then when they get to that page, whatever that target page is, you also need to say Internet Marketing Houston or Bugatti Galveston, because you've got about, I think we typically say 10 seconds, it's probably less than that, to capture the visitor. So he's typed in Internet Marketing, well, let's just say Bugatti Galveston. He's seen your pay-per-click ad. Don't ask me why you're doing a pay-per-click ad on this. And they get to that page. If they don't see Bugatti Galveston really quickly, and we did a really good example of this in one of our previous podcasts where we're talking about third-coast comedy and the fact that they were getting a lot of traffic from Comedy Houston, and the traffic was going to their homepage, which, because

of their business model, said nothing about Comedy Houston. And so people would, of course, bounce. So we convinced them. I actually work with them on stage tonight, actually, doing improv. You have to Ustream that. Yeah, I already told them. We're working on it. We'll be Ustreaming. So we'll have another Ustream video for you guys to keep your eyes out for. So I convinced them, look, you've got to put something on your homepage that's relevant to Comedy Houston, because all this traffic is coming, and it's not finding what it's looking for. So you've got to do that. So I think that's why I think that's just really powerful. These keywords kept people on my site for 10 minutes. I'm going to focus on those keywords. And you can do the same thing for SEO, right? Like maybe this keyword keeps someone for a lot longer than this keyword. I might want to drop that keyword and find a better keyword that keeps someone longer or converts better, blah, blah, blah, so on and so forth. Well, here's another example. What if you're running both pay-per-click and organic? And what if Bugatti, Galveston, pay-per-click, they stay for 10 minutes, and Bugatti, Galveston, organic, they stay for two? So you go and you look at the target pages. I would subscribe that if that were the case, the pages that the pay-per-click is going to and that your organic is going to are not the same. And so they're not finding that relevant information. So kind of boiling down all of this, you can really say, you know, not only can we say these people are staying for 10 minutes for these keywords, we can say here's another group of keywords that I think are very valuable. They're not staying for 10 minutes. They're staying for less than two. What do I need to do to those target pages to make it more relevant, to make it so that when they get to those pages, that in that first 10 seconds, they're actually finding what they're looking for.

So it's a good way to evaluate what's going on with different keywords, what's going on with different pages. Okay. That's an awesome tool. That's it. Thanks, Google. Yeah. Oh, excuse me. All right, next, there are page view-based goals. A page view-based goal is a type of conversion that's triggered when someone exceeds a particular page view limit. Page view count. Page view count. So, all right, my page, my website consists of 10 pages. I want to make sure that someone at least gets to the main five or four or whatever. You can set that up as a goal. I mean, again, you want more traffic, you want more time on your site, and you want more page views. And I talk about this, and when I send out an analysis, you want to kind of guide them down a path with your calls to action. So you want to make sure that they're hitting your most important pages. I mean, I want to make sure everybody hits every page and then gets to the page where they pick up the phone and call us and say, here's my money, do my SEO. The most important thing, yeah. Yeah. Let's just turn it converted into a client. Exactly. So you can actually set this as a goal, and I'm trying to think, is there another situation where that would be applicable? Well, again, this can be a very great tool. Same kind of thing, different keywords coming in, but let's get off of that example because everything that I just said that applied to time is also going to apply to this. In fact, this might be more valuable if you don't have that much content or movies on your page, right? Because if a keyword gets you to a page and they're on there for 10 minutes or they're on your site for 10 minutes, maybe there's a 10-minute video on that page, and that's why they're staying for 10 minutes. So page views, maybe you don't have a video, and maybe you only have like

four or five paragraphs of text so they can peruse that real quickly, and then your next call to action is to do something. Again, with this tool, you're going to be able to see what was the path that they went. Maybe I can focus on it. What I realized by looking at these statistics is when they came in on this page and they went to this page, they've got a bunch of choices, but when they went to this second page, they stayed for four more pages, right? Instead of when they went to the other ones, they ended up bouncing and getting out of the website. So if they go to that second page and they stay for four more pages, guess what? I need to adjust the very first page to target that valuable page that's actually keeping people. I also want to just kind of pull back and take a 50,000-foot view and say, okay, what is it about this page that's enticing them to go on to the next four pages? And what about my home page that doesn't make them want to stay? Or the other pages that cause them to skip. Absolutely. That's exactly right. So, again, it's another Google. Well done. Nice, Google. I see why you almost forgive them for the links. Almost, almost. The other kind of goals are called URL destination goals. And these are the old goals that were in Google that basically whenever you would get to a certain destination, it would generate a goal. And here's an example of a URL destination goal. You purchase something at Amazon.com. And when you get to the end screen, we use it. Maybe a thank you. Thank you. We use the thank you page. We use that, yeah. When you get to the thank you screen, thank you for your purchase. We appreciate blah, blah, blah, blah. That is a URL destination. They've gotten to that URL. So, now that's a goal. That's been achieved. That's been achieved. And that's, I mean, the first thing that comes

to mind is e-commerce. And if you can sell something on your website, you should definitely have that set up as a goal, as a URL destination goal. Whenever I make a purchase and I get to my thank you screen, that should definitely be a goal. And even within, there's more goals you can set, even within the URL destination goals, in the page view-based goals, in the time-based goals. There's individual goals that you can actually set up in there that we're not going to get into just for the sake of time. What else? Well, so one thing about that URL destination. So, there's two different goals. This is a goal that's been there forever and we use regularly. We'll start using the other ones now because there's a lot of value there. The URL destination, one of the things that you can do is when you can use the e-commerce features of Google and it just takes a little bit of code so that when they get to that thank you page, not only is it storing that they achieve the goal, but it's also storing how much the customer spent. So, now you actually know dollar amounts. And then that enables you to look at what keywords do they use to find us, what was their path through our website, and how much did they spend. Because if there's a particular path and a particular keyword where they're spending more money, you want to focus your efforts on those, enhance your efforts on those particular keywords. And if there are keywords that you realize or the spend is $5 and you're spending $20 a month and you're only getting $5 a month of revenue because you're spending it on keywords, pay-per-click keywords, you want to back off on that or come up with some other new designs. Again, a lot of this isn't just in stone. You need to look at the statistics and you really need to use your intuition because if your intuition says that, oh, Bugatti Galveston is going to be a

really profitable set of keywords. Seek help first because, you know, and that's kind of, I was just thinking like there's probably somebody out there that's like, man, y'all keep giving me this information like, and like, because a lot of our listeners are business owners themselves and they're trying to do their SEO or help. And they're probably like, man, you're just inundating me with information. Okay, you are going to have to spend some time on this stuff. I mean, of course, there's guys, there's nerds like us that just live and breathe this stuff and we just spend all day on it and just can't wait to get more and more and more. But there's some people that are like, this is just too much. Arduous, yeah. Yeah, I got to run my business. I got to set these goals. I got to do this. Watch out for duplication. I mean, this is going to take some time. You're going to have to invest some time into learning this kind of stuff. Invest time into your business. That's what I tell you. Well, really, you should just do what Joe Orsak said. What was that? Get experts. Hire e-webs. I think he said that literally. Hire e-webs style. Hey, that works. Because, you know, are you going to go out and you could conceivably, if you had a customer sue you or you needed to sue somebody, you could conceivably learn the law and do it yourself. Yeah. Why don't you? Because you hire an expert and your value to your company and to your business is not figuring out how to sue somebody and how to defend yourself. Your value in your company is probably not how do you get your website on the first page of Google. Your value is other things. Getting on the phone, marketing, networking, making decisions. Letting a company like us know, you know what, guys? My intuition says these keywords. My intuition slash experience with my business say these are the keywords that we need to be focused on. We're

not actually focused on those yet. So let's tweak the campaign that we're already working and let's make sure we're working in this direction. And, oh, by the way, I don't think the landing pages are as impactful as they can be. Help me figure out the best way to make those impactful. When you start utilizing experts like that, you're actually bringing the most value to your company. And then we're actually bringing the most value to you. So that's what we really want to do. I think so as well. And there's definitely some more. I don't know if we're going to get into funnels. If you're familiar with Google Goals, there's always been funnels. They've changed the user interface on funnels a little bit, but there's still only 10 steps to a funnel. And that, actually, we'll say we can do that entire podcast on that because that's just going more. That's opening Pandora's box almost. And funnels is actually kind of a classic sales process technique. I don't know if you've been in sales. I don't know it as the funnel. I mean, oh, yeah, actually, I do know it as the funnel. Yeah, it's the funnel where, like, how many people have you made contact with? How many people have you given the first packet to? How many people have you made the second contact with? How many people have been presented a contract? Because that doesn't mean the deal's closed, as we know. How many people have given you a check and still not? The deal's still not closed. So that sales funnel, that funnel, Google's just created a very similar idea or functionality so that how many people got to this page? And what's this page? You know, maybe our flow process is we're talking about hypnosis and we want to define hypnosis. We want to show the value, the next page shows the value of hypnosis with quitting smoking. The next page is here, click and buy the product, which then leads you to the shopping cart. And you've got this funnel.

How many people enter the funnel and how many people come out the other side? I don't know. I'm sorry. I'm cutting you off. How many people come out the other side as paying customers? And that's what the funnels do. Maybe we don't need to talk about them. There we go. Funnel's done. There we go. So that's the end of podcast number 41 also. All right. What else? What else can we track? Well, you... How are we doing, Tom? We printed out a list. We're doing pretty good. We've got another five minutes or so. We printed out this list of, you know, 10 must-track Google Analytics. And this came from Web Analytics World, authored by Manoj Jasra. Hey. Thanks, Manoj. Thanks. Dude. Homeboy. Appreciate that. Thanks, MJ. There you go. There you go. And he covers a couple of things that are, you know, must-track items. And I actually don't necessarily agree with some of them. So we thought we'd go in there. So no thanks, MJ. Yeah. Yeah. A punk. So one of the first ones he says is you must track comments. And, you know, comments is going to be like a situation where you have a blog and you're replying to the blog, you know, or visitors are replying to the blog. Frankly, I think you should track comments. I just don't think it should be done with Google Analytics. And the reason is because it's done in our case. We use a WordPress blog. When people put in a comment, it goes right in the WordPress blog. And WordPress tells us, you know, the comments and how it happened. When I say what's cool for it is just even just watching comments. It gets, because having a blog or having a place where people can interact with your website makes it, for lack of a better term, interactive. Yes. Having a place where people can interact makes it interactive. All right. I mean, because you want to, you know, you want people to leave a post on your blog because

that means, oh, hey, they actually came here. They liked it enough to take time and sign up for it. So I think that's cool. That's why if you listen to our podcast, we get really excited when people have left a comment on iTunes. Yes. We actually read those comments. By the way, Oh, we got a new comment. Didn't we? We may have. Oh, I'm sorry. Yes. I'm going to hide it. Yes. Yeah. New comment. I forgot about that. You better go read it. I know. We'll read it next time. Next week, we'll read it. So whoever goes to that, thank you very much. By the way, we have decided that we are going to announce this. You are currently watching or listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That's right. Hell yeah. Now, we spent lots of research hours to figure out and to confirm this. We didn't want to make that kind of announcement nonchalantly and just, you know, there are people out there who are like, you know, SEO rock stars. I don't even know exactly what that means. Yeah. But we didn't want to just throw out something frivolous like that. We actually went in and researched the comments that are on iTunes on the different podcasts and when they last posted their podcast. And it seems like we're the most popular. In terms of relevancy, podcasts, uploads, staying current, staying up to date. You're listening to it. That's right. Keep listening to it. Yeah. Yeah. So, track comments. The next one was track social bookmarking. My first response, and Paul and I had a little bit of discussion about that. My first response was, you know, the different social book, social areas let you know what they're doing. And then now as I'm saying this, I'm realizing other stuff that I missed actually. So, this is actually a good one. For instance, if you have a link to Dig, you can actually find out if people have dug your particular article or blog entry. So, that's an example

where I don't know, Dig probably won't tell you unless it's somehow tied to an account. So, I don't think that'll happen. So, that's a great example. My first response was, okay, Twitter tells me when somebody starts following me again. Facebook, I know when I got a new friend. Now, I might want to track it to figure out how they ended up or also if it came from my website. Because maybe they were Googling and they ended up on our Facebook e-web style page and they decided to follow us. So, then I don't know the difference whether it was from our website or actually directly from Facebook. So, that is an example. So, I think tracking social bookmarking is, actions is actually very good. And MJ, that's a good call on that one. And I probably shouldn't have to say this, but if you're doing some type of social networking, make sure that you are staying current, you're staying up to date because that's what people want. People want it, you know, they want now, information now. So, yeah, it's great to set it up, but make sure you're putting a post every so often or you're making a special offer or, hey, like I'm sure we're going to, we always say, hey, podcast is up, everybody go check it out. Video stream is up, go check it out. So, make sure you're actually doing something with it to keep people coming back. And we'll make announcements about, you know, clients getting, you know, hey, their keywords are finally on the first page or XYZ keywords on the first page. We did one recently, which was about, I think it was online marketing, we're on the first page because of Google Local in that particular situation. Don't forget the value of Google Local. And if you're not familiar with Google Local, go back and listen to some podcasts because we cover Google Local. I don't know if we cover it in depth, but we certainly cover it. That was like March, maybe? It's what, November? We

covered that a while back. This is podcast number 40. You are listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. Actually, that is the end of the show for now. And I have one thing that I want to remind you of. Okay, this is news to me. I don't even know what this is. Programming is like sex. One mistake and you're providing support for a lifetime. For a lifetime. Yes. Until next time, you are listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. This is Chris Burris. And I'm Paul Hanson. Bye-bye for now. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.