Growing during a recession with SEO - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 10

Hi, welcome to the eWebStyle Podcast, Unknown Secrets of SEO. Today's going to be the Octo Podcast. We'll nickname it the Octo Podcast. Wait, this would be the second Octo Podcast we've had, right? Yeah, the Suleiman family was last week. Oh, the lady with the eight. Octuplets, I guess you'd call it. What's our eight this week? Well, we debated whether we were going to go with the Octo theme or the Slumdog theme. I like the Octo theme. Yeah, yeah. But Slumdog was good. They deserved it. Slumdog Millionaire, ten Oscar nominations, eight actual Oscars. Eight awards, that's awesome. So here's our Octo Podcast. I'm Chris Burris, the owner of eWebStyle. And this is Paul Hanson, the sales manager of eWebStyle. So we're happy to get started. If you guys haven't seen Slumdog Millionaire, I saw it. This is not a movie review podcast, but my two recommendations so far are get a flu shot. And go watch Slumdog Millionaire. Go watch it. All right. So as always, we want to cover what we did last time. We covered Weblyzer in some pretty good detail. And really, the value of Weblyzer can be summed up in, and we've got a couple more things to do, but just to cover what we did last time. We talked about when you get into the details of a particular month in Weblyzer, there's a summary right at the top. And it goes, total hits, total files, total pages. And so we covered what total files, total pages, total visits. I think we did a good job of that. If you don't know the difference between a hit and a page and a visit, make sure you listen to our previous podcast. And the one thing that we kind of really learned was total unique URLs. In a blog that I had done way back when, I didn't really know what to say. In fact, I think I said, this is something we're not entirely sure of, and now we are. What it really is is, as a user, you know what?

I'm not going to go into it because it's a little complicated, but go back to our previous podcast, and you can find that out. We also went over most of the rest of the summary reports of Weblyzer, and so we really only have two things left to cover on Weblyzer. The first is total user agents. So this is not a spy thing. This is not an NSF thing. Not a 007. Yeah, there's no 007s here. A user agent is actually a computer speak for the browser that the person is using when they actually visited your website. So an example would be IE. You can probably think of one or two. Mozilla, what I use mostly. Yeah. Well, Mozilla Firefox. Okay, Mozilla Firefox. And then another one might be Chrome. Which I have not even used yet. Yeah, I haven't tried it out either. Believe it or not, I've been so busy with SEO and design and all the things we do here. We'll get to it, Google. Sorry, we don't have time for you. You know, we'll be promoting, in a very short period of time, we'll be promoting your Google Analytics enough. Yeah, really. So we really don't need to promote that. So that's what a user agent is. Why would this be useful? One of the big reasons it would be useful is if you had an understanding that everybody was using Firefox, there are some subtle differences. Like I noticed on one of our web pages, which we're going to need to fix, one of the JavaScript news of the day sections works fine in IE and doesn't work in Firefox. So if you were to look at your statistics and you saw that everyone was using Chrome, I'm changing it up there on you, then you would absolutely want to go out and download Chrome and view your website in Chrome just to make sure that everything looked normal because, you know, there are some subtle differences. Sometimes subtle differences look amazingly different when you're talking in terms of graphics. So

that would be one example. And in the stats that I'm looking at here, I can actually see that there are a couple Mac users who visit this particular website. It talks about, you know, all sorts, it's got a lot of details. So it's really useful to look at every now and then. In the grand scheme of things, you won't be using it that much. The next one is kind of interesting. It's usage for country. In this case, we're looking at top 30 of 37 countries, total countries. So this is a breakdown by hits, files, and kilobytes of from what country, at least as near as they were able to discern from what country did the people visiting your website, how they got there or from where they got there. So as we look at this, again, this would be something if you found out that all of your hits were coming from a Spanish-speaking country, then you might want to get a translator. Exactly, exactly. That would be assuming it wasn't in Spanish. Yo hablo Español. And, by the way, Babelfish and a couple of those online translators, you know, we're able to work on Spanish websites here because we have some employees who are fluent in professional business Spanish. And the difference between professional business Spanish and a line-for-line translation is crazy big. And we always hear stories of some sort of translation where they've turned something in. Isn't there a famous president who said, Eich unbitten, which basically he said I was a donut. And he meant to say that he was, I am also German or something, I don't know. So I don't remember which president that was. But, so that's an example of, you know, you want to be really careful with your translations. If you are going into Spanish, give us a call. We can help you. So, that's it for Webalizer? It is indeed. This is a, so that was a long, fun journey, a podcast and a portion. And now we're going to move on to Google Analytics.

So, throughout the process of talking about Webalizer, we've, you know, mentioned here and there Google Analytics. Just as a refresher, you know, again, analytics are about tracking traffic on your website. Where do people come from? Where do they go, actually? And that's one of the things that Webalizer does not really have the value of. You really want to know who came on your website, how they got to your website, where they went, how long they were on the first page, where they went after the first page. Did they actually follow through? And, you know, we talk a lot about having calls to action. Did they go to a particular call to action? And we'll talk a little bit about how you can track that with Google Analytics. I'd say also, like, with keywords, that's also very important. Exactly. If they came from a search engine. Well, and from our perspective as search engine optimizers, you know, that's the first thing we look at. Okay. Where is traffic coming from? We've been working on these keywords. Are our efforts helping at all? You know, are we, well, we know the answer to that. But how much are they helping and how do we document that to our clients? Because we have a deliverable, which is, well, traffic is our real deliverable, but reports to support and prove that we are sending them proper traffic. So, yeah, that's the first thing that we look at. And then, this is where kind of our company stands apart from your standard search engine optimization company. We go in and we look at the details of how people are getting there, where they're going once they get there, what are your calls to action, if any, why don't you have any if you don't have any, what kind of calls to action could we put in place? Put those calls to action in place and then track them. And that's really what, that's really why you want analytic software in general. You can also use it not just on-site specific

stuff, but you can use it to help track, you know, maybe you're going to put a banner on somebody else's website. Somebody offered your, your brother-in-law owns a website and he's like, oh, I'll let you stick a banner on my, on my website. And you want to see how much traffic you get from your brother-in-law's website. And so, you can actually track that with good analytic software and Google has a methodology for, for doing that. That's a little, little tricky, but you can certainly do that. And those are the kinds of things that you want to use analytic software for. You know, if I could butt in there, I think there's one thing that from a sales perspective that I run into a lot, why, why I think that analytics are running some type of analytic software is so important. A lot of business owners that are new to the internet or new building websites will take the approach, you know, if, if I build it, they will come. You know, just because you build a website does, I mean, if you don't understand it by now, it does not mean that you're guaranteed traffic or people are going to go there. I mean, you're going to get some traffic because you're probably going to make your homepage, your website, and everyone in your business is going to visit your website. But just because you build it doesn't mean they will come. And so web, a lot, or any type of analytical software is going to help you find out who, what, when, and where about your website. Yeah, and, and you'll probably get traffic because you'll be handing out business cards if you're smart and you've bothered to make a website, then you're actually going to have that printed up on your business cards. We've talked about if you've got a truck, it needs to be on your truck, you know, whatever. It's got to be on your forehead, you know, business is about promoting your business, so. And that's what we do here.

We promote your business. By the way, maybe this is a good time to stop. You read the news, maybe you watch a little TV when you're visiting somebody, in your case, Paul. Because they don't have cable. And all you hear, you hear just, you know, depressing news after depressing news. This person's getting laid off, recession this, recession that. And we actually had a meeting here the other day at eWebStyle, and we put it to a vote. And it was actually unanimous that we have all decided not to participate in the recession. No, sir, not today, or not this year, or not ever. Not this recession, you know, if it's a year or two years, we're not going to participate in this one. We decided, we'll catch the next one. Yeah, thank you for the offer. Please check back with us on the next recession. Y'all can keep that recession. We're good. And we also decided, well, there are probably other like-minded people out there like us who are just choosing not to participate in the recession and would like to not just batten down the hatches and survive this recession. But grow. But grow, exactly. That's how we're kind of protesting the recession. We're actually going to grow during the recession. And we're here to help those other companies who want to grow. We're not putting our heads in the sand. We're not ostriches or trying to be ostriches and not aware of what's going on. There are a lot of companies out there that are hurting. There's a lot of people out there that are hurting. We're aware of that. And we understand that people are going to lose customers. Even if you have a good business model, good business plan, you provide good service, some of those customers are actually going to participate in the recession and may fall by the wayside or at least may cut back drastically the amount of your service they use. So we understand those companies that, you know, we facetiously say aren't going to participate in the

recession or are going to survive the recession are those companies that are putting in place things to replace those customers that they're probably going to lose. You know, we have an understanding here. We will probably lose some customers to the recession. We also have an understanding we need to replace them and we need to replace them faster than we're losing them so that we can actually grow. So we can continue growing. So we're here to help you with that and we'd love to hear any feedback. If you're choosing to participate in the recession or you're not choosing to participate in the recession, let us know. You can email us at podcast at e-webstyle.com. Enough about the recession. All right. Google Analytics. What is so sweet about Google Analytics? Because we talk about it all the time. Wow. You know, a better question might be what is not so sweet about Google Analytics. You know, I've used a lot of different software. My introduction as I'm, you know, just kind of making my own web page early on and trying to follow statistics and see what happens was WebElyzer. And it's a nice tool. It's free. Well, it was, you know, it was the best kind of free product on the market at the time. There are two other, let's not, let's not, you know, forget about AWStats and Analog. Those are a couple other freebies. I've never worked with those much. I'm probably going to turn them on on our website just to track something. Let's see what's happening. Because there is one, I hate to say it, there is one failing of Google Analytics. Are you serious? Yeah. Is that possible? Yeah, there is actually one. We'll get to that later. That'll be our little teaser. We'll get to the problem with Google Analytics, at least in our case. And I'm sure there's hundreds of solutions out there. But we'll talk about that a little later. Let's talk about the good stuff right now. You know, one of the things, Google Analytics is free.

So from the price comparison, it just blows away WebElyzer. Just totally blows it away. It has the ability to track everything that we were just talking about. Why do you want Analytics? Where does the traffic come from? How long does the traffic stay on your website? Where do they go when they're on your website? Do they go through and do they do the call to action? Can we actually track the call to action? In the case of e-commerce, can we actually track the value at the end of the process? And the answer to that is yes, actually. So almost any question you can imagine having out there about your website and traffic, you can answer with Google Analytics. What about that thing that we talked about right before we started the podcast, like the timeout feature? So there's one of the things. We've got a list here of some interesting things about Google Analytics. And one of them is that we can actually change the length of time that Google Analytics waits before timing out. And Paul... Paul, I was like, well, why would you want to time out at all? Yeah, your kind of concept is don't time out. You're going to kill the customer or whatever. What they're really talking about is you can... The web is an interesting... The software you write on the web has some particular challenges because what you see on your browser is not directly interacting with the server. For instance, when you're running a piece of software on your computer, it's real-time running on your computer, and it's holding variables on your computer, and whenever you press any button, your computer knows what's going on. In the case of the web, the server, the web server, actually sends you information. So you're looking at this web page. If you look at it for one second or ten minutes, there's a part of the server that does know. Okay, so I sent this page a while back. But it doesn't know if you're still looking at it. When

you scroll up and down the page, that doesn't require what we call a server hit. You don't have to tell the server, hey, I'm scrolling down the page now. It's like when you're looking at a Word document, you don't have to open the next page. The whole thing opens at once. You're scrolling up and down, so the server doesn't know what you're doing. So if you understand that concept, then you also understand I could actually close my browser. And when I closed my browser, the server wouldn't know. There's no piece of information that's sent back to the server saying, hey, this guy was on this page, and he closed his browser. In fact, there's nothing to even say that if you were on that page and you went up to the address bar and typed in a new URL. So let's say you're on the eWebStyle website, and you go in and you type in msn.com. There's nothing on msn that says the last page we were at was eWebStyle, and there's nothing on eWebStyle that says the next page we went to was msn. Now, if I had a link on our web page to msn, then both our eWebStyle server and the msn server would know I clicked out of eWebStyle on this link, and I arrived at msn from eWebStyle. So any questions about that that makes sense? Okay, so now we've got this concept of they can do a whole lot of stuff, and I don't know about it, and how long do I want to actually consider them to be in an active session? For instance, if it were indefinite, then every day I visited the eWebStyle blog, which is at e-webStyle.com slash tech info, or if you just get to the home page, you can find the blog link. If every day I went to the blog and Google never timed out, my session, my experience, would just be one continuous experience. And so the fact that I clicked here, here, and here, and then went and bought something,

and then the next day something else, it's all like one visit. And you can imagine that that's not, you know, you may be sending out different e-mails to get people to come to your website to look at different things. Like our blogs have different entries. There's entries about, you know, stats. There's entries about podcasts. There's entries about Weblizer. There's entries about all sorts of different things. So we can send e-mails out to our clients if one day they come in for Weblizer information and another day they come in for podcast information. Well, those paths need to be handled separately. And the way that Google does that is it has a timeout. So, you know, at some point, and I don't know what the default timeout is, but at some point when you're on a Web page and Google Analytics is tracking you, if you stop interfacing with the server, therefore Google Analytics thinks that you've not done anything for, let's just say, five minutes, then it's going to timeout that session. And then when you click again, then it's going to start a new event. So really what you'll end up looking like is just a totally different user. Now, it does recognize you're not a unique user. It just tracks that as a different event. So, that good? Yes, that's awesome. All right, okay. So basically it sounds like it can skew your results or your statistics. Yeah, and it can skew it either way. So, for instance, you know, I gave the example of a five-minute timeout. What if you stick them on a page that has a ten-minute video? Okay, or tons of content. Or tons of content, and they actually like to read, which I don't know. That's me. So you can skew it up, down, either way, just depending on how your website is going to be set up. Exactly. And the video example is a great example of where you really would want to extend that timeout. Because you don't want them to watch a ten-minute video and then

all your tracking is lost. So maybe they came in the home page, they went to another page, you're like, wow, I want to see that video. They go to the video. Ten minutes later, they purchase the product. And you don't have this path of how they went from your home page to purchasing a product all associated with one event. And if you don't have that, then it's hard to figure out, you know, your belief may be that the page after the video is that it's no longer a path. Like, somebody goes away for a couple hours. The difference between somebody watching a ten-minute video and somebody coming back three days later because they bookmarked it, and that's not even the same example, because they bookmarked the video, it's totally different. You know, you want to, you know, if you've got clients who are coming to your webpage and going directly to purchasing, great, that's awesome. If they're bookmarking it for three days and then coming back, really what you want to do is analyze, okay, why are they leaving? Could I shorten the video? You know, what text could I put on there? What other calls to action, et cetera? Because as soon as they leave, some may come back, but that's not, you know, you have to expect that once they're gone, they're gone. So that's a great example of where you would really like to extend that time out. So another couple of interesting things. Now, just before I start going, these are little interesting tidbits about Google Analytics. And you're pretty familiar with Google Analytics, you know. He may be just a sales guy, but he's really good. He's a sales manager, actually. But he spends time researching and he understands, you know, Google Analytics. He understands how we actually benefit the client. So you've got a good feel for Google Analytics. Before we get into, like, tricks and interesting things, is there anything that you think we should touch upon? One thing that I thought was interesting was removing yourself from

your statistics. Yeah. I thought that was very important. And why, okay, but tell me, what is, why would you want to remove your, if you own a company, why would you want to remove your visits from your statistics? Okay. That's a great question. And that's the kind of question that really gets into the kind of guts of what, of the value of Google Analytics. So I'm glad you brought it up. If you've got a company of 50 people and they have a habit of visiting, you know, their default homepage when they open their browser is your company website, then you can imagine you've got 50 people at a minimum, they open their browser once a day, let's say. So you've got 50 hits a day, and that's not hits, that's visitors a day, just from your office. And so if you go out and look at your stats, maybe, you know, maybe you're not working with us, and so you don't have good search engine placement, and you haven't put your business, you've just barely put your website on your business card. So you're going to see this 50, and then you're going to be oscillating around 50, and the standard 50 depends on whether an employee is sick or everybody shows up or they're having problems with the browser, so they have to open it 10 times because Hotmail's failing, which they shouldn't be doing Hotmail. But, you know, so you get a lot of traffic that is just noise, right? It's not relevant. The fact that your employees open their browser and it goes to your website and you get traffic isn't the kind of information you're really interested in, unless it's some obtuse way of tracking how often your employees open a browser. So that's where you can actually go in and say, so if you're in one office, you're all under one IP, and you can exclude that IP address from the Google Analytics tracking. Because, again, that will skew your statistics. Especially if you have a ton of images on

your homepage or files or whatever, that generates tons of, air quote, hits, which is probably the most overused term when it comes to SEO. Big difference between hits and, well, I think we're kind of ironing out, you know, the stats of your were, you know, talked about hits. And when they talked about hits, they were really talking about, you know, website visits. Well, no, in the old days, they were talking about the actual, you know, page hits, server hits. Because it's a hit. It is a hit on the server. And nowadays, you know, we think of hits as being a visitor, a particular visitor, whether he goes to 10 pages or whether he goes to one page. And then you can kind of compare page views versus users and or hits. And now we really talk about hits from the perspective of, you know, a different user coming in. So that's what you got in terms of, you know, things that surprise you. I'd say what's surprising. It's free. Yeah. I'm very appreciative of it. You've played around with it. But I'm surprised that it's free. Google makes some impressive software. You know, one of the other Google product that I use that's free and is amazing is Google Maps for my Google Mobile Maps, which is on my cell phone. I don't have a GPS. I don't have a GPS locator on my particular cell phone. But I can always type in across street and then restaurants and find. I mean, it's just insane. That's awesome. It's really insane. So Google, man, they've got a creative business factory. But again, you know, their business model is right software to display ads at a fee for other people. Software generating revenue. That's like robots. You know, take it back. That's like robots running the auto manufacturing plant from start to finish. It's just a money box. Yeah. Makes sense. And it just spits out money. So then they can spend time. And, you know, they've got a good environment over there. Everything you read kind

of indicates that. So let's get on to some interesting things about Google Analytics. And I think we can do this without going, you know, step by step through Google. I think we can do that specifically because we went over Webalizer and people listened to the last podcast. So they understand some things about stats. And now we can look at little tweaks and tricks and interesting things. Something interesting, you know, with, it's always nice whenever you have a lot of data to be able to tap into that data, right? And this is true, great example. I'm actually working on some coding right now for tapping into FedEx, right? Because we want to be able to display the shipping or a client wants to be able to display the shipping cost right away, real time. And, you know, there are a couple of ways to do that. We could actually make a table and we know how much the stuff weighs and we could just spit the data out of a table. But then we have to change the table probably biannually and then it's wrong whenever it's wrong. And FedEx has the capability, what's called an API programming interface, application programming interface, where we can actually tap into FedEx's database, send them the from zip code and country, the to zip code and country, and the weight of the package and it can actually return us the value. That's called an API. Well, Google does not have an API. So if you wanted to display on your site, I don't know, unique paths, you know, you wanted to show, you know, these are some things that we've talked about where we want to show, you know, here's how we've improved SEO processes. So we've got great traffic and we see the flow and now the flow is this, so a before and after. We can't really show, like, a hard-coded copy of the before and a current version of the after because there are no APIs. But we can export different reports and play

with them. And we do that from time to time, massage the reports. In fact, one of our deliverables is the monthly reporting is actually a Google Analytics page, which is their how much traffic did we get from the top ten keywords. So that's very useful. We use that on a regular basis. Another thing that you can imagine, well, that's a great example, we print a report from Google. That means every month for every client that we have, somebody's going to Google and they're signing into our account, which is shared, so our customers have, our customers actually have control, we have access. That's how we set up everything here. Customer should always be in control and there should never be any sabotage. See our SEO sabotage. Yeah, we have an SEO sabotage podcast. Make sure you check that out. So every month we have to go into the Google Analytics account and actually literally print out a report. It would be nice and people have this perspective and there are actually other reporting software out there where it will actually email the report. Now, I think that's great and saving paper is wonderful. And I know that if somebody puts a report on my desk, I will read it. I will, yeah. If somebody sends me an email, I'll save it for later. Yeah. I'll read the title. Exactly. And see if it's important. And so we want to, you know, one of our mantras here is world-class customer service. And really, world-class SEO is not just an email that's automated. You know, that's wonderful for us SEO people because we don't have to go in and pull up the report and then there's the printer jammed and, you know, all of this muck, if you will. We just have this automated system that sends off a report. I just don't think that's world-class customer service and that's one of our mantras. So we actually print out full-color reports on a monthly basis and we stick it in there. So when you get an invoice, you

get a record of what we've been doing for your company at the time. With that, we have a bunch more of very interesting things with Google. And we still have the flaw of Google pending. So this podcast is actually over. But stick with us next time. Again, please send us emails, podcast at e-webstyle.com. Give us your comments. We want to hear them. I want to hear from someone that is participating in this recession who is deciding not to grow. I'd love to hear who, what, when, and why. Why are you participating? Why are you deciding not to grow? And challenge us to, I'd love someone to challenge us. Say, hey, we're not growing. We don't think we can. And I'd love for someone to give us an opportunity to show them that we can change that. Help them. Yeah, absolutely. I've got a nice phrase, which is, bring it on. Bring it on. All right. So next time, our teaser is that we're going to tell you the flaw of Google Analytics. And that's hard for us to say because we appreciate them so much. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. And this is Paul Hanson. And we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.