Lots of metrics that you can track in regards to your website, but what do you do with it all?
2 things to keep in mind: What are the goals of the site and what are the metrics that you can see if you’re achieving those goals. Are the metrics actionable? Not always. But zero in on what is.
Example: Does removing a contact phone number from the front page of the website help your bounce
rate? Well, it might, but is the goal of the site to get calls/ talk to your customers? If so then you’re working against yourself.
Brian, a listener, is trying to measure engaged visitors on his site. He is measuring it by defining an engaged visitor as “visiting 2 pages, stay for 2 minutes on each page, visiting at least twice and less than 5 days between visits”.
How would Vanessa measure engagement?
Take a look at the pathing information. If it’s user generated content, look at how many people are signing up, how many people are reading what other people have to say. You’ll have skewing when people change their IP’s or clear their cookies, which can make it difficult.
Peter from PeterSommer.com keeps adding content to his site which has resulted in an increase in his site’s rankings, but last week it dropped off the radar. What should they do?
How to start: where is the problem happening, 3 primary places it can happen:
1. is the site still indexed at all? if not, well that’s where to begin.
2. Is the entire site indexed or have certain parts fallen out? Build an xml sitemap of all the URLs on the site; create separate xml sitemap for each type of page (profile pages, product pages) on your site and submit it to Google. Google will tell you how many pages are there and how many pages are indexed.
3. Look at ranking. Take a look at Analytics see what top 10 queries are (the rest are usually longtail). for each of those top 10, make note of what you rank and what the URL is. From there you can measure what pages are ranking, etc.
Also, find out how behind Vanessa is on her e-mails.
