If you have a website, you need to leverage digital marketing strategies to grow your organic audience. There are three different paths you can choose to do that. You can hire someone in-house, you can outsource the work to a freelancer or agency, or you can do it yourself. We’re going to discuss the pros and cons of each option to provide a complete answer to the question of how much does a digital marketer cost.
Why Digital Marketing?
Before we dig into the three different digital marketing paths and the associated costs, let’s start with why digital marketing matters.
Digital marketing allows you to grow an audience for a digital platform in a way that is easy to track and easy to target.
Unlike traditional marketing tactics such as print advertising in magazines, digital marketing tactics save you time and money by allowing you to see what’s working and optimize those efforts.
If you take the print advertising example, you don’t have good data. You don’t know with certainty how many people read it. You probably know how many subscribers the magazine has but you don’t know how many of those subscribers looked at your ad. And you don’t know how many people it influenced to ultimately convert and use your product.
You also have little choice over who sees it. You can choose the magazine and get a rough idea of the subscriber demographic. But that will be a broad generalization. So, what percentage of those total subscribers are actually your target audience? The more total eyes on your ad the higher the cost will be. Ideally, you don’t want to spend anything displaying an ad to people who aren’t qualified customers.
Now, conversely, if we focus on a digital marketing tactic, such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) you have much more control. You can set up Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Bing Webmaster Tools on your website and get SEO data.
All three of those tools are completely free. They will give you an idea of how many people visit your website, what articles are the most popular, how long people stay on each page and where those people came from.
So, if you’re focusing on SEO you can see what percentage of your traffic came from Google organic search directly in Google Analytics. You can see what landing pages they landed on from Google. And you can see what they did next. Did they leave? Did they visit another page? Did they sign up for your newsletter? Did they register or make a purchase?
That allows you to make better decisions. You can see what SEO efforts are working and not working and you can double down on what’s having the best results. Often you find there is a type of content that resonates better with your audience and they stay on the page longer. Or a type that converts better than others and you see you have higher goal conversion rates on those article pages. That’s the type of content you should build more of because it’s bringing the people you want to attract.
So by having the data and using it to optimize your efforts you’re also honing in on your target demographic and attracting the right audience for your efforts.
And this is why digital marketing is so important. The ability to track your efforts and target an audience allows you to market in a way that moves the needle for your business.
The Cost to Hire an In-House Digital Marketer ($50,000 / year)
So, let’s start discussing the three various paths you can take to leverage digital marketing. We’ll start with hiring an in-house digital marketer.
An in-house digital marketer is someone you hire to work at your business to grow your website audience and increase conversions. This is the most expensive route and a very difficult way for a bootstrapped startup, blogger, or small company to start.
Now, that is just the payroll expense. There are several other expenses that come along with hiring employees such as recruiting, training, and benefits.
The Cost to Outsource a Digital Marketer ($100 / hour or $1k-$3k / month)
Hiring a Freelancer versus a Marketing Agency
If you decide to outsource your digital marketing there are two options. You can hire a freelancer (1 person) or you can hire an agency (team of people).
In general, a freelancer will charge a project-based or hourly rate whereas an agency typically requires a monthly retainer. The hourly rate for a freelancer averages between $50 – $100 per hour and the hourly rate of an agency normally starts around $100 per hour.
The average monthly retainer for an agency is between $1,000 – 3,000 per month. Although that is just an average. There are several agencies that charge between $10,000 – $15,000 per month. It ranges depending on the services you need and the amount of people working on your project.
A freelancer is sometimes easier to get started with because there is less commitment. Many agencies want you to commit to a 6-month of 1-year term because it does take time to see results with SEO.
And with an agency, even though they have a team of people, that does not mean the entire team will be working on your project. Make sure you know who is on your team.
In the end, whether you go with a freelancer or an agency isn’t the important factor. What’s important is to make sure you’re working with someone who will consistently show up, understands your brand, and has a growth plan and content strategy built out.
You Need to Manage Your Outsourced Marketer
Either way, whether you go with a freelancer or agency, you’ll need to manage them. You need to ask questions. You need to hold them accountable.
You don’t want to get a bill at the end of the pay period and not understand what they’ve done for your brand. When you see reports, question the charts. Make sure they aren’t only showing numbers that look good.
When you ask questions about their strategy, process, and results you remind them that you are involved and care about this partnership. They need your feedback to make sure they are focusing on efforts that matter to you and your brand.
Just because they know digital marketing doesn’t mean they understand your brand. Don’t assume they know more than you. When you outsource digital marketing communication has to be two ways. You need to meet on a regular basis and make sure both parties understand what the goals are and the path you need to take to get there.
You Might Need to Outsource For Each Digital Marketing Tactic
Both freelancers and agencies usually have a digital marketing focus. So, if you want your brand to focus on SEO, social media, and content creation you may need to hire three different people. If you go with an agency they may have all of those as options, but it will likely cost you more to add on multiple channels.
The Cost to Do Digital Marketing Yourself (Your Time)
The last option we’ll discuss is doing digital marketing yourself. This is one of the best options to start with because it doesn’t have upfront costs. And when you’ve just built a website and aren’t yet making much money, it’s hard to hire anyone.
These are all free though some have limitations on the free accounts. When you’re just getting started the free versions of the tools are normally enough. Then, as your business grows and requires more advanced tools the price shouldn’t be as big of an issue.
Another helpful tool if you want to do your own digital marketing is ClearPath Online. Of course, this is our core product, but we didn’t want to leave it out because it’s designed to turn SEO newbies into SEO know-it-alls.
ClearPath Online provides a digital marketing task list for your website. It says what digital marketing task to do when you need to do it and it explains how in a step-by-step guide. It helps you stay on top of the digital marketing tasks you need to accomplish, even if you have no experience.
Doing SEO yourself is a great place to start even if you eventually do want to outsource it or hire someone. That way, you have a basic understanding of what’s required and have realistic expectations. This will make it much easier to manage someone else to do your digital marketing.
What’s stopping you from growing your website with digital marketing? Let us know in the comments!
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Setting up Google Analytics is simple and a no-brainer for any business. It’s free and provides valuable insights about website visitor activity. Let’s walk through exactly how to setup Google Analytics. We’ll even explain the benefits of using Google Analytics and how to get the most value out of it.
The leading marketers leverage Google Analytics to gain visibility into their website. To take full advantage, you’ll want to make sure you set up goals, funnels, events, and dashboards.
Let’s start with the why and then we’ll dig into the details.
Google Analytics provides you with data about your website visitors. You’ll be able to see insights such as:
How many people are on your website, as well as what pages they viewed, what page they entered on, and what page they left on.
How many people converted.
What traffic source they came from including organic search, referral, and social.
Visitor information such as geographic location, browser, operating system, and device used to access the website.
All of this insight and data is free with Google Analytics.
Without visitor data you are operating your website blind.
If you don’t know how many people are on your site, where they came from, and what they did when they were on your site, you can’t make intelligent changes. This data is pertinent to optimizing your website, and lucky for you, it’s free and easy to set up.
Enter an account name. You’ll want to keep this generic enough to apply to any additional web properties you would want to add to the account in the future.
Review and enable any account data sharing settings, then click Next.
Enter in your Property name, which is likely your website name.
If you’d like to enable Universal Analytics, click Show advanced options and enable the toggle.
The default Google Analytics account uses the GA4 version. This is the newest and most advanced version of Google Analytics. It combines app and website data and includes machine learning to provide more metrics than we originally had access to. I would recommend still configuring the Universal Analytics option for now. You can add both versions so you have access to all available data.
If you choose to enable Universal Analytics, enter in your website URL. Then make sure you click Create both a Google Analytics 4 and a Universal Analytics property.
Click Next and then enter in any business information you’d like to provide.
Agree to the Terms of Service Agreement.
Now you will be shown all of the information you need to add Google Analytics to your website. You can click Global Site Tag to get the code to copy and paste in your website. Or you can click Google Tag Manager to add it through your Google Tag Manager account instead.
Using Google Tag Manager to add Google Analytics to your website is the preferred option. This will make maintenance a little easier, but more importantly it can improve your website page speed.
Tag Manager can be used not only to add Google Analytics but any other tags you need to add to your website. This can include Hotjar tracking, Google Ads tracking, and the Facebook pixel. Adding all of your various tags through Tag Manager optimizes your site speed because they can all load asynchronously.
Utilizing Tag Manager is not only easier to implement and maintain these systems, it’s also more efficient for your website.
Now It’s Time to Optimize Your Google Analytics Account
So, you got Google Analytics installed on your website. It’s verified and your data is being tracked. That’s great, but you aren’t done. Don’t stop at the beginning, take full advantage of your Google Analytics account.
Add Events
You can track website interactions such as downloads, video plays, and outbound link clicks in Google Analytics with events.
If you set up Google Analytics using a plugin or module, events might be automatically created for you. Most Google Analytics plugins can be easily configured to set up event tracking on key elements.
Having all of your visitor data in Google Analytics is great, but it isn’t very meaningful without goals. It’s important to know what the goal is for your website and track it so you can easily understand the value of each page on your website.
Some goals have a natural flow that the user will likely follow. That process can be setup as a funnel so you can view the full conversion path for the goal. If the goal has a specific path that must be followed, you can see where you’re loosing people in the path.
Google Analytics allows you to track a wide variety of goals. The right goals for your website varies depending on the business model. Common goals include making a payment, filling out a form, subscribing to a newsletter, playing a video, downloading a file, or sharing content on a social network.
Creating dashboards makes it easy to keep track of your key performance indicators and keep an eye on the metrics that matter to you. You can even configure dashboards to be emailed to you or others on a regular basis.
Dashboard configurations can be shared. This is really nice because you can save time by fine-tuning an existing dashboard instead of starting from scratch. It also can save you time if you have dashboards you like on one account, you can go to Share > Share template link, then simply access the link to add to other Google Analytics properties.
Bonus: Use a Segment to Filter Out Spam Referral Traffic
Sometimes you’ll see spam referrals and fake data in your Google Analytics account. Most often, you’ll notice this when looking at your referral traffic. You’ll see a site as a referral but when you go to the site they don’t actually link to your site anywhere. This is ghost referral spam.
Fortunately, there is a pretty simple way to clean this up. You can download a custom spam filter segment created by Loganix for free. Filtering traffic with a segment is great because it only temporarily modifies the data. This custom segment catches about 97% of the spam and Loganix keeps it regularly updated. Using this segment helps clean up your data and improves your insight.
Do you have any tricks to help get the most value out of your Google Analytics setup? Please share them with us in the comments!
Do you want to listen to this article? Here’s the podcast episode:
The phrase quality over quantity is becoming more prevalent in many different aspects of life including food, exercise, and managing finances. It’s the idea that less can be more, if done right. And this idea is not only applicable, but very important in relation to search engine optimization. So, what does quality over quantity mean for SEO? We’ll go over three SEO tactics where it plays a big role.
Blog Articles
The quality of the content is more important than the quantity of published articles.
Creating consistent content is one of the most important pieces of SEO. You need to provide content for the search engine to rank in order to receive traffic. But, the trick is to create high value content.
The quality of the content is far more important than the sheer number of articles you publish. If you create a blog article every single day, but they aren’t useful to anyone, they won’t help you rank in search engines.
Not only does this apply to the number of articles you produce, but this can also be applied to the length of each post. A longer post does not mean it’s better. Again, the quality of the content will outweigh the quantity of text.
External Links
The quality of the link’s domain is more important than the quantity of links received.
Not all external links are equal. One link from a high authority and trustworthy website can provide far more value than one-hundred low quality links.
In fact, getting links from sites that are considered spam can actually harm your rankings.
Generally speaking, you don’t have to worry too much about your external links. Gaining them naturally over time is the best route. If you have a strategy in place to try and earn links, remember to focus on high quality websites.
You want links from websites that have visitors you want to attract. When earning a link, look at the quality of the website. Is this a website you would feel proud to have a link on? If a link provided absolutely no SEO value, would you still want this link because it would be a benefit to the visitors of this website? If so, then that would be a good external link to earn.
If the website, on the other hand, feels like a site you would be nervous to visit, then you should think twice about trying to earn a link there. Even if it helps you out in the short term, it could hurt your brand. And as search algorithms continue to improve the temporary gain will likely cause you issues in the long run.
Social Followers
The quality of your social followers is more important than the quantity of followers.
Engagement is far more important on every social network than follower count. The number of followers is nothing more than a vanity metric. It looks nice, and it’s exciting to watch it grow, but it doesn’t provide you any value if those people don’t engage. There are more important social metrics to track.
The point of social networks is to connect with others; to be social. You need to build relationships and establish trust. People buy from people they trust.
Having engaged, high-quality followers improves the chances that your website will benefit from your social efforts. Additionally, most social media platforms (such as Facebook and Instagram) reward you for engagement. If people engage with your posts, those people are more likely to see your posts in their feed.
Social networks don’t want to overwhelm people. Their algorithms work hard to display content that matters to that person. When people like, comment, or share your post they are showing the algorithm that your content matters to them.
In Summary
The big takeaway here is to be successful, you need to do what’s best for your community and for the people you want to join your community. You need to think of people first and try to provide the best experience possible. Search engines want to provide the best results possible, so always make sure you aim to make your article the best response for the targeted query.
This is why focusing on quality with every SEO tactic will provide more benefit than quantity. And that is how you will have long-term SEO success.
In what aspect do you feel quality over quantity plays a role in SEO? Please share with us in the comments.
Do you want to listen to this article? Here’s the podcast episode:
There are two types of data you can collect on your website, qualitative data and quantitative data. Quantitative data includes numerical values and qualitative data includes observed or reported feedback. When these two data types are combined you can better understand how your site can be improved. Let’s go over how to collect qualitative and quantitative data on your blog.
Qualitative vs Quantitative — What’s the Difference?
Qualitative Data
Qualitative data is genuine feedback. It is more than just a number. It is an observed or reported experience. This type of data is often expensive, time consuming, and difficult to analyze. But, it can provide a deeper understanding and help you understand the why behind the numbers you’re analyzing.
Quantitative Data
Quantitative data is measured with numbers. It’s easy to analyze but can be difficult to understand underlying causes or why the numbers look how they look.
Why Use Both Qualitative and Quantitative Data?
When you use both qualitative and quantitative data you can create a clearer picture and sometimes solve mysteries.
Reviewing only quantitative data oftentimes raises more questions than it answers. When you combine it with qualitative data it can help you understand why you see the quantitative data you see.
The quantitative data can help you assess qualitative observations to understand where to focus your efforts. Sometimes qualitative data can uncover a problem, and then you can refer to quantitative data to determine how large of an issue it could be and if it seems many people experience the problem.
You can also do the reverse. If you find an issue with the metrics you’re reviewing in your quantitative data, you can get more information by running some qualitative tests in related areas.
Combining the two types of data is how you’ll be able to create clear data stories and uncover the complete picture.
How to Collect Qualitative and Quantitative Data
Okay, so now we understand the difference between qualitative and quantitative data, and we understand why we need both. Now, let’s go over some of the different sources you can use to actually gather the data on your website.
Qualitative Sources
Interviews
One way that you can get qualitative data is from interviews. Interview members in your community. If you have an email list or a facebook group you can reach out to your community and select a few people to interview.
Surveys
Surveys are a popular way to get qualitative data. Specifically, open ended questions in surveys. These questions give people the ability to give specific and detailed feedback.
To collect survey responses from your existing audience you can use Google Forms. It’s a free and easy tool to create a survey. Then, you can share the link with your email list and social networks.
You can also collect survey responses from website visitors. This is a fun way to do it because you get feedback from people who you otherwise may never hear from. You can create a survey so it triggers when someone is about to leave the site and then ask them why they choose not to complete the purchase.
You can also add a survey to your website to ask just a real simple question to all visitors. You can ask how likely they are to recommend the site to a friend or what they hope to accomplish on the site.
The tool I like to use to add surveys directly to my website is Hotjar. It’s easy to set up and use and they offer a free account.
No matter what tool you use, when you collect open ended survey responses the tricky part will be analyzing the data. You will get the most value out of the data if you take the time to actually read every response. It can be difficult to identify trends when you have such a manual process.
When you’re reviewing your survey responses have a system in place to try and create quantitative data with the responses. Create categories of most common issues reported and tally your findings.
You can also use tools to create a word cloud with your responses. A word cloud is a visual representation of the most frequent words. The words that are repeated most often will be largest, and the words that are less common are tiny. The words are all put together in one image so at a glance you can see what really stands out.
User Testing
Another way to get qualitative data is from user testing. User Testing is where you provide a specific task for a user to accomplish on your website. It can be something as simple as “Look at the homepage and tell me what this page is about” to as complicated as “You want to purchase a vacuum. Navigate to the vacuum you want and go through the process to purchase.”
When you perform a user test, you provide the task, then a user attempts to complete the task. What you receive is a video recording where you get to watch the entire process. Depending on the software you use for the test, you may even have audio where you can hear the user saying their thought process out loud as they navigate your site.
The goal here isn’t for the users to give you feedback on what you need to change. The goal here is to observe how real people actually use and understand your site. For each task you give a user, you’ll have an ideal route or answer in mind. But when you get the results, it becomes quickly apparent that people don’t always navigate our site as we’d expect. Witnessing how real people use the site is eye opening and can help you improve the user experience future site visitors receive.
There are several different sites you can use to administer user tests. Lately, I’ve been using UsabilityHub. UsabilityHub has a free account and if you have your own audience, you can recruit your own participants. If you use their panel of participants you have to buy credits. The required number of credits varies depending on the complexity of the tests. For simple tests, you end up paying $1-$2 per panelist. And as a general rule of thumb, you want at least 3-5 users for each test.
So, although this is not a free option, you can run a test for a small amount of money. If you have the budget, it’s a nice way to see if people understand how to use your website.
Session Recordings
One more source that you can use to gather qualitative data are session recordings. You can record what people do on your website so you can analyze and learn from their behaviors. I like to use Hotjar to gather this data.
This is different from user tests because you haven’t given these people specific tasks to perform. And these are anonymous, you don’t have personal information about the user and you won’t get any direct responses from them. What you get is a video where you can see the mouse move as people navigate your website and observe where they click and when they leave.
These recordings can provide a lot of value, but reviewing them is time consuming. Your best bet is to filter the recordings so you prioritize watching the ones where people navigate to a specific page you’re looking to improve. This can help you understand what people are looking for on the page, what they already have seen or know before they landed on that page, and where they decided to leave the site.
Quantitative Sources
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an amazing source for quantitative data. It gives you a tremendous amount of knowledge about your website. You can find out how many people visit, where they came from, what they looked at, and if they converted. And it is all free.
Google Analytics is one of those tools that’s easy to get started with but difficult to master. We have a guide you can follow to get Google Analytics set up. That is where you’ll want to start. Then, if you want to get the most value out of it you can set up goals and look into event tracking.
Split Tests
Another way to get quantitative data is by running tests. This can be a really fun way to answer questions. If you aren’t sure what version of a page will perform better, you can test it. You can create both versions, then send half of the traffic to one version and half to the other. Then, you’ll be able to see which version had more people successfully complete your goal.
A good tool for this is Google Optimize. It’s free and it uses the Google Analytics goals you already have configured.
There is a caveat, split tests don’t provide meaningful results if you don’t have very many conversions. If you have more than 500 goal completions monthly, then you’ll have no problem. But if you only have a couple of goal completions each week, your results won’t be statistically significant. That means, there won’t be enough cases to trust the data. To get meaningful results, you’ll need more data.
So, if your website doesn’t have many goal completions yet, that’s no big deal. You’ll get there. Just don’t spend your time setting up a split test.
Heatmaps
Another quantitative data source are heatmaps. Heatmaps are a visualization of quantitative data.
A heatmap is a screenshot of a page on your website with colorful shapes overlaid on top. The colors indicate user behavior. Depending on the type of heatmap they can show a few different things. The most common heatmaps show mouse movement, mouse clicks, or scroll depth.
This is another report I like to get from Hotjar. It’s nice to be able to see where the focus is. Do people click on elements that aren’t clickable? Do people ever scroll down low enough to see the call-to-action to be able to convert?
Heatmaps make it easy to get an idea of where people look on your website so you can make sure the important elements are in areas your audience focuses on.
Conclusion
The bottom line is more data is better than less. If you’re trying to troubleshoot a problem on your website and improve the user experience you want to look at it from multiple angles.
If you use both qualitative and quantitative data sources you’ll have an easier time solving problems and creating the ideal user experience.
Have you used any qualitative or quantitative data sources that I didn’t mention above? If so, please share in the comments! What was the data source and would you recommend it?
Do you want to listen to this article? Here’s the podcast episode:
To get the most value out of Google Analytics, you need to customize it for your business. That means, you need to add goals that matter to your business so the data is meaningful and specific to you. You need to be able to measure metrics that matter. Let’s go over how to set up a goal in Google Analytics so you can make data-driven decisions.
This information is all specific to the Universal Analytics version of Google Analytics. There is now a newer version, GA4. In GA4 the concept of goals is re-worked. GA4 tracks every single item as an event. And in GA4, instead of goals you can set any event as a conversion. There is no limit of how many conversions you can track and it’s as simple as toggling an event as a conversion. The rest of this article focuses entirely on the goals system within Universal Analytics.
Why do Goals Matter in Google Analytics?
Before we dig into how to configure goals, let’s take a minute to discuss why it matters. Setting up goals allows you to customize the data and reports to fit the needs of your website. It allows you to get a more complete picture.
With goals, you can not only see if your website is getting traffic, but if that traffic matters. Are the visitors the right visitors? Do they play your embedded videos? Do they sign up for your newsletter? Do they share articles with friends? Have they created an account?
Without understanding and tracking your goals in Google Analytics, the metrics are vanity metrics. They don’t tell a complete story. You can use them to brag, but you can’t make meaningful decisions because you aren’t sure what is moving the needle.
What Kind of Goals Should You Track?
Goals should be metrics that grow your business. Just because you want to track something, doesn’t necessarily mean it should be a goal. It’s great to add events and track everything you can. Reserve your goals to track metrics that move the needle for your business.
Some of the items you may want to add as goals are:
Form submissions or leads
Account signups
Newsletter signups
Downloads
Video or podcast plays
You’ll want to track both macro and micro goals. The macro goals will be the goals that directly affect your primary business objective. They are what you typically think of when thinking of your goals. These are things like getting leads, payments, and new signups.
Micro goals are sometimes harder to identify but also important. These are goals that play a role in the overall conversion process. These are small conversions that move people closer and closer towards completing a macro goal. These are things like newsletter signups, downloads, and clicking play on an embedded video or podcast.
How Many Goals Should You Have?
Google Analytics allows you to track up to 20 goals. You don’t need to use all 20 slots though. Just track the right amount of goals for your business.
First, try to identify your primary business goals. Then, identify the metrics you can measure and track those goals. The specific number of goals will vary depending on your website and business.
Google Analytics separates the goals into 4 sets with up to 5 goals per set. When you add your goals, make sure to group your macro goals and micro goals in separate sets. You can organize your goals however they make sense for your business. You’ll be able to view the report data by set. So, your data will make the most sense if you organize your sets with related or similar goals.
Where Do You Configure Goals in Google Analytics?
To access the goal configuration settings, click the Admin gear icon in the lower left of your Google Analytics account. Then under the View panel (the list on the right hand side), click Goals. Click on the red New Goal button at the top and you’ll be ready to add your goals!
How to Set Up Google Analytics Goals
When you go to add a new goal, you may see a list of templates. If you’ve selected an industry category for your Google Analytics profile, then they provide a handful of customizable templates.
Though this seems helpful, it’s generally easier to just start from scratch. So, if you don’t see templates, don’t worry about it. If you do see templates, scroll down to the bottom and select Custom. Then just continue on to the following steps.
There are four different ways to track goals in Google Analytics. You can track goals by destination, duration, pages per visit, or events. Let’s dig into why you would use the different goal types and how to set them all up.
Destination (URL) Goal
This type of goal allows you to specify a URL as the trigger. So, when a user accesses a particular page on your website it registers as a completed goal.
This is useful for thank you pages and confirmation pages that people view after they’ve submitted a form, registered, or made a purchase. This goal type is the most common. It’s often used to track your macro conversions.
This type of goal is also nice because it allows you to set up a funnel. Funnels need a URL for every step, so this is the only goal with the option. A funnel allows you to visually identify if there is a particular step where the majority of people are leaving the conversion process.
The funnel is only useful if a specific path is required. If not, people will come in and out of the funnel often and it will be difficult to make sense of it.
How to Add a Destination Goal:
Enter a name for your goal in the Name field.
Select the Goal slot ID. Remember to group similar goals in similar sets. You don’t have to use sequential goal IDs.
Click Destination as the Type and click Continue.
In the Destination field, you’ll see a drop down and a text field. Start with the text field and enter in the URL you want to use to trigger when this goal completes. So, if you are tracking form submits, and your form goes to thank-you.html after the submit button is clicked, you will use thank-you.html as your destination URL in this field.
Next, look at that drop down to the left of the URL text field. This is how you’ll choose a match type for the URL. The options are Equals to, Begins with, or Regular expression.
If the URL you used is always the same then choose Equals to.
If the URL you used sometimes has parameters at the end of it, and those parameters change, choose Begins with. Most likely, if the URL has parameters you will see something like thank-you.html?id=1&kw=none. In that case, the URL is still thank-you.html and that is what you would have in your text field, but the match type would need to be Begins with so this URL would trigger the goal as well as thank-you.html?id=2&kw=something.
If matching the URL is more complicated than the first two scenarios, you’ll need to choose Regular expression. If you’re not already familiar with regular expressions, this may be a little more than you want to dig into because it is an advanced setting. Instead, you may want to figure out if you can make multiple goals to accomplish the same task.
In the Destination section you will also see a Case sensitive checkbox. Check this if you want your goal URL to only trigger when the cases are an exact match.
If there is a dollar value associated with your goal, you can switch Value to On and add it.
If Ecommerce Tracking is set up, you can leave this turned off and the monetary values will show up under the Ecommerce reports.
If this goal requires a specific series of steps to be followed you can enable the Funnel.
This allows you to add up to 10 steps that a user must go through before reaching the goal. This allows you to see where users are leaving the funnel.
The match type of the funnel URLs will use the same match type as your primary goal URL.
When finished click Verify this Goal to ensure it looks accurate. Then click Save.
Duration (Time) Goal
I’ll just start off by saying that this goal is not useful very often. It allows you to set a length of time on the site as a goal. For the goal to trigger, a visitor has to spend more time than the goal length.
There are two main reasons why this goal is not useful. First, if a user spends a long time on your site there is no guarantee that they are spending time productively. There could be user experience problems and they are unable to navigate to the page they are looking for.
The other problem is that Google Analytics can’t measure time very accurately. The length a visitor is on a page or the site can only be calculated if there are multiple page views. So, if a user views one page and leaves, or if a website only has one page, Google will show the time spent as 0 minutes and 0 seconds regardless of the actual time spent.
How to Add a Duration Goal:
Enter a name for your goal in the Name field.
Select the Goal slot ID. Remember to group similar goals in similar sets. You don’t have to use sequential goal IDs.
Click Duration as the Type and click Continue.
In the Duration section, enter in the length of time you want someone to spend on the site before it triggers the goal.
If there is a dollar value associated with your goal, you can switch Value to On and add it.
If Ecommerce Tracking is set up, you can leave this turned off and the monetary values will show up under the Ecommerce reports.
When finished click Verify this Goal to ensure it looks accurate. Then click Save.
Pages Per Visit Goal
Very similar to the duration goal, this is another goal type you probably won’t use. Although this can be useful to track support sites, there will probably be a better goal type you can use to track more accurately.
Pages per visit is not a useful goal type because it focuses on quantity instead of quality. Just because someone visited a ton of pages on your website, doesn’t mean it was a good experience. They could have had issues navigating and locating the content they wanted to find.
How to Add a Pages Per Visit Goal:
Enter a name for your goal in the Name field.
Select the Goal slot ID. Remember to group similar goals in similar sets. You don’t have to use sequential goal IDs.
Click Pages/Screens per session as the Type and click Continue.
Enter in the number of pages you want someone to surpass before the goal can trigger.
If there is a dollar value associated with your goal, you can switch Value to On and add it.
If Ecommerce Tracking is set up, you can leave this turned off and the monetary values will show up under the Ecommerce reports.
When finished click Verify this Goal to ensure it looks accurate. Then click Save.
Events Goal
The last goal type is to track events. Events are very useful to track interactions on your website such as button clicks. Then, Google Analytics makes it easy to add those events as goals. If the goal you want to track on your website isn’t associated with a URL, events are the next best option.
This is a great option to track items like video plays or form submits that don’t load a new page.
How to Add an Event Goal:
Enter a name for your goal in the Name field.
Select the Goal slot ID. Remember to group similar goals in similar sets. You don’t have to use sequential goal IDs.
Click Event as the Type and click Continue.
In the Event conditions section, you can enter in one or more of your event parameters to target the event(s) that should trigger this goal.
You can enter in a category, action, or label. You can choose if you select the event based on one, two, or all of those attributes. You can even choose the match type (Equals to or Begins with).
You can also target the event by value. You can enter in a value and specify if it is greater, less than, or equal to that value.
For the value of an event goal, the default action is to use the value already associated with the event. You can however toggle that option to No and enter in a different value to use for the goal.
When finished click Verify this Goal to ensure it looks accurate. Then click Save.
Verify Your Goal
Google Analytics provides an easy way to verify your goal. All you do is click the Verify this Goal link and you will be able to see if the goal has triggered in the last seven days. This is just a test to confirm it’s configured correctly, this does not predict how well the goal will perform.
If it shows there are no goal completions in the last seven days it may still be set up correctly. Go find the data in your reports that you’re trying to set up as your goal. Do you see any results for the last week or is zero the correct response?
If your goal looks too high you’re likely collecting data from more pages than you intended. Take a look at your URL match type.
You can also use the Realtime reports to make sure the goals are working properly. Go to Realtime > Conversions > Goal Hits to view your goals triggering in real time. If you run a test yourself, I’d recommend running it on a mobile device with wifi turned off. That way, your IP won’t be filtered out of your analytics data if you’ve enabled internal IPs to be filtered out.
What Else Should I Know About Google Analytics Goals?
There are a few other things you should be aware of when it comes to goal in Google Analytics.
Data collection starts when the goal is created. Historical data from before the goal was set will not be included in the goal data.
You can edit goals. You will be able to go in and modify everything about your goals even after they start gathering data. Your edits will only change the future data, not historical data.
You can disable goals. If a goal becomes irrelevant, you can disable it. They can not be deleted but you can disable or edit it.
Where Do You View Goal Data in Google Analytics?
There are a couple of different reports where you will be able to review your goal data in Google Analytics.
The primary goal reports are found under Conversion > Goals > Overview.
However, several other reports in Google Analytics include goal metrics. For example, if you go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels you will see goal data included in that report. There is a conversion drop down menu on the right side of the data table that allows you to adjust the goal data in the report.
Tracking your goals in Google Analytics will allow you to take full advantage of the data it offers. It fine tunes the reports to meet the needs of your business. That way, you can use the data to make decisions and grow your business.
Do you want to listen to this article? Here’s the podcast episode:
Search marketers normally focus on optimizing for Google. Since Google has a large percentage of the search engine traffic share, that makes sense. But, how do you rank on Bing? If you optimize for Google will that automatically rank you well on Bing too? And does it even matter? Let’s discuss what you need to know about how to rank on Bing.
Does Bing Matter?
Before we talk about how to rank on Bing, let’s talk about if ranking on Bing even matters. Most marketers focus only on Google because most searches happen on Google. But how big of a share does Bing have?
According to ComScore, Bing (Microsoft Sites) has about 25% of the share for desktop searches. Now, that is specific to desktop. And mobile Bing searches are drastically lower than desktop. But still, 25% of desktop shares is a big enough piece of the pie to matter.
This share might be larger than expected. Bing not only powers the search results on Bing, but they are also used for Yahoo search results.
So, Bing not only has a decent chunk of the market share, but there is also less competition. If you start focusing some effort towards Bing you may find the traffic converts better than Google. The search engines both have different demographics so the traffic you receive from the search engines will not be equal. It’s worth seeing if the Bing audience converts better or worse on your website than the traffic you receive from Google. (Towards the end of the article we’ll go over how to view how much traffic you get from each search engine in Google Analytics.)
Start By Listening to Bing
Bing provides a few options to make it easier to understand how they rank content.
Bing Webmaster Guidelines
The first, are the Bing Webmaster Guidelines. This is a pretty short read. It is a concise overview on some of the most important ranking factors and on-page elements Bing takes into consideration when ranking websites.
It’s good to review the guidelines so you have a clear understanding of what is important to Bing.
Bing Webmaster Tools
Next, are the Bing Webmaster Tools. You’ll want to setup and monitor the Bing Webmaster Tools. This is a portal Bing provides to website owners at no cost that has a ton of free information and tools.
It provides data specific to your website and has a ton of useful tools. It has a tool to submit your sitemap to Bing, an SEO analyzer to identify SEO improvements on a page-by-page basis, and lists out any crawl errors. You can even use it to submit URLs to Bing that you want indexed. It also notifies you of suspicious activity or security issues.
This is the best way for Bing to get in direct contact with you. If there is an issue with your website preventing you from ranking as well as you could be, this is where they are going to tell you about it.
The other nice option about the Bing Webmaster Tools is it not only allows Bing to communicate with you, but you can also contact them. There is a help menu at the top (question mark icon) with a link to contact support.
This will allow you to send them an email with a specific question. Now, if your question is generic and can be answered with their support forum you probably won’t get a response. But, if you have a question specific to your account this is a great option.
Create Content for Searchers, Not Search Engines
Before we worry about the specific ranking factors, we should remember to always create content for searchers, not search engines. This comes directly from the Bing Webmaster Guidelines, but it applies to every search engine.
Whether you want to rank on Google or Bing, your best bet is to provide the best value possible for your target audience. This is how you’ll see long-term SEO success. Search engines want to provide the best experience possible for their audience, and if your website helps accomplish their goals, then you’ll rank higher.
Instead of trying to take advantage of every new trend to rank higher, think about how you can provide the best content and experience for your reader. Then, as search engine algorithms change, your website will only get ranked higher and higher. You won’t need to worry as much about changes and new trends.
Bing Ranking Factors and Differences from Google
User engagement is the primary focus for Bing and their strongest ranking factors are based on engagement. Those factors include pogosticking, social, and site authority. There are several other factors that play a role as well. We’ll go over some of the most important Bing ranking factors and how they vary from Google.
Pogosticking
One of the important metrics used to determine engagement is referred to as pogosticking. This is when a user clicks your link in the search results, visits your site, but then immediately clicked back to the search results page and selected the next response. When this happens, the search engine decides the page did not match the search query in a way that was helpful to the user. If that happens often, the page will start to rank lower. This behavior is something Google monitors as well.
The best way to monitor this behavior on your website is by looking at your bounce rate metric.
Social
Bing has made it clear that social networks do play a role in their ranking algorithm. (Google claims social has no impact on their rankings.) Bing has also made it clear that trying to game the system will not help you. They have a system in place to gauge influence. So, by using social networks in a natural manner and building your following over time, you can positively impact Bing rankings as well.
Site Authority
Bing places high value on site authority. They look at factors such as the age of the domain and the name, brand, or keywords in a domain. Google looks more at the authority of each individual page whereas Bing looks more at the site as a whole. The Page Rank metric was actually created by Google and is completely irrelevant on Bing.
Exact Keywords
Bing prefers exact keyword usage more than Google. Both in the site content and as the text in links. Google uses synonyms interchangeably but exact keyword usage still plays a role in the Bing ranking algorithm.
Mobile
Bing does want your site to be mobile friendly. It doesn’t use a mobile first index like Google does, but it does still factor into your ranking.
Page Speed
And just like in Google, page speed does matter. However, Bing doesn’t believe the user experience should be jeopardized to improve page speed. You won’t be penalized on Bing for having a 4 second load time instead of a 1 second load time if the experience the site visitor gets on the website is ideal.
Where to Review Bing Data
You can review your Bing data in Google Analytics and the Bing Webmaster Tools.
Google Analytics
In Google Analytics go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. Then, click on Source at the top above the data table. This will list out each search engine as a source. You may see Google, Bing, and Yahoo listed.
Bing Webmaster Tools
You can also see data directly in the Bing Webmaster Tools. Once you login, just click on Search Performance. This will show you your search impressions, clicks, average click-through-rate (CTR), and average position.
If you want to compare the data found in Bing Webmaster Tools to Google, you can log in to your Google Search Console account. In the Performance tab in Google Search Console you’ll see the same metrics listed. This will allow you to easily compare the data.
For the most part, if you’re focused on optimizing for your target audience, your search rankings will increase in both Bing and Google. But, knowing the differences and how you can improve your Bing rankings can help you get an advantage over your competition.
Do you focus on optimizing for Bing or only Google? Do you plan to change that in the future? Please share in the comments!
Do you want to listen to this article? Here’s the podcast episode:
So, you have a blog and you want some more traffic. You’ve heard SEO is a good way to get traffic to your blog. But, you don’t know how, you don’t have a team, and you don’t have a budget to outsource it. Can you do it yourself? The short answer is yes. Let’s go over how to do SEO yourself, even if you’ve never done it before.
Is it hard to do SEO yourself?
If you haven’t done SEO before and you’re starting at the very beginning, it will be as hard as learning any other skill. You will be able to do it, there is a place to start. Just like any other skill, as you continue to learn about SEO, it will become easier and you will be able to do more and more of the SEO tasks that you once considered to be hard.
SEO has a learning curve just like any other skill. The good news is it isn’t too steep. You don’t have to be scared to start. And you don’t have to be a master to see results. Do what you feel comfortable doing, it will be better than nothing. There’s no reason to overwhelm yourself with advanced SEO tactics until you feel comfortable with the basics.
Here are six steps you can follow to do SEO yourself.
Step 1: Know Your Audience
First off, you need to know who you’re talking to. To do this, create a persona. Really, this should be done before you even begin your blog, but if you haven’t done it already, just do it now.
Creating a persona helps you form a story to better understand your target audience. It allows you to visualize exactly who your website is for.
This will help you create and optimize your content for a specific person. Your SEO will be more effective if you are targeting a particular type of person. Not only does this benefit SEO, it will help the entire process.
Your blogs will resonate with the right people because you are speaking directly to them. Then, that person will sign up for your email list because the lead magnet is exactly what they need. Later, when you have a product or service to sell them, they will buy because it is the exact item they need to solve their original problem that brought them to your site initially.
Having a clear picture of exactly who you’re talking to will help align the content with the goal.
Step 2: Have a Content Plan
Content is going to be an important piece of SEO. You need content in order to optimize it for SEO. You need content pages for search engines to display in the results. And, you need content so your website stays current and continues to help your readers.
Post Regularly
You need to post on a regular basis. Posting on a regular basis will help grow your website traffic and make it easier for your readers to know when they can expect a new article.
How often you post depends on your availability and what you can commit to. If you can, add a new post weekly. If that’s too much for your schedule then do every other week or monthly. If you have enough time for daily posts, great!
If you can’t post weekly, that’s okay. It just will take longer to see results. Being consistent is important so choose a schedule that makes sense for you and stick to it.
When you’ve decided on a frequency (weekly, monthly, etc.) choose a specific day of the week and time you will post. You want a specific plan. This is a benefit to your website and readers, and it helps hold you accountable when you have a clear deadline you need to meet.
Perform Keyword Research
When you’re creating your content, don’t just write whatever article comes to mind. Do keyword research to make sure you’re focusing on the ideas that are most likely to see success.
I have an entire article you can read to learn exactly how to do keyword research, so I won’t go into the details here.
Keyword research will help you organize your brainstorm ideas in a productive manner. It provides a system to prioritize existing ideas while gathering new ideas.
Writing content takes time. That’s why you want to make sure you’re writing content on topics people are looking for.
Create a Content Calendar
The last step in creating a plan is a content calendar. So, you know how often you want to post and you have a list of keyword ideas. Create a content calendar to map it all out.
I like to do this with a spreadsheet. You can use a calendar or a text document if you prefer.
I normally create a spreadsheet with my post dates in the left hand column. Then next to that is the keyword or topic for the article and then I add all of the data from my keyword research in the following columns.
I like to plan out through the quarter as a minimum but sometimes I’ll plan it out all the way up to a year. Just add in the dates you are planning for, then map your keyword ideas to the dates that make sense. This lets you adjust for holidays and seasonal articles.
You don’t have to stick to everything in your calendar. Things change and it’s good to be flexible. But having a content calendar gives you a great place to start and speeds up your process. It allows you to get started on the next article as soon as you’re ready.
Step 3: On-Page Optimizations
You want to have a basic understanding of the on-page optimizations that improve SEO. That way, when you’re writing your blog posts you can add these optimizations as part of your original post.
It will save you time so you aren’t later reviewing your articles to determine how to improve them for SEO. And once you’ve done it a few times, it becomes a very natural process and the SEO updates can appear as natural and authentic additions to your article. And that is exactly how you want them to be for long-term SEO success.
Here are the on-page optimizations you want to be aware of.
Title Tag
Make sure you have your keyword in the title tag. The closer to the beginning of the title the better.
If you’re using WordPress, this will probably be the post title field.
To confirm what text you have in your title tag:
View the page on your website
Right click and select View page source
Use Find (ctrl+F) to search for <title>
The text directly after that tag is your title
<title>This is Your Title</title>
Meta Description
You want to add your keyword to the meta description as well. For information on how to do this view the full article on meta descriptions.
Article Body
You also want to add the keyword within the body of the article. Specifically you want it to be in the H1 tag, first paragraph and subheadings.
H1 Tag
The H1 tag is the primary header on the page. You can check to see what text is in your H1 tag the same way you checked to see what text was in your title tag. But instead of searching for <title>, you search for <h1>. The text between <h1> and </h1> is your H1 tag.
You can also view this by looking at the code for your post in your admin panel. In the interface where you add your blog articles, if you view the post code, you should be able to see what text is in the H1 tag.
First Paragraph
You want to include your keyword somewhere in the first paragraph of your article. If this isn’t possible, then include it as close to the top as you can. You want the article to make sense for the readers. Don’t add a keyword for SEO purposes if it doesn’t also make sense for the readers.
Subheadings
Try and include the keyword in at least one subheading. The subheadings are in H2, H3, and H4 tags. You can find them the same way you found the H1 tag. And remember, keep the user in mind. Only add the keyword to subheadings when it makes sense for the reader.
URL
If you can include the keyword in the URL, do it. If the article already has a different URL, or this is not easy to do with your system, then don’t worry about it.
For an easy reference with these on-page optimization tips, download the SEO Cheatsheet for bloggers.
Step 4: Add Internal Links
After you’ve published your article, make sure you add internal links. If you have any questions about how or why to do this you can view the complete guide on internal links.
You want to add internal links on your new article to any older relevant articles within the text of the post. And you also want to do the opposite. Add links to your new article on any older relevant articles.
You are using internal links to create a web. You are making it easier for readers and search engine spiders to navigate through your website. You always want to think of people first, if a link would benefit a reader, add it.
Step 5: Gather Data
Even if you don’t understand analytics yet, start collecting data. You’ll figure out what it all means soon enough.
The data in Google Analytics will start being collected when you install the tracking tag. You will not have any data from before that tag was set up on your website. So start collecting now and worry about what it all means later.
It will be better to have the data so you can make informed decisions when you’re ready.
Whether you subscribe to an email digest, listen to a podcast, or follow some SEO related blogs, you need to have a plan to make sure you’re aware of any big upcoming changes. Here are my favorite marketing resources to stay up to date.
Bonus: Use ClearPath Online
This is a bit of a shameless brag, but another great way to do SEO yourself is to use ClearPath Online. Full disclosure, this is our product and normally our blogs offer free support and advice with no selling. This felt like an important message to add though since it could be a big benefit.
If you want to do SEO yourself, but you need a task list that tells you what to do, when, and how; that is exactly what ClearPath Online does. It breaks down SEO tasks into manageable action items with step-by-step directions.
Instead of staying updated with SEO changes yourself and juggling which tasks you did last and what you need to do next, it takes care of all of that. The system is preloaded with everything you need to do.
The most important part about doing SEO yourself is to start now! It’s a process that takes time. No matter which route you decide to take to get started, do it and it will become easier and more beneficial as time goes on.
Are you ready to start doing SEO yourself? If not, what’s stopping you? Let us know in the comments!
Do you want to listen to this article? Here’s the podcast episode:
Building your blog, or your entire website, on WordPress is a great option. It offers flexibility, documentation, and a ton of community support. There are thousands of themes and plugins that you can use to create just about any functionality you can think of.
But, sometimes the vast number of options available can be overwhelming. To cut through some of the clutter we’ve put together five WordPress blogging tips you can follow to start strong.
Tip #1: Use a Responsive Theme
You want your website to be mobile friendly. You don’t want to get stuck duplicating content and wasting valuable time. When you’re looking for a WordPress theme, make sure it’s responsive. Start with a responsive theme from the very beginning.
When a theme is responsive, that means the width of the website can readjust to fit on mobile, tablet, or desktop. Depending on the device size, the elements on your website will be displayed differently.
On a desktop, you might have a four column layout. On mobile, those columns would be stacked on top of each other vertically instead. On a tablet, they might be displayed as a two column layout with two rows.
This allows for a great user experience regardless of what device people use to access the website.
Tip #2: Use Only the Plugins You Need
Plugins are great. They make it easy to add complex functionality to a WordPress site without knowing how to code. For the most part, they are plug and play. You download one, activate it, configure a few settings to specify your needs, and it’s good!
There’s nothing wrong with using plugins, but you only want to use the plugins you need. The more you use, the more potential issues you’ll run into. Normally, plugins are fine. But, sometimes, they can conflict with each other.
Since adding plugins is so easy, it’s also easy to have way more than you need. Sometimes when I’m looking for a new plugin I end up downloading about five plugins. I try them all and then decide one is the best and go with it.
There’s nothing wrong with that. But when you’re done, remove what you aren’t using. Don’t just deactivate it. Completely delete it so it doesn’t appear in your list of plugins anymore. If you don’t delete it you will still need to update it and you still have those files on your server.
So, if you need a plugin, use it. If you install it, don’t like it or don’t need it, get rid of it. Don’t let it be a possible vulnerability.
The same thing goes with themes. There’s no need to keep the default themes if you aren’t using them.
Tip #3: Be Cautious with Customizations
If you want to change the way a plugin or theme works, try to change it in the available settings first. Don’t play with the code unless you have to. If you don’t understand code, stay out of it.
If you make the customization directly in the plugin or theme code it will get overwritten when there’s a new update. That means your change will be gone and there’s a chance you will break something unexpected.
Always look through the available settings first. Most themes will have a dedicated area for you to add custom CSS and javascript.
Plugins normally offer quite a few customization settings as well. Chances are you’ll be able to find a settings interface to control the element you want to manipulate. And if you don’t, try a different plugin. Editing the plugin code should be a last resort.
Tip #4: Download Yoast SEO
You want to start off by adding SEO elements such as meta descriptions to your pages from the very beginning. It will be easiest to optimize your posts for search engines as you create them instead of going back and editing several existing pages when you decide to focus on it.
There are a few different SEO plugins worth using. I like to use Yoast SEO. They allow you to specify the target keyword for the page and then they have a checklist to quickly identify what remaining optimizations need to be added to the post.
Tip #5: Have a Plan for Backup and Security
Your blog will be a place you end up putting a lot of time and hard work into. You want to make sure you have a backup plan.
WordPress normally runs great. I can count on one hand the number of failed updates I’ve had in the last decade and none of them ended up needing to be restored from a backup. But still, things happen, and you want to be prepared.
I like to use UpdraftPlus for backups. It’s a plugin. You can run a backup before you run updates so you have a fresh copy in case there is an issue. You can also schedule it to run backups on a regular basis and save them somewhere else such as Dropbox or Amazon S3.
And just as important as a backup, you also want to make sure your site is secure. I like using Wordfence for this. It’s another plugin. It’s a great safeguard to have in place so you’re getting notified of any suspicious activity on your website.
Just follow these five tips and you’ll be off to a great start!
Do you want to listen to this article? Here’s the podcast episode:
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