Leads – what is acceptable?

We mentioned in a previous post that websites show a wide range of results in lead generation.  Many REALTORS are converting about 1% to 2% of their visitors to  leads.  Other industries are getting approximately 8% to 10%. 

One report from a major website development company said that a successful website would generate these statistics:

– about 2 visitors per day or 60 visitors per month

– about 3 leads generated monthly or about 5% visitor to lead conversions.

Many REALTORS may not be producing the results that they should.

How should website owners measure their leads?  Our measurements are primarily based on leads that come from submitting online forms.  In addition, other contacts are also leads – for example, email and telephone calls.  All of this should be considered.

More in our next post.

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Mayday

Google altered its search engine algorithm recently – this one is called the mayday update.  Here’s a link to a post about this update.

http://www.ecombuffet.com/SEO-Blog/seo-topics/mayday-google-algorithm-update/

This may have resulted in changes to your website’s search engine results.  However here is an excerpt from the above link.

Consistent site updates, high quality relevant content and good on-page optimization and clean code, as well as earning links because your site is a good site (and not because you play a link exchange game or belong to a link network) are the way to get top rankings.

More on Mayday later in June.

Google Caffeine ranking factors

The full blown version of Google Caffeine will be deployed after the holidays.  Here’s a short summary of some of the factors that Google has “leaked”.

“Site speed” will be a factor in rankings.  Speed is how fast your site loads.

“Broken links” – if you have them – will result in lower rankings.

We’ve also read about “overall page quality“.  This will have a greater influence on rankings.  Therefore “onpage factors” such as unique content, page design, good navigation, title, meta tags, description, keyword density, alt tags, page views, bounce rate, traffic numbers, time spent on page, and number of social bookmarks will influence better rankings.

Most of these are already being tweaked in an effort to improve our rankings.  Now they may be more important.

Prepare now by reviewing all of these so that Caffeine’s introduction will not negatively impact your rankings.

Anatomy of analytics – part 2

LOOKING AT TRAFFIC

The first thing that Google Analytics displays is your traffic for the last 30 days.  This is immediatelyhelpful because you can quickly determine if people are even coming to your site.  If so, how frequently are they doing so.

– how many visitors are you getting?  Are they repeat visitors or are they unique visitors?  Unique visitors are those that are seeing your site for the first time.  This is important because now you can determine how wide an audience you are actually reaching.  Repeat visitors are good, too.  This indicates the visitors that are still considering using your products and services, or are returning because of your rich content.  All visitors are important.

– Examine your bounce rate.  This tells you the percentage of visitors that exit your site as soon as they see the first page.  Of course, there are a number of reasons why this might happen.  They may have gotten to your website in error (wrong domain name, dot net versus dot com).  Or they may see your first page and realize that your site is not at all what they were looking for.  For example “java” could mean the coffee beverage or a programming language.  They could be “turned off” by that first page and conclude that they have no interest in doing business with you.  Obviously the lower the bounce rate, the better.

– how many pages are visitors looking at?  Which pages are atracting the most visitors? The pages with the most views are the pages that are of most interest and therefore are the pages that you should give more attention.  These are the pages where you can place more and better “calls to action” for lead generation.  These are the pages that should be better optimized to attract even more visitors from search engines.

– take a look at the traffic and when it occurs.  Are your visitors equally spread across the week?  Probably not.  If there are specific trends, then you can take advantage of that when you post new content or new “calls to action”.

Where are visitors coming from?  Are they coming from search engines? What can you expect? Are they geographically dispersed?  We’ll discuss that in another posting.

Anatomy of analytics – part 1

When you have a website, you have already been instructed about the things you need to do.  For example, you know to update your website from time-to-time to keep it alive with fresh and current content.  Search engines will like your site because of this.

Updating your website without knowledge of the visits that you are getting may mean you are doing the wrong things.  It would be like adding various pieces of software to improve the performance of your computer without your ever turning on the computer to see how it runs.

WebCubic always recommends to our website clients that they use Google Analytics on their website.  It’s free.  It provides comprehensive information.  Is it the best analytics tool available? No.  Can you monitor and manage your website usefulness? Absolutely!

We feel strongly enough about using analytics that we advise all of our template website users to use it.  In the case of all custom website users, we install it for them.  The installation process is not difficult.  Here is a simple overview of what you need to do.

1) If you have a (Google) gmail account, go to setp 2.  Otherwise setup a gmail account for yourself at www.gmail.com. 

2) Go to Google analytics at www.google.com/analytics and create an account.

3) Part of the setup will be to specify the domain name of your website.  Google analytics will generate installation code for you.  Copy that small bit of code and paste it into each page of your website.

NOTE: if you are using a template website (like WebCubic’s real estate websites) then you may not have access to every page to install the generated code.  You should be able to install it, at least, on the home page.  Your analytics results will be limited but you will still get meaningful information.

That’s it.

The way that Google analytics works is that today’s statistics will not be available until the following day.

In another post, we’ll explain what to look for from the statistics that are collected and reported by the analytics. 

In the meantime, it should be obvious that you will need to collect days and days of data before you can reach any conclusions about the statistics.  Regardless of the visitors that you get, you should let at least fifteen days go by before you “analyze” the data.  Anything before that may be statistical anomolies.