Measuring the Success of Your Website

One of my clients just went up two degrees in PageRank. Another has increased page views by 403% comparing the current fortnight with the previous one. Another had a 321% increase in sales over the same month last year.

But who's counting?

Well, I am, for one. I met with a prospective new client last week and he said, "You're very analytical." It's true. And when you're thinking about the progress of your website, it's worth being analytical.

• You can tell when to break out the champagne. If you're not keeping track of how well your website is doing, then you can't really tell whether it's doing its job or not. I've just launched my own website at RebeccaHaden.com (I've been taking care of other peoples' for years) and I was excited about having it launched. There's a spell where you're just thrilled to have your site up and visible. But that wears off. It's not a new handbag or even a new car. It has to do something for your business. And if you don't keep track, you can't really tell when it's time to celebrate.
• You can tell when to change your strategy. One of my clients designs and makes elegant handcrafted aprons. It seemed logical to go for the regional long tail with her. Turns out she lives in the epicenter of the luxury apron industry. Who knew? I sure didn't. I didn't even know that the luxury apron industry had an epicenter. Keeping track of her website's progress let us know that she needed a shift in approach.
• You can plan instead of guessing. Did you plan your site navigation based on how you guessed people might choose to use your site? Do you plan your ad campaigns based on what you guess people might click on? Do you plan your featured items based on what you guess your customers might be looking for at this time of year? If so, you would almost certainly find that your plans were all more successful if they were based on actual information. Measuring the success of various pages, items, or ads allows you to plan with greater confidence and accuracy.

So how can you check the success of your website? There are several ways to tell:

• Use Google Analytics. This is the best, most economical way to track data. Read about how to make sense of those numbers at "Understanding the Google Dashboard" If looking at charts and numbers makes your head hurt, you can have me take care of it for you. But if you have a site meter of any kind, you can see changes over time in the amount of traffic you receive. In general, more traffic is better. If you're looking for one number to watch, this would be it.
• Watch your PageRank. Google ranks all web pages according to a largely secret formula based on trustworthiness. We all start at zero, and then we work to climb up the ladder. If you are tired of Google always getting to decide everything, SEOmoz has an alternative: its Trifecta measures PageRank as well as other factors. People often complain that these measures only tell you about the past, and don't keep up well enough, but I think that the changes tell you something, even if your current PageRank isn't a good thing on which to base your self-worth. Whatever general measure you want to watch, the key is to track changes in it over time.
• Track your rank on search engines. Being #1 on Google for your keywords is a worthwhile goal, assuming the keywords are properly chosen in the first place. It's easy to see whether you are on the first page for your keyword: type it in at the search engine of your choice and look for your website. But when you are actually keeping track, then you want to see that you've moved from #99 to #48. Then you can continue doing what you've been doing. If you move from #48 to #99, then you need to make some strategic changes. If you're a client of mine, I can quickly check this for you with my special software. If not, you can search for free rank checkers and do it yourself. It'll just take you longer. Bear in mind that some situations lead to volatility in ranking, and don't assume that you can keep your place with no effort once you get there.
• Watch the bottom line. If you're an ecommerce outift, then your sales are a great way to see whether your website is performing well or not. Other cases can be more complicated. I have a client who sells her own books on her website -- but other bookstores also sell them. People may come to her website, decide to buy her books, and go do so at their local bookstore or at an online bookstore where they can also pick up that novel they've been meaning to buy. She can't tell just from her online sales whether her website is doing well or not. Another client has a local store. People will browse her website online, and then walk into the store to finish their transactions. She won't know how much effect her website really has on revenue unless she shuts it down and watches her in-store sales drop. Even with these caveats, a good website ought to pay for itself, and you should be able to see overall improvements. As my brother says, money doesn't buy happiness, but it's a good way to keep score.

So go ahead and get that bottle of champagne. Measure how things are going with your website, and keep track so you'll know when to pour it.

Going for the Regional Long Tail

The term "regional long tail" was coined, as best I can tell, in this highly amusing essay by Chris Paston. It refers to the practice of optimizing your site not for "hairstylist" but for "North Cleveland hairstylist."

When would you want to do this? Well, first off, when you deal in a product or service that has to be delivered in situ. Unless you are the kind of hairstylist who jets off to Singapore to style someone's hair, then you really want your traffic to be mostly from the place where your salon is physically located.

One of my clients is a firm of master housepainters in Sydney. Their traffic so far has been almost entirely from Australia, and this is a good thing. I'm recommending keywords for them like "Sydney housepainters."

I've recently been contacted by a firm that arranges big game hunts all over the world. The owner lives in Texas, but that doesn't matter. He wants an international clientele, and being Texan may be a matter of pride for him, but it doesn't matter at all for his business or his website. His clients aren't going to look in the local phone book for their guide, or ask over at the Chamber of Commerce, so we're not going to go for the RLT.

Some businesses may be best off starting regional and building up to a geographically wider client base. One of my clients has a brick and mortar school supply store, and we started her off with the RLT. Now we've moved beyond that and her online customers are nationally distributed. But it was easier to get the first few hundred links with her local reputation behind us.

Say you've decided that you want to go for the RLT. How can you do that?

• Post in local directories. Local directories are likely to be free, and are also likely to add you quickly on the basis of your demonstrated local-ness. This is the fastest way to gain early links, and can sometimes even bring you traffic.
• Make sure Google and Yahoo have you on their maps. This is obviously essential for businesses that want local traffic. But it also increases trust for those of us who have local businesses that don't actively seek walk-in traffic. Having a physical address is evidence that you're not a robot being controlled by some blackhat address scraper. Since PageRank is all about trust, this matters online.
• Make sure your website has that local flavor. Your physical address is a great start. You can also choose keywords reflecting your location. And you can include local news and information in your blog or other dynamic content (that is, the stuff on your page that changes).

Navigation Buttons, Marketing, and Your Brain

It shouldn't surprise us that marketing has a lot to do with the brain. In some cases, marketing efforts are carefully crafted to appeal to visitors in the most logical way. In others, marketing is attempting to bypass the rational parts of the brain and appeal directly to the hippocampus. When I think of marketing and the brain, though, I'm thinking more about the way the brain processes information.

This is a topic that comes up a lot for me, since I'm a linguist and a writer. But it came up yesterday in a meeting almost by chance.

I was meeting with clients and a web designer, Shan Pesaru. We were talking about those buttons for navigation that show up across the top or down the side of websites. You click on "home" or "about us" and are carried right over to the page you desire.

The clients, like many clients, wanted a lot of these buttons. I've had this particular conversation a lot of times lately, and I have repeatedly found myself suggesting fewer buttons. I say things like, "This is going to be confusing to your visitors" and "If you have ten buttons, it's the same as having none and just putting everything on the same page" and "Have a look at this page -- see how much cleaner it looks with fewer choices?"

Shan said, "You want five to seven buttons."

Now, being an engineer, he probably finds that he can lay down rules like this more convincingly than I. I tend to go for persuasion and metaphors and reframing. But when he said that, I remembered the phrase we linguists learn in school: "The magic number seven, plus or minus two."

That is the number of pieces of information your short-term memory can hold at one time, the number of things you can actively think about simultaneously. Your brain doesn't really care how big the pieces of information are. You can think about five to nine digits (a phone number) or five to nine words (a sentence, or a clause of a complex sentence), five to nine people (your family or immediate circle of close friends), five to nine ideas (the tenets of your faith or the goals of your company).

But that five to nine range is important. It's hard-wired for humans. If we need to keep our attention on more different things than that, we have to group them into five to nine categories. If the information in question isn't that important to us, we won't make that effort.

The navigation of your website? It's probably not that important to most of your visitors. In fact, we hope that it isn't. You don't want your visitors to be limited to people for whom you are very important. You want some strangers there, people to whom you could become important in the future.

But not if you ask their brains to do things that are hard work.

They are surfing the net, drinking coffee, checking out your website -- and if you've set up your navigation correctly, they may push those buttons and look at your other pages. If not, they'll just click on to something else.

So when you plan your website's navigation, you don't want ten buttons. You don't even want nine, since that is pushing the range. Seven is the magic number which is really comfortable for the brain. Five is the number that begins to feel like a bunch of choices. You want five to seven. Then your visitors will be likely to push those buttons and move on to another page, on which you can have five to seven more buttons.

If it is hard for you divide your offerings into five or six or seven categories, then it is time to be very grateful that you have a human brain. Human brains are very good at sorting. Write down all the buttons you currently have or are planning to have onto index cards, one word on each card. Then put them in piles. Keep trying until you have them in no more than seven piles. Determine what the items in each pile have in common. Those are the labels for your buttons.

Your brain has now allowed you to pamper the brains of your visitors by furnishing them with the number of choices they can actually think about at one time. Your website will thank you. Or it would, if it had a brain.

Keywords, Marketing, and Your Brain

The brilliant team at Sharp Hue got my website up and styled my blog to match it. You can see it if you push the "homepage" button on the right. Naturally, I wanted to thank them.

Last week, I had a client tell me I was "a delight to work with," and another said she was "grateful to have you in my life." This sort of thing is heartfelt and wonderful to hear. It makes a person feel as though her work is worthwhile. I sent something of the sort to the Sharp Hue CEO, along with some flowers.

But in the back of my mind, I was thinking of the testimonial letter I would send him for his files. Naturally, it would have to include his keywords*, so that he could post a line or two somewhere where it would do him some good with the search engines.

I realize that this kind of thing can sound a little crazy. When I send my clients the list of keywords I've prepared for them, I suggest that they print them out and tape them to the computer, or simply memorize them. I don't get to see all their desks, of course, but I'm guessing that most of the clients to whom I say this think it is a bit of gentle humor. Or outright looniness.

I'm serious.

Here's what happens when you use your keywords all the time:

• It becomes natural. In SEO, we are always striving for That Natural Look. If, instead of trying to stuff a certain percentage of keyword phrases into your text, you just get into the habit of using them, they'll come to your mind very naturally, and your website will include them in completely natural ways. If you need evidence of this, think about all the people you know who have the habit of saying "like," or "you know" or the latest movie catchphrase. It's easy to get into the habit of using particular words when you speak or write -- it's just a little service your brain performs for you. Just take advantage of the fact.
• You train your customers. You can't entirely foresee what people will type in at the search engines when they need your products or services. I can give you the most probable choices, but there will be surprises. I wasn't expecting that person who came here after searching for "rotten haden." (I'm trying not to take it personally.) But you want your clients to find you very easily. By using your keywords not just on your website but on your print documents and in your presentations, you encourage the people you contact in the real world to use the words when they search online that are most likely to find you.
• You test those keywords. Things change. Maybe your initial keywords are no longer the best choices for your business. Maybe they never were. If you find that you can't use your keywords easily and naturally in most of your writing and much of your speech, then they probably aren't really the right ones for you. It's time to do some new keyword development. When you make the effort to use your keywords in your daily work, you'll have warning signs when they become outdated or inaccurate.

Using the preferred keywords of the people you work with? That may be a little bit extra. But the fact is, once you begin getting the habit of using your keywords, it'll be second nature to think this way. Just another of those little services your brain performs for you.

* If you're wondering what keywords are and why you need to think about them, leave me a comment and I'll get you up to speed.

Are You Happy with Your Website?

Classic mystery novel writer Agatha Christie wrote stories about Mr. Parker Pyne, who put advertisements in London newspapers with the heading, "Are you happy?"

People who were not happy would call him up. He would listen to them, categorize their precise source of unhappiness, and call his secretary.

"Miss Lemon," he would say, "we have a number 8d. Call Madeleine De Sara."

The people who consult me are in similar straits. They are unhappy with their wesbites. The websites in question don't have the traffic they desire, or the return on investment, or the search rankings. They know they are unhappy with their websites. They don't know what to do about it.

You may also be unhappy with your website. But do you need Madeleine De Sara or -- that is, do you need a designer, a writer, an SEO, a developer, a linkbuilder? How can you tell?

One example is a company in Sydney that I'm working with. Their website is beautiful. It was designed by an artist. An artist who was unconcerned about usability, navigation, readability by older visitors (and many of the firm's customers will be older), and search. They need keyword development, editing for search, and a linkbuilding strategy. In short, they need an SEO.

Another example is a local bookstore owner. We increased her website's traffic and visibility through SEO and SEM, but her visitors still didn't shop. They were frustrated by the difficulty of navigation, and turned off by the content. We got her some fresh content and a much better shopping cart. She needed a copywriter and a developer.

My third example is a new choral group in Kansas City. They don't have a website yet, so their first thought was to hire an IT worker to write some code for them. In fact, since they have only the vaguest idea of how they want their site to look, they need to start with a designer. Since they also need a developer, a content writer, and SEO to make their new website visible, they're best off with a web design firm.

How about you? If you only know that you're unhappy with your website, you can contact me. Think of me as Mr. Parker Pyne.

What Color is Your Hat?

In SEO, we talk about white hats and black hats. Blackhat tactics are those that are frowned upon, and sometimes even punished by Google. Whitehat tactics are those that SEOs admit to using. But there are SEOs who admit to being blackhats, and plenty of whitehat or grayhat SEOs who lament the limitations of the SEO dress code.

I recently ran into a blackhat technique on a client's site. It was interesting to me, sort of like encountering some rare specimen that you've read about but never expected to see in real life. Maybe even like meeting someone who actually makes gin in his bathtub.

This website had a black background, and black words along the bottom of it. If your words are the same color as your background, they are invisible to human visitors to the site, but visible to the search engines. Blackhat SEOs, so I'd heard, would hide keywords there. The idea would be to put invisible words on your site to which you weren't really entitled. Perhaps you'd put a famous brand name when you were selling a much less famous generic version, or some racy words that people often search for, but which you wouldn't want to have showing up on your site.

(I once was high on search for the phrase "hot teachers" with one of my websites, but that was completely innocent, I assure you, and I digress.)

So what's wrong with invisible words your website? My client didn't even know they were there, actually. She had an amateur design her website, and it was a surprise to her to learn that she had any blackhat tactics going on. Her visitors certainly didn't know.

Why did I recommend that she get that little blackhattery cleaned up? It's a matter of ethics. She wasn't behaving in an unethical manner herself, but her website was. And maybe your website is, too. If you haven't checked your code and your backlinks, you might not know.

Here's why it matters:

• Good ethics are good business. It isn't just Google PageRank that's based on a perception of trustworthiness. Visitors to your website are deciding, to a large extent, whether or not they trust you. They can get the goods and services you offer in plenty of different places, probably all over the world. If they choose to get those goods and services from you, it's largely because they trust you. And let's face it, blackhat marketing isn't a strong indicator of trustworthiness.



• Whitehat tactics work better over the long run. We've heard of clever tricks that got someone to the front page of Google fast, or brought in plenty of paid-for clicks for a couple of days. Unless you plan to take the money and run, though, you need to develop your business with the future in mind. You need happy clients who come back to you and speak well of you to their friends. You don't get that with tricks.



• It isn't really a secret. Are you sure nobody's looking under the hood at your website? While it's true that most people aren't viewing your code or analyzing your links, the truth is that anyone can. When I worked as an in-house SEO, I discovered that one of our vendors was using link farms and other blackhat tricks. I figured, if they were willing to cheat on Google, they might be willing to cheat on us, too. We changed vendors.

When you analyze your website, of course you want to check for usability, compelling content, appealing design, and search engine optimization. Go ahead and check the color of your website's hat at the same time.

Emotional Attachment to Your Words

If you've tried clicking on the image in the corner here, you will have seen an "under construction" notice. The talented people at Sharp Hue are designing a web site for me, and I'm writing the content.

At the same time, I've been doing site analysis and copywriting for a couple of other people's web sites. The contrast between the two experiences is striking.

At Sharp Hue, we talk about clients having emotional attachment to their words. People get fond of what they've written. They've worked hard on it, and they like their turn of phrase. Sometimes their feelings are hurt if we want to change something.

I'm immune to that. I'm a professional writer, and I've been doing this for a long time. Have you ever played with one of those computer tools that lets you take a piece of music and change the key, the speed, the instrument, the language? Or maybe you like to take an image, resize it, flip it, and change the colors. That's how I feel about writing. The big thing is getting the ideas into words, and then you can mold the language and tweak it and transform it and make it dance around.

You may not feel that way about your writing. You may labor to get a paragraph crafted, and then it's your baby and you don't want anyone even commenting on it, let alone changing it.

If so, then you should stick to your day job, and let someone like me write for you.

There's more to it, though. Even though I don't get attached to my words, I still had more trouble writing for myself than for my clients. I think the emotional attachment problem requires emotional objectivity. You also need intellectual objectivity.

When you write for yourself, you see so many possibilities. One of the clients I was working for is a jeweler. She also paints murals, and does engraving, and plays music -- and you know, all those things about her are interesting, but irrelevant.

Once I did her site analysis and met with her, I could easily map out a five-year plan for her business, and write her content. If things change, that's fine; we can change her web site.

The other client doesn't yet have a web site; his is also in development at Sharp Hue. I'm writing for it. I asked him some questions and wrote down some phrases. "Can I say this?" I asked. "Do you want this effect, or that one?" I think it was most like a visit to the optometrist. I've analysed his competitors' sites and developed his keywords. I know who's going to visit his site and what he wants them to do, so I can write the words that will achieve his communicative purpose.

In order to be effective in writing my own web site, I needed to step away and treat it just the way I treated the other two. All my various clients and how I feel about them, and my own thoughts and feelings about what I do, and all the myriad possible outcomes I can imagine -- they may be interesting, at least to me, but they are irrelevant. I just need to analyze my competitors' sites and develop my keywords, plan my communicative goals, and write. Professionally.

Making Your Website Profitable

"A web site is just a great big, really expensive business card."

"I've been to the roundtables, and everyone has the same experience: you don't make any money off your web site, but you have to have one because people expect it."

These are comments from people who later became my clients. They represent the way that a lot of small business owners feel about their web sites. Your customers and clients ask you about your web site, and you can't just say you don't have one, so you get one.

Do people visit? Who knows? Some businesses only find out what their web sites were doing for them after they close down the site and see their business drop. Other businesses feel fairly sure that their web sites just aren't doing their jobs, but have no ideas about how to improve that.

Here's what your web site should do for you:

• Drive traffic to your place of business.
  
  Many consumers nowadays shop online for products and services before they ever leave their homes. The internet has replaced the phone book in many households. Your clients are probably comparing your web site with others in your community before they decide to visit you. The upside -- when your web site reflects well on you, the people who come in are closer to committing than those who haven't visited you online first.
  
  
• Pay for itself.
  
  All good marketing provides a good return on investment. Your web site, however, can also pay its own monthly fees in direct sales to your visitors. If you're like me and you're providing a service, not a product, you may not actually sell anything at your web site. In that case, make sure that your site lets you add to your contact list. That way you know that you are gaining new contacts and clients through your internet presence.
  
  
• Increase your value to your clients or customers.
  
  I think it was William Morris who said "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." (Actually, I know it was William Morris, since I'm a researcher and would never attribute a quote without checking it; it's just traditional to say it that way.) If you follow this rule at your web site, your visitors will find it interesting, enjoyable, or useful. They'll appreciate the extra service of your web site the same way they appreciate the service you provide them at your physical place of business.

The people I quoted at the beginning? They've changed their minds.

Hourly Work

There is controversy in my field over whether or not we should work by the hour. I just recently started doing that myself, and I have to admit that I have problems with it.

Admittedly, part of the problem is that I don't like to keep track. I like to work. I like, given that I'm working, to have someone send me some money now and then. I don't really like having to bother too much over the connection between the two things. If I have an inspiration for one project while I'm in the middle of another, I like being able to switch right over.

I recognize that I'm talking as though I were an artist in an atelier, with a wealthy patron who dropped in occasionally with ducats. I recognize also how unlikely it is that I will acquire such a patron. And I know that the lives of such artists were less comfortable than mine, so I guess I can get over this problem.

There remains the fact that I don't like to hurry over my writing. I'm fast, actually, and can operate with very short turnaround time, but that's not the same as hurrying.

Sometimes I like to contemplate a topic for a while. Sometimes it's an interesting subject. For example, right now I'm working on a piece on hookworm eradication for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture.

Hookworm eradication may not be your cup of tea (oh, that sounds disgusting), but it's really quite a fascinating subject in Arkansas history. It's one that I happen to know a lot about. The fee offered for this piece tells me that I ought to sit right down with my current research files and knock it out in half an hour. In fact, since the deadline is farther out in the future than anything else I'm working on, I intend to mosey on over to the library and see what there is in print. I plan to think about this gently over the next few weeks and consider all the possible ways to present it, and polish it up nicely before I send it in.

I can do that because it's not by the hour.

After all, I can't expect a client to pay me for an extra few hours' research just because I find the topic interesting. I can't even expect a client to pay for me to set the piece aside for a few days and then look back at it to make sure that the language is as tasty as I can make it.

When I'm paid by the piece, I can decide for myself how much time I care to devote to the particular item. I don't have to consider the budget, just my personal fondness for the topic -- or, let's face it, for the client.

I finesse the question by doing a lot of the composition in my head,while taking nice long walks through the woods. That's clearly for my own pleasure, and I don't feel in the least unbusinesslike when I leave that out of the client's total.

Besides, you know what happens when you cast your bread upon the waters...