Google - Marketing Squirrel

Google Analytics - Why You Need It

By The Squirrel, on October 19th, 2010%

Google Analytics

Lately we’ve come across several clients who don’t have Google Analytics. And the few that do don’t utilize the wealth of information it provides. For FREE.

If you have a web page or blog there is no reason you shouldn’t sign up for Google Analytics. Did we mention it’s FREE?

What is it? Google Analytics is a tool to help you understand how people are finding you on the web. By way of graphs and charts, it shows you what sites are sending traffic to you via referral, and what keywords people used to be shown your site by a search engine.

While it may be called “Analytics”, it’s really up to you to do the analyzing of the data.

Start at the “Dashboard”. Under “Site Usage”, you see a snapshot of the information provided. Clicking on each of the categories in the boxes below take you to a more detailed explanation.

“Visitors Overview” tells you, just as it implies, how many visitors you had, how many were new visitors, how many pages they read, how long they stayed, etc. It also tells you what browsers they used, how many were mobile phone visitors, and more.

“Map Overlay” gives very detailed location information when you drill down into the menus. Continue reading Google Analytics – Why You Need It

The New Google Search - Could This Affect Traffic To Your Business?

By The Squirrel, on September 9th, 2010%

Google Instant Search

Yesterday Google unveiled it’s new instant search, which makes hitting “enter” unnecessary. As you type Google instantly offers suggestions in a drop down window, predicting what it thinks you are looking for. Their selling point? It saves you a whopping 2-5 seconds of search time.

But, more importantly, how does this affect your marketing and organic search results?

It’s too soon to tell, but here are a few things you might want to watch out for:

1.) Will long tail keyword searches drop off?

Fewer people may finish their intended long tail phrase and opt instead for one of Google’s instant offerings. This could negatively affect websites or blogs that depend on long tail searches.

2.) Will Google’s suggestions shape keyword prevalence?

We suspect it will most certainly affect the number of times a specific keyword is used – particularly synonyms. If Google’s prediction is influential enough, one keyword could gain a huge increase in traffic – all because Google offered that suggestion. This means websites ranking for niche markets with slightly less popular keyword variants will suffer a big hit. This also begs the question: Is there a conflict of interest for Google to serve up one keyword over another? After all, they do make money on those keywords, and charge by how frequently they’re used.

3.) Will keyword research become more challenging? Continue reading The New Google Search – Could This Affect Traffic To Your Business?