Website Behavior Metrics and How They Affect Your SEO Metrics

Search engine optimization (SEO) takes time. You build a site and hope that it will climb the rankings to become one of the most popular search results when people are looking for a product or service like yours

Some people get frustrated that they don’t immediately see the results they want. This can even make them jump ship from an SEO strategy that is working and would eventually put them at the top ranking.

How do you know whether your SEO strategy is working when it doesn’t immediately put you at the top of the rankings? One way is to look at the website behavior metrics of your site visitors. If the SEO metrics look good, then your SEO strategy has put you on the right track to climb to the top ranks and stay there. Here are the numbers to check.

Click-Through Rate

Google’s business is giving people the best search results. How do they know which ones are the best? One way is with the click-through rate (CTR). This is the measurement of how often people will choose your website when it’s presented in a list of search results. As a number, it’s the number of times someone clicks on your website divided by the number of times your website appears in the search results, usually presented as a percentage.

However, in SEO terms, it’s a little more complicated. From decades of analyzing SERPs (search engine results pages), Google knows that the CTR depends heavily on your position in the SERPs. For example, the top-ranked search result typically has a CTR of 25-30%, while the second-ranked position typically has a CTR of around 15%. If Google notices a top-ranked search result is underperforming while the second-ranked result is overperforming, Google may move the one up and the other down in the future.

Time on Site

But the search engines have learned that CTR isn’t the only measure of a site’s usefulness. People might click on a site and realize it’s not at all what they thought, or that it doesn’t include the vital data they’re looking for. These people are going to quickly close or back out of the site.

To account for this, search engines use the length of time that visitors spend on your site as another measure of the quality of your site and its fitness for its ranking. The longer people spend on your site, the better you’re going to rank.

So you need to make sure you’re doing everything you can to increase the time spent on site. Part of this is providing a good user experience with sensible design. You can also increase time on site by providing interactive opportunities, such as media to watch and other engaging elements on the site

Pages Visited

Time on site proves to the search engines that the clicked-on page is valuable. But pages visited proves something even more important: that your site has more valuable content. This is a big deal.

Having one quality page on your site is good, and it makes the search engines want to keep promoting that page. But if you have multiple quality pages, the search engines might want to promote all your pages, especially for related searches. There are two metrics to look at here: bounce rate and pages per visit. Bounce rate is what percentage of visitors leave your site without visiting another page. Pages per visit is the average number of pages that visitors view before leaving.

You want to have the bounce rate low, ideally under 40%, and the pages per visit high. Do this by making sure visitors can see related content they might be interested in, either by having related content images on the page or by building internal links into your content. Of course, this means that you have to have enough quality related content to link to, which can take time to accomplish.

What about Social Media?

Another type of user behavior you might be wondering about is social media engagement. Tagging your company or sharing your content is a user behavior that seems like it should improve your ranking. The answer is complicated.

Currently, the belief is that users sharing your content on social media doesn’t directly improve your ranking. However, there is a high correlation between good social media engagement and high search ranking, so there are likely indirect connections.

Get a Quality Site That Inspires Users

Your website is the key to performing well on these important metrics. A website that is well-built with engaging content, easy navigation, and pleasant design will not only perform well today, but will continue to perform well, despite algorithm changes and the fickle will of the searching public.

To learn how we can help you build a quality site that performs well not just today, but in the future, please contact VEA Technologies today.

Why WordPress Is Better for Your Business Than Wix or SquareSpace

If you are to survive in the modern marketplace, your business needs a website.
The current pandemic has made it clear that the ability to communicate with customers via the Internet is critical for even small, local businesses that might have relied on walk-up business before.

Although restrictions will loosen along with the vaccine rollout, online shopping habits are likely going to prove hard to break for many shoppers, so it’s critical for businesses of all sizes to have a website that helps them reach their customers no matter what.

But once you start researching building a website, you realize that there are dozens of website builders out there. So how do you pick the best one for you? The three leading builders are WordPress, Wix, and SquareSpace. Among these three, WordPress is the clear winner, offering benefits for building and maintaining your website.

Control and Flexibility

The most important things WordPress offers are control and flexibility. Wix and SquareSpace are builders that have a framework already installed for your website. While there are options for customizing many aspects of the appearance and layout of the site, much of the basic functionality is already determined when you choose Wix or SquareSpace.

On the other hand, WordPress starts as a much more bare bones framework. It’s an open platform that programmers around the world tinker with to create better website designs and functions. You can build your website in a completely free fashion. You can also draw from tens of thousands of themes to get a dramatic appearance to your website with little to no work. And then expand the functionality with about 60,000 free and paid plugins (essentially apps) that help your website work the way you want.

Think of it this way: choosing Wix or SquareSpace is like choosing a Ford or a Chevy. There are many body styles that you can further customize with colors, options, and detailing packages. Underneath, though, it’s still a Ford or a Chevy. Choosing WordPress is like being able to build your own car using the best components from all the car parts from all the car companies in the world.

Cost

Another benefit is that WordPress sites can be essentially free if your willing to put in some leg work. You can find free software, free themes, and free plugins to build a great website. All you have to pay for is your domain name and hosting, which can be a relatively tiny expense. Even if you want functionality from paid plugins or themes, they are inexpensive. If you dont want to go through all the work, a web development company like us can help put everything together for you!

Wix and SquareSpace, on the other hand, charge you for using their software to build your site. Then many of the apps and themes have additional costs. Plus, you have to keep paying monthly to maintain your website. This adds up over time, which can make your website a significant, ongoing expense. Free options for Wix and SquareSpace are very limited, and may come with display ads that they sell on your site–ads that might even be for a competitor!

eCommerce

One place where the limited flexibility of Wix and SquareSpace hits worst is in terms of ecommerce. Both of these platforms are set up to accept only a few types of payment. SquareSpace, for example, only accepts Stripe, ApplePay, and PayPal. Wix starts out only accepting Authorize.net and PayPal, with additional functionality coming at a higher cost.

WordPress integrates easily with WooCommerce, which has more than 60 different extensions for taking payments the way that will be easiest for your customers. But, again, you have dozens of other choices for ecommerce plugins that can help your website serve customers more easily.

Portability

Once you choose Wix or SquareSpace, you’re stuck with them essentially forever. There is no easy way to migrate your site to another platform. You can do it, but the results are often so buggy and broken that it’s easier to start from scratch. In addition, the licensing agreements give the builders some rights to the content you create using their platform, which means it isn’t just hard to move your content–it might be illegal.

On the other hand, it’s easy to move WordPress sites around. You can disable and replace plugins, alter themes, and more with little effort. Your content is clearly your own, and you are free to back it up, download it, and move it as you want.

SEO

Wix and SquareSpace create challenges in terms of SEO. Both platforms make it harder for Google to find the information it needs to index and rank your site. This means that your website is less likely to show up high in the search results, even when potential customers are looking for the service or product you’re selling. This means that you’re likely to lose sales to competitors with better-ranking sites. Although Wix has worked to improve this for their sites, they remain behind WordPress.

WordPress is designed to be open to Google and the other search engines. This means that they can find your quality content and rank it where it belongs so that you can more easily rank higher in the search results.

Limitations of WordPress

Despite all the benefits above, WordPress does have its limitations. The biggest is that it can be a bit harder to work with. Plugins and themes mean you aren’t really designing your website from scratch, but it can take time to learn how to find, install, and customize the different parts of your website. It’s like our analogy of the car parts above. You have access to so many options that figuring them all out can be a challenge. And not all the parts work together easily: sometimes you have to pick the right ones or tweak them to make them work right.

Let Us Build the Best Site for You

Many people understand why WordPress is the best way to build a website, but either can’t get their site to work or can’t design a site that takes full advantage of the benefits.

That’s where we come in. We have experience and expertise working with WordPress, and have built dozens of beautiful, powerful, and profitable websites for our clients. We can build a website for you that maximizes the benefits of WordPress to make your company look good while offering your customers the best user experience. This can lead to more sales–and more repeat sales.

Please contact us today to start building the best website for your company.

Why and How You Should Do a Digital Marketing Audit

You might be happy with your current digital marketing. But are you sure you couldn’t be doing better? Are all your marketing dollars being well-spent? Or are some of them being wasted that might be better spent in a different area? Is your marketing ahead of the current trend, or is it in danger of becoming obsolete?

These are the questions a marketing audit can answer. Even if you are currently happy with your marketing, it’s a good idea to conduct a marketing audit. Being too complacent can lead to future troubles.

Why Conduct a Digital Marketing Audit

A marketing audit is essentially a close look at how your advertising dollars are being spent and the results you get from them. The goal is to make sure you’re really getting a good value from your advertising dollars. You might think that the question answers itself if business is good. But there are several potential concerns that might be hiding in a marketing campaign that is successful overall.

First, it’s possible that not all of your advertising dollars are pulling their weight. It might be that a few of your ad dollars are getting all the results, while much of it is wasted. You could see better results by investing more in the successful parts of the campaign and abandoning those that aren’t bringing in returns. For example, it’s possible that your PPC campaigns are turning a profit, but your organic SEO marketing is having no effect. Or vice versa.

A marketing audit might also reveal that your current marketing campaign is running out of steam. It’s not delivering the impressions, clicks, and conversions it used to. Business isn’t reflecting the decline yet, but it’s time to adjust your strategy before your bottom line suffers.
Finally, your marketing audit might reveal some surprise successes that can be crafted into a future marketing strategy.

How to Conduct an Digital Marketing Audit

You can hire someone to do it for you. Some companies might do this for free, in the hopes of winning your marketing business. But you will get a more honest appraisal if you pay someone to do it.

Or you can conduct your own digital marketing audit like this:

Identify your goals: You can’t judge the success of your digital marketing if you don’t know what it’s trying to accomplish. Are you just trying to increase awareness of your brand? Improve sales at brick-and-mortar locations? Improve online sales? Generate leads? Improve brand identity and loyalty?

Identify your audience: Who are you trying to reach? Take the time to identify your target audience, those who are most likely to be your ideal buyers. This doesn’t always have to take the shape of detailed buyer personas, but you should know generally who you’re trying to reach.

Identify the competition: Who is competing for your buyers’ dollars, time, and/or attention? Many of your marketing metrics are going to be relative to your competition, so if you don’t know who they are, you won’t be able to make any actionable conclusions.

Get data on your content: Check the performance of all your online content. You’ll want to know things like ranking for key searches, page visits, click-through rates, time on page, conversion rates, and more. Do this for your general webpages, PPC landing pages, social media posts, and other types of content. Try to collect as much of this data as possible for competitors.

Analyze your data: Put your data together to try see how well you’re achieving your goals. Also try to find out which parts of your digital marketing efforts are having the biggest impact.

Develop a plan: Take your conclusions and turn them into an actionable plan. Even if it’s just planning a more comprehensive future audit, make a plan to put your insights into action.

Active, Effective Digital Marketing

At VEA Technologies, we are dedicated to providing our clients with digital marketing that is effective now and in the future. That’s why we are committed to performing regular marketing audits for our clients as part of our regular strategy reviews. We talk about the results of these audits with our clients and discuss potential changes so their marketing remains consistently fresh.

If you are looking for a dynamic digital marketing firm, let VEA Technologies take over your marketing. Please contact us today to get started.

Marrying Web Design and User Experience

Sometimes you have an idea for your website design that is so magnificent, so groundbreaking, so astounding that we absolutely cannot use it. We know it’s disappointing, but it’s often for the best.

That’s because while design is important, it isn’t the only consideration in how your website should look. We have to make sure the web design also provides the best user experience (abbreviated UX). UX is critically important. If visitors to your website have a good experience, they are more likely to stay on your website. This inherently helps improve your SEO, which will bring more visitors to your site. It also makes them more likely to buy your product or service. So when we’re designing your website,we want to balance your vision with some important UX considerations.

Your Website Should Match Its Genre

Think of the last time you were selecting a book to read or a movie to watch. You probably noticed how most of the books or movies you were interested in had significant similarities in their cover or poster designs. That’s because publishers and movie advertisers understand that genre clues are very important to attracting the eye of their audience. Science-fiction will have a spaceship or alien on it, for example, while a romance will have a man and woman on the cover. With romance, the genre clues can be very subtle, with the exact dress (or undress) of the figures and how they are oriented or touching each other giving the audience clues about what type of romance to expect. Websites also have genres, and if you want your audience to stay on your website they should be able to recognize the genre of your website as belonging to the type of good or service they’re looking for. Visitors will often make this judgment in a fraction of a second, and they are just as quick to hit the “back” button to return to search results if your website doesn’t look right. Website designs that are either radically new or borrow heavily from other industries can have this problem. So the first part of the UX we consider is whether a website design matches what visitors look for in your type of website. There’s room to stand out, but you don’t want to be too different.

Visitors Should Find What They’re Looking For

Perhaps the most important part of the UX is that visitors to your website should be able to navigate the website easily. Most website users have visited thousands if not millions of websites, and they have developed a sense of how websites work. They don’t want to learn an entirely new organizational scheme just for your website. So your UX should build off the positive design features they’ve encountered on other websites. Plus, visitors want to be able to see their options when they get to your website. They don’t want to have to hunt around to find where they’re going. Design should never obscure or hide the navigation on your website or UX will suffer.

The Website Should Please the Eye

Don’t get us wrong: the beauty of your website is an essential part of UX. Being attractive not only makes your website more pleasant to visitors, it also makes it seem more trustworthy. This means that an attractive website will lead to more conversions as well as more time spent on site. So we want to make sure your website will appeal to a large audience, especially one in the demographic you’re targeting. And that might be why we have to modify your website design. Your design might appeal to you, but it’s possible that your taste is too specialized to work for your website. If you want your website to reach as many visitors as possible, the design can’t be too radical. Most people’s UX will suffer when they encounter it. On the other hand, if you are only trying to reach a very small audience that has very distinct tastes, it might be better if your website has a radical design. If you can target the specific taste of your audience, those people’s UX will improve because they feel welcome and known at your site. We will strike a balance that makes sure your design appeals to your intended audience.

Web Design That Works

During your consultation, we will talk to you about your goals for your website. Then we’ll design one that will achieve those goals, melding an outstanding web design with UX that will keep visitors coming to your site and contacting you about your products and services. You can review some of ouroutstanding work to get an idea of how we can help you. To get started on your web design, pleasecontact Vea Technologies today for a consultation.

Getting the Most Out of Your Facebook Ads

Facebook remains the most popular social media platform, and it’s also become one of the most powerful ways for businesses to reach current and new customers.

The potential for return is huge–a small ad spend can sometimes turn into a startling number of sales. Unfortunately, it can also be a terrible sink for your advertising dollars. Facebook ads can show little to no return on your investment if you don’t know how to approach them properly. Here are some of the keys to running a successful Facebook ad campaign.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

First, it’s important to start with what you already know about your customers. If you have a well-developed profile of your average customer, transfer that over as a starting point for targeting your Facebook ads.

Facebook ads work best when they are highly personalized, so the clearer your picture of your customer base, the closer you are to having a successful campaign.

Use All the Targeting Tools

There are several different places where you can set the targeting for your Facebook ads. You can use the custom audiences tool to target users based on those that you have on file, those that have visited your site, used your app, interacted with your store offline, or engaged your content on Facebook.

You can then target users based on certain types of behaviors, interests, and demographics.This is where it really pays to know your average customer–you can structure your ads to reach those people who have the potential to become your customers, even though they’ve never been in the past.

And you can further target your audience by choosing where your ads are going to appear, including which devices and platforms they will show up on, such as showing up for mobile or desktop, Facebook or Instagram.

Keep Their Attention with Remarketing

Although Facebook has tremendous potential to reach new customers, it wouldn’t make sense to put all your advertising eggs in that one basket. You want to not just get in front of potential customers, but stay in front of them until they become actual customers. Remarketing can help you do that.

Remarketing is when ads that customers have engaged with on one platform follow the customers to multiple platforms. If you have a Facebook ad that hooks potential customers, but doesn’t convert immediately, it might be able to convert those hooked customers as a banner ad on other sites that customer visits.

It keeps your product on their mind, and can help convert people who need time to make a decision but might otherwise move on to somebody else’s product or service.

Design Quality Ads

The design of your ads is critical to their potential success. First, Facebook has some strict criteria that you must meet if you want to get your ad approved. Making ads that won’t pass muster is a frustrating waste of time and money.

Next, you need ads that Facebook users find appealing. Not only will this increase your conversion rate, it can decrease the cost of your ads–Facebook charges more for ads it thinks will make its users mad and less likely to use the site.

And don’t neglect your