Web Analytics: From A to SEO

Saratoga Olive Oil Company (SOOC) was founded in 2011 by the Braidwood family, former pharmaceutical research consultants with a desire to “educate the public on healthy dietary choices” (Saratoga Olive Oil, n.d.). A decade later the company has three locations in Vermont and New York in the picturesque towns of Saratoga Spring, Lake Placid, and Burlington, as well as an online store. According to the company's website “Saratoga Olive Oil Company has been listed as one the top five stores in the world for olive oil selection and the retail destinations have been deemed as one of the top 10 most elegant shopping experiences in the world” (Saratoga Olive Oil Company, n.d.). In addition to olive oils, the company also sells gourmet vinegars, elevated pantry staples, kitchen accessories, and wedding as well as corporate gift options. SOOC utilizes Shopify for its e-commerce platform.  How SOOC Collects Website Traffic and Consumer Behavior Data There are a few different ways that I wou...

  As someone new to experiencing Semrush, I was blown away by the options available for enhancing on page search engine optimization (SEO), identifying areas of improvement through the site audit feature, the ability to monitor brand mentions across the internet, and the social media tracking and posting tools. What interested me the most, however, is how Semrush can be used to examine competitor SEO strategy. Today we’ll dive into one of the tools that I found most useful on the Competitive Research Dashboard, the Keyword Gap tool.  What is the Semrush Keyword Gap Tool? Keywords are essential to every digital marketing effort, as they can impact SEO strategy, advertising spend, content, and more. But do you really need to know your competitors’ keywords when shaping your own strategy? Semrush (n.d.b.) notes that “it’s important to know where you stand against your competitors so that you know where to focus your efforts. So using this tool before starting a campaign can be ke...

  With social media platform popularity changing as frequently as the tide, it can be challenging for businesses to know which platforms to focus on.  Rather than dedicate resources to the social media platform flavor of the month, brands should first think about their business goals and how social media can support their objectives. Once this introspection occurs, companies can consider the target audience in relation to each platform, and available resources, before devising an impactful social media strategy with independent goals, key performance indicators, and measures of success.  The Importance of Goals and Objectives Goals and objectives are essential to determine how many social media platforms to engage on, and which platforms to choose. According to Sprout Social , “69% of social marketers say increasing brand awareness is their number one priority”, but marketers need to ask if this a top priority of their business (Cover, L). It’s easy for marketers to view ...

  As digital marketers, we’re often taught to maximize the time consumers spend on our websites. The thinking behind this is, the more time a consumer spends on the site, the more content they will consume, and the more likely they will complete a conversion. However, no matter how wonderful a website is, at some point, a consumer will want to leave. What markers also need to consider is why consumers are leaving, when in the customer journey are they leaving, and where on the site are consumers leaving.  Enter: the importance of exit page ratios. What is an Exit Page Ratio? Exit page ratios also referred to as exit rates, are defined by Google (n.d.) as the percentage of page views that were the last in a session on a website. In plainer terms, the percentage of people who left a website on a specific page. This can be calculated using the equation below from HotJar (n.d.): Exit page ratios are crucial, in that they help marketers identify which pages most consumers are exit...

The pageview is one of the more basic Google Analytics metrics, and also one of the most hotly contested. While it can be helpful to those sites publishing content, it also has several drawbacks marketers need to keep in mind when analyzing and reporting web metrics.  What is a Pageview? A Pageview is defined by Google (n.d.a.) as “an instance of a page being loaded (or reloaded) in a browser”. Malnik (2020) further explains this by stating, “It’s a fairly generous measurement as if you land on a page, that’s a pageview. If you reload that same page, it counts as another. If you leave the page and come right back, it’s yet another pageview—all from the same page and user”. Google Analytics tracks the total pageviews for a website as well as the number of pageviews for each page on the site. Why are Pageviews an Important Web Metric? Note . Quote sourced from Bonini (2020) Pageviews can help show marketers which content is most important to consumers if going with the assumption t...