SEO - How to look at a website from an optimisation perspective - Part 2

Hey Learners,

Welcome back. Continuing from the previous post about "How to look at a site from an optimisation perspective", we covered the importance of knowing about the business, industry & the website you are working on, the set of actions you want your users to take while they are on your website while dividing them into two categories (Primary & Secondary Goals). If you have missed, you can read about these steps here.

3. List down priority URLs of the website.

You want to list down all the important pages of your website on a sheet that require SEO. In the process of doing so, you also want to observe the URL structure or schema of your websites. For e.g. the Home Page URL could be www.example.com/home.aspx OR www.example.com.html OR www.example.com/. Take into consideration the site wide URLs too. For e.g. for category pages does your site have a URL like www.example.com/category/sub-category.html OR a vague URL like www.example.com/catid=3749.html

Pro-tip - Compare industry benchmark websites & their URL schemas too.

4. List down all the links that are pointing to your website & you are pointing too.

There are so many websites that you could send your visitors too. These include your official Social media pages, partner websites, blogger sites, network sites, ad partners, sub domain sites, e-commerce stores, Online payment gateways & wallets, copyright sites, order-tracking sites, etc. Make note of the quality of sites your website is linked to & ensure these are genuine pages. These links should not hit a dead-end and should be serving content which complements your business.

5. List down Entry-Exit pages, CTA (Call-to-Action) & forms on your website

Your users may land on your site through various sources & possibly on various pages. When they land on these pages, they should be led to a certain valuable action through Call to Action Buttons & eventually your site should be able to capture necessary data through forms, Call-outs, and other important fields.

6. Identify the navigation options available on your website to reach these important pages.

Your important business pages should be easily found on your website. These could be through strategies like a search box, Sitemaps, Home page links or the navigation menus on your site for your products.

With the steps mentioned in the last two posts, you are in a great position to get started with SEO for tour website. In our coming post, we will focus on how to define a set of keywords to rank for your website pages. Hope you enjoyed the post. Be sure to share this far and wide to let more people know about SEO.

Keep coming back to this space for our next post.

Have a great day.

Happy learning.

Mitul Shingadia

Google Analytics - Setting Goals for your website

Hi Learners,

In our previous posts, we focussed on how to work around the Google Analytics account structure to suite your business needs, then we went through the steps of creating views & filters for your website. The next important setup for you as a marketer is setting up "Goals" on Google Analytics.

What are "Goals" in Google Analytics?

If you want visitors on your website to take certain important actions, like fill up a form, subscribe to a newsletter or interact with your Live Chat App on the website, you definitely want a way to keep track on how many visitors actually ended up meeting your website Goals. By setting up Google Analytics Goals, you are doing just that.

Steps to Setup Goals on Google Analytics

Step 1 - Visit Admin section on your GA dashboard and select the property.
Step 2 - From the View drop-down, choose the view you want to set the Goal for. Then click on Goals under that view.

Step 3 - Click on the Red button that says "+New Goal"

Step 4- Identify your Goal type (Revenue, Acquisition, Enquiry, Engagement) Analytics provides many options as templates under these headers. You can also choose to set up a "custom" Goal option to setup your own Goal. (In this case we want to see how many visitors spend more than 2 mins on our website.

Step 5 - Click on "continue" and give your goal a name (something that defines the nature of your Goal. For this goals its "2 mins +", Choose the Goal type from the list, in this case "duration" and hit continue.

Step 6 - Fill the goal details from the assigned toggle boxes to set the duration as 2 mins
Step 7 - Verify the Goal (Google gives you an estimate of goal performance, based on your past data.
Step 8 - Click on Save and Finish.

Goals are the cornerstone of data that you see on your website. You can create upto 20 Goals for every view in Google Analytics.

Hope the above steps were easy for you to follow. Do leave your comments and opinions on this blog. In our next blog we will learn about setting Audience segments that will help you understand your site audience better.

Happy learning.

Mitul