traffic

How to Evaluate A Website’s Performance

by

website evaluation checklistHere’s a list of basic questions I use when performing a website evaluation or audit on a client website. It gets more technical and geeky than this, but my hope is that this fives you a good idea of some of the things I do to help turn websites around.

GENERAL: questions I ask directly of the owner, or team that runs the website
1. What are the goals of the website? I want to hear from the website’s brass what they are trying to accomplish. It’s not always obvious. And it’s not always what they should be trying to accomplish. Often time there aren’t even any goals.
2. What the history of the website? Tell me specific details about sales (or membership) trends?
3. What’s the history of the site’s SEO strategy? What effect has that had on the site’s performance?
4. Have there been any major traumatic events (like de-indexing or site outages)? How have those affected sales and performance?
5. What’s your keyword strategy? If they have a strategy, I’ll ask to see the latest data they’ve accumulated about what keywords they consider to be most valuable.
6. How well has the stated keyword strategy been implemented on the site?
7. What is your content strategy?

Read moreHow to Evaluate A Website’s Performance

The Quest for Qualified Traffic Starts With the Fundamentals of SEO

by

Qualified traffic.

Small business owners and startups who rely heavily on their website for sales all stress over how to get more of it. Oh, and they want it cheap. Quite the conundrum!

There are lots of ways to get more traffic. All involve some level of investment (either time or money). None involve some level of magic (unfortunately, because that would be kind of cool).

Success acquiring qualified traffic starts with getting the basics right first. And the basics don’t always involve hiring a super-expensive SEO firm that claims they are going to make you millions in 3 months (by the way if anyone tells you that, just hang up).

If your website can do all of the following, you’ll see more qualified traffic. And it won’t burn a huge hole in your wallet.

Read moreThe Quest for Qualified Traffic Starts With the Fundamentals of SEO

SEO Success Story: Getting More Organic Traffic By Addressing the Fundamentals

by

Here’s a quick client success story in-the-making that I think is worth sharing with you: the Pacific Life Holiday Bowl is a client of ours. For you non-sports fans out there, the Holiday Bowl is one of the post-season bowl games held annually in college football (aside: it’s one of the best bowls year in and year out). We’ve had the pleasure of working with them for the last few years.

seo-successAfter last year’s game, the Holiday Bowl said they wanted more organic traffic for the 2009 game (being held at the end of December).  Although the site gets decent traffic all year long, it gets an overwhelming majority of its annual visitors in December (when the game is played).  So December is very important. It’s their entire year. The vent is once-a-year, so the better the webiste performs in that month, the higher they can charge for ad deals, partnerships, etc.

Read moreSEO Success Story: Getting More Organic Traffic By Addressing the Fundamentals

How Much Traffic Does My Competition Receive?

by

Ever wonder how much monthly traffic a website gets? C’mon, you’ve got to be curious about what kind of visits your competitors get. If you’re not, you should be!

Well, there’s a FREE and easy way to check, just use Compete. It’s really simple. I should note that I am not being paid to make this recommendation.

Here’s a graph of Compete.com’s traffic for the last year:

compete-graph

Read moreHow Much Traffic Does My Competition Receive?