Tag Archive for: social media strategies

Twitter Marketing: Build Your Brand

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Twitter marketing has evolved considerably over the course of the last year, and it is important, as marketers, that we understand how to build our brand on Twitter.

Twitter marketing is often one of the cornerstones of a social media marketing strategy. However, if you are not optimizing your Twitter page for your brand, you are missing one of the most beneficial features of the social network.twitter marketing brand optimization

Below are a few tips to help you maximize your Twitter marketing through brand optimization on your business’s Twitter page.

Design a Cover Photo

If you click on the small widget in the top right-hand corner of your Twitter profile and go to the Profile section of your Settings, you have the ability to add a customized header (Hint: 1252px x 626px in size.) to your Twitter profile.

A cover photo and the header section are great ways to showcase your business basics with a brief description or a Call-to-Action (CTA), your location and some fun, engaging photos that give your brand a personality. One of the more important factors that contribute to Twitter marketing success is the ability for people to relate to your brand and engage with the personality you create for it. The header section and the cover photo therein are a great way to do this on Twitter.

t2mktg twitter

Add a Custom Background

A custom background, once again, is another area where you can be optimizing your Twitter marketing with a CTA. There is no shortage of step-by-step guides detailing how to design a Twitter background, or services like TwitBacks that help you create backgrounds easily, and one should definitely consider taking advantage of these options when designing a branded Twitter page.

When it comes to Twitter marketing, you want to engage with people as quickly as possible. There is a constant conversation taking place on Twitter, and if your Twitter marketing is not grabbing the attention of your audience immediately with features like the background, then you risk losing that attention very quickly.

To get an idea of what we mean, take a look at these 17 captivating Twitter accounts from HubSpot and see what an engaging Twitter marketing strategy looks like.

SEO in Twitter Marketing

twitter marketing seo

The next major step when it comes to optimizing your Twitter marketing relates to optimizing your brand page for search engines. As we have noted in past blog posts, social signals are factoring more heavily in search rankings every time the Google algorithm changes. Therefore, it is important that we optimize our brand pages for search engines.

To do so for Twitter, we need to follow a set of simple but important rules:

 

  • DO NOT SPAM!
    • We cannot stress this enough. Spamming links to your followers will not only hurt your Twitter credibility, but it will also hurt your SERPs. This also has a lot to do with your handle. Google’s algorithm disregards handles with a long set of numbers in them (e.g. John123456) as these are typically used by spammers. Make your handle short, simple and professional.
  • Add Keywords to Your Bio
    • There should be at least one keyword in your bio on Twitter, as this registers to Google when determining search rankings.
  • If You Build It, They Will Follow…And Your Rankings Will Improve
    • As your network grows, it registers with the algorithm and help your search rankings improve when it comes to your Twitter profile.
  • Consider the Potential of Retweets
    • Retweets register to Google as pseudo-backlinks, particularly when they include a link to your site or blog. So consider the length of your tweets and leave some room for your followers to comment when retweeting (100 characters is your sweet spot!).

These are just a few tips that can help you optimize your Twitter marketing strategy. Each campaign, each profile, each industry and each step is going to be unique, particularly when you factor in what your goals are when it comes to Twitter marketing. But these pointers should help you quite a bit when it comes to putting together a winning Twitter marketing strategy!

How are you optimizing your Twitter marketing strategy? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

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Social Media ROI: What to Measure

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Measuring social media return on investment (ROI) is one of the biggest grey areas when it comes to this emerging market, so what is important to look at when it comes to measuring social media ROI?

Social media return on investment is constantly a point of concern for executives and skeptics when it comes to launching a social media program. The irony, however, is that many of these skeptics claim that there is no means of measuring social media ROI when the fact of the matter is that, unlike many forms of marketing, every aspect of a social media program can be monitored and measured. The complexity of social media ROI factors in when one cannot decide how one wants to measure the success of a campaign (e.g. monetization of a fan base, growth of a fan base, increase in traffic, etc.).social media roi t2social

There are several angles from which one can look at social media ROI, and what we describe below are just a few. That said, we think these are some of the best ways to measure the success of a social media program.

Social Media Cost-Benefit Analysis

In the field of Economics, a Cost-Benefit analysis is one of the most common ways of measuring the return of a program. What is important to note is that a C-B analysis looks not only at what might be gained from taking an action, but also what one stands to lose by not taking said action.

Say, for example, you calculate that an unattended social media PR crisis costs your business $10,000 in lost sales, brand tarnishing, etc., and that your brand unknowingly suffers two to three of these crises per year. That’s a calculated loss of $20,000-$30,000 every year as a direct result of not attending to your customers on social media. Now, say that you put together a social media program designed to engage with dissatisfied users and help them solve their issues on the very public sphere that is social media. The result is not only the retention of a customer, but the build up of brand loyalty through social media.

Now, it would not exactly be feasible to suggest that social media engagement in the time of crisis will mean retaining every calculated dollar lost from not engaging on social media, but if you retain half of those lost earnings ($10,000-$15,000) and you are spending $700 per month on a small, customer-oriented social media program, you are looking at a yearly return measured as follows:

social media roi 2

While this is a very black-and-white example, measuring a social media program’s ROI can be as simple as a C-B analysis.

Setting Social Media Goals

social media roi goalsOn the less technical front, you might want to consider measuring your social media success through the use of established goals that you lay out at every stage of the program. These do not necessarily have to be monetary returns. In fact, one way of measuring the success of your social program is by measuring the growth and extension of your network. Effectively, the growth of your social network translates into the growth of your pool of leads.

So when building your social media strategy, create a set of goals that you would like to achieve and measure your returns by the growth of your networks. From there, once your networks have grown to your satisfaction, you can consider this next form of social media ROI.

Return of Campaigns

You may be focused entirely on the monetization of your social media program. That’s fine. Businesses aim to be as profitable as possible, and there’s no better way to measure profit than with monetary gains. So the final and most straightforward way you can go about measuring the ROI of your social program is through the monitoring of returns from your campaigns. Be careful, however. There is something that a lot of people overlook when it comes to measuring the monetary returns from converting a client. This once again factors into a Cost-Benefit analysis.

Say you have managed to convert a lead into a client on social media. Well done! Now let’s say that this client has a lifetime value (LTV) of $120 with three $40 purchases. Then let’s say it cost you $50 to convert this client (between time, resources, expenses, etc.). You’re looking at a healthy lifetime profit of the converted client with a value of $70. Way to go! Now, let’s look at the alternative – this is where people often lose out without even realizing it.

Let’s say you spend that same $50 to convert a lead into a client on social media, but now, a client’s LTV is a one-time purchase of $40. This means that for every client you convert, you are losing $10. So the more conversions you see, the more money you lose.

It is extremely important that we measure not only how much we are making when it comes to social media, but how much we are spending. And this includes time (our most precious resource), expenses, opportunity costs, etc. If we are only measuring the returns and not the costs, we are missing the entire concept of profitability. So keep that in mind when you are measuring the success of your social campaigns.

How do you measure the ROI of your social media programs? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!Social Media Marketing Social Media Strategies

Social Equity: The Benefits of a Twitter Presence

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Social equity garnered as a result of a Twitter presence stands to add quite a bit of value to your brand.

As with any social network, Twitter adds an entirely new degree of Social Equity to your business. However, where Twitter differs with regards to the Social Equity added to a brand is the ability to use it as a broadcast medium (to a degree) which makes it unique when it comes to social networks.

There are a few statistics of note with regards to the demographics and business capabilities of Twitter. Let us first begin by examining these figures, then incorporate the numbers into our discussion of Social Equity derived from a Twitter presence.

Interesting Facts and Figuressocial equity twitter

On Twitter, American users have a higher median income than the average American population – the largest demographic with regards to income falls in the $50K-$75K range. Furthermore, more than half of the 500 million Twitter users follow a brand, company or product.

With regards to business, 79% of US-based Twitter users are more likely to recommend a brand or store they follow, and 67% of US-based users are more likely to buy from a brand or store they follow on Twitter. How does this translate? Companies using Twitter average twice as many leads per month than those that do not. This is especially true for B2C companies. Those with more than 100 followers (not a difficult goal to reach with a proper strategy in place) have 146% more leads per month because of their activity on Twitter.

Lastly, 58% of consumers following a brand on Twitter say they have praised a brand or company for a product, service or interaction.

Social Equity Derived from Twitter

As a pseudo-broadcast medium, Twitter allows brands to both engage with users and market themselves on the social network. It is for that reason that we see the numbers above. Twitter allows brands to engage with users talking about their niche, establish themselves as experts or industry leaders and drive conversions directly from the network.

Effectively, what this means is that Twitter is a realm in which brands can target leads and work to drive conversion all in one space. Granted, the main goal of Twitter should not be to market your brand. That is an added benefit of the network. The real goal should be to build your brand’s authority, which in turn will result in increased leads and conversions.

social equity twitter 2With regards to Social Equity, Twitter acts as an international platform on which to grow your brand’s reputation both on the widespread market and on an individual basis. The figures above suggest that Twitter is a medium in which people seek out industry leading brands and not only do two-thirds of these users have the potential to convert, but nearly four-fifths are going to recommend these brands to their peers.

As we noted in last week’s Social Equity segment on Facebook, true equity can be measured not only in the value added, but also in the losses incurred as a result of not having a presence on Twitter. With such a vast marketplace at your fingertips and the ability to grow your brand’s authority on both the personal and overarching levels, it seems almost counter-intuitive to not have a presence on Twitter.

Do you use Twitter to engage with your audience? How are you measuring the Social Equity derived from a Twitter presence? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!Social Media Marketing Social Media Strategies

 

Social Media Case Study: Old Spice

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Social media turned the Old Spice brand into a personality with which people were eager to engage.

In the last few years, Old Spice has become a crowned jewel of social media. Their campaigns consistently skyrocket and the brand has developed such a distinct personality that anyone familiar with the brand can recognize one of their campaigns almost immediately. What is most fascinating about their branding, you ask? Well, perhaps it is the fact that, unlike Rome, it was built in a day. (Well, not a day, but you get the idea.)

In today’s social media case study, we aim to explain how Old Spice used social media to quickly (and quite successfully) create a virtual personality that led to the explosion of their brand in new markets and demographics.

The Background

In 2010, Old Spice created the character that has widely become known as “The Old Spice Guy” and the campaign developed an instant following. When a second commercial aired with the same praise and hype, Old Spice decided to go the social media route, and did something brilliant: they never broke character.

Slowly, the proliferation of the Old Spice brand on social media began to pick up steam, and, as if by divine intervention, Old Spice did not seem to slip up in any of their steps along the way, creating a set of guidelines that any marketer should adopt when attempting to create a social media personality for a brand.

The Lessons

Be Original

People are always intrigued by something they have never seen before. Until their campaign, no one had ever seen a brand persona like the one Old Spice had created. Of course, since the dawn of marketing there have been mascots and spokespeople, but never a brand personality so bold that clients and fans were eager to engage with it.

Originality is much easier said than done, of course. It is not every day that you are going to wake up with an idea that no one had ever thought of before. Countless brands have attempted to do what Old Spice has done in the last couple of years, but few have been successful. But thinking outside the box is exactly what made Old Spice so successful, and that is the first step to creating a winning social media campaign.

Be Consistent

The second, and possibly the most important step that Old Spice took was maintaining brand consistency across every channel onto which they expanded. Have a look at the Old Spice Twitter account. You’ll notice that the witty, charming and larger-than-life personality they originally created a few years ago exists there as well. The same holds true for their other social media channels. Brand consistency is one of the most crucial aspects when it comes to developing brand loyalty. After all, how can fans recognize your brand instantaneously if there are major differences between your channels?

So remember, once you have that winning edge, maintain it on every level of your marketing, particularly in social media where you will be engaging with your audience. Which brings us to the next takeaway…

Never Stop Engaging

Commercials are one thing, but ongoing, personalized and genuine engagement with its fan base is what led to the ongoing success of Old Spice’s social media efforts. As with any campaign, Old Spice knew that eventually fans would move on and grow tired of the standard promotional commercials. So what did they do? They (once again) never broke character and engaged with their fans through personalized responses (whether they were tweets, videos or posts) in a timely and comedic fashion.

This kept fans coming back, asking questions or making comments in the hopes that “The Old Spice Guy” would respond to them. What did this mean for the Old Spice brand (as a company)? It meant increased brand loyalty through the strategic use of social media. As we noted above, people fell in love with the personality Old Spice had created on social media, and this kept them coming back to the brand on social media, and anxiously awaiting more content. As far as the business side of things was concerned, it meant a very quick 107% increase in sales.

Avoid Selling on Social Media

Last but certainly not least, Old Spice avoided selling their product on social media. Of course, posting commercials that are meant to advertise the product is different, but as far as engaging with fans goes, Old Spice kept to entertaining and shied away from selling. People like personalities, not salespeople, and Old Spice recognized that. And it was the right thing to do. After all, the personality they created took care of the sales, which is clear in the numbers above.

Old Spice showed that creating a personality on social media that engages with its audience (Old Spice was engaging with fans that ranged anywhere from celebrities to Twitter users with less than 100 followers) can build brand loyalty faster than any other form of marketing. Listening, engaging, consistency and originality were the four cornerstones of the success of Old Spice on social media. This is not to say that any idea is going to skyrocket the way Old Spice’s campaign did, but it never hurts to try something and see what happens.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z10Hrsx7FBY

Which of these lessons do you think will be most helpful in building your next campaign? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

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Mobile Marketing: What is Geo-Targeting?

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Mobile marketing is an increasingly popular choice when it comes to Internet marketing, and geo-targeting is a major part of it.

With the proliferation of mobile online searches, the concept of mobile marketing is becoming an increasingly popular option for marketers. One of the main facets of mobile marketing is the ability to geo-target potential clients based on their location.

Here, we aim to explain what exactly geo-targeting is and how you can leverage this powerful feature in your mobile marketing efforts.mobile marketing geo targeting

Geo-Targeting Defined

In order to understand how we can use geo-targeting in our mobile marketing campaigns, we must first understand what it is. As the name might suggest, geo-targeting has to do with marketing to a client base in a given location. This can be as broad as a country, or as specific as an IP address. How you decide to use the feature depends largely on what you are trying to accomplish.

In the most basic sense, geo-targeting is the automated process of determining the location of a visitor to your website (be it on a desktop or mobile device) and showing different content to that visitor based on certain geographic criteria (e.g. country, region, city, IP address, etc.). This is a powerful tool when it comes to online advertising, as it allows businesses to promote different campaigns to targeted demographics based on where their searches are taking place.

With regards to mobile marketing, there are many more versatile capabilities when it comes to geo-targeting.

Geo-Targeting in Mobile Marketing

The ability to target individuals on their mobile device using geo-targeting services opens up a world of potential clients that businesses may not have even known about. Granted, geo-targeting leads on a desktop is a viable technique, but these users may not be near your area, or may not be willing to venture out and find you. On a mobile device, however, individuals can be targeted in a location as narrowly defined as a one block radius.

mobile marketing with foursquare

Take Foursquare, for example. Using the business application for Foursquare, businesses can claim their location, create a promotion or special, and the app automatically geo-targets users in the vicinity of the store, restaurant or business. There are also new and upcoming mobile marketing PPC abilities that are more geared towards marketing to users using banners. This trend is on the rise with the increased access to the mobile web by smartphone users.

Geo-targeting can be as simple as creating a special on Foursquare and letting the application take care of the rest, or as in-depth as developing a PPC campaign and custom banner ads and mobile landing pages that drive traffic from a mobile clientele. Either way, mobile marketing is made all the more intriguing by the ability to geo-target users.

Have you done any geo-targeting in your mobile marketing campaigns? How how is worked for you? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

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Email Marketing: Tips to Your Success

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Email marketing is still one of the most popular forms of online engagement with potential clients, so how can you maximize the success of your email marketing campaigns?

We all know about the power of email marketing. E-blasts continue to be one of the top choices for online marketing when it comes to engaging with an audience of either existing or potential clients. The only problem with email marketing is that returns are low, and it takes at least six blasts before you start to see some engagement.

Below, we have featured a few great tips to help you boost your email marketing to increase opens, decrease conversion time and optimize your time spent on A-B testing in order to turn your email marketing into a winning strategy.

When Should You Send Your Email?

This is one of the most frequently asked questions when it comes to email marketing. When is the best day or time to be sending an email? Now, of course, every experience is going to be different. Statistics may suggest one thing, but it would be irresponsible to say, point blank, that, “Tuesdays at noon are the best time of the week to send an email.” However, that is not to say that with the use of some of these statistics we can determine a formula that is very close.

Let’s start with the best time of day. Statistics collected in a study conducted by GetResponse show that there are two time periods throughout the day that have higher open rates than any other: early in the day between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. and later in the afternoon between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. Average open rates and click through rates (CTRs) can increase by 6% at these times during the day.

With regards to the best day of the week to send an e-blast, you should be looking towards the middle. Contrary to what some may think, the weekends are notoriously quiet for email activity, and thus weekend campaigns are largely ignored and unsuccessful. The beginning of the week (i.e. Monday) has people feeling down and catching up on what was missed over the weekend. Therefore, your promotional e-blast will likely be tossed in the virtual trash. So. the middle of the week is your best bet, particularly Tuesday and Wednesday.

Now as for that blanket statement as to when you should be scheduling your email marketing, the numbers suggest that late afternoon in the middle of the week would be your optimal point of success.

email marketing tips

When Are Emails Read?

It may be nice to think that weeks after you send out your email campaign someone may click through to your page, but realistically, the likelihood of that falls somewhere in the realm of rare to never. The truth of the matter is your email has a shorter lifespan than you might think.

Now, when compared to the shelf life of a Facebook post (experts argue that it is relevant for up to three hours) or a tweet (anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour at most) an email can live for an eternity. But with each passing minute, the likelihood of an open or a click shrinks considerably. According to the GetResponse study, 23.63% of all email opens will occur in the first hour. 9.52% in the second, 6.33% in the third and downward from there. This is why the timing of your message is important. Scheduling an email campaign for midnight so that it is the “first thing they’ll see in the morning!” will get you nowhere.

Pay Attention to Time Zones

Where is your audience? Are they primarily on the East Coast? Are they living on Pacific Time? Maybe they all work out of Hong Kong. Regardless of where they are, if they are not in the same time zone as you, they are not going to be getting the email at the same time. So while you might think that an email marketing campaign going out on a Tuesday at 3 p.m. will generate the best results, if half of your audience is based on Hong Kong and you haven’t factored that in, you’re dead wrong.

Luckily, many mailing services (such as MailChimp) offer the option of setting time zone fluctuation so that your emails are sent at the same time in every city in the world. Some of these features are for premium members, but that’s a small price to pay for increased conversions.

TEST!

While these might be some helpful tips backed by some strong numbers, that still does not mean that you are guaranteed success. Make sure you test your campaigns from a variety of angles before making a decision as to the best avenue for your future success in email marketing. At the end of the day, this is the only way to truly see what your best options are!

Where have you found success when it comes to email marketing? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

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Social Media Tools [INFOGRAPHIC]

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Social media is made increasingly easier to manage with the help of numerous tools.

Managing social media activity is a time-consuming task. There is plenty that needs to be done and it is ongoing. Luckily, there are plenty of tools out there that can help us effectively and efficiently manage our social media marketing strategies.

Now, while these tools exist, they are not all designed for the same purposes. There are publishers, monitoring tools, multi-account management dashboards and much more. In this infographic, many of the top social media management tools are separated into their respective categories.

Which of these tools do you use for your social media management? Which ones are your favorite? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

social media management tools

Social Equity: Having a Facebook Presence

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Social equity comes in many forms, and a Facebook presence can greatly enhance your business.

What value does a Facebook fan page and community add to your social equity? This is an important question that must be answered if we are to delve deeper into the social network to measure other features of Facebook and determine how they impact social equity (e.g. campaigns, offers, promotions, etc.).

In today’s post about social media equity, we are looking to explain exactly what it is a Facebook presence offers your business in the way of value added.

The Value Lost Without Facebook

Measuring social equity and the return of social media is not as conventional a measurement as other forms of marketing and business. In fact, due to the fact that every aspect of social media marketing can be measured, it is quite different (in a much better way). So, to understand what value a Facebook presence adds to your business, we may want to consider, first, what value is lost (or overlooked) if our brand does not have a Facebook presence.

Let us first look at the added search engine optimization (SEO) value that comes with Facebook. In a post a little while back, we explained how social signals factor into SEO. Below is the graph that shows some of the most heavily weighted criteria when it comes to SEO:

Social Signals Affect Search Rankings

 

What are the top five criteria when it comes to SEO and social media? Four of them relate to Facebook. So the first aspect to consider as far as social equity of a Facebook presence is concerned is SEO. We lose some of the most important SEO criteria without a Facebook presence, rendering many of our other SEO efforts much less viable.

Second, a Facebook presence is as important as a web presence. Early on in the age of the Internet, there were those who believed that a web presence was only viable for those high tech-industry businesses. Over the course of the last few years, every business, large or small, has taken to the web to promote their businesses to both a local and international audience. The same is true for Facebook today. The ability to tout your business across a multitude of markets and expand your business drastically is as true with Facebook as it is with a website, if not more so. Facebook is all about being social. And, more importantly, unlike the seemingly endless web, Facebook has boundaries in which users are confined when using it. So, unlike a website, where people may not find you at the speed at which you may have hoped, the ability to become a viral sensation in the world of social media is much easier.

Furthermore, Facebook pages have undergone dramatic overhauls in the last few years. Facebook was the first social network to recognize its own importance to businesses, and has made adjustments accordingly. So in addition to SEO opportunities that reach outside of Facebook, there is also the ability to showcase every aspect about your company and build a corporate personality with which a customer base want to engage.

What is the Social Equity of a Facebook Presence?

As we can see from the lost value above, the social equity of a simple presence on Facebook is tremendous. So in addition to the SEO opportunities that come with Facebook, and the ability to showcase our brand, what else is added with regards to social equity when it comes to Facebook?

Perhaps the best way to determine the value added of a Facebook presence is through the use of statistics. 20% of Facebook users have purchased something because of ads or comments they saw on the social network. In a market of one billion accounts (with hundreds of millions of regularly active users) those are strong numbers. Second, in a recent survey conducted by HubSpot, they noted that 77% of B2C companies acquired a customer through Facebook while 43% of  B2B companies acquired a customer through Facebook. (NOTE: For brands in the retail industry, over 90% of those with a Facebook presence reported acquiring a customer from the network.)

According to that same HubSpot survey, 80% of social network users prefer to connect to brands on Facebook. Lastly, the two areas in which brands saw the greatest benefits from Facebook in the last year were in increased brand exposure (nearly 90%) and increased traffic (nearly 70%).

Not all of us are as lucky as a Coca-Cola or a Harley Davidson; we do not have lifelong brand loyalty, or are internationally recognized and respected brands. We need to work hard to retain customers, build loyalty and increase brand awareness. So where does the social equity of Faceobok lie? It has to do with increasing your brand awareness, reputation and loyalty.

Where do you see social equity fitting in with your Facebook efforts? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

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Social Media Measurement [INFOGRAPHIC]

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Social media is an important tool to help grow your business, but like any business tool, you need to be able to measure it!

Unlike many other business tools, however, social media is not only measurable, but easily measurable. There are a number of analytics tools, some add-ons and others built into the networks themselves, that can be used to measure the success of a social media campaign. These analytics can help you enhance or modify your social media program in order to generate the highest returns on your investment.

Yet, even with all of these tools, people are still looking for ways to measure their social media in a more tangible way. This great infographic from MediaZo details how exactly some of the most important elements of a social media program’s returns can be measured and analyzed.

Have a look below and let us know what you think.

How are you measuring your social media programs? What do you consider ROI on social media? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!social media measurement infographic

 

SEO Keywords with Google Analytics

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SEO is one of the most powerful tools a brand can use to get found, and Google Analytics offers some great insights to help you maximize your SEO efforts.

We never tire of pointing the wonderful world of analytics that are offered to webmasters in the backend of Google Analytics. With a simple code, site owners are offered a wealth of insights when it comes to the search engine performance of their sites. Though all this information exists, few people are well versed in all that Analytics has to offer. The result? Missed insights that can be vital to the success of your website on search engines.

While it would not be possible to cover all that Google Analytics has to offer when it comes to insights in a single blog (there are multi-part courses that offer this) we thought we could discuss some of the tools webmasters can use to see how their websites are performing when it comes to keywords and search terms. Are you optimizing for SEO in the right places? Are the keywords you’ve chosen for SEO performing as well as you had hoped? If not, what keywords are the driving factor behind your SEO success?

Below is a set of helpful steps when it comes to both finding and using these insights for your SEO efforts in Google Analytics.

Where can I find these insights?

So, perhaps the most important thing we will need to know when it comes to using these insights is knowing where to find them. On your menu on the lefthand side of Google Analytics is a Traffic Sources seo google analytics keywords tab. Under there you will see Search Engine Optimization and, beneath that, Queries. (NOTE: You will need to have Google Webmasters set up on your site in order to monitor these insights.) In the Queries section is where you will find the bread and butter of SEO keyword lists.

It is here that you will be able to start delving into the world of saved search keywords and see just how you are performing for those keywords you wish to rank for, and those that you did not even realize were a means through which people were finding you.

Isn’t that a treat?

Now that we know where we can find these keywords, it is important to understand what they mean with regards to our SEO, and how we can leverage this information to increase our rankings in search engines.

Analyze and Implement

SEO is an ongoing process. There will always be evolution in our SEO strategies, and this is one area that will show us how we should be evolving our SEO strategies in order to keep up with the market.

Once we arrive at the Queries section under Search Engine Optimization, we can begin to understand how we are being found on search engines. There are three means through which we can organize our search results: Impressions, Clicks, and Average Position. Impressions has to do with the number of times our site (homepage or landing page) has appeared in search results for a given keyword or phrase in a set period of time. Clicks has to do with the number of times people have clicked through to our site as a result of a searched keyword or phrase. Lastly, Average Position ranks our keywords based on, you guessed it, the average position in which our site ranks for a specified keyword or phrase. The table looks like this:

seo google analytics terms list

Taking these statistics into account, we can begin to see where we are performing best. Say, for example, you run a restaurant, and you optimized for “southern cuisine” in your initial SEO run. Well, say a few months after your launch, you notice that the majority of your clicks and impressions are coming from searches for “southern barbecue” as opposed to what you had initially optimized for. This will lead you to reevaluate your SEO strategy, and begin optimizing for a new set of keywords where you are seeing your highest return. Upon your next visit, you will see that not only have your impressions and clicks risen, but your average position will have gone up as well, as a result of your re-optimization.

Have you used these insights for your SEO in the back of Google Analytics? How so? What have you found to be the most beneficial way of using them? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

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t2 can grow your business across integrated verticals. Contact us for help with website development and technical needs, growing your ecommerce or Amazon business, and Web3 projects.