Most web sites are not effective - Is yours?
Check it out with a no-cost web tool
by Randall Tomaras - Best USA Photographer Executive
Director © 2009
When it comes to websites that provide a service for business people, the most important consideration is sales or conversion. There is a lot of hype about how an effective site is measured. This article will show you how to use Alexa, a no-cost web tool, to evaluate the effectiveness of your site and ones you are considering doing business with.
Before I take you to the tool, there are some terms you must understand. So let’s go through them and why they are or are not important.
Hits – It is a very old internet term that does not have much value anymore, but people still think it’s an accurate measurement. The reason it is no good anymore is that ‘Hits’ measures anything that has a URL to it. Each photo and graphic has a URL so if one page had 50 photos, it would count for 51 hits (the page and 50 photos). When Macromedia (now Adobe) developed “slices” it made it possible for a photographer to put up a single image in a thousand pieces, so when someone copied it they were only copying a slice. You can see how someone could get a hundred million hits easily.
Keywords – Actually there are key words and key phrases but most people just call them key words. These are the words that someone types into a search engine when they want to find something or someone. People who "buy" will type in a key phrase that is more descriptive. As an example if you typed “photographers” in Google’s search box, you would come up with around 55 million options. Type the words “best photographers” and you cut it down to 13 million and “best photographers in Florida” cuts it down to a million. So when you are trying to get people to your site think of the key phrases that someone might use to buy. In the above example, my guess is that mostly photographers would type in the word “photographers.” Buyers tend to refine their search. Alexa will show you which key words people are using for your site and your competitors too.
Reach or Unique Visitors – Another term that is easily manipulated yet people think it is a great measure because “Unique Visitors” was at one time. Alexa calls it “Reach.” What happened was that web masters started seeing which terms people were typing into search engines and then they would design their web pages around them. So if “Britney Spears” was a hot term, they'd stuff that term on the page and HTML code so the search engines rated it. When people clicked on it, it may be an accounting firm saying their figures don’t look anything like Britney Spears. The viewer would go away disappointed but the web designer would tell the accounting firm that they had 100,000 Unique Visitors that month. A unique visitor is a computer that reaches a web site in a 24 hour period. Alexa measures this in percent of all internet users. Google tops their list at a 32% reach, Amazon ranked 32 has a 2% reach and unless you are in the top 75 websites in the world you will never see 1% or better, so the other sites are looking at less than a percent.
Bounce Rate – This measures the percentage of people that only go to one page of your site. In other words what percent of the people found your site and did not think it was interesting enough to go to more than one page as in the example above. If this is the case maybe the terms that the search engine is picking are not matching what viewers are looking for. If you have a high percentage of bounce than you might consider rewriting your copy for terms that are more relevant. Because most search engines are not relevant, a bounce rate of 40% is good, 30% is excellent and 20% is unheard of with web sites in the top 500,000 in the world. That may sound like a lot but there are 433 million web sites with 15 billion pages.
Time on Site – This is without a doubt the most important term when it comes to buying and relevance. If someone stays on your site for a long time they are interested. It is that simple. Your goal is to keep them interested in your site, not your competitors. To do this you must have valuable content that the viewers want. That's the only reason they stay.
Search % - The search % measures how many people found your web site through a search engine. It is not something that Google shouts from the rooftops, but the lower the percentage the greater the sales. If you take the web sites that sell the most, you will find that they all have a lower percentage when it comes to Search %. First of all, it is common sense if someone types in your URL they definitely interested in you. This could be from being printed on material, hearing about it in an article, social networking, in an email or any number of other ways to advertise. A low "Search %" definitely shows who the go-getters are. You will ALWAYS obtain more customers by going after them, than waiting for them to come to you.
Sites linking in – This is the number of sites linking into your website on any page. It does not include pages from your site linking to other pages of your site. If you are after traffic from the search engines, especially Google, this is important. However, it will increase your bounce rate and lower your time-on-site. At Best USA Photographers we have elected to email and call on the phone people that are known photography buyers. We sell quality and we go after quality, not quantity. We care how many people buy, not visit.
PageRank – This is a Google term and you are not going to find it on Alexa. When Google first started it was their founding premise on how to rank web sites. It was based on how many other sites linked into your site. It did not take long for web masters to start “link farms” where they would start web sites that only linked other web sites. Of course to receive a thousand links they would charge you. Then organizations went to their members and they had reciprocal links. We could go on about Google history, but the long and short of it is that link masters are always finding some way around Google and as soon as they do Google changes their algorithms. To Best USA Photographers this is a very good reason to concentrate our time on finding quality customers rather than chasing a moving target that we can’t see and we know will change. As of this writing we have a PageRank of 0 and still we are rated number 1 on many key terms with over 10 million options. That should be evidence that PageRank is NOT the only consideration Google has for ranking.
Page Views – Alexa measures the number of pages a viewer looks at in both numbers and percentages. As a company we like to know how many pages the average viewer looks at. Looking at 5 pages is considered excellent. Best USA Photographers is lucky to have a current 3 month average of 19 pages per viewer, but this could be because we just put up new pages.
Traffic Rank – This is Alexa’s method of rating web sites. It is a combination of unique visitors (reach) and page views. It may be easy to inflate unique visitors or page views on one site, but to do both would require a major undertaking. The unique advantage about Alexa is that it is NOT a search engine and there is no business advantage to being rated, so web masters do not try to manipulate it. I personally like the purity of it.
World Wide Traffic – Keep in mind that Alexa rates world-wide traffic. So if your customers are primarily in the United States and your web site has only 40% of its traffic from the United States, then you can subtract roughly 60% from each category. When you reach a certain Traffic Rank, Alexa also breaks down what your rank is in certain countries. For example Best USA Photographers has a three month overall world-rank average of 372,449 as of 7-27-09 but our United States rank is 55,535. That is because 90% of our traffic comes from the USA. This information can be found on the Traffic Rank page below the fold, in other words scroll down.
OK. Now that you have the terms down and what they mean, let’s show you
how to find out what your site is like and how to research other sites.
Here is the link of where to go:
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo
You will see a page like this:
When you click “go” you will see something like this: Have fun exploring.
From all this you should pull a lot of information that you can use to evaluate your site or that of your competitors or someone you are considering doing business with. There is a lot more to Alexa, but that should hold you over for now.
Check this out
If you felt that this
was helpful we would appreciate your comments for our soon to be
blog at http://www.bestUSAphotographers.com If
you would like a more complete course for marketing your business at NO
cost, NO backend selling, and NO advertising go to:
http://www.bestusaphotographers.com/photo-marketing.html .
You will find eight great rules that list hundreds of tips to avoid costly
mistakes.
It is geared toward photography and the arts but the rules and tips are great for any business. It will be something you have never seen before because our current economy is something quite unique. Don’t let the economy control you. We want everyone to be successful in this economy so you will support the arts. If you apply these rules and they work for you, don't hesitiate to come back and buy from one of our photographers.
The only thing we ask is that you leave a comment after each rule in the form provided. Since we are a no-spam company you’ll have to confirm that you want our marketing rules after each rule. We value your privacy and we do not want to send things unwanted, but we still want your comments, positive or negative. It’s the best deal you’ll ever get at no cost. Did we mention that there is NO selling and NO advertising in our material. We just explain what works for us and how we got to where we are.
Hope this article and the next marketing e-book help,
Randall Tomaras
Founder
Best USA Photographers
Our current article page has additional articles on photography,
business and internet marketing.
