Last week, I wrote about how startups should gather all the analytics they can. This week, I want to give you a couple of free marketing tools you can download to help you tell your story in the next board meeting. Hey, we’re a startup too and this is helping us, so I figured why not share it.
Free Marketing Tool #1
Would you like to try our free website analysis tool and get an instant report on your website in 30 seconds? No signup, no email to give, nothing to install.
Mayank Lahiri’s fabulous Foursquare gaming code challenge is an excellent write-up on a “small” problem with Foursquare’s check-in API. You can check in from anywhere, but the system doesn’t verify where you are. Clever programmers can get around this by taking notes of where their favorite venues are, and can then check-in whenever they want. It may well be a long time before Foursquare learns to tell the difference between automated check-ins and people forgetting their keys.
WordPress, out of the box, unfortunately is not that SEO friendly. With the help of some plugins and proper configuration, you can make it probably the most SEO-friendly “CMS” out there. So we wanted to point out a couple very common issues in WordPress that could wreck your prospects of SEO domination.
We’ve been paying a LOT of attention to the folks who use our product as we build out a minimum viable product, along with a scalable and repeatable business model. Since July 12th (roughly 6 weeks), nearly 6,000 people from just about every country on the planet has used our SiteJuice product, running over 10,000 websites through our system which shows them basic SEO information with resources on how to fix various issues. We’ve collected close to 500 responses to our KISS Insights survey asking people what they thought – how useful was the information we gave them. The answer was overwhelmingly “very useful” – but that doesn’t mean we’re ready to throw up a paywall just yet. Let me explain…
This is a lengthy, instructional post outlining typical SEO problems and solutions with sites that have gone through several re-designs. OK, now that I’ve got your attention, let’s get down to business. If your site is more than a few years old, chances are it’s been through a fair share of changes. You’ve probably had three different designs, multiple programmers or web shops working on it. You probably went from PHP to .NET, and back to PHP again, and you added a blog from WordPress and migrated all of the static content there too. You added a boatload of pages, and got rid of just as many after marketing went through their nineteenth change in messaging. Sound familiar? Right – that’s why your site is…well….not showing up in Google as frequently as it should be.
This is a short post on how you can see the full referring url in one report in Google Analytics (GA).
The problem:
Just a quick background for people who haven’t run into this issue yet.
If you want to segment by source in GA; the referring url is cut at the domain. Which means if you got a referral from http://news.ycombinator.com/a-great-post/ you would see it in the source as http://news.ycombinator.com/. And if you have multiple urls from the same domain we cannot see which page it come from because it will be truncated at the domain.
The solution:
You’re a startup and it’s you (the CEO), your CTO and your marketing guy in the monthly board meeting, and your investors ask “so what did you learn from the marketing activities last month?” Don’t say something like “we’re not real sure”, or “traffic went up, but we don’t know from where” – or anything like that. In fact, make sure you don’t fall into the old adage “I know half of my marketing is working – I just don’t know which half.”
I thought we would do something different for this week’s SEO Tip Tuesday. As an Audi lover myself (on my 2nd A4 Turbo), I frequently search the new models so I can mostly drool and go through the whole “I wish I had..” sentiments. And I find myself at times in a bit of a love triangle between the Audi RS4 and the BMW M5, albeit different classes. So I search a lot for various BMW products, and I love watching M5board.com and seeing the M5 take on anything from an RS4 to a Porsche C4S Turbo.
This is an instructional post for advanced use of Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to uncover insights about organic keywords driving traffic to your website. It’s a bit long, but bear with me – the results will be valuable to you 
If you’ve been using Google Analytics, then you might be familiar with all of the new changes in the past year, like asynchronous code, advanced segmentation, custom reporting, and much more. Equally, Google has been making quite a few upgrades to Webmaster Tools as well. They now show you things like duplicate title tags, meta descriptions, links to your site, and now search queries.
A couple of my good friends over at MailFinch, an on-demand direct mail service, and Upstack, a site where you can hire designers to do whatever you need, have both been using ReTargeter.com to drive visitors back to their site. The way it works is a visitor comes to your site, and ReTargeter puts a cookie on the visitor. Once the visitor leaves, and goes to another website, there’s a good chance they will see a banner ad from you. And I’m talking about sites like Huffington Post, LA Times, Wall Street Journal and many more. It’s all driven to get people to come back, hence the name “ReTargeter,” and so only those people who came to your site and got the cookie will see the ads.
