This is our fourth post in the ‘Small Business Series‘ which features where we feature industry leaders on how small businesses can better leverage their strengths.  This week we are interviewing Hiten Shah, the founder of three successful startups (Survey.io, Crazy Egg and Kissmetrics) on understanding metrics that a small business should focus on. I have been using Crazy Egg for a while now and its a great tool to understand click patterns, and just yesterday tried out KissInsights (a new product as part of Kissmetrics).  KissInsights is one of the best feedback tools I have seen, I am not a fan of the pop-up technique of inviting people to participate in surveys and love the widget you have to install.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): First Hiten, thanks so much for taking out the time to do this. Why is it important to develop metrics for success for small businesses? How does one develop these metrics?

Hiten Shah: I believe that the metrics for success are important in any business, because they can be used to help the whole organization focus on a single goal. If you pick the right metrics for success, you will be able to significantly improve the focus of the whole team and thus improve your business. Developing these metrics should be done first by making hypothesis about your business and validating / invalidating these hypothesis. From there you will have a good base understanding that will allow you to determine what metrics to focus on and how to define success for your business.

Read the rest of this entry »

5 Comments »Tags: ROI, SEO, small business series, Web Analytics

Rand Fishkin is the CEO of SEOmoz, and is certainly one of the most respected and well-versed experts in the search engine optimization industry, and so we wanted to ask him a few questions as it relates to small businesses and what they can do to get a competitive edge without spending a fortune on consultants.  Special thanks to Rand for taking the time to talk with us while he tours the globe right now, and works on their new software package.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): Most SMB’s I talk to feel overwhelmed by the top positions in Google. Even when the product is remarkable, ranking well in Google can be very difficult when you don’t have the resources to focus on traditional SEO.In such a scenario, how important is it for them to use their time and money to learn and focus on SEO? Why?

Rand Fishkin: Business owners have a constant struggle to choose the activities that will earn the highest ROI for their business. I certainly wouldn’t claim that SEO will always be that activity, but it’s almost always worthwhile to learn a little about the topic. Even if you can just determine the relative volume of people searching for keywords related to your business/products/services and figure out how competitive it is to rank for those terms, you’ll be able to make an informed decision about whether to pursue that route.

Read the rest of this entry »

9 Comments »Tags: Expert Blogger Series, rand fishkin, SEOmoz, small business series

If you are a current SiteJuice user, and tou’ve recently received your website report by email and now you are wondering what Current Site Value and Potential Site Value are and the differences between them.  This post will help you understand how we cam up with this, what it means, and what we’re doing to improve it.  If you are not currently using SiteJuice, you can get a 30-day free trial.

Overview

What we are attempting to show you is the value of your SEO efforts compared to what it would cost you to purchase all of the search volume in a paid search environment.  Many times we are asked “how much should I spend on SEO”, or “how much market share do I have on these keywords”.

Current Site Value

This is calculated by taking all of the keywords in your SiteJuice account by domain, and adding up their cumulative value based on 1) where you rank for the word; 2) how much search volume that word gets, and how much you may get as a result of your position organically; and 3) what it would cost to buy that word in a PPC environment.

Example: your keyword has a search volume of 1,000 searches per month, you rank #2 for that word, and it costs $5 per click in PPC.

Word Value = 1,000 searches per month x 18% of traffic from a #2 position x $5 per click = $900

We know based on research and other data we have gathered, what the approximate number of clicks you may get for the first 30 positions in Google.  After position 30, the value is defaulted to “$0″.  Now we can calculate your Current Site Value by adding up the word values for all keywords and all pages.

Read the rest of this entry »

13 Comments »Tags: SiteJuice Updates

This is the second post in our “Small Business Series” where we are interviewing a few industry experts on how small businesses can better leverage their strengths. Today we are interviewing Ken Hilburn, from Juice Analytics, one of my personal favorite data visualization companies, on how to create awesome surveys. Surveys are traditionally one of the best ways to understand your customers, but at the same time getting your customers to participate and engage in surveys is a huge challenge. I thought of interviewing Ken when I took a survey Juice Analytics sent to me by email, and it was the most engaging survey I had taken in months.

Note: As a bonus, Ken has generously shared that survey with us.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics) : First Ken, thanks so much for taking the time to do this. The importance of surveying your customers has been repeatedly talked about. Why do you think it is important to survey your online customers/visitors?

Ken Hilburn: I have to start off by saying that Juice Analytics has an awesome community and we love talking, listening and working with them. But even with such a strong group, it’s critical to talk less and listen more.
It used to be, for the most part, that customers were at the mercy of vendors when it came to communication – it was pretty much a one-way street. However, that’s changing now. With the pervasive use of social media sites, there has been a tremendous shift toward “power to the people.” It’s certainly in a company’s best interest at this point to make sure they’re in touch with their customers and how well their customer’s needs are being met. We get to choose: we can either do that proactively, or we can wait to see it on the twitter “Popular Topics” list and hope it’s positive.

Read the rest of this entry »

5 Comments »Tags: SEO, small business series, Web Analytics

We are kicking off a series about how small businesses can better leverage their strengths. We will be interviewing a series of industry leaders to share their valuable ideas with us. To kick of the series we have none other than marketing guru, successful blogger and bestselling author, Seth Godin.

First we would like to thank Seth for agreeing to do this quick interview on short notice, and congratulate him on Linchpin for being a huge success.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): Seth, a lot of small businesses we talk to are struggling to generate leads and prospects without using some form of interruption marketing. For a small business seeking to be extraordinary, what are some tactics you would recommend to an SMB that could enhance Internet searchability beyond traditional SEO tactics?

Seth Godin: The open secret of SEO is that the single best way to get traffic is to deserve traffic. In other words, the search engines are pretty good, and if you create something remarkable, something people want to talk about, you’ll get found. Sure, the tactics of SEO can help, but if you start with a product or service that is amazing (not just you mom says that, but users do), then everything gets easier.

So, don’t search for gimmicks. Search for value and art and doing work that matters. Ask your designers to go to the edge. Price your stuff to the edge. Create digital artifacts that will spread.

All of this is hard. That’s why it works.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): Linchpin talks about creating art and being artists at work. You say “Art is about intent and communication, not substance”. As the SMB begins to leverage their web assets to generate contact and communicate with their customers, what are some suggestions you would give a small business to engage prospects over time?

Seth Godin: Why should I interact with you? If you’re boring and you don’t care and I buy a commodity from you, why should we also have a relationship? I don’t need a relationship with my jujubee supplier, or with the guy who drops off the mail in my office. No time, no upside, hard to make it work.

So the challenge is to create a reason for people to miss you, a reason they would benefit from calling you. I’m sorry that I can’t say do this and do that and then do this, but it’s more important to decide that this is important than it is to have a Dummies manual!

The bonus: We are going to pick 10 users to randomly gift a copy of Seth’s latest bestselling book ‘Linchpin’ if you sign up for SiteJuice in the next week.

3 Comments »Tags: Expert Blogger Series, Seth Godin, small business marketing

At 9am this morning we’ll be taking a caravan of vehicles up I-35N to Austin to set up our booth for SXSW Interactive 2010.  We’ll be right next to the Brandstack booth, and across the aisle from our client ServerBeach Dedicated Hosting.  In fact, fitting all of our crap into our cars is going to be a challenge.  We’re taking 9 boxes of t-shirts, 6 laptops, a projector, a 10-foot banner, 1,000 brochures, a 15-foot interactive game called “The Score is Right” where people can get their website scored while watching Hans yodel his way up the mountain, just like Cliff Hangers in The Price is Right.  Yep, it’s complete with the theme music and all.

Across the aisle you can get your Speed & Performance score at ServerBeach on a giant plasma screen.  Then they tell you how to improve the performance of your website, which can help your search rankings.

So if you are going, stop by and get scored.  If you’re not going, come back to this page where we will be updating it all weekend with photos and video from the show!

Check out these videos from SXSW:

Popout

Check out these photos from SXSW:

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

No Comments »Tags: sxsw

As of right now, it’s still not a great idea to mix Flash and SEO unless you really know what you’re doing. If you’re trying to rank higher on search engines, it’s probably a good idea to not overload your site with Flash.  While there have been strides by the search engines to parse Flash files and grab the readable text, unless you set this up properly, chances are the Flash will end up hurting your rankings.

When to use Flash

Flash is a great tool if you have a complicated product that needs more explanation or if you need entertainment value on the website.  Secondly, with the increase in mobile internet use, Flash is still not visible on the latest iPhone and Blackberry, so it’s likely those visitors will be bouncing.  At Pear, we’re getting about 20% of our visitors from mobile devices, so you could be losing out on those visitors with a Flash landing page.

Alternative solutions to Flash

But now we can use AJAX and other javascript techniques, like sliders and expanders, to uniquely display content without bombarding the visitor with content, and yet it’s all still readable by the search engine.  Check out how ServerBeach, a dedicated hosting company, uses javascript sliders instead of Flash to nicely organize lots of information.

Setting up proper use of Flash

If you or your developer still insist on using Flash, there are some ways that you can set up your code to optimize it for SEO, and it has to do with accessibility programming.  This blog post by Jonathan Hochman is a great overview of the multiple ways you can set this up using SWFObject 2.0, or even SIFR in some cases, although I understand SIFR is more used for typography enhancements, where you would like to use a non-standard web font, but get credit for the text in an H1 tag for example.

The SWFObject method provides a way to include alternate HTML content on the page which is visible in your source code, and all it uses is a tiny javascript file.  This stems from the Web Accessibility Initiative which says all multimedia content should have an alternative way of accessing the content.

29 Comments »Tags: flash, SEO

On Tuesday, Google released their SEO Report Card where they did an extensive evaluation of themselves in terms of search engine optimization. The result? Well, not so good. Even Business Insider agrees that Google fails to eat their own dog food by noting that only 10% of their own product pages conform to the proper title tag protocol. Even if you type in “search engine” into Google, they come up as the 5th result, and it’s not even google.com, but a different beta product. I wonder if that’s on purpose.

So if Google sucks at SEO, why do their other products rank #1 for so many search terms? Is Google using their own algorithm on their products, or are they overriding it when it’s convenient?

Search for “apps.” Google Apps is the top listing, not Apple.

Search for “documents.” Google Docs is the top listing, beating out several government related sites.

Search for “video.” The number one position? Google Video. Who the hell uses that anymore? And where is the Google-owned YouTube? Maybe again, this is on purpose.

Read the rest of this entry »

1 Comment »Tags: google, SEO