Igniting Business Blog

Over the past several weeks, we have written a three-part series on better understanding and analyzing your Google Analytics data.  Today, we’re wrapping up that series with a bonus fourth part (surprise!) focused on comparing your expectations to actual results.

Successful business owners know the power of staying abreast of search engine optimization (SEO) trends. Falling behind means losing rankings and potential customers.  These are five SEO trends to consider as we enter the latter half of 2017.

Your small business online presence takes a bit of experimentation. You never know quite where the most valuable customers will come from, what campaigns will spike the best, and even which landing page designs direct the most sales. But using Google Analytics effectively takes out much of the guesswork by monitoring your click rates.  This data can show you where traffic comes from and where it goes once it reaches you.

By providing the necessary tools that empower remote employees to communicate and work with each other, remote desktop apps equalize the playing field of modern business by enabling any business to tap into an enormous, global talent pool.  However, with benefits come risks, and many remote desktop apps possess documented and ongoing vulnerabilities that make them susceptible to hackers. By keeping software up-to-date, using proper, high-quality security credentials, and monitoring security concerns, businesses can enjoy the benefits of remote desktop solutions and mitigate the security risks they pose as well.

Typically, malicious actors use IP scanners to locate machines on a network, connect with target machines, and apply brute force methods to break through password protections.  Another common methodology is where malware is accidently downloaded on a local machine opening up keystroke logging which is then mined for remote desktop credentials.  These are only two examples of the many ways to gain access to remote machines, but as a result, hackers gain access to a number of targeted computers. Once a hacker has access to your device, there are many exploit varieties they can perform.  Most commonly, hackers usually steal information and /or inject crypto malware that holds user data for ransom.

Having a website means you can do business with virtually anyone. But having a site with Google Analytics means you can know from where your business and potential interest is originating. Knowing location details can help you either target your business more for a specific geographical region, or take note to spread your business's appeal to other cities, states and countries.

Does your site offer physical services? Make sure your traffic is local, or at least within your reach. Do you offer physical goods? Know which areas would be profitable for some city-specific customizations and bonuses. Does your business offer purely online services? Even so, knowing where your customers call home can help you relate to them and better address their needs.

In June, we discussed how to effectively leverage Google Analytics for your website.  Due to the sheer volume and robustness of data provided by Google Analytics, small business owners can often get lost amongst the data and reports.  Today, we launch a three-part series that dives further into how to best use, read, and analyze your Google Analytics data.

Is your business cyclical? Does it spike on certain months of the year instead of maintaining steady growth or traffic? Most businesses see patterns in their traffic. Your business's activity depends on everything from the time of the year to upcoming holidays and breaks in school attendance to even events on local and national news.  A slight decrease in traffic doesn't necessarily mean bad news -- it just means a trend is developing. Identifying trends is vital to the success of your online marketing initiatives.  To clearly view your business's progress and how it's growing in more than a month-by-month analysis, Google Analytics can give you breakdowns of your website's activity over time, no matter how to want to measure it.

Do you need a website for your business? Are you thinking of using a website builder (i.e. Wix, GoDaddy Website Builder, Squarespace, etc.)? Do you know the disadvantages and limitations of most website builders?

Website builders can certainly help you build a website relatively affordably, but most still require some additional knowledge to get the website to perform well. Among other items, you will need to understand how monitor size matters, and how the website will look on a mobile phone, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) limitations, etc. Here are a few limitations you should consider before going with a website builder platform.

Google Analytics is a must-have tool for staying aware of the latest statistics and online trends on your site - from clicks, to page views, to traffic from specific devices. These solutions offer important insights into what people are doing on your website. Nearly anyone can experiment with the platform; however, using the platform effectively takes some skill.

After Google Analytics has been configured on your site, spend time sifting through the latest tools and capabilities. You'll be able to quickly conceptualize data, research opportunities, and learn about how people use your website. However, try to go beyond the surface level information. Take the time to analyze the features that might significantly benefit how users approach and interact with your website.

We continually try to keep our clients and readers updated on SEO ranking factors. Let’s be honest, a website is only helpful if your potential customers are actually reaching it. Below are some recent SEO topics we’ve discussed on our blog. We’re referencing these topics again because they’re, quite frankly, that important.

In the past you could get away with having a simple website that displayed properly, with no errors, across a small variety of screen resolutions. Now, with the wide use of mobile devices like smart phones and tablets, your site needs to render beautifully across many different types of screens, and user experience is not the only thing for you to consider.

Recently, a website visitor reached out to us with a very common issue. They are a small business with an e-commerce website, and their product pages included mostly duplicate content. This is not uncommon, as many manufacturers and suppliers will provide businesses with product descriptions and images. Inevitably, this means there are potentially hundreds of websites with the exact same content. The question is, "Will Google penalize my e-commerce website for having duplicate content?"

In short and simplifying a very complex answer, yes! Google, and other similar search engines, want to see truly unique content authored from your company’s perspective. When duplicate content is present, Google looks for the original content author and only gives credit to that outlet. According to Google’s search quality team, in cases where Google “perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate [Google’s] rankings and deceive [Google’s] users...the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.”