Somebody Call 911! We’ve got a 301 Emergency!
As an inbound marketer you should know that inbound links are as good as gold. Inbound links are the key to securing a high position on the search engine result pages for the keywords you are targeting and getting more visitors, more leads, and more customers. That’s the reason you slave away for hours crafting the perfect blog post, coming up with the perfect title, and making sure all your On-Page and Off-Page SEO is aligned. Now what if I told you that I was only going to give you credit for half of the hard work you just did? That wouldn’t be very fair would it, but that’s why you need to make sure that you set up a 301 Redirect!
What is a 301 redirect?
A 301 redirect is also known as a permanent redirect. When you use a 301 redirect it tells your browser or more importantly the search engines “Hey the page you are looking for is actually at this URL…oh and it’s going to be there permanently.”
Why is a 301 redirect the best?
The reason a 301 redirect is the only redirect you should be using is because search engines will allow all of the SEO credit from on URL to pass through to the other. This is because of its “permanent” status. If you choose to use another form of redirect, the search engines will not pass the SEO credit and you will be splitting it between the two URLs.
An Example:
The most obvious example of how forgetting to set up a 301 redirect can hurt your SEO is by looking at the difference between http://www.yourawesomecompany.com and http://yourawesomecompany.com. Although, both of these URLs will generally go to the same page, if you don’t have a 301 redirect set up the search engines will actually recognize them as two separate sites. That means that whenever someone links to the “www” URL that site will be credited for the inbound link, and anytime someone links to the URL without “www” the other site will be credited. So instead of splitting the credit for all your hard work, take the 10 minutes and set up your 301 redirect.
How to check if you have a 301 redirect set up:
The easiest way to check if your site has a 301 redirect set up is to head over to our Website Grader. Just type in your URL to get your website graded, and we’ll give you lots of SEO tips for your website including whether or not you need to set up a 301 redirect. If a 301 redirect is not found you’ll see an error message under section E that looks like this.
Photo Credit: davidsonscott15
Free Webinar: Website Redesign Best Practices
Learn how to create conduct an effective website redesign
Connect with HubSpot:
Be Remarkable: Take That Idea and Own It!
by Stoney deGeyter
Every once in a great while, someone comes up with a stellar marketing idea. And, it’s not long until that idea is copied, tweaked, washed, rinsed, and repeated. Even now, over a decade later, we still see ripoffs of the “Got Milk?” campaign. Slogans such as “Got Sand?”, “Got Jesus?”, “Got Fruit?”, and “Got Laughs?”, are still found on vehicle bumpers as they speed by us on the highway.
I recently finished a book call Pull: Marketing Secrets The Fortune 100 Use
That’s the danger many businesses find themselves in. They are unremarkable. They started out remarkable then, due to time and familiarity, became unremarkable. That doesn’t mean they aren’t clever or good at what they do, but unless they are providing something new, it’s just more of the same.
What’s the Big Idea?
Many businesses start an online business because they can. They fail to look at what they can do that is different or remarkable from the ten other guys doing it. This makes for bad business. Who cares if you can do it well! If you can’t do it better or more creatively, you might as well get out of the game right now.
But, in reality, we know there really is nothing new under the sun. If an idea is good, it’s likely been done a thousand times before. But, that doesn’t stop us…nor should it. It’s not what you’re doing… it’s how you present what you’re doing.
All good ideas get copied. Eventually they get run into the ground, only to be resurrected again years later. Remarkable turns unremarkable, then turns remarkable all over again. As a marketer or business owner, it’s your job to figure out what works and how it can be applied to what you are doing. It’s not about stealing someone else’s idea, but about incorporating it into your own unique version of that idea.
How Do You Become Remarkable?
We can easily apply this to SEO. Take ten sites in the same industry. What is unremarkable about them is that they are all targeting visitors that search using the same words. Nothing new there. What is remarkable is the site that targets those keywords into a unique presentation on the site. Now that’s different.
Too often business owners create a site that’s simply made to sell products or a service. It’s a vehicle to get people from point A to point B, but the site itself lacks character. Just as a gas guzzling car serves the same purpose as a more fuel-friendly one; it gets people from point A to point B.
Sure, many people are willing to pay more for gas to have the vehicle that serves other purposes they have. But, what if you could have both? What if there were two versions of your dream car? Identical in all aspects… except one. One version gets twice the gas mileage over the other. Which would you choose?
Your website is like that. You can choose to have the higher gas mileage website or the low mileage site. You might have to spend a little more to get it, but the long-term payoff is significantly advantageous.
Find Your Message and Own It
Anything can be made remarkable. You don’t necessarily have to change your sales message to do it. Nor do you have to steal something else outright. You’re just adapting it to work with what you have and offer.
There is nothing wrong with taking good ideas and making them yours, as long as you don’t just flat out steal them. The higher profile the idea is that you adapt, the more likely it’ll work, but at the same time, you have to work harder to make it your own. The trick is to take an idea and turn it into something new, something different enough to be yours, but similar enough to still be effective. Don’t get caught being obvious…that’s so unremarkable.
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
2010 MIMA Summit with Gary Vaynerchuk & Baratunde Thurston
Read this post, share it on the social web and you could win a free pass to the 2010 MIMA Summit. Details below.
The 2010 MIMA Summit will feature keynote speaker Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV and author of Crush It! (review). Once I heard @Garyvee was speaking in Minnesota I hoped to do a pre-event interview, but it didn’t work out. Two years ago, Geoff Livingston introduced me to Gary at Blog World Expo and to be honest, I wasn’t familiar with who he was. But my first impression was that he could pass for Joe Pesci’s nephew and had a lot of energy.
However, after people like Brian Solis and Jason Falls pointed out the amazing work he was doing, using social media to promote his business, I made sure I was in the front row to see Gary give the keynote presentation at Affiliate Summit West in 2009 (photos above). I liked his raw, “tell it like it is” presentation. That style of speaking in Minnesota will either be received as a nice kick in the pants or it could be met with indifferent silence. MIMA members are smart and can also be a tough crowd, so we’ll see. I for one, am looking forward to it.
This year’s MIMA Summit also features Baratunde Thurston from, amongst his numerous projects and media involvement, The Onion, for the afternoon keynote. I guess two years ago was the time to meet today’s social media rockstars, because it was at my first SXSW in Austin, Texas that I met and had lunch (with a group) with Baratunde. Unfortunately, I didn’t take a photo then, but found the handy glamour shot to the right on Flickr, along with many other great pics of Baratunde.
For a good sample of Baratunde’s presentation style, check out this video from Web 2.0 Expo: “There’s a #Hashtag for That” where he talks about some pretty amazing experiments with Twitter.
I’d expect both keynotes to be nothing less than thought provoking and entertaining. There’s a great lineup of speakers in the breakout sessions as well, which makes the MIMA Summit one of those events in Minnesota that you won’t want to miss.
Except you will miss it if you don’t have a ticket. TopRank Online Marketing has purchased a corporate table at the MIMA Summit for the past 3-4 years and we usually reserve 1 ticket for a giveaway. This year is no different.
How to win a Free Ticket to the 2010 MIMA Summit?
In a test of your micro-content writing skills, all you need to do is post a creative tweet using ALL of the following:
@TopRank @garyvee @baratunde http://tprk.us/mima-2010 #mimasummit
Example: RT to help me win a @TopRank #MIMASummit free pass to see @garyvee & @baratunde http://tprk.us/mima2010
That’s 64 characters used for the message leaving a generous 76 characters for your inspired Tweeting pleasure. We’ll pick the best Tweet by Friday 9/24 end of day 5pm Central. Oh, and getting ReTweets is not required to win, but might help get your tweets noticed more often 
The winner will be announced on this blog post.
Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.
© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
2010 MIMA Summit with Gary Vaynerchuk & Baratunde Thurston | http://www.toprankblog.com
The Power of Not Giving Up – One Blogger’s Story
A guest post by Naomi Dunford from IttyBiz who emailed last week to remind me (Darren) that today is ProBlogger’s 6th Birthday and asked if she could write a birthday post. Here it is!.
I’ve sat where you sit.
I’ve devoured the articles and the blog posts and the link roundups. I’ve agonized over whether I could afford that video camera or that conference or that membership program. I’ve felt like a fool for even hoping this blogging thing could ever work.
I’ve sat right there and I know how scary it is.
Maybe I should introduce myself. My name is Naomi Dunford, and I was just like you.
I was desperate, scared and pregnant. My doctor had put me on bed-rest. I had to leave work because I was fainting all the time. Even before he was born, we knew our baby boy would have health problems.
We had intermittent web access because I could only intermittently afford to pay the bill. My husband was making very little money in a job working nights and it was going nowhere. Things did not look good.
Then I found Problogger.
I read all the archives. (All the archives.) Read some Copyblogger. Read some Chris Brogan. Slept. Drank a lot of tea. Had some panic attacks and spent a lot of time thinking about how cool it would be to be a problogger one day.
You’re waiting for the bit where I say it got better, right? Where I say I dove right in and created a blog and hustled my way to fame and fortune? Sadly, no.
I did nothing. Nothing. For a year.
I had my son. Went back to my job. Left work in the middle of my shift on my fourth day back. Went down to one (sub-poverty line) income. Flirted with the idea of starting a business. Got one half-hearted client. Put our son to bed by myself. Ate a lot of rice.
But I kept reading Problogger.
One day, Darren mentioned he needed businesses to sponsor his third birthday giveaway. Sitting there, nursing my son in the middle of the night, I had a crazy idea. I could be a sponsor. I had no idea what I was going to give, but the deadline of Problogger’s birthday was enough to get me going and get my blog launched.
I decided to give some marketing coaching. I had to fill out a form to say who I was and what I was offering, and I wrote that IttyBiz was the “offshoot blog of IttyBitty Marketing”. IttyBitty Marketing? Please. We’d had the sum total of one client and to this day, they haven’t paid me. But I had to put something in there. I sent it off, and then all I could do was wait.
(The actual story of how I went from not even having a domain name to launching my site on a Technorati Top 100 blog in four days is pretty uninteresting, although there are some juicy behind the scenes highlights and an adorable picture of Xavier here.)
I launched the blog. I wanted to email the people who commented to enter the contest and invite them to IttyBiz, but I didn’t have their email addresses. (I ended up clicking on all their links and personally emailing them via their contact pages, a process that took two full days. We worked straight through the night.) I did the same with the other sponsors.
I got some readers. Not a lot, but some. I got a little bit of traffic. A few other bloggers said some nice things about what I wrote. My goal was to get a thousand subscribers before Christmas. I didn’t make it.
But I kept reading Problogger.
Let’s flash forward three years.
My blog now employs six people. We have over 20,000 readers. We’ve helped more than 1000 people quit their job. As an affiliate, we sold enough copies of Teaching Sells to fund a school in Cambodia.
My husband quit his job. We’re unschooling our son. We moved to England for a while. We bought a little house. We finally got a car. We went to Cuba and Ireland and SXSW and Blogworld a few times. I threw a party in Austin and Darren came.
We’ve had ups and downs. I got pregnant again and lost the baby. Burned out. Missed some deadlines. Had a few site crashes. Got hacked a couple times. Did some stuff I’m not proud of. Did some stuff I’m very proud of.
And we’re home. My husband kisses my little boy goodnight seven days a week.
But here’s the really crazy part.
Nothing special happened.
I didn’t just happen to get a column in the New York Times. Nobody invited me to be on Oprah. I didn’t conveniently score a book deal. Despite my repeated attempts, I’m still not married to Brian Clark. I didn’t do anything special. The gods did not smile on me.
I just kept reading Problogger.
The point of all of this?
Please don’t give up. I know it’s terrifying. I know you are under indescribable pressure to do something serious with your life and grow up and forget your crazy blogging dreams. I know that some days, this is the hardest thing you’ve ever done.
I know your family thinks you’re crazy. I know you feel completely alone. I know you feel like it’s never, ever going to work.
But what you’re reading here? It works. I promise. Please don’t lose heart.
Happy birthday, Problogger. And thank you, Darren. I am blessed to have you as my mentor and honoured to have you as my friend.
Naomi Dunford writes at IttyBiz.
This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.
The Power of Not Giving Up – One Blogger’s Story
iStockphoto is super legit… NOT – @istock
By chance in approving comments one of our interns noticed that a lot of them were coming from the same ip.
Appears all the comments defending iStockphoto came from the same ip address…. and that address is also used by an iStockphoto employee.
Here is a screen shot from my comments (click to see full size):
When I asked “tyler” why he keeps posting from the same ip under different names he responded with:
I promise you I’m only posting as myself. Though you’ve got me curious and I’m going to ask around.
Right I mean cause that makes sense… Its the same ip, same browser, hell same toolbar, operating system and everything..
But its for sure not you. I mean you? The company that sells stolen images? Why would you do something like that?
Get a sneak peak at the all new ShoeMoney System
Interested in advertising on Facebook? Check out my latest post on Facebook Advertising
ER7 – The Venue
In the last email I gave you a brief overview of my event we will be having December 2nd and 3rd in San Francisco. In this email I want to tell you about the Venue.
A brief history of past venues:
- ER7 Spring of 2008 SF – we chose a great venue called the Hotel Vitale in San Francisco, it was a smaller boutique hotel, with water views. The hotel staff gave everyone first class treatment and it was great. Dining at Boulevard the first night of the event – Where GaryV ordered wine for everyone and then later even shot one of his winelibrary.tv episodes with a few of our attendees. The second night we dined at Waterbar – personally my favorite seafood place in the world. (but I am a crab lover)
- ER8 Fall of 2009 NYC – saw us heading to the city of New York, which can be fast paced and overwhelming to say the least. We chose the Hotel Gansevoort because… well.. It was the classiest place in NYC to have an event! We spared no expense and when we were not in the classroom working one on one with attendees we were dining on the roof top overlooking Manhattan. Everyone kept talking about how amazing the venue was. For dinners we ate at STK and sat next to celebrities – Bruce Willis and former NFL star Laurence Talyor (LT). It was an amazing night!
But we don’t just setup and pick up the tab for these these amazing dinners. We also have an amazing menu for lunch and breakfast every day. You are going to absolutely love it!
We want the Elite Retreat to be an amazing life changing experience for you. So we spare no expense when selecting the proper venues.
So without further a due I am very proud to announce this years Elite Retreat (ER7) will be held at the prestigious Clift Hotel in San Francisco.
I think they put it best when describing this one of a kind space: “An inspired fusion of old-world hotel elegance with distinctly contemporary energy and glamor, the nearly century-old Clift’s modern and daring sense of diversity perfectly captures the city’s spirit. Steps from Union Square shopping and the legendary Nob Hill, Clift is perfectly located for sightseeing, shopping and socializing.” Our event will be held in various meeting spaces throughout the hotel over the two days.
So mark your calendars for December 2nd and 3rd at the Clift Hotel, San Francisco.
In the next email I will announce the official speaker list and agenda for this years event.
We will open registration next Tuesday September 28th, 2010.
Also – We have plenty of sponsorship opportunities available and will have a media kit out soon. Shoot over a email to ersponsorship@shoemoney.com for more information.
Interested in advertising on Facebook? Check out my latest post on Facebook Advertising
Clickbooth has Cribs, Affiliate.com has Cubes
Before Clickbooth made their MTV Cribs style video of their new headquarters, Affiliate.com had a show call Cubes that featured the cubical of their employees. It was a great way to show what goes on in the life of an affiliate manager and see their working space. Unfortunately, Affiliate.com filmed only two episodes. Hopefully, they’ll make more in the future.
The first video features the cube of Jon Ringhofer, the senior affiliate manager. He’s been with the company for two years and did such a good job that Scott Richter (Affiliate.com fonder) bought him a new set of wheels as a gift for his two year anniversary. Yes, Affiliate.com treats their employees well. Even though Jon is the senior affiliate manager, he doesn’t get a private office. He gets a cube like every other affiliate manager. However, Jon’s cube is a corner cube!
The second video is the cube of Will Charland, a lowly affiliate manager who drives a 2001 Chevy Impala. While his cube isn’t as fancy as Jon’s, I found the video more enjoyable to watch. I got a good laugh out of it.
Making Money Making Friends At The Performance Marketing Expo
I will be at the Performance Marketing Expo next week to make money and friends. Actually, Making Money Making Friends is the title of the panel session that I’ll be holding with Murray Newlands, Ian Fernando and Eric Schechter. The session is on Wednesday, September 29th at 11:45am at the Eden Roc Hotel, Miami Beach. Zac Johnson and many others will also be speaking there as well. I’ve been looking for an excuse to go to Miami and this is as good as any.
Want To Join Me? Here’s A 50% Coupon
If you’re looking for a tax deductible way to check out the sites and sounds of Miami Beach, then attending the Performance Marketing Expo is your ticket. And I can get you that ticket at a 50% discount!
Register for the Performance Marketing Expo and use coupon code PMEFIFTY to slash the price in half. Then head over to our PME Keynote Panel Session Facebook page and add yourself to the attendee list. Let’s party at the beach! I’ll see you in Miami.
Social Media 101: A Required Course
Whether you like it or not, social media has become a part of our daily lives. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp – these social media platforms have changed the way we think, the way we communicate and interact, the way we build relationships, the way we make decisions, and the way we shop. Why then are so many businesses so reluctant to use social media?
The biggest barrier to entry into the social media world is education. It’s difficult to “teach an old dog new tricks” especially when social media and the internet in general, are always changing. There’s so much to learn and understand – What is it? Why do I need it? How do I get started? Who has time for this? How do I prioritize? How does this benefit my business?
My advice is to just try it – start small, make mistakes and learn from them. Here’s a great article that details Simple Ways B2B Companies Can Be More Social and another on Common B2B Social Media Marketing Mistakes to get you started. We even created a comprehensive collection of Social Media Marketing Resources to help you accelerate through and overcome the social media learning curve.
So, while the “old dogs” are learning, taking it slow and giving it a chance, how can we help the “new dogs” or the next generation of entrepreneurs and business owners get onboard with social media? We need to give them a leg up and better prepare and educate them through courses and curriculums designed around social media.
Melissa Cohen, PR Manager at Metis Communications, recently wrote an article called “The Spirit of the Real-Time Web” in which she reflects on a panel discussion from the 140 Characters Conference among two principals and a high school science teacher who all “expressed the need to educate school districts – everyone from teachers, parents, students and the board about the importance of social media for education.”
Teachers are very much like many business owners in that they continue to rely on traditional methods and technologies to reach their target audience of students or parents or customers. They aren’t thinking about the way their audience gets information today – through Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. They aren’t thinking about new ways to interact and engage through the internet. The world is shifting from being static and tangible to being instantaneous and changeable. We need to adapt on all levels if we want to create successful students, future business owners and businesses.
As Cohen says, “We welcome and challenge school districts and every entrepreneur out there to commit to social media. You might actually learn something…or…increase your customer base, raise awareness of your brand, recommend brands to others and obtain market feedback.”
That doesn’t sound so bad, does it?
Free Inbound Marketing University Online Training Program
|
Download HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing University online training program IMU includes 15 free webinar classes and notesheets. The program drills into each component of inbound marketing and prepares you for the Inbound Marketing certification exam. |
Connect with HubSpot:
So You Call Yourself an Analyst? Part 1: Asking the Right Questions
Posted by JoannaLord
Today I am going to talk about something that plagues companies and consultants everywhere–half baked analysis. It’s something we’ve all done at some point, and something a lot of us still do on a regular basis. It’s unfortunate because as online marketers we all understand the power of good data mining, but time and time again we revert to generic inquiry, at best, and default report templates.
Disclaimer: Origionally I attempted to write about the five steps I follow for solid data analysis in one post, but as I approached my 6th page of content, I realized it may be best to break up into a series.
Alas, this will be the first of three posts, tackling a five-step process toward good data analysis. The three topics are:
- Asking the Right Questions
- Identifying What is Going Wrong
- Turning Data Into Action
Yup that’s right…cancel that afternoon meeting because you my friend are giong to be stoked about data analysis in 3…2..1…
Rethinking the Questions
A few weeks ago at our SEOmoz PRO Seminar I spoke on "Analyzing What Matters & Ignoring the Rest" and I challenged the attendees to rethink the questions that guide their data research. Too often we get caught up in asking questions that simply put– don’t really matter. Let me explain. It will always be important to know things like "How much has traffic increased" and "What referrers are performing better this month," but this sort of inquiry does not qualify as marketing analysis.
Sure it’s valuable to report that to your clients or boss, but as an analyst you are tasked with much more. You are tasked with finding things others can’t. You are expected to dive into the data head first and find issues before they become huge problems. You are also responsible for finding opportunities a.k.a. the "game changer" for your company…that is your job. If you don’t like the way that sounds, please stop calling yourself an analyst. You are stressing me out.
So what questions should you be asking? Bigger ones to start.
I know they sound uber-top level, but don’t roll your eyes just yet. I challenge each of you to write these out and really think about the answers. I think you’ll be surprised with what you come (or can’t come) up with. I’m going to apply this to SEOmoz as an example.
An outsider would look at our site and say we are -
- Trying to sell PRO memberships
- An increase or decrease in completed goals would show us if we are being successful
- Losing traffic to our sign-up page, and a lower traffic count would be detrimental to our success
Well that is great, but honestly SEOmoz can’t succeed solely on increasing PRO memberships. The truth is, there is a lot more to it than that. We have a recognized brand with expectations on it, and a community of over 200,000 people that come to us for the latest SEO information on the web. We can’t afford to lose ground on either of those two. These are defining qualities of SEOmoz, and strong advantages over our competitors. So my three questions would leave me more complex answers, something like this:
- Increase organic traffic on "Learn SEO" type queries, increase branded term searches, increase YOUmoz member engagement, and increase signups
- More referrals from links to our resources, more traffic from people researching SEO, more YOUmoz submissions, more comments, improved engagement metrics on site, higher sign up attempts, higher signup completions, etc.
- Decline in branded term searches, decline in organic traffic to resource pages, decline in time on site for YOUmoz members, etc.
So now what? You are left with a handful of metrics to investigate. Those metrics should be the base of your analysis efforts. I urge all of you to revisit the reasons why you analyze what you analyze, you’ll be surprised to learn that you don’t really have a good reason most of the time. After you have your new questions nailed down and you know what metrics you want to analyze, it’s time to jump in the data.
Start Macro and Go Micro
This is when I highly suggest you fill your coffee cup, or grab another Red Bull. I also support locking your office door, or putting up a "Do Not Disturb, I am Data Mining You Silly Non-Analyst" sign up on your cubicle. Okay anyway…so the main roadmap to solid analysis includes five steps and they are:
*Please note that Analyze, Value, and Action will be covered in upcoming posts in this series.
What Do We Mean by Macro Analysis?
Macro analysis means you have a solid understanding of the different sections of your site, the different user types that navigate it, and the top-level metrics. You should know these like the back of your hand. In addition to knowing these actual numbers you should know their rate of change (how often does that data point change), the depth of change (how extreme are those changes–big jumps? small steps?), and the way they interact (is there a consistent relationship between two metrics–one goes up/down, the other will too). If this sounds like a lot to continuously track, you are right. Good analysis is a lot of work. Thankfully SEOmoz pays me in cupcakes, and Champagne Wednesdays, I highly suggest negotiating for these perks 
At SEOmoz we track our top sections by week, so we can easily identify shifts in the data, and it looks something like this:
(A portion of our weekly analysis for full site stats)
You can see we aren’t just looking at our homepage, we are looking at our subdomains, our highest trafficked sections. We also are going beyond visitors, we are pulling top-level stats like pages/visit, time on site, bounce rates, etc. This graph goes around to the entire company once a week. This macro level view helps all of us understand the momentum of our site’s growth. It helps us easily isolate problem areas so we can address them before they grow into huge "Oh sh*t" moments. Trust me when I say, if you aren’t tracking your data at this macro level, you should start today.
What Do We Mean by Micro Analysis?
This part of the puzzle is the one that most people skip over. Micro analysis means you don’t just have a sense how your blog’s traffic is doing you know how many comments you get on it, how long they spend on it, how deep they go into your site after reading a post, and how many of your blog visitors end up converting for you. In short, micro analysis means you look at all those secondary data points that you can actually manipulate.
While it’s great to go into work on a Monday and say I want to increase traffic to my blog by 20%, it is a big feat to accomplish. Not only will it take a lot of time conceptualizing, writing and sharing that content, it will also, most likely, be less lucrative than if you took the existing traffic and increased its conversion rate by 5%. That sort of move is done by honing in on data at a micro analysis level.
Specifically this is where things like event tracking in Google Analytics and deeper dives into your preferred analytics package come in handy. Everyone has their own approach for micro analysis, but I think a good place to start is see where successful events (downloads, subscriptions, sign-ups, conversions, etc.) are taking place and see if you can come up with common demoninators. If you see that successful pages all have one or more thing in common, you can start testing these on other sections to increase conversions across your whole site. Here is an example of what we pull for SEOmoz:
(A portion of our micro tool usage analysis report)
We can see which tools are performing the best, and analyze those pages to see if we can isolate out page tweaks to roll out across all tool pages. It seems simple, but way too often analysts look into analytics to see how they are doing, and fail to put in the time required to uncover what they could be doing for increased success. You should know, for every single section and user type on your site, what makes it "successful." You need to be tracking these "successes" as closely as you would your visitor count.
Well this post got a little long, but I really wanted to give you guys some real examples on how I approach data analysis both at the macro and micro level. Hopefully, you can take some of this and apply it right away. I know we all have our own unique approach to analysis, and I’d love to hear yours in the comments below!
Next post I will be talking about the "analyze" step of a solid analysis strategy. That post will hone in on quick ways to figure out what is going wrong. I will talk about some GA features that you can use to make your analysis more effective and less time consuming. So stay tuned!