On July 1st, bpodr is attending the Super Summer Business Showcase event at the Millennium Hotel on Sloane Street in London’s Knightsbridge.

We’re not only attending but taking a stand – right alongside event organiser Emmanuel Ray – and offering visitors short sharp website reviews. SEO consulting on the fly, as it were.

Just come over to our stand and tell us your website address. In the time it takes to spell out search engine optimisation, we’ll tell you how you rank for some key search terms and, more importantly, how you can start to move up the rankings.

So, if you plan to be in the Knightsbridge area on Thursday July 1st and feel like mixing business with pleasure in the company of some of London’s wealthiest and trendiest business owners (and us!), drop by the Millennium Hotel between 6pm and 11pm. (You can find all the contact details here on Emmanuel Ray’s Socialite Evenings site).

A cautionary tale

Here’s a wee story. We recently started working with a new client and, as is a standard part of the process, we began looking at the web sites of close competitors in the same geographical area. On one of these, I spotted some strange lines at the bottom of the page. This could have been the result of sloppy coding or a design element that had not been properly rendered. Whatever the reason, it looked ugly and immediately undermined the credibility of the site.

I opened up the code for the site’s home page and discovered that the lines had been added deliberately to mark the beginning of a new section of the page. Below the lines were more than one hundred hidden links to sites selling rogue pharmaceuticals (the sort mentioned in all those spam emails you receive!). Fake pharmaceuticals had no connection with the business of the web site I was examining, of course.

These links existed on every page of the site, including the page that listed the partners in the company, with their photos and impressive biographies and educational qualifications.

Most visitors would never see those links. But Google would and the other search engine robots would. Eventually, the site would be penalised by the search engines and it could quite simply disappear from search results until things were resolved – and possibly for a long time afterwards. And the company would be unlikely to discover the reason.

The moral of the story is that, if you’ve recently had a site built or had some work done on it by a third party company, it’s always worth taking more than a cursory look at your web site.

Here’s how to view your site’s code

Many web site owners don’t know that they can look at the code for their site. But it’s easy. In Firefox, you can either right-click while in the page and choose ‘View Page Source’ or select ‘View’ and then ‘Page Source’ from your browser’s main menu bar. See the screenshots that follow. (If you still insist on using Internet Explorer, the process is almost identical.)

Unless you’re familiar with HTML, much of what you see may be fairly indecipherable. However, in cases such as the one I described above, a large swathe of the page covered in links to sites that have little bearing on your business should be fairly apparent. Just make sure you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the code.

An alternative trick is to switch off ‘styling’. This gives you a view akin to what the search engine robots see and will also uncover the hidden elements that an unethical developer may have chosen to hide in your pages. You can do this in Firefox by selecting ‘View’, then ‘Style’, and then ‘No Style’ from your browser’s main menu bar. (Once again, users of IE can use a similar option.)

The end of the story

I emailed one of the partners at the company with the dodgy links and explained what I had found and how to see the links himself. When I returned to the site a week later, the majority of the links had disappeared. But not all!

I received no reply from the partner or any thanks from the company. Tut.

If you don’t know if anyone has looked at your site, it may be time to conduct a site audit. At the very least, it’s clear you need to get some sort of analytics installed, so you can be sure that you’re not the only one ignoring your site.

This assumes, of course, that your site is part of your marketing arsenal and plays a significant part in meeting your business objectives. If your site is simply there to add to the approximately 21 billion web pages in English and to serve no business function whatsoever, please ignore the rest of this post.

What is a site audit?

In its most simple terms, a site audit ensures that your site is fit for purpose. And ‘purpose’ here means its ability to attract qualified visitors/prospects – and convert them to customers or leads.

Why bother?

If your site was built with no optimization included as part of the design process, a careful audit will lay the groundwork for creating an optimization strategy. Even if your site was optimized during the build, there’s every chance that search engine technology, your customers, or your business goals have changed. An audit can still point out areas that could be improved to meet those changes.

A series of posts – yippee!

Over the next few weeks, I’ll cover some of the things to look at when performing a site audit. This is all stuff you can do for yourself, with a little help from on-line resources and free (or cheap) tools. The results may surprise (or dismay) you. Either way, you’ll learn something about optimizing sites and bringing your web site in line with your business strategy.

With a bit of luck, you may even start reaping the benefits of increased traffic and higher search engine rankings. But don’t hold me to that.

In Google Analytics terms, a bounce is simply a visit that comprises one page of your site. In practical terms, this usually means that there is nothing there that matches what the visitor was hoping to find. This may or may not be something you should be concerned about.

If you’ve done a lot of good SEO work on your site and it’s sitting high in the search rankings, it’s inevitable that a number of visitors will simply click the link with no thought. They arrive at the site, see it’s not what they’re looking for, and off they go. This is not a problem and you can probably discount somewhere in the region of a 30% bounce rate as traffic you’ll never be able to convert, no matter what improvements you make to your site. This is like the woman is the example above realising that she’s come to a bridal store instead of a boutique that specialises in ball gowns. The dresses are beautiful and of high quality; they’re just not what this customer needs.

Big bounces are only fun on a trampoline

If your bounce rate is creeping towards the 50% range and upwards, however, it may be time to worry.

For starters, a high bounce rate is a sure indication that the traffic coming to your site is not as qualified as it should be. That gives you an immediate insight into the quality of your marketing campaigns, whether they’re off-line advertising, sponsored links, or even the keywords you’re using for increasing your organic rankings.

If, after careful analysis of the traffic sources, you’re sure they are qualified, you now know that the site itself is failing to meet the promises delivered implicitly in the marketing campaign. People have been enticed to visit and still found nothing to engage them. This is especially the case where you have specific landing pages for different campaigns.

Bounce rate, therefore, can be an extremely useful metric. Even the most cursory examination of the numbers can point out some quick wins for campaign changes and amendments to site copy and/or design.

In some cases, the distinction between these terms may not be important. But for marketing departments wanting to measure the effect of a specific campaign, the distinctions become crucial.

When web pages were uncomplicated and contained little more than a block of text, page hits were what gave a reasonably accurate picture of how many people were visiting your site. As more elements were added to a page (and each graphic, for instance, requires a ‘hit’ on the server), this was no longer a viable method for tracking traffic.

(I suppose you could always count the individual elements on a page and then divide the hits by that number. But that’s a bit like counting cow legs in a field and dividing by four to find how many cattle you have.)

HTTP and Cookies

The web has a static protocol – HTTP – which means it neither knows nor cares whether it’s met you before. When you send an HTTP request to a web server, it’s a bit like greeting someone with severe short-term memory loss. It says ‘Nice to meet you’, whether or not you’ve been engaged in conversation for the last hour.

That’s where cookies come in (see the previous Analytics Tuesday post).

Perhaps the best way to think of the difference between visitors and unique visitors is this:

You launch your new site and, on the back of a series of emails to existing customers, say, around 150 of them swing by the site on the Monday. Your site incorporates a blog and you’re posting daily updates that appeal to those 150 customers. So, on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday those 150 customers return to the site. What are your numbers?

Add up the right numbers

Well, your site attracted 5 x 150 visits. 750 visits. Without cookies or accurate tracking, you might think you’ve attracted 750 visitors to your site in the first week. However, because each day saw the same 150 customers return to the site, you only attracted 150 unique visitors.

You can see how important – from a marketing ROI perspective, at the very least – getting the numbers right can be. Total visits is important, of course (and, for a blog or for am e-commerce site that thrives on repeat business, visitors who return to buy are very welcome), but for a business hoping to expand and which is using a variety of on-line and off-line marketing strategies to drive new customers to the site, it is unique visitor numbers that will take precedence.

The Google help centre defines ‘Unique Visitors’ as:

the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period. A Unique Visitor is determined using cookies.

Next week? Well, you tell me.

Our Quick Web Site Review

Think of this as the ‘continental breakfast’ option. Our normal ‘full breakfast’ is an exhaustive look at everything on your site from an SEO, usability, and architecture perspective. Our ‘lite’ version concentrates on your home page and one or two other representative pages to give you a brief overview of where your site may not be working as hard for your business as it should be.

You can download a sample pdf report here.

Why A Review Is Useful

Here’s the scenario. You’ve launched your new business site with great hopes and expectations. But some months later, you’re not noticing much difference in your business. You don’t even know whether the site is getting any visits.

Alternatively, your site may have been up for a number of years and you’re just not sure what things need to change when you decide to build a new one.

A quick review can point you to some of the most common problems that mat be preventing the site supporting your business objectives.

So, sign up for your quick review before the end of October and get an insight into any issues with your site that may be causing it to perform at a less than optimum level.

I’m going to start with ‘cookies’.

No, not those sorts of cookies.

Cookies are probably not the first thing you think of when you think about capturing metrics from your site. You may not think about cookies at all, in fact. However, they’re pretty damned important. Here’s why.

Cookies and Page Tags

For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to assume (dangerous, I know) that you’ve plumped for using Google Analytics (GA) as your metrics package of choice. After all, it’s free and the range of data it supplies is probably enough for the great majority of small businesses. Best of all, it uses page tags that you add to each of your site’s pages – so you don’t need access to your server logs – and the data is available to you through your own on-line dashboard at Google.

Page tags work (i.e. gather data) by setting cookies when visitors arrive at your site. Cookies have had a bad press, which, for the most part, is a result of ignorance. After all, a cookie is simply a very small text file (which can always be examined by a user in a normal text editor, or even deleted) that gets associated with your browser when you visit a site.

Then, whenever your browser accesses that site, it takes the cookie with it. It’s a way for a site to recognise repeat visitors or visitors accessing more than one page in the site.

If you use Amazon, for instance, you know that when you use your normal computer, you’ll get the ‘Welcome, Graham’ message (replace ‘Graham’ with your own name!) but when you visit from a different computer, Amazon doesn’t know who you are. That’s the power of cookies.

GA uses only first party anonymous cookies. This is what Google says about its cookies in its help area:

Google Analytics uses cookies to define user sessions, as well as to provide a number of key features in the Google Analytics reports. Google Analytics sets or updates cookies only to collect data required for the reports. Additionally, Google Analytics uses only first-party cookies. This means that all cookies set by Google Analytics for your domain send data only to the servers for your domain. This effectively makes Google Analytics cookies the personal property of your website domain, and the data cannot be altered or retrieved by any service on another domain.

The down side, of course, is that some companies and people prevent cookies being written to their computers. That means you’ll miss some of the data you want to collect. The number will be small, however.

Next week, I’ll look at one of the key areas where cookies come into their own: differentiating between visits and unique visits.

Remember, if you miss one of the Analytics Tuesday posts, you can simply click on the blog topic in the sidebar with that name and you’ll see a list of the posts so far.

As a bare bones agency that doesn’t expect clients to pay for carpet tiles, potted plants, or a water cooler, we work out of home offices or the IOD or coffee shops. That means that our mobile numbers are our official work numbers.

Problem: If you put up a mobile number as your main contact number, there’s a perception that you’re somehow not a ‘real’ business. Why is that? Like most people, I rarely use a land line these days. And yet there’s still a stigma about not having a ‘proper’ phone number for people to contact you.

Solution: You pay for an answering service, which either directs calls to your mobile or takes messages and gets you to call the client back. From your mobile. Is it just me or does this all seem a rather contradictory state of affairs?

How does your business solve the problem?

A good place to start is with the decision to install analytics on your site. When we conduct site reviews, we come across a startling number of sites with no means to capture metrics (and just as many where the metrics aren’t collected, even when the means to measure it is installed). So, we’re kicking off this week with a look at why installing a way to capture data on your site is, without question, as important as having a working web site in the first place.

A site without metrics is a brain without oxygen

Choosing to launch a web site and then do nothing to measure its effectiveness is akin to buying an expensive house without finding out where it is nor caring about its condition.

Of course, measuring effectiveness also implies that there is a clearly defined objective. In other words, you need to know the main purpose of your web site. For most businesses, this will usually come down to one of these:

1. To drive more sales;
2. To generate more qualified leads;
3. To establish credibility.

The first two may appear similar on the face of it but the primary objective for the site itself will depend on whether you’re running a true ecommerce site or a site that seeks to bring prospects into your pipeline.

Let’s say you’ve got a B2B business and your product or service is not something you can pop in the post and send to a customer on receipt of an on-line payment. In this case, your site is probably looking to get visitors to pick up the phone and call you (or request a brochure or fill in a contact form).

Metrics provide the data for your business decisions

A decent metrics package will let you know where your visitors are coming from, what pages they visit on your site, and how long they stay there. With experience – or help from someone familiar with analytics data – you’ll start to see if and why potential customers are failing to answer that call to action on your site. That data alone can form the basis of a marketing strategy for driving more traffic, or improving your landing pages, or even making sure you implement a plan for loading fresh content on a weekly basis.

When you capture data from your site and analyse it properly, you’ll immediately be in a position of competitive advantage. (Whether you do anything with that advantage is up to you, of course, but the chances are that at least one of your competitors will make use of data gleaned from their own site.)

In the early (earlier?) days of the web, much was made of ‘hits’. The web was much simpler then and hits on your site actually meant something. Nowadays, with each web page containing so much information served in separate calls to your server, counting a hit is as much use as counting bricks to decide which house to buy. My favourite quotation about this comes from Jim Sterne ( as quoted in Avinash Kaushik’s excellent book “Web Analytics An Hour A Day”). Jim defines ‘hits’ as “how idiots track success”.

Jim Sterne and Avinash Kaushik both have blogs that focus on web analytics. Browsing the archives on their sites is a great place to start if you want to delve into the subject further (and quicker).

Coming next week….

Alternatively, you can just wait until next week, when I’ll look at some of the key terms used when talking about metrics.

If you miss any of the posts in the series, just click on the ‘Analytics Tuesday’ category for a complete list.

Let us know if there are any metrics topics that you want to see covered. Questions, opinions, gripes, and corrections are also always welcome.

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be changing the focus of the site and concentrating on information that helps small businesses make the most of the web. There will be regular content going up – in the form of blog posts and articles – about analytics, AdWords, SEO, blogging, Twitter, and a slew of other tools and tactics to help small businesses gain competitive advantage through the most efficient and productive use of the web.

You’ll also see some changes to the layout of the site. We hope this makes it easier to navigate and to find the tools and information you need.

This will be an evolutionary process. Rather like the strategies we recommend to our clients, it’s a matter of try it, check it, and refine. It may take time but we’re sure we’ll end up with a site that meets your business needs.

Let us know at any time how we’re doing. And if there are any particular issues or problems you want us to cover – from installing web analytics through SEO best practice to how to use Twitter for business – just tell us.

That’s not all…… but it’s enough for now.

(And apologies to Adam for using that shot of him I promised never to put on the web.)