Bing being a key competitor to Google is not different atleast algorithmically as far as the ranking factor goes. There are striking similarities on the criteria used for ranking between Google and Bing.

TLD Extensions – Top level domains with .gov and .org extensions have the highest possibility of ranking higher in both Google and Bing. The most interesting part is .org is rated higher to rank than .com and it is quiet surprising.

Tip – Grab .org extension for your site and build a community on that domain or redirect to your .com domain.

Keyword in Domain – A website with target keywords in the domain name has the highest correlation with rankings higher on search.

Here is a quick example of my blog ranking higher in search because of the keyword in the domain.

Tip – Buy domains with your target keywords and build micro sites with unique content on those domains.

Keyword in subdomain – Sometimes it is harder to get a keyword rich domain and another alternative is to go for a keyword filled sub domain. Data shows that Google gives some important and Bing does not factors this in their SERPs ranking.

Tip – Stay away from creating too many subdomains to gain higher ranking in search. Create sub domains only if you feel it is required from user point of view.

On page keyword usage – Both Bing and Google ranking analysis data show a small correlation between on page keyword usage and ranking. Alt image is useful to search ranking in some cases, and so is putting keywords in the url.

In the example below, the website webhostingsearch.com has the word “dedicated server hosting” 10 times on the page in comparison to webhostinggeeks.com (3 times) and it still ranks lower. The reason is webhostinggeeks.com has over 2000 unique links to the page and webhostingsearch.com has only 246 unique links to the page.

External links - Having a small number of links from multiple websites is 10x better than having a large number of links from the same website. Websites rank higher if they have diversity in link sources and there is a high correlation for this in both Google and Bing.

Tip – Diversify your link building strategies to multiple avenues. Build social links along with content links and viral links.

Length of url – Data shows that shorter urls rank higher in search than longer urls.

Tip – I have seen that blog links with longer url tend to rank higher in search, and clearly Google and Bing have different set of rules for different types of sites. This could be because blog links are generally longer. It is ok to have longer blog post links but keep your website links short because it helps users remember the url easily.

Anchor text – The number of unique links with anchor text influence the ranking of a website. Having anchor text diversity is as important as the link diversity.

Please share your thoughts, insights and comments below.

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Google vs Bing: Advanced SEO Analytics is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

What if there was a way to find what part of the content on any given page is consumed? What if you can generate a report that shows if your headline and first paragraph are able to drive visitors to read the next part of the content?

Omniture recently announced a cool new plugin for their SiteCatalyst analytics tool. This plugin allows users to view the percentage of content viewed on any given page vertically.

The plugin is totally free for current SiteCatalyst customers. You can find the plugin code on the Help -> Supporting docs -> Implementation -> Plugins section of SiteCatalyst help section.

Here are step by step instructions on how to install this plugin.

#1. Add a new traffic/property variable.

Admin -> Report Suites -> Edit Settings -> Traffic -> Traffic Variables

#2. Set the new s.prop value to the percentage page viewed function. This variable will record the percentage of the previous page viewed.

#3. Create another s.prop traffic variable. This variable will be used to store the previous page value. Adding this variable will allow us to combine the page name with the percentage page viewed value metric.

#4. Prepare the code for implementation. This is how your final code should look like.

#5. Copy the code in the s_doPlugins() function located in the “Plugin Config” area of the s_code.js file.

(Click here to download the code file)

#6 Finally, copy the following code in “PLUGINS SECTION” area of the s_code.js file and allow SiteCatalyst to populate reports. You should see two new reports inside the Custom Traffic section.

(Click here to download the code file)

Here is a quick screen shot of how the final Custom Traffic report should look like.

Please share your thoughts, insights and comments because it really helps me write more effectively.

Measuring Content Effectiveness with Omniture SiteCatalyst is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

Voice of Visitor approach piggybacks on the VOC concept but goes a step further by promoting analysis of the web visitor qualitative data. Complaints and low ratings are also considered to be the Voice of the Visitor and this data can be used by the companies to changes to their services and/or their product line.

Few years ago, capturing qualitative data required a lot of time and money because of the manual data collection and analysis process. The results were mostly inaccurate because of the smaller sample size and mistakes in manual calculation.

With sophistication and popularity of the web analytics tools, the data collection methods for VOV have also changed. Offline forms and feedback sheets are replaced by sophisticated online surveys, and manual calculation is sidelined by advanced regression analysis of the collected data.

However, it is not easy to quantify the Voice of the Visitor in terms of simple calculations: one cannot say X % of people found this product good and Y % of people found it bad. If Y contains 90% of the company’s most loyal customers, even if X is much larger than Y, the company should consider this as a serious issue and fix it in order to make it suitable for their old customers while laying down several bases for their new customers.

Analyzing and measuring Voice of Visitor data is a fragile business – it has both an emotional as well as a practical side to it. The emotional or the social side deals with loyalty, customer satisfaction or complaints, while the practical or enterprise side deals with completion rates, review scores, speed and ease of use. While customer satisfaction may not always lead to loyalty, it becomes an abstract positive score in comparison to tangible scores in speed tests and reviews.

Here are some best practices for capturing and measuring VOV/VOC -

1. Likert scale model – Always use likert scale model for surveys and feedback forms. Yes/No type surveys popularly used by car dealers are outdated and cannot tell you anything about forecasting customer behavior.

2. Questions – Limit the number of questions per survey to ten or less. There are companies promoting 50 plus survey methodology, and it could only work if you have time, money and patience to wait for months before you can perform actionable analysis.

3. Incentives – Never offer any incentive to your visitors/customers for completing the survey/feedback form. Incentives can influence the user behavior and will result in skewed data.

4. Integration – I highly recommend integrating the VOV data (qualitative) to your web analytics data (quantitative). Integrating both data set can provide you with extremely powerful information about your visitors. You will be able to identify the referral, pathing and buying behavior of your satisfied/dissatisfied customers.

5. Metrics – You can create your own metrics depending on your business objectives and goals. For a retail business, it could be the average acceptance rate of number of steps for an order process, for informational sites it could be the page with the most useful content. Always include the “what is your overall satisfaction with this site/product/service” to get a holistic view of response.

6. Tools – Here is a list of the top five free and low cost tools for the voice of visitor/customer analysis. If you are looking for an enterprise solution then I recommend Foresee.

It is imperative to use this analysis effectively for the expansion and success of your company.

Hope you enjoyed this post.

Please share your thoughts, insights and comments because it really helps me write more effectively.

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Art of Measuring and Analyzing the Voice of Visitor/Customer Data is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

In a sales cycle, it is important to get feedback from the prospect and on the website the visitor feedback is the key.

There are large numbers of usability testing tools available online but I have prepared a list of five most useful low cost tools that you must consider in your web optimization efforts. Some of these can be used for a month and some of them can permanently sit on your website.

1. Usertesting.com –

“Low cost usability testing” is their tag line, and indeed you can’t get any cheaper than $29.95. The setup process is pretty simple, and you can access your test results within few hours.

Benefits:

• Low cost
• No installation required
• Easy setup
• Quick turnaround time
• Instant access to voice of visitor data. (Surveys can take weeks or sometimes even months)

Enhancements required:

• Fewer demographic options available
• Missing industry specific tester selection

2. Uservoice.com –

The tool is designed to generate product / service ideas from voice of visitor. It can also be used for creating a discussion / feedback forum. Top companies like Nokia, Sun and Sony are using it. The basic version of Uservoice is free and a low cost $19.95 per month version has unlimited forum option.

Benefits:

• Get instant feedback on product/service/website
• Engage customers
• Free product ideas from customers and visitors

Enhancements required:

• Requires code installation on website
• Forum monitoring
• Time required to collect good data depends on the site traffic

3. 4qsurvey.com –

4qsurvey is a simple web survey tool and can be used to improve overall web visitor satisfaction. iPerceptions are voice of visitor data specialist and 4Q survey tool is their free offering.

Benefits:

• Totally free
• Get answer to the four most important web questions
• Analytics data available in account section

Enhancements required:

• Requires code installation on website
• No support ( They provide support for the paid product)
• Cannot add customize questions
• Popup based data collection mechanism
• Minimum recommended sample size to draw conclusion for any web survey tool is 500

4. Kampyle.com –

Kampyle is another survey tool with a non obtrusive data collection system. This software requires visitors to enter comments in separate categories. The feedback form is fully customizable and the software comes in web & software based versions.

Benefits:

• Did I mention free
• Live support
• Non obtrusive data collection process

Enhancements required:

• Visitors can ignore the data collection button easily
• Requires extra efforts from visitors

5. Fivesecondtest.com –

Currently, in beta test, this is an ultimate tool focused on designers to get instant feedback for their design work. The tool is designed keeping in mind that on an average a person spends no more than 5-8 seconds on any web based advertisement. It’s great for optimizing the home page and making it more attractive.

Benefits:

• Simple interface
• Innovative
• Designer friendly
• Instant feedback from online users/designers

Enhancements required:

• Web designer focused
• Slightly technical
• Five second is not enough time to provide a good feedback

Please provide your comments, feedback, or tweets here.

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5 Kick Ass Free/Cheap Voice of Visitor & Usability Tools is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

Content is the king on the Internet and there is no second thought about it. The web technology has changed a lot in last 2 decades but core theme of Internet is still the same…to provide value information using web content. Social media is becoming the new source of information and web masters are shifting focus to user generated content. Search engines spiders love fresh and useful information and will continue to do so in future.

It is important to understand what your visitors like to see on your website. Quality content can improve visitor engagement and improve the site conversion.

Web analytics plays a key role in identifying the quality and usability of the content. If you have not installed web analytics software on your website then I would highly encourage you to do so. Read my earlier post “What is web analytics?” to learn how to instantly get started using free web analytics tools.

To measure the success of your web content you must first define the key performance indicators or key web metrics. Once you have identified the metrics you can use these to benchmark your web success.

The key metrics that I like to focus my attention to improve web content quality are page views, avg. page views per visit, time spent on page, and bounce rate.

Let’s dig deeper and understand each of these metrics and how they impact the visitor engagement.

1. Page views – This metric will help you identify the top pages on the site. Prepare a list of your top ten web pages. It is important to focus your attention on these pages because this is what your web visitors value the most. Sometimes, page views report can provide you extremely valuable information about your web content.

2. Avg. page views per visit – It’s a good idea to understand how many pages on average are being viewed on your site per visit. If your website avg. page views per visit is less than three then you might want to focus on the top three pages first.

3. Time spent on page – For each of your top pages find out the time spent by the visitors on each page. Visitors spend more time on a page either because of good quality of the content, or trying to figure out what to do next. If you see higher bounce and higher time spent then it is a clear indicator that the visitors are confused.

4. Bounce rate – One of the most important metric for any website. You must always segment the bounce rate for each channel. Bounce rate metric can be used to identify the problem pages on your site. A good bounce rate is anything between 15% and 40%. Bounce rate and time on page metrics are the key to evaluating web content success.

Initially, you will need some web analytics experience to evaluate your web content by looking at these metrics. Looking for shortcuts??? I love shortcuts and making things simple is my hobby and this is why I created a KPI that will quickly tell you if your site content is bad, good or viral (exceptionally good).

I call this KPI as the Content Quality Rater (CQR). Content quality rater will weigh your bounce rate against the time on page and will tell you how valuable your web content is.

Here is the formula I use to calculate the CQR KPI. Fill in the numbers and use the CQR rating scale to evaluate your site content.

Please provide your comments, feedback, or tweets here.

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Using Web Analytics to Improve Web Content Quality and Usability is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog