Dodgeball Marketing Podcast #51: SEO Basics: 5 Good Analytics KPIs for Business Websites

Chris Raines: Hey there, welcome to Episode 51 of the Dodgeball Marketing Podcast, your favorite podcast about marketing and dodgeballs.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Not actually about dodgeballs.

Chris Raines: Yeah, we have a dodgeball back here, but we don't really reference the dodgeball that much. Okay. We're going to talk today, Michael, about five good analytics objectives for business websites. Now, we say analytics, people immediately think about Google Analytics because that's the analytics platform people use. But we're also talking about other things that you can use with other tools, some of them paid tools. . .

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: To monitor the health of your websites, like a monthly health checkup for your website. So we're going to talk about five things that you can measure over time to make sure your business website is in good shape. So Michael, why don't you kick us off with the first one?

Michael Utley: Yeah. First one is page speed. Page speed is one of these things that's really important to search engines. This has become one of the main factors really, for Google. And it's just one of those things that you hear about it, it's one of those metrics, but how do we even know what's going on? So what we recommend is a couple of different steps to get a sense of how page speed is affecting your business.

Michael Utley: First is, go to Google and just search for Google PageSpeed tool. And it's going to bring up. . . the number one result is going to be a tool that Google provides for free that will do an immediate test of your website, and tell you both your mobile PageSpeed score and your desktop PageSpeed score.

Michael Utley: And then the downside of this tool, or sort of a shortcoming of this tool, because you're not logging in or creating an account to do it, there's no historic data that's being captured.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: So what we recommend is create a spreadsheet and go check this once a month, and store this data, store both of those numbers, the mobile score and the desktop score, and track it over time. And where this becomes really helpful is when you use it in combination with a website change log.

Michael Utley: So if you add live chat to your website, you maybe add marketing automation tools like Marketo or Pardot, and you're pulling forms into your website from those tools, or you add maybe a new piece of content, like a video that's embedded on the website, on the homepage, these are things that are going to change the behavior of how the website works.

Michael Utley: And it's good to know, is this changing anything in relation to page speed?

Chris Raines: Yep.

Michael Utley: And so yeah, this is a really good idea and a good thing to do. So what we're really saying is not only get to know your page speed, but track it over time and think about it in relation to other things that are happening. And what you're going to find is it is also going to reveal big changes that happen with Google.

Michael Utley: So recently, we noticed that a lot of our websites that were scoring pretty well for mobile, they were scoring in the 60 to 70 range, which is actually pretty good. It's a failing grade, but it was actually pretty good lately given where Google was.

Chris Raines: Yeah, because everybody else is kind of struggling around. . .

Michael Utley: Oh, yeah.

Chris Raines: Unless you just have a couple-paragraph, text-only website or something.

Michael Utley: Text-only page or something, that's just really fast for mobile. But what we saw lately was a bunch of stuff, just kind of dropped about 20 points all at the same time. And so Google, it's a Black Box. They say they're very transparent... They don't say they're transparent but they're always kind of talking about what they're doing.

Michael Utley: And then they always kind of back it up to the statement of "Just focus on good content", but really, they're dialing a bunch of knobs and making changes. And they're doing that, not just through their algorithm and their search engine, but also with the tools they provide, and the things that they tell us as SEO professionals to do. So yeah, page speed is one of those things you've got to have your own tracking to get that historic data.

Chris Raines: Yeah, that's great. Okay. Number two here, is domain authority, tracking your domain authority over time. Domain authority is a proprietary metric that's owned by Moz, which is an SEO software company.

Michael Utley: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Chris Raines: And what Moz tries to do is the domain authority is a score from zero to 100, and it tries to approximate how "authoritative" Google views your website.

Michael Utley: Mm-hmm.

Chris Raines: And so if you've got a website that's been up for at least six months, this should start to become trackable. You can plug it into Moz and it'll show you what your domain authority is.

Michael Utley: Mm-hmm.

Chris Raines: This is good to track, again, over time, because if you're doing all the right things, if you're adding content, especially if you're getting back links from other sites that have domain authority, that should in turn raise your domain authority.

Michael Utley: Right.

Chris Raines: And I think to a certain extent, the older your domain gets, the more sort of trustworthy. . .

Michael Utley: Yeah. Domain age is one of those things you can't do anything about.

Chris Raines: You just have to age the domain and Google will... If you've been around for 20 years without any major hiccups, then you're more trusted than a domain that just popped up out of nowhere.

Michael Utley: Right.

Chris Raines: So yeah, checking your domain authority over time. This is one of those things that if you're not going to. . . Like you said, you're not going to move it in a week or a month, or probably even two or three months.

Michael Utley: Right.

Chris Raines: It's a longer haul, but keeping track of it will give you that long-haul metric of, "Is what we're doing working?"

Michael Utley: Mm-hmm.

Chris Raines: And if you're getting backlinks, if you're producing good content, if you're keeping your page speed up, all that stuff, you should see that track higher and higher over time.

Michael Utley: Mm-hmm.

Chris Raines: So that's number two, Moz.com, check your domain authority over time, track it month to month.

Michael Utley: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a really good one. Next step is SpyFu items. They're two things in SpyFu that are really helpful numbers to keep in mind. One is how many keywords are we ranked for? So that's item number one. . .

Chris Raines: And SpyFu is another paid tool.

Michael Utley: Yeah, SpyFu is a paid tool. This is something that we use, we love it. It's a great, quick way to see how you're doing. And we really like it because you can run your own website through it, and then you can run a competitor website through it. And you're not hacking into their website or their Google Analytics and getting any secret data. It's a third-party tool, kind of publicly available information.

Chris Raines: Mm-hmm.

Michael Utley: But SpyFu is scanning the internet, understanding how different websites are ranking in search engines for certain keywords. And so when you put in a URL, they're able to go and generate that data and show what websites rank for what terms? So two pieces of data from SpyFu that are really great. Number one, is Keywords Ranked. And so, this is how many keywords do we show up in the top 10 pages for?

Michael Utley: SpyFu recently shifted over how they're displaying some stuff. It used to be top five pages, and now they're sort of migrating to what SEMRush has been doing for a long time with top 10 pages. So it's kind of anywhere you're in the top 10 pages. And of course, being on page 10 is not really as important as being on page one, but pages two through 10 are where keywords often go on their way to page one.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: So it's still good to look at page two of Google. Yeah, page two of Google might as well be the Dark Web.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: But. . .

Chris Raines: Nobody goes there.

Michael Utley: Yeah, nobody goes there, but this is where keywords percolate up. So understanding how many terms you have on an ongoing basis that are ranked. Yeah. And SpyFu will show that historic data. So as you're doing an SEO program, if you're working with Dodgeball Marketing or its parent company, GoEpps, and doing an SEO program, you're going to see this number move up into the right over time. And you're going to see the keywords themselves and see the types of keywords you're ranking for.

Michael Utley: So number one item for SpyFu out of two, is the Keywords Ranked. Now, the second item is called the Sum of Ranks. And the Sum of Ranks is really good because what it does is it gives you a weighted score, so the ones that are higher in the rankings, like a number one listing, you're going to get a number of points for that.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: So you might get 50 points. I don't know exactly how they're doing it right now. I need to check this, but you get 50 points for number one ranking all the way down to one point for a number 50 ranking. So this is called the Sum of Ranks, and I don't know if they've changed that since they changed the other slide to the top 100, but I think they're figuring it out right now, to be honest.

Michael Utley: But this weighted score is good because not only does it tell you whether or not you're getting more keywords up, but if they're making it higher because having millions of keywords that are on page 10 of Google, that's not going to matter.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: So Sum of Ranks is going to give you that weighted score that shows if the center of mass for your keyword tracking is moving up. And so that's a really good one. The thing that's really good about both of these is you can run your website and a competitor through it. And I just mentioned that, but we really like to do this on either a quarterly or an annual basis and go look at a set of competitors and see how the investment in SEO has shifted gears against that competitor set.

Chris Raines: Mm-hmm.

Michael Utley: So yeah, so SpyFu, two really great numbers to look at every month. Really great tool.

Chris Raines: Cool. Number four here for business websites is your SEMRush scan items. So SEMRush, another paid tool. And by the way, we keep talking about paid tools because a lot of this stuff, it's really hard to get. Google doesn't publish it, so you need these companies that are, sort of, constantly scanning the web and caching websites, and collecting data in order to get this.

Chris Raines: So SEMRush is another one, and SEMRush will give you things like Crawlability Scores. So how open to your website, how easily crawlable is it for search engines, can detect link issues. So whether those are internal links, do you have any broken links inside of your website, or do you have broken links outside of your website?

Chris Raines: Google doesn't like either one of those things, bad for usability and it's bad for SEO. So you can check Authority Scores. This is another... It's kind of their version of the domain authority from Moz, right?

Michael Utley: Mm-hmm.

Chris Raines: So it tells you how authoritative your website is in general, inside of your expertise or inside of your niche. And other things like just general site performance, how fast your pages are loading. I'm sure it checks things like image alt tags, like are your images loading fast? Image size, things like that.

Michael Utley: Mm-hmm.

Chris Raines: So all those are sort of, again, just, like, this monthly check that you can do on the health of your website, is just like a check of going to the doctor for a checkup.

Michael Utley: Mm-hmm.

Chris Raines: So yeah, SEMRush, another paid tool, but a lot of those things, it's a really. . .If you went out and tried to get those things yourself, it would take you a long time to do so. It really speeds up the process.

Michael Utley: Yeah. And these tools, even though they cost money, if you're working with an SEO agency and using SEMRush, they will have access to it. It'll be one of the... Gosh, I would say one of the top three theories that SEO agencies would use.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: I think it's more popular than. . . I think it's more standard than SpyFu.

Chris Raines: Yeah. In my industry and PPC paid search, it's definitely the standard.

Michael Utley: Yeah. So yeah, these tools, if you're working with an SEO agency, this is stuff they would be doing for you, but if you're trying to DIY it, or you're just trying to get familiar with, like, what is this industry? How do we think about this? Or if you're a marketing manager or an executive, it would be reasonable for you to have this tool in a larger company, even if you're depending on your agency to do the work and use the tool.

Chris Raines: Oh, sure.

Michael Utley: So yeah, but these scan issues, these are things that you want someone looking at in SEMRush every month, as a standard. You want a rhythm of someone scanning and essentially driving action from the results from those scans. So everything, Chris, you just listed, these are not things that get fixed once and they stay perfect forever. No, there are always new pages being added to the website. So you've always got new stuff happening.

Chris Raines: And your external links that you link to, will take down their page.

Michael Utley: Yes.

Chris Raines: Things like that, yeah.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Sometimes other websites that you're linking out to, will 404 because something doesn't exist anymore. All right. Next up is a metric that is kind of a challenge for folks, time on site. This is a good thing to get familiar with and understand, but we want to do a little myth-busting here.

Michael Utley: More time on site is not always better. So we mentioned in a previous segment, if you listen to the whole episode, in the page speed segment, to think about your overall usability of the website. So when you're making changes to your website that help people, sometimes time on site can go down, and that's a good thing.

Michael Utley: Typically, clients come into us and there are a couple of numbers they're real concerned about, time on site is low and the bounce rate is high. We had a website one time, Chris, where the client was a lead generation company, kind of a regional lead generation company. And they had such a sophisticated business that they had multiple phone numbers.

Michael Utley: So they had one for staffing, they had one for sales inquiries, and they had different phone numbers for different regional offices. And so when it came time to put the website together and update the website, they ended up with no easy way in the header of the website for anyone to contact them, even though their website was intended to be a big funnel for inbound leads. And the reason was they couldn't decide whose phone number would be the best one, because there were different regional sales offices, different stuff going on, and they really needed to take people to a page and have the user do the work of determining what phone number to use.

Michael Utley: So we talk a lot about taking work off of the user. This was an instance where users were digging in and spending a lot of time on site, just to find a phone number of somebody who can help them.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: Well, we added the phone number to a header. We picked their. . . I think it ended up being like their original sales office, kind of like the “big brother” of the sales offices. And so they were kind of picked to be like an area that could just take in a call just to not lose the sale because a phone number is hard to find.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: It was such a big shift in the website, the time on site dropped and the client was like, "Hey, we made this change but our time on site went down. We said, "Yeah, and leads went up." And they were like, "Oh, okay. We got it." And so it's one of those things, bounce rate, time on site, these things can actually go down if you're making it easier on the user.

Michael Utley: And so...

Chris Raines: That's a good point.

Michael Utley: So time on site is good. You might have to simplify some of these metrics. You can look at a lot of historic data, but if you're pulling stuff into a common dashboard, capturing average time site across all users, monthly, I think is a good metric to include in that.

Chris Raines: Yeah, that's great. Okay. That's all we have. That's five good analytics objectives for business websites. Follow us on DodgeballSEO on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. We're in all those places. Drop questions if you want to see us cover a particular subject, and that's it.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Thank you.