Are You Meeting Your Library Website SEO Goals? Measure Success with Google Analytics
1. Library Websites: Are You
Meeting Your SEO Goals?
Jennifer Grappone
@jengrappone
Gradiva Couzin
@gradiva
ALA 2012
2. About Us
Jennifer Grappone & Gradiva Couzin
Partners, Gravity Search Marketing LLC
Coauthors, Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day (Wiley, 2011)
Find out more about us:
www.yourseoplan.com
Twitter: @jengrappone, @gradiva
ALA 2012
3. What We’ll Cover
• Defining Goals
• Measuring Goals with Google Analytics
• What’s Getting in the Way of Your Goals?
SLIDESHARE URL HERE
ALA 2012
7. Search Engine
Ranking Factors
Search engines can find your pages Site Structure
XML Sitemaps
Search engines have reason to Inbound Links
trust your pages
Search engines can understand Keywords
your pages Semantic tagging
ALA 2012
8. Clarify Your SEO Goals
I want to on my site
Separate Goals for Separate Audiences
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9. Clarify Your SEO Goals
students find items
I want at my to from our on my site
school catalog
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10. Clarify Your SEO Goals
local sign up for
I want school- to homework on my site
age help
children
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11. Clarify Your SEO Goals
I want researcher to find on my site
s scholarly
resources
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12. Clarify Your SEO Goals
find our
mobile
I want users
to locations on my site
and hours
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13. Clarify Your SEO Goals
find
students documents
I want at my to from our on my site
school catalog
These are your target audiences
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14. Clarify Your SEO Goals
find
students documents
I want at my to from our on my site
school catalog
These are your conversions
ALA 2012
15. Clarify Your SEO Goals
For each of your conversions:
• What page/type of page on your website will
this person enter? These need to be accessible to robots
and optimized for search
• How are you going to measure success?
Know your way around your analytics
program
ALA 2012
16. Measure Your Success with
Google Analytics
Google Analytics:
• Free
• Works great for SEO
• Can be used as a
supplement to another
analytics system
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17. Measure Your Success with
Google Analytics
Common Conversions
• page views
• time on site/# of pages viewed
• % of total site traffic that comes from
organic search
• a visit to a "thank you"/"success" page
ALA 2012
18. Measure Your Success with
Google Analytics
Goals that are hard or impossible to measure:
• Offline conversions (walk-in visitors,
phone calls)
• Awareness
• Word-of-mouth referrals
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19. Measure Your Success with
Google Analytics
Analyze and Interpret!
• exit pages: exit may mean success
• time on site: are your users engaged or
lost?
• low-frequency conversions: find proxy
conversions
• bounce rate: view by audience segment
ALA 2012
20. Measure Your Success with
Google Analytics
Segment your audience
Average time on site: 50 seconds
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21. Measure Your Success with
Google Analytics
Segment your audience
Average time on site: 50 seconds
• For visitors arriving via keywords containing
[name of special collection]: 4 minutes
ALA 2012
22. Measure Your Success with
Google Analytics
Segment your audience
Average time on site: 50 seconds
• For visitors arriving via keywords containing
[name of special collection]: 4 minutes
• For visitors landing on your “hours and
location” page: 32 seconds
ALA 2012
23. Measure Your Success with
Google Analytics
Segment your audience
Average time on site: 50 seconds
• For visitors arriving via keywords containing
[name of special collection]: 4 minutes
• For visitors landing on your “hours and
location” page: 32 seconds
• For visitors in Germany: all bounce out
ALA 2012
24. Measure Your Success with
Google Analytics
Case Study
the find digital
I want public
to collections
on my site
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25. Measure Your Success with
Google Analytics
• How many people are coming to the
Cuneiform collection via organic search?
• What keywords are they using?
• Are they finding it useful?
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30. Measure Your Success with
Google Analytics
All the traffic using the keyword “cuneiform” is landing on
the same URL.
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31. Measure Your Success with
Google Analytics
This landing
page is a
terrible
destination!
ALA 2012
32. Measure Your Success with
Google Analytics
Why?
• The cuneiform collection pages are blocked
from search engine crawling
• The terrible landing page is findable by
search engines
• The terrible landing page has keywords on it
ALA 2012
