Google – Iceberg Web Design

Robot.txt Files & Robot Meta Tags

Heather Erickson — Mon, 16 Aug 2021 16:18:24 +0000

Have you ever wondered how Google and other search engines can efficiently organize all the content that ends up on their search engine results pages? They do it with the help of search robots. They aren’t literal robots, but virtual ones that crawl the internet, indexing titles, summaries, and entire contents of websites faster and more completely than human beings ever could. This content includes web pages, PDFs, images, and videos. Then, they rank that information for search queries.

Because of how these virtual crawlers work, many people call these bots spiders, crawling the world wide web. It is their work that allows us to retrieve information so quickly when we search the internet. It’s pretty mind-blowing when you think about it.

Managing Bot Traffic with robots.txt Files

There will be times when you won’t necessarily want everything on your website to be found by everyday people searching the internet. These would be pages meant for employees, thank you pages, and other internal business-use-only pages.

You can usually manage to keep search engine bots out of these pages, at the directory level, by using a robots.txt file. The robots.txt file is just a request. Even though Google’s crawlers are generally respectful of these requests, there is no guarantee that their bots or those belonging to other search engines won’t ignore your request.

Robot Meta Tags

Robot meta tags (also known as robots meta directives), like other meta tags, are pieces of code. They tell the search engine bots that crawl websites how to index web page content. Unlike robots.txt files, these meta tags aren’t suggestions. And rather than trying to keep bots out of your site, they tell crawlers that a page should not be indexed.

Two Kinds of Robot Meta Tags

There are two kinds of robot meta tags:

Directives that are part of the HTML page
Directives that the web server sends as HTTP headers

These directives tell search bots how to crawl and index specific web pages on your site. Even though these are directives (meaning they are orders), bots can still ignore them.

Why Wouldn’t You Want Something Indexed?

To block an element on a page, such as an image or a video, rather than the entire page.
Content not written in HTML, like flash or video, should not be indexed.
If you can’t access the section of a page’s HTML
When you can’t change your site’s global header

Since bots need to crawl your site to read robot meta tags and follow them, having robots.txt files will be counterproductive. The robots.txt file will keep the bots out, so they never see your directive. If you are unsure which one you should use, opt for a meta robots tag with “noindex, follow” parameters over a robots.txt file.

Beware!

Even if you correctly use a robots.txt file or meta tags to allow or disallow search bots from visiting and indexing your website, you will want to get your website set up in Google Search Console. This will let you see what is being indexed. It will also allow you to request that Google remove specific URLs from its search index.

Never count on either of these to keep private information out of the public eye. For that level of security, you will want to keep your data under password protection.

Always be careful when using these files. They have their place, but occasionally, people will inadvertently make their entire site inaccessible to Google’s bots which is no good for your SEO at all.

Your Best Bet with Bots

Iceberg Web Design builds custom websites every day. We also have SEO services available for new and existing sites. Are you looking for your next website-based business solution? Contact us today to see how we can help.

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Blogs- To Comment or Not to Comment

iceberg — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 14:58:13 +0000

When including a blog on your website, one question inevitably comes up: Should you allow comments? This is something on which even the experts can’t seem to agree. Even influencer Michael Hyatt took some time to decide. He removed his comment section for a year and then ended up putting it back. The fact is, there isn’t a right answer. You will have to decide for yourself what works for your website. Here are some things to consider when deciding.

How a Comment Section Benefits your Blog

If you have time and love interacting with your audience, perhaps having comments on your blog is the way you want to go. Many people advocate for keeping them. Here are a few reasons why:

Comments keep the conversation going.
Comments and responses to them can deepen your relationship with your readers
They provide social proof of what you are saying in your post
When Readers comment, they may also engage with your site in other ways
Allowing comments can make visitors feel more welcome.
It is an opportunity to network
You can get new ideas for fresh blog topics

Why a Blog Comment Section isn’t Worth it

While 90% of your readers will never comment on a blog, 90% of your comments will come from 1% of your readers.[1] That is a disproportionate representation of your audience in your comment section, which could skew the way you see your audience and write for them. Those aren’t the only reasons to cut the comment section.

Lots of low-quality, spammy comments are frustrating to deal with
Moderating blog comments is time-consuming
Comments allow the reader too much control over a conversation that is yours to direct.
Comment volume does not correlate with the number of visitors to your site

Options to Consider

Neil Patel has a great article on whether comments help your blog’s SEO. Here are some options:

Allow comments. This involves spending more time answering questions and moderating the discussion, but many people find it worth the time.
Skip the hassle. If you want more of a one-way conversation with you sharing information with your readers, you don’t need comments. If they aren’t helping you achieve your goals, why bother with them?
Move the conversation to social media! You will still have to use your time and energy to keep up with the conversation there, but low-quality social media comments won’t make your website look unprofessional.

Still want social proof?

The best social proof is a high-quality review. Reputation Management Services from Iceberg Web Design can gather all of the web reviews into one place. You can use these reviews on your website and respond (which you should always do when someone reviews your business or product). To learn more, give us a call or fill out our convenient contact form.

[1] Neidlinger, Julie. “10 Reasons You Should Be Using Blog Comments.” CoSchedule Blog, 26 Jan. 2017, coschedule.com/blog/blog-comments/.

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Google Search Indexing

Kari Sletten — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 16:09:32 +0000

Why Isn’t My Website Showing Up on Google?

This is a question we frequently get asked after launching a new website. To answer this question, let’s dig into how Google search indexing works and how websites interact with search engines.

The Search Index

A search index is basically a catalogue of all the websites that are on the internet. It is a giant database containing information about a website such as a website’s address (also known as the domain or URL), number of pages, page titles, page descriptions, and plenty of other information.

When you type a search into a search engine (such as Google), the search engine references this giant database and returns a list of results. So, for your website to be included in the list of search results, your website needs to be “indexed” or added to the search engine’s database.

Web Crawlers

All major search engines have a program (called a bot) that “crawls” the internet and looks for new websites, or changes to websites and uses that information to add to or update its search index. Googlebot is the name of Google’s crawler, and it runs around automatically scanning websites. As a website owner or a website developer, you have no control over these bots’ programming and how often they interact with your site. The only thing you have control over is the messages you put on your website for these bots.

The Robots.txt File

We can send messages to these bots such as “Please don’t crawl my site!” or “Yes! I want to be in your index!” To do this, we use a text file, named robots.txt. At Iceberg, while we are developing a website, we change this file to say, “Please don’t crawl my site,” because we don’t want any of the in-progress content to get indexed.

Once the website has been launched, we change this file to say, “Yes! I want to be indexed!”

WordPress allows for easy changes to this file by using a checkbox that says, “Discourage search engines from indexing this site.” If the box is checked, the robots.txt file is edited to disallow search engines from scanning the site. It is up to the search engines to honor this request (most do).

When the box is unchecked, the file says allow, and the site is open for indexing. The next time a bot scans the site it will index it.

But I Don’t Want to Wait!

You may be wondering how to speed up the process of getting your site found by a bot. Unfortunately, we are at the mercy of the crawling program, in addition to the number of machines throughout the internet that are running the bot simultaneously. With some search engines, you can tell them, “Hey! Look over here! I have a new site I want to be indexed!”

Google Search Console is a tool that lets you measure and monitor your website’s presence in Google’s search index. When you connect your website to Google Search Console, you can use it to submit a sitemap and request indexing. At Iceberg, when we launch a new website, part of our process includes editing the robots.txt file, connecting the site to Search Console, and requesting indexing. If you are anxious for your new website to show up at the top of search results immediately, most search engines will allow you to purchase advertising.

If you want to maximize your presence in search engines, that’s where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in. SEO can be done directly on your website, through technical enhancements, speed and image optimization, and keyword-rich content generation. SEO can also be performed off site, by utilizing third party websites to drive traffic to your business, such as social media and online directories. Iceberg offers a number of SEO services aimed at increasing your website’s visibility.

To learn more about ways you can help your website show up higher on search result lists, or about the difference between search engine advertising and search engine optimization, give us a call at 763-350-8762.

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How Your Website Code Influences Your Search Ranking

iceberg — Mon, 17 Feb 2020 15:35:07 +0000

Anyone with a website has heard the term, “search engine optimization” (SEO). But how do you achieve it for your site? There are many things that go into making your site appealing to readers and the bots that crawl the web, indexing relevant pages and ranking them for Google and other search engines. Have you ever considered how your website code influences your search ranking?

If you own a website, you probably view SEO as a way to influence your search ranking. At the same time, search engines like Google prioritize the experience of the user. That’s the goal of the various factors they look at as they rank pages. If you keep that in mind, the way that website code influences your search ranking will make a lot more sense.

What is Website Code?

Code is the set of building blocks that make up a web page. Have you ever looked closely at the code that makes up your favorite websites? All you have to do is go to a page, right-click on the page in an area where there is no image. Then, click on “view page source” in the dropdown menu. Go ahead and try it now. To most people, it would look pretty complex. Let’s examine a few components of this code to see how they influence your search ranking.

Title Tags

If you walked into a library and none of the books had titles, it would be a terrible experience trying to find what you were looking for. Likewise, if they did have titles, but the titles didn’t accurately reflect the contents of the book, it would be frustrating. You would likely go to a different library.

Just as titles are essential to books, HTML titles are essential to your web pages. They’re the most important HTML signal that search engines use to understand what a page is about. Bad titles on your pages are like having bad book titles. The keywords in your title tag should reflect the content of your web page. If the content of your title tag is deceptive to users (intentionally or simply due to poor website coding), Google will penalize your page in its search ranking. It is so important to search engines that pages are accurate and descriptive, that if they aren’t, Google will change them.

Meta Descriptions

The same keywords or phrases you include in your title tag should be in your meta description. If you are coding your own website, start the text with and end with . This tells search engines the topic and keyword that your web page is about.

Honest and unique Meta descriptions for each page on your site are a must. If readers go to your site based on the description, but then what they find doesn’t match, it will have a negative effect on the user experience.

The Meta description is a lot like the synopsis on the back of a book. The title tag is the heading, and the Meta description describes the content. Just like the limited space on the back of a book cover, your Meta description (which includes your target keywords) should be 160 characters or less.

How does a Meta Description influence your search ranking?

A skillfully written Meta description will help you rank well on Google, but it will also sell and encourage readers to “click” on it when it shows up on a search engine result page (SERP) with the keywords the user searched for in bold, catching the user’s eye. Both can result in additional clicks to your site.

It’s important to understand that having a Meta description tag doesn’t guarantee that your description will actually get used. While having made it more likely that what you prefer will appear, search engines may create a different description based on what they believe is most relevant for a particular query.

Header Tags <— (This is a Header Tag)

Header Tags help readers navigate your content more easily. For example, you would give the main headline an H1 tag. Relevant subheadings follow with an H2 tag. They identify key sections of a web page, reflecting the logical structure (or outline) of a page. Including keywords in your header tags gives search engines a clue regarding what a page is about. This can increase the chance of appearing in searches for those words.

Links

Links are essential for SEO. Together with XML sitemaps, they help search engine crawlers locate and index web pages. The following guidelines will help you create links that are more search engine friendly:

They contain the keywords you want users to follow.
They should be blue (and underlined)—these act as visual cues to the user that the text is a link. Without this formatting practice, it will be difficult for the user to recognize and click on links.
Avoid making links all uppercase or lowercase characters
Don’t give generic instructions within your links such as “more”, “read more”, “click here” and “learn more.” Users identify and understand links and therefore it is not necessary to tell users to click them.
Set up cross-links internally and from other websites.

The Need for Speed

Users typically spend between 10 and 20 seconds on a web page unless the content grabs their attention. Now imagine how quickly users will leave a web page if that content takes very long to load!

https://storage.googleapis.com/twg-content/original_images/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks-01-01-download.jpg

Faster sites create happy users and speed is becoming more important to users every year. Google has even started including site speed in web search ranking. This is a crucial way in which website code influences your search ranking.

Larger files created when JavaScript (JS) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) embed code in HTML files, make them slower to load. It can help to externalize the JS and CSS files and fetch the code whenever required. Compressing these files will make them smaller and thus faster to fetch.

Check out what a couple of Google webmasters have to say about the concept of speed on #askgooglewebmasters

How your website code influences your search ranking is complicated

If you want to increase your search ranking, contact the professionals at Iceberg Web Design. They have the experience and knowledge needed to take your website to the next level.

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Ramp Up Your Online Marketing in the New Year

Chelsi Johnson — Wed, 02 Jan 2019 15:00:37 +0000

If you are a business owner, you have probably heard about Google Ads and PPC advertising. However, the question of how beneficial Google Ads really is for business remains for many. Before diving into the benefits, it’s best to understand the company of Google as a whole. Google is the top search engine across the globe. They are constantly updating and improving their technologies and provide unmatched employment opportunities. Further, out of all the search engines, Google has proven to be the most useful for providing the best sources when individuals are searching for information, products and/or services.

All in all, a huge portion of business’ marketing efforts are moving online meaning its best to take advantage of Google’s services sooner rather than later to stay competitive.

Easily Measure Your Online Marketing Efforts

One of the hardest parts about marketing is measuring what efforts are working and what is not. For example, it is difficult to measure how successful a television ad was without physically asking each customer, “did you find out about our product/service from our TV ad?” Even social media renders some difficulties when measuring conversions and ROI. On the other hand, Google Ads is extremely transparent when it comes to measuring your PPC efforts. They offer a variety of metrics that allow you to break down each effort on a fine level, which ultimately allows you to see what is draining or increasing ROI.

Reach Your Ideal Market

If you have done any sort of advertising online, you are probably familiar with demographic targeting, location targeting, exclusions, etc. These metrics are all great when trying to reach a specific audience but imagine being able to narrow those metrics even further. Depending on your ideal client, Google allows you to target individuals based on the time of day, the type of device they are using, their exact location and even their income. Further, you can utilize remarketing which allows you to target people who have already visited your website. This uses cookies and will show your ads to people whenever they are surfing a website that partners with Google. Seeing your ad will keep your brand on the top of their mind and could possibly result in a phone call, purchase or any other conversion you deem important.

Your Competitors Are Using Google Ads

According to Google, the Display Network reaches over 90% of the internet. That translates into 2 million websites that your ads could be displayed on! Therefore, it’s safe to assume most companies, including your competitors, know this and is using Google ads. Initially, Google Ads can seem intimidating but broken down, it’s actually pretty simple. All you need is a stellar landing page, high-quality ads and a great bidding strategy! Monitor closely and adjust metrics during the first few weeks of the campaign but after that, just let the ads take their course and expect results.

Want to See Results Using Google Ads?

Iceberg Web Design is proud to be providing Google Ads Management Services now! Adding three new employees in the past year, we are fully equipped to help increase conversions and website traffic with our online marketing services. Call today for a free consultation!

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Have You Claimed Your Google Listing Yet?

iceberg — Mon, 16 Apr 2018 15:37:08 +0000

“I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more of it I seem to have.”

-Coleman Cox

You work hard to have a successful business. Now it’s time to let Google My Business work hard for you. When you search for your business on Google, does your listing show up on the Google map view? Do you have stars under your name? Are your hours listed? These are all features of your Google My Business listing, and if you haven’t claimed yours you aren’t taking advantage of one of the most powerful free tools to business owners.

What is Google My Business?

Google My Business, or GMB, is essential for every business owner. It is a free tool that allows you to manage your business information across Google, and help you appear in local search results. You can take advantage of this free tool to expand their business presence and interact with customers. Let me give you an example of why GMB is so valuable.

Perhaps you’re driving past a stripmall that has the exact shop you have been searching for. You tell yourself you will find time to contact them later, but you forgot the name of the business. The solution is to Google businesses in that area, and if the business has a GMB listing, you will be provided with all of its contact information, hours and reviews, right in your search results page.

Likewise, your potential clients will have a much easier time finding you when you are listed as a legitimate business on Google. All you have to do is sign into your account on Google, verify your business name and address, and follow the prompts.

What is a Google Listing?

A listing is what appears when potential customers are searching for your business. It is where customers can find all your business contact information in one place. Your GMB Listing will show:

Business name
Address or Service Area
Phone number
Business Hours
Photos
Reviews
Link to your website

What Is New With Google My Business?

These are new features that have been recently added to optimize your GMB listing.

New menu editor to support service menus
Google has added the ability for businesses to add service menus to their listing. This includes not just restaurant owners, which they added a few months ago, but more service businesses, from plumbers to florists to health and beauty, and even web developers.

Google My Business Posts
Miniature ads in which you can add an image or an event among other things. These are becoming more popular with businesses in recent years. It is mainly used to share information such as products, special offers, events, and announcements.

Booking Button Feature
People can now book an appointment directly from your Google My Business listing.

Messaging Feature
“Message with customers” feature is only available in select countries, it is fully rolled out in the United States. This feature allows you to answer questions directly about your business, and message with your customers.

How Can We Help You?

At Iceberg Web Design we believe in luck, and love what we do. We also work hard to provide our clients with outstanding customer service and frequently discuss popular topics such as GMB on our blog. See our previous post on GMB, Google My Business Demystified.

Contact us today to see how we can help you every step of the way to develop a website that will bring your business to the next level!

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Google Analytics Update: Data Retention Controls

Jessi Gurr — Thu, 12 Apr 2018 17:15:01 +0000

If you are an administrator on a Google Analytics account, you received an email from Google on April 11th about an update required to meet the requirements of the GDPR, a new data protection law that takes effect on May 25, 2018.

A number of our customers have been calling with questions about this update. The email from Google states:

Product Updates

Today we introduced granular data retention controls that allow you to manage how long your user and event data is held on our servers. Starting May 25, 2018, user and event data will be retained according to these settings; Google Analytics will automatically delete user and event data that is older than the retention period you select. Note that these settings will not affect reports based on aggregated data.

Action: Please review these data retention settings and modify as needed.

General Data Protection Regulation

This update follows stronger regulation for protecting personal data in the European Union. In a nutshell, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulation requiring businesses to protect the privacy and personal data of EU citizens. The GDPR also regulates how data can be exported out of the European Union. Failure to comply with this regulation could lead to lawsuits, and could be detrimental to businesses.

Companies like Constant Contact and MailChimp are informing customers of this regulation, and are preparing themselves to handle the new EU privacy protection rules.

My Business is in The United States. Why Does This EU Policy Apply to Me?

If you have a public website, or manage an email newsletter, chances are that you are not only receiving website traffic and email signups from people in the United States. The GDPR protects all EU citizens, and if there is a chance that your business is reaching them, you need to comply with these policy updates.

Google Analytics is a platform that collects a myriad of information about website visitors: location, age, gender, occupation, and more (depending on each individual’s Google Privacy settings). Even though your business targets customers in the United States, you likely have a visitor or two coming to your website from other countries. These users may opt in to your newsletter, or they may register to view content on your website, or they may submit a contact form. You need to make sure that your business is handling this information appropriately.

One thing is for sure: Google tracks those visitors, and passes their information on to you in Google Analytics.

So, What Changed, And What Do I Need to Do?

In your Google Analytics Administration, you now have the option to control how long you keep data about your website visitors. You can access this setting in your Google Analytics Property Administration section. Here is a screenshot of what your Admin view should look like, and where to click to edit your data retention length:

Here, you will have the option to choose how long you would like Google Analytics to retain information about your website visitors:

It appears that the default setting is to save user data for 26 months. If you do nothing, Analytics data about your users will likely be removed after 26 months.

Do I Need to Do Anything Else?

In general, we strongly recommend that your website includes a Privacy Policy, so that your website visitors know exactly how much information you collect about them, how you obtain that data, and what you do with it. You can view our Privacy Policy for an example of what this may look like.

If your website includes e-commerce, online forums, or memberships, we strongly recommend that you consult with your business attorney to ensure that the privacy policy on your website is adequate, and that you are doing everything in your power to ensure that information your business collects about website visitors remains secure.

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What is Mobile First Indexing?

iceberg — Fri, 06 Apr 2018 16:34:12 +0000

Google is Starting to Migrate Sites That Follow the Best Practices to Mobile First Indexing.

What this means is that your mobile version of your website will be the origin point for their index database, as well as the baseline for how they determine rankings.

Google’s ranking system, indexing and crawling systems all formerly used the desktop versions of websites when ranking websites. With the increase in mobile traffic, which has surpassed desktop traffic, has led Google to recognize mobile users as their primary visitors. The new indexing will provide better results for mobile users and desktop users. The mobile version of your site will now be considered the primary version of your site.

This Does Not Represent a Change in How Google is Regarding Your Content

Up until now your desktop version has been considered the “primary version” of your site and the mobile version an “alternate” version. This is just the start of a transition in how Google is prioritizing the way they will index your website.

Google also explains that it will have one index for search results, not a mobile-first index that’s separate from its main index. In other words, it will start to look to the mobile web pages to index the web, not the desktop version.

It is about how they go about crawling and indexing the web. Before, they crawled and indexed the web as a desktop browser would see the web page. Now with this change, Google is crawling and indexing the web as a mobile browser would see the web page.
Here’s what the official post from Google Webmasters has to say about the mobile-first index. (https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/11/mobile-first-indexing)

“To make our results more useful, we’ve begun experiments to make our index mobile-first. Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results. Of course, while our index will be built from mobile documents, we’re going to continue to build a great search experience for all users, whether they come from mobile or desktop devices.”

Mobile Users are Pushing the Change to Mobile-First Indexing

This change to mobile first indexing is primarily driven by the increase in mobile traffic over the years. Mobile is far outpacing desktop as the number one method of searching.

Google is referring to this as “primarily mobile” that the majority of people who use Google search today now do so from mobile devices, and have done so since 2015. Mobile-friendliness has long been one of the many factors in determining how a site is ranked, but it’s not the only factor. For example, there are times when a non-mobile-friendly page still has the best information and will appear higher, Google says.

Google has begun to prioritize mobile sites in several ways. For example, it began to boost the rank of mobile-friendly sites on mobile search results back in 2015, and more recently said it was adding a signal that uses page speed to help determine a page’s mobile search ranking. Starting in July 2018, slow-loading content will be down ranked.

While Google today claims the mobile-friendly indexing won’t directly impact how content is ranked, it does note that having a site’s mobile-friendly content indexed in this new fashion will likely help the site “perform better” in mobile search results.

Is the Mobile-First Index Live and Affecting My Site Now?

Google has been experimenting with mobile first indexing on a small number of sites which were selected based on perceived “readiness”. A wider rollout will take much longer. In June 2017, Gary Illyes stated that it will probably take a few years before “we reach an index that is only mobile-first.” Google reassured site owners who are not included in this rollout that rankings would not be affected and that sites which only have desktop content would still be indexed.

“Sites that are not in this initial wave don’t need to panic. Mobile-first indexing is about how we gather content, not about how content is ranked. Content gathered by mobile-first indexing has no ranking advantage over mobile content that’s not yet gathered this way or desktop content. Moreover, if you only have desktop content, you will continue to be represented in our index.”

However, the push towards mobile-friendly sites continues with Google noting that mobile-friendly content can perform better, and that slow loading content will be a ranking factor for mobile searches from July 2018 on.

Is Mobile-First Indexing Adding Mobile Pages to a Separate Mobile Index?

With mobile-first indexing, there is only one search index (the same one Google uses now). The change to mobile-first indexing does not generate a new “mobile-first” index, nor is it creating a separate “mobile index” with a “desktop index” remaining active. Instead, it simply changes how content is added to the existing index.

So What Does This Mean for You?

You Might Have to Make Some Changes to Your Website if You Want to Continue to Rank Well Into the Future.

If your website is responsive and both the mobile version and desktop are identical, you might not have to do anything. However, you want to make sure that your website is both mobile responsive and has content that is mobile-friendly. Meaning that your users are having the same great content experience across all devices. This will help you rank well on both mobile and desktop. It follows from a mobile-first indexing standpoint that your content should be produced with mobile-first users in mind. Google has already prioritized mobile-friendly content, and this official indexing move is just making it more official.

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Google My Business Demystified

Kari Sletten — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 17:56:01 +0000

Recently, we talked about what your online presence is and why it is important to your company. We also gave you our Top 5 Tips for Generating Leads with Social Media. In this blog post we are going to demystify Google My Business.

What is Google My Business?

Have you ever wondered why some businesses show up in a Google search with 5 stars and their hours listed, and yours does not? That information comes from your Google My Business profile. Google My Business (GMB) is a free tool used to manage all your company information with Google, including Search and Maps. This is vital to your organization, because 64% of online searches come through Google ₍₁₎, and over a third of mobile searches are related to location ₍₂₎. Other significant features of GMB include collecting and responding to reviews and tools to help you see how customers are finding your business. Ultimately, you get to control how customers see your information on Google searches and in Google maps.

Let’s get started!

There are two ways to get started with GMB: by claiming ownership of a business, or by adding your business.

Here’s a great video that covers the steps to get started:

Getting the most benefit from your listing

Whether you are just getting started or have already claimed your listing, there are many different tools you can use to manage your business information and help potential customers find your business. Here’s a list of some the most important things you should do.

Four Ways to Optimize Your Google My Business Listing

1. Add Your Hours and Phone Number

The number listed in your GMB profile absolutely needs to be a local phone number, and should match the phone number listed on the landing page your account links to. You will also want to make sure your business hours stay up-to-date. You can enter holiday hours or other changes to your regular hours in advance and they will be displayed to users as those days approach. If you don’t provide special hours for regular holidays, users on Maps and Search will be warned that the location’s hours may differ on designated holidays. You should therefore supply hours explicitly for these days even if the special hours are the same as your regular hours to ensure that users know that your hours are up-to-date.

2. Update Your Business Details

Select the most specific category for your business that you can. You may also want to include other details such as whether you accept credit cards or a special offer you have for new customers.

3. Add Business Images

Add images to show the interior and exterior of your business, photos of your products or services, and your team members. Remember from our previous email that it is important to use your branding information consistently across your entire online footprint. Another tip: use photos that show different people in the spaces. Empty business rooms may give the impression that no one uses your business! Even if you are using your phone, make sure you use high quality photos with good lighting, after all it is your brand.

4. Review Insights

GMB has useful tools for analyzing how people find your business listing online. Insights focus on how customers use Search and Maps to find your listing, and what they do once they find it.

Still need help?

We offer a variety of website and SEO services. Call Shane at 763-350-8762 to schedule your consultation and get started.

Stay tuned! The next blog posts in this series will discuss:

₍₁₎ Explicit Core Search Share Report by ComScore, 2015

₍₂₎ Google’s Performance Summit, 2016

The post Google My Business Demystified appeared first on Iceberg Web Design.

Google Analytics

Shane Bader — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 21:36:58 +0000

Driving new business is a must for any company that is serious about their online presence. Consistently getting qualified leads, phone calls and walk-ins is a great indicator of the health of your website, but it is important to dig deeper. The industry standard to analyzing your company’s website is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free web analytics service that provides statistics and basic analytical tools for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and marketing purposes. The service is available for anyone with a Google account. It’s a tool that can guide you to finding the weakness and strength of your company’s website.

With Google Analytics you can see your most important analytics data first, like bounce rate or new visitors. Other information you can easily access:

Find out which online traffic campaigns bring the most traffic and conversions.

Determine where your best visitors are located and what platform they are using.
Learn what people are searching for on your site and what pages they spend the most time on.
Visualize what visitors click on the most.
See what content your visitors are the most interested in.
Identify weakness such as poor performing pages.
Determine at what point people abandon online purchases/shopping cart or when they leave filling out a contact form.
Analyze your performance in online searches and navigation.
Plus many more features that dive into your website while allow you to optimizing the performance of your online presence.

Whether you decide to outsource the use of Google Analytics or dedicate somebody internally, it is important to know the basic uses of the platform. Each time you log in you will see a basic overview of your audience. There are many different types of reports that you can pull to see what the strengths and weakness are of your website. Reports like the number of visitors from each country, state and city. From there, what time visitors are searching, what browser they are searching on and what page is landed on the most. For instance, Iceberg Web Design can see how many visitors search and click on our home page in relation to how many times they land on our services page. By digging deeper we can try different layouts to engage people who are seriously interested in our services.

Some of the different reports include:

Audience reports

These reports focus on everything you need to know about your visitors. You can find details about demographics, location, behavior, technology and mobile use.

Acquisition reports

These reports tell you everything about what drove your visitors to your website. This includes what channels they came from and specific sources.

Behavior reports

These reports focus on the effectiveness of your content. You can see top pages on your website and the top entry pages. This will give you an idea of what content is giving the most effective piece of information. It also lets you know where visitors are exiting the website.

Conversions

As mentioned early you can set up goals within Google Analytics to track the conversions your website has received. By measuring conversions you can get a great understanding of the overall performance while analyzing and fixing weakness.

Using Google Analytics is a key component to getting the most of your online presence and marketing as a whole. Without diving into the numbers you are working mostly with opinion and it is impossible to develop a calculated approach. The numbers don’t lie and neither should you about the realistic performance of your website. Digging into what is and is not working on your web marketing and website will allow your business to be the most efficient in where to spend its marketing dollars.

The post Google Analytics appeared first on Iceberg Web Design.