Meaningful analytic benchmarks and insights for 100+ websites?
-
Hey all!
I work for an association that has over 100+ member businesses. These businesses are dispersed through out North America and each have their own website, totally independent of each other in look, feel, functionality, etc.. While most of these businesses offer the same core businesses such as a gym, summer camp and preschool, none of the website structures, calls to actions, etc. are the same. I have a feeling that there could be some interesting and meaningful analytics that I could pull together if I had access to all their Google Analytics accounts, but I'm not quite sure what they would be. Some ideas I have -
1 - Percentage of traffic from social media - will give insight as to which businesses in the association are using social successfully.
2 - New vs. Returning traffic - a high percentage of returning traffic might be indicative of more useful websites.
3 - Mobile usage - How mobile savvy are the customers of different businesses in the association.
Any other analytics (and quite frankly, more meaningful/impactful than the ones I posted above) that you guys can think of?
Thanks for your help!
Chris
-
Great insights and suggestions - thanks for replying!
I'm hung up on the different size markets as well. Our association has sorted the 100+ businesses into different size brackets, but those are based on revenue as opposed to size of city (although there is definitely a correlation.)
Analytics like bounce rate though would be a benchmark regardless of the demo/size of the business' location.
-
In addition to what you said, I would also get:
-
unique visitors by time period x
-
possibly geographic area of visitors
-
bounce rate
-
time of day that visitors visit
I would then take all those metrics and then compare them among similar businesses, then similar businesses in similar sized markets and see what raw differences you can see. One of the problems which you would need to overcome is the difference in markets (both in size, preferences, etc). There are local differences which would need to be accounted for if you were to be able to have actionable items. Another challenge would be that every site is probably targeting different keywords to different cities and targeted demographics. That is another thing that you would need to normalize for. Also, each site is probably running on different platforms, etc so you would need to try to think about that aspect of the data because it would introduce noise into the data.
If you had the data, you may want to look into something called Multiple discriminate analysis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discriminant_analysis due to how many variables you are going to have. If you cannot do it yourself, there are statisticians out there who could help you set up the data in the right way. They are not cheap though...
-
-
DJ123,
I guess that is the question I am asking. If given the opportunity to have all that data, what kind of meaningful insights could I get from it? Ultimately I want to be able to report back to the members of my association and tell them how to make their websites better. Sorry for the vague response, but I ultimately want to know is it worth the time to collect all the data and if I do, what are some meaningful things I could do with it.
Thanks!
Chris
-
What would the goal be if you had all the data you wanted?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
No UTM codes, How do you track in Google Analytics?
I see that Moz recommends not to use UTM codes as some directories will not allow a listing with a UTM code. I like to use tracking codes for my Google My Business (GMB) links so I can differentiate traffic/conversions from organic/google. Does anyone have a solution to measure the two in Google Analytics?
Local SEO | | RichardDantas0 -
2 Websites Targeting Similar Keywords
One of my clients is set on setting up another website targeting some of the keywords/services on the main site. One of the services they offer gets traffic from natural search and also Adwords but doesn't convert well for this service. For other services (which are often utilized at the same time by the customers) the site converts well. My client feels that... "people are not converting on the main site because they click on the page and realise that we are a wider company. From this they probably work out that we don’t actually produce Green Widgets and we just buy them in. Therefore we will be more expensive than a company who does manufacture Green Widgets (although there are only a few in the country who actually make them)." The new site "...will have more of a manufacturer and specialist feel. There will be a small mention of other services. People visiting will think we are specialists and that we make them, whereas at the moment they may feel that they are just being cross sold a product. We have also noticed that we are not being found earlier enough and we are contacted to do other work only to find that another company is providing the Green Widgets." I did something similar back in the day, but here we ran a local website and a national website covering the same products. We tried hard not to duplicate the keywords we targeted minimising this as much as possible. I don't think we cared much about the local site as the national one went crazy busy. In essence, my client wants to do the following: Main Site...
Local SEO | | GrouchyKids
Blue Widgets Bristol
Red Widgets Bristol
Green Widgets Bristol (This would be retained) New Site...
The new site would focus on Green Widgets In time the new site would include content for...
Green Widgets
Green Widgets Bristol (As per the main site)
Green Widgets Cardiff It would also make mention of Blue Widgets and Red Widgets as possible addons. The new site would be at the same address but have its own companies house registration, emails and phone numbers. My feeling is that we should take an above-board, risk-free approach and remove the Green Widgets service from the main site to ensure it doesn't upset Google. In other words go out of our way to minimise targeting of similar/same keywords across the 2 sites. My client strongly disagrees showing evidence of others using similar tactics (we have had the EMD debate as well). I am also concerned about Google Places and how this might be viewed here. Opinions please, also any idea of what if any action Google would take if we push forwards?0 -
If I kill off the franchisee websites and create a corp SEO monster...will my Company's SEO suffer? Pros and Cons?
Our 25 franchisees sell one product of our 7 within the Corporate porfolio. We getting ready to release a brand new corp website employing all the best possible SEO practices. Since the franchisee's barely maintain their 3-page website...we are thinking of killing them off. We will create some market pages on the Corp side and continue to use HubSpot to pass along leads to the individual franchisees. Corporate has robust Content Marketing strategy in place. Any suggestions? Cases studies?
Local SEO | | Joseph.Lusso0 -
Local SEO Website Structure.
Hi everyone, This might be quite a long post so please bear with me. I am currently rebuilding my website. My previous website was built by a web designer and was very basic. 5 page html site consisting of home, services, gallery, testimonials, contact pages. None of them were great - thin content, not optimised as well as could be - no h1's etc. To be fair I knew nothing about websites and didn't bother much with the site. As a new business I used it simply as a place for people to visit for more information after receiving a leaflet and never bothered much about driving traffic to the site. A few years down the line and I have realised I need the website to be working for me as opposed to alongside me. I am building it myself via wordpress as web designer didn't want to work in wordpress. I have done my keyword research and I'm working on pages as we speak. Previously my homepage - around 80% of visitors landed here for my main keyword (driveway cleaning glasgow) as it was number 6 in the organic listing. With my services page appearing directly underneath in 7 for the same keyword. I have starting building a new page for that keyword which contains (driveway-cleaning-glasgow) in the url. I have 301'd my previous services page to this url. Now for my questions...
Local SEO | | sfrediktru8
My 2nd keyword based on volume is driveway cleaning. How do I optimise for this or will the (driveway-cleaning-glasgow) page rank for this also as the words are contained within this page? I plan on having the same structure for the remaining services - pressure-washing-glasgow, monoblock-cleaning-glasgow etc, etc. As I am building new pages for each service with location built in, where does this leave my homepage? Should I be targeting keywords for this page? It is still my strongest page and apart from the (driveway-cleaning-glasgow) page which will get some help from the 301 these are all new pages so I would expect perhaps initially to lose some traffic. But as I am not ranking well for anything other than the main 2 keywords mentioned above it can only be beneficial long term when google recognises the specific pages for each service. And when I start using Adwords I will have a specific landing page for each service. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks0 -
Suggestion "How can I improve my website"
Hi Folks , I'm trying to help my friend , I need your suggestion. I gathered all the data , Please find the attachment , our spam score is 5 as compared with competitors 0 root domain 0 total links 1.)How can we increase the page authority ? 2.)Should i buy more backlinks ? Which website you will recommend me ? 3.) How can i reduce my spam score to 0 or 1 ? I'm not sure about the links which are attached to my website? However, I read in moz article it could be because large domain and few links. It doesn't show any thing on open site explorer. It looks like we haven't discovered link data for this site or URL. We are running google ads , Facebooks ads and twitter. MpYq1
Local SEO | | hemantt0 -
Benefits of "Buffer Websites" Marketing for Real Estate Firm.
A local seo firm has approached us and mentioned that we should incorporate something called buffer websites into our SEO. I work with a Houston based real estate agency that sells single family homes. In a nut shell they suggested that we create 5-10 separate standalone websites that each have 40-50 pages of unique copy for specific targeted keywords of our choosing. The idea would by that all these websites and copy would all point back to our main website and help generate substantial traffic. This concepts seems to have been a couple years ago and now sure if we should go this route. Would we be better off just building unique copy on the main site and not focus on the 5-10 websites we would need to deal with? C
Local SEO | | RETEX0 -
How to remove countries viewing my website
Hi All, I operate from the UK only. How can I exclude select countries from viewing both my organic website and Google Adwords listing. Organic Website
Local SEO | | Mark_Ch
Are the any free online services that give you a simple click + download/view script to cut & paste into a .htaccess file. Google Adwords
Ditto as above with the exception to paste the IP list into Campaign | Setting Tab | Advanced settings - IP exclusions Thanks Mark0