Update: Watch Video Below!

Below is information on what we learned.  Check back on Monday to see the video of the event in its entirety.

1.     It’s easy, 5-minutes easy, to setup Google Analytics – As John Shiple mentioned…it’s easier than going to your local café and ordering coffee.  Many content management sites such as WordPress and Blogger make it so easy to track the behavior of your visitors by allowing you to copy + paste a tracking code in the headers or footers of your site.  You’ll be collecting analytics data in no time!

2.    Having the Right Goals in Mind – Many people focus their energy towards driving large volumes of traffic to their site, which is great, but what you do with that traffic is even more important.  Is your bounce rate high? Are you experiencing a drop-off on certain pages? Google Analytics tracks all that.  By making your conversion goals more deliberate and spelled out such as “collect an email”, “add an item to shopping cart”, “spend X dollars to buy my product”, and “confirm sale” , you greatly improve your metrics  and are more enabled to make more informed decisions to improve your company’s online marketing campaign and overall bottom line.

3.    Tracking Inbound Traffic – Learning where your traffic came from and how they got there is just as important as what they do once on your site. So make sure you code your links to be human-readable.  Use us for example; we over here at Highly Relevant like to comment often on interesting social media blogs found on Mashable as well as other blogs regarding online reputation management. In this case, of commenting on Mashable we would use the http://www.highlyrelevant.com/social-media-marketing.html as s opposed to http://www.highlyrelevant.com/online-reputation-management.html.

This helps online users on Mashable know we are part of the social media community plus it also helps us determine where most of our traffic is coming from – social media blogs or online reputation management blogs.

4.     Need Help? Don’t fret.  GA help is Everywhere – The panel members provided the following resources:

• Avinash Kaushik – the GURU of Google Analytics has a blog on the subject:  Click Here.
• Google’s Conversion University has a bunch of training guides.  Here’s the link:  http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/
• Google Analytics works within Facebook.  See this link:  http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2010/google-analytics-for-facebook-fan-pages/

5.    Creating Funnels –Funnels are great (and illustrative) tools for building the steps towards your company’s goal.  They also show you how to identify your user drop-off rate at each step.  Essentially, if there’s drop-off for every step you will want to limit and simplify the number of then in order to successfully convert into sales.

A special shout-out to the very informative speakers– You guys were great!

Check them out on twitter to see what other projects they are working or if you have any questions.

Serena (Host): @serena
Erica: @SnowboardWomen
Alex: @aybecker
Andrew:@andrewhahn
John: @FreelanceCTO

Are your tweets not helping your company’s bottom line?

Fortunately,  Alex Becker, Co-Founder & President of Highly Relevant and panel member of Social Media Club Los Angeles, along with a few of his friends want to help you take your online media strategy to new levels.

Join us on Tuesday, February 23^rd from 7-9:30 pm as we jump head-first into one of easiest ways to measure online social media efforts—yup, Google Analytics.

Location: Mahalo (902 Colorado Avenue in Santa Monica, CA)

Buy Your Ticket Here!!!

Featured Speakers Include:

John Shiple, CTO of Ultralive

[www.linkedin.com/johnshiple]

Known within the industry as General John Shiple is the founder of Startup Army and one of L.A.’s most sought after CTOs.  He’s been making huge waves in the internet world since its birth.  In 1994, he became a founding member of HotWired’s engineering team – the first commercial magazine website on the internet.  He’s had his hands in many other big projects such as redesigning the front-end of GeoCities (then the 4^th largest site on the web) and introducing pop-up ads to the world (yep, that’s his fault but it was and still is kind of a big deal).

Alex Becker, Co-Founder and President of Highly Relevant

[www.linkedin.com/in/alexybecker]

Alex Becker, actively involved in online marketing since 2004, began as an Affiliate and Product Manager for a pair of multi-million dollar affiliate programs while still a student at University of Indiana – Bloomington.  After graduating in 2006, he made the full-time transition to interactive content and became the SEO manager for Spine-Health.com, a position previously occupied by Ben Parr, the current co-editor of Mashable.

Alex teamed up with Rex Freiberger after working with him at DONE! SEO to form Highly Relevant.  For more information on Alex, please check out his Chicago SEO blog.

Erica Forrette, Event Moderator, Online Marketing / E-commerce Expert

[www.linkedin.com/in/ericaforrette]

Erica online has  online marketing experience dating back to 1999. She has experience on the brand side, vendor side and even the agency side.  She currently oversees the online marketing efforts and analytics for Internships.com.    In the past, Erica has worked as a consultant for lead generation and e-commerce site projects, Senior Manager of Online Acquisitions at PacSun.com, Director of Marketing for Adapt Technologies, and the list goes on.  She’s a much achieved online marketing professional and we are very happy to have her as this event’s moderator.

Additional Speakers TBD, including:

Andrew Hahn of Luxury Link and Familygetaway.com

[www.linkedin.com/in/andrewhahn]

Since back links were so important in getting top rankings in Google people soon realized that they could begin spamming blogs and leaving comment link farms on thousands of sites and soar to the top of rankings. Google had a problem, their formula to protect top rankings was misfiring. Change was necessary and came in the form of a “NoFollow” tag.

What is a NoFollow Tag?

A Nofollow tag is a simple piece of code that you put in a link. Here is an example:

This link is passing strength to the Los Angeles SEO page it’s linking to.

This link is NOT passing strength to the Los Angeles SEO page it’s linking to.

Why Do NoFollows Now Matter?

Google originally introduced the nofollow tag to combat spamming and the like. Now, Google, Yahoo & Bing seem to be rewarding websites who are actively commenting on blogs, forums and other web properties that don’t pass strength through these social media links. BUT THEY DO PASS STRENGTH. Social networking profile links, blog comment links and forum signatures now matter — again. The difference is that you need to keep at it and be participating in relevant, authority/industry blogs/forums.

NoFollows Matter: A Case Study

Below is a screen shot that shows Highly Relevant’s top 10 back links. As you can see, 5 out of 10 of the back links are social media blog comments — Including our #1 back link being a blog comment on Chris Brogan’s site.

What do you want your visitors to do when they get to your site? Do you facilitate this effectively and clearly? If you want people to call and schedule appointments, is the number above the fold on the site? Does it pop off the page and make people want to call? If you are looking to capture leads, do you have a lead capture form on every page above the fold? Does the lead form make you want to enter your information and click submit? If the answer is no to these questions, your website probably does not have a clear call to action, hurting your conversion rate.

2) Make it easy for visitors to buy a product (or complete the primary site objective)

Within 3 clicks, visitors should be able to perform a desired action, whether that is purchase a product, fill out a form, or visit a conversion-oriented page, and they should be able to do this from any webpage. Don’t be afraid to clearly direct people to the product or service page you want them to visit.If they want to buy a product or service from you, they want to do so as easily as possible. If people have to click through too many pages before beginning the checkout process, they are more likely to leave your site and take their business elsewhere.

3) Use Trust Logos

If your website does not use trust logos, you are not converting as many visitors as you could be. Take a look at the Petco web site or any other high converting ecommerce websites, and you will see a prominently placed McAfee trust symbol. The implementation of a trust symbol, or simply moving an existing trust symbol above the fold, can have a profound impact on your conversion rate.

4) Proper Packaging

If you are giving away bonuses, free email/phone support, expert documentation, free shipping, discounts for larger orders, or anything that differentiates yourself from the competition, you need to make sure your visitors are aware of these promotions. Make any promotion as clear as possible, especially if it will only last a limited time. Creating urgency can often push a potential sale to an actual purchase.

5) Determine the Value of a Visitor and Conversion

Knowing the average monetary value of a visitor and conversion is vital to running a profitable website. By employing a tracking system such as Google Analytics, you can begin tracking data on the actions your visitors take. This will enable you to focus your search engine optimization strategies on the keywords that deliver the highest converting traffic. With enough data and proper analysis, you will know which products to promote, allowing you to plan future promotions on products that will deliver the best return for your company.

The Power of Conversion

To give you a sense for the power of conversion optimization, let’s consider an e-commerce site that receives 10,000 visitors a month. If your site converts 1% of those visitors, or 100 per month, and 1 conversion averages $50, then your websiteís monthly revenue equals $5,000. Through increasing the conversion rate by 50% from 1% to 1.5%, your website will generate an additional $2,500 in revenue for the company. This slight conversion increase is the equivalent of increasing traffic by 50% for an additional 5,000 visitors per month. This isnít rocket science, but it shows how important conversion optimization can be as part of a companyís broader SEO and Social Media strategy.

The fact that we are able to reduce a clientís search engine marketing costs while making an acceptable profit for ourselves tells us that SEO knowledge is still imperfect and not as widespread as those of us in the internet marketing bubble probably assume. Furthermore, once the SEO campaign is completed, our clients are left with an online asset that will continue to generate traffic and business after our work is done (with the caveat that like all properties, online properties deteriorate over time without proper upkeep).

Inevitably, as more companies embrace SEO and competition increases, the cost differential between SEO and PPC will be reduced. For SEO companies to be able to deliver a return on investment to clients and maintain an acceptable profit margin for themselves, they will have to become more intelligent with their strategies and more efficient with their execution. This will increasingly mean that SEO companies must have expertise not only in SEO but also in social media marketing, web design, and traditional marketing, and be able to deliver synergies between these elements and SEO.

We think the ability to continually deliver comprehensive marketing strategies that achieve tangible returns for clients will determine which SEO companies are able to stay relevant and stay in business.

Below is a case study demonstrating the Rank Leveraging process we used for www.blankspaces.com.

Step 1: Determine which keyword you should target Through an analysis of site traffic (in this case, we used Google analytics), we discovered that the keyword phrase ëoffice space los angelesí is both a high volume and high-converting Google search term. By conversion, we mean a visitor who is directed to blankspaces.com through an organic search result and then signs up for a free trial. Because we felt that this search term could deliver a high number of converting visitors to the website, we decided to utilize rank leveraging for this keyword as part of our broader SEO strategy.

Step 2: Use Google query to find the most relevant pages on your site for targeted keyword We performed a Google query for ësite:blankspaces.com office space los angelesí to determine which page we would focus our ranking efforts on and which pages we would utilize for internal linking. On the results page (see image below), the first listing is considered by Google to be the most relevant page on the website for the targeted keyword. The second listing is the second most relevant page and so on. We now know that after the home page, the resources page, press page, map page, and team page are the most relevant pages for “office space los angeles”.

Step 3: Internal linking Armed with this information, the final step is to create links to the top page from the additional pages Google considers to be relevant, making sure to use the anchor text ëoffice space los angelesí for the link. As with all SEO efforts, it could take anywhere from a couple of days to several weeks for rankings to improve for your targeted page. When employed intelligently, however, this tactic enables you to harness the power and relevance of your entire domain to achieve a particularly high page ranking for a targeted keyword.