Single-Page Websites & SEO
Carlton Hoyt
One of the newer trends in website design, which has actually existed for quite a while but is just now becoming more popular and easy to implement, are single-page websites where the content is accessed via anchor links which trigger dynamic scrolling. (In case you’re not sure what I’m talking about you can find a whole website of examples here.) While single-page design can add a lot of character to a life science website and be visually captivating without sacrificing user flow, a single page website almost always sacrifices SEO.
The reason is quite simple: Fewer pages means fewer URLs, fewer page titles, and fewer high-on-page header tags. Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Muller explained on the Google Webmaster Central forum:
Quote from Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Muller
I’d generally recommend a more traditional site format. It’s complicated for search engines to understand a “one-page” site like that, given that there is so much information on a single page. It’s much easier for our algorithms to focus on individual pages with content that matches the same context. Additionally […], it could be extremely confusing to the user to see basically an empty page when they expect to find content based on a search that they’ve made.
John raises another excellent search-related point that addresses a UX flaw in single-page websites. Even if you do manage to optimize for content that is farther down the page, Google doesn’t index anchor links. Therefore, the search results could indicate the page being relevant to the search due to content well below the fold, but a user who clicks the link will land at the top of the page and not at the relevant content.
Does this mean you can’t use all those nifty scrolling effects on your site? Not at all. It’s possible to use the same type of single-page design and the same effects while still having multiple pages – for example by using a static nav bar header with “real” links as opposed to anchor links but making on-page content accessible via anchor tangs with dynamic scrolling. Another solution is to use landing pages to target additional keywords then link back into the dynamically scrolling page(s) – or just capture leads right on the page by leveraging more highly targeted content, which is the purpose of most landing pages. Landing pages are generally not well cross-linked with other site content and are outside the normal site hierarchical structure, however, and therefore often require additional off-site SEO effort to achieve a high rank for competitive terms.
Ultimately, if you want scientists to be able to easily find your products via search engines, it’s probably best to have a traditional site format.
When Search Ads Don’t Work
Carlton Hoyt
Regardless of who you are or what you’re looking for, one of the most common ways to look for products and services is the mighty internet. An unpublished BioBM study found that among life science researchers, 45% will turn to search engines first when looking for a product or service – roughly the same amount as will ask a colleague first – and almost all scientists will perform an internet search at some point in their buying journey. Given the near-ubiquitous prevalence of search as a tool to find products and services, search engine marketing just seems to make logical sense. If you have a product, and someone is looking for that product, then put up an ad, they’ll click on it, and bingo – for a few bucks you’ve targeted a highly relevant member of your target market who is even looking for product information right now! Simple, right? Not always…
There are, in fact, multiple scenarios in which search engine marketing can fail. One of those reasons, however, is a bit more difficult to detect and can actually cost you a lot of money.
eBay Research Labs recently published a study where they set out to determine if brand keyword search ads, in other words keywords that contain the brand name of the company, were worthwhile. Unsurprisingly, they found that such advertising was not effective; in these circumstances people were using Google as a navigational tool and when paid search was turned off, and therefore paid traffic dropped to zero, their organic traffic increased by roughly the same amount.
The much more interesting question that they asked was: “What would happen if we simply turned search advertising off altogether?” The answer to this may seem obvious. If someone searches for “used Gibson Les Paul” (an example they use in the paper) a number of guitar resellers appear in organic search prior to eBay. As this is also the case for many other product-specific terms, eBay’s search ads help direct traffic to eBay when they would otherwise be directed to other sellers / resellers, and thereby increasing eBay’s business. It seems to make logical sense.
eBay wasn’t satisfied with that assumption, however, so they took a sampling of United States geographies and turned off all search ads, leaving search ads in the rest of the country on as a control. What happened to their sales? Largely, nothing. Looking at the sales and advertising data in conjunction with customer data, they found that search advertising is only cost-effective on the least active customers; those whose last eBay purchase was not recent and who made few purchases in the past year. However, eBay is a very popular company and those infrequent purchasers constituted a small percentage of searchers. Therefore, when cost effectiveness was calculated, search advertising had an astonishing -75% ROI. In other words, for every dollar they spent in search advertising, they got back only 25 cents!
Most life science companies, however, as with most companies in general, do not have the kind of brand recognition that eBay does. You probably don’t have to remind scientists that Sigma sells chemicals or that Illumina sells sequencers, but these are the exceptions rather than the rules. So what’s the takeaway for smaller companies? First, while search engine marketing is a fantastic tool and can work wonders for sales or lead generation, we shouldn’t simply expect it to do so. Secondly, testing and analytics are extremely important – not just for search marketing but any advertising campaign and most marketing endeavors. While it may be more difficult to draw accurate conclusions from smaller sample sizes, most of the experiments that eBay ran to test their hypotheses could be done by any company.
SEO: Optimizing Clickthrough
Carlton Hoyt
You’ve seemingly done everything right – you have lots of high-quality backlinks pointing to the relevant page and the page has an optimized title, URL, and header tags. You have well-optimized content and lots of it, and your domain and site have “aged”. You’ve avoided any “black hat” tricks that could get you penalized. So why aren’t your search engine rankings where they should be? It’s not an uncommon problem, and there’s generally only two answers: 1) You’ve underestimated your competition, or 2) Your clickthrough is poor.
If you know a few things about SEO, you probably heard a lot of talk about backlinks and content / page optimization, but those are by no means the only important factors in SEO. Your search results also need to appeal to the scientists that are doing the searching. Think about it: Google is in the business of helping internet users find the content that they’re looking for. People use Google more than other search engines primarily because of the quality of the search results. If a result isn’t being clicked on, then that indicates that it’s less relevant than other results. If it’s less relevant, then it’s in the search engines’ best interest to return a different result for that query that is more relevant and the experience is better for the users.
If you keep a close eye on your Google rankings, for example, you probably noticed that your rankings for some terms will occasionally bounce around a bit. That’s usually Google performing clickthrough testing – seeing if another result would be of more interest to the users.
Optimizing Clickthrough
So what is the life science marketer to do? A few things. First, pay attention to your meta description attribute. While this attribute is not included in Google’s algorithms that determine search ranking, this attribute is generally what will display as the descriptive text under the link in the search results and therefore effects clickthrough. Be sure that’s relevant and interesting. Including language used in the search term will help as well. Secondly, think about what searchers for that term will be looking for and what the page you’re optimizing is offering. Are searchers going to be interested in cell-based assay products but your highest-ranking result is a blog post? Conversely, may they be interested in informational content about pre-clinical toxicology but your result offers it as a service? Perhaps they are looking for stem cell culture protocols but your result is for a white paper. Regardless of the exact reason, you could be significantly impacting your clickthrough if your optimized result is not what the searchers are looking for.
Measuring Clickthrough
Unfortunately, you cannot measure clickthrough in Google Analytics since there is no information provided about impressions. You can, however, use Google Webmaster Tools. The “Search Queries” menu will show you the ballpark number of impressions for any given search term, the average position in search results for that term, and the amount of clicks those impressions led to as well as the CTR (provided you have more than 10 clicks for the given term). Keep in mind that unlike Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools only retains data from the past 90 days, so if you want to keep track of clickthrough long-term you’ll want to export it.
You can do everything right – have high-quality links, well-optimized content, etc. – but if your clickthrough is poor your SEO will suffer. Life science marketers who measure and optimize for clickthrough will be rewarded with higher search rankings.
Website Entry Points & SEO
Carlton Hoyt
Somewhat recently, another life science marketing agency (who shall remain anonymous), wrote that “No one ‘peruses’ websites from the homepage anymore. Sites need to be optimized to have an infinite number of ‘front doors’.” They’re largely correct on the first part – many users today will find your web content via search or other avenues which will lead them to an entry point that is not your homepage. However, the claim that every page should be a “front door” is flat-out wrong. If you’re not controlling the entry points to your website, you need a good dash of … SEO.
SEO, despite its name, isn’t all about simply ranking our website higher in the search engine rankings. Another crucial component of SEO is controlling which one of your website’s pages will show up highest for any given search term. Life science companies need to not only assess what terms they want to optimize for, but what content they want searchers for those terms to find. The best SEO plan is the one that executes on both of these factors.
The most basic tool for life science SEO is the landing page. Landing pages are single web pages that are designed to provide highly targeted content for a particular purpose. In the context of SEO, landing pages are often “one-way” pages designed to be content-rich on a particular topic, pulling in searchers for that term. Targeted audiences might be for a particular type or class of product, researchers using a particular type of sample or organism, or scientists looking to perform a specific type of analysis. Often the content of landing pages is too specific to make sense having on the more general sections of your website, but provide information that is highly relevant to your audience.
Landing pages are just one tool in the life science SEO toolbox, however. There are many other methods to control entry to your website, and not all of them even occur on your own site. For example, there are ways of “donating” SEO from one page to another. There are ways of creating super-effective landing pages outside your main website, then using those to drive traffic back to your site. The list of tools in the toolbox goes on…
Your website is not simply at the mercy of the search engines. Search engine optimization can be used to not only improve search rankings, but also to channel search traffic through specific paths and optimize how viewers interact with your website. Your website is your most important internet marketing tool, and controlling entry points is a key factor in wielding that tool properly.
Google Wants You To Plus
Douglas E. Rogers
In what’s probably half designed to make search results more personalized and half an encouragement for people to use Google+, Google implemented changes to its search algorithms recently. Google+ users who are frequently signed in while performing searches have likely already noticed, but Google+ results and pages that have been +1’d or shared by a connection are now given a massive boost in the search, usually to the front page.
Click the image blow for an example. Note the areas that I’ve highlighted in red, green, and blue, which each indicate different Google+ results.
Say your company sells PCR primers. If you mention PCR primers in your Google+ profile or in a post or other content on Google+, and a scientist that you’re connected to on Google+ searches for PCR primers, your post will almost guaranteedly display near the top of the results (assuming the person doesn’t have lots of other connections also talking about PCR primers). Likewise, based on information that Google compiles about a user, it will have “recommended” connections and content from recommended connections get a similarly high-profile
Of course, this type of simplification ignores the difficulty of growing a following on Google+. Unlike Twitter and more similarly to Facebook, Google+ doesn’t let companies follow people who aren’t following them back. Facebook at least partially makes up for it by allowing you to have high customized pages which you can use to incentivize engagement. Google+ has no such capabilities, so building engagement can be somewhat more difficult.
Another thing about the change is that it places a huge premium on social content – posts, links, videos, images, everything. Have pictures of the team from the last conference? Put it on Google+. Was there a news article about your company or products? Put it on Google+. While you’re at it, write search engine optimized descriptions; just keep in mind that people will read them so don’t go overboard.
With that one change, social media marketing for companies with Google+ went from kind of pointless to extremely worthwhile. Just know that like any social media marketing it’s a slow process with long-term rewards, so be patient, provide good content, and do your best to build your network.
Also, expect that Google will continue to try to integrate Google+ into search, so long as they don’t do anything that creates a massivle backlash. The past few days there have been reports of google asking searchers if they’d like to ask their Google+ connections about their search. Not sure if that particular feature will stick, but it’s certainly an indication of the direction Google’s trying to go…
UPDATE: Between the writing of this and its posting, we noticed another change. Google now integrates social results from your Google contacts. This means that if someone in your gmail contacts or from a synced android phone shared something, it will also show up in the new “personal results” section and receive greater visibility, even if you’re not signed up with Google+. Furthermore, if you have a website listed in your Google or Google+ profile, Google’s search well respond as if you’e shared all pages on the site, even if you haven’t actively done so. The screenshot below is taken from a search where I was signed into Google on an account that does not have a Google+ account.
Microdata & SEO
Carlton Hoyt
As search engines try to provide ever more relevant results to searchers, they continuously change and update the way their crawlers view data as well as the way their search tools display it. With the advent of HTML5 one of the things that has been implemented is microdata. Microdata are metadata-like snippets of HTML code, hidden to a human viewer, that help computers (most importantly search engines) understand semantics and contextual information on a website or individual page. If you’re not up on your HTML or generally aren’t the most web-savvy individual you may find that a bit confusing. Don’t be. I’ll walk you through an example.
Search for a local theater, performing arts center, or something of that nature in Google. Chances are that it’s showing you show times and upcoming shows, a map, when the box office is open, and some other details about it. If not, search for another until you find one where that info is displayed, or just use the one local to us here in Kingston, NY. All that extra information is there because Google a) could find it, and b) believes it to be relevant to your search. What microdata does is provides information to Google and other search engines in a context that they inherently understand such that the information can then be provided to searchers that are looking for it. You want to make sure that when someone searches for you or your products that not only they do find you, but they are given the information that they are looking for but that as much info on your product is displayed as possible. Why? The same reason that General Mills wants supermarkets to carry all the different kinds of cereal that they make and put them at eye level – visibility.
There is a highly relevant eye-tracking study done by SEOmoz that shows, unsurprisingly, that the more content-rich “enhanced” results that show up get a disproportionately high amount of visibility. The more likely someone is to look at your link, the more likely they are to click on it, plain and simple. As search engines find more ways to serve more relevant data, more results will be enhanced, and microdata is a tool for them to do just that.
Bing, Google, and Yahoo have all gotten together recently and published a collection of microdata-providing HTML tags (which they call “schemas”) which they will all recognize. You can find it at schema.org. If you don’t have microdata implemented across your site, don’t panic. Even Google, the most progressive of the major search engines, doesn’t know how to answer most queries with enhanced results. That said, they are all moving in that direction as the internet progresses towards being a semantic web. Jumping on the microdata bandwagon now will make you an early adopter, especially in the life sciences, but over the next years, or possibly even months, you’ll improve your search visibility, and likely your search rankings as well, by allowing search engines a clearer and more accessible view of your data.
Search for Distributors
Carlton Hoyt
I was having a conversation about web design and search engine optimization with a life science tools distributor recently, and he asked me how to target a website to a particular region? This got me thinking about search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) for distributors.
One of the limitations of search is that it is difficult to organically target a website to a region, at least in the life sciences. Search engines recognize some searches as inherently local. Search for “pizza” in Google for example and it will read your IP to determine your location and return local results. Search for electrophoresis gel boxes or Ras1 antibodies, however, and that location-specific context isn’t there. Therefore the simple answer to his question: “How do you target a website for a particular region [using SEO]?” – is that you don’t.
The next logical question: is SEO important to distributors? Often, but not always. If you can do a better job of optimizing for relevant terms than your life science supplier(s), then yes, you should optimize for those terms. It would be far better for a potential customer to find you than find a competing manufacturer or distributor. Likewise, if your country or region’s language(s) are different the language that your suppliers’ websites are written in, then SEO may be important as well since your customers may search in your local language (although newer technical and scientific terms are often the same across languages). If you do not have exclusive distribution rights and are effectively competing with other distributors in overlapping regions, then SEO may be very important. However, if your suppliers are well SEO-optimized, if you have exclusive distribution rights, and if your region speaks the same language as your suppliers’ websites are written in, then SEO is not of particularly great importance. In this scenario, which is actually quite common, you should be able to rely on your suppliers to pass along leads to you and in most situations they should have a listing of distributors directly on their website.
Unlike search engine optimization, search engine marketing can very easily be targeted to a particular region. SEM also allows companies to buy a top spot in the search results even if they are not doing so organically. Distributors often ignore SEM, leaving it to their suppliers, but there is no practical reason to do so. Even if you and your supplier are effectively advertising for the same product, having two listings in the paid advertisements only increases the odds that a searching scientist will click on one of them. If your suppliers are not performing SEM, and especially if their search engine rankings are not very high, you should be using SEM to target scientists in your region and get a placement near the top of the search results. So long as SEM campaigns are well-managed, they should be creating a good ROI and be well worth it for distributors.
With about half of life scientists stating that they look for product information on Google before anything else, a strong search presence is not only important to the sales of any life science tools company, but can deliver a great ROI. When deciding on how much resources to devote to search, distributors have different factors to consider than do suppliers. A strong SEO / SEM presence by suppliers can reduce the importance of SEO / SEM for distributors when compared to other marketing channels, but too many scientists use search to find products for it not to be at least a strong consideration in any distributor’s marketing strategy.
Search Engine Optimization Tips
Douglas E. Rogers
A 2011 survey performed by BioBM found that when looking for a new laboratory product, 90% of life scientists will first turn to one of two places. Half of that 90% will first turn to colleagues for recommendations, and the other half will turn to search engines (and the search engine of choice for scientists is overwhelmingly Google). Ensuring that your products are held in high esteem by a large enough number of life scientists to influence the 45% that turn to colleagues first for product recommendations is a complex, difficult problem, as well as one that takes a significant amount of tiime and money to tackle. Being seen by those 45% that will turn to Google or other search engines, however, is much easier and cheaper. Consider this: an Enquiro / Eyetools eye-tracking study (Enquiro, âEnquiro Eye Tracking Report I: Googleâ, March 2005) found that 100% of people performing Google searches will see the top three search results. Not to understate the competitiveness of organic search, but if your search engine optimization efforts are sufficient to get you into the top three search results for the relevant terms, you can more or less guarantee yourself that your products will be seen by 45% of scientists who are looking for your kinds of products. That is huge.
Now while much of the life sciences is competitive enough that getting into the top three positions in a search term is not a trivial task, you can still make a significant difference in your web traffic (and subsequently your leads and sales) by, for example, going from the fourth page of a major search term to the second page. Various research has shown that 70-90% of searchers do not go past the first page, and 90-99% do not go past the third page. Also, the aforementioned Enquiro / Eyetools study found that the position on the page makes a huge difference as well. While 100% of study participants saw the first three results on a search page, only 10% saw the 10th result. Moving from 9th or 10th to even 5th or 6th can make a big difference.
So… What do you need to know to help prop up your search rankings? Instead of writing a book on the topic, we’ll just list some tips below. If you have any questions or would like some elaboration, feel free to contact us.
The page title is very important to SEO. The meta description is important to the searcher, but is irrelevant to SEO. Using the wrong title HTML (meta_title= instead of title=) can significantly hurt your SEO.- Content is king. Nothing will improve your SEO better than more content, especially if you don’t have a lot of content to begin with. What is “not a lot of content”? Under 100 pages is certainly little enough content that more content can yield an easily noticeable improvement. If you are looking for ways to increase content while staying relevant, look into content marketing methods, such as blogging.
- If you have content on external websites, try to bring it onto your site. For example, some companies have a primary website and then an online store at a different URL (either because of the restrictions of the e-commerce platform they are using, or just due to poor planning). Many companies have off-site blogs. These things should be brought onto your primary site so your SEO is not diluted across multiple sites.
- Links back to your site are also very important for SEO. Google also determines contextual relevance, so links back from more relevant sites are more important, as are links from more popular (read: high traffic) sites. Just as an example, we recently did a very fast back-link campaign where we deployed about a dozen relevant links via product news releases and the client saw an average 13 place jump in search rankings for relevant terms.
- Don’t try to fool Google. They know most of the tricks, and trying to trick them will likely either hurt your SEO or get your site completely de-listed. (see the Wikipedia article on “spamdexing” for a good list of what not to do)
- Site traffic is highly important and creates a bit of a chicken-or-egg problem. Traffic is a very important factor in determining search engine rankings, but in order to get a lot more traffic you need better search engine rankings. Honestly, it’s not as much of a conundrum as it sounds. The key is trying to maintain the upward spiral (better SEO â more hits â better SEO â more hits, etc…).
- Checking your search rankings manually is a pain. Seobook.com used to have a Rank Checker plugin for Firefox that allowed you to save up to 100 desired search terms and then to see if you are in the top 200 results on Google, Yahoo, and Bing and output the results as a csv file, which you can open in Excel. Unfortunately, last I checked it was no longer working. Until it’s up and running again, the rankchecker.net SEO tool should hold you over.
- Trial-and-error is okay. Play with your content and see what works.
Another strategy worth noting is to become the first result for an ancillary search term. Regarding ancillary results, allow me to give an example using a company that I’m familiar with. Next Advance manufactures a high-throughput bead-mill homogenizer for disruption and lysis of tissue and cells. There are a lot of companies that sell homogenizers, many of which are larger than Next Advance and have been around for a long time. This crowding makes it relatively difficult to get to the top of search results. For the search term “homogenizer”, Next Advance first shows up on the fourth page of the results, as result #34. However, they know that “homogenizer” is not the only thing their potential customers are searching for, so they also optimized for less competitive terms. If you search for “tissue homognizer” they are 5th. For “liver homogenization” they are first. By enacting SEO strategies that allow them to leverage these alternate terms, they can drive a lot of traffic from search without having to compete for the highly competitive terms.
SEO is a great marketing tactic, especially for small companies on a limited marketing budget. It’s a low-cost, high-ROI form of internet marketing that can put your life science company directly in the sights of your potential customers by being where they are looking: search engines. It’s not rare at all for SEO to be a company’s highest-ROI form of marketing, and given the massive amount of scientists that are turning to search engines for product information, that shouldn’t be a surprise. With a meager budget and some sustained effort, you can help your company drive web-derived leads and sales through SEO.
Search Engine Marketing Tips
Douglas E. Rogers
There are many reasons why any life science tools company should be using search engine marketing (SEM), yet many do not. Scientists are frequently on search engines to look for publications, protocols, product info, scientific knowledge, and more. In a field so highly dependent on information, and on such a wide variety of information from so many different sources, you can bet that scientists are on search engines a lot. Search engine marketing can not only provide a large audience to market to, but since you select which search terms you want your ads to appear on, it can provide a highly targeted audience as well. Best of all, and my favorite thing about any cost-per-click (CPC) based marketing – you only pay for results.
Please note that the following advice pertains mostly to major search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing), as they will have the full set of features that these tips assume the search engine to have. There are certainly other search engine tools that have reasonably good features and very competitive cost-per-click rates, but although some of the advice will likely be applicable to smaller and / or more focused platforms as well, we will leave those for a separate discussion.
Understand how SEM works
If you and your life science company are new to search engine marketing, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with the basics. It’s easy to have a poor ROI if you don’t know what you’re doing. Each search engine will likely have a wealth of literature for you to read and watch, likely enough for you to gain quite a good proficiency with each system if you bother to take the time. For example, you could spend weeks reading all the information that the Google AdWords help center provides. Perhaps one of the most important lessons to learn before you initiate an SEM campaign is how the bidding process works and how CPC is determined. Again using Google AdWords as an example, they have a helpful intro video explaining the process (albeit a bit simplified from how it actually works).
Use the tools that each SEM platform provides
Google AdWords, for example, will provide you with all sorts of lovely info. It will give an index of competition for any given keywords, provide estimates on how many searches are performed for any given term, both globally and within a given region, and estimate the cost-per-click that you would need to bid. It will even provide suggestions on additional search terms, and give historical search estimates month-by-month. This information can help you tremendously in determining what search terms are best to target.
Be an opportunist
In part because life science tools companies do so little search engine marketing compared to the breadth of terms used in the field (and perhaps in part due to many life science marketers general inexperience with SEM), there are a lot of opportunities out there that can drive down your cost-per-click, drive up your ROI, and result in more sales. To start doing this, think like a scientist. What could they be searching for that may not be a product, but may be related to your product. For example, if you are selling DNA extraction kits, perhaps you could target not only users who are searching for DNA extraction kits, but DNA extraction protocols, phenol / chloroform extraction, DNA purification, etc. There are many terms that would indicate that someone is performing DNA extraction. Alternative methods, related upstream or downstream procedures, and even names of competitors products are all good search terms to consider. Find those terms with a low CPC and take advantage of them.
Monitor, update, repeat
Major search engines will try to maximize their income by displaying the ads that make them the most money. This, simply stated, is based on cost per click multiplied by the click-through rate (CTR). Click-through-rate is the rate at which your ad is clicked on by searchers for any given term. If your ad gets clicked on a lot, the search engine gets more money, and you get more visitors. Everyone goes home happy. Search engines will reward ads that have a higher CTR with lower CPC, higher ad placement, or both. An eye-tracking study found that the top-placed ad to the right of Google search results is viewed five times as frequently as the ad that is fifth on the list, so ad placement is an important thing that should not be undervalued. By monitoring your results and tweaking our ads as necessary, you can drive up your CTR, lower your CPC, and improve your ad placement.
One last thing deserves mention. We are often asked by life science companies how much is the correct amount for them to dedicate to search engine marketing. This question doesn’t have a numeric answer. The answer is: as much as you can while getting the desired ROI (and without breaking your budget). Note that this will not be an “infinite” amount of money; you will be limited by the number of searchers. However, so long as you are achieving the desired return-on-investment from your SEM campaign, you should continue to reinvest in it to continue to drive sales growth.
Search engine marketing is a valuable, highly scalable, and readily accessible tool that can generate lots of traffic for your site and, more importantly, lots of sales for your company. Properly utilized with a well-designed site including the appropriate landing pages, your life science tools company can realize a high ROI from your SEM investment and grow both your sales and your company.
Site Metrics: Where to Focus?
Douglas E. Rogers
Website analytics can provide very useful information to bioscience companies. It can be used to assess the effectiveness of your marketing messages, optimize your site navigation, and track external marketing campaigns. At it’s most basic, and without spending too much time on the matter, most companies want to know one thing: how much traffic are we getting? For most purposes, however, this isn’t the question they should be asking.
By “traffic”, most people are referring to visits – how many people viewed their website over a given period of time. Alone, that doesn’t really tell us much. Another measure of traffic is pageviews – how many pages on a website were viewed over a given period of time. Again, that doesn’t really tell us much on its own. Where you get to some rich metrics is in the pages per visit and the bounce rate. Pages per visit is exactly what it sounds like – how many pages the average visitor is viewing. A “bounce” is when a visitor views a page and then leaves the site without viewing any other pages. Having high pages per visit and a low bounce rate is indicative of quality visits. It is an indication that your content is relevant to the people that are finding your site, and you are successfully engaging those people with your content.
Another good thing to focus on is your search engine optimization as measured via search rankings for relevant search terms. While you can’t get your search rankings via Google Analytics or similar free analytics tools, there are tools on the internet for determining your search rankings. Our favorite is Rank Checker from SEO Book. It’s a plugin that operates in the Firefox web browser and can tell you your rank for up to 100 different terms at a time in Google, Yahoo, and Bing search engines, save searches and output results into .csv files which can be opened in Excel. Knowing where you stand in search rankings, and keeping track to see if you’re moving up or down in key search terms, is key for driving relevant (and free!) search traffic. This information can be analysed in conjunction with search traffic data from Google Analytics to determine if you’re optimizing for the right terms. If you’re very high in the search rankings for a particular term, but you’re not getting much traffic from searches for that term, then it’s likely that few people are searching for that term in the first place and you should consider how you can re-optimize for a more popular but still relevant term.
If you dig just a little deeper into your analytics instead of just looking at raw traffic, you can learn a lot more useful information.