Online Marketing Course

Hi, I'm Mihai from Visitor Analytics. Welcome to our first course about digital marketing for websites. This particular course focuses on SEO and web analytics. We will go through the basics of bringing more traffic from search engines like Google to your website. You will also learn how to track and interpret your website traffic and performance in order to be able to further improve your results. I will start by saying a few things…

Welcome back to our course about website analytics and SEO! Let's start off by understanding a few things about traffic. There are several channels that can get you traffic for your website, like social media, paid online ads, streaming platforms, organic searches, etc, etc. Each of these with their own possibilities. SEO is the one possibility that is likely to get you the most benefits long-term. And this is why we focus on this on our…

Welcome back to the Visitor Analytics course about Web Analytics and SEO. Before we begin, we can split the subject of SEO into four main branches. Technical SEO, which includes all aspects of website functionality, optimize content, which refers to tags, meta tags and other similar things that refer to content in general, authority building for the website, as well as rankings based on user interaction signals. Technical SEO has to do…

Welcome back to our SEO course and we continue talking about technical SEO. The second important aspect of technical SEO is responsiveness. Responsiveness is the ability to adapt content to all devices and display sizes. Always keep in mind, what the site looks like on all displays. It will be accessed using laptops, desktops, tablets and smartphones, all with different display sizes. You have to provide good UX on all of these. Also,…

Welcome back to the technical SEO module!

Next up are friendly URLs. You can see an example right here. The first one is friendly. The other one, not so much. Both users and search engines crawl bots get some of the information about the page content, also by looking at the URL. If it makes sense and follows the logic and hierarchy, search engines will index it properly. If it's random or inconclusive like the second one on this slide,…

Back to our technical SEO module.

We look at HTPPS encryption. HTPPS encryption is a protocol that keeps the data of your visitors safer. It is a highly important factor nowadays, but the implementation can be a bit technical. Many hosting providers and web builder platforms provide it automatically for you, but just in case they don't, you will notice that the lock near your URL is not green and that your address begins with HTTP instead…

Welcome back!

We're still on technical SEO. Back, in section 1.1., we mentioned the importance of having a Google search console account where you can actively submit URLs with new content, so that they are indexed and show up in Google searches faster, but there is a lot more than that that you can do with the search console account. And in this section, we're going to show you exactly what that is.

Let's start by creating an account and…

Welcome back to our chapter about using the search console.

Once the account is verified, the next step is to make the most of it. The first thing I recommend doing is to create and submit a site map of your website. A sitemap is like an arborescent structure of all your pages. The Google bot will look for the sitemap and use it to navigate your site better and understand the hierarchy and importance of your pages. With Wix, there is no…

Welcome back to our SEO module, as we move forward towards content writing for SEO purposes.

Remember when I said content was king? In this section, we try to explore that a bit more. How you plan your content and whether you provide information that is more useful, more comprehensive than what is available on other websites and make a big difference in terms of rankings.

The words you use and the way you present information will also…

Welcome back to our chapter about content writing for SEO.

Now, you know your topic and your audience. Next up is to see how the people in the determined location use Google and what are the keywords they search for the most in relation to your topic.

Start from general keywords like "Florida tourist destinations" and find other keywords related to that. How can you do that? A simple way is to perform the search on Google and scroll down…

Welcome back to our section about content writing for SEO. And now we finally start writing.

When we do that, we need to keep in mind readability and tone and this is connected to one of our previous steps, which was defining the audience, if you remember. Part of this is deciding how long the content should be and the answer to that question is relative.

There's no given answer. It pretty much depends on your competition. If you want to…

Welcome back to our section about content writing for SEO!

In this part, we will look closer at using the keywords you discover during your research in the actual text. Right at the beginning, remember the first thing is to try to use those words as much as possible, but also, without overdoing it. Overusing a keyword and trigger what we called keyword stuffing. This is an algorithm from Google which can severely hurt your rankings.…

Welcome back to our course about SEO and website analytics! We'll still talk about SEO. If the advice from the previous two chapters, the ones about technical SEO and the ones about content would be enough for websites to rank high, following a sort of SEO recipe, then everybody could be an SEO champion and several websites would probably claim the number one spot in the search. In theory, you can create a website today and ranked at…

Welcome back to our SEO module, as we move forward towards the end of the entire module.

In the grand scheme of SEO algorithm, there is one thing we can't forget: the user. All of the things we talked about have the end goal of providing relevant answers to users. If Google would not properly answer the needs of the user, it wouldn't be what it is today. This is why we talk about user interactions in this section, but this will be shorter…

Welcome back to the SEO module and we have reached its end.

So these are the basics of SEO. There are many things we did not have time to cover. We know of at least 200 ranking factors that play a role in searches. Some of them go into the most in-depth detail and we'll have to be included in our next advanced course on the topic.

Until then, remember the big chapters related to SEO: Technical SEO, which included good page speed, few…

Welcome back to our course about SEO and website analytics.

After module 1 SEO, you now know the basics of building and developing a website that will be successful in search engines, but SEO is not a one-time action, and it is deeply connected to many more aspects of your website performance. So you need to continuously be aware of how the site is performing and how users are interacting with it and you need to adapt to what you find…

Welcome back to the beginning of the website analytics module.

Let's start with a crucial choice of opting for the right tool for analytics. Apart from the big issue of privacy, there is also the complexity of data that needs to be addressed. Some tools and again, I have to mention Google Analytics provide a lot of web analytics data but so much so that it becomes too much, overwhelming graphs and stat charts with tons of numbers. You…

Welcome back to the Visitor Analytics course about SEO and analytics.

We are on the web analytics module and we will now talk about the most important metrics and stats to follow in your dashboard. If you're a beginner, then you might not know exactly what some of these metrics mean, so let's go through them one by one. First thing you will see in the app there are three metrics next to each other: visitors, unique visitors and page…

Welcome back to our series of metrics for website analytics.

We continue with the bounce rate and session duration. To understand how visitors interact with your website, check the bounce rate of your site. It will show you the percentage of visitors that close your website after seeing only one page.

There are four ways of living the website that count as bounces: hitting the x button to close the page, clicking the back button on in the…

Back to the most important metrics.

Now, let's have a look at conversions. In order to have something displayed here in this box, you need to first decide what a conversion is to you, which page does a visitor need to reach in order for you to regard it as a valuable action. In most cases, this will be a checkout page or a sign-in page. These represent classical conversion actions that turn a visitor into a customer.

So, you need to go to…

Back to metrics and stats to follow.

Next up, you also have an option to check visitors by location. You can do it either in the visitors by country map, right here where you can see where your visitors are coming from in terms of country, the region, even city and please remember that because of privacy the exact location and address will not be available to you or you can check the latest visitors table. When you can see individual…

Back again to metrics and stats to follow. 

We move forward to referral traffic and here the connection to our previous SEO module is the most obvious. If your SEO is successful, then in the top refers box you see here you will see many visits from google.com and from other search engines. 

We will also get a list of the other websites that link to your site and that actually bring in visitors from those links. You can always try to…

Welcome back to our section about metrics. 

We talked about Urchin Tracking Modules or most commonly refer to as UTMs. we will tell you how to use them to analyze referral traffic. Sometimes you may have several links in marketing material like a mass email you send to potential customers and you would like to know exactly which of these links brought you the most traffic to your website. 

Was it from a button? From a paragraph? From a…

Welcome back to our course and to our section about metrics. 

There is more that we can find out about visit stats using Visitor Analytics. If we go to statistics, visitors, traffic charts, we can see timelines of visits and visitors per hour, per day and per month. You can select a longer time reference here, like 12 months. If you want to compare, this is by month. 

That way, you know, when your audience is more active and you can post…

Welcome back to our module about website and user insights. 

We move forward to user Behavior insights. As I mentioned a few times before, stats are not everything. In order to understand your performance, You should also be looking at user behavior insights. 

What are those? Well, they are features that allow you not only to see that users - to take an example - bounce off of one of your pages. You can also find out why. 

So, in this…

Welcome back to user Behavior insights. We move on to Session Recordings.  

A friend and a collaborator of mine once told me about a landing page he had created in order to promote the booking of test drives of a luxury car model. After 24 hours he had over 500 clicks on the page, but not a single booking. He had no idea why. The visitors seem to be within his target group and he thought that the design of the page complied with just…

Welcome back to user behavior insights and we move on to Heatmaps. 

A user behavior feature tightly connected to session recordings is heatmaps. Going through thousands of recordings and watch them all is impossible. But if you use heatmaps, the information from those recordings and the aggregated into click, movement and scroll maps instantly show you patterns of usage inferred from all those recordings. 

For example, you might see 2 or…

Welcome back to user behavior insights and now we focus on conversion funnels. Some time ago when the internet was still in development and the first attempts at e-commerce were being made, website owners and digital marketers did not have all the functionality of the analytics tools that we have today. Tracking sales processes was very difficult at the time. 

I remember working with website owners who were confused about why they had…

And that's a wrap. This is the end of our website and user insights module. 

You should now have enough information to be able to fully understand what happens on your website and how to identify pain points for users in order to be able to fix them and have the best possible user experience. This is also the end of our beginner's course about SEO and analytics. If you want to learn more about the topics we covered in these modules. All…