If you are a local business and you have a website, it is important to know its performance as you would a regular employee…

The secret sauce to our being able to provide maintenance, support and reporting that is informative, timely and relevant is a combination of the following tools;

Tracking Tools

As a business owner you may or may not have answers to the above questions but clearly they are important and necessary questions. So if you do not have answers to these questions at least your web developer or marketing team must have them. On the contrary these are the questions to ask your marketing team…

A website is not a set and forget property otherwise you will not benefit from most of what it is supposed to do. Nor is a website a brochure or company catalogue! If your company website is more of a set’n forget, or treat it like a brochure or catalogue you are under-utilizing it.

The responsibility of the website starts with the business owner (or a marketing department in the case of bigger companies). Then this responsibility flows down to a digital marketing service provider (or department).

As a digital marketing agency we know our responsibility and we are well positioned to provide you with the informative, timely and relevant reporting system that is a combination of maintenance, support and data analysis reporting.

This service is inter-twined with our Local SEO Service. To get the most of our Local SEO Service you need a monthly plan of at least 12 months so that we can optimize your website the best way possible. SEO on its own is not a once off task, it is a process relying on many factors to be effective.

This Website Maintenance, Support and Reporting Service is not a stand-alone service and includes the following parts;

It is important to note that it is important to carry out technical maintenance on a website from time to time as you would a car. A car is maintained in different ways. As the owner you may be able to clean and polish such that it looks new, at the same time you need an expert to change oil, check air filters, etc. The technical things that require expertise.

The second thing is the report will show if the webpage URL was clicked on or not and if it was clicked on, how many times. This is also called Click Through Rate. Here we know the CTR or number of clicks.

Armed with this information we can know what to do on that particular webpage to improve ranking position, impressions and CTR. We come up with recommendations like may be adding additional content either image, text, video, etc. Sometimes we may just have to make a few tweaks like changing some wording, building more internal links, etc.

In a nutshell this is what SEO Maintenance would entail. It is all about improving ranking potential to attract more visitors and ultimately increase sales.

Website Support

Website Analysis & Reporting

This service is part and parcel of our Local SEO Service in Botswana and to get the most out of it we must be providing you with the Local SEO Service. We will provide either monthly or quarterly reports. These reports are easy to read and understand. They will also come with recommendations or what we would have done in the case where no action was required from the website owner.

 With these reports you will know how many visitors are coming to the website, how they arrived at the website, how the number of visitors is increasing from month to month. Further, if there is any form of PPC marketing like Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Facebook Advertising, etc. you will be able to know which campaigns are profitable and more… 

What would bring or necessitate these changes, you ask? If say a page is on page 1, position 3 on the search engine results page, at times to bring it to position 1 is simply to change and write a better meta description of the page that will attract clicks. As it gets more clicks it is likely to go to position 1.

Or say in the case of deciding to add a video on the page… at times reducing bounce rate on a page that is to say encouraging website visitors to stay longer on a page could just take adding a video to the page. And as a new video is added it will also help to “schema markup it”.

In order to help you understand the type of reporting we refer to, it is best demonstrating it with an example. Since we walk the talk, we are going to be using this website data to showcase our reporting style. What is important to note, though, is that this is just part of the data we collect on a website and there are many permutations as to how to read and/or give recommendations. Here is how we start; 

Google Console

Google has a free tracking tool called Google Console. Among other things this tracking tool reveals the performance of a website based on Clicks, Impressions, Average CTR and Average Position over a period of selected time.

Going back to the Clicks, Google Console will also show which each click came from i.e. it will show which search term produced the click(s). Going further, next to clicks is the Impressions. This is a total number of times individual URLs were displayed on the Google Search Engine Results (SERPs) page for the different search terms used by online searchers. We will show the importance of this as we go along.

Next is the Average CTR. This parameter basically shows the number of clicks against the Impressions expressed in percentage. Then lastly is the average position of the individual webpages as they are impressed!

Going back to the previous screenshot that shows the Website Performance Report Summary as displayed on the Google Console Dashboard. This summary can be broken down further depending on a number factors. These factors depend on the objectives that one wish to achieve. Let us look at one of the possible objectives with URL & Keyword Breakdown to illustrate this. 

URL & Keyword Breakdown

As one of our SEO practice and say we want to investigate a URL that has a comparably higher CTR and see if we can improve the webpage to yield even better results. This objective may be fitting because a well performing webpage that has not been optimized before indicates that it has a lot of potential to do even better.

To locate such a page we first download a spreadsheet that displays even more information than the summary above

Remember that in the Summary Dashboard above the totals were not broken down into individual URLs, so here we want totals for individual URLs. Further, in this grouping, individual URLs will also have the specific search queries that relate to a particular webpage. Also note that there will be totals for each webpage and individual search queries.

We will explain and show what we mean by this further down below. Let us start with Site & Webpage Performance Analysis.

Site & Webpage Performance

We are looking for a webpage that has a relatively higher CTR to analyze it further to see where else it can improved,which search terms have potential of making the webpage rank better.

URL-Keyword Analysis

Before we go any further notice how we have used splicers to have the ability to filter the table according to Device, Date (Month) and Country producing the clicks or impressions.

So since from the onset this was the target keyword, this will be the second optimization around this search term. Now say we were giving a recommendation to a client. This is what we will take into consideration;

At the time of this writing the webpage has a has about 4200 words article with images and no video. We would advice more content i.e. longer text and adding FAQ section, more images and possibly a video. Further, on writing the content other queries that appear under this URL should be included in the new content (this may not be necessary if this turned out to be any other query than the one that was originally targeted!).

After implementing these recommendations it is advisable to wait for 4 – 8 weeks to see what the improvement is. The expectation is to improve from 8th position to something better, increase in impressions.

Note: This screenshot is meant to show what and how the comparison works – it is not showing the actual results because at the time of this writing we have not made any changes on the webpage we have picked for this illustration. The idea is to show that there is yet another report that compares one parameter over the same time period. This concludes this demonstration which just one of the few ways we provide support and maintenance.

Let us briefly touch on one of the report that can be drawn from Google Analytics as opposed to Google Console.

Google Analytics – In-House Dashboard

As mentioned above Google Analytics shows Bounce Rate as one of its parameters. Bounce Rate basically measures or can be used to determine the amount off time website visitors spend on a webpage. The longer the better and this can positively influence ranking potential.

In conclusion this are some of the benefits of our Maintenance, Support and Reporting service that we provide. We do not follow a pre-made or cut’n paste style of reporting. We customize our reporting according and depending on the clients’ needs. We also create marketing strategies unique for each clients depending on their needs, behavior of the website in terms of performance, etc.

There are several more tracking tools that we use to really enhance the performance of a business website. These tracking tools include the following;

More About Tracking Tools

These are some of the tools that we use for tracking to help us improve website performance in rankings and customer acquisition. However it is important to know that they do not come as a standard in our service.

We use them as and when is necessary depending on the performance of a website. In other words, they are our arsenal, our ammunition that we pull out of the shelf when need be.

We may service you as a client and never have to use any of these tools (except Google Console, this one is our springboard!). Sometimes you do not need that much ammunition to get the job done.

Normally we get to use these tools as we go along together maybe after 4 to 6 months as new opportunities arise and more stubborn search terms become more noticeable.

Also of note is that creating either or both Google My Business or Bing Places websites carry a cost but once they exist and using any of their data for reporting and strategizing carries no charge. In other words you will not be charged extra along the way just because we now have to use data to report from these platforms. The idea is to enhance performance in the most affordable way to you..

As a business you will want to know if where you are spending your money is worthwhile. The reason you have a website is to attract more customers from the internet, get known by people who would otherwise not know about you even when using traditional marketing methods.

And also to tap into this huge potential the internet bestows local businesses. If you do not have a website already see Website Design and Development in Botswana.

At VirincSolutions we understand start a website is a multi-faceted tool that is 24/7 working horse wearing the hats of a receptionist, salesperson, marketing head, catalogue, brochure, business card and more.

It is a selling tool, it is a marketing tool and equally as important it is a branding tool. It is your virtual office that should be able to receive and inform or educate your visitors (as would a receptionist), direct and sell your visitors your services and products (as would a salesperson), etc.

Not only that, a website is a marketing tool that should be able to provide your office contacts (all available contacts – telephone, email, etc.), location and directions as easily as possible.

We appreciate this and understand why it is necessary to know if your digital marketing efforts are bearing fruit. This is why we are promoting transparency in what we do and provide you with reporting that is easy to read and understand.

You do not have to be an expert in this field in order to understand our reporting because the reports cut right to the chase.

Our reports simply answer the question “what am I paying for?”. We create these reports for you to see if your website is receiving visitors and if it does is your customer base increasing. Well that is what you have to tell us.