Google Analytics is a great free statistics package that allows you to see information about the visitors to your website. It can be very useful in finding out if your marketing is working and where is best to invest your time and money. Not only does it show you the number of visitors but it can also show you how they came to your site e.g through Google organic searches, Adwords etc.

You do have to be careful though taking everything at face value as sometimes the data can become skewed. There are many sites that will show as referral visits to your site increasing the traffic to your website (often quite substantially). With further investigation these sites are often not referring real traffic to yours and are actually what’s known as spam referrals. Spam referrals can make your web stats have a sudden unexplained spike in traffic which often comes with an extremely high bounce rate. To be able to find out your accurate statistics you need to be able to remove these spam referrals by creating a custom report.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is effectively optimising your site in such a way to improve its rankings on sites such as Google. Bing and Yahoo. If you have a website and are not aware of SEO then it is certainly something you need to look in to. It may be that your site has been built with little or no SEO meaning it may struggle to get ranked high on the search engines. If you had a site built that was SEO friendly, that may have been great to start with, but over time this will need to be tweaked and new pages optimised to allow your SEO to build.

Getting SEO wrong can actually be worse than not doing it at all as you can find your site penalised and therefore removed from the search engine listings entirely. When doing SEO be sure to use a company or individual that has the relevant experience to carry out the work. You may be able to ask for examples of projects they have worked on to see for yourself if the SEO is working.

There are so many ways to advertise your business online, it can be hard knowing which methods are right for you and your company. What works well for one type of business may not work well for another.

The main point you need to consider is “are you getting a return on your investment?”. There is no point in spending thousands on marketing every month if you are only making a few hundred in sales. This being said, most companies do have to spend more on marketing initially to get the website up on the search engines and to build up their brand awareness so there may be a period when you are spending money on marketing but not seeing a great improvement in sales or enquiries. This is to be expected, but all marketing needs to be tracked in order to ensure that it is currently or soon will be having a positive impact on the business.