a la mode
news & tips — posted May 25,
2005
Capturing
quality leads with local search engine services
Lately, you may have heard a lot about
web features like
Yahoo! Local
and Google
Local that enable search engine users to find relevant local
information with neighborhood business listings, maps, directions and
web pages. Why should you list your business on one (or both) of
these sites? You'll make it easy for qualified prospects to find your
business, you have full control over your listing and, best of all,
it’s free!
Both Google Local
and the Yahoo! Local Listings program collect business information
from their own indexes of websites, Yellow Pages directories, and
other sources to populate search results. However, the best way to get
an accurate listing is to submit your own listing to the directories.
You can sign your website up at Yahoo! Local
here
and for Google Local
here.
It takes 3-5
business days for your listing to appear in Yahoo! Local. After
submitting your information to Google Local, you’ll receive a letter
to your business address within two weeks containing a unique PIN
number and activation instructions for your listing. Your listing
will then display on Google Local four to six weeks after it's
submitted.
While both the
Google and Yahoo! local tools allow you to edit your listing whenever
you like, changes can sometimes take six weeks or more before they’re
reflected in the search results.
Need help setting
up your business listing? No problem. We’ve created a tutorial for
setting up your listing on Google Local and Yahoo! Local in our Web
Marketing Strategies section of our website, which you can access
here. If you have XSellerate, the tutorial is also located in the
Marketing Aids section under Tools.
How to analyze your XSite traffic
You’ve
chosen your themes, uploaded pictures and added content pages,
calculators and videos. But how do you know who's visiting your
XSite? That’s where your XSite’s Statistics come
into play, which you can view by
going to the My Office section of your XSite and clicking on "XSite
Statistics." It’s here you can find out how many visitors came
to your site, where they’re coming from, what keywords they entered that
brought them there, what pages they viewed, and much more.
Although all of this information is available at your fingertips, some
of you may be confused by terms such as "visitors," "page views" and
"entry pages" and what they tell you about your XSite visitors.
So let’s clarify things a bit.
Who's there?
A visitor to your XSite is just that — someone
who comes to any
page on your XSite. When referring to the number of visitors your XSite
has generated, you’re referring to the total number of people who
access a website over a certain period of time. A single person
is counted as one visitor each time he/she visits your site. So,
if a person visits your site three times during a specified time, it
counts as three visitors.
A unique
visitor, on the other hand, is someone with a unique IP address (A
number used to identify a computer connected to the Internet) entering your site for the first time during a specified period.
Unique visitors are counted only once no matter how many times they
visit your XSite.
You can check
your unique visitors on your Statistics page by scrolling down to the
"First Time Visitors" section. You can also how many times a
visitor returns to you site in the "Returning Visitors" section.
This is a good thing to check regularly since people that visit your
site again and again are most likely to become new clients!
What do they want?
While it’s important to know how many people are visiting your site,
you also want to know what tools and content they find most useful.
That’s why many XSite owners monitor the "Page Views" section of their
Statistics, which tracks the number of times each page on your site
has been visited.
Similarly,
the "Listings" section of your Statistics page tracks the number of
views each of your listings receive.
Many agents fine tune their most popular pages with the goal of
turning those visitors into leads. For example, if you find that
the content page "9 Steps To Owning" has the most views of any other
page on your site, you’ll want to make sure there’s a lead generation
form on that site. And if there’s a page on your site that you’d
like more people to view, you can simply rearrange the pages on your
homepage to make it more visible.
How'd they find you?
The entry pages in your Statistics indicate where visitors
entered your site. Due to search engines used and links on other
websites, you’ll likely see that not all of your visitors arrive at
your home page first. If you find that many visitors are
arriving on one page but you’d like to have them visit other pages,
you may want to modify that popular landing page to include links to
the page you’d really like them to visit.
The "Referring URLs" section shows you other websites that are sending
visitors to your XSite, such as Yahoo! Or Google. And, if you’ve
created linking partners with other Agent XSite owners or other
websites, this is a good way to find out which of those sites are
bringing you the most traffic.
"Common Search Terms" will tell you what keywords and phrases people
use on major search engines to find your XSite. The section also
tracks the number of times the keyword or phrase was used over a
specific period of time. Because you can see exactly what
keywords visitors typed in to get to your site, you can better target
your marketing campaigns as well as any pay-per-click services you
use.
Now what?
Analyzing your XSite’s statistics regularly
allows you better target your website and marketing efforts so you can
achieve better ROI and, of course, turn more leads into clients!
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