We have a competitive group at Red Nova Labs. Whether it’s our company basketball team or the race against competitors, we want to be winning and we want to see tangible results. We believe success is results based, and that’s why we devote a lot of resources and energy to analytics.

To understand how we manage analytics, the road to measurable results starts with the nuts and bolts of what generates strong Search Engine Optimization (SEO): content, links, and technical SEO.

Content

It’s obvious that any website needs content. Not only do we need strong content that shows we know what we’re talking about, we also need to consider what search engines think of our content. Search engines care about keywords, density, freshness and duplicate content.

Some stuff their website’s content with keywords by carelessly throwing them in, even if where they place them does not make much sense. We do not believe in that practice; 1) it’s not ethical; and 2) search engines are smart and will eventually figure out such a spam-like practice. We use keywords in our copy, but we do so logically.

Content freshness is important because search engines do not like a website that is stale and never changes. It’s important to continuously have new content, such as timely blogs or updates about your company in the form of press releases. As for duplicate content, search engines like Google frown on this practice. They want unique content.  

Links

The number of links is important, and the quality and relevance of those links is just as crucial. As a website, you want other similar websites pointing back to you, websites that Google deems important. The rate of acquisition is also important. Get too many links too quickly and search engines will grow weary. A website that steadily attains relevant and quality links will be deemed important by Google and achieve the reward of such popularity – high placement in Google searches.

Technical SEO

Google and other search engines crawl* sites to figure out how to rank them. To make sure that you rank well with search engines, you need to make sure your pages are indexed, which means Google can read the text. We make sites that are Google-reader friendly.

*The search engines do not have actual people reading sites. Instead, a robot crawls the sites. When a robot “crawls,” it’s the equivalent of a guy named John reading and reviewing the content to make sure it’s legit. Some think they can fool the robot, but it’s best to build a site and fill it with content that John would be happy with.  

SERP

To calculate how well we are doing with our content, link-building and technical SEO, we analyze our SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ranking.

A SERP ranking determines how high a websites shows up on keyword searches. It’s important to have strong SERP ranking in three different searches: organic, local and social. An organic search is where you show up no matter the location; it’s sort of like a national search.

Local search is where a website ranks locally, and it’s important to have strong local SEO, particularly for an industry like self storage.

Social SERP ranking is dependent on a website’s popularity in the social media realm; for example, how many likes or fans a site has on Facebook and how many followers and mentions a site gets on Twitter. If a website is popular on sites like Facebook and Twitter, that gives it credibility and helps its SERP rankings for organic and local searches.

Traffic/Leads

The reason we put in so much work on our content and SERP is to generate traffic and leads.

Traffic is measured by number of visitors, source of traffic (how someone ended up on our site), number of keyword searches where our site appears and the popularity of landing pages.

Without traffic, it’s impossible to generate leads; and in our analytical world, we measure the final score by how many leads we generate.

Leads are different for every platform. In self storage, for example, leads are measured by phone calls, reservations and inquiries. When we generate a high frequency of all three, we know we’re winning. And we cannot win by skipping any step in the process along the way.