• FAQs

          Search engine optimization (SEO) helps businesses drive visits to their website through organic search traffic. Given that the top organic search results receive a third of the clicks, a decline in ranking could be detrimental for your business. Implementing SEO best practices on your website will help to ensure that your web content is seen by as many potential customers as possible. The more visitors you have, the better your chances are of converting those visits into sales!

          Local search engine optimization (SEO) helps local businesses gain visibility by optimizing their local business listings for local search. A business that leverages local SEO will include its address, phone number, local opening times, and exact location in the form of a local citation. The goal is to rank for local searches which are usually performed by people in a specific geographical region looking for a business near them.

          We typically see results within the first 30 to 60 days, but when it comes to SEO, there are many factors at play. It's important to remember that SEO is a long-term strategy and results may not come as fast at you wish.


        • FAQs

          Digital advertising uses the internet to send advertisements to customers who are online through different websites and social media platforms like Google, Bing, LinkedIn and Facebook.

          The price for Google Ads management depends on the monthly ad spend. For accounts with $1,000 in monthly ad spend, the price is $550/month. Between $1,000 and $5,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $950/month. For $5,000 to $10,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $2,000/month. For more than $10,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $4,500/month.

          The price for Social Media Ads management depends on the monthly ad spend. For accounts with $1,000 in monthly ad spend, the price is $550/month. Between $1,000 and $5,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $950/month. For $5,000 to $10,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $2,000/month. For more than $10,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $4,500/month.


        • FAQs

          This depends on the complexity and size of a redesign and if eCommerce is needed. On average, it takes around 14-18 weeks from the web design intensive stage to launch.

          If your website experiences the following issues: it’s not responsive on all devices, has a slow loading speed, the design appears old and tired, users don’t spend long on the site, sales are stagnant, or your business is going through a rebranding - your website needs a redesign to boost your brand awareness and sales.

          Sometimes there’s no need to rebuild a website. Minor edits, refreshing page content and images, or restructuring page layout for SEO best practices can boost traffic and sales.


        • FAQs

          Semantic search launched in 2013 with the release of Google's Hummingbird update. Since then, Google's search engine has become more complex. The integration of machine learning, with RankBrain, and NLP, with BERT, has enabled the search engine to better understand the context of a query and deliver more personalized and targeted results. Semantic SEO is the process of creating machine-readable content using structured data and linked open data to help search engines better understand your content.

          On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page SEO refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals. From meta tags to page content, website structure, and HTML, on-page optimization services are focused on making your website more visible to search engines.

          Structured data refers to any organized data that conforms to a certain format, such as information in a relational database. When information is highly structured and predictable, search engines can more easily organize and display it in creative ways. Structured data involves using a piece of code that is laid out in a specific format easily understood by search engines. The search engines read the code and use it to display search results in a more dynamic way.


        • FAQs

          An SEO agency has experts in different areas of search engine optimization that may be out of the realm of your marketing team's abilities. SEO can be very complex and time-consuming. Furthermore, as search engine algorithms change it can be difficult to stay current on the latest ranking factors and strategies for improving online visibility. You will likely see a greater return on investment and better results from using a professional SEO agency than you would from tackling this on your own.

          As a digital marketing agency, SMA Marketing provides products and services in four areas: SEO, Local SEO, Digital Advertising, and Web Design

          We focus on building authentic, long-lasting relationships with our clients. We’re goal oriented and results driven and believe in doing good and making a difference in the world.

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Google Analytics: Pros and Cons

    Google Analytics is the de facto way that websites get information about their visitors. It’s extremely popular, installed on the majority of websites, and has a plethora of data available as Google slurps up every detail about everything that happens on the site.

    It is the Swiss Army knife of marketing applications, reasonably handling many challenges without actually excelling at any of them.

    Back in 2005 Google acquired a software called Urchin, forming the base of GA. At that point websites were simple things, a collection of static pages built in HTML 4 with the newfangled thing called AdWords only being a few years old.

    All GA initially had to do was measure:

    • How many people were visiting the site
    • How people were arriving at the site

    But online marketing is now increasingly complex, so more information is needed to make decisions that improve performance. Page tracking isn’t enough, especially with touch points spread across multiple devices, the growing competition for attention, and marketing funnels that combine a plethora of platforms.

    Google Analytics is still ideal for many marketing tasks, but it definitely has its strengths and weaknesses. So let’s look and see where it makes sense to stick with Google Analytics and where you need an alternative to make sure you have all the information to understand your customer journey correctly.

    Great at… tracking traffic and basic goal attribution

    As more resources get poured into adverts and inbound marketing, measuring performance gets increasingly important.

    GA is still great for seeing where engaged visitors are coming from. It will track the source and medium down to the social campaign, collecting landing page information and measuring if they met a goal such as making a purchase or subscribing.

    Lacking at… attributing lifetime value and long term performance

    GA is fundamentally designed to track page views and events during individual sessions, with extra tech bolted on to try and extend that to measure someone over multiple visits.

    If you’d like to measure something more complex, like which blog attracted long term subscribers or if the flood of leads became clients, then you will need to seek an alternative.

    Events might be pinged to GA for a form submission or completed purchase, but it will be associated with that vulnerable cookie. Event tracking is helpful, but it is not a robust way to record someone’s behavior across months or years as they progress through your touch points into the revenue and retention stages of a funnel.

    Instead try… querying your email marketing platform

    Email automation platforms collect lifetime data on your customers. Unlike GA, an email platform is not bothered if cookies are cleared or the customer is on a different device. So long as they use the same email the data stays consistent.

    It can record which contacts converted from newsletter subscribers into paying customers or which trial signups turned into long term users.

    Many email platforms can collect UTM data, touch points they have engaged with and purchases they have made. That way you can analyze whether a campaign attracted visitors who became big spenders or if it only created a burst of vague enthusiasm.

    Great at… optimizing top of funnel and website behavior

    GA is ideal for measuring who is landing on your website and how they navigate it. You can see whether they stuck around after reading an article, drop off at a later stage or make it through to your goal.

    This is great for helping you win people’s attention and getting the relationship going, but once a visitor has met that goal they’re of no interest to GA.

    Lacking at… analyzing behavior through the entire funnel

    Marketing tools tend to each show you a detailed view of their own data silo without any consideration for the rest of the marketing funnel.

    For example, an email sequence will rarely consider the UTM data that is fundamental to GA. You won’t see that visitors from one source might perform differently from another while an ad platform might give you it’s own mysterious interpretation of their ad performance (which of course shows themselves in the best light).

    While GA has some multi-touch attribution, that is only for considering multiple website visits without an ability to consider how other parts of your marketing process is affecting sales.

    Instead try… querying your email platform’s data some more

    Again, your email marketing system can reveal these secrets. It might take a bit of tidying up your tags to keep each contact fully updated with all the details, but most systems can automatically tag them with how they behave at each stage.

    That way you can start looking at questions such as:

    • Does changing your email sequence affect freebie hunters and big spenders differently?
    • Do live demos vs video walk-throughs perform differently for different sources?
    • Does your cart abandonment campaign increase the likelihood of a purchase?

    You can look at how all the stages in your funnel interact to maximize revenue, not just how each part is performing individually.

    If you are fully utilizing your CRM then this information can be extracted with additional tools or pivot tables.

    Great at… website performance dashboards

    The dashboards in Google Analytics are great for monitoring how your website is performing, showing aspects such as active visitors and user locations.

    If you want to confirm your website is loading smoothly for everyone, monitor the amount of traffic and quickly detect any bugs then it is ideal to use.

    Lacking at… big picture marketing reports

    But, these dashboards aren’t so suitable for marketing reports. They aren’t friendly for showing inexperienced clients or colleagues without raising more questions than they answer.

    They also can’t handle displaying touch points outside your website such as spending across ad platforms and performance of an email campaign.

    Instead try… specialized reporting tools such as Data Studio or SegMetrics

    You could spend hours importing data into spreadsheets and manually making docs for your monthly reports.

    Or, you could use one of the many available tools.

    Google Data Studio natively integrates with all of Google’s products. You can make slides showing all the data you want with relevant annotations. Just remember that the report is only as good as the quality of the data it communicates, which might not include the long term or big picture data described above.

    SegMetrics is designed to query the data contained in email automation platforms. You can see the long term ROAS or how different lead sources are progressing through a funnel each with a few clicks. These insights can then be combined into dashboards to monitor your marketing performance.

    Conclusion: Don’t overlook your email platform as a source of invaluable data

    Google Analytics is viewed as a fantastic data source, but is often stretched past its comfort zone. Meanwhile, email platforms are typically only used for tracking email sequence performance, without an appreciation of the deeper answers they can hold.

    It does require some additional setup of tidying up tags and recording UTM data, but now you should have an incentive to get them sorted.

    Uncovering the information isn’t always straightforward. Some platforms will allow basic filtering of data, but more as an afterthought.

    You can either crunch the numbers with pivot tables as described in the guide to calculating Lead Value, or use a tool such as SegMetrics to manipulate it with a few clicks. Either way, you can start seeing beneath the surface of how your work is performing.

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