Benchmarking Your Website for Social Media, SEO & Mobile

Neal Schaffer: 0:01

Welcome to maximize your social, practical and actionable advice on how your business can truly maximize your social media presence. Now, the host of maximize your social author of the recently published book of the same name, and founder of maximize social business, Neal Schaffer. Greetings, everybody this is Neal Schaffer, welcome to another episode of maximize your social. Today I'm going to talk about benchmarking your website, visa vie social media and SEO. You know, recently one of my clients for my social media coaching, which I do both short term and long term, one of my long term clients reached out to me for some analytical help, got access to their accounts, Google Analytics, what have you. And it's very interesting, the more and those of you that are involved in SEO, or even do website development and get access to web analytics, it's very interesting to see obviously, the differences between those companies that are very active in social and not as well as those companies that seem to do better at SEO than other companies. And I'm really looking for a barometer a benchmark, so that you can compare yourself and see where you may need to be improving things. As far as social media and website traffic generation, maximize social business, we're honored to have the lovely lilac Bullock, who every month is providing some great advice on each of these social media channels and how to generate website traffic from them. So you should definitely go check out maximize social business and look for lilacs posts. But very, very fortunately, we had a company this is a British company. Well, I guess I should say they're from the UK. That is called investors IQ. Their website is www dot investors i n v e s t is as an invest is and they just came out with their first ever and I guess they're going to do this on a quarterly basis report on analyzing websites for a number of different things. Now, they say that they have been reviewing 60 corporate websites and they have data for at least two years to provide the insight as to how they're being used. Now, as you can imagine, this is not an American perspective. This is an overseas a European, a UK perspective. So primarily these 60 companies are coming there's actually some diversity here. They're either on the the footsie 100 footsie 250, footsie small cap, or there's even some companies that are European that are not headquartered in the United Kingdom. But I think it serves as a really good data set for us to analyze how well our own websites are doing. And I wanted to pinpoint a few pieces of data here. Now, I found out about this through a post on social media today. So if you go to social media today.com, you may be able to find this post as well. It was published either Friday, October 25th, or Thursday, October 24. But anyway, here's some of the data that I really liked that I think you should really be considering for these companies. 54% of all visitors to these 60 corporate websites came via search engines. And that number actually looking over the last two years is pretty consistent between 50 and 55%. It was interesting because my client had a website that was getting about that much from search engines, but a separate blog on a separate domain that was only getting 20 or 30%. from search engines. The blog is regularly providing fresh, insightful and thought leading content. And that made me need to believe you know what, there may be something going on here with the blog, something that we may be able to do to improve its SEO. Now, if you're getting, you know, 70 to 80% of your traffic from search engines. That's great. But as I mentioned at a conference where I was asked about hummingbird and what companies should do, and I am by no means an SEO expert, never pretend to be, you know, it's really not my main focus of what I do is all about social media and business. Right. But, you know, what I said was, you know, what Google giveth, Google also taketh away. It's an algorithm that's constantly changing, they make mistakes, and they, you know, remedy them in future updates. I know that I have seen some effects from hummingbird as well. And you know, what, you you live with it, and you try to improve everything that you're doing, and especially just creating more unique and great content, right. But if you're getting, you know, search engine traffic from, you know, way above in the 70s and 80s. I think it's great. But I also think that at some point that search engine traffic should convert she you should be getting some more direct traffic. At some point that search engine traffic should convert so that you're getting more backlinks. And if you're getting a heck of a lot of search engine traffic, knowing that it's never any guarantee, you're going to continue to get that I'd really work on those two things. Now. Let's keep going down the statistics here. The direct amount of traffic was 20. 8% Now you got to remember, this, you know, comes from a lot of pretty famous large companies where if you want to go and book an airplane ticket, you go straight to united.com, right? You're not doing a search for it. If your company is a small business, not very well known in a niche industry, what have you, this direct traffic may indeed be a lot lower. So if you add that direct and search engine traffic, that comes to 82%, right, and maybe that may be a barometer that you're looking for, if you get a lot of direct traffic, that's well over 28%. Well, there may be things you can be doing on the SEO side to improve getting more referral traffic from Google, I think that's definitely one way of looking at it. The other traffic is 17%. Other I'm assuming is referrals from non search engine, non social media sources. Very, very interesting figure, I think it's really hard for a lot of companies to get a lot of this other type of traffic. But if you're in an industry, where you have a lot of partners, you have resellers, distributors, marketing partners, what have you, hopefully, you'll be able to use that to your advantage and see an increase in this. And then the social media visits, only comprised 1.5%. So if you're getting 1000, hits a day to your website, and you are getting this number really calculated out to 15. If you're getting more than 15 visits from social media, you're doing well, that's, you know, what the number states. So hopefully, if you've been listening to maximize your social internet, you're active in social media, and you're generating great content, hopefully, you're getting this if not, well, there's obviously a lot more you can do to maximize your social. So I thought those were some really, really good barometers. The other thing, and it's really great that I come to you just one week after we talked with Jay Baer, about utility, and we talked a lot about mobile. So the interesting stat here is that less than a quarter of companies 23% provide either a dedicated mobile site or a responsive website. This report goes into the details of how mobile is really driving the increase in website traffic that they spotted across these companies over the last few years. And therefore 67% of these large, fairly large companies that should have fairly large budgets are not providing a mobile experience. You know, it really depends on your budget and your website design. But even at a minimum, if you run on WordPress, like a lot of businesses do, or have your blog on WordPress, there's a great plugin called WP touch, there's a free version of paid version, I highly recommend the paid version, your content is gonna look much better whether it's on an iPhone, an iPad, or an Android. And another interesting stat related to that is that two thirds of all visits to corporate websites from mobile devices. And this is, you know, primarily UK are from iPads and iPhones. So if you're looking at testing, yes, you need to test for Android as well. But you probably want to make iOS and iPads and iPhones, your number one testing platform for mobile. So the stat that was really brought to my attention in the headline in social media today, which caught my eye was that these sites are getting 1.5% of their website traffic from social media of that 1.5%. Where's it all coming from 64% of that traffic is coming from LinkedIn. Now you got to remember, these are corporate websites, right? If you are a consumer facing brand, and you're active on Facebook, and doing campaigns and engaging photos, what have you, you may not be generating a lot of traffic back to your corporate website. On the other hand, if you're a b2b company, where you want to engage with clients, you're probably doing that with white papers, webinars and information that's on your website. Right. So I think that's where we see a big difference. And that's why LinkedIn is so significant. Next to LinkedIn, we have Facebook at 17%, and Twitter at 14%. I don't think that these are good barometers per se, I really think it's going to be different depending on your industry. But I think they're good numbers to consider that LinkedIn indeed, can generate a lot of traffic, but you need to be newsworthy, I think in order to generate that traffic from LinkedIn. And the same goes with Twitter, interestingly, Flickr, YouTube, Google Plus SlideShare all at about 0.1%. Only Flickr was 0.2%. And I do think that obviously, depending on your industry, YouTube, Google Plus and SlideShare can generate a lot more traffic for you from there. But hats off to LinkedIn for impressive results. And hopefully, especially if you're a b2b. And you're blogging, you see the potential for generating traffic from LinkedIn. Another interesting stat and I won't bore you with all the stats in the report, like I said, you should be able to go to the site and download it. I was able to download the report directly from that social media today.com link. But the last thing I want to leave you with, was looking at the footsie 100 and footsie 250 companies, and what corporates social media accounts, did they link to their social media accounts. In other words, when you go to a website, and even in the US, I see this, when I do a social media audit, you go to a website, you don't find a link to a Facebook page or Twitter account, or wherever they have their social media. So if companies are trying to hide their social media accounts, which I recommend you don't do, unless you really don't want to generate more traffic from social media, or attract people to your social media presence. Other than that, you know, you really should have a link to your main social media property somewhere on your website, whether it's above the fold below the fold is a whole different story. But I do believe it should be somewhere. And if we look at the stats that say that I use in my presentations that you know, 93% of US businesses with 100 or more employees are using social media for marketing this year. What are the accounts that they're using, we see Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, obviously, being the top three, I think, throughout the 6070 80%, when we get a little European flavor here, and I've always thought that every country, every continent is different in their adoption of social media, us obviously is ahead of the game, because this is where social media evolved, where the headquarters of Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn or what have you. And I always thought after I visited London last year, and Vienna this year that they were a little bit behind, you know, a few months to a year, we see that this number of linked accounts for Facebook for Twitter for YouTube, indeed, is not very high, we see Twitter actually being the highest, averaging about 43%, YouTube would come in second at about 31%. LinkedIn XD comes in third at 27%. Facebook comes in fourth at 24%. So if you've linked social media profiles to your corporate page, congratulations, you're ahead of two thirds of these companies that were being looked at in this specific report. You know, whenever I find data like this, I think provides good benchmarking data for you to compare yourself with and for you to include as part of your you know, your KPIs, or your metrics for analyzing both your social media and your entire digital presence. I'm going to try to share them with you. I don't know if any of you were surprised by any of those stats, but I really do think that they're good benchmarks, and I hope that you will put them to good use in helping you to maximize your social in the future as well. Thank you again, for listening. I welcome all of your iTunes ratings, comments, and any requests that you may have for me, wherever you are in the world. Make it a great day. Bye bye, everybody. Thanks for listening to maximize your social. We appreciate your iTunes subscriptions, ratings and comments. If you would like to appear on this show or recommend content, please contact Neal Schaffer at Neal at maximize your social.com Thanks for listening and have a great day.