By Mackenzie Pelletier Lead generation is the process of attracting potential customers to your business, educating them on your offerings and encouraging them to convert and become a customer. Inbound lead generation involves attracting customers through content such as blog posts, ebooks, online guides, etc. Outbound lead generation involves more traditional tactics, such as cold calling, email marketing and direct mail. A website serves as both a platform for publishing and a machine for generating inbound leads. However, simply having a website that explains what you do and how to co ..read more

By Andy Crestodina Nervous? Sweaty palms? The website launch date is coming soon. What if everything goes wrong? What if you lose your rankings in Google?? Relaunching a high ranking website is a little scary. Just imagine: hundreds of hours of work, tens of thousands of dollars invested and then… lower rankings, less traffic, fewer leads. If your current website ranks high and gets traffic from search engines, the idea of a website redesign may be terrifying. It shouldn’t be. As long as you follow best practices, you can expect a minimal impact. You may even improve your rankings. After ..read more

By Andy Crestodina Ranking isn’t really the goal in SEO. Traffic is. That means we need to use GA4 for SEO reporting, because traffic data isn’t in the SEO tools. Traffic isn’t the ultimate goal in SEO either. Lead generation is. That means we need quality traffic that converts into leads. That also means we need to use GA4, because that’s where our conversion data is. Welcome to our mini-guide for using Google Analytics to track SEO performance. We’ve outlined seven reports that show how to use GA4 for SEO, showing how you’re doing in Google search, from top-line traffic to bottom-line l ..read more

By Andy Crestodina Congratulations! You just got some media coverage. There you are in the press or on someone’s blog. You’ve been mentioned. It feels great doesn’t it? But as the warm fuzzies wear off, the big question sets in… What do I do now? You’re getting a flurry of attention and traffic. But it won’t last long. Usually, the spike in website traffic from media coverage lasts only for a few hours. Traffic goes back to what it was within a day or so. Here’s what a classic “press hit” looks like in GA4. It’s visible in your referral traffic and often your direct traffic. How do I get ..read more

By Andy Crestodina New messaging, new offerings, fresh leadership or updated branding. Suddenly, the website (and maybe the current web partner aren’t cutting it). It’s time to redesign. You’re on the quest to choose a new web developer …which can be a challenging, high-stakes decision. Probably, you’ve been through this before and you know that in the world of web development, both costs and results vary wildly. This is a guide for qualifying (or disqualifying) possible web development companies. It is a list of 20 questions, based on our experience on the agency side, combining 25 years ..read more

By Andy Crestodina An effective website has to do a lot of things right. Think about your ideal visitor. Something happens in their life that sends them looking for help. This is the moment of truth. They need what you do. They open a browser. Here’s what happens next… They search. Do you appear in search results? They click on your website. Does it load quickly?  They may be on a mobile device. Does the site display properly? They may have a visual impairment. Is the site accessible to them? They may not want to be tracked. Does the site comply with privacy laws? They read the pag ..read more

By Andy Crestodina Click! You have a visitor. They land on a page and begin navigating around your website. Hopefully, answers are easy to find. Navigation labels are clear. Internal links are useful. The search tool is helpful. But then they hit a dead end. These are places where the flow of visitors stops because the page is blank. There are no offers, no information, no reason to stay. Probably, they close the tab or hit the back button. Here is a quick guide to finding and fixing website dead ends. We’ll list the seven most common dead ends on websites and suggest fixes that keep your ..read more

By Andy Crestodina It’s a website. You can put anything there. But should you? People add all kinds of crazy stuff to their sites, often without a thought for strategy or their visitors. It’s common to see websites that distract, confuse or worse. On this blog, we’ve published research showing which website features are standard and how some of those features don’t align with best practices. Today we’re being more direct. Here is a list of things that should probably just be removed from all websites. Some are common. All are suspect. This is based on our experience planning 1000+ website ..read more

By Andy Crestodina Once upon a time… SEO was mostly about just using a keyphrase a certain number of times. Not too many times or you look spammy. Not too few or you don’t look relevant. I did SEO back then. It was very weird and search results were bad. Those were dark days online. Today… Search engines are much better and SEO has evolved. Through research and experimentation, SEOs learned that it isn’t just about using the target keyphrase. Now, to indicate relevance and quality, the page should use the target keyphrase, but also the page should use the closely related phrases. Here is ..read more

By Andy Crestodina I personally review the performance for every website we launch. We redesign around 40 websites per year. So I spend a lot of time in and out of GA4 accounts, measuring the impact of website redesign projects. Every website is different. Different traffic sources, different content strategies, different goals and conversions. So every post-launch Analytics review is unique to that client. But there are some reports I always run. But first, a warning… If you want to measure pre/post-launch results accurately, you should not change GA4 setup when you launch. You should fi ..read more