Blue Fire Media offers responsive web design and search engine optimization services to business owners in Grand Rapids, throughout Southwest Michigan, and beyond. When you work with us, we take steps to ensure that your online presence is as strong as possible to drive more visitors to your website and generate leads. However, there are things you can do to help maintain that online presence. In today’s post, we will discuss some of these do’s and don’ts and how they can affect your online presence.
Marking Form Submissions as SPAM
If you have a contact form on your website, it’s a given that you are going to receive submissions from bots or people looking to scam you. You may be tempted to mark these as SPAM, so you don’t receive submissions like these in the future. However, this can have the exact opposite effect.
Whenever you mark an emailed form submission as SPAM, you are not filtering submissions from a specific email address – you are blocking submissions from the entire server. This means that all future submissions will be filtered out, due to them coming from the server you marked as SPAM, and sent to your SPAM folder in your email. Depending on how your email is set up, these emails may even go directly into the trash, being deleted forever.
If you have marked form submissions as SPAM, you will need to speak with the administrator of your email server to get the problem rectified, so you receive the email properly. While it is frustrating to see the illegitimate submissions, it’s better just to delete them, rather than marking them as SPAM and potentially missing out on leads.
Google Analytics Terminology
Google Analytics can be a very useful tool to show you how many visitors come to your website, which pages they are viewing, and much more. Below are explanations of some common terms used in Analytics to help you better understand the data as you view it:
- Active User – a unique visitor to your site, whether a human or a bot. In some cases, Google can even tell if the same user has visited using a phone and a computer, but it’s not 100% accurate. For example, if you are logged into your Google account on your phone and your computer, you can visit the same website on both, but it will only register you as a single user.
- Engagement – any action someone may take while visiting your website. This includes, but is not limited to: visiting the website, opening a new page, clicking a link, scrolling on a page, watching a video, filling out a form, submitting a form, and even your first visit to the site. Each action is also referred to as an Event.
- Bounce Rate – the percentage of people who leave the site after only viewing one page for a short time.
- Organic Search Results – the ranking of your website in search results based solely on the content on the site without any paid advertising or pay-per-click campaign.
- Search Impressions – the number of times your website appears in results when someone instigates a search on Google or another search engine. This has nothing to do with where the site is ranked, but how many times the site link was visible in search results.
- Click Through Rate – the percentage of search impressions that resulted in a user clicking on your link to visit the site.
- Views – the number of times a certain page was viewed either by a human user or by a bot.
- Acquisition – how visitors accessed and visited your site for the first time. This can happen in numerous ways:
- Direct – visitor typed in the URL and went directly to your site without using a search engine.
- Organic Search – visitor clicked on an unpaid impression in search results to access your site.
- Paid Social – visitor clicked on a paid ad on a social media platform like Facebook or X.
- Organic Social – visitor clicked on a link on a social media page belonging to the business.
- Paid Search – visitor clicked on a sponsored (pay-per-click) ad in search engine results.
- Referral – visitor clicked on a third-party link, usually through a referral program in which users are rewarded for driving new leads to the business.
Gmail Accounts and Google Business Profile
In order to have access to your Google Analytics, Tag Manager, Business Profile, Search Console, and other modules, you have to have a Gmail account (or a third-party email address linked to a Gmail account as a recovery email). It is vital that you keep the information about this Gmail account handy because you will have difficulty maintaining these modules in the event that you lose your credentials. Here are a few tips for your Gmail and Google accounts:
- Use a Business Specific Gmail Address – you may be tempted to let an employee use a personal Gmail account for your Google modules, but if something happens to that employee – especially if the employee becomes disgruntled and leaves the company – then you run into potential issues with your online presence. Recovering ownership of your online presence in cases like these can be difficult, time-consuming, and very frustrating. Create and use a unique Gmail account that is attached to another email that you own, so you can recover the account more easily.
- Get Access to Your Google Accounts – even if you have a third-party company handling your Google accounts, it’s crucial to make sure you have management access to them, so you can maintain and transfer control when necessary. Some agencies are not responsive to requests to transfer ownership of these accounts, so make sure you have at least partial ownership of these accounts to avoid a potential problem down the road.
- Keep Track of Credentials – this goes against almost all security recommendations, but you should keep track of any and all Gmail accounts you use for your business and make sure they are kept in a safe, yet easily accessible location. If you lose your Gmail credentials – especially the email address – recovering your email and accessing your Google modules can be extremely difficult. This will make it difficult to update your business listing and respond to customer reviews, which can be a detriment to your online presence over time.
With these recommendations in mind, you will be able to maintain your online presence and provide better feedback to customers more efficiently. If you think it’s time to update your website to improve that online presence, contact Blue Fire Media, and let us know we can help.
