Company Blog
7 Redesigns Added to Our Portfolio
The past few months have been very busy for us here at Growth Spark. With nearly two dozen projects on our plate, we've had little time to update our portfolio and showcase the great work our clients and team have collaborated on. Realizing this, we added seven of our recently launched wordpress designs to our site the other day. Check them out! Each represents months of careful planning, designing, development and marketing work. They also represent seven flourishing relationships with exceptional clients.
Intern’s Review of Branding
After being chosen to become part of Growth Spark’s team, I was invited to a business dinner where we would talk about branding and future company goals. We all brainstormed sat around, ate Thai and talked about what the word brand meant to all of us.
For me, branding is, an identity of a product, service, or business.
First, gathering the fuel from our brainstorming the question we have to ask ourselves is, what is the problem and how should we solve it. The information we explored, we concluded that the next phase of our research and development clearly understands what branding means. Branding establishes a common ground or goal within the company. Building a product or service is important to a business in the marketplace. It will create value that differentiates who you are as a company. Bringing our brand personality to the surface we channel a “we” attitude rather than the “I”. This is a team working together continuing to develop an innovative internal company as well as external. Internally changing the brand making it unique. Externally providing businesses a marketing service. The main goals being tackled head on are changing themes, font consistency to the brand, and colors that will lead you wanting more. All these internal points of interest are important to a brand because you do not want to create confusion. By creating confusion in consumer’s minds the message wont be clearly conveyed.
It is crucial that your product stands out through other various media types. A well-branded product or service determines its company’s position in the market place. The image has to be professional and different so unique it stands out among the rest. Having a USP, Unique Selling Proposition will communicate a brand promise, an identity that incorporates logo, and brand identity. While inspiring creative thought in a work environment, the USP of Growth Spark gives new growth providing a marketing service to businesses that are looking to grow online. Promising to build and channel innovative strategies, Growth Spark will value an easy profitable and fun business. Through that online medium it successfully heightens the level of awareness and delivers a clear concise message.
Branding is the most important word to understand in the marketplace. If you do not have a brand you have nothing. Being clear and concise is the key. Less is more. Create a message that allows your brand to stay unique and be ahead of the times. This will create brand loyalty within your target market. Staying true to your brand will not create doubt. Primarily, branding and what it means to us understanding growth. Growth Spark will continue to question the brand only to maintain a high level of presence online. This will keep the brand fresh and inviting to its consumers, which in the end create brand loyalty among their target.
Amber Goldberg is an Advertising student at The New England Institute of Art. She graduates in August, 2010. As an intern, she assists in industry research, competitive analysis, press release drafting, and implementing client-facing marketing strategies.
A Marketing Intern’s Thoughts On Branding
I had been looking for a summer internship earlier in the summer when I found that Growth Spark was offering one. I was interested in web marketing and thought the internship would be a great opportunity for me. I applied and was fortunate enough to be chosen as a new intern. To get familiar with the company, I was invited to a business dinner, where we discussed the company, our goals, and some details about the internship. The heart of the discussion revolved around branding.
Branding refers to establishing the identity or image of a company. It can be as simple as designing a logo or as intricate as creating a specific style and structure for all products and literature associated with the company. Our ultimate goal was to have a style that was unique to Growth Spark, one that people will recognize as ours whether they see it on a webpage or a pamphlet. In order to develop this style, our branding has to convey the qualities that define our company: a passion for collaborating with our clients and open, team-oriented discussion on projects.
Prior to this branding meeting, we had already established some key branding elements like the logo that appears on all of our products. At the meeting we debated a new design for business cards and a new stationary for our literature when we realized that it is important to have consistency across these formats. Our fonts, colors, and imagery must be consistent between the webpage and the printed page. Because we need to maintain consistency, we noticed that if we make one change, it leads to more changes. For example, if we were to drastically change the business cards, we would need to change the website. We need to make sure the colors and fonts seen on the card are also seen on the website.
Since one change can lead to many, we needed to establish priorities. We’re a busy, growing company and needed to decide what we can handle at the moment. Realizing this, we agreed that our goal at this point isn’t to completely rebrand or restructure our identity. We don’t have the time or resources for such a project. But after that meeting, we had much more perspective on the process of branding and the role it will play in our future.
Redefining our image will be a complicated matter, but we can start by representing the ideals of Growth Spark through our activities and interactions. These ideals have lead us to create an environment in which everyone has an equal voice, feedback is valued and collaboration is encouraged, and it is these ideals which will guide us in future branding efforts.
Alex Ramirez is an intern at Growth Spark and a Junior at Emmanuel College majoring in English Communications. As an intern, he assists in press release drafting, competitive analysis, industry research and implementing client-facing marketing strategies.
SEO Basics: Tracking Results with Analytics
This is the seventh and final post in Growth Spark's SEO Basics for Business Owners series.
So, you've been working hard on improving your SEO, but how do you know if it is getting the results you want? You can search for your keywords to see that they are higher in the rankings. You can keep track of how many orders you get. But the best way is to use analytics software, where you can see the real statistics of people that visit your site, where they come from, and what they do there. Armed with this information you will know which SEO tactics are working, and you can go back to the beginning and continuously improve.
The most popular way to keep track of your website visitor's statistics is Google Analytics (free). While Google is the leader, they do have some competition worth mentioning. Clicky (basic free, pro $10/month) provides a high level of detail on individual visitors. Mint ($30/site) is a self-hosted analytics program. Crazy Egg (basic $10/month) tracks exactly where people click on your site, very useful for optimizing layout and determining behaviors of visitors from different sources. The great thing about analytics programs is that you can use as many as you want simultaneously, and many people use more than one.
There's so much information available though, that it's hard not to be blown away and engulfed all at once. This post will run you through the basic and most important reports in Google Analytics.
Setting up Google Analytics
Setting up Google Analytics (GA) is relatively simple. It requires that you get a piece of code and insert it in the footer of every page that you wish to track. To get the code, sign in to your Google account at http://www.google.com/analytics/. If it is your first time setting up analytics, Google will guide you through the process. If you're going back a second time, you want to find the profile you created for your website, and select 'Edit.' On the next page, at the top right of the 'Main Website Profile Information' box, click "check status." Now you will be presented with the code that needs to be inserted into your website.
At this stage, just copy & paste the code into each page just before the </body> tag. If your website is built using PHP, you can usually just paste it once into the footer.php file and it will be displayed on every page that includes the footer. If you're using a CMS such as Wordpress, you can use a plugin which will insert the analytics tracking code into each page. If you're not sure about this step, since it is a little technical, contact your website developer or manager and they should be able to do it for you. In fact, installing analytics should be a basic included feature in any website build project.
The Dashboard
The first thing you will see when you open up GA for the first time is the dashboard. It looks like there is a lot of information here, but it really only scratches the surface. It is highly customizable, but the default GA Dashboard shows you Site Usage, Visitors Overview, Map Overlay, Traffic Sources Overview, and Content Overview.
The Default GA Dashboard
The Site Usage section gives you a really good brief glance at general user behavior on your site. You can see how many pages the average person visited, how many people left the site after viewing only one page (Bounce Rate), how long people spend on the site on average, and how many of the people are new visitors.
The Visitors Overview section is basically a reflection of the main graph, and so it is the least useful of the default panels. You can remove it by clicking the x at the top right of its box.
The Map Overlay is very cool to look at. It tells you what part of the world your visitors are coming from and, if you click on it, it can even drill down to the individual city. While it is a very cool feature, for most businesses it won't actually give you much actionable data. It will most of the time look like the image above for US companies: the States are dark green, and other countries are white or light green.
Traffic Sources and Content Overview are the most useful for SEO reasons. Traffic Sources tells you whether your visitors came directly (typed in your URL), were referred by another site (clicked a link), or came from search engines. The Content Overview tells you what the most popular pages on your site are.
But these overview reports are not specific enough to really let you know at a glance if your SEO efforts are working. There are a few other elements that you can add to your dashboard to make it a bit more useful.
Click on 'view report' in the Traffic Sources Overview, then on the next page under keywords on the bottom right click "View Full Report." This brings you to a page which lists your keywords which people used to find your site. On this page, below the graph, you will want to click 'non-paid,' because we want to look at only organic keywords. This is where you can see how each of your keywords is doing in terms of how much traffic it sends to your site. You can click the "Add to Dashboard" button at the top of the page to add this to your dashboard.
Organic Keyword Report
We'll get a little more advanced for the next section, even though this is an Analytics basics article. A great thing to be able to see is which pages people are coming to directly from the search engine results. Do get this, we will have to use an Advanced Segment, but GA makes this feature really easy to use.
On the left-side navigation, go to Content, then Top Landing Pages. The display will show all of the pages people landed on when they first visited your site. We want to narrow it down a bit to show only the ones that came from search engines results pages. To do that, just go to the top-right corner where it shows the Advanced Segments selector. Click on that, and select the box which says "Non-paid Search Traffic." Not it is showing your most effective pages in regards to SEO: the ones that are pulling in the most search engine traffic.
Landing Pages from Search Results
You can add the top landing pages to your dashboard, but the advanced segments will not be contained in the small dashboard box. So, it will not show only the landing pages from search traffic, but from all traffic sources.
As you look through the different sections of GA, you will find some sections particularly useful and interesting, and you can always add those to your dashboard as well. Each website is different, and will have a different set of metrics that are important. Other features that are likely to be on the dashboard are ecommerce tracking and goals, which leads us to the next section:
Analytics Goal Setting and Tracking
While the dashboard is nice to look at to give you information quickly, you can leave it as-is. But you need to set up goals for your website!
Goals are how you track whether users are doing what you want them to do. For every website it might be different. It may be to buy a product, to register an account, sign up for a newsletter, download a white paper, or even just to view over a certain number of pages. In reality, each website will likely have many goals that they would like visitors to complete.
The reason that goals are so important is that they are the real measurement of your success. Visitor counts and bounce rates might be interesting, but they don't show you if any visitors are converting into potential customers.
If you haven't set up Goals yet, click the button in the left-hand navigation and it will bring you to a Goals Overview page where you can click "Set up goals and funnels." If you already have set up goals though, you will have to go back to the Edit section of your profile (the page before you got the tracking code), and you can edit goals there. Either way, we get to the same place.
In GA, you are allowed to have up to 20 goals organized into 4 groups. Click 'add goal' to start a new one. Let's use the example that we want a visitor to download a free brochure. They will typically click the download brochure link from the homepage, then are brought to the download success page once the download is complete. For purposes of example, let's say that one out of every ten people that download the brochure end up making a purchase that results in $100 of revenue. Here's how to set up this goal :
Some things to note that are important: You should, if possible, always have a Goal Value set for your goal. This is how you can tell which visitors and keywords are making you money, and which aren't. Especially when you have many goals set up that are worth different amounts, this will be the indicator of success. To find a goal value, take the percent of people who will make a purchase, times the average revenue per customer for this action. In the above example we have 10% x $100 = $10 as our equation.
Conversion Rate x Average Revenue per Customer = Goal Value
The Goal Funnel represents the normal path that a visitor will take to arrive at your goal. Here it is only 2 clicks, but some actions may be longer (such as signing up for an account). If you set this up, GA can show you a visual representation of where people enter and exit your Funnel. It is a great indicator of which pages are effective, and how many clicks people are willing to go through to reach a certain goal. While it is an optional feature, I recommend it.
Conclusions and More Resources
This post on basic analytics tracking for SEO really only touched on a few of the main things you will want to do when you first set up Google Analytics. As you dive in to the different sections, you will find that there is almost too much information to handle. Advanced reports and segments will help you filter out some of the noise, and ecommerce tracking is essential for anyone running an online store or ecommerce website. These may be featured in future posts here at Growth Spark, but for now I would like to leave you with some articles that go deeper into the world of analytics for those who are interested.
- A Guide to Google Analytics and Useful Tools
- The Missing Google Analytics Manual
- Official GA Blog: Back to Basics
- Introduction to Google Analytics
Image Credits: tastybits, Search Engine People Blog
SEO Basics: Updating Content & Blogging
This is the sixth post in Growth Spark's SEO Basics for Business Owners series.
One thing that have a great positive impact on your website is constantly adding content. Each new page you create is a new chance to show up in the search engine results.
Search engines are constantly browsing the web, looking for new content to index. When they come across a website that updates or adds content often, the search engines make a note to return to that website more frequently to look for new content. Sites that update and add content regularly are more likely to have a lot of pages in the search engine's index, which means that they will show up in search results.
Changing & Updating Content
When updating existing pages, you should try to make sure that it will improve the rankings rather than hurt. For example, if you have a page that is in the number one spot for a certain keyword, I would recommend not changing it. You might think that by adding content to this page, you could get it to rank higher for its second-best keyword as well. In a lot of cases, especially if this page is ranking because of on-page factors, adding more keyword variations will 'dilute' the keyword density and the page could drop from the number one spot.
If you're already at the number one spot, you should instead try to build links pointing to that page containing the secondary keyword. Links are a very powerful aspect of search engine optimization, and are more likely to have a positive impact in this scenario.
In another situation, if you have a page that is not doing well, adding and changing content could be a good strategy. Continue to update and add to the information on the page, and it may do better over time. SEO and content updating is a constant process; an ongoing experiment to see what makes each page go up in the rankings.
SEO Blogging and Writing Tips
Blogging is a great way to continuously add more content to your website. A lot of companies are starting corporate blogs, and all have different writing styles. Your blog should reflect your company's corporate culture.
Keep in mind that the first goal of your blog should be to have people read it and share it with their friends (links!), and only secondarily focused on search engine optimization. Interesting, informative, insightful, or provocative topics are better than just choosing a keyword for each post and forming a post around it.
Write your post first, then once it's done you can go back and make sure that the words you used fit relevant keywords. If you think of the keyword first, it could come out choppy and unnnatural: not something people want to read. Remember that links are worth much more than on-page optimization.
If possible, you should have a good writer from your company write the blog and website, then have it proofread and edited by a professional if needed. If you're not sure that anyone on your staff is qualified, you can hire a professional writer to write the blog. A word of warning though - make sure that your hired writer is accurately reflecting your brand image in the blog.
Here are a few tips for writing and blogging on the web:
- Use correct spelling and grammar.
- Short is often better. Reading on the computer screen is easier when there are short sentences and paragraphs.
- Use lists. People love lists, and it can make your posts more readable.
- Include pictures! It will add some color and make your posts more attractive.
- Post regularly. Depending on your ability this could mean once per week, or once per day.
These tips don't just apply to blogging though. You can always add pages to your main website as well. If you have a new product or service, a new member on your team, or a new client testimonial, all these things can be used to create new pages on your website that also have the possibility to lead to more traffic. Once you have a lot of content, you need to see who is visiting it so that you can improve. The last part in the cycle of search engine optimization is tracking with analytics software, which will be covered in the next post in this series.
Image Credit: dbdbrobot
