A handy tool for 2012

Posted on by

So I looked at my blog today and realized I’m about a year overdue on my “post once every 2 years” schedule. I understand if you feel outraged that you’ve been cheated of this post for a whole extra year so I figured I’d make it a good one.

Do you ever have trouble accessing a website and wonder… is the website down or is it just me? Just type www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/domain.com

I checked several of my sites and it confirmed that it really was just me!

Now sure if you really wanted you could check it on your phone or get up and go to a coffee shop to test it on their wifi but honestly do you really want to leave your comfy chair at home?

I didn’t think so…

 

Increasing Brand Awareness with SEO

Posted on by

Today, I wanted to share an SEO strategy that is becoming increasingly important for many of our clients. It was written by a member of our Modern Media team at space150, Craig Key, and published by the Minnesota chapter of the American Marketing Association.

The best way to describe the strategy is “SEO for Brand Awareness”. Essentially, we target lifestyle search traffic by providing content that will appeal to a brand’s audience. This strategy is especially valuable for continued SEO growth after top rankings for brand/product keywords have already been achieved.

Here is a link to the full article:
http://mnama.blogspot.com/2009/07/by-craig-key-if-youve-asked-yourself.html

A great example of this strategy we are working on right now a client is a travel planning website. It will contain valuable content around top travel destinations and activities that is designed to appeal to people interested in travel. By pulling in this core travel audience through SEO, we can increase their awareness and likelihood to purchase of complementary travel services.

Posted in SEO

Google Analytics Version 2

Posted on by

Google Analytics Version 2 launched yesterday and the changes are dramatic. Eric Skogen, space150 Creative Tech, speaks for us all when he says of the new version, “I am freaking out! It’s an infographics dream and that interface is GORGEOUS.”

Here are some of the new features we love at space150:

Date Selector

The new date selector was the first improvement we noticed that will help make Google Analytics more usable. It is now really easy to compare date ranges against each other for easier seasonal analysis.

And the addition of the timeline feature means you can quickly get a long-term view of the data without loading a full report. The benefit is that you automatically see big changes as they occur. As you can see in the screenshot below, the timeline alone leads you to question what caused the traffic spike in mid-April.

Streamlined Report Menus

In the previous version of Google Analytics, all reports were categorized as either Marketing Optimization or Content Optimization. Under each of those were 4–5 more categories of weird names before you finally get to the reports. Basically you had to be an expert just to figure out what the categories were, let alone figure out which report you needed.

The new reports are stored under easily understood categories. If you want to know how many visitors are coming to a site, it is immediately obvious that you’d want to click on the Visitors category. If you want to know where those visitors are coming from, just click Traffic Sources.

There are so many new features in Google Analytics that we can’t begin to cover them all. So here are the best links we’ve read that go into more depth: