Website Benchmarks

There are my four ideas that drill down into how your website is a segment of the public marketplace. Like it or not, if you want to excel, which means connecting with your target audience, you have to, in one degree or another, apply these ideas to your website content.

In Growing Marketplace, Sustain Consumer Confidence

Somewhere between 80-90% of customers now check online reviews prior to making a purchase, and this number is only expected to increase. It won’t be long before virtually everyone is searching for products and services online. Do you want them to be able to locate your business, or not?

You must create links into your website from credible sources, which are called inbound links. A place to start are the free Bing business profile and free Goggle business profile. Another place to create those links with your YouTube or Vimeo channel. Then follows social media channels. To take it to the next step of to an app like Keyabase to setup an account and link that to your website using their verification process.

Growth Of Mobile Computing

Make sure that you content loads quickly on mobile devices and displays properly. This is referred to as responsive website marketing.

As time goes by, the amount of traffic delivered to mobile devices is expected to exceed that delivered to traditional desktop devices. With this dramatic explosion in mobile usage, a whole new world of effective SEO techniques have opened up for companies, such as local search optimization.

Information Age: Businesses Require Data Sharing

The methods of sharing data are always being adjusted. IMO, the whole purpose of this type of sharing is to make your products and services more visible in the marketplace, without having to pay advertising fees.

Today there are rich snippets which are a “must have” on your website to help the search bots correctly identify you, as well as, to better display your products and services in the most appropriate way.

Rich Snippets [aka meta content and/or structured meta tags] provide a small sample of a site’s content on Search Engine Result Pages of search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. They enhance your search listing, making it more enticing for users to click on and easier for search engines to extract information.

Adding rich snippets to your site won’t affect the appearance or content of your pages; rather, everything is done behind the scenes in your site’s HTML code. To display RS, you just need to tweak the code of your website with some additional tags.

Another method of sharing data is the meta tag method, which has been around since websites technology came into existence.  Make sure that every page on your site has as has least a meta tag for “description”. This should be a concise statement, maybe containing key words, that exists in the web page content.

Differentiate the descriptions for different pages. Identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site aren't helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. If you don't have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content: At the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.

Must Keep Up With Competitors

“Remember, SEO is a never-ending process,” says Jason Bayless, Owner of BestSeoCompanies.com, a website which tracks and ranks the efficacy and service of many of the nation’s leading SEO providers. “If you’re not moving forward and improving your position, you’re losing ground to a competitor who is. That’s a simple fact of how the process works.” Don’t let your competitors out maneuver you by ignoring the SEO technology methods in your online showcase. 

The USA does not have federal online privacy laws to protect the privacy of folks while they browse the internet. This leaves the door open to manipulating data selling it to third parties that want to build profiles about visitor browsing habits and purchases, even the giant tech companies are being accused of selling data of individuals.

The analytics you ouse on your website does collect user data. It’s how you filter that data and what you do with that data which determines if you are protecting privacy or not protecting privacy.

The European Union (EU) has set forth the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In the USA you there is a non-profit group that tracks legislation covering state by state online privacy regulations.

While the GDPR is the gold standard for website privacy in all aspects, it remains a work in progress. The “privacy cookies” we see on so many website are NOT even on the scale of GDPR requirements.

How can you protect the privacy of website visitors and also discover the success to convert your target audience? I will discuss the four points below to cover that question.

1. What does it mean to track a website visitor.

2. Compare tools that capture website visitor information.

3. How to modernize your website privacy policy.

4. Move forward with optimal website visitor privacy.
   
   

Tracking A Website Visitor

The most common understanding of tracking website visitors is to identify important website activity - important being related to your website objective.

Website owners must understand the behavior of website visitors in order to improve their sales funnel, or another way to say that, convert visitors into subscribers or buyers. And, to achieve having website visitors appear at the website requires SEO to make the website visible in search engine results.

Tracking website visits is collecting data (analytics) that shows how each visitor found your site, what they did on your site and also characteristics on them personally to understand your target audience.

That data comes from your analytics. For example, Google analytics that you can use for free.

Visitor tracking gets much more powerful when you apply tags, such as Google analytics tags. In thr tsgs you crate you distinguish bettwen wat Call To Action (CTA) the visito took. Dis they push a button, watch a movie, or click a text link? You identify performance based on statistics, and drilling down with tags, to understand the effectiveness of page views, what devices are used on your website, and the overall flow of wacy visitor.

As a website owner, to visitor protect privacy, you must wipe the IP address of your visitors. You are still able to see and track visitor performance, but you cannot trace that performance back to a specific individual or computer.

Tools Capturing Website Visitor Data (Analytics)

Google Analytics (GA) are, perhaps, is most recognized analytics tool. There are many such tools, but GA is free so that helps induce the majority of websites to use it. Unfortunately, that analytics has a terrible record on data privacy that is pretty much out in the open if you take the time to read the consent you make to use the GA product. This is a recent news article where Rusiia has fine Google Analytics.

• Russia fines Google more than the world's entire GDP
• Antitrust: Commission fines Google €1.49 billion
• Justice Department Sues Google for Monopolizing Digital Advertising Technologies

Matomo is an analytics product I use for my website clients. It’s based in Germany, which means it must be compliant with GDPR.

In terms of visitor privacy, while also collecting visitor behavior data, I like these four features in Matomo.

1. Automatically anonymize Visitors IPs.
   
2. Include a analytics opt-out feature on your site (using a simple iframe).
   
3. Ability to delete old visitor logs.
   
4. Built in function to respect Do Not Track setting.
   

Below are five distinct benefits that Matomo has automatically with the key being this is all GDPR complaint. 

A. Your data is housed on a server in Germany and Germany requires GDPR be intact.
B. Analysis feature to ensure you get insights into how well your content is performing.
C. Integration of search words from Yandex, Bing and yahoo into Matomo.
D. Multiple websites under the one account means one login for 30 websites..
E. Sales funnel is easy to create, monitor and adjust.

As a business website owner, you want the data showing what visitors do on your web pages so that you can build a better website.

The three fundamentals to applying an ROI include 1) identifying what your organic search results are now 2) what you paid to achieve those results, and 3) the cost to sustain those results.

To have that information you must apply analytic data that tells you website visitor details where you can drill down to see what each “tag” is accomplishing.

Underlying that ROI process is a privacy policy, posted on your website, that provides information as to what you are doing with website visitor information.

According to the GDPR a cookie notice must meet the four characteristics.

1. Freely given (the user must have a choice to not give consent and be able to opt out at any time).

1. Informed (you need to disclose who is processing the data, what data is processed and how to opt out).

2. Specific (consent is only valid for the specific informed purpose).

3. Unambiguous (for example, pre-ticked boxes or similar aren’t allowed). By those four measurements, 99% of the websites in USA displaying cookie notices, at time of writing this article, are invalid. They don’t meet GDPR.
   
   

Update Your Website Privacy Poilcy

You are welcome to use the privacy policy on this website to model your own privacy policy.

These are my suggested next steps for you to modernize your privacy policy.

These are my suggested next steps for you to modernize your privacy policy.

1. If you are using a cookie based analytics, or if you are choosing a analytics service with servers in USA then be advised they are probably not in compliance with GDPR. You would do well to ask them in an email if they are in compliance.

2. Once you know if you are using cookies, or want to use cookies - meaning you want to collect personal data from your visitors - then set up a hard cookie notice on your website that satisfies the four characteristics mentioned about in Website Cookie Notice section. Most likely you will need to add a function to your website that allows your users/visitors to sign in and manger their cookie preference.

3. If you want to move forward without using cookies, simply find an analytics provider. Or, use a service like Matomo that collects data but wipes the IP address so a website visitor cannot be tracked to an individual or computer.

4. One last pertinent detail to keep in mind with your website privacy policy is a recent ruling. On July 16, 2020, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) invalidated the “Privacy Shield” in a U.S. Surveillance case. It ruled that personal data can't simply be transferred to the US or to another country, unless they have similar privacy standards.

My intention is that you learned something to benefit your business website operations and marketing. If this content was not helpful to you,  send me an email and tell me.

Steu Mann