Prof T's SEO and Analytics Blog

  Summit Community Bank is a nearly $4 billion regional community bank. It provides banking, lending, and trust and wealth management services at 44 banking locations across three states. While primarily focused on maintaining its strong footprint in legacy locations, Summit Community Bank has used a successful merger and acquisition strategy to encourage steady growth over the last six years. As it continues to grow in new markets, new opportunities bring new, diverse challenges, including exploring new peers and competitors, expanding brand awareness, and capturing market share. In the digital landscape, competitive analysis is especially important when it comes to optimizing one of an organization’s most valuable online resources, its website.  Competitive analysis, as SEMrush notes, can help benchmark a business’ current SEO performance, identify areas of improvement in SEO strategy, reveal any competitor gaps or weaknesses, and discover competitors' winning strategies (Sl...

  Nearly Natural is e-commerce company that primarily sells silk and artificial flowers, plants, and home decor, located at nearlynatural.com. The artificial and silk plant industry is a steadily growing global market, estimated to reach $780MM by 2028. Nearly Natural is one of the top four United States-based artificial and silk plant companies (GlobeNewsWire, 2021). One way to learn about how certain sites are built and will help deduce if they are utilizing analytics, is by inspecting the website’s code. This is something I’ve used many times when I am looking at websites and I want more information about how they run, and how they might be collecting data. The website’s code can tell us much about the tools that company is using to collect data and measure metrics. On the Nearly Natural site, we can tell right away from our web inspection that there are tags for Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, both web analytics tools. We can also see that Nearly Natural is using Shopi...

I have to admit that I have a love/hate relationship with social media sometimes. I love it when brands and people can have meaningful conversations and I love that over the last decade we’ve seen some really amazing content that has allowed the consumer to be involved very directly in the decision-making process for companies and for brands. But social media can be fickle, (let’s look at Twitter for example, or even TikTok, where changes in leadership or the algorithms that circulate content aren’t always the most transparent). Also it may be unpopular, but I’m not into gimmicky content that goes viral one time and is exploited forever, I just don’t believe that’s a strong social strategy in the long run. Sure, it drives traffic to a brand from a reach perspective, but how many of those people are truly valuable toward your business goals in the long run? Jack Appleby from Marketing Brew explains that social strategy should be simple, and he lays out a four-question framework on how t...

  An analytics tool that I find valuable and one that I plan to use as my company migrates toward the full adoption of Google Analytics 4, is Google Search Console. Google Search Console is a powerful analytics tool that helps data analysts understand how a website is performing in Google Search. Along with Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console can provide an in-depth look at how a website is performing in Google Search and provide insights for optimizing websites for search engines (Vanhee, 2022).  According to SEMRush, Google dominates the worldwide market share of search except in China and Russia, with almost 83% of the United States’ desktop search traffic coming from Google Search (2021), and as of September 2022, SimilarWeb reports that Google is still ranked as the most popular website in the world (SimliarWeb, 2022). Even with how search is changing with privacy concerns, and with the younger generations increasingly searching on mobile devices and with other apps...

Since the sunset of Universal Analytics was announced, one of my main concerns as a marketer was to ensure that I was still able to provide the same or similar insights that I was currently reporting to my organization once we transitioned our online and digital properties to Google Analytics 4. However, as the decision-makers in my organization have grown comfortable with the format and metrics of Universal Analytics, my main concern with migrating over to Google Analytics 4 is trying to explain the differences in a way that makes sense and can account for the differences that they will see in the reports they receive. While much of what I believe has changed with Google Analytics has changed on a technical and more nuanced level, I want to try to make those concepts easy to understand without getting too deep or overly complex. One of the important things to note with Google Analytics 4 versus Univeral Analytics, and is the foundation to understanding those subtle differences is how...

  Here is an article written by Backlinko that talks through the technical aspects of SEO. It breaks technical SEO into 6 chapters and is pretty in-depth about the topic. Let me know what you think:  https://backlinko.com/technical-seo-guide Prof. T

 Hello Class, I thought you might find this article to be interesting. It discusses web analytics but focuses on leveraging web analytics to help you do better. Let me know what you think. GMI Blogger. (2021, August 5). UNDERSTANDING WEB ANALYTICS. WHY LEVERAGING IT MATTERS? Retrieved from:  https://www.globalmediainsight.com/blog/web-analytics-benefits-for-business/ Prof. T

I own a horse. That horse happens to be white and enjoys all things dirt and mud. That horse also manages to find anything he can get into. Needless to say, I am constantly buying horse supplies both in person and online. I have go-to trusted regular retailers, but I noticed recently that a new name keeps popping up on my searches, my digital ads, and equestrian box I subscribe to, Cavali Club. Enter Corro . On the Side-by-Side SEO Comparison Tool, Corro describes themselves through the meta description as an “online store for all of the best in horse supplies, tack and equipment, grooming supplies, and more. Lowest prices and free shipping available for all products.” If they are making a brand promise for lowest prices then clearly they have their eye constantly on the competition, as they are up against the established competitors such as Dover Saddlery, Stateline Tack, SmartPak, etc. Recently, I remembered a Facebook horse forum I’m a part of talking about an easy horse bathi...