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...