Danny McKeever

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wheel chair icon referencing ada website comnpliance

August 23 2021

How to Make Your Website ADA Compliant

The internet as we know it today is over 30 years old. Throughout most of that time, there has been little, if any, regulation governing its use, opportunities, and proliferation. There was always going to be a moment, however, where unbridled freedom would eventually run into necessary responsibility. When it comes to the Americans with Disabilities Act, it would seem as though that moment is just around the corner, if not already upon us. Many website owners are beginning to wonder how they can make their website ADA compliant for both compassionate and legal considerations.

What is the Americans with Disabilities Act?

The ADA is a piece of civil rights legislation that protects the equal opportunity of disabled Americans in everyday life. The ADA became law in 1990 and was amended in 2008. At first, focusing on the right for the disabled to not be discriminated against when seeking gainful employment, the ADA has since evolved to include equal access to telecommunications (think telephones, closed captioning, and equal access to information).

The passage of the ADA finally gave the disabled the same expectations of rights that had previously been granted to Americans based on race, gender, and sexual preference. After its passage, state and commercial properties began to build ramps and install elevators for people in wheelchairs, hired staff to help communicate with people suffering blindness and deafness, and America began making accommodations so that people who are disabled could live equally with their fellow Americans.

Does the ADA apply to websites?

Title II of the ADA loosely requires government-funded websites to meet certain ADA standards regarding accessibility. While the ADA does not implicitly dictate accommodations for the disabled on the commercial internet, the topic has surfaced recently in a handful of court cases where access to particular websites was impossible for people with certain disabilities. The prospect of litigation in these cases suggests that an amendment to the ADA may be coming sooner rather than later.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are not yet law

Dating back to the Obama administration, in 2010, the Dept. of Justice was considering adopting a set of standards to guide websites towards a more accessible future. While the guidelines were not adopted during either the Obama or Trump administrations, it is possible that the current or future administrations will come back to these guidelines and add them into the ADA.

Apis Productions believes the time is now for ADA compliance

Apis Productions has already begun to update some of our clients’ websites to take the ADA into account and provide equal access to disabled Americans that may use these sites. At Apis, we believe that every American deserves to enjoy a quality website experience regardless of their race, gender, preference, or disability. Fortunately, there are now tools available to help us do just that. Let’s take a quick dive into what a potential amendment to the ADA might look like where websites are concerned.

4 WCAG Guidelines to having an ADA compliant website

Obviously, a website has no need to build physical access such as ramps or railings. However, there are many things that we can do to allow for blind people who utilize screen readers, or color blind people who may not be able to distinguish one part of a website from another to improve their experience on our clients’ sites. Here are some of the preliminary guidelines and considerations that we have compiled for this purpose.

Perceivable – A website must present its information in a way that is perceivable to all users

1. Images must contain alternative text (i.e. if a user cannot see an image, logo, etc., there must be accompanying text for a screenreader to convey the meaning)
2. Utilize captions and descriptions for multimedia content
3. Create options for text size, color distinctions, and other design considerations

Operable – Website navigation and operations use must be accessible equally
1. Functionality must be possible from the keyboard alone (i.e. if a user cannot operate a mouse, keyboard options are available to navigate through menus)
2. Time allocation – events on a website that appear and disappear must allow adequate time for a reader to fully finish reading the information
3. No harmful content (i.e. flashing content that could cause someone with epilepsy to experience a seizure)
4. Helpful tooltips that assist a user in navigating content

Understandable – Both the content and the overall operation of the website should be able to be understood by the user
1. Text should be clear to any user
2. Functionality of buttons, features, and operation of the site should be predictable
3. The website should help prevent users from making mistakes

Robust – The website should be able to interact with third-party technologies (such as screen readers) that assist the user in accessing and understanding the website.

What do the WCAG guidelines mean for my website?

As you can see, the guidelines printed above share the common goal of creating an as equal as possible experience for a disabled person visiting your website. While the work of making these accommodations may seem daunting, there are tools available to help retrofit your website to accomplish the fulfillment of these guidelines.

Adjust the experience to their own ability

There are programs, plug-ins, and scripts that run on your site giving your users the ability to open a suite of accessibility tools to adjust the experience to their ability. They can change the size of the text, view the site in grayscale, alter everything from the contrast to the amount of background light and truly create the best version of your site, for themselves!

What is left up to you is simply to continue providing quality content that is clear and understandable.

We’re all about it

When the technology meets the need, the answer is always a simple, “yes”. In this case, being able to afford our customers a more complete experience of our website is worth implementing. Perhaps, more than that, we could see it another way. As website owners, we are participating in an enormous global information community where attention equals success. If that is true, then we should always strive to make the tent bigger and more engaged. By including our disabled neighbors more compassionately, we achieve both.

May 10 2021

Google My Business is Free, Simple, and Incredibly Important for Your Website

Danny McKeever Blog 0

The first page of Google is the Holy Grail of online marketing. Over 75 percent of internet searchers click on one of the first-page results. One way to get there is through the effective use of keywords, website authority, and on-page SEO combined with patience and perseverance. Another way is to purchase search ads in your niche. There is, however, another way to jump onto the screens of your sought-after audience: Google My Business. It’s free, simple to set up, and by far the fastest way to get in front of your customers on that coveted first page.

Why You Should Set Up Google My Business If You Haven’t Yet

Visibility. When you set up a Google My Business account you are allowing the search engine to help people who are local to your business find you when they are searching for a service or product you provide. Google uses the physical location of your business to curate a list of you and your local competitors for potential customers to see.

Local SEO. By appearing in local searches, you are increasing organic traffic to your website. What’s more, that traffic is targeted traffic. Engaged traffic. While not a replacement for quality content, keywords, and functionality, appearing in local results will improve your overall SEO rankings.

Branding. Google My Business allows you a certain amount of control over what people see when your business comes up in the search results. Reviews, pictures, and a description of what you offer is free branding for your enterprise and when it comes to marketing free is always beautiful.

Google My Business: Step by Step Setup

To get started, simply go to https://www.google.com/business/ and click the manage button. There are going to be about a dozen screenshots here, but they are all quick and relatively painless. Let’s get our business listed on Google!

Step 1: Add Your Business To Google

See if your business is already listed in Google. If it is you can ‘claim’ it to edit the details. We will assume your business is not yet listed in these instructions. In which case you will click ‘Add your business to Google’.

Step 2: Enter the Name of Your Business and Select or Create a Category

When choosing your business category, you could very well find that the category you want is not automatically listed as an option. No problem. Simply create your own category that best describes the type of business you have.

Step 3: If You Have a Physical Location or Office, Select ‘Yes’

If you have an office or a physical location for your business, enter it here. If you don’t, no worries. You will have the option later to describe your service areas on another screen. (Even if you have a physical address you will still be able to describe your service areas later on).

Step 4: Enter the Cities you Service

Here is the screen where you can expand the areas that you will be seen in Google’s local listings. You can select as many areas as you wish, but you can always change these later on your Google My Business dashboard.

Step 5: Enter Your Contact and Website Information

This is where you will let potential customers know how to reach you. The fields are not mandatory, so if you don’t want to reveal a phone number, you can simply leave it blank. Your website, if you have one, should absolutely be written in here.

Step 6: Select ‘Yes’ for Recommendation from Google

Unlike most “opt-in” features where we would select ‘no’, I feel that Google’s recommendations are very useful to help you gain a better understanding of how to place your business higher in its local rankings. I suggest saying ‘yes’ for now with the knowledge that you can always change it later.

Step 7: Choose a Method for Google to Verify Your Business

Google needs a way to verify your business. If you have a physical address, they will mail you (yes, snail-mail) a postcard with instructions that will arrive within 5 days. There are also alternatives if you do not have a physical address for your business. You will be able to complete the setup before being verified, but it will not publish until you are verified.

Step 8: Select or Create Services You Offer

This section is of immense importance. The services you provide are what Google will use to determine if your company is appropriate for people searching for services. Feel free to add your own here if the list that Google provides is incomplete. As you can see here, it most likely will not be a sufficient list of services. Google suggested ‘telemarketing’ for an internet marketing service. It’s true. Sometimes, even the tech gods are flat-out wrong.

Step 9: Select Your Business Hours

This is important but not exactly necessary depending on the type of business that you are running. If you are a brick-and-mortar shop, then, by all means, include your hours. Otherwise, feel free to skip this section.

Step 10: Select if you would like customers to message you

This is relatively new to Google My Business listings. Google affords internet searchers the ability to contact you directly through a platform run by Google. It’s free to you, however, you may have a more preferred method of communication. In some ways, one could argue that allowing your customers to contact you through Google takes some control away from you where messaging is concerned. It is ultimately up to you, so feel free to choose as you like. You can always change your mind in the dashboard later on.

Step 11: Describe Your Business to Your Customers

This is by far the most consequential section for your business. A clean, well-written description of what your business is, why it exists, and who you serve will be one of the key deciding factors that helps a customer choose you over your competitors. Take your time with this one and make certain it reflects the tone and quality of your offering.

Step 12: Add Photos of Your Business

For a restaurant, this is essential but that doesn’t mean that you should ignore this section if you sell life insurance. Photographs speak to a different part of the human mind. When used appropriately, they are immediately relatable to the experience that the customer is going to have with your organization. Google realizes this, and if you do not include photos, Google will let you know that you should reconsider.

You’re All Set!

After you’ve completed these steps, you will be taken to the dashboard. From here, you will be reminded to verify your business on Google if you haven’t already. Now local internet users will be able to see your business and website popup when they are looking for services in your area. Easy as that!

New GA 4 out with the old in the with the new

November 11 2020

The Shiny, New Google Analytics: Minor Headache for Major Insights

Danny McKeever Blog 0

Google Analytics the single most relied-upon data gatherer in the world. Since 2005, Google Analytics (eventually branded as Universal Analytics) has been tracking visitors to millions of websites while opening the door for web-owners to understand what aspects of their sites are driving traffic or pushing people away. Every year around November, Google makes semi-significant updates to some of its products. Less frequently, they roll out a complete overhaul of one of them. As if 2020 needed any more drastic changes, Google went ahead and coded us into the future with the new Google Analytics 4 that will eventually replace the Universal Analytics we have all become accustomed to. Let’s see if the minor headache is worth the major insights.

Was Universal Analytics ever Smart?

When I first began my own deep dive into the world of website data many years ago, I felt as if I were stepping into the Land of Oz. There were so many unexpected twists and turns down the yellow-brick road of Sessions, Bounce Rates, Time on Page, and seemingly endless filters that my eyes grew wide at every turn. After spending some serious time there, I was curious to know what the wizard looked like behind the great, green curtain, and just like Dorothy, I was…underwhelmed.

In what turned out to be less of a mastermind and more of a Toto, the great secret behind all this data was more or less a cookie. A simple tracking code that only sent a hit back to headquarters when someone landed on a webpage. If they were interested enough to click on another page on the same website, the hit would give you a little more insight into what they were doing and how long they were doing it.

Basically, the tracking code could tell you:

If a user visited a page and where they might be from
If a user clicked through to other pages of your site
If they clicked through, how long they spent on each page
If they left the site
If they came to the site from a Google Ad or certain social media sites

It was a glorified calculator. It’s limitations led to obfuscated data in so many scenarios.

If a visitor viewed your website on their phone and then decided to switch to their laptop, Google had no way to realize that they were in fact the same person and they would be counted twice. Additionally, if a visitor came to your website from a different site, Google almost never knew where they came from.

In a world where the user journey is the most important knowledge a marketer can possess, the old man behind the curtain had to step aside for a more advanced A.I.

There’s No Place Like Home: GA-4 Is All About the Visitor’s Backyard

While the original Universal Analytics platform took a limited dataset and extrapolated tons of useful information from it, it was missing key steps on the visitor’s journey. It is no longer enough to know that a visitor found you. Today, we need to know precisely how they found us and exactly where they came from. It wouldn’t hurt to know what else they are looking for when they are on the internet leading up to discovering our site. Once they do land on our site, it would be wonderful to know how much of it they are reading. I am not talking about whether or not their laptop screen is showing our blog page, I am talking about their hand scrolling through the content. Precise, polymetric, and predictive are the adjectives I would use to describe the new Google Analytics 4.

Let’s break these down in light of some of the new features:

Precision: GA-4 breaks down data into individual users which can be collected into audiences to reveal grouped patterns of purchasing and other behavior. If you have an app and a website, GA-4 can now unite the data offer a more accurate accounting of one user’s journey.

Polymetric: User Sessions are no longer the standard upon which other metrics are centered around. Instead, GA-4 uses Events. These events can be named anything you like and you can build your dataset accordingly. Not unlike the setting Goals in Universal Analytics, you can now track in much more granular detail the behavior of users on your site to get the data that matters most to your unique audience or user.

Predictive: GA-4 leverages machine learning on your behalf to create market predictions of your users in your niche. Through analyzing events on your website and on others in your niche, GA-4. For instance, it can help predict when to focus on customer retention vs customer acquisition based on market data combined with your own data.

Honorable Mention: Big Query Is Now Free!

Google’s Big Query is a warehouse to collect data from many sources. It allows you to blend internal company data with Analytics data to further drill down into your successes and failures. While this used to be a paid feature for users of Google 360, it is now included free with new GA-4 properties. Big Query is an entire article (or several) on its own but worth mentioning here. Check out the ins and outs of Big Query here.

Expanding the Backyard

Essentially, the journey of your web visitors is more accurately defined in the new Analytics. Coupled with more robust audience reporting and integration with Google Ads, the new Analytics promises to be one of the most significant shifts in data-based marketing we have seen to date. It has become about the personal experience of each user on your site combined with the larger picture of your grouped audience experience. Your website becomes the user’s backyard and as Dorothy said, “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with… There’s no place like home.”

So, Can I Just Click My Heels Together and Start Using the New Google Analytics?

While it sounds like a great moment to dust off our ruby red slippers, integrating the new Google Analytics 4 will take a bit more patience than that. Firstly, consider the fact that this is not an update to Universal Analytics but rather an entirely new product. Google requires (and recommends) that you create a new property in addition to your existing analytics property. Moving forward, all updates to Analytics will be for this new product. Eventually, Universal Analytics will become obsolete.

What About All My Current Data???

The good news for those of us not quite willing to start from scratch after building up years of useful data on our websites is that there is an option to run the new Analytics alongside your Universal Analytics property. This might be the most prudent option. The data generated between the two will not likely match up the way you expect due to the fact that user sessions are counted differently than user events, but since you will still be collecting the data you are accustomed to it will make for a smoother transition in the short term.

The process is not impossible although it does require some administrative knowledge of the Analytics tools dashboard and a little elbow grease. In the end, however, you will be a part of a new way to look at user data.

Now Anyone Can Be the Wizard

For the first time in a long time, everybody is starting at ground zero. Now is the time to capitalize on this revolution and relearn Analytics in order to best compete in the marketplace. With advanced reporting options, robust real-time data, custom events, and high fidelity user information, GA-4 is a new Oz in data collection. There may be a few bumps along the way and a wicked witch or two during the transition, you will ultimately be able to be your own wizard with fantastic and powerful tools to set the course for your future success. Go forth and good luck on that bright yellow road!

October 2 2020

Small Town Heroes: Write a Big League Blog for a Small Niche Audience

Danny McKeever Blog 0

There are many resources out there to talk about basic blog structure and tips for making sure that your posts are SEO friendly and it’s important to pay attention to what you are writing about and how it fits into the broader internet landscape on your chosen topic. Critical aspects such as layout, headings, keywords, length, multimedia and more are all essential to keep in mind and we’ll be discussing some of those here. But what about writing a killer blog for a niche audience? How does one capitalize on solid blog writing when their audience isn’t necessarily everyone, but instead resides in a certain aspect of a particular industry? This tiny slice of the pie is what we will dig into in this post.

Keyword Volume Stats are Less Meaningful in a tight Niche

There are dozens of programs to help you discover impactful keywords for your posts. Whether it’s the Jaaxy Keyword Tool,, Moz Keyword Explorer, or Google itself, you can find programs that let you type in keywords and phrases in order to see how often they are searched in Google each month. A tool such as Jaaxy, also tells you how robust the competition is for that keyword or key phrase.

In a tight niche market, however, some of these keyword stats can be underwhelming. Let’s take a look. For the purpose of this post, we will be looking for keywords in the Life Insurance niche. Instead of focusing on policyholders and consumers, however, we are going to drill down and instead focus on topics that producers and agents might be searching for.

When running a keyword analysis on a phrase such as Indexed Universal Life Insurance you would see a breakdown like this:

As you can see, it receives hundreds of searches each month. We can imagine that while there may be some insurance agents and advisors searching these terms, there will most likely be many consumers searching these terms as well. This ‘mixed’ stat does not mean that an article on Indexed Universal Life would be a waste of time in our niche as that key phrase would certainly pertain to our overall genre, however, if we are specifically targeting and writing for brokers, producers, and advisors, the typical keyword tools will fall short of hitting the mark.

Small Town Hero #1: Google Search Suggestions

A great tip to find keywords and phrases when typical tools fail us is to use the suggestions at the bottom of Google’s search itself. When you type in a search on Google, it returns a list of closest matches followed by a list of links at the bottom of related or suggested searches. These also appear as you are typing your search query.

Let’s say that in our effort to dig down into the question of “What do Life Insurance agents, brokers, and producers search for?” we decide to focus on Broker General Agencies. These are companies that provide services and support for agents. They help agents connect with the best life insurance products available today and assist them in every aspect of their career. A typical policyholder or consumer would generally not search for these agencies, whereas a new agent would most likely seek these out as they build their career. Let’s imagine our target audience is searching for an excellent BGA to partner up with.

If we type a search for “The Best Broker General Agency” and scroll to the bottom of the search page, we will find these related searches suggested below our query:

Again, these will also be listed as links at the bottom of the first Google search page like this:

Even though we are not given stats on these terms (in fact if we type them into a keyword stat tool it will show the low volume of monthly searches) the fact remains that we know that agents and brokers will search these terms. In the top 10 results for this page, 2 of them have titles pertaining to defining the term Broker General Agency and the corresponding websites are in fact BGA’s. I would suspect there is room on that list for a more robust description of BGA’s and that our chance to place for that phrase is a good one.

Small Town Hero #2: Our Knowledge of the Niche Audience we want to Attract

When you are writing a post for a very specific group of people, your knowledge of the terms and phrases they care about is perhaps the most important tool that you have. To stick with our life insurance niche and specifically our audience of brokers, agents, and advisors, we used our knowledge of BGA’s to find ideas on what a broker might be looking for when they type that term.

Finding the right keywords and phrases can be difficult but if we leverage Google’s search along with our knowledge of the audience, we can quickly find topics and articles to write for them. For example, we may not know exactly what we want to talk about but we do know who we want to speak to. If we type in a phrase such as “life insurance broker tools” we will find a number of entries followed by these ‘related searches’:

Here we can see that agents are looking for software to help them manage their clients. An article about these different tools would likely be a great place to start. Just like that, with a few keystrokes, we can find a suitable topic for our niche audience.

Small Town Hero #3: The SEO Basics, the Format, and the Result

There are a few basic rules that should be followed when writing a blog for any audience and these rules are just as applicable to a niche audience as they are to any writing on the internet. While some of these may sound arbitrary, they are based on Google’s search algorithms which are, in turn, based on improving the user’s experience on the internet. Guidelines such as the length of the article, the general format, the use of images, appropriate headings, and clarity are all a part of the mosaic that makes for a successful post. Let’s take a quick look at these now.

Length of a Blog Post

Typically, the longer the post, the greater the opportunity for keywords to be discovered by Google. While it is certainly possible to rank over time with shorter posts, especially if your website has many of them, Google currently rewards more verbose articles over lean articles. Try to hit 1,000 words or more when you are writing an article. Apis Productions has an excellent post about outlining an article to make writing easier that you can find here.

Use Headings and Subheadings

The title of any blog post is considered a heading. It is denoted by large bold text. Each article should have 1 of these. Subheadings (also known as ‘Heading 2’) should announce each new aspect of the article. You can see in this post that you are reading, there are many subheadings. The search engine (as well as the reader in most cases) skims these headings to get an idea of how you are addressing the main topic. So, as a rule of thumb, never just write a stream of consciousness. They look ugly, they are unorganized, and Google hates it. In this particular section, I am making use of Heading 3’s. You can find these heading categories in the word editor of WordPress as well as any word processing software you use (i.e. Google Docs, Microsoft Word, etc).

Have at Least 1 Outbound Link and 1 Internal Link

Within your post, find a reason to link to some information that lives outside of your website. Oftentimes, a post might link to information on Wikipedia, or to a study, or anywhere that corroborates the point you are trying to make. Google likes an outbound link.

Additionally, your post should link to at least 1 page in your website. This could be another blog post that relates to what you are writing or it could be another content page on your site. In this post, I have linked to another post about organizing your blog articles. (you can see that link in the “Length of a Blog Post” heading 2 sections above. This will help elevate both the post you are writing as well as the post that you are linking to in Google’s content hierarchy.

Use Images!

Word salad is always bland. Both Google’s search engine as well as your readers will thank you for tossing in some pertinent images to help break up the visual monotony of text. Some good sources for free stock images can be found on Pixabay and a quick search for free stock images will yield many other results. (By the way, did you catch that Outbound Link I just added for Pixabay?)

When you upload your images to your blog post on WordPress, make sure that you include the ‘Alternative Text’. This how Google ‘sees’ the image in the article. You will find the option to add alt-text when you upload the image to your media library. Make sure you describe the image succinctly.

Know Your Audience, Be Clear, and Publish Consistently

In the end, it all comes down to knowing who you are speaking to and speaking to their concerns and curiosity. Answer a question that you suspect they are asking and make use of free and paid tools to help you find the phrases that they are searching for online. If you publish regular blog posts you will see in time that some of them are more successful than others. When you do, capitalize on those topics and write some more in depth articles around them.

Writing for a small, niche audience can have tremendous advantages in terms of low competition and high user interaction with your material. Sometimes it is not about finding the most people to visit your website, but finding the right people. Go forth and grab your niche!

August 17 2020

How to Analyze Google Analytics: Metrics and What they Mean

Danny McKeever Blog 0

There are 400 million active websites in the world today and every minute there are around 380 new websites being created. From a competitive standpoint, these numbers could sound daunting, impossible, and intimidating. Operating a website in the world’s largest marketplace requires you to take every advantage available to you and run with it. For a web owner, data is the key to discovering how to do more than just stand out from the crowd. Google Analytics is the most important tool at your disposal when it comes to realizing both who your audience is and how they are responding to what you are offering. While Google Analytics is free to use, the number of data points it presents can be overwhelming. Let’s break down the basic use of Google Analytics, the most important metrics, and what they mean!

Google Analytics: The Dashboard Basics

The Analytics dashboard packs a lot of buttons into a limited amount of real estate.

Let’s look at the sidebar menu on the dashboard. Here is where you will tell Analytics which set of data you want to examine. Think of everything underneath the ‘REPORTS’ section as the starting point towards understanding how people interact with your website. Let’s take a look.

Realtime
- This will actually show you how many visitors are on your site right now. While this is definitely interesting, it’s usefulness comes in testing something brand new that you may be tracking or a change that you just made moments ago. For the data you’ve been collecting for a while, it’s the remaining menu items that we will focus on here.
Audience
- This tab is incredibly important. Here you will see stats on how many new users visited your website, how many pages they viewed, how long they stayed, whether they interacted beyond their first visit, and more. We will dive into this later on.
Acquisition
- This tab runs a close second in terms of importance. Here is where you will see where you are acquiring your visitors from. Are people finding you organically through Google search or are they loyal users who typed your web address directly into their browser. If you are using Google Ads or other paid digital advertising, that will also appear here.
Behavior
- This is where you can dive a bit deeper into the number of pages (and which pages) your visitors are spending time on, which pages they leave your site on, site speed, page load speed, and more. Think of it as both the behavior of your visitors and the behavior of your website. Additionally, you can track events on your website (such as who clicks the “Register Now” button and track those events in this tab.
Conversions
- This tab involves setting goals for your website which is outside the purview of this article. However, goal setting can be very useful and will be discussed in a future post. If you sell products directly from your website (i.e. you have a shop page) eCommerce stats can be accessed from this tab.

The Stats You Must Watch in Google Analytics

There are so many intriguing stats to examine in Google Analytics, but for most people there are just a handful that you will want to always stay on top of in order to make better decisions about content on your website. First, let’s look at the basic 5 that you should include at the top of any report.

There is a reason that the Audience tab is first on the left-side menu, when you click on the Audience tab the first option underneath is the Overview. Let’s take a look at that screen.

The 8 data-boxes are key metrics that you will look at and compare from week to week and month to month. Here’s what they mean.

Users
- This is how many total users you have had visit your website in the time frame selected. This includes people who may have visited on more than one occasion. In that case, if a person visits once on monday and again on Tuesday, they will be counted twice. A better term for this would be Visits (which is what Google used to call it but has switched changed their naming convention.
New Users
- This represents the total number of, you guessed it, new visitors that have come to your site. Basically, the people that have visited twice in the time period are only counted once.
Sessions
- This one sounds trickier than it is. Basically, a session is a set amount of time that a user engages with your site. If a user lands on a page and doesn’t click anything or go to any other page for 30 minutes, the session expires. All sessions reset regardless of the activity at 12 midnight. So if I visit your website at 11:50 pm and stay on until 12:25 am, this will count as 2 sessions. Sessions matter because they represent visitors that are interacting with your website.
Number of Sessions Per User
- This is self explanatory given what we learned about sessions above. Basically, this is the average number of sessions each user has on your website.
Page Views and Pages Per Session
- This metric matters! Depending on how your website is structured, the number of pages that a user visits on average represents how engaged they are with your website. If you have a one-page website, then obviously, this number will not be higher than 1. In most websites, however, a user that visits multiple pages indicates that they are interested in the content and that they are truly exploring the information you are supplying them.
Avg Session Duration
- This metric tells you roughly how long someone spends on your site before going somewhere else. This can be broken down into pages and how long users spend on each page. (which is useful to learn how effective specific pages and how certain pages are performing.
Bounce Rate
- This is a somewhat controversial metric. A bounce is registered when a visitor to your site does not interact in any meaningful way once they first arrive. If they find your site and land on one of it’s pages from Google Search, or from an ad and they don’t click any other pages of the site, it is counted as a bounce. The average bounce rate for a website is anywhere from 41 – 55 percent. Lower is better when it comes to bounce rate.

As you can tell, these 8 data points can be very telling in and of themselves as to how your website is performing overall. Let’s open up the Acquisition tab and find out where our users are coming from!

Acquisition: Where Your Traffic Meets Your Website

When you open the acquisition tab and click ‘overview’ you will see the data in this picture.

Here you are being told the way that visitors found your site. Let’s explain these 4 origins of your web traffic.

Direct Traffic
- This represents visitors who arrived at your site by either typing in your web address directly into the browser, visitors who have bookmarked your site and arrived via that bookmark, or visitors who clicked a link inside an email that was linked to your site.
Organic Search Traffic
- This is the honeypot of web traffic. This represents the visitors who found your website on Google after typing a query that matched with your content. Focussing on fresh, readable content and search engine optimization will eventually lead to higher rankings in Google Search. Higher rankings will lead to expanded traffic in this category.
Social Traffic
- This metric tells us who arrived via a social media platform such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Referral Traffic
- This represents people who were sent to a page on your website from a link on another website, or a referral link. If you wrote a guest article for another website and linked to your website in the article, clicks on that link would be recorded as referral traffic, for instance.

Quick Note: You’ll notice that under the ‘acquisition’ tab is also a tab for Google Ads. If you are running a Google Ad campaign and have connected it to your Google Analytics account, you will see data on the performance of those ads in this tab.

Behavior: What Do your Visitors Do on Each Page of your Website

While the Behavior tab overview shows information about pageviews, bounces, and exits, it really shines in letting you know how each page of your website is performing. For example, if you find that one of your blog posts is knocking it out of the park with views and time on page but another is falling flat that should tell you the type of content that the majority of your visitors are interested in learning. This kind of information is very useful when picking new topics to write about in your genre. Additionally, if you have a static page on your site that isn’t attracting enough attention, this data can help make decisions about updating content on that page and monitoring its success or failure.

Digging deeper into the Site Content tab, you will be able to see more data on individual page performance.

Getting the Most out of Your Analytics

Even though the amount of data provided by Google Analytics can seem overwhelming, sticking to the basics covered in this article alone would be enough to help make more informed decisions about the content of your website. The ability to share data with others in your organization, download pdfs of the graphs and charts that Analytics provides, and really getting to know exactly how visitors are interacting with your business online vastly outweighs the learning curve of using Analytics. There is excellent documentation online and from Google itself on how to navigate their program from beginner to advanced user and it’s free.

Do yourself and your company a solid and play around in your data sandbox for a few hours to see what story the data tells you. In the end, your enhanced understanding of your audience will help you stay ahead of the game and on top of your niche.

June 20 2020

Google’s Latest Update: Comprehensive Page Experience

Danny McKeever Blog google page experience, new google update, SEO for 2021 0

Since Google launched the first search algorithm in 1998 in an effort to bring order to the internet, the company has been on an endless quest to define what the internet should look like and how it should operate. As webmasters adapt to each update that the search giant puts forth, the journey to the top of coveted searches becomes more and more complicated. There are a few basic principles, however, that can help cut through the clutter surrounding the latest update: Google Page Experience is the perfect example of where your time should be spent when optimizing your search presence.

Google Page Experience 1.0: The First Standards

As you know, Google began addressing the basic concept of a page experience several years ago. They came up with a core set of credentials that a website should adhere to in order to provide the best possible outcome for what the page does for a person using it.

These initial credentials centered around safety and accessibility. The internet had become rife with horrible pop-ups, malicious and misleading links, and unreadable mobile experiences in an increasingly mobile web. These issues were addressed directly with the core credentials.

Mobile Friendliness
1. Perhaps the most important update seeing with much of the world browsing everything on their phone. This incentivized web designers to make certain that no matter what size screen a user may be on, the content on the screen was readable and attractive.
HTTPS Security
1. Gone are the days of insecure websites. The little screen lock you see in the corner of a certified site is now more prominent when visiting sites that do not use the HTTPS protocol. Nowadays, Google straight up warns you that the site you are visiting could be dangerous and urges you to ‘go back to safety’.
Safe Browsing
1. Google wanted to go on the offensive against sites that employ malicious code and social engineering techniques to trick less savvy web visitors into giving away information or otherwise compromising the security of their browsing experience.
Intrusive Interstitials
1. My personal favorite as I loathe popups with a mighty fury. Google set out to discourage the use of intrusive popups once and for all. Unfortunately, I still feel that they permeate sites that I would otherwise enjoy. Ironically, Google ads that cover content on sites employing their ad display network are some of the biggest culprits that get in the way of my experience. But generally speaking, the attention has shifted away from such irritations.
Page Speed
1. Page speed and load times were the beginning of what would become the latest update. Google began to rank based on overall page speed and site speed some years ago and it took on larger prominence in their search algorithm.

Divin into the latest (upcoming in 2021) update, the concept of ‘speed’ seems to take on a more nuanced meaning. The result is the creation of some new metrics that Google will use in conjunction with the above credentials to encourage an overall improvement of page experience.

Google Page Experience 2.0 – No More Waiting

At it’s most basic, page experience refers specifically to the experience that a user has while they are on your website. The metrics that affect their experience range across several fronts:

Load times for elements on a page and the overall load time of the page itself
Interactive elements and how they respond to user input
How the page ‘feels’ when moving or scrolling

Let’s take a moment to understand the importance of these very nuanced metrics. Loading times have been a critical component of Google’s ranking algorithm for many years now. Born from the cries of internet users’ frustrations at websites that seemingly take forever to present graphic elements, Google decided to incentivize speed. You may well remember (as it wasn’t even that long ago) the “loading” icons that permeated nearly every website just a few short years ago. We waited patiently for large photographs, javascript elements, and page transitions to appear on our screen. Eventually, our patience ran out.

Google’s decision to base at least part of it’s ranking structure on speed encouraged web designers and developers to get creative with how their page loads, the size of images and files, and the elegance of the code behind it all.

Metric 1: Largest Contentful Paint

As part of the latest update to page speed ranking, Google has added a metric they call Largest

Contentful Paint (LCP). LCP specifically refers to the load time of the largest content area within the viewport. This differs from the overall page speed as the rest of the page may not be immediately visible in the viewport. (i.e. a user scrolls down to the bottom of a page). The most obvious example of an LCP would be the large ‘hero’ images you will often see on landing pages or the carousel slider hero images on a home page like this.

(here the beautiful brain would be the LCP)

Metric 2: First Input Display

The next metric that digs into the speed aspect of a webpage and affects the overall experience has to do with all of the interactive elements on a page. They call it the First Input Display (FID) Buttons, sliders, and anything that the user can actually manipulate are now being tracked for responsiveness. In other words, if I click something, how long does it take to react? If it feels like a light switch, then it’s perfect. If however, it’s more akin to the experience of opening a sliding glass door, then it needs to be able to respond faster.

Metric 3: Cumulative Layout Shift

The final metric in the new update is called the Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). CLS is actually a pretty easy one to grasp. It refers to the sense of motion when a user scrolls through the page layout.

You have probably noticed that on some websites when you scroll down, certain elements move around. This can feel like a serious head jerk when implemented poorly. The whiplash effect you receive from a site like this is downright nauseating to some. Unfortunately, too many web developers don’t take this into consideration and it can dramatically affect the experience a user has on a page. Well, with Google’s new update, developers are now incentivized to care about the ‘motion’ of their website.

How Do I Measure the Page Experience of My Website?

Fortunately, Google has gone above and beyond with this update in terms of transparency. There are many tools to measure page speed and they have been around for a while. Additionally, Google has helped to develop new resources to assist you in checking your site against these new recommendations.

Check out the Chrome User Experience Report. In it, you will find access to how to measure some of these new metrics. If you haven’t set up search console with your website yet, make sure you do that. It provides invaluable information about how people find you on the internet. Additionally, Google Search Console now provides a Core Web Vitals Report that helps you measure your site against these new guidelines.

For those of you who want constant access to some of this information and use the Chrome browser, there is a free plugin to check out the details of these metrics as your browser the internet. It’s called the Web Vitals.

As you can see, Google is committed to helping you create the best page experience that you can for your users. Too often their algorithm updates are obtuse and discovered retroactively leaving webmasters to scramble as they desperately try to get their sites up to speed. With this update, though, Google has given an advanced warning and fairly straightforward documentation to accompany an array of tools that help make it possible.

How Important Are these New Guidelines for Search Engine Ranking?

The honest answer is that no one is quite certain which of these metrics matter most and what weight Google will place on any one of them. If past anecdotal evidence is any guide, however, the concept of Page Experience will most likely grow over time.

The hard truth is still the same. Frequent, high-quality content that users are actually searching for will always be the most important factor in where a website ranks for any given term.

There is no getting around the fact that if a site has the fastest load time, is optimized for all screen sizes, avoids irritating popups, and scrolls smoothly, it will be dead on arrival if it is stuffed with lousy content that doesn’t answer anybody’s burning questions about any topic.

Content is the engine of any website. A beautiful car with snappy controls, leather interior, power seats, windows, and shiny rims, doesn’t go anywhere without an engine. Always keep that in mind as you create your landing pages, auxiliary pages, and blog post content. The web is about answers. Make sure that you are providing the best ones that you can.

With that said, page experience is obviously important to retaining users and getting visitors back to your website. To keep with the car metaphor, you can put a Ferrari engine under the hood of a 1970’s Volkswagon ‘Thing” (see picture, yes this was actually a car) and odds are nobody’s gonna wanna drive it.

It’s About Being a Good Host to Your Guests

In the end, this whole update is about showing your users that you care about them. Showing them that you want them to come back to your site time and time again and each time they do you want them to feel good about it. By understanding that people are inherently less patient today then they were when the internet began all those decades ago, you want to show the world wide web that your site is the fastest, smoothest, sexiest site in its niche with top-notch content, snappy visuals, clean transitions, and intuitive menus.

These are all elements that every webmaster should have been striving for since the beginning. The upcoming 2021 update from Google doesn’t change any of that, it simply codifies it. As always, I say take a long hard look at what your site is providing for the people that visit it. Imagine what they experience when they are on every page. The moment you see something that feels off, laggy, or unnecessarily cumbersome, find a way to resolve it or remove it altogether. Do your part to make your little piece of the internet awesome, and the ranking will follow.

November 12 2019

Becoming Friends With BERT: Google’s Latest Search Algorithm Update

Danny McKeever Blog 0

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (yikes! How about just BERT) is Google’s latest update to its search and SEO empire. It promises to alter nearly 10% of all search traffic on its engine! While this may sound like the beginning of an SEO apocalypse, don’t break out your bug-out-bag and change your on-site keywords just yet. What BERT does is remarkable and presents webmasters and site operators with both clarity and opportunity. This is because Google’s BERT is an advanced reader.

What Google’s BERT Update Does…and What it Doesn’t Do

Google’s original premise when it came to searching the internet was simple. Create an intuitive way to find information online. It became clear very quickly that this was too simple. The best reality is one where someone finds information that they are actually looking for when they type a query into the box and press ‘enter’.

Even after they invented sophisticated algorithms for ranking and multiple core updates to the process of retrieving the information that people sought, the problem that persisted was always user input. The ultimate language barrier is having to speak all of them. In human beings, language is innate and nurtured. In machines, nothing is innate. The nuance of how we use context to understand the meaning of a sentence or phrase is very difficult to replicate programmatically. BERT solves the word puzzle and arrives at context.

Twisted Context: The Brazilian Traveler

Here is an example given by Google itself. If a Brazilian is looking for information about how to obtain a visa to go to the United States they may type in “2019 brazil traveler to usa need visa”

The results without BERT pertain to how an American can obtain a visa to Brazil. With BERT, we receive the information that was desired which in this case is how a Brazilian would obtain a visa to travel to the United States.

You can see that without BERT, the word ‘to’ is being ignored or misinterpreted. When we read it, we can guess quickly that the traveler is from Brazil and going to the U.S.A. If we ignored that word and read the rest in order the last 4 words are “usa need a visa”. “To” is ignored because it is what’s known as a ‘stop’ word or a word that Google’s search engine generally ignored in the past.

Previously, Google’s search engine would read each word in order and pick out the keywords and find the most relevant result. BERT instead searches all the words from both directions looking for relationships that give context to the initial user’s intent. So all the “stop” words (such as the, a, an, or, of, many, is, etc) will now be used to form appropriate context and deliver more accurate and refined results. It is actually quite revolutionary.

Will Google’s BERT Destroy My Site Rankings?

Well, the short answer is probably not. Some of that depends on where your search traffic is coming from or more specifically, what your search traffic typed in to arrive at your website. Google estimates that 1 in 10 search queries typed into its engine are shown results that are inaccurate given the context of the query. This means that 10% of traffic that is hitting a website due to mislabeled queries will undoubtedly drop off. The upside to this is two-fold. One, people that are searching for information about the banks of the Missouri for fly fishing probably don’t want to see a bunch of results for all of the financial institutions that exist in the state of Missouri! It isn’t desirable traffic because unless they are giving away free money, the person who just wants to fish probably isn’t going to stay around for long on a bank website. Two, this update won’t affect shorter search queries. BERT will focus on long-tail queries in order to provide information in line with the appropriate context so if you’ve consistently ranked for a few keywords in your niche, those rankings will be unaffected.

In short, while there is nothing overt to worry about with this update, it is worth mentioning that BERT is more of a harbinger of things to come in the world of SEO. A world that Google created and has been evolving ever since the 1990’s.

The Very Brief Version of Google Updates

Google has been evolving ever since its inception in the mid-1990’s. While some updates have caused great upheaval, others have quietly shifted the SEO landscape in a meaningful and harmless way. There have been hundreds of updates but here are a few that changed your (and your website’s) life.

2000 – Update adds the concept of page ranking, unofficially starting the concept of SEO
2003 – ‘Florida’ update seeks to end the practice of keyword stuffing
2004 – ‘Austin’ update introduced ‘page relevance’ and continued the crackdown on spammy SEO practices
2005 – ‘Bourbon’ and ‘Jagger’ updates seek to end link farms, low-quality links, and duplicate content across the web.
2011-2015 ‘Panda’ update demotes content farms and low-quality content. Improves ability to recognize bad practices.
2012 ‘Penguin’ update continues the assault on keyword stuffing affecting 3% of all queries
2013 ‘Hummingbird’ update allowed for better reading of text and queries
2015 ‘Mobilgeddon’ update enforces mobile-friendly websites
2018 ‘EAT’ updates concern themselves with Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness
2019 ‘BERT’ update to better understand the context of search queries.

While nowhere near a complete synopsis of all of the iterations of Google’s magical algorithms, the timeline above shows forward motion in a singular direction. (for a complete list, check out this excellent timeline of Google updates) All of these updates, over time, align themselves with encouraging websites to showcase exceptional content, user engagement, and SEO with integrity.

What Does Google Say about BERT?

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison tweeted “There’s nothing to optimize for with BERT, nor anything for anyone to be rethinking. The fundamentals of us seeking to reward great content remain unchanged.”

Changes made just before BERT were already beefing up the need for sites to contain quality content, links, layouts and more. The overarching trend is that if you continue to supply your site with excellent articles, meaningful on-page SEO, and quality links without being spammy about it, you will attain success in Google Search.

Do Keywords Still Matter?

Yes! Absolutely! Keywords and phrases are still king. If anything, the addition of BERT interpreting context in search queries presents a unique opportunity to go after phrases that sound like conversational speech. It means that your articles and on-page SEO can be beautiful and easy to read.

Everything is traveling on a path towards relevancy. If your content is genuine and polished and your information is accurate and well-presented, your rankings will improve. BERT is about the world finding what is looking for.

What Should You Do Next?

Well, Google states that there are 4 main factors to consider as you continue to build content on your website: “Content & quality, expertise, presentation & production, and competitive comparison”

Here’s what we suggest:

Review the overall quality and effectiveness of all page content
Make a checklist of areas you could optimize more and places where you have over-optimized
Check the quality and language of inbound and outbound links
Research the search results for long tail key phrases with stop words and see how you can best utilize them
Pour over your Google Analytics site data to gleen new markets and ideas

Most importantly,look at your content with fresh eyes and ask “does this answer the question being asked and does it answer it in a beautiful way?”. If it doesn’t, then make a few updates and move forward until the Google Gods decide to once again roll the applecart up on one wheel. See you on the first page of Google!

July 5 2018

SEO Website Strategy

Danny McKeever Blog 0

What is SEO?

Let’s take a moment to discuss the importance of SEO in your overall web marketing strategy. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of setting your website up for success in Google, Bing, Yahoo and every search engine out there today. Let’s cut straight to the chase here. When a person is using the internet and they type a phrase into the top of their address bar or into the search box in Google, they receive a list of websites that the search engine thinks best matches the information they are seeking. For instance, if I were to type the phrase “Dog houses for large dogs” into Google, I would receive a list that looks exactly like this:

As you can imagine, the websites that hit the first page of Google for any given search are sure to see a tremendous amount of traffic as they are the first sites to provide the information that the consumer is looking for in the first place. That’s the very basic and most obvious reason to care about where your website ranks for search terms related to your products. But, as with everything in life, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Benefits of SEO

As we just observed, the closer a website is towards the top of the first page in Google the more traffic they will receive. Let’s break that down a little further. Believe it or not, the actual phrase “dog houses for large dogs”, those exact words, are entered into Google over 4,000 times every month in the United States alone! Take a look at this from a keyword tool that analyses searches for keyword phrases.

As you can see, every single month 4,471 people type “dog houses for large dogs” into Google. The next column over called ‘Traffic’ is just an estimate of how many people would click on your website, each month, if you ranked on the first page of Google for this phrase. The following column, ‘QSR’, is the number of other websites who are competing to rank for that exact phrase either through articles about large dog houses, products using that exact phrase, etc. The reason you see the word ‘Great’ and an SEO score of ’90’ is because that’s a tremendous amount of people searching Google using those exact words and not a lot of websites competing for them. (Generally, anything under 100 websites competing is a good keyword to go for)

Imagine in your niche with your products, if the brokers searching the internet for insurance related products, financial planning tools, annuity rate calculators, etc. were able to see your site first in Google. The potential for driving business to your company through SEO is profound. What’s even better is this beautiful fact: since we are all human, we don’t all type in the same words for the same information. This means that there are hundreds and thousands of search phrases that people type in that your website can try to rank highly for. The pie is large and there is enough for everyone!

What Else Affects My SEO Ranking?

While content that focuses on keywords and phrases is a dominant driver for SEO ranking, there are several other factors to consider as well. Google’s search algorithm also seriously considers technical aspects of a website when it is crawling the web. For instance, outbound links from your website to other websites are taken into view. Perhaps you have links to all of your business partners and product/vendor partners on your website. If any of these links are broken or lead the reader to a ‘Website Not Found -404″ error, Google’s crawling robots frown on this and it should be fixed immediately.

Google also frowns on unsecured sites (the little ‘https’ at the top of the address bar on this page tells you that the site is secure from hackers. If it was missing the ‘s’ and was simply ‘http’ that would designate a site without a security certificate). In fact there are dozens of small, technical items that can make Google’s robots frown but they are all fixable once discovered. So I suppose the next question should be:

How to Make Google’s Robots Smile 🙂

Making Google happy makes your bottom line happy too! Fortunately, there are a bunch of things we can do to make those little robot crawlers filled with glee and enthusiasm for your website. Here’s a barebones list:

Perform a thorough SEO Audit to clear up potential technical drawbacks in your website
Write keyword targeted, consumer focused, sparkling content in the form of articles and posts
Add posts and articles to your website regularly so that the bots can see that your website is active
Add comments to your articles and posts to get a conversation going. Robots love to see an active conversation
Leverage your social media (Facebook, Twitter etc.) to announce your new website content and drive people towards it
Make sure that all images on your site have descriptions for people who cannot see that use the internet (remember, the robots can’t see either and they will use these descriptions to understand the images as well)
Have your vendors link back to your site on their websites (robots like to see that other people value your site, too!)

There are many tasks you can perform to improve your search rankings but perhaps the most important task is to have a strategy in the first place.

Create a Strategy, Follow it Flawlessly

I cannot stress this enough. Get your people together for an exciting meeting. All of your people. Together, define precisely who your target audience is. Not just if they are insurance brokers or dog owners or what have you, but be more specific if you can. What information do they need the most? What are their dreams? How can your products and your company help them achieve their dreams? Once you know the answers to these questions review your mission statement (or create one if you don’t have one) and apply it to your SEO strategy moving forward.

What Should We do Next?

An SEO Audit is the first step in a solid SEO Strategy but the good news is that besides the technical details of how to improve a website for search rankings, it will also give an in depth look at your users as well as an educated opinion about which specific steps to take moving forward. You will be provided with a list of keywords for your niche that your people can use to craft informative, user-intent driven articles and posts. All you need to do after that is what you are already excellent at…delegate.

If Anne from accounting is secretly an excellent writer who is passionate about End of Life Financial Planning, have her write an article about it. If John from sales wants to discuss his favorite product of yours, have him write about it. As you can see, SEO should be a company-wide effort. In my opinion, every aspiration within a business should be promoted company-wide. Once you adopt a sound SEO strategy your business will begin to benefit from the millions of people online looking for exactly what your company has to offer them. Over the months after you begin your SEO adventure, watching your rankings for certain keywords and phrases go higher and higher in the mighty Google algorithm will make the entire company proud. I wish you success in your efforts and happiness in your success!