The LaunchSite Blog

Going Beyond Your Own Website Analytics

Your website traffic is may be growing and your daily visits increasing but how do you look to the outside? And how is your competition doing? An important part of your online strategy should be edging out the competition in terms of visitors and traffic so here are a couple of tools that can help you track this valuable information.

Alexa - They’ve been around a long time and although the company has seen it’s better days (before Google was king of search) they still have great data that can be helpful to see where you stand and what data they have about your visitors. Alexa gets it’s data from visitors who use their toolbar or browser extension. The extension shows the visitor how popular the website is and in return Alexa gets data about which website they visit. You may even want to install it yourself but note that your usage will influence their rankings.

Compete - Compete works like Alexa in that they use a panel of internet users but no one really knows where they get their data exactly. If you pay for a subscription you can get very detailed analysis including demographic information as well but note that your website has to be pretty popular in the first place to even show results.

It’s important to note that neither of these solutions give you the actual visitor or hit rates but they can give you a clue as to where you place in comparison to your competition.

Domain Names and Google Ranking

It can be tempting to get that domain name that you have always wanted. Your current domain might be too long and another shorter .com domain has just surfaces. It has the right keyword(s) and the previous owner has let it expire. You quickly buy it thinking Google will give you better results with a more appropriate domain. But before you set up your 301 redirect from your old domain you should educate yourself about just how bad you could mess up your current rankings.

Domain Age

If this new domain ‘younger’ than your old domain Google will not rank it as high, even if the keywords are better. Google sees the new domain as riskier since it hasn’t been around as long.

Inlinks and Reputation

All those other lovely sites that link to you have your old address and Google cares very much about domain inlink reputation. Also there is evidence that even if you get all your wonderful inlinks to change to the new domain Google will still rank it lower because it has not worked up the reputation that your old domain has. 

Blacklists

It’s very possible that the previous owner used blackhat SEO practices or other things that could cause Google to blacklist the domain. Additionally, if the domain was parked for a period of time it could also get blocked. It can take a long time to fix the domains negative reputation which costs you dearly if your business gets a good percentage of it’s traffic from organic search results.

How to Get Value From Your New Domain

First off, keep your old domain and use it as always have. Your new domain can still be very valuable but you shouldn’t immediately set it up to resolve to your website. Instead you should create a brand new website for the domain. It should have unique content (blogs work great) but you don’t need to spend a ton of time on the site other than adding good quality content about the topic of interest. 

Keep an eye on the search results for your new site and if you start to see some good rankings you can start thinking about merging the two sites or just keep them both and link to your main website. The point is to be careful to not ruin your existing standing by doing something drastic. And you can still leverage your shiny new domain.

One last note: if the domain is for a brand new website you should focus on getting good quality content built up before worrying about the blacklist. Google tends to still crawl blocked sites to see if they improve their practices. If you remain blacklisted, you can apply for a review from Google to get back in the search results.

Introduction to LaunchSite

LaunchSite is a bootstrapping, lean startup and we are currently actively developing our first version of our product suite. Our product is meant to make launching and managing websites as painless as possible while also making your websites as beneficial to your business as possible. That means automating all of the mundane tasks, bundling things into one easy to use solution and never sacrificing quality.  

Our first bundle will include the ability to register and manage your domains, DNS, hosting and web applications such as a blog, CMS and shopping cart. If you are at all interested and want to tell us about the problems you face in managing your own website we would love to talk.