Tag: Moz

Track Our Startup: Tracking Internal KPIs + Customer Success

September 29, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

What are we working on? What aren’t we working on is more like it! As for product features we’ve had a bunch of stuff in the hopper. If you recall just a few:

Competitor Dashboards - we’re very close with these, look for them in a week or so!
Google Campaigns and Goals
Hashtag tools for Instagram Analytics
Exporting a data dashboard to a PDF so you can send reports, we’ve seen this work on our test servers and it’s very, very cool.

Features Further Down the Road…

Always more integrations with more apps
Speaking of more integrations, we’ll be helping get outside developers developing dashboards of their own with our internal tools
Ability to have an ADMIN user manage multiple users for agencies and larger teams
The ability for you to build your own custom insights for your data dashboard!

Customer Success

Alf, our VP of Customer Success was tasked with documenting our user’s journey and all of the touch points we already do as well as all of the ones we need to add and change. When it’s in a nifty data visualization it’s so much more clear where there are opportunities and improvements to be made. He’ll be working closely with Jenny to refine it and start acting on all of the things to make the customer experience the best it can be.

Bring on the Traffic!

Traffic was a bit flat this week due to just 2 blogs and referral traffic down. It’s what you get when you don’t write content for two week. THAT won’t happen again :-).

Speaking of traffic, we’ve been working on a mammoth SEO project. What we do know here is that SEO is a journey, not a destination, that’s for sure. And since we have to deliver reporting on KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for you, we need to do if for us too and traffic driven by SEO is a huge KPI for us to keep a close eye on. Thanks to SEMrush and Moz we’ll start to work on getting those search results and traffic to spike.

Mimi will be attending Constant Contact’s OneCon next week, it’s where Constant Contact Solution Providers and Authorized Local Experts from all over the world are invited to network and learn from each other, Constant Contact executives, and small business experts. Seems like a cool networking thang.

What was I thinking? The two days I planned for a company offsite in Austin (where half of our amazing team resides) is the day after Formula 1, Austin weekend! Way to go, John!

Ok, more next week. Don’t forget to watch out for this week’s Startup Lessons Learned. Should be “Don’t book a meeting in Austin the day after F1” LOL.

Startup Lessons Learned: SEO, It’s a Journey Not a Destination

August 13, 2015 by John Hingley·1 Comment

We’ve been plugging away at making our product the best it can be. We want people to love it and tell all of their friends about it so we don’t need to spend a ton of money on Google AdWords - been there, done that. Not at Dasheroo.

This week’s startup lessons learned is all about SEO. We’ve been focusing on our search engine optimization strategy. Janine and Alf have been putting a ton of time into getting above all of the search engine noise. Going up even a point for your Moz page authority and domain authority is NOT easy and takes time. Our focus isn’t just to only win at one big keyword, but to win at dozens of other keywords as well. Only a diversified SEO strategy (ranking high for lots of relevant keyword searches) wins in the long run.

We decided to start with Moz’s pie chart of what goes into Google’s search algorithm. This chart was created by insights from a ton of SEO experts, and focuses on key efforts that are going to really move the needle.

1. Inbound Linking - We put a concerted effort into inbound linking since that makes up almost 21% of the ranking factor. And it ain’t like the olden days where you could stick a link on a million sites and get ranked #1. Here it needs to be from quality sites that have a good domain authority. We use the Moz bar when we’re looking at sites and if they’ve got a killer domain authority, they make the list.

2. Page Level Linking - Since this makes up for almost 20% of the ranking factor, we took a look at our website and our blog and found we were not really doing enough linking from page to page and we were just doing one word linking instead of entire phrases. So we changed that. Instead of just linking “Dasheroo” to our blog, we link phrases like best free dashboards a business can find to our site. And we don’t mind linking people off of our site, say to the Moz Bar tool page since it makes total sense for this content you’re reading.

3. Page Level Keywords & Content - This makes up almost 15% of the Google ranking factor. So we took a look at our site and decided that for every app integration we do, we’re going to make the focus be long-tail keywords. Instead of “business dashboards” all over the site, on these specific pages we may focus on the specific integration. For instance we have an integration with Google Sheets where you can take your Sheets data and create great-looking dashboards. So we have a specific Google Sheets dashboard landing page where the URL reads: https://www.dasheroo.com/google-sheets-dashboard. We put the keyword right in the URL and use the keywords in the description and the content so we hopefully will someday be found pretty easily, we’ve already risen out of nowhere to page 2; page 1 here we come!

SO WHAT HAPPENED AFTER A MONTH OF FOCUS?

Our page authority went up 2 whole points and our domain authority went up 3 (the more important one IMHO). Like the headline says, it’s a journey not a destination. We’ll keep you up to date on how we’re improving and what we’re doing to get there.

3 Must-Reads: Measuring ROI for Social Media

June 1, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

We are freaks about data here at Dasheroo and that’s no joke. So this week we scoured our favs and here are 3 articles we think are great about how to measure your ROI (return on investment) for your social media efforts!

5 Steps for Successfully Measuring Social Media ROI

Higher Visibility wrote this great article for Small Business Trends on measuring social media ROI and being that Dasheroo is in the biz of delivering your data from most social networks to you we thought this one was one point! We love that they’re looking at conversions with monetary value!

The Delightfully Short Guide to Social Media ROI

We love the folks at Buffer. They did a great job at telling you to calculate your time, the money you spend on social media tools and any advertising money you spend on social. Then they walk you through how this gets you to your return on investment with a wonderful infographic! Check it out!

A 3-Step Process to Measuring Social Media ROI

Brian Zeng, a Moz community member, did a great job of talking us through a great and easy process of looking at the ROI we nee to assess as we’re spending time and money on social media. We only think you should replace step 1, where you calculate your traffic using Dasheroo!

You need to be aware of how much your spending on social, so calculating your ROI for social media marketing is important!

Cheers to a healthy SEO plan for 2015

December 27, 2014 by John Hingley·0 Comments

Wow, only a week or so left of 2014. And what an incredible year it has been! We launched our free business dashboards company, Dasheroo, spent some quality time with friends, family and our pups, & did some fun travel to boot!

And right around the end of one thing and the beginning of the next, it’s a natural time to take stock of some things you may have put on cruise control for the past few months. Like? Search Engine Optimization of course! So we thought we’d spend a few minutes reminding everyone, including us here at Dasheroo, of some important things to keep in mind when thinking about driving high search results for your website. So here goes! (Plus, a bonus for us, we noticed a couple things we should improve as well.)

A quick note: this is meant to be a quick read. For a lengthier, very good, & recent article on SEO, check out ‘Learning SEO from the Experts’ from our buddies over at HubSpot.

First.

And this cannot be hammered home enough: make sure your site is focused toward it’s #1 purpose - to be a useful resource for your target market. Which, if so, should result in leads and sales. If you do that, good things will happen. If you do that and some of the tips below, very good things should happen!

Second.

Keep in mind it’s a marathon not a 50-yard dash. It takes awhile to creep (and it is a creep) up the search rankings. We feel that pain here at Dasheroo. Just starting our, with a new domain, zero authority and building content, we are now on page 4 for our #1 keyword, ‘business dashboards’. But we started out 8 months ago, not even existing. Progress!

Third.

Each page of your site has a purpose. So don’t optimize for the exact same keyword phrases on each page. Now, in this era of single scrolling sites (yes, we are guilty) this can cause a challenge. So, pick 2-3 keyword phrases and target each one for the content on the appropriate area on that looong page.

‘Business Dashboards’ is our primary keyword, but ‘free business dashboard’ is important too. So we include both in our meta tags.

Fourth.

Do some keyword research! Use Google Adwords Keyword Planner, start with a small list first and expand as you learn. It’s all about focus! Plus, look at your goals and see which keywords actually drive your conversions, and then use the Keyword Planner to find more words similar to those!

Lastly.

Think social! How does that impact SEO? Lots. The Googles of the world value the ‘social signals’ you throw off. So think about a) having a great company blog that also includes your main keyword phrases b) have FB, Twitter and other social sharing buttons on your posts! c) use your main keywords within your social media updates.

Oh yeah, and measure. We love Moz, they do a great job of recommendations to improve your on-page SEO. And keep learning! In addition to the Hubspot post mentioned above there’s a wealth of great resources to help you improve. We just picked up a great book, ‘Search Engine Marketing, Inc.’ by Mike Moran and Bill Hunt. A great resource!

OK, even if you just pick a couple things to do to improve, we hope this helps you create a great SEO plan for 2015!

Google’s Penguin 3.0 Release: What You Need to Know

October 27, 2014 by John Hingley·0 Comments

Google is notorious for rolling out massive updates to its search algorithm and Penguin and Panda were probably the two that affected the widest group of websites. We’ve all been waiting for the next Penguin “upgrade” and Google began that process in the past few weeks.

If you recall, Penguin is an algorithm, launched in April of 2012, that tracks what Google thinks is “spam” and it penalizes websites by dragging them to the depths of the search queries. So if you had inbound links that you “paid for” on weird sites and directories, you may have been hit with this nasty change. Hey at one point everyone wanted more inbound links right?

And a ton of companies have been out there cleaning up their links, disavowing them, waiting for this change, while others stood still and did nothing. So most of the companies may have a positive outcome of the Penguin 3.0 change but those who are spammy offenders will notice a change, much to the negative.

For us here at our business dashboard startup Dasheroo, we’ve noticed a hugely positive change. We’re not sure if it’s because we’re producing content that our readers like to read or that those in front of us had such a negative impact from the alogorithm change that we jumped 6 pages! Who knows we’ll just keep doing what we’re doing and remain clean!

Here’s a great article by Moz to dig in deeper.

Weekly Progress - Business Dashboards & Other Stuff

October 21, 2014 by John Hingley·0 Comments

We’ve been having a wicked time in this past week getting our sh*t together from all sides for your business dashboards. So we took a look at all that we’re doing and tried to synthesize it to a manageable (and shorter!) timeline, whew!

We’re testing out how funnels would work in a dashboard, stay tuned!

Salesforce Dashboards

We’re not going to get into how we want to launch Salesforce Insights again, just know we’ve been working really hard on it.

Timeline: Fingers crossed by the end of the week.

We went to a killer Dreamforce party (#df14) where we met some very sharp & cool people. Nuff said.

FAQs, Help site

We’re really going to focus on writing better and more FAQs as part of our launch process. This is going to give you better answers when you ask your questions about our application and those we connect to. As part of this project we’ll be looking under the hood at the knowledgebase we’re using.

Timeline: A week from now and ongoing!

New Website

We’ve got a new site we just launched that we’ll iterate on; we love to do that otherwise we’ll never get anything launched. We are now displaying all applications we connect to on our site.

We use Moz to monitor our SEO rankings and we’ve needed to do a bunch of fixes to our site. Moz has been great about telling us what to do to fix stuff. We just graduated from an F to a B…Woohoo! We’re a page authority of 35 now up from the 20’s, that’s really good.

Development

We’ve got a hot line on some great new developers and if you develop software you know how important that is.

Timeline: Look for more applications we connect to in the later part of the year when we have more people to focus on it.

Also, since we heard that you wanted to re-size your charts we looked into developing our very own charts so that you can easily do that.

Timeline: By Beta in November

The Business

We’re in the throws of setting up a business bank account, figuring out business insurance, looking at health insurance, finding out which financial software we want to use, and potentially switching up our CRM database and our support knowledgebase. Holy moly that’s a lot!

Timeline: 4 Weeks!

That’s it for now, back to work!

Qwickbyte: Your Website Visitor Dashboard, New vs. Existing, Which Stat is More Important?

March 20, 2014 by John Hingley·0 Comments

Are you making sense of the Google Analytics dashboard for your business? Check out this stat: your NEW visitors vs. your EXISTING visitors. Which is more? You want to keep existing visitors coming back for sure but you want to grow your new visitors as well. If you’ve got 70% of your traffic coming from existing then set yourself a goal to increase your new visitors to 40%.

This means some more focus should spent on things like SEO since 5x the number of people will click your link if you’re on page one vs. page two in Google. Check out MOZ, they’ve got a free product and cool community to help out.