Online marketing professionals concerned with innovative software may wish to be aware of a new upgrade of Pardot, the popular automated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program.

Previously, Pardot was mainly used as web-based software suite used by professionals looking to create and track online marketing campaigns. Now, for the first time, it has added new search engine optimisation (SEO) marketing tools to assist small businesses, with features for monitoring the performance of keywords and those of your company’s closes competitors.

The data is harvested from various online sources and online marketing professionals can access it all from the Pardot system’s dashboard. Website rankings on Google and Bing can be tracked, in order to keep precise tabs on how well a SEO marketing campaign is going.

Online marketing analysts can also see the ranking status of each keyword, the average cost per click if they are thinking of bidding for the keyword in Google AdWords and the word’s approximate search volume on Google.

Using the competitor monitoring tool, online marketers can see how their SEO ranks against their rivals, tracking key components such as their competitors’ Google PageRank, inbound links and indexed pages.

Google Analytics is easily the world’s most popular analytics package. Businesses across the globe use it, from tiny blogs to major online retailers and affiliate marketers. In this article we’ll take a quick look at five very simple things that it can do for your site.

1. Track the progress of an SEO campaign. If you’re going to contract an agency to do SEO for you, it’s only natural to expect to see quantifiable results. The best SEO companies are only too happy to provide figures on how much traffic you’re getting and where it’s coming from (and more). For the most thorough picture, look at the figures from month to month and year on year so seasonal variation is taken into account.

2. Segment your visitors. Some users will like what they find on your site, spend some time there, and maybe go on to make a purchase, give your company a call, or otherwise convert from a casual visitor to a customer. Others will bounce off straight away and go elsewhere. It’s very useful to know where the two types are coming from- for example, if one organic keyword is delivering visitors of a very high quality and another is delivering people who rarely convert, you probably want to focus SEO efforts on the more valuable keyword.

If a poorly performing keyword is one that you really think should be delivering good value, take a look at where those visitors are landing. This brings us to the next point.

3. Examine page quality. Let’s say you have two high level category pages- men’s clothing and women’s clothing, for example. Comparing one against the other might reveal that men’s clothing has a far higher rate of visitor exit, with a lower percentage of people moving through it towards the products. In that case, the page needs to be redesigned. If the women’s clothing page is performing well, it’s time to figure how the two are different and what design lessons can be learned.

The new-look Google Analytics package (Version 5) also includes handy visitor flow visualisations, so it’s now much easier to see where users are being lost and how they travel from page to page within your site.

4. Estimate the effect of an offline campaign. Getting real data on the effectiveness of offline campaigns is difficult, whether you own a website or a bricks and mortar shop or both. One good trick is not to advertise your everyday URL. Set up a special page with a memorable name (www.sitename.com/special). The only people landing on this page will have heard about your site through the print, TV, or radio campaign.

It won’t be an exact figure as some people will head straight to www.sitename.com, but an estimate is better than nothing and this method will let you compare multiple offline ad campaigns against one another.

5. Find out what your visitors are looking for. If you have an internal site search capability, taking a look at commonly used search terms can give you some good ideas about new pages you might want to create. It can also provide clues to existing pages that should be easier to find. Heavy use of internal search is sometimes (not always) a sign that your navigation scheme needs to be tweaked for greater usability.

Jess Spate is professional web analyst with a PhD in data mining. She works with us to make sure all our clients get the very best out of their Google Analytics accounts.