By and large, most small business Web sites only attract local traffic because people in their local area have heard about them from friends, family, local advertising, etc. It's great to have a brand that is memorable, but unless you are a company with an unlimited advertising budget, you will be hard pressed to get your name in the minds of those outside your local reach.

Enter the Internet.

You no longer have to set aside millions of dollars for national advertising because your best national advertising outlet is free. It is called a search engine. Your goal is to get your advertisement (your Web site) to come up as a result for as many relevant keywords as possible. This is sometimes referred to as a long tail search.

If you are launching a brand new Web site chances are your only visitors that first month are going to be your mother, father, siblings and friends. You will be lucky if anyone finds you on a search engine at all, but if they do, it will probably be someone in your own town searching for your company name to see if you have a Web site. This trend will continue for some time until you start developing pages of content on your site.

A web site consists of content pages. If and when google finds out about your site it will review the homepage to see if it wants to include it in its search engine. On your homepage you will have links to other pages on your site. Every page of your site contains words. The words on these pages get indexed as keywords representing the content on your site. The more pages you have the more pages Google can potentially index as part of your site, and therefore there are more keywords associated with your site. How are you supposed to know if you are extending past those looking for your brand, and reaching potential customers that are searching for your products and services but are yet to find out you exist?

Enter Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a completely free tool that you can install yourself if you know anything about building a web site. But if you don't - no worries! Your web company can install it in less than one hour. If you don't have a web company, you can contact a Google Analytics consultant, and they can install it for you.

Next you want to use the keyword analysis tool and exclude all variations of your company name to find out how many different (nonbranded) keywords people are using to find your site. Here are the steps to do this:

Step 1. Click the Traffic Sources Menu item
Step 2. Click the Keywords Menu item
Step 3. Choose your date range
Step 4. In the "Find Keyword" field at the bottom of the keyword list, choose "excluding" in the drop down box, then type in the keywords you want to exclude.
You can use any regular expression but for this particular example we want to exclude multiple keywords so type this:
(keyword 1)|(keyword 2)|(keyword...)

In this example I am trying to discover how many people come to the Plexus Web site who don't already know our company name. I want analytics to tell me how many keywords are represented in searches to our site that don't include variations of our company name. Any phrase that has "Plexus" or "creation" should be excluded because most likely those people are trying to find us by our company name - Plexus Web Creations. I didn't include "web" since that is actually a valid keyword for us. See below for my search exclusion argument.

Example Search Exclusion

The | (pipe) separator between the (keyword) represents OR. (It can be found as part of the backward slash button, press SHIFT to have it appear)

Then click the go button. Then you will have a list of all keywords that people used to find your site that do not include variations of your company name. The goal is to have that number grow each month!

Why do you want that number to grow each month? Read our next article about the power of conversions to find the answer, subcribe to our blog so you don't miss it!