www or not, Yoast Social settings, service-area Google My Business, ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics (12/16/20)

This week, we tackled some common SEO questions- and experienced the common frustration with tracking ecommerce sites.

Which is better to use – www or non-www? That’s a good question. As with most SEO questions the answer is, “it depends.” Which of these “subdomains” has the most back links? What are your future plans for your website? What have you historically done? This question relates to the idea of the canonical url for your website.

I love to sing the praises of the Yoast SEO plugin. One of the things it does out-of-the-box is adding Open Graph and Twitter Cards to each post. There are several advantages to this (outside of an SEO campaign) and you don’t need to do anything for this to work- just installing Yoast sets this up for you.

One of the challenges for online businesses is what to do with a Google My Business listing for a company that works from a residence. The answer: they should set themselves up as a service-are business. This protects the owner’s privacy and helps promote the business to the right people.

Last we talked about one of the most frustrating aspects of tracking: ecommerce attribution of sales in Google Analytics. IMHO, it’s malpractice when an ecommerce solution does not do this for free and out-of-the-box. Unfortunately, most ecommerce solutions don’t really work like that and tracking sales and attributing them to the source of traffic can be hard to do. It’s worth the effort, however, even more than for a lead-generating business! You’re spending time and money marketing your products! You need to know if that is resulting in sales.