When it comes to your website, 'friction' is anything that make the visitor less likely to do the thing you want them to do.

That could be to call you, email you, read more content, sign up for something, download something or buy something.

The more of these points of friction you have on your website, the less effective it will be.  So how to you reduce or remove it?

This is term used frequently in online marketing conversations – so what does it mean?

It's an important concept that can make a significant difference to the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts.

A question many a small business owner asks themselves.

Unlike a lot of the advice you'll get if you Google "Facebook marketing", we don't necessarily agree that Facebook is the answer to all your marketing challenges – especially if you are a small business with a few (or possibly only one) employee(s).

Much of the advice is very generic and, just like stretch pants – one size does not fit all.

Google Analytics is a great tool. Powerful. Free for small businesses. It's a million times better than AWStats or other similar free reporting tools that come with website hosting.

But it's not perfect. There are some serious issues that have escalated recently to the point where you just can't take the statistics at face value.

If your website is so amazing that everyone is talking about it and telling others to go see it – well, put your feet up!. But for most, getting more people to come to your website is one of their biggest challenges.

And sadly, “build it and they will come” only works in the movies.

It takes work, sometimes quite hard word, to get more people to visit your website. But to make it easier - we're giving you a dozen ways to do it.

If you have a website for your business, you'd know that without visitors (aka traffic) your website is dead in the water. It's like a party with amazing food that no one goes to.

It's also important to know where those visitors come from and how they contribute to your bottom line, because like party guests - not all visitors are quality.

We all know that having a website for your business is critical. But there's no point if no one visits it!

Attracting visitors (aka traffic) is a task that takes up the majority of the time and attention of most webmasters (and mistresses!) and can be a huge challenge if you don't know where to start.

Making it harder is the fact that any old traffic isn't good enough – it needs to be the kind of visitor that has a good chance of taking you up on your offer of goods or services. And one important group are those that are physically close to you.

(updated January 2016)

If you are running Google Adwords, there's a good chance that you haven't been able to resist searching with your target keywords to see if your ad shows up, where and how it looks.

You have probably come across a situation where your ad doesn't show up – either it doesn't show up no matter what you search for, or it shows up for some phrases and not others, or perhaps you are getting anedotal comments that you're 'not there'.

And so naturally, you become concerned that something is wrong. But don't worry - there are legitimate reasons why this happens. Here are the most common....

Your website conversion rate is a simple calculation that says "of the people coming to my site, how many take the action I want?"

There are three types of Keyword matching in Adwords:

• Broad
• Phrase
• Exact

Sometimes we'll ask someone if they have Google Analytics installed but they don't know if they do or not.

This isn't as strange as it seems, it may have been installed by the web developer when the site was built, but because no one has never checked the stats, it's been forgotten about.

This is what is known as Referral Spam.

Referral spam will show up as strange site address's, or address that don't make sense as referral sources, in your Google Analyics reports under Acquisition.