Design & Marketing Blog

It’s no secret that we all want our websites to show up at the top of Google’s search results.  But what many people fail to follow through on,  is how to keep people on their website, once they arrive.

A common mistake many website owners make in the development process, is they fail to provide engaging content to their audience. The goal is to keep your visitors on your website, and have them poke around a little bit, to see exactly what you can offer them.

When a visitor finds nothing of interest upon arrival, or they lose their patience, exiting your website on the page they came in on is called a “bounce”.

A website with a high bounce rate indicates that the website owner is failing to capture and peak the interest of visitors.

The first step in trimming your bounce rate, is to obviously find out what your bounce rate is… Google Analytics is by far the best traffic measurement tool available, so if you’re not currently using it, you should be. Discuss this with your web developer, or let us help you.

Next, we’ll run you through some steps to help you reduce your bounce rate:

Analyze Traffic Sources

This step seems like an obvious one. Take a look at your top sources of traffic (where your traffic is coming from), and focus on them to start. Some of these sources may include; Search Engines, Email Marketing Campaigns, etc.

Ignore unqualified sources such as; unknown referrals, random directories, social media sites.

Use Effective Landing Pages

Landing pages are pages within your website that are designed specifically for entry level visitors, from a specific source (pay per click ads, email campaigns etc). Designing these pages properly, and ensuring they have relevant, engaging content is critical in trimming your bounce rate. After all, if a visitor “lands” on this page, and doesn’t have the urge to browse around, that’s a bounce.

Headlines
Creative use of headlines also plays a big role in lowering your bounce rate in the landing page design. Referencing the traffic source that brought the visitor in, provides them with the feeling of relevancy, and promotes enhanced attention.

Call to Action
Use a clear, to-the-point “call to action”.  Since you only have a few seconds to capture the attention of your visitor, you want to provide a sense of urgency at first glance.

Stick to Clean, Relevant Copy
When writing the copy for your landing pages, use clear and specific content. Steer clear of vague or general content. Your visitor is there for information, not a song and dance.

Structure
This seems like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how often it’s neglected. Keep priority in mind when structuring the copy on your landing pages. Place the most important information as close to the top of the page, in paragraph or bullet form.

Testing

The only way to ensure you’re doing things right, is to test… and test often. Set a goal, and work to achieve it. After making changes to your landing pages, give it some time, and see how well your “bounce rate trimming” is progressing.

Google offers some pretty stellar tools in their arsenal to help you. In the Google Website Optimizer, they offer A/B split testing, which allows you to test landing pages against each other. Here’s how you do it…

• Create a campaign to test landing pages against each other.
• Upload the URL of the original page that you’re testing.
• Upload the URLs of the other landing pages you want to test against the original.
• Copy the JavaScript codes provided by Google and paste them in to the relevant pages you’re trying to test. (This will require access to the HTML code of the pages.)
• Send at least 500 visitors to the primary URL and Google will separate those visitors randomly for you to test the performance of the pages in a non-biased way. You can do this by using AdWords, email campaigns or even affiliates to send traffic from specific keywords through the funnel.

Developing landing pages that encourage your visitors to remain on your website, can often times be time-consuming, but it’s critical to high converting, high performing websites.  So scope out your bounce rate today, and see where you’re dropping the ball.

Search Engine Optimization has been long thought of, as somewhat of a mysterious process. Many people think that there’s some sort overly complicated and calculated formula to achieve high rankings in the major search engines, like Google.

The fact of the matter is, and I hate to sound cliche, but “Content is King”… That’s always been the case, and it will continue to be the most important thing in achieving high search engine rankings.

Google has been making some big algorithmic changes recently (what else is new?), in an effort to continue to seek out and rank the most legitimately relevant websites. They’ve always been for the most part secretive on their process of ranking websites, which leaves many marketers and SEO providers trying to “fool” Google with black-hat SEO techniques… That has been happening for over a decade now, and the people who really suffer, are the website owners, who find their high search engine rankings short lived.

Developing quality, relevant website content is without question, the biggest factor in achieving and maintaining high search engine rankings. Couple that, with white-hat techniques, and you’ll often find yourself in a desirable position in the major search engines.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of factors when it comes to achieving high search engine rankings, however the majority of them should be part of your web development process already… At least if you’re using an experienced web developer.

Here’s a few quick things that you can investigate on your own website, to see if it’s on track (before worrying about quality content).

• Domain Canonicalization - Ensuring the ‘www’ and ‘non-www’ version of your website, are seen as just one website, not duplicate versions of the same website. Your web developer should be familiar with this term. If they’re not… It’s probably time to find a new one… How to check? Visit your website, entering “www.yourwebsite.com” in the address bar. Once your website loads, look at the address bar, and see if the ‘www’ is still there…. Now try again, without the ‘www’… yourwebsite.com… Once it loads, see if it still appears the way you entered it. If the address bar always shows exactly what you entered, thats a problem.
• XML Sitemap - Ensure that your website has an XML sitemap… Usually, you can simply try and enter www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml. If that doesn’t work, ask your web developer if you have one, and where you can find it. Again, if you don’t… you should start looking for a new web developer.
• Make sure your website uses “heading tags” (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6)…. This is a little trickier to check, but definitely do-able…. Visit your website, and view it’s “source code”.  How to do this, will depend on your browser, but you can usually find it somewhere in the menu toolbar at the top of your browser. Once you’re looking at your page’s code, simply look for items that look like this <h1>some content</h1> (your page should use atleast one, but often times many… h1-h6).

Those are just a couple quick things that will help you at least see if you’re taking some initial steps in having a fighting chance in search engines… Check them out, and correct them… After all, your search engine rankings depend on them!