Monthly Archives: May 2009

How to reduce a high bounce rate

With any SEO campaign, it is important to measure the successfulness by regularly analysing the analytics data. When looking at your analytics data, you may see that your site is starting to get some good traffic and is attracting a lot of visitors, but if your bounce rate is high (i.e. over 50%) then you may need to re-think your on page strategy. A ‘bounce’ refers to when a user leaves a website from the landing page, and your bounce rate is the percentage of users that bounce. A good website would expect an average of around a 10-25% bounce rate.

If your bounce rate is high, you need to consider why people aren’t visiting other pages in your site. Perhaps it is because of a usability issue? If your navigation is complicated, or doesn’t display properly in different browsers, this may be preventing people from being able to view other pages in your site. A common issue is that the homepage contains too much information or is unattractive to the user. This can be addressed by creating call to actions, or obvious choices that the user can make based on their personal preference. For example, if you had an online clothes store, your starting links or choices could be clothes for men, clothes for women, clothes for children etc. This provides your users with a clear path they need to follow in order to help them find what they are looking for.

To help you reduce the bounce rate for your site, it may be worth thinking about the main reasons why users bounce. The top reasons, in no particular order, are:

  • The page doesn’t load or render properly
  • The page loads too slowly
  • The user hasn’t found what they are looking for
  • The user has found the information they were looking for
  • The user is overfaced by the amount of content
  • The user doesn’t trust the website
  • Other usability issues

If your bounce rate is high, have a cold hard look at your homepage and top landing pages in your site. Alternatively, you should get an expert to analyse it - the results could be enlightening and profitable!

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Improving position through internal linking

Internal linking can be a very powerful technique when used correctly. This refers to the internal linking structure of your website, and includes the importance of both the link and the anchor text that is used. For example, everytime we use the key phrase Manchester SEO company in a blog or webpage, we make sure that it links back to the website homepage. Using this technique alone before gaining external links to your site can help improve your position in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).

If you’re using a WordPress blog, you can use a plugin called ’smart links’ that will turn all of your chosen keywords into links. I’m still a little but dubious about this plugin, but I’ve been assured that is good and can save a lot of time! Personally, I like to have control over which of the keywords are links and which aren’t. For example, if I mention the keyword SEO several times on a single page, I only want one of those to be a link.

Additionally, improving your internal linking structure can aid the usability of your site. For example, a lot of the content on this website can be quite technical and includes acronyms which could appear as gibberish to an SEO novice. We convert these acronyms into links which lead to the relevant page in our SEO glossary.

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Maintaining search engine position

Recently I have been working with a client that requested some search engine optimisation for their website because they had not been getting any sales enquiries. On further investigation, it became apparent that although their website was badly optimised it was ranking well and getting a lot of daily traffic. However, this was mainly due to their competitors having similar issues with their sites. Once the client realised that they were actually getting decent traffic, they questioned whether or not they needed to optimise their site, which is completely understandable.

However, although their site was currently ranking well, we still recommended performing some crucial on-page search engine optimisation to their website. This was to make sure that they maintained their current search engine position. If a competitor was to raise their game, it wouldn’t take much effort to start ranking above them in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Additionally, we recommended starting a monthly link building campaign (off-page optimisation) to their site as part of an overall strategy to continue ranking well for their chosen keywords.

Once the optimisation was complete, we recommended performing a full website usability analysis to address the issues with the navigation, and general site usability. These changes combined with modifications to the design increased the conversion rate of the visitors (sales enquiries). Although the key issue with the website was that it wasn’t converting visitors, it was important to make sure that they maintained their position within the SERPs. This is something that is often overlooked, but as a general rule with SEO, it is better to be proactive instead of reactive. Maintaining your position within the search engines is generally easier than trying to improve your position.

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Using Google analytics to find out your top traffic sources

We’re always being asked questions about understanding Google analytics, and as such we occassionally add some simple step by step guides to our blog. This week we’re going to go through another very simple process of finding out how to view the traffic sources for your website.

First of all, select the time period for which you would like to view. The default time period is one month, but you can choose your exact time frame by clicking the date, followed by a start and end date using the calendar. If you check your analytics data regularly (like me) you may only want to view the last day or so.  Alternatively, you may wish to view all the data for the last month, year etc to view which traffic source has the been the most beneficial to your site traffic.  Once your time frame is chosen, click the “apply” button, and your traffic graph should update accordingly.

In the navigation on the left hand side, select ‘traffic sources’. This will take you to the main traffic sources page, where you will see the total number of visits your site has received and a pie chart showing the percentages of your traffic sources. From here you can now click on “referring sites” to see which site has given you the most referrals i.e. for the last month a majority of our referrals have come from Sphinn and Twitter. You can also view your direct traffic, which is people that have typed the URL of your website directly into the address bar.

My favourite is the keywords people have used to get to the site. Here you can measure exactly how successful your organic campaigns have been by seeing the most popular keywords people have used to get to the site. For example Manchester SEO and Manchester SEO company both tend to rank near the top. Additionally, of you go to the end of your keyword list you can view all the random key phrases that have got people to your site (normally through blog posts), and it can give you a good insight into how people are finding your site.

For a more advanced technique, you can click on a referring site or keyword, and then choose a ‘dimension’ from the drop down menu. Dimensions include geographic location (i.e. continent, country, city etc), browser types, Flash version and many more. One of the options is “Network location”, which is the name of the network the user was on when they visited your site. This can also be very enlightening! Many big companies have named networks, so they may appear as i.e. Sony Corporation, BBC Manchester etc. You will also get named networks from public networks i.e. Starbucks Manchester etc.

So, have an experiment with Google analytics and see what interesting information you can find out about your site visitors. To find out more, simply contact Elevator and someone will be happy to help!

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