Your Bounce Rate is that depressing Internet statistic that measures the proportion of visitors that look at one single page of content and then bounce away, immediately leaving your site.  Bounce Rate has to be one of the most talked about statistics of the year, and yet one of the least well understood or interpreted.

We all want to reduce our bounce rates, that is to say we want to entice visitors to look at least one more page of content on our sites.  And a high bounce rate is a generally accepted signal that something is wrong, whether it’s your website content, or bad navigation, or poor user experience, or lousy business proposition.  A high bounce rate means your site has failed to engage your visitor enough to look at another page, and it might be that simple design changes can often lead to significant improvements in your bounce rate.

But in my experience, small businesses actively pursuing a search engine optimisation strategy may well experience a rise in their Bounce rate.

You must keep in mind that  Not all Bounces are Created Equal. You need to look at your Bounces on their individual characteristics and merits, and decide which Bounce rates provide significant information for your business, and which need addressing as a matter of priority.

1.  Evaluating Bounce on a “Page by Page” Basis

Let’s start with your Home page.  It should have a low bounce rate, as it is typically one of your most visited pages, and it acts as a signpost to encourage visitors to explore further.   It typically will have a linear path of links encouraging people to click through for further information.

By way of comparison, your search engine optimisation activities will often result in a huge number of what Jakob Nielsen calls “deep dips” – visitors arriving on interior pages that are highly relevant to their search phrase.  Obviously, these pages should be of interest to your visitors because the page is exactly what they were looking for. A high bounce rate for these pages might be a reason to worry.

However, you may also find that your pages may also be ranking highly for search phrases that are not appropriate, or do not show intention to buy your products or services.  And so these visitors will bounce, and because they were never really a prospective customer, you just can’t worry about them.

The danger would be to start redesigning your pages based on this spurious visitor activity.  You need to identify a strategy to focus on the behaviour of your real potential customers, not the time wasters.

2.  Bounce Rate for Particular Key Phrases

Some of your phrases do indeed show intention to buy, and you will want to carefully monitor these specific phrases and have a strategy in place to drive the bounce rate down.

Use your Google Analytics to segment out these phrases, and generate reports that help you to keep an eye on them.  Lose sight of this bounce rate at your peril, because it is at the heart of both your search engine optimisation and customer conversion strategy.

3.  Bounce Rate for Entry Sources

Your search engine optimisation activities will result in visitors coming from sites such as Digg, or Stumble Upon, who may well be idly browsing the web, and to be frank will never become a customer. Their bounce rate may be high, and my advice is don’t worry about it.  If appropriate, segment this traffic out, and review their bounce rate separately from other traffic sources.

How about links from other websites?  Visitors coming in as referrals from other sites should have a lower bounce rate, after all it is a recommendation that led them to visit your site.  You need to determine if the inbound link is indeed a recommendation that shows some intention on the part of the visitor, or again is just driving in random traffic.

Visitors from search engines are showing a high level of intention:  they have searched and clicked through to your site, and they should start engaging in your content.  High levels of bounces from search traffic should be a warning signal.  Either there is something wrong with your landing pages, or there is something wrong with your search engine optimisation strategy.

And of course, for a Pay Per Click campaign, a high bounce rate means wasted money with serious repurcussions for the overall cost of the campaign.  Keep a beady eye on your paid traffic sources, whether PPC, banners or other forms of paid advertising.

4.  Loyal Visitors

What about all you lovely people who follow visit my website in order to read my blog postings using either the RSS feed, or my email  marketing newsletter.

If I were thinking purely in terms of Bounce Rate, then I have to say you disapppoint me:  you often read one article, and then you leave.

But you are loyal visitors to the site, you come back week after week.  And to be honest, I’m happy if you usually just look at a page or two, because I suspect you’ve read some of my other articles already, and I hope from time to time I’ll lure you into clicking on the shiny new courses I’m running.

And finally…

One of the best techniques for reducing bounce rate is to offer specific links to further information at the bottom of the page, and hope your visitors will be motivated to learn more:

Search Engine Optimisation Myths:  don’t fall for these scams (PDF)

What’s happened to my search engine rankings?

I am trying out a new free customer feedback service that provides an independent, unedited source of evaluations from my customers.  I can display this feedback on my website, helping to build business trust and credibility as part of my marketing strategy. And of course it provides a valuable feedback loop as part of my process of continuous improvement of the business.

Feefo is a  customer feedback tool being used by household names like the BBC and Charles Tyrwhitt, as well as number of small businesses ranging from retailers to service providers.

The customer review process is quite simple:  I provide Feefo with all the email addresses of my customers and details of what they bought.  Feefo invites them to provide comments that will be published, unedited, on the Internet.  I have undertaken to give Feefo all my customer addresses (not just those who I think will say nice things!) and also understand that whatever the customer says, good or bad, will appear in my reviews. And finally, I do have the ability to reply to comments as appropriate.

Best of all, Feefo keeps the evaluation process short and sweet, with just two questions:  provide a rating of your product and give a comment.  Keeping it simple seems to work well.

It is a British company, and they have been very helpful in providing support when it was needed.  I think there are some areas that still need refining, for instance the icons aren’t particularly intuitive, and the reporting is a bit ropey, but I have the impression they are open to suggestions and constructive feedback.

The first question is an open ended box to write in comments. I have used Feefo’s very simple editor to write the introductory text:

Feefo can take automatic notifications of the details of your sales direct from your website, in much the same way you send details of your sales to your credit card payment processing provider.  Alternatively, you an upload the details of your sales by creating a simple file using a spreadsheet.

It is a free service, provided you only need 100 feedbacks per month. If you require more feedbacks, or want to customise the service, then they provide the Pro version.

Be sure to take a look at my article discussing the value of customer reviews as part of your Internet marketing strategy.

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Barack Obama became America’s 44th President on 20 January 2009 at 12:00, and just one minute later at 12:01 the Whitehouse published it’s very first blog posting.

Change has come to the Whitehouse, and at least one of those changes is the aim of building community by using blogging, RSS feeds, and email newsletters.  These technologies were instrumental in the successful election campaign, and now they are being transferred to.

And the change wasn’t limited to just adding a blog.  The site has had a complete makeover.  Here is the new Obama verson of the White House home page, complete with compelling graphics, blog postings as the main content on the home page, videos to watch, Call to Action to subscribe to the newsletter:

Compare and contrast with the previous Bush version of the whitehouse.gov website:

Google Knows Who’s President

Speaking of change, it didn’t take Google long to update it’s database with  the correct information.  A search for White House displays the two lines of text in black from the newly revised meta description tag telling me about the new president:

On the other hand, at the time of this posting Yahoo! still hadn’t managed to update it’s database, telling me that Bush was still president:

It’s 2009 – and I’ve decided to get on the Twitter bandwagon.  I’ve had a Twitter account for a while, but I just couldn’t see the benefit of using it.  But now I’m seeing clients getting lots of traffic and engagement with their users via Twitter, so in for a penny, in for a pound.

Let’s start with a brief introduction to Twitter:  it’s a service that lets you send small messages, no more than 140 characters, letting people know what you’re doing or what you’re thinking about.  It’s often called “microblogging” and it works either by using the Twitter website, or sending and receiving text messages on your mobile phone.

I found this big list of companies using Twitter to be very persuasive in demonstrating the business benefits of using this technology

It’s all about social engagement.  Having a conversation with your customers, building a community, engaging with your potential clients.  It could be a way of conducting surveys and getting your customers’ opinions.

What do you need to do to play the Twitter game?

1. Decide what you’re going to Twitter about. What will I be tweeting about?  My tweets will cover Internet marketing news and updates, using it as a way to quickly share useful information and resources. Restaurants could send Tweets about today’s menu.  Estate agents could tweet new properties.  How about tweeting about new products or new services.  Consider sending customer service tweets. Or even tweeting discount codes.
2. Get a sensible Twitter identity.  Use your real name, or your company name, or your brand.  Make it easy for people to recognise that it is you doing the talking.
3. Use a tool to make small web addresses. I like to embed web links in my tweets, and so use either www.tinyurl.com to generate small versions of urls.  With only 140 characters to play with, you need to use teeny web addresses in your tweets.
4. Get a Twitter icon to promote your Twitter on your website.  I got mine from www.twitterbuttons.com/
5. Think about how you will promote your Twitter.  Will you put an icon on your website?  Send out an email invitation to your client base? Include it in your email signature?  Put it in your product delivery notes?
6. Learn the Twitter Etiquette.  Spend a few minutes reading a bit:

• Mastering Twitter in 10 minutes or less
• Twitter Guide for Dummies,

And why am I using Twitter?  It is a way to reach new audiences:  some people like to read my blog on the website, some follow using an RSS feed, some subscribe to the email marketing newletter.  And now it is time to get involved with the Twitterati.

I’ll keep you posted, but in the meantime take a look at my twittering at www.twitter.com/susanhallam

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I send New Year’s wishes to all the readers of my blog, and I wish you a successful and prosperous 2009.

The New Year is a good time to take stock of all our websites, and I’m evaluating the response to my blog articles in order to guide what I write next year. There are a number of different measures that I am considering:

• the number of times the blog posting was read by unique visitors
• the number of times the blog posting was a landing page meaning it was the first page people saw, for example from a Google search
• the response to my email newsletters

The most popular postings in 2008 for email subscribers to the blog were:

1. Announcing the new Hallam website design
2. EMNET Ceases Trading
3. Review of the new Cuil Search Engine
4. Google’s new Publishers Guide to the Web
5. Plural vs Singular Keywords
6. How Much do Internet Marketing Companies Charge
7. Improvements to the Google Keyword Tool
8. Google Chrome Review
9. Viral Marketing, Social Media & Blogs:  New UK Laws
10. How to Use Internet Marketing to Fight the Credit Crunch

In terms of blog content on the website, my most frequently read postings in 2008 were:

1. Google Analytics vs WebTrends
2. How To Create a Free Website
3. John and Anne Move to Panama
4. American Google vs UK Google
5. EMNET Ceases Trading

3 of those 5 articles are “old” articles, written in 2007, which demonstrates the value of keeping older content on your website.  It may be that the articles need updating, but that will also be a positive contributing factor to the search engine optimisation of those pages.

And finally, in terms of postings that drove visitors to the site from specifically the Google search engine, then the top 5 articles overlap with the categories above.

What is interesting to note is that every single article written in in the last 4 years has acted as a landing page for some type of Google search in 2008. Old articles, new articles, each and every one contributed in some way to acquiring traffic to the website.

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Successful websites need to get alot of visitors, and alot of your visitors should be coming from search engines, particularly Google.

I’m often asked why a site isn’t ranking well in the websites, or why they’re getting the wrong kind of visitors.

In short:  what’s wrong with my website?

I want to talk about 3 problem scenarios that are typical for small business websites:  that they’re not ranking well in Google, that visitors just bounce right off the site, or that they’re getting the wrong kind of visitors.

1.  I’m not ranking well for my key phrases

Google is constantly tweaking the search engine results, testing sites for their quality and relevance.  These quality signals are coming from the content on your site, where your website fits in the rich mesh of links that Google trusts, and the behaviour of the visitors searching for and visiting your site.

If your site is not ranking well, then you need to review these factors:

Check the content on your website.  You want to be looking out for these poor quality signals:

• Duplicate Title tags used across multiple web pages
• Duplicate Meta description tags
• Duplicate content, either duplicated pages, or pages with duplicated elements such as large menus
• Pages with little or no meaningful content
• Keyword Diarrhea, also known as keyword stuffing, which applies to Title tags, Alt tags, meta tags
• Keyword rich content contained in decorative graphic images
• No coherent keyword strategy, often referred to as keyword density
• Pure keyword stuffing, without using keywords within a meaningful context

Check that your inbound linking strategy is delivering quality, topical links.  You want to be looking out for these danger signals:

• You’re purchasing links from a link brokerage service
• You have a high proportion of reciprocal links
• Your recipricoal links are not with quality, relevant, topical websites
• You don’t have outbound links to those authorative, quality sites
• You have acquired a flood of inbound links, and then just as quickly stopped link building

2.  I’m getting lots of visitors, but they bounce straight off the site

Your web analytics software will let you know what proportion of your visitors look at just one page of your website, and then decide to leave straight away.  Your bounce rate is a good measure of what kind of first impression your site is making, and an indicator of the quality of your site.

Google make it clear that Bounce Rate is an important contributor to their AdWords quality score, and I think it is reasonable to assume (and I’m only assuming) that bounce rate is also taken into consideration when determining your search engine rankings.

So a bad (high) bounce rate is a double whammy:  you are losing visitors after just one page view, and their decision to leave your site may have an negative effect on your rankings.

You need to figure out what your visitor’s don’t like about your site.  Of course, it may be that your site is perfect and they found exactly what they wanted in a single page.  Bravo for you, and dream on.  For the rest of us, it means checking:

• that the design of the site reflects your business core values.  Does your website look professional, or home made?
• that your site looks trustworthy, someone I want to give my money to?
• that your site loads quickly
• that the navigation is clear and easy to use

3.  I’m getting lots of visitors, but no buyers

Once upon a time I wrote an article about the mystery canoeist who faked his death and went to Panama with his wife Pam.  I wanted to highlight the fact their fakery was discovered by a casual searcher discovering their photograph on Google Images, and the importance of image search.

My article, John and Anne Move to Panama ranks highly in Google for people searching for John and Anne, is the landing page for many thousands of Google searchers, and it’s even been translated into Russian.

But it hasn’t earned me a penny.  It’s a badly optimised page delivering irrelevant traffic.  But it is useful as an example in my workshops!

If you’re getting lots of visitors, but no buyers,then check your web analytics to see if you are receiving traffic for irrelevant key phrases.  If you are, then:

• amend the culprit pages to have more appropriate keyword rich text in the Title Tags, headings, body copy and all the other relevant places on the page
• generate more content relevant to your key theme
• work on getting high quality inbound links from appropriate websites
• and accept the fact that you will be getting a proportion of irrelevant traffic

So, if you are struggling with your rankings, your visitor behaviour, or getting the right kinds of visitors then these are some suggestions to help you out.

Good luck!

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This free event is available to small and medium sized businesses in the West Midlands region.

After popular demand IT Futures are bringing this exciting event back to Worcestershire! This one day workshop is designed to help you harness the marketing potential of the internet. It will show you how to generate consistently high levels of the right kind of traffic to your website through employing simple and low-cost promotional techniques.

This exciting event will cover

At the end of the day you will have ideas, information and techniques to help you improve your website, and the basis for an internet marketing action plan which you can apply to your own organisation.

For futher information, or to  book your place, visit the e-Adoption website.

A free one-day workshop for small and medium sized businesses in the West Midlands.

Google dominates the UK search market place but it is much more than just a search engine; it offers a wide range of business tools that can save you money, make your business more efficient, and improve your marketing efforts. And if you’re on a budget then it’s hard to beat Google’s free office productivity tools.

Presented by Susan Hallam this one day workshop will show you how Google can make your job easier. Practical examples of how small businesses are using these tools will be given so that you can evaluate the Google offering for yourself.

This exciting event will introduce you to the following Google applications:

* Introducing your Google Account
* Understanding & improving Google’s indexing and ranking of your website using Webmaster Central
* Analysing the visitors to your site & how they behave using Analytics
* Offering eCommerce on your website using Google Checkout
* Improving your website using Maps, Mashups, Site Search & Gadgets
* Superior searching using Suggest, Trends, Alerts & Advanced Search
* Promoting your business on the web using Blogger, Product, Mobile and Base
* Discover productivity tools including Docs, Spreadsheets, Calendar, Desktop & Pack
* Communication tools using Gmail, Talk & Groups
* Personalise your Google experience with iGoogle
* Understanding the Google universe: Sketchup, Orkut, YouTube & More

Tuesday, 24 February 2009

09:30 – 16:00

Park House Hotel, Shropshire

To learn more, and book your place, take a look at the eAdoption website