Filed under: SEO Analytics
So, you experience bad bounce rates and you wonder why? don’t these visitors stay around? I have had some internal clients ask me a lot lately about why they have such a high bounce rate. Firstly, understand that when I mean “high” I mean, 70% – pretty bad stuff.
Some assume it might have something to do with our SEO/SEM program. I explain that the purpose of SEO and SEM is to drive traffic to your product pages and we can and do this with great success. What we can’t do is get the visitor to take some sort of action or decide the page is a good fit for them once they arrive there. I liken this to a lead in sales terms. I can get you all the leads you want, but it’s up to the salesperson to actually close the deal. In this case, the page must hold the attention of the visitor within approximately 3-5 seconds of arriving to your page. Not a long time is it? Think about your own search and land behaviors? How many times have you clicked on a search result, only to find yourself annoyed at the lack of content or info you were searching for?
You might be a product champion who needs to drive leads on your product page. You have been looking at the same product page for 18 months or more and wonder what’s wrong with this page? Getting some outside input is always helpful. Have the pseudo visitor (another person who isn’t as involved in the day to day as you are) honestly and critically look at what experience others might be having. What action must you have your visitor take once they arrive on the page? Is there sufficient content and is the navigation easy to follow? Can the visitor even find the action or is it below the fold of the page lost in lots of content and ads? This action should be very simple – request more information, contact a sales rep, send a brochure – something.
I have seen some really awful, confusing, busy pages and really am quite sure that the bounce rate is high because of this very experience. Of course you might also have a high bounce rate based on the search query of the visitor. There might be a visitor who types in “itouch reviews” and selects a page (in natural results of course) that she thinks might give her some information on an itouch – when in fact it’s some mostly blank page with adsense ads strewn about – no real review content to see at all. Can you fault the visitor who returns right back to the search engine to conduct another search query?
This year will be the year that SEO goes another level higher – SEO conversions, at least from my perspective. I really hope to both educate others and learn a lot more in this area of converting and assisting in reducing the large bounce rates I see.
Check your bounce rates lately?
January 30, 2010
I just came across an articlewritten about two years ago, but is not “so yesterday” by any means, and I wanted to share it with you.
This article was found using the keyword search “seo metrics“
When working in a large corporate environment, you are asked to put together “scorecards” of information that the CEO might be interested in seeing.
There is a balance, what to show and how to show it. Don’t get so granular that you make them dizzy, but put some meat in there that even this person, who knows little to nothing about SEO, can get what success is.
So, next time they ask “howdoes our most broad keyword rank in Google?” steer them in the right direction by educating them on what they really should be looking at.
Slowly but surely, we can educate the world on what to look at when looking at SEO Metrics!
May 27, 2009
Thought I would share a cool tool I was made aware of by a colleague of mine in Sydney, crazyegg.com. During the re-designing of the corporate site for Australia, he was able to quickly show us the heat map report – very cool to see where your visitors on going on page, without having to spend tons of cash. There are some analytics packages that have this included, WebTrends has a very ugly interface with numbers, but not even presented on top of the site itself, in a whole separate area within your WebTrends profile. Another minus for WT in my opinion. Here’s a bit of an older review, but a review none-the-less for crazyegg from mashable I know there are others out there too, but A heat-map visual gives you an instant analysis of your page without number crunching, which we could all do a little less of.
May 11, 2009
Avinash Kaushik has some great analytics learnings – after just sitting in on a web analytics 1-day conference, I actually find Avinash’s blog more educational. I don’t mean to belittle the speaker, who had a pretty impressive analytics resume, but if your presenting information based on your expertise, you should probably appear at the very least enthusiastic about the topic or site some real life examples every now and again – and please do not read your PowerPoint slides – hell, I can read – tell me something I don’t know. (more…)
September 18, 2008
There are many web analytics packages to chose from. Lots of people have many opinions on various ‘best analytics” packages. For most large corporate sites, you need something robust and sophisticated. All have similar stats and reports. I have had very little experience using WebTrends. I had used a very basic version years ago.I can tell you right off the bat this newer WebTrends Marketing Lab2 version is pretty smooth. I particularly like the “site overlay” nice feature, its similar to ClickTracks in that it shows you the number of users entering into specific areas of a page, scratch that entry – it’s ugly and not something I would use now that I can use something a lot more appealing, using the heatmap overlay can be very helpful if you have an e-commerce site and a particular product you are trying to sell just isn’t selling, you may test different more visible areas on your page and find the right place your visitors are clicking. (You gotta like the visual in a world filled with numbers – at least I do).Under the marketing area of the dashboard, you will find literally tons of options under search engines like:Search Engines DashboardSearch Engines with KeywordsSearch Engines with PhrasesSearch PhrasesSearch KeywordsAcquisition by Search Engine (All)Most Recent Searches by Entry Page (All)Most Recent Organic Searches by Entry PageMost Recent Paid Searches by Entry PageMost Recent Search Phrases (All)Most Recent Search Phrases (Organic)Most Recent Search Phrases (Paid)Most Recent Search Engines (All)Most Recent Search Engines (Organic)Most Recent Search Engines (Paid)Ok, now all I have to do is start creating crazy reports all day. Create custom reports, with admin access – which is good this limits the amount of custom reports your company can listed. Otherwise you can have 20+ people with access and all kinds of reports all over. There are a variety of “dashboards” the marketing dashboard provides a quick overview of how effectively different methods, such as search engines and on-site ads, bring traffic to your site.This is the primary area I will focus my concentration on, you can certainly get lost in the analytics labyrinth. As I become more proficient, I will certainly update any new findings to add to this review.Anyone have any similar experience with WebTrends Marketing Lab2 Feel free to add your own uncensored opinion.
May 20, 2008
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