Getting better results from your Website
I don’t often branch out into this realm of trying to dictate to your what you should and shouldn’t put onto your website. But you do want the website to perform better – right?
Let’s pick the title of this article apart a little – ‘Getting better results from your website’ – The key is I’m not going to fuss about how many visitors, or what your marketing, your aims and your aspirations are for your website. Want I want to stress is how you might get better results from what visitors you’re already getting.
The key with any page on any website is to give the visitor enough information to satisfy them. You might ask them to buy something, contact you or just inform them. But ultimately you want to satisfy their need whatever it is.
Therefore this leave one metric that is cast iron every time to getting a better result. It’s called the ‘Bounce Rate’ – the Bounce Rate measure the number of people who visit a web page and leave… 9 tenths of the time unsatisfied. It followers therefore the lower your bounce rate the more satisfied visitors you will have. If 2 in 10 people are leaving before they have read your page – that would be better than 4 or 6.
All web pages have a Bounce Rate and the target varies depending on the content of the page, but you might say 20% was good, 40% acceptable and 60% worrisome, there are plenty of ways to find this out on your website.
So back to my title – Getting better results from you Website – the goal is to reduce the bounce rate and the main way that is done is by improving the page they are bounce from… But you need to put that in context with who and why they are landing on the page in the first place.
Examples – if you have a web about ‘Holidays in France’ and people and it announces information and facts about holidays you offer – that’s great – but you might find that Bounce Rate is at 60%… working backwards you can analyse that 300 of your 500 visitors to the page typed in the keyword ‘Ski Holidays’ – you’d know that people were arriving on your website because they want to know about ‘skiing holidays’.
The obvious thing to do is to make sure that ‘Skiing Holidays’ is prominently featured on your website. This would mean those 300 people would see information about what they are looking forward to most prominently. This would reduce the chance of a Bounce. A big notice on your Home Page saying ‘Click Here for Skiing Holidays’ is what is needed.
Now you can take this all a few steps further – if you had Summer Holiday Cottages and Ski Chalets on the website – and your visitors were using a mix of keywords related to these two different activities, you should set up two pages – one for Summer and one for Winter.
Now you can take it further – if you get more people looking for ‘short break holidays’, ‘two bedroom chalets’, ‘august French villas’ You can see you are going to start building specific pages for all these eventualities – the goal is always the same – to make sure you give people the information they actually want.
These sorts of pages are called Landing Pages and you can usually fill them with more direct information. ‘We have two bedroom Villas for rent’ – this leaves the visitor with little room to manoeuvre – they looked up the keyword and you’ve given them exactly the information they want… the chances are your website will get better results.
What can we draw from this?
I recommend setting a few rules. If you get traffic from an keyword above a certain amount (say 500 visitors) they you absolutely should build a specific page on your website for this traffic.
Secondly, you’d be wise to look for theme from your top 20-50 keywords and include these keywords in your normal website, this is a compounding thing, the more you include these keywords in your website they more people will be satisfied with the bonus the more Google will promote these pages.
And lastly most importantly, in my opinion, you are starting to give the visitor what they want, rather than you dictating to them… If they are looking to you for answering what better service can you given than the answers.