Category: Google

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Fixing Your Bounce Rate Part Two

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McCord Web Services is a Google Partner.

Continued from Monday…

If you’ve been worrying that your 70%+ bounce rate needed immediate remediation, you need to take a deep breath and dig further.

If your website has in-depth informational content and a blog to build authority for search engines, with the increase in mobile searches, your bounce rate may be higher than a site without this type of content. Equally your website traffic will typically be higher.

So how high is too high for a bounce rate. When the numbers get to 78% to 80%, I would start to really be concerned. But there is more to this equation than just a bounce rate percentage.

Make sure to evaluate your time on page and time on site as part of an overall review. It may be as simple as moving out of the Google Display network with your advertising or adding exclusions to your program to drop your bounce rate fast. You may be driving low cost and low quality traffic to your own site erroneously thus negatively impacting your own bounce rate.

Before you start to tease apart your content take a careful look at your website and the potential causes for a high bounce rate.

  1. Is your user experience good?
  2. Do your pages load quickly?
  3. Do you have an esthetically pleasing website design that is easy to navigate?
  4. Do you have content that matches what you are selling or to build your authority?
  5. Have you reviewed your AdWords traffic? Is it targeted?
  6. Are your ads showing heavily in the content or display network thus driving up impressions?
  7. Is your content thin or scraped from other sites. Uniqueness is important here.
  8. Are you providing thoughtful content that builds a case for the use of your services or just filler?

Bounce rate is definitely a strong indicator of a user’s vote for your website, but a higher than typical number may not necessarily mean that you have a site that needs repair.

However a high bounce rate definitely needs a careful review to assure that you do not have a problem that needs to be addressed.

 

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What Should Your Bounce Rate Be? Part One

Google Partner Badge
McCord Web Services is a Google Partner.

Before the advent of more than 50% of searches done in the mobile arena, a website wanted to strive for about a 45 to 50% bounce rate. Now with “in the moment” searches done on mobile accounting for more than half of all Google search traffic, the time on a website is dropping fast and bounce rates increasing.

When I do a survey of a number of website we access here is a quick synopsis of bounce rates we are seeing.

e-Commerce Store 73.94%
Home Service Provider 75.48%
Software and Security 65.62%
Architectural Features 95.80%
Home Service Provider 62.26%
Real Estate Services 41.68%
Industrial Product 74.58%
Home Services Provider 75.80%
Aviation Industry 69.44%
Electrical Service 67.32%
Home Services 58.69%
Healthcare 69.13%
SEO Services 77.63%
Landscape Services 66.29%
Cosmetic Services 72.48%

The site average is 69.74% this is significantly higher than the benchmark of 46.9% that Google Analytics had shared three years ago as a global benchmark. Now it is not uncommon for sites with strong informational content and a blog to have a 70% plus bounce rate.

In fact the sites in our list that have low bounce rates also typically those that have lower traffic and do not have additional  informational content on their site. They are mainly brochure-type websites focused on showcasing only their own services and do not typically have a blog.

So what do you do with this new normal of a relatively high bounce rate, and should you be concerned? Please come back to read the rest of this two part series on Wednesday.

 

 

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Google Shopping – Why You Should Be Using It

Rake It In With Google Shopping
Rake It In With Google Shopping

If you are selling online you need to be using Google Shopping. Yes, I know creating the data feed is a major pain in the neck, but there’s no reason why you can’t start out small.

Choose your top 20 products and get those into a data feed and you’ll find out that Google Shopping ads in AdWords really work. There’s nothing like strong success to help you know that you need to add 20 more product and so on.

It is cheaper and gives you better control if you can build your own Google Data Feed. Some new shopping carts even create it for you with minimal additional massaging on your end.

If you really can’t get the hang of creating your own data feed, you can use a service like Lexity to build the feed and then add a percentage to clicks you get in Google and Bing using their data feed.

Either way with Google putting Google Shopping elements mixed in with organic results, and the fact that several Google Shopping items can appear at the same time as well as your own regular Google AdWords program, you can really start to blanket your market and boost online exposure for your store.

Don’t let time or trouble hold you back. The benefits from using Google Shopping are real and the return is big!

Need help with AdWords? We’re in the top 6% of all Google Partners for performance. Check out our services and pricing.

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Global SEO Tips Part Two

ELooking at Global SEO
Looking at Global SEO

Continued from Monday…

  1. Make sure to use the correct meta tag for language in the header like this – <metaname=”language” content=”spanish”>
  1. Make sure to localize the content of each site. For example in the UK organization is spelled organisation. It is best to have a country native read the content and help to make edits based on how people really speak in that country – even English for the UK and Australia.
  1. This was an interesting tip I found: “Local hosting: If you have ccTLD or set the geo targeting in Google webmaster tools, local hosting does not have much of an incremental impact in most countries as a geo signal. However, it still helps hugely in some countries especially China.” http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2334892/international-seo-tips-what-are-the-game-changing-factors Google goes on to say: “We do, however, recommend making sure that your website is hosted in a way that will give your users fast access to it (which is often done by choosing hosting near your users).”
  1. “HrefLang” XML sitemap: Many websites have problem with a different country page ranking in a country. It may be caused by the fact that your International website is using ccTLD and cannot set the geo targeting or the local site not having enough links from local websites. “HrefLang” XML sitemap was created to help those website owners. Basically, it maps the URL of the page ranking with the URL of the page you want to rank instead. It even works across domains. Once you match the pages one to one for each of the country/language combinations, and indexed by Google, you will quickly see the right pages replace the old ones in each market.” For more great info on this topic visit this wonderful resource page http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2334892/international-seo-tips-what-are-the-game-changing-factors
  1. Metadata – language and country code: You should place “content-language” meta tag indicating the language and country in the <head> section of webpages. It tells engines the target audience by language and country of the created page. The code looks like this: <meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”en-us”> You change “en-us” for other language and country such as “en-uk” for U.K. English and “de-at” for Austrian German. While Google doesn’t weigh this signal as heavily as geo targeting, it still helps with other search engines. You can read more on this topic here: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2334892/international-seo-tips-what-are-the-game-changing-factors
  1. Work on getting some local links for each new country specific website. If you don’t have any, Google will most likely not show the domain in the search engine results. Start first by linking the US parent website to all new global sites. Then see if you can get local business partners and chambers of commerce to link to the new local site regionally.  Setting up LinkedIn and social profiles for the staff at the new location may be helpful as those links will point back to the newly created region specific website, but look for additional links as well.
  1. Blogging for these small regional websites may be very important for slow link building growth which would be good for Google.
  1. Make sure to set up Google and Bing Local pages for these new websites. Again the links from these social and map properties help Google to understand that these are like new branch offices for you.

Need help with your strategy to get more visibility on the Web? Check out our services at www.McCordWeb.com today!